(1932)

Character List
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 Crow's 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 Dekke~s' 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 house.”
Bet Chinnock	a madwoman
Finn Toller	alias Codfin

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





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 sys-
tems 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 as-
tronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave,
a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too sub-
liminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular hu-
man 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 feel-
ings of a few intellectual sages in various places in the world who
had 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, advanc-
ing, 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 tight-
ening upon stick arid bag he moved to the station-entrance, were
the vast, dreamy life-stirrings of the soul of the earth. Aware in
a mysterious manner of every single one of all the Conscious
nesses, human and subhuman, to which she has given birth, the
earth might have touched with a vibrant inspiration this particu-
lar 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. ‘Tm 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 irregu-
lar 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 re-
sembled 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 com-
panions now as he took the bare grass-edged road towards Bran-
don 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 be-
came, 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
that 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, how-
ever, 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 ex-
quisite 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-rooted
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, unappeas-
able 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 mo-
ments 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 gro-
tesque 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 Cathe-
dral, 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 inter-
mittent 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 scru-
tinising, haughty and inquisitive look, as much as to say, "Who,
m 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. 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 be-
fore 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 twenty years old, composed of all his memories of his child-
hood; 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 atmos-
phere 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.

"The funeral; Northwold; thank you very much,"John Crow
replied in broken phrases; and his own voice was to him as the
voice of one speaking in a dream. As he uttered the words his
eyes glanced in a bewildered daze over the contents of the motor
car. The back seats were all piled up with neat and very new
travelling bags, canvas hold-alls, and bright rugs, from among
which an elderly, gentle, majestic-looking woman smiled at him
in an extremely reassuring manner.

"There's room up here then, Mister,"went on the driver, after
a hurried turn in his seat and a glance backward at the lady amid
the pile of bags. "That's to say,"he added, with an appeal to a
figure at his side, whose presence had hitherto escaped John's
notice, "unless you objects to being crowded, Miss."

The pulse of time that followed this remark was one of the
most singular in all John Crow's experience. It was not, in fact
like a pulse of time at all. It was like a perfectly calm and per-
fectly quiet sinking aside, into a region altogether outside the
jeopardies and agitations of time. John and the young girl who
was seated on the further side of the driver exchanged a long
stare.

"You don't mind, Miss, do 'ee?"repeated the man. " 'Tis a
long walk for the gentleman; and the Canon would wish all that
come to his burying to be treated proper."

The nervous mouth of the young person he thus addressed,
which had mechanically opened, showing a row of long, strong,
white teeth, shut abruptly, and her eyes, which had become large
and round, became little dark-lashed slits in her sallow face. "Of
course not,"she murmured in a low voice, making herself ex-
tremely small and pressing close to the man's elbow.

John Crow walked round the rear of the machine and after a
moment's clumsy fumbling at the handle pulled the door open,
clambered up, and sat down by the girl's side. "All comfort-
able?"asked the driver. "Very, thank you!"came so simul-
taneously from both John and the young girl that it sounded in-
coherent. The man, however, started the car without further
parley.

Is my nephew expecting you to lunch?"came the pleasant
voice of the majestic lady from amid the luggage. "I wonder if
you are one of the cousins?"she went on. "There are really a
terrible lot of us. And we shall all be here."There was a pause
during which the driver remarked that there wouldn't be many
of the local people either who'd stay away. "They respect Canon
Crow in Northwold more'n anyone would suppose, seeing how
little he came out towards the end."

He speaks as if Grandfather were a snail,"thought the young
girl.

"My father liked his books better than visiting,"the lady con-
tinued. "But he used to read beautifully at people's bedsides. I've
heard him do that often when I was little. Some clergymen have
such poor voices."

"I never heard'n read myself,"replied the driver thoughtfully.
"Maybe 'twould have been better if I had. My dad brought me
up chapel; and chapel I've stayed; though I've often thought
Twere a pity. Chapel be all for salvation but it neglects the
King's Majesty...

"That's where we used to look,"broke in John Crow suddenly,
addressing the girl as if he had been completely alone with her,
"for the towers of Ely!"He pointed with his hand over the wide
horizon; and half rising from his seat strained his eyes to catch
a glimpse of what he remembered. "Oh, it's too late!"he added,
and sank by her side. "These cars go quicker than pony carts.
Grandfather used to drive a pony called Judy."

"I'm beginning to think I know who you are,"resumed the
elderly lady. "Aren't you my nephew John who went to live
in France?"

It was the girl who replied for him. "Yes, Aunt Elizabeth, he's
Cousin John. I knew him at once. You used to come with us
sometimes yourself when John took me down the little river in
the old boat. Don't you remember, Aunt Elizabeth? He was with
us that day we went to Oxborough Ferry, when Cousin Percy was
there. Cousin Percy wouldn't fish with worms! You must remem-
ber that, Aunt Elizabeth. She kept putting bits of purple loose-
strife on her hook."There was a nervous exaltation in the girl's
tone that her aunt did not miss.

"I knew Mary at once too,"John Crow said, turning round
to address their relative, "but you used to be very busy when I
stayed at the Rectory so it's no wonder we didn't know each other.
Dear Aunt Elizabeth!"And with a rather exaggerated foreign
gesture he stretched out his arm, and capturing the stout ladys
hand lifted it up to his lips. "I came every summer to North-
wold, you know,"he said, and he remained for a minute leaning
sideways and holding the hand he had taken. "And I came when
he came,"cried Mary with an abrupt and awkward intensity; and
she too turned and leaned back and took possession of her aunt's
other hand. Thus with their faces so close to each other that the
girl's hair brushed his cheek the two cousins, for an appreciable
passage of time, clung to the elderly woman as if their mutual
contact with her brought them closer.

And thus they entered the outskirts of the village of North
wold. It was Miss Elizabeth Crow who made the motion to releast
her fingers.

"Tis like old times to see ye all back,"remarked the driver
as his two front-seat passengers resumed their normal position.
It makes anyone wish he were brought up to Church. Us chapel-
folk are less liable to be gathered together by funerals. When the
Lord divides us. He divides us. But Norfolk gentry, all such as
I've seen, and I've seen a deal o'n one way and another, are
mighty tender over the family. Me own mother had five of us
and I've got more nephies than I knows of, yet devil a one would
I want to see coming up me steps. 'Tis as nat'ral to me to turn
and run from a blood-relation as it is to some folks to hug 'en
to heart."

I am afraid human nature is much the same all the world
over," remarked Miss Elizabeth.

So 'tis, Madam. So 'tis,"said the man, winking at John Crow.
"If I were a cousin of the late Canon, not Ameriky itself would
keep me from hearing Lawyer Didlington read the old gentle-
man's will!"

They had reached the middle of the village at this point and
the visitor from France laid his hand on the driver's elbow. You
can set me down here,"he said.

"No, no,"cried Aunt Elizabeth. I can't allow that. I'll vouch
for it that Philip will be glad to welcome you to lunch. He and
my niece Tilly went ahead in the first car, leaving us detached
females to follow with the luggage."

But the machine had stopped; and John, holding his bag in his
hand, was already out in the road.

"There'll be quite enough of us all without me, Aunt,"he said.
"Good-bye for a time! As our friend here reminds us, we'll all
meet in a few hours, when Lawyer What's-his-name opens Grand-
father's will."

But Miss Elizabeth was destined to receive a much severer
shock than the escape of her eccentric nephew.

"What are you doing, Mary?"she cried in consternation at the
sight of her young niece rapidly following John Crow out of the
motor car.

"I'm going to stay with Cousin John,"she said. "We'll be at
the service. You can tell Philip without fail we'll be at the service."

"But, Mary--you can't do that! What will Tilly say? What
will Philip do? Mary--think! We want your help with Per-
sephone and her husband. You know how Philip and Mr. Spear
always work each other up. Mary, you really can't do this!"

Mary came close up to the window of the car through which
her aunt was protesting. "It's all right, dear,"she said. "Tilly
will manage. You'll look after Dave Spear yourself and see that
he doesn't make Philip too angry. You're always doing that sort
of thing for all of us. Grandfather's servants are used to enter-
taining people. They won't run away, any more than we shall,
before the will is read."The bitter east wind made the girl pull
her black woolen scarf tightly round her neck. There was some-
thing in the genius loci of that Anglo-Danish spot that seemed
to evoke all her contrariness. "You're not Euphemia Drew,
darling, so don't try to be. It was to get rid of Miss 'Phemia for
a bit that I let Philip bring me. I know there's nothing for me in
Grandfather's will! Be the darling you always are. Aunt, and
explain to Philip. I swear I'll bring Cousin John to the service
in good time."

In the startled pause that followed the girl's appeal Elizabeth
Crow's mind flashed back to those days when she was indeed
"busy"as John had said. She had outlived all her generation;
and yet she was not even now an old woman. This came from
being the youngest by many, many years of William Crow's
children. Ah! How her thoughts ran to her dead father. He would
have no flesh and blood of his own to keep him company in that
crowded graveyard. Mary's parents were gone. Persephono'e par-
ents were gone. John had scarcely known his parents. And not
one of them lay in that place to warm the bones of the old man!
Till she herself was brought there he must lie by himself. Their
mother had died in a Swiss sanitarium and had been buried out
there. Yes, Cousin John was right when he said she had been
"busy"in those days. As she stared now at her rebellious niece
in a sort of humorous helplessness all that old imbroglio of
tragic difficulties patterned itself before her mind's eye. The Crow
family always had had a curious vein of gross, drastic common
sense; and when her quarrels with her father reached an intoler-
able point she had simply cut the knot by leaving him alone and
going to live with Philip. Thirty years ago she had gone to Philip,
when this proud man was a mere boy, beginning his life at
Glastonbury. She had achieved this separation with a secretive
suddenness that puzzled everyone who knew her; and it flashed
upon her mind now that something of this blind animal-like ob-
stinacy had lodged itself in Mary. "Better let her go,"she thought.
I dont blame her for being attracted to this trampish fellow.
The extreme opposite of Philip he is; and that's enough for
Mary. I don't care if she does fall in love with him. Father did
his best to shut me up and I'm not going to play that game with
any other woman."

Mary thought, "Dear old Aunt Elizabeth! She's got that queer
wrinkle in her cheeks at this moment which always means she's at
war with Philip. She's glad I'm going off with John--just glad."

The driver thought, "That young fellow will play upsidaisy
with that young lady, soon as they're out of sight! He'll do it,
sure enough. Look at's eyes all gimletting through the lass. He'll
eat her up, I shouldn't wonder."

John Crow thought, "I'll take her to Harrod's Mill to see those
big fish again. Yes, yes, I hugged her at the bottom of the boat
on the little river' when she was eight and I was ten. Yes, I did!
It was a Sunday afternoon I did that. It was drowsy that day;
sunny and drowsy. I had rhubarb tart that day with a lot of
cream. We went to Harrod's Mill. We left the boat at the dam. We
couldnt get it over the dam. There were unripe blackberries
round the dam that day."Then all of a sudden a different figure
from Mary's rose up in his mind. "I believe it was Tom at the^'
bottom of the boat,"he thought, "and not Mary at all!"

Such were the thoughts of four human skulls at that moment;
but only to one mood out of all these did the great maternal soul
of the Earth respond and that was to a sudden exultant sense of
peace and deliciousness in Mary's virginal breasts. Her conscious
thoughts were all with Aunt Elizabeth and how that brave woman
would deal with Philip's anger; but as she stepped over to John's
side and kissed her hand at the departing car something seemed
to stir within her like a warm wave that was at once fire, air and
water and it shivered up from the centre of her being to the tips
of her breasts.

As soon as the car was out of sight John and Mary glanced at
each other with unembarrassed satisfaction.

"I was puzzling in my mind ever since you all overtook me
how I was going to get you to myself, but now that I've got you,"
said John, "I don't care what we do or where we go."

"I care very much because I want to escape from everyone
but you."

"Well, then! The first thing to think of is to find something
to eat. Let's buy some bread and cheese at that Inn over there and
see if they'll let us carry away a flask of port wine."

They went into the little hostelry and had no difficulty in ob-
taining exactly what he had visualised. The Inn lacked a sign-
board and John asked the girl behind the bar what its name was.
"Name?"said the girl with that East Anglian rising inflexion
that seemed to mount up to the last word of the sentence as if in
a kind of optimistic chant or plain-song. "Dew ye come from
far, 'tis Northwold Arms. Dew ye live in these parts, 'lis just the
New Inn. The beer be the same dew ye be thirsty. 'Tis Patteson's
best ale and brewed in Norwich."

It was at this point that John heard a voice in the interior
parlour of this repository of Palteson Ale mentioning his grand-
father's name. "They say in Rectory kitchen,"said the voice,
"that old man Crow have left all his money to that bloke from
Glastonbury what preaches in Prayer-meeting."The voice became
inaudible then. But presently John caught further words among
which "Geard of Glastonbury"came clearly to him.

"May I leave my bag here for an hour or so?"' enquired John
of the barmaid. As the girl seemed unwilling to do more than
murmur some further information about the quality of Norwich
ale, he boldly got rid of the shabby, black object he was carrying,
hoisting it across the counter with an abrupt swing of his long
arm and dropping it shamelessly at the young lady's feet. "It's
just possible--that I'll be staying the night here,"he threw out,
with a catch in his breath from this sudden muscular exertion.

"Single or double?"responded the girl, putting her bare elbows
on the counter, staring gravely at Mary, and displaying a much
livelier interest in her visitors than she had done before.

The cousins glanced triumphantly at each other. Nothing could
have pleased them more at that particular moment than such a
question. "Single--at present,"he answered, giving the questioned
the most foxy and whimsical smile she had ever received.

They were just leaving the place--the flask of wine in John's
pocket and the bread and cheese in a neat parcel in Mary's hand
--when several labouring men, laughing uproariously, pushed
past them towards the bar. Norfolk, here too, showed its inde-
pendent Danish blood. There was no obsequiousness towards "the
gentry,"such as would have been apparent in Kent or Surrey.
One of the newcomers boldly addressed John.

"Relatives arrived for the funeral, I reckon? 'Tis as we all
knew 'twould be. Canon were left lonesome enough when he were
alive; but anyone would think the man were a Member o' Parlia-
ment now he be dead. Never have I see'd so many folk turn into
them gates. Old Ben Pod at the lodge, who counts every wheel
that passes--'tis his only joy since he lost the use of his legs--
must have broke his 'rithmetic in counting them."

There won't be so many to count when we be put under sod,"
remarked one of the other men. " 'Tis because there's been Crows
in England since King Canute."

Since when?"cried the other. "There's been Crows in Eng-
land since earlier than him. He be in History, he be; and this
here family goes further back than History. Talking of families,"
he went on, "I hope your lady won't mind my saying so but it's
singular how old customs abide in certain breeds. I don't know
how near related to the Canon ye two be? but every man's child
born in this place knows one thing about this family."He low-
ered his voice as he spoke. "There's not one of ye Crows when
'a comes to die, that has a son left to bury 'un. They be all sons'
sons that lay 'un in ground. There must be Scripture for't;
though why it should be as 'tis is beyond my conjecture. Some
man of old time, amidst 'en, must have done summat turble...
eaten his own offspring like enough, in want of kindlier meat
...summat o' that...and ever since such doings they all outlive
their sons. 'Tis a kind of Divine Dispensation, I reckon."

John and Mary, who had felt it impolite to desert the threshold
where they had been arrested by this discourse, were now enabled
to make their escape. For one second the phrase "Geard of Glas-
tonbury"returned upon John's mind; but it was gone as quickly
as it came.

"To the Mill, to the Mill!"he cried excitedly, and the two
cousins hurried eastward against the sharp wind down the
narrow, straight lane.

Harrod's Mill was approached, by its own drive, through a
couple of open fields. They entered this drive through a gate
leading out of the road to Didlington, just before the bridge over
the River Wissey.

The wind was sharp indeed as they crossed these two big
meadows; but there was a faint fragrance of sap-filled grass in the
air and the sun was hot. Mary's ecstasy of mood increased rather
than diminished as she walked by John's side, following his step
with her step and even picking up a stick from the ground as she
went along. This she did with the conscious desire to have some
sensation of her own exactly parallel to that which her cousin en-
joyed as he pressed the end of his stick into the ground. Mary felt
that everything she looked at was bathed in a liquid mist and yet
was seen by her for the first time in its real essence. It seemed to
her that the souls of all living things flung forth their inmost
nature that day in a magical rapture. All things seemed anxious
to let all other living things realise how they loved them. As for
herself she felt she could have stroked with her bare fingers
everything she looked at. The very wind, so keen, so bitter, that
now blew in her face and tugged at her clothes; even towards it
she felt a sort of tenderness! She seemed to divine that it felt
itself to be hated by all the human beings it encountered; and
she longed to disabuse it of this mistake.

At one moment she caught sight of a patch of small plants in
the grass of the field whose leaves seemed to have a glossy texture
and a greenish-whitish look that was familiar to her. "Aren't
those cowslips over there?"They both hurried to the spot. Yes,
they were cowslips; but so early or so stunted were they that the
tiny buds were barely yellow. John was immensely relieved that
she did not incontinently snatch at these pale, rudimentary, brittle
stalks, covered with tiny white hairs, like the forearms of young
girls, and hand them to him or keep them in her dress as memo-
rials of this hour. How often in country excursions with his
French friends, had he been railed at by them as a prig, a poseur,
un fou Anglais for his diseased conscience in refusing to pick
flowers.

Before reaching Harrod's Mill-pond they came upon an old
cow-shed, once black with tar, but now blotched with queer
patches of a minutely growing moss, which in some places was
green and in others the colour of rusty iron. Against the western
side of this shed the grass was twice as tall as in the rest of the
field and of a much more vivid green. The cousins surveyed this
erection in silence for a moment, he leaning on his hazel-stick
which was smooth to his hand, she leaning on the rotten bramble-
stick she had picked up which was rough to her hand. Their hesi-
tation was so humorously identical, that when they glanced at
each other they smiled broadly, their white strong teeth gleaming
in the sun.

Oh, to the devil with it!"he cried. "It'll get up again as soon
as weve got up. It does from under the cows and we're lighter
than cows. Come on, Mary--let's have our feast!"

He clutched at her skirt from his seated position and almost
pulled her off her balance. She slipped down, however, facing
him, her legs drawn up under her, and at once began untying the
parcel of bread and cheese, holding it carefully on her lap. High
above their heads several larks seemed bursting their little bodies
with their shrill canticle. Their song was stoical and continuous,
with a kind of harshness in its quivering rapture. "Hark at the
larks! said John to Mary, watching the careful way she was
dividing their viands. As a distributor of the bread and cheese
both the woman in her and the young girl played their part. She
made sandwiches for John and herself as if the two of them had
stood back to back measuring their difference in size. He mean-
while pulled out the cork of the flask and held it out to her for
her to take the first drink. Preoccupied with the sandwiches, she
let him hold it till his weary wrist rested upon her knee. But as
soon as she had put it to her lips he jumped to his feet again,
murmured some kind of abracadabra and poured out what he
told her was a libation to the gods.

When they had finished all there was of both food and drink,
he produced a packet of Gold Flake cigarettes, and they smoked
for a while, contented and at rest. But the larks had come down.
The cold wind rendered their exultation intermittent.

"Those men were perfectly right," said John. "It has become
almost absurd, the way, from generation to generation of our
family the older generation outlives the younger. When you come
to think of it it's quite unnatural that four cousins, Philip, you,
myself, and Persephone should all be grown-up orphans; and the
only child of Grandfather's alive should be Aunt Elizabeth. And
I'll tell you another thing that's queer too; not one of our parents
is buried in the churchyard! How do you suppose that happened,
Mary?"

"How do you know they're not buried there, Cousin John, when
you've lived all your life in France?"

"Oh, I've watched the family, Mary! Don't you make any mis-
take. I've watched them like a hawk. I know exactly how much
money Grandfather's got. I know where every one of the uncles
and aunts died and where they were buried. I could write a his-
tory of the Crows of Norfolk, I tell you, like Ranke's history of
the Popes."

"They've never been very much,"murmured Mary dreamily,
changing her position and stretching herself out on the grass.
"You're sitting on your coat, aren't you?"

"Yeomen, I fancy, for about five hundred years,"said John.

She lifted up her head to smile at him.

"I've never thought much of yeomen."Her next words came
with a drowsy, luxurious querulousness as she let her head sink
down again. "I wish he had been buried yesterday."

They were both silent for a couple of minutes. Then she pushed
herself with her hands a little nearer him and took off her hat,
flinging it on the grass a few paces off.

"I like your hair, Mary," he said, boldly twisting a wisp of it
back from her forehead, round a couple of his fingers. "It's the
nicest hair I've ever touched. It's just the right tinge of brown.
I say, it's awfully full of electricity!"

"I expect you're a great authority,"she said. Her remark was
made as if it were simply a grave statement, free from all irony,
and she went on in the same tone. "How many girls have you
made love to, John, in your whole life?"

As she spoke she propped herself up a little and this time let
her shoulders rest against his knees.

"God! My dear,"he muttered, "do you think I count them?
I'm not Ben Pod."

"I've never been made love to in my life,"said Mary. "So I
don't know what it's like. Does a girl get as much pleasure
out of it as a man, John, do you think?"

"That's the oldest question, Mary, ever asked of any oracle.
In fact it was first asked by the gods themselves."

"Tell me about it,"said Mary. "I feel just as I did, asking you
such questions when we went in the boat"

"They asked the greatest of all soothsayers,"John informed
her. "The old Teiresias; and do you know what he said? He said
that in the act of love it was the woman who enjoyed it most."
All the while he was speaking, he was indulging in a delicious
feeling of pleasure because she had remembered the boat.

"I expect he was right,"commented Mary gravely; and then,
after a pause, "I think he was right,"she concluded.

"The Queen of Heaven must have known he was right,"said
John, "for she was so angry that she turned him into a woman.
Does it strike you, that was a queer punishment?"

She fixed her brown eyes upon him. "Not at all, Cousin John.
It seems a very natural punishment."

From a meadow remote from where they were and at present
concealed by the shed there came to them at that minute the wild
familiar cry of the lapwing.

"I've been wanting all the time to ask you, Mary,"he recom-
menced, "whether you remember that day we couldn't get the
boat past the dam--the dam between the big river and the little
river? You said just now that you'd never been made love to.
Why! my dear, I've had a feeling of longing to see you again all
my life since that day that I hugged you and so on in the bottom
of that boat. Do you remember that too, the way the boat leaked,
and how fishy it smelt and the way I held you?" The queer thing
was that once more, even as he said these words, the image of the
boy Tom Barter rose up.

Mary frowned, struggling desperately to evoke the scene he
described. She remembered the day; she remembered the diffi-
culty with the dam; she remembered his pleasure as they leant
over the rowlocks to watch the fish; she remembered her grand-
father's anger when they came home; she remembered with a
peculiar sweet sort of shame having asked him various questions;
but the one thing she had completely forgotten was his having
hugged her "and so on." A rather sad smile flickered across her
face, a smile that she gave way to because her face was invisible
to him. "You're sure you remembered right which little girl it
was, John,"she said, "that you hugged that day?"

Her words arrested his attention. He could not tell whether she
was mischievous or grave because he could not see her face.
"You mustn't tease me like that, Mary,"he said. "You never once
teased me in those days and I never once teased you. There's no
need for us to be ashamed of being serious now any more
than then."

He noticed that one of her hands began to pluck at the grass by
her side but she made no reply to his words. "What do you re-
member, Mary,"he said, "about that day at the dam?"

The silence that followed his words was like the silence of a
field at the bottom of a mountain-valley, when the setting sun
touches the flanks of a herd of feeding cattle.

Mary's thoughts were like a rain of bitterness and a dew of
sweetness gathered in the hollows of a tree-root. A brimming over
from them all would have escaped and vanished if she had tried
to express them in any sort of speech. The shame of those ques-
tions she had asked of little Johnny Crow was a sweet shame.
That she had forgotten what he remembered was bitter to her.
Could he be inventing? Could it really have been another little
girl in another boat? How could she have forgotten whatever it
was he did to her? "I must have been an imbecile," she said to
herself. "If he were to hug me now, and so on, I should not
forget!"

His voice continued to murmur on over her head; and what
was this? His wrists were under her armpits and his hands cov-
ered her breasts. He was holding them very still; but her right
breast was beneath one of his hands and her left breast was be-
neath the other. That up-flowing wave which she had felt before
seemed now to encounter a down-flowing wave. Every conscious
nerve of her body seemed to be responding to his hands. Her
jacket and her dress intervened, or he would have felt her heart
beating. He probably did feel it beating! Her mind wandered for
a second to the secluded drawing-room of Miss Euphemia Drew
in the Abbey House at Glastonbury. Under the pressure of his
hands she shut her eyes and leaning back in complete relaxation
against his knees she gave herself up to an inner vision of the
Abbey Ruins through those great windows. How often had she
sat there in the late afternoon light in profound unhappiness
watching the rooks gather about the tall elms and the shadow of
the great, mutilated tower arch grow longer and longer upon the
smooth grass! How she had come to hate Glastonbury and hate
the Ruins and above all hate the legend of the Grail! Tom Barter
agreed with her in all this. That had been the secret of her
friendship with Tom. That and his having come from North-
wold. "Mary--there's a rabbit in the asparagus-bed! Mary , the
ducks are in the garden!"Oh, how she hated Miss Drew some-
times-hated her almost as much as the Ruins. And yet how good
the woman had been, putting up with her moods, her sulkiness,
her sheer bad temper, treating her always more like a daughter
than a companion. "I hope he won't kiss me or anything else,"she
thought And then she thought, "I don't want him to take his
hands away. I want him to go on like this, without a change,
forever."

And Jonn thought, "I'm English and she's English and this is
England. It's more lovely to feel her little cold breasts under
these stiff clothes, on this chilly grass, than all the Paris devices."
And without formulating the thought in words he got the im-
pression of the old anonymous ballads writ in northern dialect
and full of cold winds and cold sword-points and cold spades
and cold rivers; an impression wherein the chilly green grass and
the peewits' cries made woman's love into a wild, stoical, ro-
mantic thing; and yet a thing calling out for bread and bed and
candlelight! "Lisette would not have the faintest shadow of the
faintest notion of what I'm now feeling. England! England!"
How small, how very small Mary's breasts were! Why, as he
held them now they seemed like the cold cups of water-lilies, not
like a woman's breasts at all! God! She wasn't a woman, this
new-found Love of his. She was an undine out of Harrod's Mill-
pond! Yes, this is what he had been secretly craving; so long!
so long! In his foxy shifts, in his wanton driftings, in his stormy
reactions against the life of a great city, in his pathetic escapes
into those whitewashed villages with their orchards, barley fields,
and church steeples, in his crazy, reiterated attempts to do some-
thing better than the wretchedest literary hackwork, in it all,
through it all, he had been pining for a moment like this. Why,
this girl was his very "other self."What luck! What incredible
luck! He could feel her consciousness as he held her like this,
holding her where a woman's identity, her very soul, must surely
most of all lie hid! And her inmost consciousness was exactly like
his own--he knew it was--exactly like his own. "Oh, I needn't
kiss you or anything, Mary,"his thoughts ran. "We've met. We're
together. We've got each other now. It's all done. Once for all
it's all done."

He moved his hands from her breasts and encircled her thin
neck with all his fingers. He could feel the luxury of abandon-
ment with which her chin sank on his knuckles and her head fell
sideways. She was feeling exactly as he was feeling--only, as was
right and proper, the reverse way. Oh, what magical expressions
for the only things in love that really counted, were those old
ballad phrases. Mary was not pretty. She was not beautiful. She
had what the old ballads had. Yes, that was the thing. The best
love was not lust; nor was it passion. Still less was it any ideal .
It was pure Romance! But pure Romance was harsh and grim and
stoical and a man must be grim to embrace it. Yes, it went well
with cold March wind and cold rain and long chilly grass.

