MORTIMER ROMER
The incredibly halcyon June which had filled the lanes and meadows of
Nevilton that summer with such golden weather, gave place at last to
July; and with July came tokens of a change.
The more slow-growing hay-fields were still strewn with their little
lines of brown mown grass waiting its hour of “carrying,” but the
larger number of the pastures wore now that freshly verdant and
yet curiously sad look, which fields in summer wear when they have
been shorn of their first harvest. The corn in the arable-lands was
beginning to stand high; wheat and barley varying their alternate
ripening tints, from the rich gold of the one, to the diaphanous
glaucous green, so tender and pallid, of the other. In the hedges,
rag-wort, knapweed and scabious had completely replaced wild-rose
and elder-blossom; and in the ditches and by the margins of ponds,
loosestrife and willow-herb were beginning to bud. Even the
latest-sprouting among the trees carried now the full heavy burden,
dark and monotonous, of the summer’s prime; and the sharp, dry
intermittent chirping of warblers, finches and buntings, had long
since replaced, in the garden-bushes, the more flute-like cries of the
earlier-nesting birds.
The shadowy woods of the Nevilton valleys, with their thick entangled
undergrowth, were less pleasant to walk in than they had been. Tall
rank growths choked the wan remnants of the season’s first prime; and
beneath sombre, indistinguishable foliage, the dry, hard-trodden paths
lost their furtive enchantment. Dog-mercury, that delicate child of the
under-shadows, was no more now than a gross mass of tarnished leaves.
Enchanter’s night-shade took the place of pink-campion; only to yield,
in its turn, to viper’s bugloss and flea-bane.
As the shy gods of the year’s tender birth receded before these ranker
maturings, humanity became more prominent. Print-frocked maidens
assisted the sheep in treading the slopes of Leo’s Hill into earthy
grassless patches. Bits of dirty paper and the litter of careless
picnickers strewed the most shadowy recesses. Smart youths flicked
town-bought canes in places where, a few weeks before, the squirrel had
gambolled undisturbed, and the wood-pecker had deepened the magical
silence by his patent labour. Where recently, amid shadowy moss “soft
as sleep,” the delicate petals of the fragile wood-sorrel had breathed
untroubled in their enchanted aisles of leafy twilight, one found
oneself reading, upon torn card-board boxes, highly-coloured messages
to the Human Race from energetic Tradesmen. July had replaced June. The
gods of Humanity had replaced the gods of Nature; and the interlude
between hay-harvest and wheat-harvest had brought the dog-star Sirius
into his diurnal ascendance.
The project of Lacrima’s union with Mr. John Goring remained, so
to speak, “in the air.” The village assumed it as a certainty; Mr.
Quincunx regarded it as a probability; and Mr. Goring himself,
enjoying his yearly session of agreeable leisure, meditated upon it day
and night.
Lacrima had fallen into a curious lassitude with regard to the whole
matter. In these July days, especially now that the sky was overcast by
clouds and heavy rains seemed imminent, she appeared to lose all care
or interest in her own life. Her mood followed the mood of the weather.
If some desperate deluge of disaster was brooding in the distance, she
felt tempted to cry out, “Let it fall!”
Mr. Quincunx’s feelings on the subject remained a mystery to her. He
neither seemed definitely to accept her sacrifice, nor to reject it. He
did not really--so she could not help telling herself--visualize the
horror of the thing, as it affected her, in any substantial degree.
He often made a joke of it; and kept quoting cynical and worldly
suggestions, from the lips of Luke Andersen.
On the other hand, both from Mr. Romer and the farmer, she received
quiet, persistent and inexorable pressure; though to do the latter
justice, he made no further attempts to treat her roughly or familiarly.
She had gone so far once--in a mood of panic-stricken aversion,
following upon a conversation with Gladys--as actually to walk to the
vicarage gate, with the definite idea of appealing to Vennie; but it
chanced that in place of Vennie she had observed Mrs. Seldom moving
among her flower-beds, and the grave austerity of the aristocratic old
lady had taken all resolution from her and made her retrace her steps.
It must also be confessed that her dislike and fear of Gladys had
grown to dimensions bordering upon monomania. The elder girl at once
hypnotized and paralyzed her. Her sensuality, her feline caprices, her
elaborately cherished hatred, reduced the Italian to such helpless
misery, that any change--even the horror of this marriage--assumed the
likeness of a desirable relief.
It is also true that by gradual degrees,--for women, however little
prone to abstract thought, are quick to turn the theories of those they
love into living practice,--she had come to regard the mere physical
terror of this momentous plunge as a less insurmountable barrier than
she had felt at first. Without precisely intending it, Mr. Quincunx
had really, in a measure--particularly since he himself had come
to frequent the society of Luke Andersen--achieved what might have
conventionally been called the “corruption” of Lacrima’s mind. She
found herself on several occasions imagining what she would really
feel, if, escaped for an afternoon from her Priory duties, she were
slipping off to meet her friend in Camel’s Cover or Badger’s Bottom.
