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⇒ Cover ⇒ Preface ⇒ Introduction ⇒ The visit ⇒ Weymouth map c.1930 ⇒ Portland map c.1930 ⇒ Works quoted ⇒ Postface |
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A visit to Weymouth with John Cowper Powys [ ⇒ continue... ] |
A man is strangely detached from Nature; and deep in his heart lies a fear of Life beyond the comprehension of any woman. But holding a woman by night and by day between him and Life, he is protected from this underlying fear. |
THE HEAD |
... the curious Inn known as The Sea-Serpent's Head, or just briefly, The Head (...) was composed of huge square blocks of Portland stone; and although a very small edifice—of not more than half-a-dozen rooms all told—it presented itself when seen from the bottom of the cliffs that sank down beneath it, in the form of a massive fortress, that might well have defended the Island in ancient times. Immediately round it were several small paddocks, enclosed by rough stone walls; but within a stone's throw of its door were two quite large quarries, and all the table-land round that portion of the Island was strewn with blocks of oolite, limestone lying upon limestone, as human bones might lie upon human bones.(...) Their sunset walk to The Head (...) was so happy that for the third time that day the Jobber came near to forgetting the Chesil Beach pebble which he still carried in his trousers pocket.(...) Long after Perdita was sound asleep the Jobber's mind went whirling on in the same blood-stained circle.(...) As he tossed from side to side in that windless, starlit silence, with the sea-airs from the unruffled West Bay flowing in through their open window, there came moments when his hold on objective reality grew faint, and when a strange exultation seized him, made up of his love's lost maidenhead and his passionate possession of her, made up of the wild mixing of their blood; and in the tide of this exultation he felt as if blood and death and the blow with which he would rid the world of the Dog, were all part of some mystical transaction, beautiful, terrible, miraculous, that he had only to carry up to its appointed end, to redeem all. |
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