He released her neck and ran his fingers through her brown
wavy hair. Mary always parted it in the middle and drew it back,
each way. Mary's forehead always seemed fullest just over each
temple where there were little blue veins. Her nose was rather
long and very straight; but it had wide, flexible nostrils, the nos-
trils of an animal who goes by scent. John's restless fingers now
began feeling over all her features, one by one, as if he had been
a blind old man and she his unseen guide. It gave him a queer
sensation, like touching the exposed belly of some delicate fish or
bird, when he felt the pulses of her eyes beating under her tight-
closed eyelids. He and she were both of them blind now. By God!
And they both of them felt blind; and in the blind arms of
chance. When he came to her full lips and her rather large mouth
he hoped in his heart it would come upon her to bite his fingers.
And she did . He drew his bitten fingers away and sucked at them
dreamily. He struggled to his feet and catching her under the
shoulder blades lifted her up. The feeling of her body in his
hands excited his senses but he only gave her one savage hug,
pressing her fiercely against him, his long bony hands gripping
the front of her thighs. Then he let her go with an abruptness that
almost flung her on the grass.

"It's time to see the fish if we're not going to miss the funeral,"
he said.

They both picked up their sticks after that and went forward.

John Crow had forgotten how separated from the farm-house
the mill-pond was. He had just begun to feel those fears of dogs
and angry farmers common to all tramps and gipsies. But he was
to be spared any agitation of this kind. The Mill stood by itself;
and the face which it turned to the mill-pond was vacant of
windows. It was a queer blind face, under its heavy East Anglian
tiles. Mary and he soon found themselves leaning over the low
stone parapet and staring into the huge deep pool....

"It's the same!""I remember!""I remember!"

Their voices came simultaneously; and for one flash of a frag-
ment of a second something in them held a wind-blown taper to
a scene lost and buried more than twenty years. But from the
depths of John Crow's mind another image suddenly mounted up
and another memory. Tom Barter! Tom Barter! It was more than
once he had come here with Tom, a boy of his own age, the son
of the Squire of Didlington; but the episode came back now with
an overwhelming rush. What a heap of information about fish and
about fishing Tom had known! And he had got the boat up those
shallows and past the dam too...got it right into the "big river,"
near Didlington bridge! John became very silent now, staring at
the water and thinking of Tom. It seemed very curious, looking
back at that far-off day, that there should ever have been any
boy so strong, so capable, so extraordinarily nice to him as
Tom Barter had been. He and Tom were exactly the same age.
What had become of him?

"On one of those days,"he announced now to Mary, "I came
here with Tom Barter. Do you remember Tom, Mary? He was
probably the best friend I shall ever have!"

Their four hands were pressed against the parapet, palms down,
and their two heads were close together. Mary moved one of her
hands a little till it just touched one of his.

"Ye...es, I...think...I do,"she replied musingly, In her heart she
said to herself, "I won't tell him now that I know him quite well
and that he's working for Cousin Philip at Glastonbury,"

"Oh, you don't remember him if you don't see him clearly!"
cried John emphatically. "Look at that big one, Mary, look at
him rising there! It was that fish that brought him back to my
mind. Directly I saw that big one I thought of Tom. He got the
boat right up the dam that day, Mary, Tom did."

"I...don't...think...I was there that day,"said Mary in a low voice.
And in her heart she saw two little boys standing exactly where
they two were standing at this minute. Could it have been Tom,
and not her at all, that he had hugged at the bottom of the boat?
Boys no doubt are often shameless on long, hot afternoons!

"Right over the dam. . , went on John Crow. "I can see his
face now as he pulled at it. He must have taken off his stockings.
The dam was all slippery with moss."

"Damn the dam!"cried Mary in her heart. But she said quietly,
"I think I remember him in church, John. He used to sit in the
front pew. Or if it wasn't your friend it was a great, big, strong-
looking boy with curly hair and a freckly face. Yes, I think it
must have been Tom."

"Tom hadn't freckles,"said John Crow with a faint touch of
peevishness. There arose in his masculine brain an obscure an-
noyance with himself for having brought that boy into it at all.
His vague thought, thus limned in the darkness, was that certain
emotions were best kept separate! But this thought vanished as
quickly as it came and both the man and the woman instinctively
dropped the subject.

They dropped it without any feeling at all on his part and on
hers only a faint obscure sense that she would have to Confess
sooner or later that this boy was now living at Glastonbury. Then
they plunged into the deep pool together now with their eyes,
their minds, and their souls.

There are few mill-ponds like Harrod's in all Norfolk and the
sensation which these two returning natives got from looking into
its depths was unforgettable by both of them. On its outer rim
the water was of a pale, neutral colour, a sort of ashen grey, but
as the eye moved from circumference to centre it got darker and
darker; a faint bluish tinge mingled there with the grey and there
appeared a sort of mysterious luminosity as if there had been a
subterranean light at the bottom of the pool.

But what a thing it was to see those great fish, one after an-
other, rise up slowly from the unseen depths, mount to the sur-
face as if they were going to breathe the air, and then, with a
reversion of their slow ellipse, turn back towards the depths
again!

To the girl this sight was purely disinterested--just objectively
arresting like a flight of beautiful swallows--but to John, with
his boyish memory of fishing-rods and predatory pursuit, there
was a spasm of possessiveness in it, intense, disturbing, provoca-
tive, erotic. The girl satisfied no sense but that of sight as she
watched these mysterious water-denizens, first sub-aqueous clouds,
then vague darknesses, then noble fish-shapes, rising up and
sinking down as if in the performance of some elaborate court
ritual, the rules of which were as strict as in some water palace
of the Oceanides! But John's grosser nature was not so easily
content. A longing seized him, that seemed to carry with it some
primordial phallic tremulousness, to grasp with his hands these
slippery creatures, to hold them tight, to feel their fins, their
scales, their sliding coolness, their electric livingness.

Making no attempt to analyse why it should have been that
the sight of these alien beings, gliding upward, downward, with
such intense and yet easy volition, should excite his desire, he
moved instinctively behind his companion and slid his arms be-
tween her body and the rough fabric of the wall against which
they leaned.

"You're like a cormorant,"she gasped when she recovered her
breath' from the disturbance of his protracted embrace.

"Sorry,"he muttered. "I couldn't help it. Curse it!"he added.
"We've got to go, my dear, and quickly too! So say good-bye
trout, or chub, or whatever you are! I don't know what you are!"

He caught her hand and pulled her away, as if he feared she
might transform herself into one of those cold, slippery fish-
shapes, and vanish forever into the bluish-grey twilight. As he led
her off, his last glance revealed a gleaming circle of ripples.
"There's a rise!"he murmured. "The only one we've seen, but
we must hurry! I daren't look at my watch."

The tolling of the bell in the flint tower of the high-roofed
Northwold church did indeed begin before they reached the first
house of the village. The wind had dropped considerably and the
strong sunshine, warming their bodies through all their clothes,
combined with the motion of their rapid walk to throw them into
a glow of delicious well-being. John felt so well satisfied with
what life was offering him that his mind took a leap--unusual for
him--into his practical future.

"I'm going to ask Philip to give me a job in Glastonbury,"
he said.

The girl found a secret vent for the rush of rapturous delight
which this newt brought to her by clutching the flapping edges
of --------and pulling them tightly round her neck.

"I'm a companion to an old woman there called 'Phemia Drew,"
she said eagerly. "Her house is what they call the Abbey
House so I can see the Ruins from my bedroom."

"You owe your job to Philip, I suppose?"said John. "I de-
cided before I left the rue Grimoire, that I'd ask him for a job
there myself. So my English life will begin side by side with
your life."

Her voice was decidedly strained as she asked her next ques-
tion. "You're not married, are you, John?"

The tolling of the bell in the flint tower fell upon them at that
moment like a long, bony arm thrust out of a coffin. He uttered
a sardonic chuckle.

"If I were, my dear, she'd be a funny kind of Frenchwoman
not to have tricked me out better. She did buy me this tie "
He pulled out the object referred to and flapped it between his
finger and thumb as they hurried down the street. "No, no--I'm
not married. And now I've got hold of you I'm not likely to be--"
he cast a foxy glance at her out of the corner of his slanted eye-
lids; a look such as a thievish schoolboy, with a stolen plum in
his fingers, might throw upon the owner's daughter--"unless you
would marry me!"

She gave him a dreamy, abstracted stare in answer, as though
she had not heard his last words at all. Then she bit her lip with
a little frown and turned away her head. When she looked at him
again her face had cleared. "How lucky that Philip got the idea
of bringing me here, John. I don't believe you'd have thought of
Glastonbury if we hadn't met."

They had now reached the entrance to the churchyard; and
they found they had to push their way through a crowd of vil-
lagers to get through the narrow gate. They made their way to
where two clergymen were standing above a hole in the ground.
The white surplices these wore fluttered a little in the wind, dis-
playing at intervals the black trousers underneath. In front of
these white figures, on the other side of the hole, all the relations
were mutely assembled, the men in a sort of discreet trance,
shamefacedly holding their hats, over which their heads were
bowed; the women, much more self-possessed, throwing quick
little glances here and there and fidgeting with the umbrellas.
prayer-books and handkerchiefs which they hold in their black-
gloved hands. John and Mary advanced instinctively to the side
of Miss Elizabeth Crow, who was the only one of the whole com-
pany to be showing any deep emotion. She was sobbing bitterly;
and she held both hands, bare and empty, pressed against her
face.

Quickly enough, however, when Mary reached her side, she real-
ised who it was, and removing her hands from her face, gave
her, through her falling tears and the convulsed twitching of her
rugged cheeks, a sympathetic and humorous smile. Those were
the only tears, that was the only smile, evoked from any human
skull at the funeral of William Crow. This stalwart, stout lady,
now so sturdily wiping away her tears with the back of one of
her plump hands, was indeed, according to that queer destiny
which the man in the New Inn had discoursed upon, the only
child of the dead man left alive. All the rest of the company
were grandchildren; or they were county neighbours. "She treated
'un pretty bad in's lifetime,"murmured one of the village on-
lookers. " 'Tis too late to make a hullabaloo, now the poor man's
dead."

The service had begun some while before John and Mary ap-
peared upon the scene; so it was not very long before it was all
over and the company trooping back to the Rectory. This was
an easy proceeding for the simple reason that at the side of the
churchyard opposite to the public entrance there was a private
door leading into a portion of the Rectory garden; and not only
so, but into that very portion of it, a walled-in courtyard, which
surrounded the front entrance to the house.

It was in the large, old-fashioned drawing-room, that room that
had made such a deep impression on the mind of the youthful
John, that all the relatives were now gathered to hear Lawyer
Didlington read the will. It fell to Philip Crow to act the part of
host to everybody and also the part of the natural heir to his
grandfather; although, as a matter of fact, no one except the
lawyer himself had more than the vaguest speculative guess as
to what the will was likely to contain. But Philip had so much
nervous domination that he was the sort of person who always
takes the lead in any group or on any occasion of importance;
nor would an outsider have guessed for a second, watching the
man's youthful energy, that in a couple of days from today he
would be fifty years old.

The windows opened upon an enormous lawn which itself
opened out into a field surrounded by trees. In the middle of the
lawn was a great cedar tree. The windows almost reached to the
floor of the room; and thus, with the lawn and with the field,
entirely secluded from the outer world, the drawing-room itself
became the inner sanctuary of "a great good place,"a conse-
crated Arcadia. To the right of anyone standing at these windows
and looking out, rose, behind a border of laurel bushes, the high,
grey, flint nave of the church. Thus this room possessed that rare
delicious quality that certain old chambers come to have that
overlook scholastic quadrangles or walled-in college gardens.

It might, however, have appeared to an observer curious in
antiquarian lore that compared with similar retreats there was
about this scene in spite of the presence of the church something
essentially heathen and secular. The disproportioned size of the
Rectory and its great lawns compared with both church and vil-
lage gave an impression of the existence on that spot--at least a
former existence--of something high-handed and predatory. In
other words there was displayed in all this sequestered felicity
the same Danish tendency to profane self-assertion that has been
noted in the character of the Northwold villagers. "Possess, enjoy,
defy"might have been the heraldic motto of both rich and poor
in this portion of East Anglia.

While the sexton was lazily and contentedly shovelling into
the grave, on the top of the earth-covered coffin, all the good
Norfolk clay, so auspicious for the growing of roses, that had
been piled up at the foot of the hole--and be it noted that
several lob-worms and several lively little red worms, which are
so irresistible to Wissey perch, went down into that hole with the
clay--there hovered round the body in the coffin a phantasma-
goria of dream-like thoughts. These thoughts did not include any
distaste for being buried or any physical shrinking, but they
included a calm, placid curiosity as to whether this dream-like
state was the end of everything, or the beginning of something
else. Nerves of enjoyment, nerves of suffering, both were atro-
phied in this cold, sweet-sickly, stinking corpse; but around and
about it, making a diffused "body"for itself out of the ether that
penetrated clay and planks and grass-roots and chilly air, all
alike, the soul of the dead man was obsessed by confused mem-
ories, and deep below these by the vague stirring of an unini-
passioned, neutral curiosity.

William Crow was in his ninety-first year but he had never ex-
perienced such intense curiosity since his son Philip in his twen-
tieth year had run away and married an unknown woman.

Up and down, up and down, these memories kept washing,
Backward and forward they washed, they drifted, they eddied
And always, far beneath them, the root of curiosity stirred trem-
ulously, like a lazily swaying seaweed, beneath an ebbing and
flowing sea-tide.

The eyelids of the old, dead face under the coffin-lid were
tightly closed; and the mouth, that eloquent actor's mouth, was
a little open; but what remained totally unchanged was the
beautiful, snow-white hair covering the round skull on every side
with curls as silky as those of a child.

The memories of this death-cold skull gravitated always to-
wards the image of his long-dead wife. No emotion did they
excite, not one tremulous flicker, either of love or hate; only upon
each separate memory that calm curiosity turned its neutral gaze.

"A thoroughly mean man...that's what you are, William, a tho-
roughly mean and cruel man! That sad look in your eyes that
you always say is sensitiveness is really cruelty! That's what it
is. Just cold-blooded malicious cruelty...and sensual too, oh,
wickedly, wickedly sensual!"

With the absolute calm of a botanist observing a plant did the
curiosity in the soul of this corpse listen to this whisper of
memory.

And again the voice of the proud lady out of her Swiss grave
penetrated the Norfolk clay.

"Elizabeth Devereux to William Crow! I was a fool ever to
marry such a person as you, William. Mother always said it was
marrying beneath me."

The mouth of the dead face fell open a little further and the
terrible, unapproachable silence of decomposition deepened.

"My Philip's son will be like his father,"the woman's voice
reiterated. "He'll be all me! He'll be a true Philip Devereux.
He'll have no touch of the Dane in him."

The confinement of the coffin-boards was nothing to William
Crow. The raw clay, rattling noisily down from the sexton's
spade, was less than nothing to him. To suffer from anything, to
enjoy anything--he had forgotten what those words meant. En-
joyment, suffering? What strange, morbid by-issues of human
consciousness were these?

But the voice of the woman began again; and that cold, dis-
interested curiosity stirred placidly to hear her words.

"Yes! You may look at yourself in the looking-glass as long as
you like, William. That sad, weary look under your eyebrows,
over your eyelids, is nothing but selfish cruelty...such as kills
flies and torments people without hitting them! My family has
always taken what it wanted. But it never stooped to spiteful tor-
menting. My father used to say that when Norman families stop
ruling England, England will get soft and wordy and mean...
just like you, William...

With impervious calm, as he listened to all this, did the soul ot
that passive corpse wonder vaguely whether this Devereux despot-
ism was, or was not, the true secret of dealing with earth-life
below the sun. It wondered too, with the same complacent indif-
ference, whether the humming of these confused memories was
going to lapse into what they called "eternal rest"or going to
prelude some new and surprising change. Whichever it was, it was
equally interesting, now that pleasure and pain were both gone.
Annihilation--how strange! A new conscious life--how strange!
What indeed the soul of the Rector of Northwold experienced, at
that moment of his burial, was more like the Homeric view of
death than anything else--only with more indifference to love and
fame! Everything human in him was, in fact, subsumed in that
primeval urge which originally lost us Paradise. The Reverend
William, cold and stiff, cared for nothing except to satisfy his
curiosity.

Meanwhile in the great Rectory drawing-room another and a
far less disinterested curiosity was mounting up, mounting up to
a positive suffering of tantalisation, as Mr. Anthony Didlingtoa--
looking so much like a character of Sir Walter Scott that you
expected him, after every resounding period from his parchment
document, to take a vigorous pinch of snuff--read the late
Canon's will.

John and Mary had ensconced themselves on a small eight-
eenth-century sofa, that had the air of being the identical sofa
that gave a title to Cowper's poem; and that stood back, behind
the more pretentious pieces of furniture, near the furthest window.

In the most important place in the room sat Tilly Crow, Phil-
ip's wife, a small, trim, dark, little woman with a high forehead,
carefully parted hair, black, beady eyes, and under her chin a
colossal wedgewood brooch. Opposite Mrs. Philip, on the further
side of the hearth where a warm fire was burning, sat Elizabeth
Crow in her mother's little green velvet arm-chair which the great
black satin dress of the portly lady filled to overflowing. Her face
was weary and wistful rather than unhappy; but above and be-
neath her firmly modelled cheeks and rugged cheek-bones those
quaintly indented creases were extremely marked, whose con-
tractions, according to Mary, were an indication that there was
trouble in the wind .Lawyer Didlington with sedate pontifical
gravity sat on a high chair with his back to the largest window.
Not a glance did he give at that gracious lawn, across the smooth
surface of which the long afternoon shadows from lime-tree and
cedar-tree were already falling.

Close to the lawyer's table, and taking not much more notice of
the shadows on the lawn than he did, sat at another table, with
writing materials ostentatiously displayed in front of them, Dave
Spear and Persephone Spear. It might have been supposed that
this young couple were desperately transcribing every detail of
the late Rector's will; but this would have been an erroneous sup-
position. The papers which lay before them had been extracted
from a battered leather case which now reposed on the carpet at
their feet. The calculations upon which they were so absorbingly
engaged, and which entailed the passing across the little table of
all manner of pencil scrawls, had not the very remotest connec-
tion with what Mr. Didlington was reading with such careful and
explanatory unction; unless indeed all human activities of a revo-
lutionary character are to be regarded as having a relation to the
rights of property.

Persephone Spear and her husband had in fact just come from
a communistic meeting at Leeds and were proceeding to another
one at Norwich before returning to Bristol where they lived. This
matter of consigning Persephone's grandfather to his native Nor-
folk clay would not have allured them from a mile off if it had
not been for the fact that there was the possibility of a strike just
then at one of Philip's Somersetshire factories. Feeling a family
interest in this event they had naturally got into touch with the
leaders of the strike and were doing their best not only to give the
event a communistic turn but also to use the accident of their re-
lationship with him to win concessions from Philip

It was a faint amusement to Miss Elizabeth, even in the midst
of her sad thoughts, to observe how curiously unlike each other
these two young revolutionaries were, and yet what a perfect
unanimity existed between them. Spear was a short, humorous,
broad-faced youth, with closely cropped fair hair and small,
merry, blue eyes; while Percy was a tall, lanky maid of a brown-
ish, gipsy-like complexion and with a mop of dusky curls.

Mr. Philip Crow himself had been, until the lawyer actually
commenced reading, moving, like the energetic diplomat he was,
from one to another of all these relatives; and even now, while
everybody else was seated, he stood with alert, polite attention,
leaning against the side of the big window with his back to the
lawn and keeping his eyes fixed upon the old-world physiognomy
of Mr. Anthony Didlington. No one could have denied to Philip
Crow the epithet of handsome. He was indeed the only thoroughly
good-looking one of all the assembled relatives; but his good
looks were attended with so little self-consciousness and were
so completely subordinate to his formidable character that they
played a very minor part in the effect he produced. The man
drove himself--you could see that in his hawk's nose, his com-
pressed lips, his narrowed eyelids, his twitching brows--but he
drove others yet more inflexibly, as was apparent from the roving
intensity of his grey eyes, the eyes of a pilot, a harpooner, a big-
game hunter--in a word, of a Norman adventurer who took, kept,
organised, constructed; and who moulded sans pitie weaker na-
tures to his far-sighted purpose.

John and Mary were so absorbed in whispering to each other
as first one memory and then another stole into their minds out of
the aura of that old room, some associated with the view outside
the window, some with the furniture, some with the figures of
their grandparents, that they had little attention to spare for any
of the rest of the company. It is true that every now and then
John did cast a swift, foxy glance, past the bowed heads of the
two revolutionaries, at that great parchment document, with its
official red seals, that Mr. Didlington held as reverently as a priest
holds the Gospels at Mass. These hungry, furtive glances were the
tribute he paid to all those excited expectations of incredible
legacies, discussed at so many rue Grimoire suppers with Lisette
and Pierre. But these greedy thoughts came quickly and went
quickly! The seductive softness of Mary's long limbs, as she sat
with crossed legs and clasped hands staring gravely at his face,
made his already achieved good luck more precious than any ec-
clesiastical bequest.

It really seemed interminable, the list of plots and parcels of
good English ground, inhabited and uninhabited, which, in vari-
ous portions of Norfolk, William Crow had inherited from his
thrifty yeoman ancestors. Still it went on drawing itself out, this
protracted list; and as yet no hint had appeared as to who was
going to be the gainer by all this accumulation of properties, of
which apparently the dead man had an undisputed right of free
disposal.

The wind had quite dropped now. The shadows on the lawn
were darker and colder. The few yellow dandelions that had es-
caped the gardener's shears had closed themselves up and looked
--as dandelions do when near sunset--forlorn, impoverished,
empty of all glory. A pallid radiance alternated with velvet-black
shadows upon the trunk of the cedar; and over the daffodils in
the grass and over the hyacinths in the flower-beds a peculiar
chilliness, rising from a large hidden pond beyond the field, and
not yet palpable enough to take the form of vapour, moved
slowly from the edge of the distant shrubbery towards the house.

Philip's thoughts were like far-flung hooks piercing the gills of
some monstrous Fate-Leviathan that he had resolved to harness
to his purpose. He visualised his factory at Wookey Hole. He
visualised those stalactites and stalagmites in the famous caves
there and saw them lit with perpetual electricity. He remembered
how he had stood alone there once by the edge of that subterra-
nean river flowing under the Witch's Rock and how he had felt a
sensation of power down there beyond anything he had ever
known. "These Norwich-investments are nothing,"he thought,
"these over-taxed properties are nothing. The three big mort-
gages are the thing! Forty thousand they'd sell for. He's left
them to me--I feel it, I sense it, I know it. Besides, he promised
Grandmother. He confessed that to me himself. What a good thing
he died when he did! Never again shall I have to listen to that
voice of his reading Lycidas. Old epicure! I can see him now,
putting cream into his porridge and looking out so voluptuously
across his garden! Living for his sensations! That's what he did,
all his days. Putting cream into his porridge, reading his poetry,
and living for his sensations. What a life for a grown man! The
life of a frog in a lily-pond. Aunt Elizabeth is sorry now he's
dead. But she didn't like it when Johnny Geard became the favour-
ite. She very quickly cleared out. He must have fancied himself
a lot over that. Must have thought he was converting a Methodist
to the true doctrines. Old fantastical-brained, crochetty ass! I
shall rebuild the Wookey Hole plant entirely. That'll take about
ten thousand. That will leave thirty thousand to play with. And
by God! I'll play with it. Four thousand would take electricity
beyond the actual known limits of every one of those caves. I'll
do the plant for ten thousand and spend five on the caves. With
five thousand I could electrify the bowels of the Mendips!" What
Philip felt at that second of time when he imagined himself with
all that electric power at his disposal, standing among those pre-
historic stalactites, would be hard to put into rational human
speech. The drumming of a meteorite travelling through space
would best express it. "I...I...I...riding on electricity...I...I...I...
grasping electricity...I...I...I...alone...all-powerful...under the Men-
dips...letting loose my will upon Somerset...my factories above...
my electricity beneath....I...I , . , Philip Crow...planting my will
upon the future...moulding men...dominating Nature."

His hard grey eyes began to soften a little and his gaze, leaving
Mr. Didlington's face, turned itself towards vacancy.

"I shall have a completely new sort of boat made, to explore
that subterranean river,"he thought, "flatter than a barge, lighter
than a canoe. I'll build an electric engine for it and I'll have my-
self floated under the Witch's Rock and I'll make them leave me
there; and I'll have that feeling....I'll make it work too. I'll have
water power for my plant run by the buried river in the heart of
the Mendips! I'll electrify the caves of the Druids. I'll carry elec-
tricity deeper under the earth than anyone's ever done. How
slowly this old ass reads!"

But Miss Elizabeth Crow, staring sometimes into the fire and
sometimes out of the big window across the lawn, thought to her-
self, "I should have had an easier life if I'd put up with Johnny
Geard and stayed with F ather." She remembered how she had first
seen this Glastonbury ex-preacher whose mystical ideas got such
a fatal hold on William Crow's mind and on William Crow's heart.
She had been visiting her mother in Switzerland; and when
she came back there he was--the Somersetshire revivalist, in-
stalled in Northwold Rectory! "How his black eyes gleamed as
he listened to Father's morning prayers! The man was fascinating
in his own way. I can't blame Father for liking him."She could
hear now her father's resonant voice repeating the great poetical
chapters in Isaiah. "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith
your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto her,
that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned;
for she hath received of the Lord's hands double for all her
sin!"And she could hear this charlatan interrupt--an unheard-of
thing for a servant to do!--and beg for another chapter of sacred
rhetoric.

Tilly Crow's mind was neither conjuring up large legacies nor
brooding over ancient grievances. It was occupied entirely with
minute problems connected with the larder, the pantry, the
kitchen, in her own home at Glastonbury. There was a certain
shelf in the pantry that her housemaid always kept too crowded.
Tilly Crow could see now a particular stream of light in which
the sun motes were wont to flicker when she entered that pantry
after breakfast. This light always fell upon a suspended dishcloth,
different from the rest, with a little green border, which she kept
for drying her best china cups herself when they had visitors.
Then her mind left the pantry and made a journey of about a
dozen feet to the larder. Here she saw with abominable vividness
a bluebottle fly--she maintained a special and constant warfare
against these--walking along the edge of a shelf where the butter
and cheese were kept. Not being able to endure this image with
equanimity she gave a sharp little shake of her head to drive it
away and as Mr. Didlington began a long list of freeholds in the
parish of Thorpe her adventurous mind took a daring leap to her
Glastonbury drawing-room where it concentrated upon the faded
pink ottoman wherein she kept her wools.must re-line the
ottoman,"she said to herself. "There's that rent that Elizabeth's
cat made. It always bothers me to see it. How sentimental Eliz-
abeth looks, staring out of the window! Oh, I hope the Canon has
left her enough money to go and live by herself in some nice
seaside place!" At this point in Tilly Crow's thoughts there came
an image that she would have been very reluctant to put into
words; but as a mere image in the void--brought to her by some
housemaid of the air upon a silver tray--she gave herself up to
it. This was the image of a solitary cup of tea carried up to her,
with her letters, by Emma the cook, during a paradisiac holiday,
when Philip--such was Tilly's furthest reach of felicity--had
gone to stay for a whole fortnight with Aunt Elizabeth, at that
pleasant seaside place!

But what was this? What words of fatal significance had fallen
from the lips of Mr. Didlington? By what incantation had this
roomful of grown-up people been incontinently jerked upon their
feet, protesting, exclaiming, jeering, enquiring, denouncing, argu-
ing; and by no means speaking gently of their Grandfather Crow
who, for all that he was one of the chief causes of their being
alive upon the earth, seemed to have turned into a deliberate
enemy?

"Does it mean that none of us get a penny--not even Philip?"
whispered Mary to John.

"Not a penny,"the man from Paris answered. "And what's
more, Mary, I'll have to borrow ten shillings from you to get to
Glastonbury."

"You'll want more than that,"she returned gravely.

"No, I shan't. I'm going to walk. Ten shillings is what I want.
Not more, not less. But I want it from you and you'd better give
it me now if you've got your purse; for they're terribly excited
and it's best to be on the safe side."

Mary fixed a very straight look upon him at this. But seeing
that he was perfectly serious she moved back a little towards the
window and nodded to him to follow her.