When the suggestion had been first made to her of this monstrous
marriage, it had seemed nothing short of a sentence of death, and
beyond the actual consummation of it, she had never dreamed of looking.
But all this had now imperceptibly changed. Many an evening as she sat
with her work by Mrs. Romer’s side, watching Gladys and her father
play cards, the thought came over her that she might just as well
enjoy the comparative independence of having her own house and her own
associations--even though the price of them _were_ the society of such
a lump of clay--as live this wretched half-life without hope or aim.
Other moods arrived when the thought of having children of her own
came to her with something more than a mere sense of escape; came
to her with the enlargement of an opening horizon. She recalled the
many meandering discourses which Mr. Quincunx had addressed to her
upon this subject. They had not affected her woman’s instincts; but
they had lodged in her mind. A girl’s children, so her friend had
often maintained, do not belong to the father at all. The father
is nothing--a mere irrelevant incident, a mere chance. The mother
alone--the mother always--has the rights and pleasures, as she has the
responsibilities and pains of the parental relation. She even recalled
one occasion of twilight philosophizing in the potato-bed, when Mr.
Quincunx had gone so far as to maintain the unscientific thesis that
children, born where there is no love, inherit character, appearance,
tastes, everything--from the mother.
Lacrima had a dim suspicion that some of these less pious theories were
due to the perverse Luke, who, as the cloudier July days overcast his
evening rambles, had acquired the habit of strolling at night-fall into
Mr. Quincunx’s kitchen. Once indeed she was certain she discerned the
trail of this plausible heathen in her friend’s words. Mr. Quincunx,
with one of his peculiarly goblin-like leers, had intimated--in jest
indeed, but with a searching look into her face that it would be no
very difficult task to deceive,--in shrewd Panurgian roguery, this
clumsy clown. His words at the time had hurt and shocked her; and her
reaction from them had led to the spoiling of a pleasant conversation;
but they invaded afterwards, more deeply than she would have cared to
confess, her hours of dreamy solitude.
Her southern imagination, free from both the grossness and the
hypocrisy of the Nevilton mind, was much readier to wander upon an
antinomian path--at least in its wayward fancies--than it would have
been, had circumstances not led her away from her inherited faith.
While the sensuality of Gladys left her absolutely untouched, the
anarchistic theories of her friend--especially now they had been
fortified and directed by the insidious Luke--gave her intelligence
many queer and lawless topics of solitary brooding. Her senses, her
instincts, were as pure and unsophisticated as ever; but her conscience
was besieged and threatened. It was indeed a queer rôle--this, which
fate laid upon Mr. Quincunx--the rôle of undermining the reluctance
of his own sweetheart to make a loveless marriage--but it was one for
which his curious lack of physical passion singularly fitted him.
Had Vennie Seldom or Hugh Clavering been aware of the condition of
affairs they would have condemned Mr. Quincunx in the most wholesale
manner. Clavering would probably have been tempted to apply to him some
of the most abusive language in the dictionary. But it is extremely
questionable whether this judgment of theirs would have been justified.
A more enlightened planetary observer, initiated into the labyrinthine
hearts of men, might well have pointed out that Mr. Quincunx’s theories
were largely a matter of pure speculation, humorously remote from any
contact with reality. He might also have reminded these indignant ones
that Mr. Quincunx quite genuinely laboured under the illusion--if it
were an illusion--that for his friend to be mistress of the Priory and
free of her dependence on the Romers was a thing eminently desirable,
and worth the price she paid for it. Such an invisible clairvoyant
might even have surmised, what no one in Nevilton who knew of Mr.
Romer’s offer would for one second have believed; namely, that he would
have given her the same advice had there been no such offer, simply on
the general ground of binding her permanently to the place.
The fact, however, remained, that by adopting this ambiguous and
evasive attitude Mr. Quincunx reduced the more heroic and romantic
aspect of the girl’s sacrifice to the lowest possible level, and flung
her into a mood of reckless and spiritless indifference. She was
brought to the point of losing all interest in her own fate and of
simply relapsing upon the tide of events.
It was precisely to this condition that Mr. Romer had desired to
bring her. When she had first attracted him, and had fallen into his
hands, there had been certain psychological contests between them,
in which the quarry-owner had by no means emerged victorious. It was
the rankling memory of these contests--contests spiritual rather than
material--which had issued in his gloomy hatred of her and his longing
to corrupt her mind and humiliate her soul. This corruption, this
humiliation had been long in coming. It had seemed out of his own power
and out of the power of his feline daughter to bring it about; but this
felicitous plan of using the girl’s own friend to assist her moral
disintegration appeared to have changed the issue very completely.
Mr. Romer, watching her from day to day, became more and more certain
that her integral soul, the inmost fortress of her self-respect, was
yielding inch by inch. She had flung the rudder down; and was drifting
upon the tide.
It might have been a matter of surprise to some ill-judging
psychologists that a Napoleonic intriguer, of the quarry-owner’s
type, should ever have entered upon a struggle apparently so unequal
and unimportant as that for the mere integrity of a solitary girl’s
spirit. Such a judgment would display little knowledge of the darker
possibilities of human character. Resistance is resistance, from
whatever quarter it comes; and the fragile soul of a helpless Pariah
may be just as capable of provoking the aggressive instincts of a born
master of men as the most obdurate of commercial rivals.
