Read Ebook: Wood and Stone: A Romance by Powys John Cowper

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WOOD AND STONE

LEO'S HILL

Midway between Glastonbury and Bridport, at the point where the eastern plains of Somersetshire merge into the western valleys of Dorsetshire, stands a prominent and noticeable hill; a hill resembling the figure of a crouching lion.

East of the hill, nestling at the base of a cone-shaped eminence overgrown with trees and topped by a thin Thyrsus-like tower, lies the village of Nevilton.

Were it not for the neighbourhood of the more massive promontory this conical protuberance would itself have stood out as an emphatic landmark; but Leo's Hill detracts from its emphasis, as it detracts from the emphasis of all other deviations from the sea-level, between Yeoborough and the foot of the Quantocks.

It was on the apex of Nevilton Mount that the Holy Rood of Waltham was first found; but with whatever spiritual influence this event may have endowed the gentler summit, it is not to it, but to Leo's Hill, that the lives and destinies of the people of Nevilton have come to gravitate. One might indeed without difficulty conceive of a strange supernatural conflict going on between the consecrated repository of Christian tradition guarding its little flock, and the impious heathen fortress to which day by day that flock is driven, to seek their material sustenance.

Even in Pre-Celtic times those formidably dug trenches and frowning slopes must have looked down on the surrounding valley; and to this day it is the same suggestion of tyrannical military dominance, which, in spite of quarries and cranes and fragrant yellow gorse, gives the place its prevailing character.

The rounded escarpments have for centuries been covered with pleasant turf and browsed upon by sheep; but patient antiquarian research constantly brings to light its coins, torques, urns, arrow-heads, amulets; and rumour hints that yet more precious things lie concealed under those grassy mounds.

The aboriginal tribes have been succeeded by the Celt; the Celt by the Roman; the Roman by the Saxon; without any change in the place's inherent character, and without any lessening of its tyranny over the surrounding country. For though Leo's Hill dominates no longer by means of its external strength, it dominates, quite as completely, by means of its interior riches.

It is, in fact, a huge rock-island, washed by the leafy waves of the encircling valleys, and containing, as its hid treasure, stone enough to rebuild Babylon.

In that particular corner of the West Country, so distinct and deep-rooted are the legendary survivals, it is hard not to feel as though some vast spiritual conflict were still proceeding between the two opposed Mythologies--the one drawing its strength from the impulse to Power, and the other from the impulse to Sacrifice.

A village-dweller in Nevilton might, if he were philosophically disposed, be just as much a percipient of this cosmic struggle, as if he stood between the Palatine and St. Peter's.

Let him linger among the cranes and pulleys of this heathen promontory, and look westward to the shrine of the Holy Grail, or eastward to where rested the Holy Rood, and it would be strange if he did not become conscious of the presence of eternal spiritual antagonists, wrestling for the mastery.

He would at any rate be made aware of the fatal force of Inanimate Objects over human destiny.

There would seem to him something positively monstrous and sinister about the manner in which this brute mass of inert sandstone had possessed itself of the lives of the generations. It had come to this at last; that those who owned the Hill owned the dwellers beneath the Hill; and the Hill itself owned them that owned it.

The name by which the thing had come to be known indicated sufficiently well its nature.

Like a couchant desert-lion it overlooked its prey; and would continue to do so, as long as the planet lasted.

Out of its inexhaustible bowels the tawny monster fed the cities of seven countries--cities whose halls, churches, theatres, and markets, mocked the caprices of rain and sun as obdurately as their earth-bound parent herself.

The sandstone of Leo's Hill remains, so architects tell us, the only rival of granite, as a means for the perpetuation of human monuments. Even granite wears less well than this, in respect to the assaults of rain and flood. The solitary mysterious monoliths of Stonehenge, with their unknown, alien origin, alone seem to surpass it in their eternal perdurance.

As far as Nevilton itself is concerned everything in the place owes its persuasive texture to this resistant yet soft material. From the lordly Elizabethan mansion to the humblest pig-stye, they all proceed from the entrails of Leo's Hill; and they all still wear--these motley whelps of the great dumb beast--its tawny skin, its malleable sturdiness, its enduring consistence.