"How much money have you got left?"Mary whispered. He
searched his pockets thoroughly and produced three shillings and
fourpence. This sum he held out to her in his two hands as if she
had demanded it of him. She shook her head. "Put it back,"she
said. "I'd better get some more for you. You can't walk all that
way. I'm sure Aunt Elizabeth "

He pulled her nearer to him, interrupting her words. The mas-
sive green curtain on the left of the window--for the winter cur-
tains had not been changed yet--hung in bulging folds against his
shoulder. Mary long afterward remembered how exactly like a cer-
tain Venetian picture she had seen somewhere his refined rogue's
face looked against that background. "I'm not going to take a
penny from anybody but you!"he whispered fiercely, with a mali-
cious gleam in his eye. "I'll find you out at Glastonbury in a week
or so--not longer than two weeks anyway--and then we'll see. I
may sponge upon you like the devil then,"he added, giving the
girl a quick, searching look. "I have sponged on girls before. It's
a way of life that seems to suit me!"

Mary showed her strong white teeth in a schoolgirl grin. Turn-
ing her back to the room she drew out her purse and took from it
three half-crowns, a florin and a sixpence. "Miss Drew,"she re-
marked, "doesn't pay very much. Philip doesn't give tips either.
Aunt Elizabeth gave me this for pocket-money."

It would have been clear enough to any close observer that
Mary derived an exultant happiness from handing over her
pocket-money to John in this childish manner. It would also have
been clear that John's feelings were equally those of a romantic
lover and a sly, unscrupulous tramp.

‘Til ask Aunt Elizabeth if you can't sleep here tonight,"whis-
pered Mary, as they turned away from the darkening window.

He made a wry face at her. "Don't you dare!"he breathed.
"I've got more than three shillings without touching your ten
and I've left my bag at the Inn. I'll make them give me a room
and breakfast for two nights for that--you'll see! I want to go
with you to the big river tomorrow. We never went there
together."

Mary got red with excitement. "We did, John! You've forgotten
but I remember. We did just once!"

Their dialogue was interrupted by Philip's voice which was not
raised, but which was lowered to such a key of indrawn inten-
sity that it compelled attention.

He was now standing with his back to the fire, fronting Mr.
Didlington, who, with his fingers inserted between the loose plages
of this calamitous will, swayed heavily and limply before him,
like an obsequious but surly seneschal whose account has proved
faulty.

"The whole of...this...forty thousand...left absolutely to this man...
and no chance...of legal action...that...in short...is the situation?"

Mr. Didlington began murmuring something in a husky, injured
voice; but it was only the word "legacies"that reached the
ears of John and Mary.

"Damn your legacies!"said Philip in the same tone. "Two
hundred a year from the Norwich property to my aunt; and a
hundred in cash to the servants. That's all of your precious lega-
cies there are. The maddening thing is that it was Tilly and I who
introduced this sly dog to Grandfather."

His voice changed a little and he looked towards his wife.

Tilly Crow had drawn up her thin legs in the great arm-chair
and, with her hands clasped so violently in her lap that the
knuckles showed white, stared at him with frightened eyes.

"Where is this thief, Tilly?"he said, in a much gentler voice.
"Where is this holy rascal who has fooled us all?"The fact that
he had displayed self-control enough to speak in a half-humorous
tone was in itself sufficient to bring about the recovery of his
equanimity. "Why,"he finally remarked, looking round with the
air of a monarch addressing his courtiers after the loss of a bat-
tle, ‘‘why doesn't someone fetch this good, religious man and let
me offer him our united congratulations!"

"The furniture,"murmured Tilly. "Did he say the furniture
was to be divided equally? Does that mean, Philip, that we can't
have the silver with your grandmother's crest on it? Ask them,
Philip, ask them now! They will give us the silver, won't they?
And the linen? We don't want any more furniture, Philip, but
these girls must let me have the linen! Tell them we don't want
any heavy furniture, Philip. Tell them we want the silver and
linen."

Aunt Elizabeth herself rose heavily from her seat now. Her
thoughts had been wandering away to Glastonbury, where thirty
years ago she had been so fond of the youthful Vicar of the place,
who had jilted her. to marry a maid-servant. She completely dis-
regarded Tilly and addressed herself to her nephew. "You are
thinking only of your own affairs, Philip,"she said sternly. She
looked at him, as she spoke, without a trace of the respectful awe
into which he had bullied the others. "Why don't you and Tilly
congratulate me on my two hundred a year?"

There was a weight of character in Aunt Elizabeth when she
was on her feet and confronting her nephew that enabled her to
reduce his importance and to reduce his loss of forty thousand
pounds! Mary pinched John's arm with delight and whispered to
him something he could not catch. It was from the other young
couple in the room, however, that the next word came.

"Percy and I congratulate you, Aunt,"cried Mr. Spear.

"Yes, yes,"echoed Persephone, straightening her shoulders and
tossing her head, "and we hope you'll come out of the enemy's
camp now and listen to wisdom."

Miss Crow moved towards them, attracted by something so
kind in their tone that it surprised and disarmed her. "I'm in no
enemy's camp, Percy,"she murmured, putting her arm round the
tall girl's waist. "I am an old-fashioned woman, and very fond
of my dear nephew and niece. I know nothing about politics--any
more than Mary does,"she added, making an instinctive move-
ment to bring the four young people together. John and Mary
did approach her.

"If there is to be anybody's wisdom thrust upon Aunt Eliza
beth,"John threw in, "I think mine would suit her best."

"What do you mean by that, Mr. Crow?"said young Spear, in
an argumentative tone.

"Yes, what do you mean, John?"repeated Persephone. "You
don't mean that Dave and I would try and browbeat Aunt Eliza-
beth, to force her to see the light, do you?"

"The light, the light, the light, the light!"cried John suddenly
with a convulsed face.

Aunt Elizabeth unconsciously started back a pace or two, drag-
ging Persephone, whose waist she still held, back with her; for
there was something about Percy's slender figure that provoked
people to touch her and made it difficult to let her go.

But John's face smoothed itself out in a second and the hum-
blest apologies flowed from him. "It's my French mischief com-
ing out, Dave Spear,"he said. "It's all acquired cynicism. Really,
I love to think that there are people with strong convictions,
people who know they are right, like you and Cousin Philip."

Philip's own voice broke into their talk at this moment. It had
not failed to strike him that Aunt Elizabeth and the four young
cousins, in their obvious indifference to the grotesque event of
forty thousand pounds passing from the Crow family to the
Geard family, had succeeded in ostracising him in a sort of
moral solitude. He and his wife might go on quarrelling with
Mr. Didlington over this fiasco. The others were civilised people,
prepared to take a mere financial blow with becoming urbanity!

"Don't lump me and Dave Spear together,"he interrupted,
pushing his way between Aunt Elizabeth and Mary with jocular
bluster. "Percy would never cook him another meal if she
thought we had anything in common. To my pretty Perse I shall
never be anything but a bloated capitalist, shall I?" And he also,
just as Aunt Elizabeth had done, put his arm round the tall girl's
slender waist.

Cousin Tilly,' cried Dave Spear, with a schoolboy grin on his
broad countenance, "come and stop Philip from flirting with
my wife!"

But Mrs. Crow, who had just rung the bell and had had a long
whispered conversation with the maid who answered it, was her-
self at that moment upbraiding Mr. Didlington in a plaintive but
penetrating, voice. "She says that horrible man departed yester-
day from Glastonbury. I suppose both of you knew that Grand-
father had left him everything."She paused, and then turning
to her husband, "Tea's ready in the dining-room, Philip,"she
said.

The lawyer made his way to the group in the centre of the
room and allowed his answer to Tilly's shrewish attack to be a
general professional reply to them all.

"It is true,"he said, "that Mr. Geard was aware, just as I was
aware, of the late Canon's intentions; and as his family live in
Glastonbury it was natural and indeed suitable that he should
proceed there at once to acquaint them with this very consider-
able bequest."

"Well, Didlington,"returned Philip, looking round at the com-
pany, "I hope you will do my wife the pleasure of letting her
pour out tea for you? Shall we go into the dining-room? Will you
follow Mrs. Crow, Didlington?"

He opened the door and they all trooped out into the passage.
Down this they moved, past the broad staircase where the walls
were hung with some really valuable oil paintings selected by
William Crow's great-uncle. Not far from this staircase was the
front door, leading--through a pleasant conservatory--out into
the courtyard. It was through this door rather than any other that
Mr. Didlington now hastened to pass, picking up his hat from a
marble table that offered itself conveniently to his attention.

"Have to get home, Crow. The wife expects me, you know, and
it's quite a walk. If I stayed to tea with all you good folk I
shouldn't be at Methwold till after dark."

Philip had the wit to see that Tilly's tactless outburst had
really upset the worthy man. What wild creatures women are!
He followed the lawyer out into the conservatory which was
fragrant with heliotrope and lemon verbena. "You must forgive
Mrs. Crow, Didlington,"he said quietly. And then, as the man
only nodded with a faint shrug of his shoulders, "The great point
you've made clear,"he went on, "is that the family has no case
against this fellow? We should have no chance--eh? not the
ghost of a chance--of upsetting tliis will?"

Mr. Didlington gravely bowed and buttoning his overcoat with
his free hand pensively picked a leaf from the lemon verbena
with the one that held his stick.

"Not the ghost of a chance, eh?"repeated Philip.

The man straightened and looked him in the face.

"I am acting,"he said, "for all parties concerned." He paused,
and resumed with real dignity. "My position as executor is a
difficult one. Mr. Geard recognises its difficulty. His departure for
Glastonbury proves that he does so. I hope that there may arise
no occasion for the introduction of further advice and Mr. Geard
hopes so too."

"I warrant he does,"thought Philip. But he only said: "I con-
fess to be startled, Didlington. You must have expected us to be
startled."

The lawyer continued crumpling up between his fingers the
lemon verbena leaf. "Mr. Geard has been your grandfather's
valet,"he said, "his secretary, his confidant, and, I might say,
if you'll permit the word, his friend, for the last ten years. No
opinion you called in would advise you to contest the will."

Philip Crow bent down and smelt a heliotrope. "Won't you
change your mind, Didlington, after all, and let my good wife
give you a cup of tea? She was over-excited just now. It was a
surprise, you know; and ladies always take things hard. I expect
if Mr. Geard wasn't . . hadn't been...well-known to us in
Glastonbury as a rather trying local preacher, she wouldn't have
felt--"

The lawyer shook his head. "In case there arose,"he said, "in
the mind of any of your family, a wish for further advice, I would
like to point out that the late Canon's doctor, a good friend of
mine, feels as I do, that your grandfather's mind was never
clearer than during the time he made this will. No reputable firm
would take up this case. Sir, on the grounds of undue influence.
Everybody knows--if you'll allow me to be quite frank--that his
family left the late Canon very much alone; and it is natural
enough that under these circumstances--"

Well--well--I'm afraid I must be getting back to my guests,"
interrupted Philip coldly. "I wish you a pleasant walk home,
Mr. Didlington."He opened the door of the conservatory and
bowed the man out.

No sooner had he entered the dining-room than Tilly Crow,
peering at him round the great copper urn which stood on the
table in front of her, with a little blue flame burning below it,
cried out to him in a tearful, plaintive voice. "It was our own
doing, Philip. That's what hurts me most. Oh, why, why did
we ever let that man go to him?"

"What kind of a man is he, this lucky wretch?"Percy Spear
enquired, as the head of the family sat down at the end of the
table.

"He was an open-air preacher who lived in Glastonbury, Perse,"
Philip explained. "He was always out of luck and had a wife
and two children. He was a nuisance to the whole town; and when
your grandfather wanted a lay-reader, or someone who'd com-
bine the duties of a valet and a curate, we packed him off to him.
No one would have dreamed of this being the result."

"Perhaps he isn't a bad sort of chap after all,"remarked Dave
Spear. "Did you ever see him, Mary?"

Mtary shook her head.

"I suppose,"said John in a low voice, as if speaking rather to
himself than to anyone in particular, "there is no way he could
be persuaded to give up some of it?"

Philip gave him a swift glance of infinite disgust. "One doesn't
do that sort of thing in England, Mr. Crow,"he said, "not, at
any rate, people in our position."

"A will is a funny thing,"said Dave Spear meditatively. "A
dead man arbitrarily gives to some living person the power that
he has robbed the community of! The mere existence of a thing
like a will is enough to prove the unnaturalness of private
property."

Aunt Elizabeth looked anxiously at Philip. "Don't start a dis-
cussion of politics now, I beg you, Dave Spear,"she said.

"My quarrel with Spear," interjected Philip in a low voice,
"is not confined to politics."

"What is it confined to?"cried Persephone sharply. "Don't you
begin teasing my Dave,"she went on, and as she spoke, she
stretched out a long, delicious, young girl's arm across the table
and taking Philip's hand in her own gave it a little playful scold-
ing shake.

Philip caught her fingers and held them gravely, while he looked
intently into her eyes. John saw the communist's rather rustic
countenance wince sharply while this magnetic vibration passed
between the cousins.

"What puzzles me about all your theories, Mr. Spear,"began
John, speaking rather rapidly, "is that they contradict the deep-
est instinct in human nature. To possess--doesn't the whole world,
for every one of us, turn upon this great pivot? Our philosophy,
for instance, what is it but the act by which we possess the Cos-
mos? Our love? That surely is the quintessence of possession. And
isn't this asceticism which you people practice, this giving up
of everything except the ‘bare essentials' as you call 'em, isn't
it a sort of wet blanket thrown upon human nature, a sort of
moral rebuke to the natural pleasures?"

"I think you will agree, Mr. Crow "began Spear excitedly, but
his wife broke in. "Let me put it to him, Dave!"she cried. "The
point is this, Mr. Crow. We fully agree with you about the impor-
tance of a free fling of our whole nature towards happiness.
But it's just this that the capitalistic system interferes with!
You are confusing two things. You are confusing natural,
instinctive happiness and the artificial social pride that we get
from private property. Under a just and scientific arrangement
of society such as they have achieved in Russia, our human values
begin to change. People feel ashamed of having money. It be-
comes a disgrace, like the reputation of a thief, to have more than
the essentials. But everyone has a right to the pleasures that bring
happiness. Everyone has a right to "

"She means,"interrupted her husband, raising his voice to a
very vigorous pitch, "she means, Mr. Crow, that everyone who
works honestly and doesn't live by exploiting others can have
enough to enjoy their life on. The exploiting classes, of course,"
here he nearly shouted, causing Tilly to give a quick glance at
the door, afraid lest the servants should hear him, "must be
starved out!"

The contrast was so great between, the rosy face of this fair-
haired youth and the fanaticism of his tone that John stared at
him in astonishment. Into the darkening twilight, past all those
dim faces sitting round the table, the fierce words "must he
starved out"twanged like a bow-string.

Philip Crow from the end of the table cast upon the young
revolutionary very much the sort of glance that some Devereux
of the Norman Conquest would have cast upon some Saxon
Gurth who had dared to challenge him as his horse broke through
the brushwood with a raised quarterstafF. "You could starve me
out, my son, if you won over the army and the air-force, but I
assure you you'll have one bloated capitalist you'll never starve
out."

"Philip means our friend Mr. Geard, I suppose,"murmured
Aunt Elizabeth.

"I mean Nature!"

Persephone gave vent to a rather uncivil whistle. "Nature?"
she mocked. "What are you talking about, Philip?"

"Don't you see, my good child,"he said quite gently, "that it's
always been by the brains and the energy of exceptional individ-
uals, fighting for their own hands, that the world has moved on?
What you people are doing now is simply sharing out what has
already been won. We have the future to think of; or, as I say,
Nature has the future to think of."

The blood rushed to the face of Dave Spear and a misty film
gathered in front of his eyes, so that what he saw of the room
and the people in the room was a swimming blur.

"I can't argue...with you . . he jerked out as if each word carried
with it a streak of his heart's blood, "but I know that...if the mass-
es...the masses of workers...the real workers...got...got the machin-
ery and the...the land and water . . into their hands...a new spirit...
not known before in all the history...of...of...of humanity conscious
of its fate...would be stronger, greater, more...more...more god...
more godlike than anything that your great selfish individuals have
...have felt."

In his emotion the young man had lurched to his feet, and had
seized with his fingers a half-cut loaf of bread which he began
squeezing spasmodically. Aunt Elizabeth stretched forth her hand
and removed this object; but not before that particular gesture
in this darkening room with the damp, green lawn and the sombre
cedar outside, had caught John's attention as something symbolic.
Long afterward John remembered that clumsy, bucolic figure
leaning forward over the shadowy, unlit table and clutching that
bread. With far more force than the slender Percy's eloquence
those awkward, blurted words seemed to carry the seal of proph-
ecy upon them. A green-coloured gust of rainy wind came rushing
across that spacious garden, came swishing and swirling through
the laurel-bushes, came moaning through the cedar-boughs.

"Just touch the bell, would you, Mary, so that they know we
want the lamp?"broke in the voice of Tilly Crow.

The coming of the lamp changed the whole mental atmosphere
of that group of people. It brought their minds back from the
vibrations of the ideal to the agitations of the real. As the round
orb of light was placed in the centre of the great table there
entered the devastating reminder that forty thousand pounds'
worth of power over the lives of men and women had passed from
this comfortable room, from this secluded lawn, into some little
shabby domicile at Glastonbury.

"How many children has this lucky person got, Philip?"en-
quired Mary in a low voice.

"Two,"was Philip's laconic answer.

"But didn't you say he was a nuisance?"persisted Mary Crow.

"Two great sprawling girls,"sneered Philip. "I suppose they'll
buy Chalice House; or try and get the Bishop to sell them Abbey
House and turn out Euphemia Drew."

"Oh, I hope they will!"cried Mary.

"You hope they will?"

"I'm tired of Abbey House. I'd like the fun of seeing Miss
Drew choose new wall-papers."

"I'm afraid you'll never get that pleasure, Mary,"said Aunt
Elizabeth " 'Phemia was born in the Abbey House and she'll die
in the Abbey House."

"It's all very well for you, Elizabeth,"piped up Tilly Crow in
a voice like that of a melancholy meadow-pipit, "you've got your
two hundred a year."

"Yes, and I'm going to leave you in peace, too, Tilly, and live
on my two hundred a year. I shall take one of those little work-
mens cottages m Benedict Street that the town-council put up!"

Philip turned upon her with good-humoured bluster. "You'll
take nothing of the sort, Aunt,"he cried. "Why, those wretched
socialistic cardboard toys don't even keep the rain out."

"It's simply disgraceful of you, Philip," threw in Persephone,
"the way you do all you can to make the work of that town-
council of yours so difficult."

"By the way," exclaimed Philip suddenly, disregarding her
protest and speaking in a raised and carefully modulated voice,
"where do you intend to sleep tonight, Cousin John?"

"Philip reads all our thoughts, you know," murmured Aunt
Elizabeth. "He thinks you've got an eye to that big sofa in the
drawing-room."

"There won't be any sleeping on sofas in a house where I am!"
cried Tilly Crow sharply. Her voice sounded so exactly like the
miserable tweet-tweet of a bird soaked in a windy rain that John
felt disarmed and sorry for her.

"Don't be afraid, Philip," he said, "and don't you fret about
the sofa, Cousin Tilly. I've got a room for two nights at the Inn."
Persephone leaned over and whispered something in Philip's
ear. It was impossible for John to hazard the least conjecture as
to what she said; but a minute later Philip addressed him in a
loud it not a very amiable tone.

"I shall be offended, Cousin John, and I'm sure your Cousin
Tilly will be terribly hurt if you don't let us pay for your room
while you re here. How long a holiday have you allowed your-
self? How soon are you returning to Paris?"

"I...I...I haven't--on my soul I haven't thought about yet,"
muttered John Crow. "But thanks very much for the room
at the Inn."His voice suddenly became unnaturally loud.
Thanks very much, Cousin Philip. I shall he glad to stay two
nights at the Inn at your expense. Shall I tell them to send the
bill to you up here?"

John's tone, when his voice subsided, left everybody a little
uncomfortable.

"Well,"Philip said, "well-yes. Yes, of course. Yes, I shall
be here a few days more...perhaps... His voice sank down at
that point in a polite but weary sigh. It was plain to them all
that he felt no very strong attraction to the wanderer from
across the channel. His exact and precise thoughts, in fact,
might be expressed thus: "This fellow never expected any legacy.
He only came to see what he could get out of me. He's on
his beam-ends. He's probably got consumption, diabetes and the
pox. If I give him an inch hell take an ell. At all costs I mustn't
let him come to Glastonbury."

Miss Elizabeth turned round towards Tilly Crow now, and in
a gentle, unassuming voice asked what time dinner would be.

"I do wish everybody would stop calling it dinner,"said Tilly,
peevishly. "It'll be just a cold supper. There is so much over
from lunch. I thought of it just for the family, you know, and I
hoped Mr. Spear would not mind it being cold."She glanced as
she spoke, not at Dave, but at John. And it was John who lifted
up his voice in answer. "Don't think of me, in your hospitality,
Mrs. Crow, I beg. I shall be running up that bill--is it not so,
Philip--that we spoke of at the Inn?"

He rose to his feet as he said. this. But Philip rose too. "You
misunderstood me, Mr. Crow,"he said sharply. "It was only a
bedroom I was unable to offer you."He paused for a second
while a flicker of unconcealed distaste crossed his features. "But
of course you are jesting. Anyway you're free to enjoy which
you please...a hot supper at the Inn or a cold supper with us
here. Well! he added in a different tone, "I've got some writing
to do; and I think I'll desert you all now and do it in the study."

There was a general movement to leave the table at this point
and under the protection of the confusion John whispered to
Mary, "Look here, I'm not coming up here again. That Beggar
hates me comme le diable! You come, tomorrow mornin^, after
breakfast, and call for me at the Inn. Ha? I'll find out if we
canget a boat on the ‘big river' Anyway, you tell Aunt
Elizabeth that you're off for the day. How long are you going
to stay here?"

But, woman-like, Mary went straight to the main issue. "What
time shall I call for you, John?"

"Oh, about ten, if that's not too early? That'll give me time
to find out about the boat."

She gave him a peculiar look. It was a steady calm look.
Above all it was a stripped look. It held his attention for a
second; but he missed everything about it that was important.
He missed its touching confidence, its bone-to-bone honesty. He
missed its unquestioning, little-girl reliance upon him. He missed
its weariness, he missed its singleness of heart.

"You won't change your mind, John, and start off for Glas-
tonbury at dawn?"

It was his turn now to reveal, in an eyelid-flicker of self-
abandonment, the animal-primitive basis of his nature. It had
evidently crossed his mind, in his reaction from the pressure of
the family, that it would be nice to escape and be upon the
road alone! His face betrayed all this; but the newly born ma-
ternal tenderness in her tone expressed itself in such a gleam
of humorous indulgence that he was lifted up out of the shame
of having been caught in such a treachery, on a delicious wave
of sheer repose upon her understanding.

"No, I won't change my mind,"he whispered, "but don't let
anything they say keep you from coming, Mary."

"I think I can get you a little more money for--for the road,
John,"she said hurriedly.

He treated this with the decisive gesture of a strong man show-
ing off before a weak girl. "I'll be very angry if you do,"he
said. " Nothing would make me take it! So it's better not to
waste breath."

Both dining-room and drawing-room and the hall and the
passage outside these rooms were now left to themselves. Silent
and alone too the now-darkened conservatory listened to the
placid sub-human breathings of heliotrope and lemon verbena,
the latter with a faint catch in its drowsy susurration, where one
of its twigs was bleeding a little from the impact of the fingers
of the indignant Mr. Didlington.

Silent and alone the broad staircase fell into that trance of
romantic melancholy which was its invariable mood when the
hall lamp was first lit. The oil paintings upon its walls looked
out from their gilt frames with that peculiar expression of in-
drawn expectancy--self-centred and yet patiently waiting of
which human passers-by catch only the psychic echo or shadow
or after-taste, for a single flicker of a second, as if they had
caught them off-guard.

Of all these rooms the one that now fell into the most intense
attitude of strained expectancy was the drawing-room..."You
ought to have been older than all your brothers, woman, instead
of younger." The words emanated from a pale, insubstantial
husk upon the air, a husk that resembled the cast-off skin of a
snake or the yet more fragile skin of a newt, diaphanous and
yet flaccid, a form, a shape, a human transparency, limned upon
the darkness above the great chair to the left of the fireplace.
The words were almost as faint as the sub-human breathings of
the plants in the conservatory. They were like the creakings of
chairs after people have left a room for hours. They were like
the opening and shutting of a door in an empty house. They were
like the groan of a dead branch in an unfrequented shrubbery at
the edge of a forsaken garden. They were like the whistle of the
wind in a ruined clock-tower, a clock-tower without bell or balus-
trade, bare to the rainy sky, white with the droppings of jack-
daws and starlings, forgetful of its past, without a future save
that of anonymous dissolution. They were like words murmured
in a ruined court where water from broken cisterns drips dis-
consolately upon darkening stones, while one shapeless idol talks
to another shapeless idol as the night falls. They were like the
murmurs of forgotten worm-eaten boards, lying under a dark,
swift stream, boards that once were the mossy spokes of some
old water-mill and in their day have caught the gleam of many
a morning sun but now are hardly noticeable even to swimming
water-rats. No sooner were these words uttered, than a simula-
crum in human form, seated opposite to the shade of the Rector
returned a bitter response.

"A cruel coward is what you are, William Crow, and what
you've always been; but if ever, when I am dead, you leave your
money to anyone but Philip's son I will punish you with a pun-
ishment worse than God's!

While these words were being uttered the thin wraith from
whom they came became lividly accentuated in its facial outlines
which were of a ghastly pallor and hideously emaciated; but at
the close, while she was actually crying out "worse than God's"
not a vestige of her lineaments remained visible

The other wraiths too, in the chair opposite, aIthough a faint
film of his identity survived hers by two or three seconds, soon
likewise faded. The chairs, the pictures, the ornaments on the
mantelpiece were already lost in darkness. The fire was now
nearly extinct. The only glimmer it was able to throw, in feebler
and feebler jets from a little blue flame that kept racing along a
charred bit of burnt wood, fell upon a tall, gilded screen painted
with mythological figures. These intermittent flickerings soon died
down m a dusky red spot that illuminated nothing and itself
became dimmer and dimmer.

One of the big windows had been opened by Tilly Crow "to
air the room" while they all went to their tea; and through this
window the presence of the night flowed in. Sweet-scented, ob-
litating equalising, it flowed in, taking the bitterness from defeat,
taking the triumph from victory, and diffusing through the air an
essence of something inexplicable, something beyond hope and
beyond despair, full of pardon and peace.



THE RIVER



When Mary arrived at the New Inn, punctually at ten o'clock,
with their lunch tied up in white paper in a basket, she found
John Crow seated on a bench outside the entrance, with two
oars and a long boat-hook lying across his knees.

The wind had sheered round to due south and what there was
of it was faint-blowing. The sky was covered with an opalescent
vapour; the sun was warm; and the wandering odours that were
wafted towards the girl from the neighbouring cottages had a
sweetness in them beyond the pungency of burning peat; a
sweetness that may have come from the new buds in the privet
hedges, or from the dug-up earth clods in the little gardens at
the back, where the spades and forks of the men still stood fixed
in the ground awaiting their return when the day's work was
over.

He rose with alacrity to welcome her, the two oars in one hand,
the boat-hook in the other. "I've got the key," he announced
triumphantly. It s at the end of Alder Dyke on the big river.
They say we'd better go there by Foulden Bridge." He lowered
his voice and bent down his head. "Did any of them try to stop
you coming? Did Philip say anything?"

She shook her head and stood for a moment without moving,
her face averted, looking dreamily down the street. "This will
never happen to me again," she thought. "I am in love with him.
He is in love with me. I shall never forget this day and I shall
never feel just like this ever again, whatever happens." She turned
towards John. "I don't care where you take me," her look said,
"or what you do with me, as long as we are together!" But her
lips said, "Do you mind going in and getting some more of that
wine, John? I didn't want to make my basket too heavy, so I left
on the table the bottle of milk that Aunt Elizabeth made me
take."