There are certain psychic oppositions to our will, which, when once
they have been encountered, remain indelibly in the memory as a
challenge and a defiance, until their provocation has been wiped out in
their defeat. It matters nothing that such oppositions should spring
from weak or trifling quarters. We have been baffled, thwarted, fooled;
and we cannot recover the feeling of identity with ourselves, until,
like a satisfied tidal wave, our will has drowned completely the
barricades that defied it. It matters nothing if at the beginning, what
we were thwarted by was a mere trifle, a straw upon the wind, a feather
in the breeze. The point is that our will, in flowing outwards, at its
capricious pleasure, met with opposition--met with resistance. We do
not really recover our self-esteem until every memory of such an event
has been obliterated by a complete revenge.
It is useless to object that a powerful ambitious man of the Romer
mould, contending Atlas-like under a weight of enormous schemes, was
not one to harbour such long-lingering rancour against a mere Pariah.
There was more in the thing than appears on the surface. The brains of
mortal men are queer crucibles, and the smouldering fires that heat
them are driven by capricious and wanton guests. Lacrima’s old defeat
of the owner of Leo’s Hill--a defeat into which there is no need to
descend now, for its “terrain” was remote from our present stage--had
been a defeat upon what might be called a subliminal or interior plane.
It was almost as if he had encountered her and she had encountered him,
not only in the past of this particular life, but a remoter past--in
a past of some pre-natal incarnation. There are--as is well-known,
many instances of this unfathomable conflict between certain human
types--types that seem to _find_ one another, that seem to be drawn to
one another, by some preordained necessity in the occult influences
of mortal fate. It matters nothing in regard to such a conflict, that
on one side should be strength, power and position, and on the other
weakness and helplessness. The soul is the soul, and has its own laws.
It is a case of what a true initiate into the secrets of our
terrestrial drama might entitle Planetary Opposition. By some hidden
law of planetary opposition, this frail child of the Apennine ridges
was destined to provoke, to an apparently quite unequal struggle, this
formidable schemer from the money-markets of London.
In these strange pre-natal attractions and repulsions between men and
women, the mere conventional differences of rank and social importance
are as nothing and less than nothing.
Vast unfathomable tides of cosmic conflict drive us all backwards and
forwards; and if under the ascendance of Sirius in the track of the
Sun, the master of Nevilton found himself devoting more energy to
the humiliation of his daughter’s companion than to his election to
the British Parliament, one can only remember that both of them--the
strong and the weak--were merely puppets and pawns of elemental forces,
compared with which he, as well as she, was as the chaff before the
wind.
It was one of the peculiarities of this Nevilton valley to draw to
itself, as we have already hinted, and focus strangely in itself, these
airy and elemental oppositions. To rise above the clash of the Two
Mythologies on this spot, with all their planetary “auxiliar gods,”
one would have had to ascend incredibly high into that star-sown space
above--perhaps so high, that the whole solar system, rushing madly
through the ether towards the constellation of Hercules, would have
shown itself as less than a cluster of wayward fireflies. From a
height as supreme as this, the difference between Mortimer Romer and
Lacrima Traffio would have been less than the difference between two
summer-midges transacting their affairs on the edge of a reed in Auber
Lake.
Important or unimportant, however, the struggle went on; and, as July
advanced, seemed to tend more and more to Mr. Romer’s advantage.
Precisely what he desired to happen was indeed happening--Lacrima’s
soul was disintegrating; her powers of resistance were diminishing; and
a reckless carelessness about her personal fate was taking the place of
her old sensitive apprehensions.
Another important matter went well at this time for Mr. Romer. His
daughter became formally engaged to the wealthy American. Dangelis had
been pressing her, for many weeks, to come to some definite decision,
between himself and Lord Tintinhull’s heir, and she had at last made up
her mind and given him her promise.
The Romers were enchanted at this new development. Mrs. Romer had
always disliked the thought of having to enter into closer relations
with the aristocracy--relations for which she was so obviously
unsuited; and Ralph Dangelis fitted in exactly with her idea of what
her son-in-law should be.
Mr. Romer, too, found in Dangelis just the sort of son he had always
longed for. He had quite recognized, by this time, that the “artistic”
tastes of the American and his unusual talent interfered in no way with
the possession of a very shrewd intellectual capacity. Dangelis had
indeed all the qualities that Mr. Romer most admired. He was strong.
He was clever. He was an entertaining companion. He was at once very
formidable and very good-tempered. And he was immensely rich.
It would have annoyed him to see Gladys dominate a man of this sort
with her capricious ways. But he had not the remotest fear that she
would dominate this citizen of Ohio. Dangelis would pet her and spoil
her and deluge her with money, but keep a firm and untroubled hand
over her; and that exactly suited Mr. Romer’s wishes. The man’s wealth
would also be an immense help to himself in his financial undertakings.
Together they would be able to engineer colossal and world-shaking
schemes.
