Unknown

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 Legge’s “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.

A cold blue sky and a biting east wind were John Crow's companions now as he took the bare grass-edged road towards Brandon Heath. The raw physical discomfort produced by this wind, and the gathering together of his bodily forces to contend, with it, soon brought down by several pegs the emotional excitement in which he had left the train. That magnetic ripple in the divine-diabolic soul of the creative energy beyond space and time which had corresponded to, if not directly caused, his agitated state, sank back in reciprocal quiescence; and the physical tenseness and strain which he now experienced were answered in the far-off First Cause by an indrawn passivity as if some portion of that fount of life fell under the constriction of freezing. The soundless roaring of the great solar furnace up there in the vast ether became, too, at that moment worse than merely indifferent to the motions of this infinitesimal creature advancing into the bracken-grown expanses of the historic Heath, like a black ant into a flowerpot. The man's movements now became weary and slow, even though he caught sight of the words “To Northwold” upon a newly whitewashed signpost. Humming and roaring and whir-.ling in its huge confluent maelstroms of fiery gas, the body of thai: tornado of paternity concealed at that moment a soul that associated John Crow not only with such beings as neglected to invoke its godhead but with such beings as in their malicious rational impiety positively denied it any consciousness. Among all the greater gods around him it was the soul of the earth, however, that remained most jealous and hostile. It must have dimly been aware of the narrow and concentrated feeling, exclusive, misanthropic, which John experienced as he approached the home of his dead mother. And thus as it shot quivering vibrations through the greenish-yellow buds upon the hawthorn bushes, through the tender white blossoms upon the blackthorn, through the folded tremulousness of the fern fronds and the metallic sheen of the celandines, to John Crow it refused to give that exquisite feeling of primordial well-being which it gave to the rest. Why, thinking of his mother, he felt so sad, was a strange fact beyond this man's analysis. How could he know that mingled with their awareness of wet, green mosses, of dry, scaly lichens, of the heady-sweet odours of prickly gorse, of the cool-xooted fragility of lilac-coloured cuckoo flowers, of the sturdy swelling of the woolly calices of early cowslips, of the embryo lives within the miraculous blue shells of hedge-sparrows' eggs, the thoughts of the earth-mother throbbed with a dull, indefinable, unappeasable jealousy of a human mother?

Bending his head a little above his tightly buttoned greatcoat collar, John Crow began to recall now certain actual moments of his recent nights with young Lisette and old Pierre. These moments as he butted his way against this bitter east wind came to him impregnated with the subtle smells of a Latin Quarter street. He saw the neat frippery of Lisette's front room. He saw the grotesque photograph of himself taken by a photographer in a street booth at Saint-Cloud upon her mantelpiece. He saw her absurd muslin curtains, tied with great bows of green ribbon. He saw the big, cracked mirror with the little, carved Cupids at either corner, from one of which the gilt had been chipped, revealing scars of bare wood, black as if they had been burnt in a fire. He saw these things against the far grey horizon, where as a child he had been so often told to look for the great towers of Ely Cathedral, visible across leagues and leagues of level fens. He saw. them against old, stunted, lichen-whitened thorn trees. He Saw them against the curved, up-pushing, new-born horns of the sap-yellow bracken, protected from the wind by the dead husks of last year's mature ferns, and crouching low, like the heads of innumerable mottled snakes, the better to leap at the throat of life. He saw them against the' reddish gnarled trunks of intermittent clumps of Scotch firs and against the scuttling white tails of the rabbits and the hovering wings of solitary kestrel-hawks. And over and over again he said to himself, “Philip will have had all Grandfather's money, of course. Of course Philip will have had all Grandfather's money.”

At one point, when he came to a place where Brandon Heath seemed to gather its personality together and to assume a scrutinising, haughty and inquisitive look, as much as to say, “Who, in the devil's name are you, you dog-faced foreigner?” in reply to this look of Brandon Heath John muttered a sulky defiance and ejaculated aloud, as if to let the place know that he was more than a common tramp: "I shall make Philip give me a berth at Glastonbury?5 He had been on foot now for about an hour, and he had been walking fast too; for the bite of the cold air seemed to give an energy of demonic malice to his defiance of the wind, of the sun, of the hostility of the earth. He had begun to notice too that the heath scenery was transforming itself by degrees into ordinary farm scenery, when he heard a motor car coming up fast behind him.

He stepped hastily to the grass by the roadside and without the least idea as to why he did so stood stock-still and stared at the approaching machine. “Nothing would induce me to take a lift,” he said to himself. “It must be a good two hours still before the time.”

The car, however, lessened its pace the moment he stood still; and as soon as it reached him stopped dead.

“Canon Crow's funeral, Sir?”

The driver's voice had that peculiar up-drawing, up-tilting, devil-may-care intonation, no doubt derived from a long line of Danish ancestors, which renders the Norfolk tongue different from the speech of every other English county. . John Crow looked up at the speaker. There was something in the man's tone that gave him a totally unexpected emotion. A lump of long-frozen tears began to melt in his throat, a frozen lump Lwenty years old, composed of all his memories of his childhood; composed of the image of his grandmother, reading to him in the low-ceilinged, old-pictured, old-brocaded Rectory drawing-room; composed of the image of his grandfather with his snow-white hair in short, wavy curls covering his round, brittle-looking skull, and his voice melodious as a great actor's. Mingled with these came memories of the taste of a certain species of unusual pink-coloured strawberries that grew in the walled garden and the sharp, pure taste of red gooseberries that grew from near the manure heap there; and surrounding all these as if by an atmosphere of something still more intimately felt, there came over him, under the impact of that Norfolk utterance, an impression of acrid smoke, the smoke of burning peat, rising from innumerable cottage hearths.