Wood and Stone: A Romance

by John Cowper Powys

The digging up of onions or lettuces in his garden, and the stripping them of their outer leaves, was a ceremony to be performed in no light or casual haste, but with a prepared and concentrated spirit.

No profane hand ever touched the little canister of tea from which Mr. Quincunx, at the same precise hour every day, replenished his tea-pot.

In all these material things his scrupulous and punctilious nicety never suffered the smallest diminution. His mind might be agitated to a point bordering upon despair, but he still, with mechanical foresight, sawed the fagots in his wood-shed and drew the water from his well.

As he pulled up weed after weed, on this particular morning, his mind was in a state of extreme nervous agitation. Mr. Romer had called him up the night before to the House, and had announced that his present income—the sum regarded by the recluse as absolutely secure—was now entirely to cease, and in the place of it he was destined to receive, in return for horrible clerical work performed in Yeoborough, a considerably smaller sum, as Mr. Romer’s paid dependent.

The idea of working in an office was more distasteful to Mr. Quincunx than it is possible to indicate to any person not actually acquainted with him. His exquisitely characteristic hand, admirably adapted to the meticulous diary he had kept for years, was entirely unsuited to competing with type-writing machines and machine-like type-writers. The walk to Yeoborough too,—a matter of some four or five miles—loomed upon him as a hideous purgatory. Walking tired him much more than working in his garden; and he had a nervous dread of those casual encounters and salutations on the way, which the habitual use of the same road to one’s work necessarily must imply.

His mind anticipated with hideous minuteness every detail of his future dreary life. He decided that even at the cost of the sacrifice of the last of his little luxuries he would make a point of going one way at least by train. That walk, twice a day, through the depressing suburbs of Yeoborough was more than he could bear to contemplate. It was characteristic of him that he never for a moment considered the possibility of an appeal to law. Law and lawyers were for Mr. Quincunx, with his instincts of an amiable anarchist, simply the engines through which the rich and powerful worked their will upon the weak and helpless.

It was equally characteristic of him that it never entered his head to throw up his cottage, pack his scanty possessions and seek his fortune in another place. It was not only Lacrima that held him from such a resolution. It was as impossible for him to think of striking out in a new soil as it would have been for an aged frog to leave the pond of its nativity and sally forth across the fields in search of new waters. It was this inability to “strike out” and grapple with the world on equal terms, that had led, in the beginning, to his curious relation to the Romers. He clung to Susan Romer for no other reason than that she supplied a link between his past and his present.

His lips trembled with anger and his hand shook, as he recalled the interview of the preceding night. The wife had annoyed him almost more than the husband. His brutality had been gross and frank. The lascivious joy of a strong nature, in deliberately outraging a weaker one, had gleamed forth from his jeering eyes.

But there had been an unction, an hypocritical sentimentality, about Mrs. Romer’s tone, that had made him hate her the more bitterly of the two. The fact that she also—stupid lump of fawning obesity as she was!—was a victim of this imperial tyrant, did not in the least assuage him. The helot who is under the lash hates the helot who crouches by the master’s chair, more deeply than he hates the master. It is because of this unhappy law of nature that there are so few successful revolts among our social Pariahs. The well-constituted ruler of men divides his serfs into those who hold the whip and those who are whipped. Yes, he hated her the most. But how he hated them both!

The heart of your true Pariah is a strange and dark place, concealing depths of rancorous animosity, which those who over-ride and discount such feelings rarely calculate upon. It is a mistake to assume that this curious rôle—the rôle of being a Pariah upon our planet—is one confined to the submerged, the outcast, the criminal.