It was a satisfaction, too, to think that, when he died, his loved
quarries on Leo’s Hill and his historic Leonian House should
fall into the hands, not of these Ilchesters and Ilminsters and
Evershots--families whose pretensions he hated and derided--but of an
honest descendant of plain business men of his own class.
It was Mrs. Romer, and not her husband, who uttered a lament that the
House after their death should no longer be the property of one of
their own name. She proposed that Gladys’ American should be induced
to change his name. But Mr. Romer would hear nothing of this. His
system was the old imperial Roman system, of succession by adoption.
The man who could deal with the Legions, the man who was strong
enough to suppress strikes on Leo’s Hill, and cope successfully with
such rascals as this voluble Wone, was the man to inherit Nevilton!
Be his patronymic what you please, such a man was Cæsar. Himself,
a new-comer, risen from nothing, and contemptuous of all tradition,
it had constantly been a matter of serious annoyance to him that
the wealth he had amassed should only go to swell the pride of
these fatuous landed gentry. It delighted him to think that Gladys’
children--the future inheritors of his labour--should be, on their
father’s side also, from new and untraditional stock. It gave him
immense satisfaction to think of disappointing Lord Tintinhull, who no
doubt had long ago told his friends how sad it was that his son had got
entangled with that girl at Nevilton; but how nice it was that Nevilton
House should in the future take its proper place in the county.
There was one cloud on Mr. Romer’s horizon at this moment, and that
cloud was composed of vapours spun from the brain of his parliamentary
rival, the eloquent Methodist.
Mr. Wone had long been at work among the Leo’s Hill quarry-men,
encouraging them to strike. Until the second week in July his efforts
had been fruitless; but with the change in the weather to which we have
referred, the strike came. It had already lasted some seven or eight
days, when a Saturday arrived which had been selected, several months
before, for a great political gathering on the summit of Leo’s Hill.
This was a meeting of radicals and socialists to further the cause of
Mr. Wone’s campaign.
Leo’s Hill had been, for many generations, the site of such local
gatherings. These gatherings were not confined to political
demonstrators. They were usually attended by circus-men and other
caterers to proletarian amusement; and were often quite as lively, in
their accompaniments of feasting and festivity, as any country fair.
The actual speaking took place at the extreme northern end of the hill,
where there was a singular and convenient feature, lending itself to
such assemblies, in the formation of the ground. This was the grassy
outline, still emphasizing quite distinctly its ancient form, of the
military Roman amphitheatre attached to the camp. Locally the place was
known as “the Frying-pan”, from its marked and grotesque resemblance to
that utensil; but no base culinary appellation, issue of Anglo-Saxon
unimaginativeness, could conceal the formidable classic moulding of its
well-known shape--the shape of the imperial colisseum.
Between the Frying-pan and the southern side of the hill, where the
bulk of the quarries were, rose a solitary stone building. One hardly
expected the presence of such a building in such a place, for it was
a considerable-sized inn; but the suitableness of the grassy expanses
of the ancient camp for all manner of tourist-jaunts accounted for its
erection; and doubtless it served a good purpose in softening with
interludes of refreshment the labours of the quarry-men.
It was the presence of this admirable tavern so near the voice of the
orator, that led Mr. Romer, himself, to stroll, on that Saturday,
in the direction of his rival’s demonstration. Though the more
considerable of his quarries were at the southern end of the hill,
certain new excavations, in the success of which he took exceptional
interest, had been latterly made in its very centre, and within a
stone’s throw of the tavern-door. The great cranes, used in this
new invasion, stood out against the sky from the highest part of the
hill, and assumed, especially at sunset, when their shape was rendered
most emphatic, the form of enormous compasses, planted there by some
gigantic architectural hand.
It was in relation to these new works that Mr. Romer, towards the close
of the afternoon, found himself advancing along the narrow path that
led, between clumps of bracken and furze-bushes, from the most westward
of his woods to the hill’s base. Mr. Lickwit had informed him that
there was talk, among some of the more intransigent of the Yeoborough
socialists, about destroying these cranes. Objections had been brought
against them, in recent newspaper articles, on purely æsthetic grounds.
It was said they disfigured the classic outline of the hill, and
interfered with a landmark which had been a delight to every eye for
unnumbered ages.
It was hardly to be supposed that the more official of the supporters
of Mr. Wone would condone any such outbreak. It was unlikely that
Wone himself would do so. The “Christian Candidate,” as his Methodist
friends called him, was in no way a man of violence. But the fact
that there had been this pseudo-public criticism of the works from an
unpolitical point of view might lend colour to any sort of scandal.
There were plenty of bold spirits among the by-streets of Yeoborough
who would have loved nothing better than to send Mr. Romer’s cranes
toppling over into a pit, and indeed it was the sort of adventure which
would draw all the more restless portion of the meeting’s audience.
The possibility was the more threatening because the presence of this
kind of general fair attracted to the hill all manner of heterogeneous
persons quite unconnected with the locality.