He propped up the oars and the boat-hook against the house
and went in. Mary moved away, crossed to the other side of the
road and bending over a low brick wall stared at a manure-heap
in which three black hens were scratching. The manure-heap with
the three black fowls became at that second a sort of extension
of her own personality. She felt at that moment, as she rested
her basket on the top of the wall and heedless of her sleeves
stretched her arms along its surface and ran her hare fingers
through the cool stone-crop stalks, as if her soul was scarcely
attached to her body. Almost without allowing her happy trance
to be broken she took down her basket from the wall, recrossed
the road and met John at the instant he emerged. "Sorry to have
kept you," he chuckled, "but I've made them give me a flask of
brandy as well as a flask of port. That's the best of having a
greatcoat on, even on a hot day. Its pockets are so useful."

They walked rapidly now side by side past the churchyard and
past the gardener's cottage at the drive-gate where Ben Pod had
counfed the cars. They came to a narrow foot-way that led them
across the little river by a bridge that was scarcely more than
a plank, and after that across the fields to the big river. Here
at Foulden Bridge, which they did not cross, they debouched
from the path; and turning to the left, followed th* river bank
downstream.

They had not spoken a word since leaving the Inn. Mary
grew conscious, just before they got to Foulden Bridge, that she
had been repeating to herself as she walked along, "That's the
best of a greatcoat on a hot day. Its pockets are so useful." What
she had been thinking was, how bony and thin was John's hand
as it clutched the boat-hook which swung horizontally between
them like an antique spear.

John was delving in his memory for something; something
important. There had been several patches of yellow marigolds
along the path they had followed and these had excited a tan-
talising feeling in his mind that he could not fathom. Those
gleaming yellow flowers kept leading his memory to the verge
of something and then deserting him and turning into a blur of
blackness! Tom Barter had to do with it; but it was not Barter.
This preoccupation with an obscure past, although it made him
grave and silent, did not lessen his delight in his companion's
presence. They were indeed, both of them, thrillingly happy, these
two flesh-covered skeletons, drifting so lingeringly along the
banks of the Wissey, but John's happiness was much more com-
plicated than Mary's. His return to his native land played a part
in it; the revival of local memories played a slill larger part;
and this latter feeling was so intimately associated with Tom
Barter that to oust that sturdy figure from its place was impos-
sible. He kept reverting to the marigolds, especially to their
stalks in muddy water, and he kept thinking too of the stickiness
of certain lumps of flour-dough mixed with cotton-wool and
treacle that Tom and he had used for bait for roach and dace.
Perch, that more rapacious fish, despised these harmless pellets;
and he wondered whether it could be the black stripes of these
deep-water fish and their enormous mouths, or the stickiness of
this bait for the others, or a certain kind of homemade ginger-
beer that their grandfathers cook used to make, and not the
marigolds at all, that had been the tap-root lo his rapturous
sensation. It was not that this tantalising sense of being on the
edge of some incredible life-secret interfered with his feeling
for Mary. It was that his possession of Mary had become a calm-
flowing tidal-stream which released and expanded all the an-
tennae of his nature. These responses leapt up towards the un-
known, like those great, slippery fish at Harrod's Mill. Tom Barter,
marigold-stalks, fish-scales, dough-pellets--all these, and the
secret they held, depended, like the long shining river-weeds
upon which his eye now rested, upon the flow of that stream of
contentment which was his possession of Mary.

They were walking now very close to the river bank and it
was not long before they reached Dye's Hole. This spot was really
a series of deep holes in the bed of the Wissey where the stream
made a sweeping curve. Over these dark places in the swirling
water bent the trunks of several massive willow trees and be-
tween these trees and the edge of the stream there was a winding
path, too narrow to be trodden by horses and cattle but inter-
spersed with muddy footholds and beaten-down clearings amid
the last year's growths, where it was just possible for two peo-
ple to stand close together having the willow trunks behind them
and the dark water in front.

John stopped when he reached the largest of these little clear-
ings, and standing on the trodden mud balanced the iv.o oars
and the boat-hook against the branches of an elder bush which
hung over a narrow ditch on the side of their path opposite to
the river. Then he turned round and facing Dye's Hole waited
for the girl to come up. The back of his head touched the vivid
green shoots of a gigantic willow tree whose roots, like great
thirsty serpents, plunged below the flowing water. As soon as
the girl reached him he took her basket from her and laid it down
on the ground, taking care to place it where a fragment of an
old post, of dark, rotting wood pierced by three rusty nails, would
prevent it from toppling over into the ditch. As he placed it
there he chanced to touch, between it and the post, a newly grown
shoot of water mint; and at once a wafture of incredible aromatic
sweetness reached his brain.

They both stood still and gazed round them. "I wonder if you
and I will ever see all this again?" he said.

"It's home to me," she said.

"It's home to both of us," concluded John; and the two of
them as if they were one flesh drank up in great satisfying
draughts the whole essence of that characteristic spot. With the
same unspoken understanding that had brought their thoughts
together before, the girl's hat and the man's cap were now
thrown together on the earth at their feet and they gave them-
selves up to a protracted love-making. What was remarkable
about this love-making was that during all their embraces, in
which the man held her and caressed her, first with her body
front to front against his, and then with her face turned towards
the river, their male and female sensuality--he "possessing" and
she being "possessed"--was, in its earth-deep difference, of ex-
actly the same magnetic quality. This was not due to his expe-
rience or to her inexperience; for, in these matters. Nature, the
great mother of all loves, equalised them completely. It was due
to some abysmal similarity in their nerves which, after making
them fall in love, made them "make love" in exactly the same
manner! There always remained the unfathomable divergence,
in their bodies, in their minds, in their souls, due to their being
male and female; but their similarity of feeling was the exciting
element sounding the depths of ever-new subtleties in this de-
liciousness of like-in-unlike.

What John and Mary really did was to make love like vicious
children; and this was due to the fact that they were both very
nervous and very excitable but not in the faintest degree tempted
to the usual gestures of excessive human passion. The rationalism
of analytic logic has divided erotic emotion into fixed conven-
tional types, popular opinion offering one set of categories, fash-
ionable psychology offering another. As a matter of fact, each
new encounter of two amorists creates a unique universe. No
existing generalisation, whether of the wise or of the unwise,
covers or ever will cover a tenth part of its thrilling phenomena.
In one respect this love-making by Dye's Hole was the most child-
like that the spot had ever witnessed; in another it was the most
cerebral. The nervous excitement manifested by these two was
so free from traditional sentimentality and normal passion, so.
dominated by a certain cold-blooded and elemental lechery, that
something in the fibrous interstices of the old tree against which
they leaned was aroused by it and responded to it.

And so when they forsook that ledge of muddy ground between
the confederate tree and the dark water, it was not only with
relaxed nerves and an absolute sense of mutual understanding,
it was with a dim awareness of some strange virtue having passed
into them. Lingering behind the girl for a moment the man
pressed his forehead against that indented willow trunk and mur-
mured a certain favourite formula of his, relating to- his dead
mother. After that, taking up his oars and boat-hook, he followed
the girl along the river bank. It did not take them long now to
reach Alder Dyke.

Alder Dyke! Alder Dyke! It was not marigold stalks nor the
smell of dough. It was alder boughs that brought Tom Barter
and that unknown ecstasy into the arteries of his soul! He made
a fumbling forward movement with his arms as he touched these
alders, as if welcoming a living person, and Mary divined merely
from the look of his lean vagabond's back, that some new e-
motion, entirety unconnected with her, had taken possession
of him. When he dived into the mass of entangled boughs he
plunged his hands into it and only after pressing an armful of
rough twigs against his mouth and cheeks did he turn his head
towards her. Any ordinary girl would have been disturbed by the
nature of the crazy sound he now made to express his feelings
and to summon his mate to enjoy Alder Dyke with him! It was
more like the whinnying of a wild horse than anything else and
yet it was not as loud as that; nor was it really an animal sound
any more than it was a human sound. It was the sort of sound
that this thick bed of alders itself might have emitted when tossed
and rocked and torn by some fierce buffetting of the March winds.
Instead of getting angry with him or thinking to herself "Who
is this man I have given myself to?" instead in fact of thinking
anything at all, Mary simply put down her basket, and ran
hastily to his side. Without a word she threw her arms round his
neck and pressed her lips against his cold leaf-smelling cheek.
An alder twig had chanced to scratch his skin and the girl tasted
now .the saltish taste of spilt blood. Johns cap had been already
switched from his head by his dive into the mass of boughs, and
Mary instinctively snatched off her own hat. Thus they swayed
together for a minute like two wild ponies who in joy bite furi-
ously at each other's necks. Then, using all his strength, though
she was nearly as tall as he, he lifted her up and trampling for-
ward like a centaur with a human burden plunged headlong
deeper and deeper among those twisted branches.

When he reached the banks of the deep ditch itself he turned
towards its mouth, and after an angry and tender struggle to
keep the twigs from striking the girl's face, emerged trium-
phantly at a grassy open space where the Dyke ran into the
river. There lay the boat he was looking for, moored by a pad-
locked chain to a stake in the ground, its rudder embedded in
mud, its bottom full of dark rain-water. He put the girl down
and the two stood side by side staring into the boat.

"It...rather...wants...bailing," gasped Mary.

John was too much out of breath to make any comment but
he glanced at her with a furtive look, half shame, half pride,
and his lips twitched into a wry smile.

"I'll look," she cried, jumping into the boat. "You stay where
you are for a while, John."

He saw her pass quickly to the stern, stepping from seat to
seat. Then she stooped down and began feeling about in the
bottom of the boat. "Here we are!'' she cried, holding up a big
tin cup. "Now don't you move, John, please, till I've got some
of this water out."

He sat still, watching her, hugging his knees and his hands.

"It smells very fishy down here!" she cried. He saw her
make a sudden face of disgust and scoop with her hands in the
bilge-water under the stern seat. "Ugh! It's the head of an eel."
She threw something far into the river, where it sank with a
splash.

"I'd sooner be an eel than a worm," he muttered, and the soul
within him sensitized by love-making flung forth an obscure
prayer across the flowing stream. Over the level Norfolk pas-
tures it went; over the wide fens and the deep dykes, until it
came to the sea-banks of the North Sea. Here John's prayer left
the earth altogether and shooting outward, beyond the earth's
atmosphere, beyond the whole stellar system, just as if it had
been an arrow shot from the Bow of Sagittarius the Centaur,
reached the heart of his dead mother where she dwelt in the
invisible world. "Don't let me ever compete with anyone!" his
prayer said. "If I'm a worm and no man, let me enjoy my life
as a worm. Let me stop showing off to anyone; even to Mary!
Let me live my own life free from the opinions, good or bad, of
all other people! Now that I've found Mary, let me want noth-
ing else!"

He continued to watch his new-found mate bailing out the dark
rain-water from the bottom of the boat. "This is our home," he
thought. "With the smell of Alder Dyke in our souls we'll defy
Glastonbury and Philip together! Our ancestors got their bread
from the fens and we'll get our bread from Glastonbury and then
come home, home to Alder Dyke! We won't compete with any-
one. We'll live our own life free from them all! If we are Alder
Dyke eels, let us remain so! If we're worms of Norfolk mud
let us remain so! Eels and worms can suck the breasts of life as
well as any of them. What does anything matter as long as Mary's
alive and I'm alive; and we're not divided?"

"Are you feeling all right now, John? I'm not going to bail all
day, I can tell you!"

The tone of her voice delighted him. It was an earthy tone,
like the sound of a horse's hoof on springy turf. He had a pe-
culiar sensation as if he could mount up on that tone of hers
as on a flight of mossy stone steps.

Extracting the key from his pocket he now unlocked the boat
and they were soon in midstream. "Don't let's row, John," she
said. "I'm tired and you've exhausted yourself carrying me. Let's
drift with the tide!"

She seated herself in the stern and took possession of the rud-
der lines. John, holding the oars in the rowdocks at an upraised
angle, placed himself opposite to her. Thus she steered the boat
and stared gravely forward past his face; while he, balancing
the blades of the oars above the water, watched every flicker
of her expression, as a look-out man on a ship watches the
horizon of all his hopes.

The river weeds, below the tide that bore them on, gleamed
emerald green in the warm sunshine. Across and between the
weeds darted shoals of glittering dace, their swaying bodies some-
times silver white and sometimes slippery black as they turned
and twisted, rose and sank, hovered and flashed by. Beds of
golden marigolds reflected their bright cups in the swift water;
and here and there, against the brownish clumps of last year's
reeds, they caught passing glimpses of pale, delicate-tinged
cuckoo flowers. Every now and then they would come upon a
group of hornless Norfolk cattle, their brown and white backs,
bent heads, and noble udders giving to the whole scene an air
of enchanted passivity through which the boat passed forward
on its way, as if the quiet pastures and solemn cattle were the
dream of some very old god into which the gleaming river and
the darting fish entered by a sort of violence, as the dream of a
younger and more restless immortal.

"Don't you think, Mary, that there was something rather touch-
ing about the way that young Spear hummed and hawed last
night, trying to express his ideas?"

"Look out, John! Look out! Push with your left! No, the
other one....Damn!"

He rose to his feet and shoved the prow of the boat round a
muddy promontory. "Can't you do it by steering?"

"No, I can't. Keep your oars down a bit. No! Closer to the
water! Give a pull now as I tell you."

He took his seat again and tried to obey her.

"With your left, now!" she cried. "Your left! Your left! Don't
you know your left hand from your right?" She loved him for
being so clumsy. She loved him for not knowing his left hand
from his right. And yet these things irritated her so much that
she could have boxed his ears. She would have liked to hit him.
She would have liked to throw her arms round his neck and kiss
him, after she had hit him!

"Don't you think it was rather pathetic, the way he talked?
I didn't like him at first. I thought he was a bully. But I came
round to him in the end."

"You didn't like Cousin Percy much. I could see thatl " said
Mary.

He was silent for a second, frowning. Then he struck the water
with the flat of one of his oars. "Only because she's in love with
Philip!" he cried. "That young Spear is what you English call
a decent chap and that girl is out for making him a cuckold."

"I think Percy is sweet," said Mary. "She can't help being at-
tractive to men. She's attractive to you, my dear, or you wouldn't
be so cross with her."

"She's a fatal girl," muttered John Crow.

"What did you call her?"

"Fatal. And that's what she is. She's the most dangerous type
of all. If she goes down to Glastonbury there'll be the devil
to pay. I could see Cousin Tilly had her eye on her...and
Aunt Elizabeth too."

"It's interesting you should concern yourself so much about
Dave," said Mary. "I expect he reminds you of that boy Barter,"
she added.

John gazed at her in astonishment.

"What a little witch you are! God! I must be careful what
thoughts cross my mind when I'm with you."

"Now I must tell him," Mary said to herself. "This is the mo-
ment to tell him." It was really beginning to amount to some-
thing grotesque, this inability of hers to explain that she knew

Tom Barter well and had often been to tea with him in a little
tea-shop near the Pilgrims' Inn in the Glastonbury High Street.

She dropped the rudder-lines and clasped her fingers in her
lap. "Row now, will you, John? And T'm not going to steer you
either. I'm going to have a cigarette."

Her instinct was always to smoke a cigarette at any serious
crisis in her life. She lit one now, and out of the midst of a
cloud of smoke she made the plunge. "I believe I know your
friend Tom Barter," she said. Damn! Why must her voice take
that funny tone? "I believe he works in one of Philip's factories.
I believe it's your friend; but of course it may not be. He's got
lodgings next to the Pilgrims' Inn."

Like an experienced fox who hears the dogs in the distance
and automatically takes to the hedge, a deep self-preservative
instinct in John, a male friend-preservative instinct, made him
say hurriedly, "Do you really think it's the same? I don't believe
it can be. Tom Barter used to go for endless long walks col-
lecting birds' eggs. Does yours do that? If he doesn't go on long
walks alone he's not the same!"

She surrounded her smooth, dark head with smoke that went
trailing in spiral wisps down the water-track behind them. "I
like Tom very much," she said, scrupulously weighing her words.
"There are few people down there that I like better.

They both looked away from each other at the darkly massed
woods which terminated the shining meadows on their right.

"It's the aspen poplars that give this scenery its character,"
he remarked sententiously. "Those rounded masses of foliage,
seen across absolutely level fields, and growing in great wild
scattered clumps too; they give the whole place a park-like look;
and yet it's a neglected, untidy park. Woods on flat ground look
much larger and more mysterious than woods on hillsides. Dont
you think so?"

He wanted above everything else to keep their conversation
away from Tom Barter but the harder he tried to do this the
closer to him did the friend of his boyhood come. The darting
dace cried out "Tom Barter!" as they flashed through the water.
The dazzling sun-gleams upon the surface of the current danced
to a jig of that name. The long swaying weeds laughed languish-
ingly and coquettishly, "Tom, Tom! Come back to us, Tom!"

"Yes, my dear," he continued, "we can't get away from the
fact that we Crows are plain sea-faring Danes, settled ‘for cen-
turies as simple working farmers in the Isle of Ely. We haven't
the goodness of the Saxon, nor the power of the Norman, nor
the imagination of the Celt. We are run-down adventurers; that's
what we are; run-down adventurers; who haven't the gall to steal,
nor the stability to work."

Mary threw her cigarette into the river and resumed her hold
of the rudder lines. "Row a bit, John," she said.

He let his oars sink into the water and commenced pulling
with long furious strokes. He began now to feel a longing to
make love to her again; and in his vicious cold-blooded manner,
like the depravity of a weather-beaten tramp, he began telling
himself stories of exactly how he would do this as soon as he
could create the opportunity.

The girl felt at once glad and sorry that she had told him
about Tom Barter. If the sun-sparkles on the water and the shin-
ing green weeds were voluble of Tom her girl's heart was heavy
with him.

The whole matter of Barter was a grievous wedge in the sweet
pith of her peace at that moment. She did so love her companion,
as she watched his deep-drawn breathing and noted his pathetic
attempts at feathering with his oars. She loved the way his
knuckles looked as he pulled. She loved the whiteness of his
wrists and even the frayed, travel-stained cuffs of his shirt. She
loved the extraordinary faces he made when the oar got en-
tangled in the weeds! She too began, in her girl's way, but quite
as subnormal a way as his own, to long to be made love to again.
And then at last, so deep was the psychic similarity between
them, they both fell silent; and in their silence, set themselves
to pray to the First Cause that their love might have a happy
future.

They prayed to this unknown Ultimate, out of their hollow
boat, above that gleaming current, so simultaneously and so
intensely, that the magnetism of their prayer shot like a meteorite
out of the earth's planetary atmosphere. Something about its
double origin, and something about the swift and translucent
water from which it started on its flight, drove it forward beyond
the whole astronomical world, and beyond the darkness enclosing
that world, till it reached the primal Cause of all life.

What happens when such a wild-goose, heart-furious arrow of
human wanting touches that portion of the First Cause's aware-
ness that encircles the atmospheric circumference of the earth?
So many other organisms throughout the stellar constellations
and throughout the higher dimensions are unceasingly crying out
to this Primordial Power, that it can obviously only offer to the
supplications of our planet a limited portion of its magnetic
receptivity. And again, as all earth dwellers discover only too
quickly, it Itself is divided against Itself in those ultimate regions
of primal causation. Its primordial goodness warring forever
against its primordial evil holds life up only by vast excess of
energy and by oceans of lavish waste. Even though the cry of a
particular creature may reach the First Cause, there is always a
danger of its being intercepted by the evil will of this vast Janus-
faced Force. Down through the abysses of ether, away from the
central nucleus of this dualistic Being, descend through the dark-
ness that is beyond the world two parallel streams of magnetic
force, one good and one evil; and it is these undulating streams
of vibration, resembling infinite spider webs blown about upon
an eternal wind, that bring luck or ill luck to the creature pray-
ing. The best time for any human being to pray to the First Cause
if he wants his prayers to have a prosperous issue is one or other
of the Two Twilights; either the twilight preceding the dawn or
the twilight following the sunset. Human prayers that are offered
up at noon are often intercepted by the Sun--for all creative
powers are jealous of one another--and those that are offered up
at midnight are liable to be waylaid by the Moon in her seasons
or by the spirit of some thwarting planet. It is a natural fact
that these Two Twilights are propitious to psychic intercourse
with the First Cause while other hours are malignant and bale-
ful. It is also a natural fact, known to very few, that many of
the prayers offered to the First Cause by living organisms in their
desperation are answered by less powerful but much more pitiful
divinities. Priests of our race, wise in the art of prayer, are wont
to advise us to pray to these lesser powers rather than to the
First Cause; and they are wise in this advice. For whereas the evil
in the First Cause is only partially overcome by the good, in
some of these "little gods" there is hardly any evil at all. They
are all compact of magical pity and vibrant tenderness. It hap-
pened by ill luck on this particular occasion that the prayer to
their Creator offered up by John Crow and by Mary Crow in
their open boat on the Wissey in Norfolk aroused a response not
in the good will of this ultimate Personality, but in Its evil will.
Neither John nor Mary was aware that if a human being prays
at noonday or at midnight it is better to pray to the Sun or the
Moon rather than to the First Cause. Chance led them to pray
on this occasion almost exactly at twelve o'clock; and although
their prayer reached its destination unintercepted by any other
power, it lost itself, not in the ultimate good, but in the ultimate
evil....

Was it a dim intimation of this that led John to redouble his
furious strokes as he rowed their boat down the Wissey? The
sweat began to pour down his face as he tugged at those long
oars and his mouth, open now and twisted awry, began to re-
semble the fixed contorted lineaments of an antique tragic mask.

Mary was divided in her mind whether to call to him to stop
or to let him alone until he stopped of his own accord. Assisted
by wind and tide as well as propelled by his desperate efforts,
the boat shot forward now with an incredible speed. The girl
had grown by this time more skilful with the rudder lines. John,
in the tension of his rowing, kept more even time than he had
done before. Thus, though their speed was much greater, they
seemed to avoid the beds of reeds at the river curves, and the
shallows opposite the deeper pools, and the floating masses of cut
weeds that they overtook, with much greater facility, than when
they were casually drifting.

"I'll make him stop in a minute!" she kept saying to herself;
and then something in the very effort they both were making,
he to row and she to steer, something almost religious in their
united tension, compelled her to concentrate upon what she was
doing and to hold her peace. Past deep, muddy estuaries the boat
shot forward, where the marigolds grew so thick as to resemble
heaps of scattered gold, flung out for largesse from some royal
barge, past groups of tall lombardy poplars, their proud tops
bowing gently away from the wind, past long-maned and long-
tailed horses who rushed to look at them as they shot by, their
liquid eyes filled with entranced curiosity, past little farm-
houses with great, sloping red roofs, past massive cattle-sheds
tiled with those large, curved, brick tiles so characteristic of East
Anglia, past sunlit gaps in majestic woods through whose clear-
ings tall, flint church towers could be seen in the far distance,
past huge black windmills, their great arms glittering in the sun
as they turned, grinding white flour for the people of Norfolk,
past all these the boat darted forward, rowed, it seemed, by one
relentless will-power and steered by another. And as he swung
his arms forth and back, repeating his monotonous strokes with
grim pantings and with a glazed, unseeing look in his eyes, it
seemed to John as if merely by making this blind quixotic effort
he was on the way to insure a happy issue for their love.

He had prayed to the First Cause and the superstitious idea took
possession of him that the longer he kept up this struggle the
more likely he was to get a favourable answer.

He was indeed a good deal more exhausted already than his
coxswain had any notion of. If she had not been compelled to
concentrate her attention on rounding the river curves she would
have marked how pale his lips were growing; but she too was
wrought up to a queer hypnosis of blind tension. Every now and
then she would cry out, "Right, John!" or "Left, quick! Left!
I tell you," but apart from these brusque words she remained as
silent as he.

One effect this nervous madness had. It united them as nothing
else could have done. The longer this tension lasted the closer
these two beings drew together. Casual amorists have indeed no
notion of the world-deep sensuality of united physical labour.
More than anything else this can give to a man and a girl a mys-
terious unity. Nothing in their sweetest and most vicious love-
making had brought these two nearer to becoming one flesh than
did this ecstatic toil.

It may be that a blind instinct had already warned them that
their prayer to the Living God had only stirred up the remorse-
less malice in that Creator-Destroyer's heart. Whether this were
so or not, it is certain now that some obscure and lonely fury
in them turned upon that tremendous First Cause, and deliberately
and recklessly defied it! The two of them were alone on that
Norfolk river, a man and a woman, with the same grandmother
and the same grandfather, with the same grandparents in a
steady line, going back to Agincourt and Crecy, going back to
all the yeomen of England, to all the sturdy wenches of England,
to all the John Crows and Mary Crows that fill so many church-
yards in the Isle of Ely unto this day.

The silver-scaled dace and red-finned roach that their swift
movement disturbed seemed actually to pursue this furiously
speeding boat. The quivering poplars seemed to bow down their
proud tops to watch these two; the cattle lifted their heads to
gaze at them as they swept by; beneath air-region after air-
region of tremulous lark-music they flashed and glittered for-
ward; water-rats fled into their mud-burrows or plopped with a
gurgling, sucking sound under the swirling eddies that their boat
made; moor-hens flapped across their way with weak, harsh cries;
small, greenish-coloured, immature pike, motionless like drowned
sticks in the sunny shallows, shot blindly into the middle of the
river and were lost in the weeds. The prolonged struggle of these
two with the boat and with the water became in a very intimate
sense their marriage day upon earth. By his salt-tasting sweat
and by her wrought-up passion of guiding, these two "run-down
adventurers" plighted their troth for the rest of their days. They
plighted it in defiance of the whole universe and of whatever
was beyond the universe; and they were aware of no idealisa-
tion of each other. They clung to each other with a grim,
vicious, indignant resolve to enjoy a sensuality of oneness; a
sensuality of unity snatched out of the drifting flood of space and
time. It was not directed to anything beyond itself, this desire
of theirs. It was innocent of any idea of offspring. It was an
absolute, fortified and consecrated by the furious efforts they
were making, by the diamond-bright sparkles upon the broken
water, by the sullen clicking of the rowlocks.

John had begun to count now. "I'll stop after twenty more
strokes," he thought. But when the last of the twenty came, and
he found in the beating pulse of his exhaustion an undreamed-of
nerve of renewal, he did not stop. The dazzling spouts of water
drops which followed his oars, each time he drew them from the
water, mingled now with a renewed counting. "Ten...eleven
...twelve...thirteen...fourteen...fifteen..." Those rhythmic, up-
flung splashes of dancing crystal, stirred and subsiding amid
the long emerald-green weeds, became the thudding reverb-
eration of his own unconquerable heartbeats. These again
became triumphant figures of victory, of victory over nature,
over custom, over fate. "Sixteen...seventeen...eighteen
...nine "

He never reached his second twenty. Disturbed by the appear-
ance of a living javelin of blue fire, flung forth from a muddy
ditch, darting, like a gigantic dragon-fly, down the surface of
the river in front of them and vanishing round a bend of the
bank, Mary gave a startled pull to her left rudder string; and
the prow of the boat, veering in midstream, shot with a queer
sound, like a sound of snarling and sobbing, straight into the
overhung mouth of the weedy estuary, out of which the king-
fisher had flown!

John fell forward over his own knees with a groan. His shoul-
ders heaved silently under his heavy sob-drawn breathing. He was
lost to everything except the necessity of finding free and unim-
peded breath.

Mary sat quietly on where she was. "I'll go to him in a min-
ute," she thought. "Better let him get his breath first." She could
not see his face. She could see nothing but his head and his
knees. But she knew, without seeing it, that his face was quite
hideously contorted. She noticed that something wet was falling
down from his face upon the plank under his feet. She peered
forward and stared morbidly into the darkness at his feet. Was
blood dripping from his mouth? "Dear God!" she cried in her
heart, "Have I killed him by my foolishness?" The cry was
followed by such a wave of love for him that she could hardly
bear it and remain passive any longer. She wanted to throw her
arms around him and press his head against her thin chest. This
feeling was followed by another one of an egoistic tightness and
self-pity. "It would be just like my fate," she thought, "just like
the way everything has happened to me all my life, if he has con-
sumption and this has given him a hemorrhage."

