Wood and Stone. John Cowper Powys
his vows of ordination—if he were now to draw back from the firing-line of the battle and give up the struggle by a cowardly retreat? Even supposing the temptation were more than he could endure—even supposing that he fell—would not God prefer his suffering such a fall with his face to the foe, sword in hand, rather than that he should be saved, his consecrated weapon dropped from his fingers, in squalid ignoble flight?
So much for the arguments whispered in his ear by the angel of darkness! But he had lately been visited by another angel—surely not of darkness—and he recalled the plausible reasonings of the great champion of the papacy, as he sat in that pleasant window sipping his wine. Why should he agitate himself so furiously over this little matter? After all, why not enjoy the pleasure of this exquisite being’s society? He was in no danger of doing her any harm—he knew Gladys at least well enough by now to know that!—and what harm could she do him? There was no harm in being attracted irresistibly to something so surpassingly attractive! Suppose he fell really in love with her? Well! There was no religious rule—certainly none in the church he belonged to—against falling in love with a lovable and desirable girl. But it was not a matter of falling in love. He knew that well enough. There was very little of the romantic or the sentimental about the feelings she aroused in him. It was just a simple, sensuous, amorous attraction to a provocative and alluring daughter of Eve. Just a simple sensuous attraction—so simple, so natural, as to be almost “innocent,” as Mr. Taxater would put it.
So he argued with himself; but the Tower of the Church opposite seemed to invade the mists of these subtle reasonings with a stern emphasis of clear-cut protest. He knew well enough that his peculiar nature was not of the kind that might be called “sensuous” or “amorous,” but of quite a different sort. The feelings that had lately been excited in him were as concentrated and passionate as his feelings for the altar he served. They were indeed a sort of temporal inversion of this sacred ardour; or, as the cynical Mr. Quincunx in his blunt manner would have expressed it, this sacred fire itself was only a form taken by the more earthly flame. But a “flame” it was,—not any gentle toying with soft sensation,—a flame, a madness, a vice, an obsession.
In no ideal sense could he be said to be “in love” with Gladys. He was intoxicated with her. His senses craved for her as they might have craved for some sort of maddening drug. In his heart of hearts he knew well that the emotion he felt was closely allied to a curious kind of antagonism. He thought of her with little tenderness, with no gentle, responsible consideration. Her warm insidious charm maddened and perturbed him. It did not diffuse itself through his senses like a tender fragrance. It provoked, disturbed, and tantalized. She was no Rose of Sharon, to be worshipped forever. She was a Rose of Shiraz, to be seized, pressed against his face, and flung aside! The appeal she made to him was an appeal to what was perverse, vicious, dangerous devastating, in his nature. To call his attraction to her beauty “innocent”—in Mr. Taxater’s phrase—was a mere hypercritical white-washing of the brutal fact.
His mind, in its whirling agitation, conjured up the image of himself as married to her, as legally and absolutely possessed of her. The image was like fuel to his flame, but it brought no solution of the problem. Marriage, though permitted by his church, was as directly contrary to his own interpretation of his duty as a priest, as any mortal sin might be. To him it would have been a mortal sin—the betrayal of his profoundest ideal. In the perversity—if you will—of his ecclesiastical conscience, he felt towards such a solution the feeling a man might have if the selling of his soul were to be a thing transacted in cold blood, rather than in the tempest of the moment. To marry Gladys would be to summon the very sacraments of his church to bless with a blasphemous consecration his treachery to their appeal.
Rent and torn by all these conflicting thoughts, the poor clergyman scrambled once more to his feet, pushed his way recklessly through the intervening fence, and began ascending the steep side of the pyramidal hill. As he struggled upward, through burdocks, nettles, tall grasses, red-campion, and newly planted firs, his soul felt within him as if it were something fleeing from an invincible pursuer. The rank aromatic smell of torn elder-boughs and the pungent odour of trodden ground-ivy filled his nostrils. His clothes were sprinkled with feathery seed-dust. Closely-sticking burs clung to his legs and arms. Outstretched branches switched his face with their leaves. His feet stumbled over young fern-fronds, bent earthwards in their elaborate unsheathing.
He vaguely associated with his thoughts, as he struggled on, certain queer purple markings which he noticed on the stalks of the thickly-grown hemlocks, and the bind-weed, which entwined itself round many of the slenderer tree-stems, became a symbol of the power that assailed him. To escape—to be free! This was the burden of his soul’s crying as he plunged forward through all these dim leafy obstructions.
Gradually, as he drew nearer the hill’s summit, there formed in his mind the only real sanctuary of refuge, the only genuine deliverance. He must obey his innate conscience; and let the result be as God willed. At all costs he must shake himself clear of this hot, sweet, luscious bind-weed, that was choking the growth of his soul. His own soul—that, after all, was his first care, his predominant concern. To keep that, pure and undefiled, and let all else go! Confused by the subtle arguments of the serpent, he would cling only the more passionately to the actual figure of the God-Man, and obey his profound command in its literal simplicity. Ecclesiastical casuistry might say what it pleased about the danger he plunged Gladys into, in thus neglecting her. The matter had gone deeper than casuistry, deeper, far deeper, than points of doctrine. It had become a direct personal struggle between his own soul and Satan; a struggle in which, as he well knew, the only victory lay in flight. On other fields he might be commanded by his celestial Captain to hold his post to the last; but in the arena of this temptation, to hold the field was to desert the field; to escape from it, to win it.
He paused breathlessly under a clump of larches, and stretching out his arms, seized—like Samson in the temple of Dagon—two of the slender-growing trunks. “Let all this insidious growth of Nature,” he thought, “all this teeming and prolific exuberance of godless life, be thrust into oblivion, as long as the great translunar Secret be kept inviolable!” Exhausted by the struggle within him he sank down in the green twilight of that leafy security, and crossed his hands over his knees. Through a gap in the foliage he could perceive the valley below; he could even perceive the outline of the roof of Nevilton House. But against the magic of those carved pinnacles he had found a counter-charm. In the hushed stillness about him, he seemed conscious of the power of all these entangled growing things as a sinister heathen influence pulling him earthward.
Men differ curiously from one another in this respect. To some among them the influences of what we call Nature are in harmony with all that is good in them, and have a soothing and mystical effect. Others seem to disentangle themselves from every natural surrounding, and to stand out, against the background of their own spiritual horizons, clear-edged, opaque, and resistant.
Clavering was entirely of this latter type. Nature to him was always full of hidden dangers and secret perils. He found her power a magical, not a mystical, one. He resented the spell she cast over him. It seemed to lend itself, all too willingly, to the vicious demons that delighted to waylay his unguarded hours. His instinctive attitude to these enchanting natural forces was that of a mediæval monk. Their bewitching shapes, their lovely colours, their penetrating odours, were all permeated for him by a subtle diffusion of something evil there; something capable of leading one’s spirit desperately, miserably far—if one allowed it the smallest welcome. Against all these siren-voices rumouring and whispering so treacherously around us, against all this shifting and flitting wizardry, one defence alone availed;—the clear-cut, absolute authority, of Him who makes the clouds his chariot and the earth his footstool.
As Clavering sat crouching there under his tent of larches, the spirit of the Christ he served seemed to pass surging through him like a passionate flood. He drew deep breaths of exquisite relief and comfort. The problem was solved,—was indeed no problem at all; for he had nothing to do but to obey the absolute authority, the soul-piercing word. Who was he to question results? The same God who commanded him to flee from temptation was able—beyond the mystery of his own divine method—to save her who tempted him, whether baptized or unbaptized!
He leapt to his feet,