But what really influenced Mr. Romer in making his own approach to the
spot, was the neighbourhood of the Half Moon. Where there was drink, he
argued, people would get drunk; and where people got drunk, anything
might happen. He had instituted Mr. Lickwit to remain on guard at the
eastern works; and he had written to the superintendent of police
suggesting the advisability of special precautions. But he felt nervous
and ill at ease as he listened, from his Nevilton terrace, to the
distant shouts and clamour carried to him on the west wind; and true to
his Napoleonic instincts, he proceeded, without informing anyone of his
intention, straight to the zone of danger.
The afternoon was very hot, though there was no sun. The wind blew
in threatening gusts, and the quarry-owner noticed that the distant
Quantock Moors were overhung with a dark bank of lowering clouds.
It was one of those sinister days that have the power of taking all
colour and all interest out of the earth’s surface. The time of the
year lent itself gloomily to this sombre unmasking. The furze-bushes
looked like dead things. Many of them had actually been burnt in
some wanton conflagration; and their prickly branches carried warped
and blighted seeds. The bracken, near the path, had been dragged and
trodden. Here and there its stalks protruded like thin amputated arms.
The elder-bushes, caught in the wind, showed white and metallic, as
if all their leaves had been dipped in some brackish water. All the
trees seemed to have something of this dull, whitish glare, which did
not prevent them from remaining, in the recesses of their foliage, as
drearily dark as the dark dull soil beneath them. The grass of the
fields had a look congruous with the rest of the scene; a look as if it
had been one large velvety pall, drawn over the whole valley.
In the valley itself, along the edges of this grassy hall, the tall
clipped elm-trees stood like mourning sentinels bowing towards their
dead. Drifting butterflies, principally of the species known as the
“Lesser Heath” and the “Meadow-Brown,” whirled past his feet as
he walked, in troubled and tarnished helplessness. Here and there
a weak dilapidated currant-moth, the very epitome of surrender to
circumstance, tried in vain to arrest its enforced flight among the
swaying stalks of grey melancholy thistles, the only living things who
seemed to find the temper of the day congenial with their own.
When he reached the base of the hill, Mr. Romer was amazed at the crowd
of people which the festivity had attracted to the place. He had heard
them passing down the roads all day from the seclusion of his garden,
and to judge by such vehicles as he had secured a glimpse of from the
entrance to his drive, many of them must have come from miles away. But
he had never expected a crowd like this. It seemed to cover the whole
northern side of the hill, swaying to and fro, like some great stream
of voracious maggots, in the body of a dead animal.
Round the cranes, in the centre of the hill, the crowd seemed
especially thick. He made out the presence there of several large
caravans, and he heard the music of a merry-go-round from that
direction. This latter sound, in its metallic and ferocious gaiety,
seemed especially adapted to the character of the scene. It seemed
like the very voice of some savage Dionysian helot-feast, celebrated
in defiance of all constituted authority. It was such music as Caliban
would have loved.
Unwilling to arouse unnecessary anger by making his presence known,
while there was no cause, Mr. Romer left the Half Moon on his right,
and crossing the brow of the hill diagonally, by a winding path that
encircled the grassy hollows of innumerable ancient quarries, arrived
at the foot of an immense circular tumulus which dominated the whole
scene. This indeed was the highest point of Leo’s Hill, and from
its summit one looked far away towards the Bristol Channel in one
direction, and far away towards the English Channel in another. It was,
as it were, the very navel and pivot of that historic region. From this
spot one obtained a sort of birds-eye view of the whole surface of
Leo’s Hill.
Here Mr. Romer found himself quite alone, and from here, with hands
clasped behind him, he surveyed the scene with a grave satiric smile.
He could see his new works with the immense cranes reaching into the
sky above them. He could see the swaying crowd round the amphitheatre
at the extreme corner of the promontory; and he could see, embosomed in
trees to the left of Nevilton’s Mount, a portion of his own Elizabethan
dwelling.
Mr. Romer felt strong and confident as he looked down on all these
things. He always seemed to renew the forces of his being when he
visited this grass-covered repository of his wealth and influence.
Leo’s Hill suited his temper, and he felt as though he suited the
temper of Leo’s Hill. Between the man who exploited the stone, and the
great reservoir of the stone he exploited, there seemed an illimitable
affinity.
He looked down with grim and humorous contempt at the noisy crowd
thus invading his sacred domain. They might harangue their hearts
out,--those besotted sentimentalists,--he could well afford to let them
talk! They might howl and dance and feast and drink, till they were as
dazed as Comus’ rabble,--he could afford to let them shout! Probably
Mr. Wone, the “Christian Candidate,” was even at that moment, making
his great final appeal for election at the hands of the noble, the
free, the enlightened constituency of Mid-Wessex.
Romer felt an immense wave of contempt surge through his veins for this
stream of fatuous humanity as it swarmed before his eyes like an army
of disturbed ants. How little their anger or their affection mattered
to him--or mattered to the world at large! He would have liked to have
seized in his hands some vast celestial torch and suffocated them all
in its smoke, as one would choke out a wasp’s nest. Their miserable
little pains and pleasures were not worth the trouble Nature had taken
in giving them the gift of life. Dead or alive--happy or unhappy--they
were not deserving of any more consideration than a cloud of gnats that
one brushed away from one’s face.
