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John Powys: Ducdame

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John Powys Ducdame

Ducdame: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Ducdame was John Cowper Powys' fourth novel published in 1925. It is set in Dorset. The protagonist, Rook Ashover (a wonderfully Powysian name) is an introverted young squire with a dilemma: to go on loving his mistress, Netta Page, or, make a respectable marriage and produce an heir. Of his early novels (pre- Wolf Solent) this one is often considered to be the most carefully constructed and best organized. Like them all it contains a gallery of rich, complex characters and glorious writing.

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“I’ve no one to go to! I’ve no one to go to,” Mrs. Ashover found herself saying. “Doctor Twickenham is a fool. William Hastings is mad; and Lexie is worse than mad where Rook is concerned. I told you a year ago, Richard”—“She drops the Corporal when she wants help,” thought the old man—“where it seemed to me Ann Gore might come in. Well! I’ve had her with me for several months, and what’s the result? I am besieged in my own house. That woman is everywhere. I meet her on the staircase. I meet her in the garden. I only don’t meet her in the dining room and the drawing room because I stay in my own bedroom! I tell you the place doesn’t belong to me any more. I am just an uncomfortable visitor, staying with my son and his mistress. That’s how it must appear to all our neighbours; and that’s how it is.”

The Corporal threw his pitchfork away and led his agitated visitor back to the house. Opening the front door he took her straight into his own little room where there was a big wood fire. He placed her in a dilapidated armchair with the utmost courtesy and then began muttering and groaning while he fumbled for his best clothes in the chest of drawers.

“So Ann has gone over to the harlot? Ay, John. Ay, John. Ay, John. That I should have lived to see this.”

“I’ve no one to go to,” repeated Mrs. Ashover. “That’s why I came to you. John always used to come to you. I can hear him saying it now—‘I’ll just run across and talk to Richard’—so, my friend,” and she smiled almost wistfully at the wrinkled contorted features appearing under the upheld coat, “you must help us at this pinch or see us go right down to the bottom.”

Granfer Dick pulled a chair to the opposite side of the fire, took his seat deliberately, and stared with concentrated intensity at his kinswoman.

“Smoke if you want to, Corporal,” said the old lady. He shook his head and continued to survey her with frowning forehead and screwed-up eyes, thinking many things.

“It’s funny…. It’s as funny as a bad dream,” murmured the old woman. “But if something isn’t done soon nothing will change it. Rook will get older and older till he dies childless; and the family will die out with him.”

A fierce light came into the Corporal’s pale eyes and the skin of his closely shaven face tightened itself over its bony framework like parchment that is pulled taut.

“What’s that?” he cried. “Die out? The Ashovers ‘die out’?”

“Certainly they will, if you can’t think of how to help me. When once I’m buried and out of the way, things will go on exactly as they are now, till Lexie is dead and Rook is dead. That woman is certain to outlive them both; and then … Well! that’ll be the end. There’ll be nobody else.”

The two old people looked each other full in the eyes and all manner of wild fantastic thoughts passed between them. They were like a pair of aged priests, servants for innumerable years at a venerable altar, who suddenly awake to the fact that the great god of their idolatry is stricken with a mortal disease.

Terrible with a kind of mad panic such priests might become. They might slaughter holocausts of sheep and oxen. They might steal the flocks from the shepherd and the swine from the swineherd. Nothing might be safe from their sacrificial depredations unless their god himself intervened.

But how could the shadowy god of Squire John’s widow and Squire Ralph’s bastard express its pleasure or displeasure?

Could the sad-eyed cavalier come forth from his gilt picture frame and say: “Let the family end!”? Could Sir Benjamin come forth with his marble smirk and say: “Let the family end!”? Could the Crusader uncross his feet, or John Ashover lift the slab from his more recent dissolution, and cry with one united sepulchral voice: “Let the family be as though it had never been!”?

Without a word interchanged these two crack-brained old people, the elegant lady and the social outcast, let their wild fancies circle round the figure of Cousin Ann — Cousin Ann, who seemed dedicated by Nature herself to be a mother of distinguished offspring. It was incredible that a girl like that should really betray them. But what was she doing? It looked like callous, careless, cynical caprice; Girls have ways of getting hold of men. They have absolutely sure ways when they can be persuaded to sacrifice their pride.

The unspoken thoughts of the two fanatics grew queerer and madder every moment, as the November mist, blending with the smoke of the bonfire, darkened the windows of the room.

“What can I do?” murmured Mrs. Ashover at last, making a pitiful little movement with one thin arm toward her companion. But the Corporal had lifted himself up very straight now and sat bolt upright, his long fingers on the arms of the chair, his little eyes almost shut.

“With buck-rabbits who won’t come to’t, with buck-ferrets who won’t come to’t, with hound-dogs who won’t come to’t, ’tis only a matter of putting the right mate to ’em; shutting her up with him and taking yourself off. You know that and I know that. It’s only a question of the hour and the maid.”

The matter-of-fact gravity of the Corporal and the outrageousness of his suggestion so tickled the old lady’s nervous fancy that she clapped her hands to her face and burst into a peal of hysterical laughter.

She laughed until the tears ran down between her fingers; but even then, deep down underneath her collapse, she was conscious that a set of fantastic possibilities, like blocks of erratic tesseræ, were forming themselves into a kind of pattern. It was all so mad and strange. But who could tell? She knew there were powers and forces in the world that would sometimes carry to a conclusion what was imagined when they refused to yield an inch to what was willed.

She was suddenly aware of a crazy desire to bring the Corporal upon the scene. It could do no harm for him to see Rook; it could do no harm for him to see Cousin Ann. It would gratify a perverse longing in her for him to see the intruding woman herself. Let the bastard deal with the mistress. There would be an ironic justice in that. She thought deeply for a minute, biting her lip and tapping the ground with her stick.

It couldn’t do any harm; that was certain. Rook had always treated the old man well and Lexie, before he got ill, had been in the habit of spending hours with him.

She glanced at the clock on Granfer Dick’s mantelpiece. How the days were closing in! It was only a quarter to five now. If they started together at once they might find the whole party still sitting over tea; and what was more natural than that she should have asked the Corporal to escort her home? Then he would see the woman. John was dead but John’s brother would see the enemy in the house.

She felt like some beleaguered chatelaine who could bring up at need a trusty freelance ready for anything. The adventure appealed to the old woman’s youthful spirit. It appealed to a vein of superstition in her, too. The Corporal was a queer character. Perhaps he had the evil eye! Perhaps he would strike God’s own terror into the heart of the creature. Her mind ran off down a long avenue of wild conjectures. Perhaps John’s brother would whisper such murderous threats into the wretch’s ear that one of these fine days she would pack her things without a word and be off into the void!

The hands of the clock in that little empty room were still short of the hour of five when the mistress of Ashover, leaning on the Corporal’s arm, was struggling up the slope that led to the Scotch firs.

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