John Cowper Powys - A Glastonbury Romance

John Cowper Powys

A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE

FIRST PUBLISHED 1933

To my youngest sister and oldest god-daughter

LUCY AMELIA PENNY

"A grave for Mark, a grave for Gwythur,

A grave for Gwgawn of the ruddy Sword,

Not wise (the thought) a grave for Arthur."

BLACK BOOK OF CARMARTHEN Trans. John Rhys

CONTENTS

VOLUME ONE

1 The Will

2 The River

3 Stonehenge

4 Hic Jacet

5 Whitelake Cottage

6 The Look of a Saint

7 Carbonek

8 Wookey Hole

9 The Unpardonable Sin

10 Geard of Glastonbury

11 Consummation

12 The Dolorous Blow

13 King Arthur's Sword

14 Maundy Thursday

15 Mark's Court

16 The Silver Bowl

17 May Day

18 Omens and Oracles

19 The Pageant

VOLUME TWO

20 Idolatry

21 Tin

22 Wind and Rain

23 The Miracle

24 "Nature Seems Dead...

25 Conspiracy

26 The Christening

27 The Saxon Arch

28 The Grail

29 The Iron Bar

30 The Flood

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS IN THE ROMANCE

John Geard, secretary-valet to the late Canon William Crow; later Mayor of Glastonbury.

Megan, his wife.

Cordelia and Crummie, their daughters.

Philip Crow, Glastonbury industrialist.

Tilly, his wife.

John and Mary Crow, cousins to Philip and to each other.

Elizabeth Crow, daughter of the late Canon Crow; aunt of Philip, John, Mary and

Persephone Spear, wife of

Dave Spear, half-brother of

Nell Zoyland, wife of

Will Zoyland, bastard son of

The Marquis of P., father of

Lady Rachel Zoyland,

Edward Athling, yeoman farmer and poet.

Euphemia Drew, elderly spinster and Mary Crowds employer.

Tom Barter, Philip Crow's manager.

Owen Evans, Welsh antiquary.

Mat Dekker, Vicar of Glastonbury.

Sam Dekker, his son.

Doctor Charles Montagu Fell, a disciple of Epictetus.

Barbara, his sister.

Tittie Petherton, a cancer patient.

Red Robinson, formerly foreman at the Crow Dye-works.

Nancy Robinson, cousin of

Red, Tittie's nurse.

Penny Pitches, servant at the Dekkers'.

Abel Twig and Bartholomew Jones (Number, One and Number Two), old cronies.

Isaac Weatherwax, gardener at the Dekkes' and Euphemia Drew's.

Lily and Louie Rogers, sisters; housemaid and cook at Miss Drew's.

Tossie Stickles, Elizabeth Crow's servant.

Nancy Stickles, a devoted disciple of Mr. Geard.

Mother Legge, procuress.

Young Tewsy, doorkeeper at Mother Legges other housed.

Bet Chinnock, a madwoman.

Jenny Morgan, Philip Crow's former mistress.

Morgan-Nelly, their unrecognised little daughter.

Finn Toller, alias Codfin.

Elphin Cantle, a boy-friend of Sam Dekker's.

Paul Trent, Solicitor, a philosophical anarchist.

John Beere, Solicitor.

Angela Beere, his daughter.

Jackie Jones, Sis and Bert Cole, members of "MorganNelly's robber-band.

Place : Glastonbury, England, and its environs.

Time: The present.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Not a single scene, or situation, or character, or episode in this book has been drawn in any respect, or in any sense whatsoever, from real life. All are pure invention; and the author is absolutely unacquainted with any living individual or with any existing industry in the Glastonbury of our time. The only two persons, and they only misleadingly and remotely, in any way connected with the author's experience, are Canon Crow and the London Architect; and of these the former does not appear till after his death, and the latter only in his buildings, which themselves are entirely imaginary.

AUTHOR'S STATEMENT AND APOLOGY

The Author's attention has been drawn to certain external resemblances between his character, Philip Crow and Captain Gerard William Hodgkinson, M.C., who was for sometime the owner of Wookey Hole Caves and who is now the Managing Director of the Company to which this property has been transferred. The Author wishes to state that Philip Crow is an entirely imaginary figure. He was wholly ignorant of the fact that Philip Crow outwardly resembled Captain Hodgkinson and he wishes to state most emphatically that he did not intend Philip Crow to be identified in any way with this gentleman. The Author adds his sincere apologies for any annoyance he may have caused to Captain Hodgkinson.

THE WILL

At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of march, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway-station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.

In the soul of the great blazing sun, too, as it poured down its rays upon this man's head, while he settled his black travelling bag comfortably in his left hand and his hazel-stick in his right, there were complicated superhuman vibrations; but these had only the filmiest, faintest, remotest connexion with what the man was feeling. They had more connexion with the feelings of certain primitive tribes of men in the heart of Africa and with the feelings of a few intellectual sages in various places in the world who bad enough imagination to recognise the conscious personality of this fiery orb as it flung far and wide its life-giving magnetic forces. Roaring, cresting, heaving, gathering, mounting, advancing, receding, the enormous fire-thoughts of this huge luminary surged resistlessly to and fro, evoking a turbulent aura of psychic activity, corresponding to the physical energy of its colossal chemical body, but affecting this microscopic biped's nerves less than the wind that blew against his face.

Far nearer to the man's conscious ,and half-conscious feelings, as with his overcoat buttoned under his chin and his fingers tightening upon stick and bag he moved to the station-entrance, wen the vast, dreamy life-stirrings of the soul of the earth. Aware k a mysterious manner of every single one of all the consciousnesses, human and subhuman, to which she has given birth, the earth might have touched with a vibrant inspiration this particular child of hers, who at twenty minutes after twelve handed up his ticket to the station-master and set out along a narrow dusty March road towards Brandon Heath. That she did not do this was due to the simple fact that the man instead of calling upon her for help called habitually upon the soul of his own dead mother. Jealous and exacting are all the gods, and a divided worship is abhorrent to them.

John Crow had given a hurried, suspicious sideways glance, before he left the platform, at the group of fellow-travellers who were gathered about the heap of luggage flung from the guard's van. They all, without exception, seemed to his agitated mind to be attired in funeral garb. He himself had a large band of crape sewn upon his sleeve and a black tie. I'm glad I ran in to Mon-. sieur Teste's to buy a black tie, he thought as he met the wind^on the open road. I never would have thought of it if Lisette hadn't pushed me to it at the end.

John Crow was a frail, thin, loosely-built man of thirty-five. He had found himself a penniless orphan at twenty. From that time onward he had picked up his precarious and somewhat squalid livelihood in Paris. Traces of these fifteen years of irregular life could be seen writ large on his gaunt features. Something between the down-drifting weakness of a congenital tramp and the unbalanced idealism of a Don Quixote hovered about his high cheek-bones and about the troubled droop of his mouth. One rather disturbing contradiction existed in his face. There was a constant twitching of his cheeks beneath his sunken eye-sockets; and this peculiarity, combined with a furtive, almost foxy, slant about the contraction of his eyelids, contrasted disconcertingly with the expression in the eyes themselves. This expression resembled one particular look, as of a sea-creature without a human soul, that Scopas gives to his creations.