The master of Leo’s Hill drew a deep breath and listened to the screams
of the merry-go-round. Something in the strident machine made him
think of hymn-singing and mob-religion. This Religion of Sentiment
and Self-Pity with which they cloak their weakness and their petty
rancour--what is it, he thought, but an excuse of escaping from the
necessity of being strong and fearless and hard and formidable? It is
easier--so much easier--to draw back, and go aside, and deal in paltry
subterfuges and sneaking jealousies, veneered over with hypocritical
unction, than to strike out and pursue one’s own way drastically and
boldly.
He folded his arms and frowned. What is it, he muttered to himself,
this hidden Force, this Power, this God, to which they raise their
vague appeals against the proud, clear, actual domination of natural
law and unscrupulous strength? Is there really some other element
in the world, some other fact, from which they can draw support and
encouragement? There cannot be! He looked at the lowering sky above
him, and at the grey thistles and little patches of thyme under his
feet. All was solid, real, unyielding. There was no gap, no open door,
in the stark surface of things, through which such a mystery might
enter.
He found himself vaguely wondering whose grave this had originally
been, this great flat tumulus, upon which he stood and hated the mob
of men. There was a burnt circle in the centre of it, with blackened
cinders. The place had been used for some recent national rejoicing,
and they had raised a bonfire here. He supposed that there must have
been a much more tremendous bonfire in the days when--perhaps before
the Romans--this mound was raised to celebrate some savage chieftain.
He wondered whether, in his life-time, this long-buried, long-forgotten
one had stood, even as he stood now, and cried aloud to the Earth and
the Sky in sick loathing of his wretched fellow-animals.
He humorously speculated whether this man also, this ancient challenger
of popular futility, had been driven to strange excesses by the
provocative resistance of some feeble girl, making her mute appeals to
the suppressed conscience in him, and calling in the help of tender
compassionate gods? Had they softened this buried chieftain’s heart,
these gods of slavish souls and weak wills, before he went down
into darkness? Or had he defied them to the last and died lonely,
implacable, contemptuous?
The quarry-owner’s ears began to grow irritated at last by these
raucous metallic sounds and by the laughter and the shouting. It was
so precisely as if this foolish crowd were celebrating, in drunken
ecstasy, a victory won over him, and over all that was clear-edged,
self-possessed, and effectual, in this confused world. He struck off
the heads of some of the grey thistles with his cane, and wished they
had been the heads of the Christian Candidate and his oratorical
associates.
Presently his attention was excited by a tremendous hubbub at the
northern extremity of the hill. The crowd seemed to have gone mad.
They cheered again and again, and seemed vociferating some popular air
or some marching-song. He could almost catch the words of this. The
curious thing was that he could not help in his heart dallying with
the strange wish that in place of being the man at the top, he had
been one of these men at the bottom. How differently he would have
conducted the affair. He knew, from his dealings with the country
families, how deep this revolutionary rage with established tradition
could sink. He sympathized with it himself. He would have loved to have
flung the whole sleek structure of society into disorder, and to have
shaken these feeble rulers out of their snug seats. But this Wone had
not the spirit of a wood-louse! Had he--Romer--been at this moment the
arch-revolutionary, in place of the arch-tyrant, what a difference in
method and result! Did they think, these idiots, that eloquent words
and appeals to Justice and Charity would change the orbits of the
planets?
He strode impatiently to the edge of the tumulus. Yes, there was
certainly something unusual going forward. The crowd was swaying
outwards, was scattering and wavering. Men were running to and fro,
tossing their hats in the air and shouting. At last there really was
a definite event. The whole mass of the crowd seemed to be seized
simultaneously with a single impulse. It began to move. It began to
move in the direction of his new quarries. The thrill of battle seized
the heart of the master of Nevilton with an exultant glow. So they were
really going to attempt something--the incapable sheep! This was the
sort of situation he had long cried out for. To have an excuse to meet
them, face to face, in a genuine insurrection, this was worthier of a
man’s energy than quarrelling with wretched Social Meetings.
He ran down the side of the tumulus and hastened to meet the
approaching mob. By leaving the path and skirting the edge of several
disused quarries he should, he thought, easily be able to reach his
new works long before they did. The tall cranes served as a guide. To
his astonishment he found, on approaching his objective, that the mob
had swerved, and were now streaming forward in a long wavering line,
between the Half Moon tavern and the lower slopes, towards the southern
end of the hill.
“Ah!” he muttered under his breath, “this is more serious! They are
going to attack the offices.”
By this time, the bulk of the crowd had got so far that it would have
been impossible for him to intercept or anticipate them.
Among the more cautious sight-seers who, mixed with women and children,
were trailing slowly in the rear, he was quite certain he made out
the figures of Wone and his fellow-politicians. “Just like him,” he
thought. “He has stirred them up with his speeches and now he is hiding
behind them! I expect he will be sneaking off home presently.” The
figure he supposed to be that of the Christian Candidate did, as a
matter of fact, shortly after this, detach himself from the rest of his
group and retire quietly and discreetly towards the path leading to
Nevilton.
