Wood and Stone: A Romance

by John Cowper Powys

“You would avoid everything,” he said cunningly. “You would avoid everything you hate, if someone—myself for instance—or Luke—made it easy for you to save her from these houses and these churches! Luke will arrange it. He is not like us. He is wise. He knows the world. And you will only have to go on just as before, to burrow and twine! But you’ll have done it. You’ll have saved her from them. And then it will not matter how deep they bury me in the quarries of Leo’s Hill!”

“Is he drunk? Or is he not drunk?” Mr. Quincunx wondered. The news of Andersen’s derangement, though it had already run like wild-fire through the village, had not yet reached his ears. For the last few days he had walked both to and from his office, and had talked to no one.

A remarkable peculiarity in this curious potato-digger was, however, his absolute and unvarying candour. Mr. Quincunx was prepared to discuss his most private concerns with any mortal or immortal visitor who stepped into his garden. He would have entered into a calm philosophical debate upon his love-affairs with a tramp, with a sailor, with the post-man, with the chimney-sweep, with the devil; or, as in this case, with his very rival in his sweetheart’s affection! There was really something touching and sublime about this tendency of his. It indicated the presence, in Mr. Quincunx, of a certain mystical reverence for simple humanity, which completely contradicted his misanthropic cynicism.

“Certainly,” he remarked, on this occasion, forgetting, in his interest in the subject, the recent strange outburst of his companion. “Certainly, if Lacrima and I had sufficient money to live upon, I would be inclined to risk marrying. You would advise me to, then; wouldn’t you, Andersen? Anyone would advise me to, then. It would be absurd not to do it. Though, all the same, there are always great risks in two people living together, particularly nervous people,—such as we are. But what do you think, Andersen? Suppose some fairy god-mother did give us this money, would you advise us to risk it? Of course, we know, girls like a large house and a lot of servants! She wouldn’t get that with me, because I hate those things, and wouldn’t have them, even if I could afford it. What would you advise, Andersen, if some mad chance did make such a thing possible? Would it be worth the risk?”

An additional motive, in the queerly constituted mind of the recluse, for making this extraordinary request, was the Pariah-like motive of wishing to propitiate the stone-carver. Parallel with his humorous love of shocking people, ran, through Mr. Quincunx’s nature, the naive and innocent wish to win them over to his side; and his method of realizing this wish was to put himself completely at their mercy, laying his meanest thoughts bare, and abandoning his will to their will, so that for very shame they could not find it in them to injure him, but were softened, thrown off their guard, and disarmed. Mr. Quincunx knew no restraint in these confessions by the way, in these appeals to the voices and omens of casual encounter. He grew voluble, and even shameless. In quiet reaction afterwards, in the loneliness of his cottage, he was often led to regret with gloomy remorse the manner in which he had betrayed himself. It was then that he found himself hating, with the long-brooding hatred of a true solitary, the persons to whom he had exposed the recesses of his soul. At the moment of communicativeness, however, he was never able to draw rein or come to a pause. If he grew conscious that he was making a fool of himself, a curious demonic impulse in him only pressed him on to humiliate himself further.

He derived a queer inverted pleasure from thus offering himself, stripped and naked, to the smiter. It was only afterwards, in the long hours of his loneliness, that the poison of his outraged pride festered and fermented, and a deadly malice possessed him towards the recipients of his confidences. There was something admirable about the manner in which this quaint man made, out of his very lack of resistant power, a sort of sanctity of dependence. But this triumph of weakness in him, this dissolution of the very citadel of his being, in so beautiful and mystical an abandonment to the sympathy of our common humanity, was attended by lamentable issues in its resultant hatred and malice. Had Mr. Quincunx been able to give himself up to this touching candour without these melancholy and misanthropic reactions, his temper would have been very nearly the temper of a saint; but the gall and wormwood of the hours that followed, the corroding energy of the goblin of malice that was born of such unnatural humiliations, put a grievous gulf between him and the heavenly condition.

It must also be remembered, in qualification of the outrageousness, one might almost say the indecency, of his appeal to Andersen, that he had not in the remotest degree realized the extent of the stone-carver’s infatuation with the Italian. Neither physical passion, nor ideal passion, were things that entered into his view of the relations between the sexes. Desire with him was of a strange and complicated subtlety, generally diffused into a mild and brooding sentiment. He was abnormally faithful, but at the same time abnormally cold; and though, very often, jealousy bit him like a viper, it was a jealousy of the mind, not a jealousy of the senses.

What in other people would have been gross and astounding cynicism, was in Mr. Quincunx a perfectly simple and even childlike recognition of elemental facts. He could sweep aside every conventional mask and plunge into the very earth-mould of reality, but he was quite unconscious of any shame, or any merit, in so doing. He simply envisaged facts, and stated the facts he envisaged, without the conventional unction of worldly discretion. This being so, it was in no ironic extravagance that he appealed to Andersen, but quite innocently, and without consciousness of anything unusual.