John Cowper Powys Championship Page: Post #3 "What came over the mind of the heretic priest at that moment was a certain day, years and years ago..."

(During the 1980s, after Wolf Solent, Weymouth Sands, and the Autobiography, I then read Ducdame.  I followed that with Maiden Castle.  I felt that I had gone over to another world, no mirror needed, no low door in the wall, but merely the further opening of my mind to a literature and a mythology that was bigger than anything I'd ever read before.) 

"What came over the mind of the heretic priest at that moment was a certain day, years and years ago, when, in the wretched playground of a second-rate preparatory school, he had watched a couple of his companions throwing handfuls of cinders taken from a galvanized iron ash bin at the body of a dead rat.  He had been the laughing stock of the school even before that day for his inability to conform to their standards, but after that day his loathing for every aspect of youthful high spirits hardened into a misanthropic mania." (p. 198)

"Netta pressed instinctively closer to the clergyman's side; for the figure that followed the voice, from what seemed the very depths of a watery ditch, was strange enough to scare the most preoccupied

mind.  It was that of a woman so old as to be almost beyond human recognition.  Her face was not so much the colour of ashes as the colour of the inside of a white eggshell that has been exposed on

the top of a rubbish heap for many weeks.  Out of this face looked forth a pair of ghastly sunken eyes, colourless now in the darkness, but possessed of some kind of demonic vitality that made both Hastings and Netta shrink and draw back, as if from the presence of something malignant and dangerous.

    "'Betsy must have known 'ee was coming dearie!  What else was I nursing my old bones for on way home from town?  'Twas so when the gentleman from London brought his sweetheart this way fifteen years agone.  These things be writ in the stars, sweet lady; they be writ in the stars.'"  (P. 201)

"Between his soul and all this enchanted spaciousness there arose a reciprocity he could not analyze, a feeling that had the irresponsibility of despair and yet was not despair, that resembled loneliness and yet was not loneliness.  It was almost as if, just behind all this etherealized chemistry, there really did exist something corresponding to the old Platonic idea of a universe composed of mind-stuff, of mind-forms, rarer and more beautiful than the visible world."  (p. 3)

(Glimpses of the Dorset countryside in which the novel Ducdame takes place.)

"The red coals in Lexie's grate seemed to lose something of their power.  The rosy glow reflected from Lexie's crowded bookcases seemed to fade.  The little blue fire devil that danced like a demon butterfly on the top of the colas flagged and drooped.  A great blind streaming face was pressed against the window--the gray featureless face of the rain.  It was as if a corpse-cold cloudy arm, wavering and shadowy, fumbled and plucked at those two dripping figures; as though, drenched as they were, they belonged to the drowning fields outside and not to this warm human interior."
(p. 31)

[All selections from Ducdame are courtesy of the Village Press edition, London, 1974.  First published by Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1925.]