Romer retraced his steps as rapidly as he could. He repassed the
tumulus, crossed a somewhat precipitous bank between two quarries, and
emerged upon the road that skirts the western brow of the hill. This
road he followed at an impetuous pace, listening, as he advanced, for
any sound of destruction and violence. When he arrived at the open
level between the two largest of his quarries he found himself at the
edge of a surging and howling mob. He could see over their heads the
low slate roofs of his works, and he could see that someone, mounted
on a large slab of stone, was haranguing the people near him, but more
than this it was impossible to make out and it was extremely difficult
to get any closer. The persons on the outskirts of the crowd were
evidently strangers, and with no interest in the affair at all beyond
excited curiosity, for he heard them asking one another the most vague
and confused questions.
Presently he observed the figure of a policeman rise behind the man
upon the stone and jerk him to the ground. This was followed by a
bewildering uproar. Clenched hands were raised in the air, and wild
cries were audible. He fancied he caught the sound of the syllable
“fire.”
Romer was seized with a mad lust of contest. He struggled desperately
to force his way through to the front, but the entangled mass of
agitated, perspiring people proved an impassable barrier.
He began hastily summing up in his mind what kind of destruction they
could achieve that would cause him any serious annoyance. He remembered
with relief that all the more delicate pieces of carved work were down
at Nevilton Station. They could do little damage to solid blocks of
stone, which were all they would find inside those wooden sheds. They
might injure the machinery and the more fragile of the tools, but they
could hardly do even that, unless they were aided by some of his own
men. He wondered if his own men--the men on strike--were among them,
or if the rioters were only roughs from Yeoborough. Let them burn
the sheds down! He did not value the sheds. They could be replaced
tomorrow. Their utmost worth was hardly the price of a dozen bottles of
champagne. It gave him a thrill of grim satisfaction to think of the
ineffectualness of this horde of gesticulating two-legged creatures,
making vain assaults upon slabs of impervious rock. Man against Stone!
It was a pleasant and symbolic struggle. And it could only have one
issue.
Finding it impossible to move forward, and not caring to be observed by
anyone who knew him hemmed in in this ridiculous manner among staring
females and jocose youths, Romer edged himself backwards, and, hot and
breathless, got clear of the crowd.
The physical exhaustion of this effort--for only a man of considerable
strength could have advanced an inch through such a dense mass--had
materially diminished his thirst for a personal encounter. He smiled
to himself to think how humorous it would be if he could, even now,
overtake the escaping Mr. Wone, and offer his rival restorative
refreshment, in the cool shades of his garden! For the prime originals
of this absurd riot to be drinking claret-cup upon a grassy lawn, while
the misled and deluded populace were battering their heads against the
stony heart of Leo’s Hill, struck Mr. Romer as a curiously suitable
climax to the days’ entertainment. Hardly thinking of what he did,
he clambered up the side of a steep bank, where a group of children
were playing, and looked across the valley. Surely that solitary black
figure retreating so furtively, so innocently, along the path towards
the wood, could be no one but the Christian Candidate!
Mr. Romer burst out laughing. The discreet fugitive looked so absurdly
characteristic in his shuffling retirement, that he felt for the moment
as if the whole incident were a colossal musical-comedy farce. A puff
of smoke above the heads of the crowd, and a smell of burning, made
him serious again. “Damn them!” he muttered. “They shall not get off
without anything being done.”
From his present position he was able to discern how he could get
round to the sheds. On their remoter side he saw that the crowd had
considerably thinned away. He made out the figures of some policemen
there, bending, it appeared, over something upon the ground.
It did not take him long to descend from his post, to skirt the
western side of the quarries, and to reach the spot. He found that the
object upon the ground was no other than his manager Lickwit, gasping
and pallid, with a streak of blood running down his face. From the
policemen he learnt that an entrance had been forced into the sheds,
and the more violent of the rioters--the ones who had laid Mr. Lickwit
low--were now regaling themselves in that shelter upon the contents of
a barrel of cider, whose hiding-place someone had unearthed. The fire
was already trampled upon and extinguished. He learnt further that a
messenger had been sent to summon more police to the spot, and that it
was to be hoped that the revellers within the shed would continue their
opportune tippling until their arrival. This, however, was not what
fate intended. Reeling and shouting, the half-a-dozen joyous Calibans
emerged from their retreat and proceeded to address the people, all
vociferating at the same time, and each interrupting the other. The
more official and respectable among the politicians had either retired
altogether from the scene or were cautiously watching it, from the
safe obscurity of the general crowd, and the situation around the
stone-works was completely in the hands of the rioters.
Mr. Romer, having done what he could for the comfort of his manager,
who was really more frightened than hurt, turned fiercely upon the
aggressors. He commanded the two remaining policemen--the third was
helping Lickwit from the scene--to arrest on the spot these turbulent
ruffians, who were now engaged in laying level with the ground a
tool-shed adjoining the one they had entered. They were striking at the
corner-beams of this erection with picks and crow-bars. Others among
the crowd, pushing their less courageous neighbours forward, began
throwing stones at the policemen, uttering, as they did so, yells and
threats and abusive insults.