Who can resist a momentary wonder at the strange mutability of the fate that governs these things? The actual slabs, for example, out of which the high shafts and slender pinnacles of the church-tower were originally hewn, must once have lain in littered heaps for children to scramble upon, and dogs to rub against. And now they are the windy resting-places, and airy "coigns of vantage," of all the feathered tribes in their migrations!

What especially separates the Stone of Leo's Hill from its various local rivals, is its chameleon-like power of taking tone and colour from every element it touches. While Purbeck marble, for instance, must always remain the same dark, opaque, slippery thing it was when it left its Dorset coast; while Portland stone can do nothing but grow gloomier and gloomier, in its ashen-grey moroseness, under the weight of the London fogs; the tawny progeny of this tyrant of the western vales becomes amber-streaked when it restricts the play of fountains, orange-tinted when it protects herbacious borders, and rich as a petrified sunset when it drinks the evening light from the mellow front of a Cathedral Tower.

Apart from any geological affinity, it might almost seem as though this Leonian stone possessed some weird occult relation to those deep alluvial deposits which render the lanes and fields about Nevilton so thick with heavy earth.

Though closer in its texture to sand than to clay, it is with clay that its local usage is more generally associated, and it is into a clay-bed that it crumbles at last, when the earth retakes her own. Its prevailing colour is rather the colour of clay than of sand, and no material that could be found could lend itself more congruously to the clinging consistence of a clay floor.

It would be impossible to conceive of a temple of marble or Portland stone rising out of the embrace of the thick Nevilton soil. But Leonian sandstone seems no more than a concentrated petrifaction of such soil--its natural evocation, its organic expression. The soil calls out upon it day and night with friendly recognition, and day and night it answers the call. There is thus no escape for the human victims of these two accomplices. In confederate reciprocity the stone receives them from the clay, and the clay receives them from the stone. They pass from homes built irretrievably of the one, into smaller and more permanent houses, dug irretrievably out of the other.

The character of the soil in that corner of Somersetshire is marked, beyond everything else, by the clinging tenacity of its soft, damp, treacherous earth. It is a spot loved by the west-wind, and by the rains brought by the west-wind. Overshadowed by the lavish fertility of its abounding foliage, it never seems to experience enough sunshine to draw out of it the eternal presence of this oppressive dampness. The lush pastures may thicken, the rich gardens blossom, the ancient orchards ripen; but an enduring sense of something depressing and deep and treacherous lurks ever in the background of these pleasant things. Not a field but has its overshadowing trees; and not a tree but has its roots loosely buried in that special kind of soft, heavy earth, which an hour's rain can change into clinging mud.

It is in the Nevilton churchyard, when a new grave is being dug, that this sinister peculiarity of the earth-floor is especially noticeable. The sight of those raw, rough heaps of yellow clay, tossed out upon grass and flowers, is enough to make the living shrink back in terror from the oblong hole into which they have consigned their dead. All human cemeteries smell, like the hands of the Shakespearean king, of forlorn mortality; but such mortality seems more palpably, more oppressively emphasized among the graves of Nevilton than in other repositories of the dead. To be buried in many a burying-ground one knows, would be no more than a negative terror; no more than to be deprived, as Homer puts it, of the sweet privilege of the blessed air. But to be buried in Nevilton clay has a positive element in its dreadfulness. It is not so much to be buried, as to be sucked in, drawn down, devoured, absorbed. Never in any place does the peculiar congruity between the yellowness of the local clay and the yellowness of the local stone show so luridly as among these patient hillocks.

The tombstones here do not relieve the pressure of fate by appealing, in marble whiteness, away from the anthropophagous earth, to the free clouds of heaven. They are of the earth, and they conspire with the earth. They yearn to the soil, and the soil yearns to them. They weigh down upon the poor relics consigned to their care, in a hideous partnership with the clay that is working its will upon them.

And the rank vegetation of the place assists this treachery. Orange-tinted lichen and rusty-red weather-stains alternate with the encroachments of moss and weeds in reducing each separate protruding slab into conformity with what is about it and beneath it. This churchyard, whose stone and clay so cunningly intermingle, is in an intimate sense the very navel and centre of the village. Above it rises the tall perpendicular tower of St. Catharine's church; and beyond it, on the further side of a strip of pasture, a stagnant pond, and a solitary sycamore, stands the farm that is locally named "the Priory." This house, the most imposing of all in the village except the Manor, has as its immediate background the umbrageous conical eminence where the Holy Rood was found. It is a place adapted to modern usage from a noble fragment of monastic ruin. Here, in mediaeval days, rose a rich Cistercian abbey, to which, doubtless, the pyramidal mount, in the background, offered a store of consecrated legends.