She remained rigid, her heart beating, holding herself in by
an effort of the will. At last his breath became quieter. For a few
seconds after that, his head seemed to sink helplessly down. It
looked almost as if it would touch the plank between his knees.
The oars, still clutched tight in his hands, stood up at a grotesque
angle. "Are you all right, John?" she whispered at last.

He did lift his head at that and smiled at her, drawing a deep
sigh. "Exhausted," he murmured. "I was a fool to go on so
long."

"Lean back a bit in the boat," she said. He tried to obey her
and she got up on her feet and crossing over to him took the oars
from the rowlocks and laid them side by side. As she did this
she thought to herself: "John and I are one now. Nothing in* those
hateful Ruins will be able to divide us now."

She helped him to lie down on his back in the prow of the boat
with his arms extended along its sides and with his head against
the acute angle of its wooden bow. "Give me the flask, my sweet!"
he murmured.

His overcoat was in the stern and she had to move once more
down the whole length of the boat to get it. As he watched her
doing this a most delicious languor rippled through him like a
warm tide. Something weak and clinging in his nature derived a
special satisfaction at that moment from being tended by this
girl. "She is what I've waited for all my days."

After he'd drunk the whiskey Mary began to wonder whether
she ought to suggest their having their lunch here in this king-
fisher ditch. She was secretly very averse to doing so. In her
mind's eye, all that morning, she had pictured herself spreading
out a Virgilian repast on mossy grass and under great trees for
herself and her lover. Anyway it would be much nicer to leave
this ill-smelling boat for a time and stretch their legs on the land.

"I'm going to explore the neighbourhood," she said at last, get-
ting up upon the seat where he had been rowing, and seizing a
willow branch wherewith to pull the side of the boat nearer the
bank. In the glow and relaxation which he enjoyed just then her
figure, standing there above him in the flickering shade of the
branch she held, gathered to itself that sort of romance which of
all things had always stirred him most. Both sun and shadow lay
across her brown hair, parted in the middle and drawn back to
a rough, simple knot, and upon her plain dress, and upon her
sturdy peasant-girl ankles.

"Very good, you beautiful creature!" he murmured. "You
might give me a cigarette out of my greatcoat before you go.
I'm too comfortable to move."

She jumped down with alacrity, gave him cigarettes and
matches, and then stepping lightly for a second on the side of the
boat sprang to the bank. "You won't go to sleep and let it drift
out, will you? It's fast in the mud; but you don't think I ought to
tie it to the tree?"

"You run off and explore, my pretty one!" he said. "I'll deal
with the boat." When she was gone he thought to himself, "It's
the way she parts her hair and pulls it back and twists it, that
I like so well. Who would have guessed that I'd find her like this
the first minute I got to my native land?" He frowned a little and
then closed his eyes. Though it was warm enough to be May
rather than March, it was too early for that confusing murmur of
insects which is the usual background for a hot afternoon. When
the rustling of her steps died away an incredible silence de-
scended on the place. The newborn reeds were too young to play
with the flowing river. The noon had become afternoon. The larks
were silent. The fish had ceased to rise. There were no swallows
yet and the few spring flies that hovered over that weedy ditch
were safe from attack whether from the firmament above or the
firmament below. The only sound that reached his ears was the
sound of a faint trickle of water which came from some infinites-
imal ledge in the bank above his head and fell down drop by
drop into the ditch. Not a breath of wind stirred. Not a leaf-bud
quivered. Not a grass-blade swayed. There was only that elfin
waterfall and, except for that, the very earth herself seemed to
have fallen asleep. "This is Norfolk," he said to himself, and in
that intense, indrawn silence some old atavistic affiliation with
fen-ditches and fen-water and fen-peat tugged at his soul and
pulled it earthward. And there came to his nostrils, as he lay with
his eyes shut, a far-flung, acrid, aromatic smell. It was not the
smell of mud, or leaf-buds, or grass-roots, or cattle-droppings, or
ditch-water. It was not the smell of last night's rain, or of the
sleeping south wind. It reached him independent of the eel
slime that still clung about the bottom of the boat. It was the
smell of East Anglia itself. It was the smell to greet which, on
uncounted spring mornings, his Isle-of-Ely ancestors had left
their beds and opened their back doors! It was the smell that had
come wandering over the water-meadows on afternoons like this,
to the drowsy heads of innumerable John Crows, resting from
their ploughing with their ale mugs in their blistered hands, and
their minds running on ewes and lambs and on bawdy Cambridge
taverns! A fleeting thought of what lay before him in Glaston-
bury no sooner touched his mind than he flung iL away as Mary
had flung the eel's head.

He made a feeble attempt to recall the subtle idea which he
had had when he prayed to his mother under the alders, but he
could only remember the part about never "competing." "Com-
pete?" he thought vaguely. "What does ‘compete' mean?" At
that moment there seemed nothing in the world comparable to
allowing sleep to steal through and become one with him, just as
this tinkling rivulet he listened to lost itself in the body of this
ditch. But all the while, though he kept yielding to these invasions
of sleep, he could not give himself up to it to the point of losing
his consciousness. Every now and then, when his eyelids still un-
closed a little, he saw a drooping willow shoot trailing in the
ditch beside him. Its extremity seen through the water was differ-
ent from the upper part of it seen through the air; and as some-
thing in him refused to yield to unconsciousness, he came by
degrees to identify himself with this trailing shoot. There was a
queer imperative upon him not to sink any deeper into sweet ob-
livion. There was an imperative upon him to remember his vow
about "competing." This "never competing" became identified
with the slow swirl of the ditch stream as it^made tiny ripples
round the suspended shoot. He was allowed, he dimly felt, to
enjoy his paradisiac lassitude, as long as he, this being who was
partly John Crow and partly a willow shoot, kept these ripples in
mind. All these phenomena made up a complete world, and in this
world he was fulfilling all his moral obligations and fulfilling
them with a delicious sense of virtue merely by keeping these
ripples in mind; and the drip-drop, drip-drop of the tinkling
rivulet at his elbow was the voice of the queer imperative which
he obeyed.

A moor-hen propelling herself in quaint jerks past this willow
shoot towards the river was so startled by confronting the face of
a man staring with flickering eyelids down into the water that she
rose with a scream and flapped off heavily into the rushes. This
aroused John, who in a moment forgot altogether the imperative
of the tinkling rivulet; and, clutching the edge of the boat with
numb sleep-swollen fingers, raised his neck like a turtle and
pricked up his ears to listen for his girl's return.

It was under a great ash tree in the centre of a neighbouring
field that they finally had their lunch.

"Why didn't you stand up to Philip more if you disliked him
so?" 'she asked when their meal was over and they were recalling
last night's gathering. His face worked expressively before the
words came out in answer, a curious pulse appearing in his cheeks
at the corner of his nostrils and a certain twitching round his
cheek-bones. It was a facial peculiarity not quite the same as that
of Miss Elizabeth Crow; and yet it was evidently a family trait.
Touching in the women, and no doubt often a signal of danger in
the men, this facial sign, like a well-worn coin, must have fre-
quently, in the last three or four hundred years, gone to Norwich
for the fair, gone to Cambridge to buy books and silk dresses,
appeared in the depths of old-fashioned looking-glasses, above
mahogany chests of drawers, before the pushing open of innumer-
able ivy-shadowed front-bedroom windows to watch visitors come
over the home-meadows. It must often have been the last of all
their possessions that they were forced to leave behind, when,
like William Crow on this beautiful March day, they lay with six
feet of East Anglian clay above them!

It appeared now indeed more emphatically than Mary had ever
seen it in any of her relative's faces except once when she had
asked her grandfather at breakfast, as he dreamily looked out
over that smooth secluded lawn, what the word "whore" meant.

"I'll tell you exactly why!" John Crow cried, seizing a clump
of soft moss, just beyond where his overcoat extended, with ex-
cited fingers. "It's for a reason that I wouldn't tell anyone in the
world but you. It's because I've long ago decided always to yield
to my cowardice. I was afraid of Philip the moment I saw him.
I hated him; but that's another matter. Something in his person-
ality frightens me. I could have struggled against it and made
myself say a lot of things. I thought of plenty of them. But it's
become a principle with me to yield to my fear of people. I pro-
pitiate them, or I'm silent, or I avoid them."

Mary looked at him very earnestly.

"Have you ever loved anyone you were afraid of?"

"You mean a woman?"

She nodded.

"I tell you I've never loved anyone; though of course I've made
love to endless women. Oh, yes! Yes! It would kill my love to be
afraid. Not at once, but by inches and inches. Oh, yes! If I ever
got thoroughly afraid of anyone in the end I should stop lov-
ing them."

She lowered her eyes and remained silent for a moment. Then
she cried with a kind of quivering fierceness, "I won't have you
dare ever to be afraid of me, John! "

He looked at her sharply. There was a note in her voice that
he had not heard before. It was the danger-note of the female,
beyond reason, against reason.

"Why not?" he asked.

She turned away her head and looked across the wide, flat
meadow at the Wissey bank, making no reply. A soft gust of
south wind stirred the lighter branches of the ash above them.
The cold, thin, smooth, grey twigs, with their clean, black buds,
moved solemnly up and down like classic dancers.

"Shall I be pleased with Glastonbury?" he asked after a pause.

"I believe you'll feel just as I do, John, about Glastonbury.
You'll hate- the sentimentality that has been spread over every-
thing there, like scented church-lamp oil! You'll hate the visitors.
You'll hate the tradesmen catering for the visitors; you'll hate
the sickening superstition of the whole thing."

"I hate it now, quite sufficiently," he interrupted. "Simply be-
cause Philip's there. Oh, I wish " He became so pensive that
she did not like to break into his thought. "I wish, Mary, that
you'd leave Glastonbury and try and find something of...of
the same kind...whatever it is...that you do...somewhere round
here."

She smiled a broad, amused smile, showing all her strong
white teeth.

"How funny!" she murmured. "Why, my dearest, I can't do
anything! You don't seem to realize that I've only been on my
own for a couple of years; and before that I did nothing at all
but look after Mother."

"Where did you live?"

"In Thorpe, near Norwich. Mother's buried in Thorpe. She
couldn't leave me anything because she lived on her pension."
Mary's eyes opened very wide as she spoke of her mother. No
tears came into them. They just opened very wide, with a curious,
self-conscious movement of the facial muscles.

"It was Philip of course who got me the place," she went on.
"Miss Drew is some sort of a connection of Tilly's." She leaned
forward now, and stretching out her hand caught hold of his
foot. "John, my dear John," she said with extreme and childish
gravity, "will you really walk all the way to Glastonbury?"

"I shall start very early tomorrow," he replied, "and I expect
I'll see you again in ten days. I suppose it will be all right to send
you a postcard when I get there? I shall anyway have a penny left
to buy that with."

Mary jumped to her feet, and gave her skirts a vigorous shake.
His question restored to her with a healthy rush her abrupt
woman- of-action quality.

"Yes," she said, "send me a card. Miss Drew, the Abbey House,
is the address. You won't forget that? You can think of the Ruins
for the Abbey part, and you can think of ‘screw' for the rest.
‘You,' ‘screw,' Drewl " and she laughed uneasily.

John slowly pulled up his legs and got upon his feet. The
hard, cautious, furtive look of a tramp was upon his face now.
"Will...you...really...be able...to help me...keep body and soul
together...when I get there?" And then shooting at her a
completely impersonal look, as if she were a housemaid hir-
ing him to chop wood, "How often does she pay you?" he
asked.

But Mary was totally undisturbed by this revelation of the
lower self of her lover. Indeed she looked pleased. "Every
month," she replied with shining eyes. ""It's my pocket-
money, you know."

Her pleasure at the ungentlemanly turn he had given to the
conversation brought such a glow to her cheeks and such a smile
to her lips that she became for a moment really beautiful. He
rushed up to her and caught her in his arms. Long and long did
he caress her under that confederate ash tree. "You're a hama-
dryad--that's what you are!" he kept repeating. "You're a
hamadryad!"

Every girl lives so constantly in the imaginative atmosphere of
being made love to that even the most ignorant of them is rarely
shocked or surprised. It is the material consequences that they
dread, not moral remorse or any idea that they are allowing what
is wrong. John's way of love-making might, however, have easily
palled on a more passionate nature than Mary's; for he was not
only profoundly corrupt but extremely egoistic, touching her and
holding her in the manner that most excited his own childishly
fantastic imagination and never asking himself whether this was
what suited her, nor for one second forgetting himself in any
rush of tempestuous tenderness. But Mary, as though she really
were a hamadryad, who had known the shamelessness of hundreds
of whimsical satyrs, treated the whole thing with grave, sweet,
indulgent passivity. Something in her kindred nature, some wil-
low-rooted, fen-country perversity, seemed to need just this pro-
tracted cerebral courtship to stir the essential coldness of her
blood and nerves. One quaint feeling often came to her, in the
oddest moments of his "sweet usage," namely, that he was one of
her old, faded, wooden dolls; yes, the most dilapidated and in-
jured of all four which used to belong to her, come to life again,
but this time full of queer, hardly human exactions that she
would willingly prostitute herself for hours and hours to satisfy,
so long as she could hear those wooden joints creak and groan in
their joy.

They both knew they were safe from interruption. Children of
generations of fen-country life, they were well aware how far
safer for lovers is the great, wide, flat expanse of grass-meadows,
than any thickly grown copse or spinney, where an enemy can
easily approach unseen.

Emanations of sympathy were not lacking from the vast, smooth
tree, with its upward-clutching branch-ends, though they were
of a different kind from those of that aged denizen of Dye's
Hole. They both knew well that after the heavy effort of getting
the boat back against the current to Alder Dyke, there would be
little chance for more than a few kisses before they separated for
their unknown future; and this made them loath to cease their
play. But the role the ash tree served was to bring to them in the
midst of their dalliance with incredible vividness the image of
their grandfather. Both of them saw clearly in their mind's eye the
well-known head of their grandfather, covered with thick curly
hair, "as white as wool," with his patient servants sitting in a
row on the red-leather dining-room chairs and with his life-weary,
King-of-Thule eyes in their hollow eye-sockets, lowered over the
page, as with his classic-actor's voice beautifully modulated to
the occasion, he intoned one of the poet Cowper's hymns.

The language of trees is even more remote from human intelli-
gence than the language of beasts or of birds. What to these lov-
ers, for instance, would the singular syllables "wuther-quotle-
glug" have signified?

"It is extraordinary that we should ever have met!" These
words, uttered by John in a moment of relaxed gratefulness,
struck the attention of that solitary ash tree in Water-ditch Field
with what in trees corresponds to human irony. Five times in its
life of a hundred and thirty years had the ash tree of Water-ditch
Field heard those words uttered by living organisms. An old
horse had uttered them in its own fashion when it rubbed its nose
against a young companion's polished flanks. An eccentric fisher-
man had uttered them addressing an exceptionally large chub
which he had caught and killed. A mad clergyman had uttered
them about a gipsy girl who did not know of his existence. An
old maiden lady had uttered them to the spirit of her only lover,
dead fifty years before; and finally, but twelve months ago, Wil-
liam Crow himself had uttered them; uttered them in the grate-
ful, attentive and astonished ears of Mr. Geard of Glastonbury!

All this the ash tree noted; but its vegetative comment thereon
would only have sounded in human ears like the gibberish:
wuther-quotle-glug .

The afternoon had by now advanced far. Long, orange-col-
oured rays of light fell horizontally across the flat meadow. The
shadow of the ash tree grew dark and cool as a stone-covered
spring. From the ditch where their boat was moored came the sun-
set melody of a blackbird, full, as that bird's song at that hour
always is, of some withheld secret in nature beyond human sor-
row and human joy. Sadly they gathered up the remains of their
feast and retraced their steps to the boat.

Their row back to Alder Dyke against the current was, as they
had anticipated, no light task. Armed with the boat-hook, Mary
at first stood upright in the stern and punted with all her strength
while John stubbornly rowed; but as time went on she became
conscious that they were advancing so slowly that something else
would have to be done.

"Let me sit by your side, John," she said at last, "and both of
us row."

She came over from the prow of the boat and sat down by him,
taking possession of the oar upon his left. In this position, each
pulling at a separate oar, but with elbows and shoulders touching
and their four feet pressing against the same stretcher they
rowed home.

"What is my address, John?" she said, letting the blade of her
oar rest flat upon the water when they reached Alder Dyke.

"Care of Miss Drew, the Abbey House, Glastonbury, Somer-
set" Thus came his answer quietly and grimly enough; but the
girl had a shrewd and bitter knowledge that, if only their hands
had not at that moment been clutching those heavy oar-handles,
he could easily--when once this simple lesson had been properly
repeated--have let his twitching cheek sink against her small
cold breasts and burst into a fit of convulsive, childish, unreason-
able sobbing.



STONEHENGE



AS he plodded along the hedgeless white road over Salisbury
Plain John Crow became acquainted with aspects of bodily
and mental suffering till that epoch totally unrevealed to him.
He felt very tired and although he had been lucky, during the
whole of his tramp, with regard to rain, he had been unlucky with
regard to cold. He had indeed endured eight days of exception-
ally cold weather and now as he moved forward with the idea of
reaching Stonehenge before dark the thought of having to sleep
again, as he had done ever since he left Didcot, in some sort of
draughty cattle-shed or behind an exposed haystack made him
shiver through every bone of his exhausted body. A warm bed
ran in his mind, a bed like the one to which he had treated him-
self at Maidenhead, which had one of its brass knobs missing;
and an excellent supper ran in his mind of potatoes and cabbage
such as he had enjoyed in that Maidenhead tavern before sleep-
ing. His overcoat was heavy, his bag was heavy, and what was
worse, one of his heels had got blistered, so that for the last
twelve hours, ever since he had left Andover at dawn, walking
had been a misery to him. He had only eightpence left. This had
to last him till he reached Glastonbury; so bed and supper to-
night were quite out of the question. He had got a pot of tea and
a roll and butter at Salisbury and he had still a couple of Social
biscuits and a piece of cheese wrapped up in his pocket He also
possessed unopened a packet of Navy Cut cigarettes. "I wonder
what these Workhouses are like?" he thought "I suppose the
officials are bullies; I suppose a person's always in danger of
getting lice. No, I must find a shed or something; but I'm going
to see Stonehenge first."

John Crow had never in his life known a road more bleak and
unfrequented than the one he was now traversing over Salisbury
Plain. He knew that the sun had just sunk below the horizon
though its actual shape was invisible. It had been totally ob-
scured by clouds for an hour at least before it sank; but soon
after its disappearance the north wind which had been his fellow-
traveller ever since he left Salisbury dispersed some of these
clouds and swept the sky a little clearer. It was clearer, but it was
still grey with a greyness that was positively ashen. The differ-
ence between the pallor of the road, which was sad with a recog-
nised human sadness and this ashen grey sky overhead was in
some way disturbing to his mind. He kept staring at the sky as
he dragged his blistered foot forward. Every step he took caused
him pain and if the sadness of the road was congenial to this pain,
the appearance of the sky was intimately adjusted to it. The north
wind which had followed him from Salisbury and had kept on
whistling between his cap and his coat collar was not hateful to
him. He had almost got attached to its company. Once or twice
when he rested, sitting, under walls or under hedges, he found
himself missing its sullen monotone. Why the juxtaposition of
this particular cap and this particular coat collar should cause
the wind to hum and drone and sometimes almost to scream in
his ear was a puzzle to him. But this north wind travelling with
him over Salisbury Plain had many strange peculiarities and
although it was surly it did not strike him as in the least malig-
nant. Perhaps since he came from the North, from the rough
North Sea region, where this wind had its own habitation, it was
busy giving him warnings about Glastonbury. Perhaps it was
giving him warnings against believing anything that this ashen
sky was putting into his head. What the sky made him think of
were fleeing hosts of wounded men with broken spears and torn
banners and trails of blood and neighing horses. The sky itself
carried no token of such far-off events upon its corpse-cold vast-
ness, but such ruinous disasters seemed to rush along beneath it
in their viewless essences, wild-tossed fragments of forgotten
flights, catastrophic overthrows, huge migrations of defeated
peoples. And upon all these things that sky looked down with a
ghastly complicity. Two small motor cars, one dog cart, and a
queer-looking lorry with soldiers in it, were the only tangible
vehicles that passed him that evening as he went along; but the
road seemed full of human memories. There was not a signpost
or a milestone on that wayside but had gathered to itself some
piteous encounter of heart-struck lovers, some long and woeful
farewell, some imperishable remorse! Through ancient and
twisted thorn trees, whose faint green buds were growing as in-
distinct in the after-sunset as specks of green weed on the sides
of old ships on a darkened tide, that north wind whistled and
shrieked. Once as he rested his bad foot on the fallen stones of a
ruined sheepfold and stared across the chalky uplands in front
of him he caught sight of an embanked circle of turf with broken-
down wooden railings on the top. The look of this object so ex-
cited his curiosity that he limped over towards it and wearily
climbed its side. It was a circular pond full almost to the brim
of bluish-grey water from the middle of whose silent depths rose
a few water plants but whose edges were quite clear and trans-
parent. All the light that there was in that fatal-brooding sky
seemed concentrated on the surface of this water. "I know what
this is," thought John Crow to himself. "This is one of those
ponds they call a dew-pond." He advanced cautiously down the
slope, leaving his bag on the top of the bank, and supporting
himself upon his stick.

Arrived at the edge of the water, he stirred it a little with his
stick's end. But in a second he hurriedly drew his stick away.
There in that blue-grey, motionless transparency hung suspended
a dark object. "A newt!" In his boyhood in Norfolk he had loved
these minute saurians more than all living things; and to catch
sight of one of these, on this day of all days, filled him with an
almost sacred reassurance. "All is going to be all right," he said
to himself, "I'm going to get to Glastonbury and to Mary!"

He watched the newt with interest. Disturbed by his stick it had
sunk down a short distance below the surface; but there it floated
at rest, its four feet stretched out, absolutely immobile. Even as
he watched it, it gave the faintest flicker to its tail and with its
four feet still immoveably extended it sank slowly out of sight
into the depths of the water.

John Crow scrambled up the bank, picked up his bag, and
limped back to the road. For the next mile his mood was a good
deal happier. He was pleased by the way every milestone he
passed recorded the distance to Stonehenge, just as if it were a
habitation of living men, instead of what it was.

"Two miles to Stonehenge," said the particular one he now
reached, just as the after-sunset nebulosity began to turn into
twilight. He sat on the ground with his back against this mile-
stone. His blistered foot hurt him abominably. "It looks as if I
should have to sleep among those Great Stones," he thought. "I
shall be at the end of my tether when I get there."

A drowsiness fell upon him now, in spite of the pain in his
foot, and his head began to nod over his clasped hands and his
tightly hugged knees. Three things, the image of the bed at
Maidenhead with one of its brass knobs missing, the image of the
Great Stones as he had long ago seen them in pictures, and the
image of the newt sinking down into the dew-pond, dominated
his mind. He struggled frantically with this obsessing desire to
sleep. The wind seemed to have dropped a little. "Perhaps if I
see a warm shed," he thought, "I'll leave Stonehenge till
tomorrow."

He dragged his body into motion again and limped on. A motor
car passed him at top speed, sounding its horn savagely.
While it went by his one fear was lest it should stop and offer
him a lift. Its vicious look, its ugly noise, its mechanical speed,
its villainous stench, the hurried glimpse he got of the smart
people in it, all combined to make it seem worse to have any con-
tact with such a thing than to die upon the road.

His foot hurt him most evilly. He knew it was not serious. He
had not sprained his ankle or even twisted it. It was only a blister.
But the blister throbbed and burned, pulsed and ached as if his
heel had been struck with a poisoned arrow.

The grey sky had changed a little in character now. It was
dimly interspersed with twinkling points of pale luminosity. Most
of these points were so blurred and indistinct that it would have
been hard to catch them again at a second glance in the same
position in the vast ether. They were like nothing on earth; and
to nothing on earth could they be compared. They were the stars,
not of the night but of the twilight. The sky around those points
of light was neither grey nor black. It was a colour for which
there is no name among artists' pigments. But the man limping
across Salisbury Plain gave this colour a name. He named it Pain.
Where it reached the climax of appropriateness was in the west
towards which the road was leading him. Here there was one
fragment of sky, exactly where the sun had vanished, that to the
neutrality of the rest added an obscure tinge--just the faintest
dying tinge--of rusty brown. This low-lying wisp of rusty brown
was like the throbbing pulse from the pressure of whose living
centre pain spread through the firmament. Walking towards the
West Country was like walking towards some mysterious celestial
Fount wherein pain was transmuted into an unknown element.

First one leg; then the other leg. He had reached the point now
of being conscious of the actual physical automatism of walking.
That form of peculiar self-consciousness which as an infant had
made the art of walking a triumph of self-assertion now returned
upon him to make it a necessity of self-preservation. John Crow
felt that he was nearing the end of his power over the very
simple achievement of putting one leg in front of the other. He
struggled forward for about half a mile. Then he stood still. "I
must find a place to lie down in," he thought. "I can't go on."
The Maidenhead bed, with the one gilt knob missing, had re-
treated now beyond the horizon of opportunity. The image of
cattle-scented straw floated before him.

A dull, beating thud was proceeding from some portion of his
body and travelling away from it into the darkness. He felt like
a run-down clock which could not be hindered from a meaning-
less striking. Whether this thudding came from his heel, his heart,
or his head he could not tell. It might, for all he knew, come
from that rusty-brown place in the western sky.

"I can't go on," he repeated aloud. And then, quite as natur-
ally as he had before grown conscious, in that infantile fashion,
of the triumph of walking, he grew conscious now of the neces-
sity of praying.

And John Crow prayed, calmly, fervently, simply, to the spirit
of his mother.

His mother had died when he was six years old and his devo-
tion to her personality had been, ever since that day, not in the
least different from the extreme of superstitious idolatry. The
childish weakness of his character was just the sort of thing that
would endear an only son, as John was, to the protective maternal
instinct. The woman had died in a convulsive spasm of tragic
tenderness for the child she had to leave; nor is it difficult to
conceive how, even on the most material plane, some formidable
magnetic vibration, issuing from that grave in the Yaxham
churchyard, might linger upon the chemical substratum of the
ether, and prove of genuine supernatural value to the child of
her womb, when in his weakness he was most in need of her.
Thus it happened that when he had finished praying John found
he could move forward again, although with very slow steps.

His pace indeed was the pace now of an extremely old man
who used his stick as a crutch; and anyone listening to his ap-
proach might have taken him for a lame man or a blind man.
The heavy tap, tap of his stick upon the road was a sound that
travelled further than his footsteps.

At last he came in sight of the faint whiteness of another mile-
stone. This ought to carry the token "One mile to Stonehenge."
But this time the roadway opposite the milestone was not empty.
Under the nebulousness of that rusty-brown horizon-tinge stood
a small dark motor car. It had a red spot at the back but no
headlights. It obstructed the road, but it did not impinge upon
the scene with the crude violence of the car that had recently
passed him by.

As John Crow limped up to it a figure that he had not distin-
guished from the hedge advanced into the road to intercept him.

"You must let me take you on a bit," said a tall, gaunt, un-
gainly man wearing a dark bowler hat. "You are too lame to be
walking like this. I want to stop presently--a mile from here--
but only for a minute or two. I am going to Glastonbury."

A shiver of excitement ran through the worn-out frame of
John Crow.

"I was done in, dead beat, at...the end...of my...of my tether,"
gasped John when he found himself safely inside the little car.
And then, as they moved on very slowly, what must this im-
pulsive man do but confess to this stranger how he had just
prayed in the middle of the road to the spirit of his mother and
how he too was bound for Glastonbury. "There is another ex-
planation, my good friend," said the motorist gravely. "My mind
was at the moment absorbed in thoughts of Glastonbury--yours
was also--what more natural than that I should ask you to let
me take you there?"