The mass of the people behind, hearing these yells, and yielding to a
steady pressure from the rear, where more and more inquisitive persons
kept arriving, began to sway ominously onward, crowding more and more
thickly around the open space, where Mr. Romer stood, angrily regarding
them.
The policemen kept looking anxiously towards the Half Moon where
the road across the hill terminated. They were evidently very
nervous and extremely desirous of the arrival of re-enforcements.
No re-enforcements coming, however, and the destruction of property
continuing, they were forced to act; and drawing their staves, they
made a determined rush upon the men attacking the shed. Had these
persons not been already half-drunk, the emissaries of the law would
have come off badly. As it was, they only succeeded in flinging the
rioters back a few paces. The whole crowd moved forward and a volley of
stones and sticks compelled the officials to retreat. In their retreat
they endeavoured to carry Mr. Romer with them, assuring him, in hurried
gasps, that his life itself was in danger. “They’ll knock your head
off, sir--the scoundrels! Phil Wone has seen you.”
The pale son of Mr. Wone had indeed pushed his way to the front. He at
once began an impassioned oration.
“There he is--the devil himself!” he shouted, panting with excitement.
“Do for him, friends! Throw him into one of his own pits--the
bloodsucker, the assassin, the murderer of the people!”
Wild memories of historic passages rushed through the young anarchist’s
brain. He waved his arms savagely, goading on his companions. His face
was livid. Mr. Romer moved towards him, his head thrown back and a
contemptuous smile upon his face.
The drunken ring leaders, recognizing their hereditary terror--the
local magistrate--reeled backwards in sudden panic. Others in the front
line of the crowd, knowing Mr. Romer by sight, stood stock still and
gaped foolishly or tried to shuffle off unobserved. A few strangers who
were there, perceiving the presence of a formidable-looking gentleman,
assumed at once that he was Lord Tintinhull or the Earl of Glastonbury
and made frantic efforts to escape. The crowd at the back, conscious
that a reverse movement had begun, became alarmed. Cries were raised
that the “military” had come. “They are going to fire!” shouted one
voice, and several women screamed.
Philip Wone lifted up his voice again, pointing with outstretched arm
at his enemy, and calling upon the crowd to advance.
“The serpent!--the devil-fish!--the bread-stealer!--the money-eater!”
he yelled. “Cast him into his own pit, bury him in his own quarries!”
It was perhaps fortunate for Mr. Romer at that moment that his
adversary was this honest youth in place of a more hypocritical
leader. An English crowd, even though sprinkled with a leaven of angry
strikers, only grows puzzled and bewildered when it hears its enemy
referred to as “devil-fish” and “assassin.”
The enemy at this moment took full advantage of their bewilderment. He
deliberately drew out his cigarette-case and lighting a cigarette, made
a gesture as if driving back a flock of sheep. The crowd showed further
signs of panic. But the young anarchist was not to be silenced.
“Look round you, friends,” he shouted. “Here is this man defying you
on the very spot where you work for him day and night, where your
descendants will work for his descendants day and night! What are you
afraid of? This man did not make this hill bring forth stone, though it
is stone, instead of bread, that he would willingly give your children!”
Mr. Romer gave a sign to the policemen and approached a step nearer.
The cider-drinkers had already moved off. The crowd began to melt away.
“The very earth,” went on the young man, “cries aloud to you to put an
end to this tyranny! Do you realize that this is the actual place where
in one grand revolt the men of Mid Wessex rose against the--”
He was interrupted by a man behind him--a poacher from an outlying
hamlet. “Chuck it, Phil Wone! Us knows all about this ’ere job.”
Mr. Romer raised his hand. The policemen seized the young man by the
arms, one on either side. He seemed hardly to notice them, and went on
in a loud resonant voice that rang across the valley.
“It will end! It will end, this evil day! Already the new age is
beginning. These robbers of the people had better make haste with their
plundering, for the hour is approaching! Where is your priest?”--he
struggled violently with his captors, turning towards the rapidly
retreating crowd, “where is your vicar,--your curer of souls? He talks
to you of submission, and love, and obedience, and duty. What does this
man care for these things? It is under this talk of “love” that you are
betrayed! It is under this talk of “duty,” that your children have the
bread taken from their mouths! But the hour will come;--yes, you may
smile,” he addressed himself directly to Mr. Romer now, “but you will
not smile for long. _Your_ fate is already written down! It is as sure
as this rain,--as sure as this storm!”
He was silent, and making no further resistance, let himself be carried
off by the two officials.
The rain he spoke of was indeed beginning. Heavy drops, precursors
of what seemed likely to be a tropical deluge, fell upon the broken
wood-work, upon the half-burnt bracken, upon the slabs of Leonian
stone, and upon the trampled grass. They also fell upon Mr. Romer’s
silver match-box as he selected another cigarette of his favourite
brand, and walked slowly and smilingly away in the direction of
Nevilton.