North of the churchyard, beyond the main village street with its formal town-like compactness, the ground slopes imperceptibly up, past a few enclosed cottage-orchards, to where, embosomed in gracious trees and Italianated gardens, stands the pride and glory of Nevilton, its stately Elizabethan house.

Their first use had not been attended with an altogether propitious destiny. How far their present use will prove of happier omen remains a secret of the adamantine Fates. The imaginary weaving of events, upon which we are just now engaged, may perhaps serve, as certain liturgical formulae of propitiation served in former days, as a means of averting the wrath of the Eumenides. For though made use of again and again for fair and pious purposes, something of the old heathen malignity of the Druid hill still seems to hang about the stone it yields; and over the substance of that stone's destiny the two Mythologies still struggle; Power and Sacrifice dividing the living and the dead.

NEVILTON

A fanciful imagination might indeed have amused itself with the curious dream, that some weird Druidic curse had been laid upon that grass-grown island of yellow rock, bringing disaster and eclipse to all who meddled with it. Such an imagination would have been able to fortify its fancy by recalling the suggestive fact that at the bottom of the large woodland pond, indicated in this narrative under the name of Auber Lake, was discovered, not many years before, an immense slab of Leonian stone, inscribed with symbols baffling interpretation, but suggesting, to one antiquarian mind at least, a hint of prehistoric Devil-Worship. However this may be, it is certain that the family of Seldom found themselves finally faced with the alternative of selling the place they loved or of seeing it lapse under their hands into confusion and neglect. Of these evil alternatives they chose the former; and thus the estates, properties, royalties, and appurtenances, of the historic Manor of Nevilton fell into the hands of a clever financier from Lombard Street.

The family of Mr. Mortimer Romer had never at any time bowed its knee in kings' houses. Nor were its religious antecedents marked by orthodox reputation. Mr. Romer was indeed in every sense of the word a "self-made man." But though neither Christian nor Jew,--for his grandfather, the fish-monger of Soho, had been of the Unitarian persuasion--it cannot be denied that he possessed the art of making himself thoroughly respected by both the baptized and the circumcised. He indeed pursued his main purpose, which was the acquiring of power, with an unscrupulousness worthy of a Roman Emperor. Possibly it was this Roman tenacity in him, combined with his heathen indifference to current theology, which propitiated the avenging deities of Leo's Hill. So far at any rate he had been eminently successful in his speculations. He had secured complete possession of every quarry on the formidable eminence; and the company of which he was both director and president was pursuing its activities in a hundred new directions. It had, in the few last years, gone so far as to begin certain engineering assaults upon those remote portions of the ancient escarpments that had been left untouched since the legions of Claudius Caesar encamped under their protection.

The bulk of Mr. Romer's stone-works were on the Hill itself; but others, intended for the more delicate finishing touches, were situated in a convenient spot close to Nevilton Station. Out of these sheds and yards, built along the railway-track, arose, from morning to night, the monotonous, not unpleasing, murmur of wheels and saws and grindstones. The contrast between these sounds and the sylvan quietness of the vicarage garden, which sloped down towards them, was one of the most significant indications of the clash of the Two Mythologies in this place. The priest meditating among his roses upon the vanity of all but "heavenly habitations" might have been in danger of being too obtrusively reminded of the pride of the houses that are very definitely "made with hands." Perhaps this was one of the reasons why the present incumbent of Nevilton had preferred a more undisturbed retreat.

The general manager of Mortimer Romer's quarries was a certain Mr. Lickwit, who served also as his confidential adviser in many other spheres.