John now became aware that although a few faint stars were
visible the departing day was still dominant. "It will not be dark
for half an hour yet," he thought. "I shall see Stonehenge before
night." They were now reaching a little upward slope of the road.
The wide Plain stretched around them, cold and mute, and it was
as if the daylight had ceased to perish out of the sky, even while
the surface of the earth grew dark. The identity of that great
space of downland was indrawn upon itself, neither listening nor
seeking articulation, lost in an interior world so much vaster and
so much more important than the encounters of man with man,
whether evoked by prayer or by chance, that such meetings were
like the meetings of ants and beetles upon a twilit terrace that had
thoughts and memories of its own altogether outside such in-
finitesimal lives.

To John's surprise, the stranger put on his brake and stopped
his car. "Can you see that thorn?" asked the man.

John peered forward through the twilight- Yes, he did clearly
see the object indicated. It looked to him like a dead tree. "Is it
a dead tree?" he enquired.

But the man went on, "From the foot of that thorn theres a
path across the grass leading straight to Stonehenge. You can
see Stonehenge from the foot of that thorn."

"Can anyone go there, at this hour? Someone told me in
France that it was guarded after sunset by soldiers."

"Are you able to come with me or would you like best to stay
here till I come back?" said the man, totally disregarding this
remark.

"I must come! Of course I must come with you!" insisted John
Crow.

They got out of the little car together. The stranger gave John
his arm; and although John would have liked to lean on it a
great deal more heavily than he did, it was some support. He
hobbled along as best he could, leaning the bulk of his real
weight upon his own root-handled hazel-stick, and staring for-
ward at the dead thorn tree with dazed curiosity. Deep in his
mind he was thinking to himself, "I'll always pray to her for
everything from now on. I'll pray to her that Mary and I can live
together in Norfolk!"

When they reached the thorn tree John stopped and drew a
deep breath. He pressed heavily now on his companion's wrist
and stared across the dark strip of downland turf before him,
staggered and thunderstruck. Stonehenge! He had never expected
anything like this. He had expected the imposing, but this was
the overpowering. "This is England," he thought in his heart.
"This is my England. This is still alive. This is no dead Ruin like
Glastonbury. I am glad I've come to this before I died!" "Will
you excuse me, Sir," he said, in a loud, rather rasping voice, the
voice he had always assumed when, in the presence of French
officials, he wished to assert himself, "will you excuse me if I sit
down for a minute?"

"Do you feel queer? Are you ill?"

"I want to look at it from where we are." They sat down on
the ground beside the thorn tree; and even as he did so John
observed that from one or two dark twigs upon a twisted branch
a few leaves were budding. "It's not quite dead," he remarked.

The stranger naturally thought he was speaking of the dark
pile in front of them. "You mean its powder's not left it?" He
paused and then went on in a low voice. "About four thousand
years it's been here; but, after all, what's that to some of the an-
tiquities there are in the world? But you're right--it's not quite
dead."

"It's very English," said John,

The man turned and gave him a strange, indignant glance. "Is
it English then to hide your great secret?" he cried excitedly.
"Is it English to keep your secret to the very end?"

"I expect you know much more about it, Sir, than I do," said
John humbly, "but I don't feel that those stones have anything
hidden. They look to me just what they are, neither more nor
less. They look simply like stones, enormous stones, lifted up to
be worshipped."

His companion swung round and hugged his shins, resting his
chin on the top of his knees and balancing himself on the extreme
tips of his haunch-bones. He gave his head an angry toss so that
his black bowler fell to the ground and rolled a few inches before
lying still.

"Could you worship a stone?"

"I...I think...I think so...." stammered John, a little disconcerted
by the man's intensity. "He must be a nonconformist preacher,"
he thought.

"Simply because it's a stone?" cried the other, and he hugged
his ankles so tightly and tilted himself forward so far that John
was reminded of a certain goblinish gargoyle that he knew very
well, on an out-of-the-way portion of Notre Dame.

"Certainly. Simply because it's a stone!"

"And you call that English?" the stranger almost groaned.

"I could worship that nearest one," John said, "the one that
stands by itself over there."

The man jumped to his feet and, picking up his bowler hat,
clamped it upon his head. He was a tall man and he looked pre-
ternaturally tall as he stood between John and the stone which
John had said he could worship. His profile was like a caricature
of a Roman Emperor.

"Do you know what that stone's called?" he cried, "Do you
know what it's called ?" In his excitement he bent down and shook
John by his shoulders. John thought to himself, "I wish my stick
had a heavier handle. This man is evidently a mad dissenting
minister."

"Have all these stones got names?" asked John eagerly, making
two desperate attempts to rise to his feet.

The man gave him his hand and John stood up. He surrepti-
tiously substituted the handle of his hazebstick for its ferrule end
and grasped it tightly. "If he becomes dangerous," he thought,
"I'll step backward and hit him on the head with all my force."
He laughed to himself as he swung his stick in the darkness.

The Great Stone Circle had stirred up in him an excitement the
like of which he had never felt in all his life before. The pain of
his blistered heel became nothing. He lurched forward, pushed
the man aside, and stumbled towards the huge, solitary, unhewn
monolith which had attracted his attention. The other strode by
his side murmuring indignantly, "It's more than that, it's more
than that." When they reached the stone John embraced its rough
bulk with his arms, his stick still clutched by the wrong end m
his fingers. Three times he pressed his face against it and in Us
heart he said, "Stone of England, guard Mary Crow and make
her happy."

The stranger continued his surly protest. "This stone, he said,
"is called the Hele Stone. It's this stone which stands exactly
between the sunrise on a certain day and the Altar Stone inside
the Circle--Hele--you can see what that is, can't you? It's
Helios, the Sun! You've been playing your little game, Sir, with
the Sun Stone."

But John, in that fading twilight, with Stonehenge looming up
in front of him, was not to be overawed. He felt too far drunken
with the magnetism emanating from these prehistoric monoliths
and trilithons. He felt no longer afraid of blaspheming against
any God, even against the great Sun Himself!

The two men confronted each other. It was not yet too dark
for them to see each other's faces. John leaned on his stick in a
normal manner now--the sight of the look of his companion's
aquiline nose, combined with his last remark, had reassured him.
No religious maniac would have referred to Helios. John con-
tinued their disputation, "I believe this stone," he said dogmati-
cally, "is far older than the rest. I believe Stonehenge was built
here because of this stone. I think stone-worship is the oldest of
all religions and easier to sympathise with than any other religion."

The stranger made no reply and looked round him with the air
of one who listens intently.

"Come!" he said peremptorily, taking hold of John by the
upper part of his arm. "Let's enter the Circle."

They moved on for a short distance and came upon a large
stone lying fiat at their feet. The man's fingers clutched John's
flesh now with a convulsive clutch.

"You know what that is, I suppose?" he said.

John's answer to this was to tear himself loose, go down on
his knees, fumble at the stone with his hands, scoop up some
seven-days' old rain-water that he came upon in a hollow con-
cavity there and lap it up noisily with his lips. The stranger's tall
figure hovered over him like a great, agitated dusky bird. He was
wearing a long, old-fashioned overcoat, thin at the waist and very
baggy round the legs, and the tails of it kept flapping against his
ankles as he went circling about John's crouching figure, gasping
forth bewildered protests.

"What are you doing? I've been here more times than I can
remember, and I've never dared do that! That water's stagnant.
It's worse than stagnant. They've killed thousands and thousands
of their enemies here. It's the Slaughtering Stone, I tell you!"

John Crow rose from his feet and drew the back of his hand
across his mouth. This childish gesture, visible enough in the
twilight, seemed to confound his companion.

"Have you no reverence at all?" he groaned, while the deep-
sunken eyes above his Roman nose flashed a disconcerting gleam
of anger. John Crow gave vent to a queer animal sound, that was
something between a fox-bark and a pig's grunt. Some ancient
vein of old Danish profanity seemed to have been aroused in him.

"I've got what I've got, Mister," he said, "but I want to kneel
by that Altar Stone in there before it gets too dark." He was
already limping forward when the man pulled him back with
a jerk.

"How did you know there was an Altar Stone in there?" The
words were uttered in such an awed whisper that John gave vent
to a gross Isle-of-Ely chuckle.

"Know it? Hee! Hee! Who doesn't know it?" Saying this he led
the way between two of the perpendicular cyclopean uprights
which bore aloft a third, a horizontal one. Vast, shadowy, terrific,
this third stone now took the place of the twilight sky. John
leaned his back against the left-hand monolith, digging his stick
into the ground, and his companion imitated him, standing erect
against the right-hand one. Above their heads, concealing the grey
mass of the zenith, hung that monolithic roof-tree. The faint stars,
as they gazed up at them, past the monstrous obstacle, seemed
less obscure than they had been before. To the northward, by the
way they had entered, they could dimly see the form of the Hele
Stone. It emerged out of the obscurity like a gigantic, bare-headed
man, wrapped in a skin or a blanket.

"I've been told," remarked John, "that the origin of these
Stones is entirely unknown."

"Not true," growled the other, in a tone that seemed to say.
You are the most irresponsive vandal that has ever entered
Stonehenge and your folly is only equalled by your ignorance.
"It is well known," he continued aloud, "that this is the greatest
Temple of the Druids."

John's blistered foot caused him at that moment a sharp pang.
He lost his self-control and cried aloud in a scandalous voice
that rang out far over the silent Plain, "Damn your Druids!" The
moment he had uttered the words he knew he had followed the
gathering-up and the mounting-up in his nature of an emotion
which, unexpressed, would have disgraced him in his own eyes.
He moved away towards the centre of the titanic Circle. "He'll
bolt now and leave me in the lurch," he thought, "but I can't
help it." He stood still and looked eagerly round, observing how
two of the largest monoliths had fallen across the ends of a yet
larger one but without concealing the centre of it. "If this isn't
the Altar Stone, it ought to be," he muttered audibly; and falling
down on his knees he tapped his forehead three times against
the rough surface of the stone and then continued to hold it there,
pressing it against the cold substance with a painful force. This
action gave him extraordinary satisfaction. When at last he
scrambled to his feet he found his Druidic friend seated on one
of the prostrate "foreign stones," surveying him with fearful
curiosity.

"You've been here before," he said severely, and heaved a deep
sigh, as a man sighs when he finds an intruder at his hearthstone.
John came over to him and sat down by his side. "To what kind
of stone," he enquired politely, "does that Altar Stone belong?"

The man turned gratefully towards him, free of all suspicion.
"The best opinions seem to agree," he said, "that this stone is
micaceous sandstone. It no doubt comes from that portion of
Wales where the Druids were most powerful; probably from
South Wales, like the others; but the others are of a different
geological formation."

John Crow felt at that moment as if he were endowed with
some magical gift of becoming inhumanly small and weak. And
not only small and weak! He felt that he possessed the power of
becoming so nearly nothing at all--a speck, an atom, a drifting
seed, a sand-grain, a tiny feather, a wisp of thin smoke--that he
was completely liberated from the burden of competing with
anyone, or disputing with anyone, or assuming any definite mask
or any consistent role. He seemed to have been given a sort of
exultant protean fluidity. He felt an intense desire to make a fool
of himself, to act like a clown, a zany, an imbecile. He longed to
dance round the grave personage at his side. He longed to go
down on all fours before him and scamper in and out of those
enormous trilithons like a gambolling animal. He felt as if all
his life until this moment he had been concealing his weakness of
character, his lack of every kind of principle, his indifference to
men's opinions, and a something that was almost subhuman in
him. But now beneath these far-off misty stars and under these
huge blocks of immemorial stone he felt a wild ecstatic happiness
in being exactly as he was.

"Very few people," he remarked to his companion, "could have
told me about that Altar Stone being made of micaceous sand-
stone or about it having come from Wales. I am deeply in your
debt, Sir, and I am overjoyed at having met you. My name is
John Crow. May I ask what your name is?"

"My name is Evans," said the other, making a dignified in-
clination of his body towards John. Had he said "My name is
Plantagenet," or "My name is Hapsburg," he could not have ut-
tered those syllables with more self-conscious weight. " Owen
Evans," he added, with a little sigh; and it was as if he desired by
this emphasis on Owen to indicate to his interlocutor that it would
have been more proper on general grounds if his Christian name
had been Caradoc or Roderick or Constantine or even Taliessin.
"My home used to be in Wales," he continued, "in South Wales.
I was in fact born in Pembrokeshire where that Altar Stone
comes from."

"Are you living in Glastonbury now?" John enquired. As soon
as he had asked this question he felt he had said something gross,
indecent, ill-advised; something lacking in all delicate intuition.

"Staying there...for the present," Owen Evans answered,
"and what's more," he continued, rising from his seat, "if we
want to get there before everyone's in bed we must look sharp."

He seemed to have forgotten--as indeed John himself had al-
most done--the lameness of his protege, and he strode off hastily
now, past the Hele Stone, back to the thorn tree, taking for
granted that the other was just behind him. But John Crow was
not just behind him. He had turned as soon as they were a few
paces away from the stones and was now gazing at them with an
ecstasy that was like a religious trance. It was an ecstasy that
totally abolished Time. Not only was Mr. Owen Evans and his
motor car obliterated, but everything, past and future, was ob-
literated! Mary alone remained. But Mary remained as an essence
rather than a person. Mary remained as something that he always
carried about with him in the inmost core of his being. She was
a dye, a stain, a flavour, an atmosphere. Apart from Mary, Stone-
henge and John were all that there was. The enormous body of
colossal stones wavered, hovered, swayed and rocked before him;
so wrought upon was he, so caught up was he. It rocked like the
prow of a vast ship before him. He and It were alone in space. Its
dark menacing bulk seemed to grow more and more dominating
as he stared at it, but even while it threatened it reassured. And
it did not only grow calmer and larger. The taciturn enormity of
the uplifted horizontal stones seemed to impose themselves upon
his mind with an implication more stupendous than the support-
ing perpendicular ones. These uplifted stones--these upheld
nakednesses--that covered nothing less than the breast of the
earth and upon which nothing less than the universal sky rested,
seemed to have become, by their very uplifting, more formidable
and more sacred than the ones that held them up. They were like
cyclopean Sabine women upheld by gigantic ravishers. Both those
that upheld and those that were upheld loomed portentous in their
passivity, but the passivity of the latter, while more pronounced,
was much more imposing. What the instinctive heart of John
Crow recognized in this great Body of Stones--both in those
bearing-up and in those borne-up--was that they themselves, just
as they were, had become, by the mute creative action of four
thousand years, authentic Divine Beings. They were so old and
great, these Stones, that they assumed godhead by their inherent
natural right, gathered godhead up, as a lightning conductor
gathers up electricity, and refused to delegate it to any mediator,
to any interpreter, to any priest! And what enhanced the primeval
grandeur of what John Crow gazed at was the condition of the
elements at that hour. Had there been no remnants of twilight left,
the darkness and Stonehenge would have completely interpene-
trated. Had the stars been bright, their eternal remoteness would
have derogated from the mystic enormity of this terrestrial por-
tent. The stars were, however, so blurred and so indistinct, and. at-
mospherically speaking, so far away, that Stonehenge had no
rival. John longed to get some impression of this vast Erection
from some subhuman observer, unperverted by historic tradition.
What would be the feelings of a sea gull, for example, voyaging
thus far inland from Studland or from Lulworth in search of
newly turned ploughlands, when it suddenly found itself con-
fronted by this temple of the elements? Would it lodge for a mo-
ment on the highest impost of the tallest trilithon? Had any of the
Wiltshire shepherds, who lived round about here, ever seen a sea
gull actually perched upon the Hele Stone? What did the foxes
make of Stonehenge as they came skulking over the grassy ridges
from Normanton Down? Did the sound of their barkings on wild
November nights reach the ears of travellers crossing the Plain?
Did a power emanating from these stones attract all the adders
and grass snakes and blindworms between Amesbury and
Warminster, on certain enchanted summer evenings?

Never would Stonehenge look more majestic, more mysterious,
than it looked tonight! The wind had almost dropped and yet
there was enough left to stir the dead steins of last year's grasses
and to make a faint, very faint susurration as it moved among
the Stones. The very indistinctness of the dying daylight served
also to enhance the impressiveness of the place. Had the night
been pitch dark nothing could have been distinguished. On the
other hand, had the twilight not advanced so far, the expanding
sweep of the surrounding downs would have carried the eye away
from the stones themselves and reduced their shadowy immensity.
No artificial arrangement of matter, however terrific and unhewn,
can compare with the actual hollows and excrescences of the
planet itself; but the primeval erection at which John Crow
stared now, like the ghost of a neolithic slave at the gods of his
masters, was increased in weight and mass by reason of the fact
that nothing surrounded it except a vague, neutral, Cimmerian
greyness.

"Stonehenge, you great God!" cried John Crow, "I beg you to
make Mary a happy girl and I beg you to let me live with her in
Norfolk!"

He tore himself away after this and hurried, as fast as he could,
towards the thorn tree. The voice of Owen Evans increased his
speed as he staggered up the slope. "Mr. Crow! Mr. Crow! Mr.
Crow!" came that voice from beyond the tree in a high querulous
accent. His blister began to hurt him again. He began again to
feel famished and faint. Once more he paused and looked around.
The effect at this distance had undergone a change. The stones
seemed actually to have melted into one another! It was no longer
at a series of stones he was looking, but at one stone. Perhaps
indeed just then he was seeing Stonehenge as it would have ap-
peared, not to a wild bird or a fox, but to a flock of sheep travel-
ling from their pastures to the shearing-place.

"Mr. Crow! Mr. Crow!" came the voice of the Welshman; and
John felt it incumbent upon him now really to turn his back upon
Stonehenge. When he reached the car John Crow was surprised
at the urbanity and good-temper of Mr. Owen Evans. He had
expected that the man from South Wales, even if he didn't desert
him, would reproach him vehemently. Nothing of the sort oc-
curred. John got in and took his seat by the motorist's side,
avoiding with some difficulty, for his legs were long and his foot
extremely sore, the mechanism that worked the machine.

"Are you going to stay long in Glastonbury?" enquired Mr.
Evans. John was perfectly frank with him in answer to this direct
question. Indeed, in the entranced and relaxed condition of his
nerves, he was more frank than he need have been. He became, in
fact, very voluble. He told him everything; only keeping back
the existence of Mary and the existence of Tom Barter. By de-
grees, as he conversed with the man, while their car reached and
passed the lighted streets of Warminster, he became conscious
that Mr. Evans' questions and answers were composed of two lev-
els of intensity, one below another. The upper, more superficial
level, was pedantic and a little patronising, but the lower level
struck John's mind as not merely humble and sad but tragically
humble and sad. One or two of his remarks were indeed as ex-
citing to John's curiosity as they were stimulating to his sym-
pathy. And another thing he noticed about the conversation of
this man in the large bowler hat and the tight black overcoat was
that it was always when the conversation returned to Glastonbury
that this secondary tone came into his voice.

"We'll get a late supper at Frome," Mr. Evans said at one
point; and the idea of this heavenly refreshment spoken of lightly
as a "late supper" so preoccupied John's thoughts that by degrees
he contented himself with a drowsy attempt to learn the names of
the villages through which they passed and dropped all other
conversation.

They skirted the wall of Long Leat Park. They passed Upper
Whitbourne; they passed Corsley Heath; they passed Lane End
and Gradon Farm; and while still the memory of his mother was
lulling him with a security beyond description, they entered the
main street of Frome. Mr. Evans seemed to know the place well,
and having left their car in the yard of one of the smaller inns,
the two men walked slowly down the street. Most of the ordinary
teashops were shut, but they found at last a little refreshment-
place of a more modest kind, where they were given a cordial wel-
come and a substantial though simple supper in a small private
room. During this meal this strangely assorted pair had the first
opportunity they had yet enjoyed to study each other's physiog-
nomy under illuminated and relaxed conditions. John found that
Mr. Evans had already heard rumours of the strange sequence of
events by which the lay-preacher Geard had inherited William
Crow's money. Evans himself, he explained, had made the ac-
quaintance of the Geards through the fact of Mrs. Geard being
a member of a very ancient South Welsh family called Rhys. The
motorist uttered the name Rhys with the most reverential respect.
Not that Mrs. Geard's immediate relatives, he made clear to John,
were anything but quite simple people, but all the Rhys family
were, as an ordinary person would put it, of the blood royal
of Wales.

It did not take any great diplomacy on the part of John Crow
to lead the conversation up to a point where he learned the not-
unexpected fact that the maternal ancestors of Mr. Evans himself
belonged to this same ancient House of Rhys. After a little further
dalliance round and about the subject of the Geards, John found
himself possessed of the further information that Mr. Owen Evans
was an admirer of one of Mrs. Geard's daughters, a girl in whom
"the very spirit of the old Cymric race" had found a notable hab-
itation. It was in his "first manner," the pontifical one, that Owen
Evans described this young lady. The foxy John had begun to
wonder indeed whether his whole discovery of these two person-
alities in his patron were not a crazy fancy of his own, when a
chance allusion to the Abbey Ruins brought back in a minute
that diffident, hesitant, almost cowering tone. It was a queer thing
and a thing that John never afterward forgot, as he saw a look of
positively tragic suffering cross those strongly marked linea-
ments, that he himself became extremely uncomfortable when this
second tone of his friend's utterances thus predominated. It was
exactly as if some bombastic masquerader in theatrical armour
had suddenly unclasped his sham gorget and revealed a hairshirt
stained with authentic blood. He got the impression, the longer
this confidential talk over this felicitous "late supper" lasted,
that it was to very few persons, and probably least of all to the
maiden with the "very spirit of the old Cymric race," that this
singular descendant of the House of Rhys revealed his real nature.

Once more sitting by Mr. Evans in the little motor car and
moving swiftly through the darkness, John's attention was dis-
tracted now by a certain vivid consciousness of being in a part of
England completely new to him and heavy with unique qualities.
After walking all day over the chalk uplands of Wiltshire this
long, enchanted drive into the western valleys was like plunging
into an ever-deepening wave of rich, sepia-brown, century-old
leaf-mould. From spinneys and copses and ancestral parks, as
they drove between dim, moss-scented banks, a chilly sweetness
that seemed wet with the life sap of millions of primrose buds
came flowing over him....

As both the men grew more and more dominated, by the mo-
tions and stirrings, the silent breathings and floating murmurs, of
a spring night in Somersetshire, they seemed to grow steadily
more sympathetic to each other.

"Do you believe, Mr. Evans, as so many people do," said John
suddenly, "in always struggling to find a meaning to life?" Very
slowly and very carefully did the Welshman reply to this.

"It's not...it never has been...in my...in my nature," he murmured, "
to...to take life...in that...way...at all. I find meanings everywhere.
My..." he hesitated for a long time here,"difficulties," he went
on, "are entirely personal."

John was delighted with this reply. "My difficulties," he said,
"are personal too. I simply cannot understand what people mean
when they talk of life having a purpose. Life to me is simply the
experience of living things; and most things I meet seem to me
to be living things."

In the darkness John felt the car crossing a little bridge.
"Nunney Brook," he heard Mr. Evans murmur. Soon they were
moving along the southern wall of Asham Wood, and then came
East Cranmore and West Cranmore and then a place called
Doulting.

"Look out for Shepton Mallet next," Mr. Evans said. "I'm
afraid all the pubs will be shut, or we 5 d stop for a drink there to
nerve us up for the last lap of our journey. His words were jus-
tified. It was plain that the inn-bars in Shepton Mallet were all
fast closed.

"We must put on speed now," said Mr. Evans, "or everybody
will be fast asleep. They go to bed early in Glastonbury."

John was soon conscious, as they left the last houses of this
little Somersetshire town, solidly built houses under the gas-lamps
at the street corners with old carved lintels and worn buttresses,
that the countryside was again changing its character. A faint
reedy, muddy, watery atmosphere visited his East Anglian nos-
trils. For a mile or two he was puzzled by these damp waftures
carried upon the cold night air, so different from that leaf -mould
sweetness, that smell of ancient seignorial parklands, through
which they had recently passed. He experienced a pang of sad-
ness which it was easy enough to explain. It was a thousand old
impressions of Isle-of-Ely dykes, called up, out of deep-buried
race memories, by the ditches, or "rhynes," as they call them, of
the Isle-of-Glastonbury.

"I am getting near Mary! he thought. "She's lying in bed
looking at those Ruins. And then he thought, "Evans is going
to get me a bed somewhere. He knows I've got no money. I'll see
her tomorrow by hook or by crook and then everything will work
itself out.

The thoughts of Mr. Evans, as they passed the hamlet of Pilton
and crossed the Whitelake River by a small stone bridge, were so
absorbing that he instinctively began driving very slowly. Like
all thoughts that have tormented a person's mind for many years,
these thoughts had bruised and beaten themselves against the
mental walls of habit until they had ceased to be thoughts and
had become palpable images. The images in Mr. Evans's case were
of a very peculiar nature. If they could have been revealed to any
average human mind--a mind less vicious and depraved than
John's--they would have presented themselves as something so
monstrous as to be the creation of an insane person. This they
certainly were not, unless all erotic aberrations are insane; and
Mr. Evans, apart from these images, was, as John had discov-
ered, a pedantically and even tediously guileless man. They were
scenes of sadistic cruelty, these pictures that dwelt in the back
chambers of Mr. Evans' mind; and the extraordinary thing about
them was that, in spite of their iniquity, which was indeed abom-
inable, they still produced in him--whenever the least glimpse of
them took form again--an inebriation of erotic excitement that
made his pulses beat, his blood dance, his senses swoon, his knees
knock together. The taste of the least of these loathsome scenes
was so overpowering to him that it reduced all the rest of life--
eating, drinking, working, playing, walking, talking--to tedious
occurrences, that had to be got through but that were wanting
entirely in the electric quiver of real excitement. What Mr. Evans
suffered from was a fever of remorse such as cannot very often
have taken possession of human minds in the long course of his-
tory. To say that the unhappy man wished that he had never been
born would be to put his case mildly. Like Othello he longed to
bathe in "sleep-down gulfs of liquid fire." No one would ever
know--unless Mr. Evans confessed to a priest--how many of
these abominations had actually been practised, how many of
them described in forbidden books, or how many just simply in-
vented by a perverted imagination. If the victim or victims of
Mr. Evans' perversion, supposing they really existed and were
not phantoms of his imagination, had suffered cruelly, Mr. Evans
himself had suffered, for the last five or six years, a torment to
which human history can, we must hope, offer few parallels.

His nature was so riddled and saturated with this appalling
habit of mind that it became a mania with him--now that he had
rejected all practice of it and all pleasure from all thoughts of
it--to blame himself for innumerable forms of suffering in the
world, of which he was entirely innocent. He walked about as if
the ground under his feet was red-hot iron, so fearful was he of
hurting so much as the tiniest beetle or the smallest worm. He
used deliberately to walk across heavy grass and heavy under-
growth so as to avoid the little half -made paths which always
struck his imagination as things that had been hurt. Since a
feeling of power, carried to a monstrous intensity, played such a
role in his vice, it was natural enough that when, aghast at what
he had become, he gave the whole thing up, he should labor
under the delusion of being a much more powerful force in the
world than he really was. Few modern persons, as intelligent as
Owen Evans, believed as intensely as he did in the existence of
a personal God. Perhaps there is something in the peculiar nature
of this vice which especially lends itself to this belief.

Recovering himself from his secret thoughts, as they came
nearer and nearer to the end of their journey, Mr. Evans mur-
mured to his companion such words as "Havyatt" and "Edgar-
ley." He nodded his head, too, towards a great level expanse of
low-lying country which extended southward, on their left, as they
approached their destination. In connection with these dark
fields he uttered the syllables "Kannard Moor" and "Butt Moor."
He further indicated that Baltonsborough and Keinton Mande-
ville lay on the other side of these wide-stretching water-logged
pastures, at which John, in his blunt East Anglian way, declared
that in his country such places would have had names ending in
"ham," not in such finicking sounds as "ville." He told Mr. Evans
that Saxmundham was a much more characteristic English name
them Keinton Mandeville!

As they approached the outskirts of the place, John became
aware of the dim pyramidal form of Glastonbury Tor, towering
above the walls and roofs of the town. The moment he caught
sight of this great pointed hill, with the massive deserted church
tower on its summit, he felt conscious that here was something
that suited his nature better than he expected anything to have
done in these parts.

