Rotten Borough*

The Greatest Powys Treats of Immemorial Animalism

The Story. Over a windy English heath and down a hill crept a rutty road. At the bottom of the hill, the road found, unexpectedly, a village called Shelton, with old elms and houses bulging into the lane.

Dairyman Tasker, who is not the hero of this story (it has none), lived in Shelton with his gods, which gods were large black boars and sows in a pig-yard deep with manure.

When Mr. Tasker went to his worship in the darkness of dawn, he flung his stunted daughters from their beds to serve as acolytes, If the ceremonies were bungled, Mr. Tasker booted the acolytes or smashed their faces with a pitchfork. On feast days, the gods were offered the carcasses of horses or cows. The blood thirst that the gods thus developed happened to save Mr. Tasker the embarrassment and expense of burying his father when he, a drunken tramp, was throttled in the pig-yard one night by Mr. Tasker's watchdog. It was at moments of this sort that joy filled Mr. Tasker's soul.

Slightly more pleasant than Mr. Tasker, though not really so different psychologically, was his vicar, the Rev. Hector Turnbull. Days at the vicarage, all identical, were punctuated by the Rev. Hector's heavy and regular meals, heavy and regular tread, heavy and regular sermons, tooth troubles and grumblings over money. Occasionally, the Rev. Hector noticed the second maid's ankle. Occasionally, he went away to a dentist. That ankles and teeth were connected in the life of a churchman with so proud a bearing as the Rev. Hector's, none would have guessed; and when the Rev. Hector fell heavily dead one day in a disreputable city rooming house, his two elder sons-a middle-class doctor, an ambitious curate-could not, had they wished, have made the villagers believe he was suborning, not rescuing, the girl.

Mrs. Turnbull, whose querulous existence up to that point had been in potting jam and waiting for her husband to speak at table, was deprived of her jam-pots and suffered to board at her doctor-son's house. The curate-son, with his rich wife and her pet lemur, got the Shelton living.

Six other characters shed varying degrees of light. One was a cattle drover. Out of animal fear, to lay the ghost of a girl he had beaten dead, he protected a girl whom someone else had seduced. Another was a hulking bank clerk, one Malden. He was benevolent toward chess, Nature and Rose Netley. Rose, was a social worker to whom all fallen girls were "sisters," She did a certain amount of temporary good in an enthusiastic way.

Henry Turnbull, the Rev. Hector's youngest, was thin, docile, an idiot to his family and the village. He ran errands, dug in the garden and walked, when not in demand, to South Egdon, for respite from mankind's puzzling beastliness. This he found in his only friend, Henry Neville, the South Egdon curate, a sickly ascetic who was hated by his flock because he did not bully them into religion as a proper curate should. Instead he forgave them their malice, an effrontery that he aggravated when he robbed them of the pleasure of stoning him to death by taking poison to end a mortal illness.

His saintly sister, Molly Neville, who compassionately supplied the poison, was called "murderess." Later, she was called ''harlot" because she took Henry Turnbull into her tiny cottage on the heath after his brothers had driven him out. To teach all rebels a lesson, the tavern sots of Shelton gave the elder Tasker, just before the pigs ate him, a bottle of whiskey for kicking the life-spark from Henry's frail body with a handsome pair of iron-cobbled boots. Thereafter, there was none to feel that Molly's cottage light was a blessed star on that rude countryside.

The Significance. The turf of English countrysides is rich and old. Mr. Thomas Hardy arbitrarily says it is poisoned by a malignant Deity. Mr. Powys, also arbitrary, but more candid than Mr. Hardy, declares that it is decayed turf. His "rotten borough," with its immemorial animalism, its "idiot," its saints, is propaganda of the universal order. The Rev. Hector would be recognized in Gopher Prairie. The country churls would have pleased Dostoievsky.

The Author. Of a distinguished English family of seven, the three eldest Powys brothers are writers. Two are migratory between home and the U. S. John Cowper, the eldest, lectures brilliantly to women on how poorly most people write. Llewellyn, the third brother, tells good stories, notably his South African adventures, some of which are to be found in a scary hook, Black Laughter.

Theodore F., perhaps the greatest Powys, lives in Dorsetshire, a recluse, known to his brothers as the "Hermit." He combines his brothers' talents. In wry, childlike sentences, he lays spiritual values that his brother John might reason out, beneath stories that his brother Llewellyn might invent. Mr. Tusker's Gads is the first lengthy exertion of an original force that was felt in The Left Leg, Mark Only, Black Bryony.