The works at Nevilton Station were left to the superintendence of two brothers named Andersen, skilled stone-cutters, sons of the famous Gideon Andersen known to architects all over the kingdom for his designs in Leonian stone. Both Gideon and his wife Naomi were buried in Nevilton churchyard, and the brothers were condemned in the village as persons of an almost scandalous piety because of their innocent habit of lingering on warm summer evenings over their parents' grave. They lived together, these two, as lodgers with the station-master, in a newly built cottage close to their work. Their social position in the place was a curious and anomalous one. Their father's reputation as a sculptor had brought him into touch with every grade of society; and the woman who became his wife was by birth what is usually termed a lady. Gideon himself had been a rough and gross fellow; and after his wife's death had hastened to take his sons away from school and apprentice them to his own trade. They were in many respects a noteworthy pair, though scarcely favourites, either with their fellow-workmen or their manager.

James Andersen, the elder by some ten years, was of a morose, reserved temper, and though a capable workman never seemed happy in the work-shop. Luke, on the contrary, possessed a peculiarly sunny and serene spirit.

They were both striking in appearance. The younger approximated to that conventional type of beauty which is popularly known as being "like a Greek god." The elder, tall, swarthy, and sinister, suggested rather the image of some gloomy idol carved on the wall of an Assyrian temple. What, however, was much more remarkable than their appearance was their devoted attachment to one another. They lived, worked, ate, drank, walked and slept together. It was impossible to separate them. Had Mr. Lickwit dismissed James, Luke would immediately have thrown down his tools. Had Luke been the banished one, James would have followed him into exile.

It had fallen to Mr. Romer, some seven years before our narrative begins, to appoint a new vicar to Nevilton; and he had appointed one of such fierce ascetic zeal and such pronounced socialistic sympathies, that he had done nothing since but vehemently and bitterly repent his choice.

The Promoter of Companies had been betrayed into this blunder by the impulse of revengeful caprice, the only impulse in his otherwise well-balanced nature that might be termed dangerous to himself.

He had quarrelled with the bishop over some matter connected with his stone-works; and in order to cause this distinguished prelate grief and annoyance he had looked about for someone to honour who was under the episcopal ban. The bishop, however, was of so discreet a temper and so popular in his diocese that the only rebel to his authority that could be discovered was one of the curates of a church at Yeoborough who had insisted upon preaching the Roman doctrine of Transubstantiation.

The matter would probably have lapsed into quiescence, save for the crafty interference in the local newspaper of a group of aggressive Nonconformists, who took this opportunity of sowing desirable dissension between the higher and lower orders of the hated Establishment.

Mr. Romer, who, like Gallio, cared for none of these things, and was at heart a good deal worse than a Nonconformist, seized upon the chance offered by the death of Nevilton's vicar; and installed as his successor this rebel to ecclesiastical authority.

Once installed, however, the Rev. Hugh Clavering speedily came to an understanding with his bishop; compromised on the matter of preaching Transubstantiation; and apparently was allowed to go on believing in it.

And it was then that the Promoter of Companies learned for the first time how much easier it is to make a priest than to unmake him. For situation after situation arose in which the master of the Leonian quarries found himself confronted by an alien Power--a Power that refused to worship Sandstone. Before this rupture, however, the young Priest had persuaded Mr. Romer to let him live in the Old Vicarage, a small but cheerful house just opposite the church door. The orthodox vicarage, a rambling Early Victorian structure standing in its own grounds at the end of the West Drive, was let--once more at the Priest's suggestion--to the last living representatives of the dispossessed Seldoms.

It indicated a good deal of spirit on the part of Valentia Seldom and her daughter thus to return to the home of their ancestors.

Mrs. Seldom was a cousin of the man who had sold the estate. Her daughter Vennie, brought up in a school at Florence, had never seen Nevilton, and it was with the idea of taking advantage for the girl's sake of their old prestige in that corner of England that Valentia accepted Mr. Romer's offer and became the vicarage tenant.

She had, indeed, under her own roof, cause enough for preoccupation and concern.

Her daughter--a little ghost-moth of a girl, of fragile delicacy--seemed entirely devoid of that mysterious magnetic attraction which lures to the side of most virgins the devotion of the opposite sex. She appeared perfectly content to remain forever in her tender maidenhood, and refused to exert the slightest effort to be "nice" to the charming young people her mother threw in her way. She belonged to that class of young girls who seem to be set apart by nature for other purposes than those of the propagation of the race.

Her wistful spirit, shrinking into itself like the leaves of a sensitive plant at the least approach of a rough hand, responded only to one passionate impulse, the impulse of religion.

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