Mr. Evans, speaking in his second manner, told him that it
was the tower of St. Michael the Archangel. I am glad, said
John, "that St. Michael's tower was the first thing I saw here!"
But in his heart he thought, "To the Devil with St. Michael! That
tower is nothing but a tall pile of stones. I like that tower--I
shall go up to that tower at the first chance!

But Mr. Evans in his tormented mind cared nothing whether
John liked the tower or not. He was crying, like a lost spirit, O
Cross of Christ! O Cross of Christ! O Cross of Christ!"

Thus did these two, the man from Wales and the man from
Norfolk, enter the silent streets of the town of Glastonbury.



HIC JACET



The Reverend Mat Dekker, Vicar of Glastonbury, was working
in his garden. He was loosening the earth round his long,
straight rows of potatoes, while his son Sam was going back-
ward and forward with an old wheelbarrow to a smouldering rub-
bish heap under the high wall upon which he deposited the weeds
which his father pulled up.

Mat Dekker was a man of sixty. A widower from his only
child's birth, twenty-five years ago, his powerfully banked-up
affections had long concentrated themselves upon two objects:
upon Christ, the Redeemer of his soul, and upon Sam, the son of
his loins. It was about ten months this March since the lad had
taken his degree at Cambridge; and the first serious misunder-
standing between father and son was even now, month by month,
gathering weight and momentum. It had to do with the young
man's profession, and with the young man's first love-affair.
Having brought him up with the constant idea of his taking or-
ders, having seen him graduate with a creditable third-class in
the Divinity Tripos, it is not difficult to imagine the crushing
blow that fell upon the luckless father, when--the question aris-
ing as to what particular theological college he was now to enter
--the lad gravely and resolutely declined to carry the thing a
step further. And at that point the matter had hung fire for more
than half a year. Refusing to give up hope of a change of heart
in his son, Mat Dekker had followed the policy of complete in-
ertness. Every opening in life, except unskilled manual labor,
requiring the expenditure of some initial sum, the older man,
without consciously tyrannising, acted on the assumption that eco-
nomic pressure, negatively exercised, was the best weapon that
age possessed in dealing with the wilfulness of youth

Apart from religion their tastes were unusually congenial. They
both loved gardening, they both loved natural history, they both
were proud and shy and anti-social. In their secluded Rectory,
surrounded by walls fifteen feet high and faced even across the
road by nothing more gregarious than the equally high walls of
the Abbey House, they were able to follow their hobbies as
botanists, entomologists, geologists, ichthyologists, without cessa-
tion or interruption.

Mrs. Dekker had been a French Swiss from the city of Geneva.
She had indeed been the pretty housemaid in this very house
when Mr. Dekker took it over, and the girl with it, when he
entered upon his labours in Glastonbury as a young bachelor
priest some thirty years ago. But she had died in childbirth; and
since that day there had been no more pretty housemaids; indeed
it might be said that there had been no more women of any kind,
within the Rectory walls.

For Penny Pitches, their one servant, could only be regarded
as a woman under what Sir Thomas Browne would have called,
in speaking of other difficult questions, "a wide solution." Penny
Pitches had lost her own baby just about the time of Sam's
birth; and since that day she had been as good as a mother to
Sam. She had suckled him, taught him his letters, taught him his
manners--for she was not one to spare the rod--taught him his
morality, his mother-wit, his legends and his superstitions. But
with these female attributes, Penny Pitches' appearance was
more gnomelike than anything else. She was undoubtedly the least
human-looking anthropoid mammal in the whole county of Som-
erset. Penny Pitches was not deformed. She was no humpback.
What Nature had done was to make her back so broad and her
legs so short that she presented the appearance of a Playing-Card
Queen of Spades; a Queen of Spades endowed with the privilege
of three dimensions and the power of locomotion, but denied that
natural separation of head from shoulders and of bust from hips
which is the usual inheritance of female mortality. She was in
fact an animated Euclidean Square moving about over the earth.
Nature had, however, in order to compensate Penny for these
peculiarities, given her a volubility of speech that was womanly
and more than womanly. To speak the truth, the tongues of a
dozen cantankerous shrews and a dozen loquacious trollops re-
sided in this gnome-like skull.

It was Penny herself who now appeared upon the scene and
standing between wheelbarrow and potato row delivered herself
of her view of that morning's general outlook. "'Tis not that I
querrel with 'ee for going out to ‘lunch,' as they called it. That's
as 'ee do please 'eeself about. What I do, and always shall, uphold
is that for a person not to know ‘inavarst' whether there's to be
dinner on table or no dinner on table is a mock to reason."

"Who told you that we were going out today, Penny?" pro-
tested Mr. Dekker mildly, leaning upon his fork. He was in his
shirtsleeves and his large, rugged cheeks were redder than usual
against the clipped grey whiskers that surrounded them. His chin
and his upper lip were clean-shaven; and, as if to make up for
this, his eyebrows above his formidable grey eyes were so long
that they resembled a pair of thatched eaves.

"Wold man Weatherwax," replied the Vicarage servant, "be
round to me pantry with sarcy tales enough to turn milk in a pan!
He do say that Miss Mary over the way have a cousin come to
town what be lodging with Mr. Evans, the new Antiquities man
who's looking after wold Jones' shop, who's to Hospital again
with one of they little cysteses what do trouble he. 'A said 'twere a
surprise to 'un--silly wold sinner as 'tis--that Miss Drew allowed
of such doings. But I said to 'ee, I said, if Miss Drew thinks
enough of Miss Mary's cousin to ask us to meet 'un, though 'a be
a friend of their new Antiquity man, 'a must be one of they great
factory people. Crow ain't no common name. Crow ain't no West-
Country name, Crow ain't. And our Miss Mary, as us do know,
be related to they rich folks. So I be come straight to 'ee, Master,
to reason wi' 'ee as to why, when 'ee be going out for dinner, ye
haven't let us so much as hear a word of it."

"I was just this very minute coming to tell you of our invita-
tion, Penny," murmured the clergyman. "It hadn't arrived at
breakfast. In fact Weatherwax must have brought it. I suppose
there's no excuse for us, eh, Sam?" and he glanced humorously,
from above the rim of his spectacles and from beneath his bushy
eyebrows, at the lad on the further side of the wheelbarrow.

Young Sam Dekker answered the look with a grin. Then he
suddenly got red. "You've not forgotten, Father," he said, that
you promised to have tea at Whitelake Cottage with the
Zoylands?"

Before Mr. Dekker could reply to this, Penny Pitches turned
angrily on the lad. "And you're dragging the Master out over
they girt marshes, are ye, too, then? It's that little white scut of
a Missy Zoyland ye be after, Sam Dekker; and don't 'ee forget
that I told 'ee of it! Oh, I do know 'ee, I do know 'ee, Sammy,
me blessed babe! Tis a daffadowndilly day, like this day be,
that leads to these unholy doings. On days like this day 'tis hard
for young men to bide quiet at home and take their cup of tea
with their dad, brought sweet and strong to 'un by such as knows
what a minister's table should be. A lot you care, Master Sam,
what poisonous foreign sweetmeats your dad'll have to eat, and
what devil's dam drinks he'll have to drink, out there over
Splott's Moor. It's thik Missy Zoyland ye be after. Look at's
cheeks, Master! Look at's hot cheeks! "

"I didn't know Mrs. Zoyland had a daughter, Penny," remarked
the Rector gently, looking anywhere except in the direction of
his son's confusion.

"I never said she had, Master," averred the woman stoutly,
glancing at her embarrassed foster-child with a defiant glare.

"Penny's thinking of that Fair at Hornblotton, Father, when I
took Mrs. Zoyland on the merry-go-round with me. You were
there yourself. You saw us. I'd be ashamed to say such unkind
things of a quiet little lady like that, Penny!"

"I baint said nothing about no quiet lady," protested Mrs.
Pitches. "My words be to do wi' a young master, what stands
afore us, among these here 'taties."

"Well, Penny," said Mr. Dekker with decision, "I'm afraid it
looks, anyhow, as if you'd be a lone woman today. Sam's quite
right. I did promise the Zoylands to walk over to Whitelake River
this afternoon and I did tell Weatherwax that we would come
across to lunch. Did Miss Drew send for any brandy as I told
her to?"

"Brandy!" cried Penny Pitches in high dudgeon. "Ye'll have
plenty of brandy left, ye will, if ye go giving it round to all the
old maids in Silver Street!"

"But, my dear Penny," said Mat Dekker, stretching out his long
white-shirted arm across the handles of the wheelbarrow and tak-
ing the woman caressingly by the shoulder, "Miss Drew sent
Weatherwax for that brandy that we might drink it at lunch, we
and Mary's new cousin; so I do hope you've not been crotchety
and refused it to him."

"Refused it!" The words came like a bullfrog's croak from the
geometrical centre of that well-aproned human square that had
planted itself before them. "Thik wold Weatherwax be settled in
me chair, in me pantry, at me table this blessed minute. Refused
it! Why, he's ‘been tasting thik brandy for the last hour. He says
he be tasting it to see if it be the same as Miss Drew had from ‘ee
at Christmas. If it be the same, he'll take it over, he says, same as
she told he to. And I do tell he that if it's not the same therell be
no need to worry about leaving it in bottle; for bottle'll be like
thee own stummick, Master, on Sunday morn! Bottle'll be empty
and tinklin'!"

"Well! you run off now, Penny, and let Sam and me finish this
couple of rows. Tell old Weatherwax it is the same. Let Miss
Drew have what she wants ; and cork up the bottle. I've got to do
some work this morning if we're going to Whitelake. Never mind
about those, Sam! I'll wheel away the rest myself. You go back
to the house now with Penny; oh, and if you change the water
in the aquarium, do find a bowl of some kind to put that minnow
in! It's only been up at the top since yesterday afternoon and
I changed the water two days ago." (This expression "up at the
top" referred to the habit of minnows when sick or dying of re-
maining with their heads upslanted at the top of the water
breathing heavily.)

Sam Dekker surveyed the retreating form of Penny Pitches. He
was of a lankier build than his father; and there was something
pathetically animal-like about his shambling limbs. He had a
clean-shaved, rather puckered face, with freckles all over it. His
nose was long and thin, like the nose of some kind of honey-
eating bear; and his small, greenish eyes were surrounded by
many wrinkles. His upper lip was long, like his father's, but
while Mat Dekker had a massive, square chin to support this
peculiarity Sam had a weak, retreating chin. Sam's retreating chin
was in many ways the most marked portion of his face, for it was
creased with all manner of queer corrugations. He had a nervous
trick of opening his mouth a little, drawing in his under jaw, and
pulling down the corners of his underlip. The effect of these
movements was to compel the contours of his chin to fuse them-
selves with the contours of his long neck. Had his face been any-
thing but what it was, this trick of contorting his chin would have
been much more noticeable; but where everything was so much
out of proportion no particular lapse could become prominent.

His greenish eyes almost closed as he stood there in a heavy
daze, while his father, anxious to finish that long piece of weed-
ing, bent again over his work. Sam Dekker was not one for
moralising on the events of his life, nor for analysing his motives.
He took for granted that it was just one more trick of Nature that
his interest in fossils, in birds' eggs, in fishes, should lose its
savour month after month, as he found himself entoiled in the
beauty of Nell Zoyland. He took it for granted that in his weak-
ness he should not dare to mention his entanglement to his father,
that in his weakness he should lie to the old man as to the real
meaning of the long solitary excursions he was always making
these days, past Brindham and Splott's Moor, across Whitelake
River to Queen's Sedgemoor; he took it for granted that he should
be too unpractical and too cowardly to dream of carrying Nell
off or of separating her from the formidable William, or of doing
anything at all to clarify the situation. All he could do was to
go on constantly seeing her, which intensified rather than resolved
the dilemma he was in! He loved his father with the deep passive
animal intensity with which he loved Nell. It was indeed his love
for his father quite as much as his natural timidity that made it
absolutely impossible that he should reveal to the older man the
real tragedy of the situation. This tragedy was that not only did
he love Nell Zoyland, but that Nell loved him, recklessly, shame-
lessly, and was constantly urging him, cost what it might to both
of them, to carry her off! It had been the deepest and the most
exciting astonishment of his life, the fact that a girl as lovely as
Nell could love an ugly, lumpish, uninteresting failure, such as
he felt himself to be; Nell, too, who had so original, so surpris-
ingly good-looking a man as Will Zoyland for her mate! William
was, it is true, a good deal older than Nell; but what a man he
was, with his leonine beard and rolling blue eyes, his enormous
courage, his immense physical strength! Under the low forehead
of Sam Dekker there stirred strange feelings towards this for-
midable rival whose power of character was so little to be trifled
with. Even Sains father, no negligible personage himself, showed
evident respect for William Zoyland. It was indeed this respect of
Mat Dekker's for the bearded man that had brought about the
excursion this afternoon, an excursion which, though he had him-
self reminded his father of it, filled Sam's heart with deep
uneasiness.

Now, as he slowly plodded off to refill the aquarium in their
play-room, he cursed Penny Pitches for her uncalled-for outburst.
What had induced the absurd woman to meddle in his affairs?
Never before had she deliberately and wilfully betrayed him to
his father. As a rule in any trifling misunderstanding between
her two men she took the side of her master's son against her
master. The more he thought about it the less he understood it.
Penny, he knew, was anything but puritanical. The indecent jokes
that passed between her and old Weatherwax were the standing
disgrace of Glastonbury Vicarage. "How much does she know?"
he asked himself as he entered the house; and the idea that some
gossiping crony of the old woman had seen his meetings with
Nell on Crannel Moor or in the old barn on Godney Marsh began
to taunt his brain.

Left to himself to finish his weeding, Mat Dekker sternly put
out of his mind the whole matter of Penny's attack upon Sam.
Dekker's nature was a rich, deep, passionate one; but his religion
had assisted him in bringing it under a rare and unusual control.
One of the chief things he had learnt to do was to obliterate every
sexual suspicion. One of Mat's favorite writers was St. Paul; and
he had made a custom of forcing himself not to think evil , a
characteristic of that divine Agape which, according to St. Paul,
held the magic clue to the universe.

But there was a power now shining down upon Mr. Dekker
that cared nothing for St. Paul. The soul of the great burning
sun which illuminated that massive, iron-grey, bent head had
many times ere this been roused to anger against him. Among the
myriads of conscious beings peopling that hemisphere of our
planetary orb who refused in that spring solstice to make the sort
of grateful gesture towards this great Deity which the Powers of
Nature demand of those they favour, this ruddy-faced man in
shirtsleeves bending now over his potato bed seemed to that flam-
ing heart the most obdurate and the most sacrilegious. "Let his
Christ protect him!" thought (if we can call the titanic motions
of super-consciousness in such a Power by the name of
"thought") this great outpourer of life heat. "As for us, we will
let loose his own offspring upon him; and the thing he loves most
in the world we will rouse up against him!"

It must have been about six hours after their talk with Penny
Pitches in the potato garden that Sam Dekker, troubled at heart
by what he considered the gross and inexplicable treachery of his
foster-mother, sat gloomily by himself on the warm steps of the
Abbey House terrace. A little below him, on wooden seats placed
side by side, above a low parapet, sat Miss Euphemia Drew and
her other guests. The more Sam meditated upon that afternoon's
excursion to Whilelake, the more troubled he became. Would his
father detect anything? Would Nell in her agitation as hostess
forget her prudence? Had William Zoyland secretly planned the
whole affair in order to nip in the bud this perilous growth whose
frail seedling-shoot he had already discerned? "I shall get red,"
he thought, "I shall get red as a turkey-cock, just as Penny said.
My hand will shake when she gives me my tea. We shan't dare to
look at each other, or speak to each other. Father's bound to
notice something."

Had Nell Zoyland seen the lad at this moment and watched the
puckering of his freckled forehead and the way, as he rose now
to offer help to Mary, the muscles of his poor chin contracted,
she would have loved him more than ever. Mary's own face, as she
carried a silver tray in one hand and a coffee jug in the other, was
drawn and white. It was all over as far as Miss Drew was con-
cerned! She knew that already, though the lady had not spoken
a word to her on the subject. John had behaved with irretrievable
folly at lunch; had talked wildly; had expressed disbelief in the
legend of the Holy Thorn, had announced that it was a pity that
the Danes had been turned back at Havyatt Gap and finally had
declared that the discovery of Joseph of Arimathea's tomb was
the mere mummery of the monks! Yes; it was all over for them
with Miss Drew. She would never ask him again. She would never
let her meet him again. It would be a lucky thing if she didn't
pack her off, then and there, merely for having such a cousin!

When Mary, with Sam helping her, for both Miss Drew's cook
and housemaid, the sisters Rogers, had begun to wash up, joined
the rest of the party on the terrace, John had fallen into a more
amiable mood. He still remained irresponsive about the Holy
Thorn, but he had evidently taken a fancy to Mr. Dekker, and he
was listening now quite humbly while the Vicar narrated to him
in a grave and unaffected tone certain historic facts about the
Ruins before them.

"Hic jacet sepultus inclitns Rex Arturus in Insula Avallonia"
recited Mat Dekker in a deep, quiet voice. "The end of the twelfth
century it was," he went on, "when they found the coffin, a great
hollowed-out oak trunk, with the bones of the king and queen.
Nearly a hundred years later Edward the First buried them be-
fore the high altar. The books say that Leland the Antiquary
actually saw them as late as the sixteenth century. Since then they
have been lost to sight." The Vicar of Glastonbury sighed as he
ceased speaking, and at the same moment a light wind from the
west, rustling across the masses of ruined masonry caught the
topmost twigs of the tall elms on the right of the Tower Arch and
made them bow before it.

"When I told my good friend Mr. Evans this morning," began
John Crow, "that I had been invited here, it did excite him! He
quoted what he called a Welsh Triad--something about no one
knowing where the grave of Arthur was."

Miss Euphemia Drew folded her cream-coloured cashmere
shawl more lightly round her neck, hiding the gold-mounted
moonstone brooch that clasped her bodice; and then, turning her
chin above the wrinkled fingers she had thus raised to her throat,,
"Not know where it is?" she said sternly. "Fiddle-de-dee! we all
know where it is! It's under that broken arch."

Mary tried to convey to her cousin by a rapid glance that he
must accept the verdict of Miss Drew as to the grave of the great
king without further question. But the run-down Danish adven-
turer refused to be stopped. "My friend Mr. Evans quoted a Latin
jingle too. What was it, Sir? I expect you know it. It began with
Hic jacet, just as yours did."

Mat Dekker smiled sadly. "You mean ‘Hic jacet Arturus, rex
quondam , rexque futurus '? Is that what he said? 'King once and
king to be,' " he added, with his clerical instinct for making
things clear. "Most of our Glastonbury sayings have to do with
some sort of ‘Hic jacet he concluded rather wistfully.

"Would you say, Sir," enquired John, "that King Arthur is
really the most deeply rooted superstition that this place repre-
sents?" The younger Dekker began to feel seriously angry with
the East Anglian. It was all very well to display a lack of anti-
quarian interest. But here, on this terrace, gazing out at Edgar's
Chapel, at the great Tower Arch, at St. Mary's Church, at St.
Thomas' Chapel, at the rich ruins of the most sacred ecclesia
vetusta in all Britain, to definitely challenge the whole genius loci
seemed to Sam's simple mind as much a lapse from Nature's ways
as it would have been to allow a minnow to perish for lack of
fresh water.

But the elder Dekker seemed totally unconscious of the insult
to the spot he loved. "Well, of course to our old-fashioned Prot-
estant ancestors Glastonbury must have reeked with what you call
superstition.' Three famous Saxon kings are buried here, some-
thing like six well-known saints are buried here. All the Holy
Grail legends gather to a head here. The Druids played a great
part here; and long before the Druids there was a Lake Village"
--he gave a grave, characteristically West-country jerk with his
head to indicate the northwestern point of the compass--"whose
mounds you can still see in the fields. Ancient British that prob-
ably was; older anyway than History! But I expect the deepest-
rooted superstition here, if you could compel Glastonbury Tor to
speak, would turn out to be the religion of the people who lived
before the Ancient Britons; perhaps even before the Neolithic
Men. At any rate we have some excuse for being 'superstitious' in
these parts. Don't you think so, Miss Drew?"

"I think you are very kind, dear Vicar, to answer Mr. Crow's
question at all," said the old lady severely. "For myself I would
answer it rather differently. I would assure him that what he calls
superstition we call the Only True Faith."

This remark produced a complete silence.

"My friend Mr. Evans,"--it was John who broke the spell--"says
that it's neither King Arthur nor Joseph of Arimathea that's the
real hidden force still active in Glastonbury."'

"What does he say it is?" enquired Mary, hoping against hope
that John would, even now, redeem himself.

"He won't say. He gets reserved and touchy. It's my own opin-
ion that it has to do with Merlin. But I expect I'm all wrong.
When I mentioned Merlin all he did was to quote a lot of Welsh
Triads in Welsh. He's a queer character, my friend Evans, but he
interests me very much."

"Will you take some more coffee or some more brandy,
Vicar?" interrupted Miss Drew in a tone that seemed to say,
"When once I have exposed the unpleasantness of a rude young
man there is no need for him to make further efforts to reinstate
himself in my favour." And then when the Vicar had shaken his
head, "Carry the trays away, child, please; and tell Lily and
Rogers that you and I will get our own tea today."

The cook's name was Louie Rogers. She was only a year older
than Lily and as a rule Miss Drew called her Louie; but when
upset by the spectacle of the world's disorder she always called
her Rogers. It had been her mother's as well as her grandmoth-
er's custom to call their cooks by their surnames and Miss Drew
reverted to it as a sort of invocation of these thin-lipped, tenderly
stern women, whose miniatures were on her writing-table. The
mere utterance of the word "Rogers" seemed to Miss Drew to
bring back decency and respect to human intercourse.

John had not the courage nor the wit to rise from his chair and
help his cousin carrying her tray into the house; so it worked
out that Sam Dekker once more was her companion. But Sam
never addressed a single word to her as he walked by her
side. His sole thought was his growing dread of the afternoon's
encounter. Mary herself pondered bitterly upon the interior mean-
ing of Miss Drew's little speech about their tea. It meant a kind
of emotional unbending, an intimacy, a crisis of sympathetic
confidence; hut it also meant that under no conceivable circum-
stances would her employer allow her to go on meeting her
cousin. Ladies who live together possess these indirect ways of
communicating with each other and by the tone in which Mary
replied, "Yes, dear, that will be so nice!" Miss Drew knew that
while there would be nothing in the nature of a scene between
them, the separation of Mary from John would take more than
one evening's dignified protest.

Meanwhile the sun began slanting its rays more and more
warmly and mistily upon the group on the terrace. The smooth
expanse of grass which separated them from the Ruins bore on its
surface now a few dark, fluctuating shadows as the light wind
stirred the elm-tree tops. The three hills of the place, Wirral
Hill, Chalice Hill and the Tor, were all behind them, and beyond
the Ruins and beyond the trees and beyond the vaporous roofs
of the town, stretched the wide, low valley where flowed the River
Brue, and where that Bridge Perilous was, into which, as Dekker
was now telling him, Arthur had thrown his sword. Dim and rich
and vague the valley stretched, covered with an undulating veil of
blue-purple mist. Orchard upon orchard, pasture upon pasture, it
sank away, the lowest pastoral country in the land of England,
lower than the level of the sea, heavy with its precious relics as
the sea bottom with its drowned ships. As he gazed at all this,
feeling more and more friendly to Mr. Dekker and more and more
hostile to Miss Drew, John began to say to himself that it was
nothing else than this very low-lying character of the country
that made it such a fatal receptacle for the superstitions of two
thousand years! Into this blue-purple vapour, into the bosom of
these fields lower than the sea, floated, drifted upon the wind,
all those dangerous enervating myths that had taken the heart
out of man's courage and self-reliance upon the earth. The True
Faith Indeed! Why, the land reeked with the honey lotus of all
the superstitions of the world! Here they had come, here they had
taken refuge, driven into flight by the great dragon-beaked ships
and the long bright spears of his own heathen ancestry! And
here, caught by these fatal low-lying flats they had lingered;
lingered and clung till they grew rotten and miasmic, full of in-
sidious mind-drugging poison. God! This place must be charged,
"thick and slab," with all the sweet-sickly religious lies that had
ever medicined the world! Here like green scum over old stagnant
water courses, here like green pond weeds upon castle moats,
these tender-false mandragoras lulled to sleep the minds of the
generations! No wonder Philip, with his accursed machines,
found no manhood to resist his despotism in a place like this!

It was at this point in John Crow's contemplations that Mary
and Sam came slowly back and reseated themselves by his side.
They had exchanged only two sentences on the way back from the
house. Mary had asked him whether they could spare Mr. Weath-
erwax, who worked in both their gardens, for the whole day to-
morrow, and Sam had replied that he thought they could, as
long as the old man "helped Penny to pump before he came
across the road."

John was soon made aware of the miserable depression into
which Mary had fallen. Her profile troubled him by its tragic
tenseness. He rose abruptly. "Good-bye, Miss Drew," he said,
bowing to her from where he stood. "Thank you so much for
having asked me here. Good-bye, Sir, I hope you'll let me see you
again. Cousin Mary, will you show me that short cut to Wir-
ral Hill?"

He swept her off with him so boldly and decisively, actually
taking her by the arm, that Miss Drew was nonplussed. "Don't
desert me, Mary!" was all she could cry out after them. They
skirted the kitchen garden and reached a little gate in a budding
privet-hedge, where old Weatherwax in some wanton mood had
planted hyacinths. There was a clump of these heavily fragrant
flowers by this gate and a lark high up above them was quivering
in the hot sky. Mary put her hand on the latch after giving him
minute directions of the way. They could see the whole ridge of
Wirral Hill in the distance and the girl knew she ought to leave
him at once and return; but it was hard to do so. Mr. Owen
Evans was expecting him, he explained, by a lonely tree up there;
and as he searched with his eyes the ridge she showed him, he
could see clearly a particular tree which stood out in clear relief.
He declared he could even see the Welshman's figure propped on
the ground against this tree; but the girl contradicted this. "I
know that black thing up there well," she said. "I used to take it
for a person. It's an old post. I went up there once to make sure."

"What tree is that? Evans said it was a thorn hut it doesn't
look like a thorn to me."

"It's a sycamore," she answered. "At least I think so. Oh, I
don't care what it is!" Her voice trembled. Her lips were
quivering.

"What is it, my treasure?"

"What is it?" Her tears were swallowed in a sudden gust of an-
ger. She dropped the latch of the little gate and her whole body
stiffened. "You know what you've done, I suppose, John, by your
silly talk? You've spoilt everything! She'll never ask you again.
She'll stop my seeing you again! Oh, how could you do it, you
fool? How could you do it?"

He was so astonished at the flashing eyes and the white face
that his eyes and mouth opened with a blank, idiot look. His ex-
pression in fact was so exactly like one of those pictures of
human beings that school-children draw on their slates, that
Mary could not refrain from a faint smile.

"You see, John dear," she said more gently, "it would be very
hard for me to get another job. If Miss Drew gave me notice I'd
be penniless. I'd have to be a governess or a companion with
someone else. That would almost certainly mean my leaving
Glastonbury. You don't expect to follow me about all over Eng-
land, do you, while I work in peoples' houses?"

"But I'm going to get work myself, here, and soon too," he
protested. "Evans knows lots of people. He's going to help me.
He's going to take me this very afternoon to see his cousin, Mrs.
Geard. Mrs. Geard and Mr. Evans are both Rhyses; if you know
what that means! At any rate you know too well who the Geards
are."

Mary did smile outright at that. She shook her head. "They
call ditches about here by some funny name like that. No!
Rhyne, that's it, not Rhys. But won't Philip be furious if you
go and see those Geards?"

"I don't care a damn about Philip. I hate the fellow! I'll make
this Geard chap give me work. He ought to do something for some
of us. Any decent man would, after collaring all that. And Evans
says he's all right."

"But it would hurt Philip terribly, wouldn't it, and Aunt Eliz-
abeth too, if you really did take money from that person? Does
your friend know if this Geard man is going to go on living here?"

"Certainly he is! Mrs. Geard--who's a Rhys; and don't you
forget that, Mary, for God knows all that that means!--has been
three times already to look at a place over there"--he swung
round on his heel and pointed to a sloping ridge not far from
the Tor--"a place they call Chalice House. So they're going to
stay here, don't 'ee fear. I tell you, my treasure, you needn't
worry. It's going to be all right. We'll go on meeting in that same
place in the Ruins where we did that first time. And as soon as
I get work we'll be married--and the devil fly away with your old
lady!"

Mary seized his wrist with all her fingers and lifted it to her
mouth. "I've a great mind to punish you for behaving so badly,"
she murmured. There was something about the smell of John's
bony hand that made her homesick for Norfolk. "It smells like
peat," she thought, and she began licking with the tip of her
tongue the little hairs which now tickled her lips. This gave her
a sharp tingling sensation that ran through her whole frame. In
a flash she imagined herself stretched out in bed by John s side.
"Oh, my dear, oh, my dear!" she sighed.

"Take care, my treasure; they'll see us," he whispered. "Wait
till tomorrow afternoon! About half-past two, eh? When your old
lady is asleep? I'll wait for you. So don't you get agitated; even
if you can't get away for hours. I'll wait there till they close up
the whole place! I'll walk about a bit, you know, and come back.
It's dry in that little chapel, even if it's raining outside."

Thus they talked by the gate, unwilling to separate, hugging
each other--though they were not actually touching each other
now--as tightly as if they were stark naked, but with no wild,
irresistible rush of passion. They were Norfolk Crows, Crows
from Norwich, from Thorpe, from Yaxham, from Thetford, from
East Dereham, from Cringleford, from Methwold. Their love
was lust, a healthy, earthy, muddy, weather-washed lust, like the
love of water-rats in Alder Dyke or the love of badgers on
Brandon Heath. They were shamelessly devoid of any Ideal Love.
Born to belong to each other, by the same primordial law that
made the Egyptian Ptolemies marry their sisters, they accepted
their fatal monogamy as if it were the most casual of sensual
attractions.

And in the etheric atmosphere about those two, as they stood
there, quivered the immemorial Mystery of Glastonbury. Chris-
tians had one name for this Power, the ancient heathen inhabi-
tants of this place had another, and a quite different one. Every-
one who came to this spot seemed to draw something from it,
attracted by a magnetism too powerful for anyone to resist, but
as different people approached it they changed its chemistry,
though not its essence, by their own identity, so that upon none
of them it had the same psychic effect. This influence was per-
sonal and yet impersonal, it was a material centre of force and
yet an immaterial fountain of life. It had its own sui generis
origin in the nature of the Good-Evil First Cause, but it had
grown to be more and more an independent entity as the centuries
rolled over it. This had doubtless come about by reason of the
creative energies pouring into it from the various cults, which,
consciously or unconsciously, sucked their life-blood from its
wind-blown, gossamer-light vortex. Older than Christianity, older
than the Druids, older than the gods of Norsemen or Romans,
older than the gods of the neolithic men, this many-named Mys-
tery had been handed down to subsequent generations by three
psychic channels; by the channel of popular renown, by the
channel of inspired poetry, and by the channel of individual
experience.

Names are magical powers. Names can work miracles. But the
traditional name of this entity--the Holy Grail--might easily
mislead an intelligent historian of our planet. The reality is one
thing; the name, with all its strange associations, is only an
outward shell of such reality. Apart from the fabulous stories
that have become the burden of this wind-blown "Numen" it must
be noted that as these two figures--this man and this woman--
longed to make love to each other but were withheld by circum-
stance, their intense desire--all the more electric for being as
vicious as it was--was urged by its own intensity (apart alto-
gether from any consciousness in these two as to what was hap-
pening) to the very brink of this floating Fount of Life. The
strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire.
And the desire of these two at this moment, gathering electric
force out of the atomic air and striving blindly towards each
other in despite of the sundering flesh, was so caught up and so
heightened by the frustrated desires of two thousand years, which
in that valley had pulsed and jetted and spouted, that it did
actually draw near to that Secret Thing. Thus the loves of these
two people, both of them hostile to all these miraculous forces,
both of them rooted in fen-mud and vicious heathenism, did, by
reason of the strength of what the old Benedictines would have
called their "brutish and carnal purpose," approach the invisible
rim of that wind-blown mystery. Approach it, hut not touch it!
With a heavy heart Mary dragged herself off. Three times she
looked back and waved her hand, watching him make his linger-
ing way towards Wirral Hill. Southwest he went; and, each time
she turned, the afternoon sun seemed more obscuring, more
vaporously concealing, more hopelessly swallowing! He seemed
to disappear into that golden haze like "the knight-at-arms" of
the poet, "alone and palely loitering." But darkly, not "palely,"
did his figure pass away, vanishing amid the yet darker forms
of tree trunks and wall cornices and wooden water butts and
clothes lines and garden pumps; all mingling together in dim,
fantastic, purplish dream stuff; as if the slanting sun-rays had
hollowed out all substance, all solidity, from both them and
him!

As, hot and perspiring, John toiled up that dusty ascent, he
saw the boyish countenance of Tom Barter before him. He was
going to see Tom Barter tomorrow evening. Would he prove a
complete stranger when he was face to face with him? Tomorrow
evening was Saturday. He hoped Mary would be able to reach
that place in the Ruins in good time. Well! if she were late, he
would have to keep Tom waiting. But Tom would not mind. Tom
was always good-natured. Tom never got angry. No, he never
got angry, even when the boat was stranded in the mud, even
when the bait was left behind, even when a float was lost, even
when an oar got adrift, even when you kept him waiting for
hours!

By God! it was with Tom, and not with Mary, that he had
played that wicked game, that day, at the bottom of the boat.
How extraordinary that he should have mixed up those two like
that in his mind!

It was a steep and a dusty path he was following up the slope
of Wirral Hill. Oh, how he longed for the stormy north wind and
the wide fens. His nostalgia for Norfolk became a shrinking back
from the strangeness of Glastonbury! He found himself staring
at an iron seat which the municipality of the town had placed
on a ledge of that long ascent. His sensations were very queer
as he stood staring at this iron seat. "When I am having exciting
thoughts about making love to Mary," he said to himself, "I feel
careless and reckless; but when I think of Tom I have such a
sensation of being protected that it makes me frightened of every-
thing! God! I wish Mary and Tom and I were all safe back in
that Northwold drawing-room, looking out on that lawn! There's
something funny about this place. This place seems to be unreal.
I feel exactly as if it were floating on a sea of coloured glass. I
feel as if at any moment it might sink and carry me down into
God knows what!"

He really did begin, at that moment, to feel physically dizzy.
This alarmed him and made him tighten his hold on the handle
of his stick and hurry on up the hill. He soon perceived beyond
the curve of the incline, lifted above the dust of the pathway in
front of him, the gaunt, outstretched branch of the ambiguous
tree. And there was the black post; and there, with his back
propped against the post and his chin upon his knees, sat Mr.
Owen Evans. The sight of Mr. Evans, seated in that manner,
brought back, in a flash, to John's mind, the image of Stone-
henge. "Ha! those stones are older than Glastonbury!" he mut-
tered to himself. And then feeling his courage and his adventur-
ousness returning to him, "0 great Stone Circle," he prayed,
"give me my girl into my hands in spite of all these kings and
saints and thorn trees!"



WHITELAKE COTTAGE



When Mr. Dekker and his son set out to walk to White-
lake River they decided to cross that particular region in the
environs of Glastonbury to which local usage had come to re-
strict the romantic name of Avalon. Over the uplands known as
Stonedown they directed their way straight to the hamlet of
Wick. At this point Mr. Dekker began to take a little surreptitious
pleasure in their excursion independent of its troublesome and
complicated purpose. He always loved a long walk with Sam
and there was not a field or a lane within several miles of their
home where some rare plant or bird, or, as the Spring advanced,
some butterfly did not arrest their attention.

"I was telling Mr. Crow," said Sam's father, "about this hamlet
Do you know, it was the one thing I told him that really inter-
ested him. A quaint fellow this Crow seems to be."

His last words were spoken in a raised voice for Sam had
moved a little ahead of him and was standing by the side of
an immense oak tree which grew at the edge of the lane. Another
tree of the same species, equally enormous, grew a stone's throw
further on; and these two gigantic living creatures, whose top-
most branches were already thickly sprinkled with small, gam-
boge-yellow leaf buds, appeared to be conversing together, in
that golden sun-haze, far up above the rest of the vegetable world
and where none but birds could play the eavesdropper.

The sight of these two titanic trees, trees that might have wit-
nessed at least a fifth portion of the long historic life of Glaston-
bury, suggested to the mind of the elder Dekker thoughts quite
unconnected with either Vikings or Druids.

"We must try again here this summer for those Purple Hair-
streaks, Sam, my boy."

But the lad heard his father's words without his accustomed
sympathy in entomological pursuit. His body was at that mo-
ment bowed forward towards the great corrugated trunk, his out-
stretched arms pressed against it, his fingers extended wide. All
this he was doing in complete unawareness.

Was Sam's gesture, at this moment, destined to prove the ex-
istence of an increasing rapprochement in these latter modern
days between certain abnormal human beings such as were both
Sam and John, and the subhuman organisms in nature? Was it
in fact a token, a hint, a prophecy or a catastrophic change im-
minent in human psychology itself?

Across the soul of that immemorial oak tree, as it flowed up-
ward like an invisible mist from the great roots in the earth to
those gamboge-coloured leaf buds, there had passed more wild
November rains, more luminous August moons, more desperate
March winds whirling and howling over Queen's Sedgemoor and
Wick Hollow, than either Sam Dekker or his father had any
notion of. Then why to the troubled heart of the younger man,
just then, did there not come from the immense repository of
this huge tree's vast planetary experience, a kind of healing
virtue?

Why did Sam Dekker draw back from that oak tree uncom-
forted, uncounselled, unsoothed, uninspired? Against that great
rough trunk many a gipsy donkey had rubbed its grey haunches
and got comfort by it, many a stray heifer had butted with her
wanton horns and eased her heart, squirrels had scampered and
scratched there, and hung suspended, swaying their tails and
scolding, wrens had built their large, green, mossy nests there,
chaffinches had scraped and pecked at the lichen for their nests,
so small, so elegant, in the nearby blackthorn bushes. Past that
trunk and its great twin brother further down the lane had ridden
men in armour, men in Elizabethan ruffles, men with cavalier
ringlets, men in eighteenth-century wigs. Many of these no doubt
jumped down from their horses, drawn by an indescribable, mag-
netic pull, and touched that indented bark with their travel-swol-
len bare hands. And to many it must have brought luck of some
sort, some healing wisdom, some wise decisions, some hints of
how to deal with their mates, with their offspring, with the tumult
of life!

But nothing of this sort came to Sam Dekker. The son was he
of the man who refused to worship the sun! That great reddish
orb, now sinking down towards the Bristol Channel, had its own
strange superhuman consciousness. And this consciousness, roused
to anger against this simple priest, had resolved with a mysterious
envenoming tenacity, corrosive and deadly, to separate him from
the only earthly thing he loved!

The two men walked on in silence now, Mr. Dekker instinc-
tively understanding that his son was on tenterhooks about this
encounter, and beginning himself to feel, in his own sturdy con-
sciousness, certain premonitions of danger on the air.

They passed Wick Hollow. They passed Bushev Combe. As
they went on, they were sometimes compelled to stop and stare
at the hedges for it was weeks since they had been that way and
they were astonished at the extraordinary beauty of the celandines
this year. The ground was uneven, broken up into many little
depressions and small hillocks, and whether because February
had been exceptionally wet, or because the winds had been so
steadily blowing from the west, not only were the petals of the
celandines more glittering than usual, but their leaves were larger
and glossier.

"Celandines were my father's favourite flower," said Mat Dek-
ker as they moved on again after one of these pauses. It always
pleased him to think of his father when he was alone with his
son and to speak of him to him. It made him feel that the three
of them--three generations of Dekkers--were intimately bound
together, and bound together too with that fecund Somersetshire
soil. His piety in this classical sense was one of the massive single-
hearted motives by which he lived.

The landscape around them changed completely now, for they
descended from the verdurous island of Avalon down into a con-
fused series of cattle droves which led across the low-lying water-
meadows.

Few, even among the dwellers in Glastonbury, could have found
their way as these two did over these fields and ditches. When they
had passed the outskirts of Brindham Farm and reached the less-
frequented marshes of Splott's Moor, it was even more difficult
to proceed; for the cattle droves yielded place then to mere foot-
tracks from weir to weir and dam to dam. Wider ditches too,
interrupted their way, those great ditches of formidable water
called rhynes to which Mary Crow had referred in her conver-
sation with John; and the planks across these deep water courses
were, in many places, perilously rotted by rains and floods and
needed to be trodden with extreme wariness by two such heavily
built men. Whitelake River itself was also no contemptible ob-
stacle to surmount, for there were no bridges anywhere near;
but in the end they discovered a willow branch fallen across the
little stream, and managed to make use of this as a bridge. It was
in the overcoming of little chance difficulties like this in explor-
ing the country that Mat Dekker always showed at his best. On
this occasion, with the sun, his heathen enemy, already so near
the horizon he forgot completely the annoying nature of their
excursion and began chuckling and boasting over this or that
achievement of the way, as if they had been crossing the Danube
instead of Whitelake River!

They were now actually upon the marshlands of Queen's Sedge-
moor; and here they found themselves without the trace of even
a footpath to follow, and once again the elder Dekker had an
opportunity of displaying to his son his skill as a cross-country
guide.

"Whitelake Cottage is on the bank of this stream, my son," he
said gravely, "and ive are on the bank of this stream. All we've
got to do is to follow it down."

Sam mechanically obeyed, letting his father move in advance
of him by several paces. In his son's silence the elder man had
reverted to his natural custom of brooding sluggishly upon every
single little natural object they encountered. Nothing was neg-
ligible to this despiser of the sun when once he was out-of-doors.
There was no weed that lacked thrilling interest for him. But it
was not a merely scientific interest; still less was it an aesthetic
one. The master-current of the man's passionate West-country
nature found in a thousand queer, little, unattractive objects,
such as mouldering sticks, casual heaps of stones, discoloured
funguses on tree roots, dried-up cattle-droppings, old posts with
rusty nailheads, tree stumps with hollow places full of muddy
rain-water, an expression of itself that wide-stretching horizons
tailed to afford.

By approaching their objective this particular afternoon by so
rambling and indirect a road, it was a good deal after half-past
four-- the hour when they had been invited-- that they reached
Whitelake Cottage at last.

In recognition of the abnormally warm day, Nell Zoyland had
arranged to give her guests their tea upon a little grassy terrace
overlooking the swollen stream. Here then the father and son
sat, munching such exquisite thin bread and butter as Mistress
Pitches did not often cut for their delectation and trying to con-
ceal both from each other and from their host, the growing
measure of their uneasiness. For, truth to tell, the situation was
drifting, moment by moment, more and more out of control. Nell
Zoyland's cheeks were hot and her breath came quick. Mat Dekker
had certainly never seen a girl with more beautiful, mdre allur-
ing breasts than hers; nor had he ever seen one who dared to
wear a bodice so tightly fitting, so mediaaval-looking, so unfash-
ionably piquant! These beautiful breasts seemed indeed to domi-
nate the whole occasion. Mat Dekker felt that there was some-
thing so unusual about their loveliness that they endowned their
owner with a sort of privileged fatality; a fatality that might
lead to halcyon happiness; or on the other hand, to tragic devas-
tation and destruction. They seemed meant, Mat Dekker thought
as his eyes wistfully followed them, for something beyond the
suckling of any human infant. At this point the man's ingrained
morality pulled him up short. But he could not resist the feeling
that there was something in the loveliness of such breasts that
carried a person far from ordinary human life, to those old wild
legends of immortal creatures of mist, of dawn, of dew that
have troubled good men's minds from the beginning.

"It is only children of the elements," he said to himself, "that
such breasts ought to suckle!"

It was at this point in this singular tea-party that William
Zoyland began to speak his mind.

Sam Dekker soon ceased to drink any more tea or to eat any
more bread and butter. He sat now with his shoulders hunched
up and his chin sunk into his neck. His elbows rested heavily
upon Nell's wicker-work garden table. His eyes were fixed upon
the face of William Zoyland as if upon the face of a well-known
animal that had suddenly begun uttering surprising sounds,
sounds that belonged to an entirely different type of beast.

Nell, on the contrary, had the aspect of a girl desperate and
reckless at the close of a day-long struggle with an equal adver-
sary. She fixed upon her husband's leonine head, as he went
on speaking, that careless, contemptuous look, which, of all looks
in their harem, men dread the most.

Whitelake Cottage was like a little doll's house by the reedy
banks of Whitelake River. It only possessed two rooms down-
stairs and two upstairs, with a little kitchen at the back, above
which, under a sloping roof, which had been attached to the rest
of the house at a recent date, was a low-ceilinged attic-study de-
voted to the use of the master. They evidently had no servants
nor was there any sign of a flowerbed, although at the edge of
the grassy slope where they all now sat, several wild-flower roots,
by the look of the disturbed soil and the appearance of the
plants, had been lately put in.

Under that flowing torrent of deep-toned revelations, full of
startling import, to which they were perforce listening, Mat
Dekker was staring at last year's drooping rushes, brown and
crumpled, among which several newly green shoots were sprout-
ing up. The sun was quite below the horizon now; and in the
early twilight these green reed shoots threw forth a peculiar cool-
ness of their own, a pure, liquid coolness, after that warm day
that was like a calm but tragic Finis to some magical play of a
great playwright.

Mat Dekker was gathering up his forces to deal with a situa-
tion altogether new in his narrow and single experience, and
the effort to cope with this was so great that its effect upon him,
as Zoyland went on speaking, began to be the very last anyone
would have predicted. He began to grow extremely sleepy. This
tendency to grow sleepy at a crisis was indeed an old infirmity
in his family. The great-grandfather of his father, James Dekker,
had grown sleepy when called upon, with other well-known
Somersetshire gentlemen, to rise to the support of William of
Orange against the last of the Stuarts.

"It's for the wench to decide for herself," Will Zoyland was
saying, as, lying back in his wicker arm-chair with his leather-
gaitered legs stretched out in front of him and one hand deep in
his corduroy breeches' pocket and the other tugging at his great
yellow beard, he rolled his blue eyes from Sam's bowed face to
Sam's father's averted face. "I'm a philosopher, Mr. Dekker. I'm
not one to let myself suffer, or the girl either, when there's no
need for it. But it's too much for her to expect that I'll go on
living with her and sleeping in a separate bed. In fact, I refuse
to do it! I'm a philosopher, I tell ye; and as such I know that
all conventional idealism is puff-ball foolishness. Any girl can
love two men if she wants to, just as we can love two women. I've
no doubt a man like yourself, Mr. Dekker, has frequently' loved
two women at the same time. It's natural to us. Nell and this
silly lad here think they're in love. They've imagined till today,
or at any rate Sam has imagined till today, that I was the sort
of born cuckold who could be fooled till judgment. Well! I'm
not. D'ye hear, Sam, me boy? I'm not. I live my own life in my
own way and always have. I could live here perfectly well with-
out Nell, though she doesn't think so. She thinks I could live
without sleeping with her; but she don't believe I could get my
meals for myself or get on without having her to talk to. That's
where women are so stupid. They think they're necessary where
they're not necessary; and they don't know how necessary they
are, in another direction! But I'm a philosopher, as I say, Mr.
Dekker, my good Sir, and I know very well that my little Nell
still loves her old Will (though she doesn't know it herself!)
quite as much as she loves this sulky young gentleman here.
Now what I say to her, Sir, and to you, my romantic young
friend, is simply this. If Nell will stop this foolery of sleeping on
the sitting-room sofa, stop, in fact, this foolery of being cross with
me and cold to me, I'll be ready--d'ye hear me lad?--I'll be
ready to share her with ye. So long as ye don't tumble her 'in me
wone bed,' as they say round here, ye can have the lass uphill
and down dale--I'm mum. I'm mute. I'm the dumb fish. In fact,
to tell ye the truth, Mr. Dekker, I've got ridiculously fond of
this great hulking son of yours. I respect the boy. I like talking
to the boy. We've had some fine times together, haven't we, Sam?
No, no. I agree with that old rogue Voltaire. I'm one who could
be quite content to live 'a trois,' as the rascal says. But I'm not
one who can live side by side with a girl like Nell and have her
cold and cross and savage, like she's been this last month. To
Hell with her cooking! I'm as good a cook as she is; and a better,
loo. Sam would like her to remain my servant and to become his
light o' love. Nell wants to run off with Sam and leave every-
thing. Only when I tell her to stop talking about it and do it, she
says Sam hasn't the guts to leave his dad. And then when I
laugh at her and tell her to try him and see, she just cries and
cries at the thought of how her poor old Will is to get on, all
alone, without anyone to get him his meals,"

He paused and looked round to make sure that his wife had
not slipped away and retreated into the house. No; Nell Zoyland
was standing exactly where she had been when he began to speak,
her hands pressed against the back of an empty chair. It was then
that Will Zoyland's eye, as he looked round, caught sight of a
kestrel-hawk hovering in the air above some pollarded willows.
He clapped his great hand on his mouth with an inarticulate
shishing sound.

"Shish! Shish!" he murmured, glancing at the two Dekkers
and then at Nell. He rose to his feet, turned his back upon them
all, and stepping lightly on tip-toe, like a gamekeeper in pursuit
of a poacher, hurried to the side wall of his house.

Following his motions with his eyes, the elder Dekker remem-
bered now, what everybody in Glastonbury knew, namely that
Mr. Zoyland was the bastard son of the Marquis of P., the great
Somersetshire landowner. He saw the fellow seize upon his gun,
where it lay propped against the wall, and glance quickly up-
ward. Like the dedicated naturalist that he was, Mat Dekker hated
to see any bird shot; and even though he had been told that in
that low-lying ground, kestrels had grown to be a nuisance, he
still would have protested violently.

Without a second's hesitation he lifted up his voice from where
he sat and uttered a resounding, "Hoy! a-hoy! hawk-a-hoy!"

The report of the gun followed almost immediately; but,
startled by his guest's shout, the bearded bastard of Lord P.
missed his bird.

Nell fully expected the roar of a Polyphemus to follow this
mischance and a terrible, "Damn your soul, Sir! What do you
mean by that?" But neither Mr. Zoyland's voice nor any look in
his eyes betrayed a flicker of such emotion.

"Sorry, Sir!" was all he said, as he resumed his seat with his
gun across his knees ; "I ought to have remembered your penchant
for hawks. Sam told me how he used to keep a pair of them
when he was at school. I expect it was by taming hawks that he
learnt to tame girls. Well, Sam; well, Nell, what are you two
romantic children going to decide? Is poor old Will to go on
sleeping alone?"

There was something about the man's tone that roused the girl
to a level of emotion and a quality of emotion that astonished her
lover.

The slow-flowing water beneath them seemed to have taken
to itself all the daylight that was left; and between the girl's
tense face and its unruffled surface an affinity of whiteness that was
almost phosphorescent rose into being, established itself, and be-
came more and more dominant. Had the little house, the pollarded
willows, the gun on the bearded man's knees, the twitching chin
of Sam, been elements of sound in a momentous orchestra, this
whiteness of flowing water and of a woman's face would have
been the flute note or the oboe note in the symphonic effect.

Here sat together, on the darkening bank of this steel-white
water, three formidable men, any one of whom could have
crushed out that frail spark of girlish life as the swish of a
horse's tail might crush a currant moth. And yet the tension of
that single feminine heart reduced all three of them to the neg-
ligibleness of three wooden posts in the palings around an
agitated heifer.

And just as such a heifer's up-tossed head and lifted voice
might bring some farm girl upon the scene who would pass those
paling-posts by as if they did not exist, so the suppressed tem-
pest in Nell Zoyland's nerves brought to her rescue nothing less
than the great planet of the evening itself. Whiter than the White-
lake stream, whiter even than the girl's face, this celestial lumi-
nary, this immortal sign in the heavens "that brings the traveller
home by every road," emerged now from the cloudy western lake
wherein the sun had vanished.

A long relaxed shiver of nervous relief passed through Nell
Zoyland's perfect breasts, and through her ravished but uncon-
ceiving womb, and through her thighs and through her trembling
knees. Turning her gaze from the evening star she looked, for
some reason she could never have explained, not into Sam's
pathetic bear-eyes that were following her every motion, but into
two deep, twilit, granite pools. Into such granite pools--now that
his enemy, the Sun, had long since vanished--Mat Dekker's quiet
grey eyes, under their bristling eyebrows, had been transformed!
The man met the girl's gaze; and the mysterious sweetness of her
soul--troubled still but no longer convulsed with anger--rested
for a second upon the priest's new strength, as if he and not her
lover or her husband were her true friend among those three
men.

"Well, you two," repeated Will Zoyland, "aren't you going to
answer? I am one for living a civilised life in these things. Could
any man make a more liberal offer? If Nell will live again with
me, as she did when we were married a couple of years ago, I'll
let her see as much of our good Sam as she likes. Will's bed
isn't the only place where young blood can cool itself. There's my
offer. If you two want to go off together and leave Will to look
after himself, go! For God's sake, go! And good luck to you!
I can't hand you the money for expenses, because I haven't got
it. She knows--none so well as she!--that I haven't got it. But
if you go I won't trouble ye. I won't lift a finger to stay ye. Only
I won't take Nell back if she gets sick of it. ‘Once gone, always
gone' is my motto for runaway little girls.

"Well, Sir,"-- and he turned quite definitely to Mr. Dekker
now, bowing towards him over his gun--"do you feel like treat-
ing these frisky lambs to a trip abroad? Or are you prepared to
let 'em kiss and clip under our own roofs?"

Mat Dekker rose slowly to his feet.

"May I be allowed a few words alone with Mrs. Zoyland be-
fore we talk any more about this?"

The bearded man looked, for one quarter of a second, a little
nonplussed; but he quickly recovered himself and waved his hand
towards the house.

"You go in with him, Nell, if you want to! Can you light
the sitting-room lamp or do you want me to come and do it?
You can? Very well, then! Sam and I will stay out-of-doors. Come
and see my otter trap, Sam! It's more likely to catch a water-
rat than an otter in this little puddle; but you never can tell.
Queer if there should be an otter in it tonight--of all nights--
but I don't suppose there is."

The man went so far in his blustering bonhomie as actually
to take Sam by the arm. Sam was so dazed by all these events
that he offered no resistance. His mind seemed to have become
incapable of any thought or any decision. What wavered before
him just then was the gasping mouth of the sick minnow, at the
top of the water in the aquarium, in their play-room. He felt like
that minnow himself!

"You know, Sam, the truth is, since we've broken the ice"--
Zoyland's voice went booming on in the darkness by the lad's
side like a low-toned threshing machine--"our little Nell's not
so much in love with you as she's in love with Love. She's as
romantic as a child of sixteen. In fact mentally, I often think,
she is sixteen. That's what it is, Sammy, old friend, mentally six-
teen; and with no more idea of the realities of life than a school-
girl. It's a good thing it was a boy like you who came along.
With anyone else she'd have made herself seriously unhappy; but
with you she's safe. That's what I've said to her from the begin-
ning. ‘You'll never make me angry with you over Sam Dekker,'
I've said. ‘With that boy you're safe,' I've said. And you are
safe, aren't you, Sam?"

He pressed the lad's arm with his free hand as he led him
along the bank of the stream. Sam at least had the wit to notice
that in his other hand he still held his gun. By degrees Sam be-
came conscious too that he did have one clear and strong wish
in his confused brain. He wished that William Zoyland did not
live where it was possible for him to trap otters.

"My father doesn't like the idea of trapping otters," he re-
marked.

After following a kind of tow-path along the bank they came
to a small river weir. There was a gurgling sound under the
woodwork here, and a low humming and rustling sound; both
sounds were evidently being caused by the position of the dam
at that hour, but it was too dark to distinguish them exactly.

Out of the darkness of that full-brimmed swishing water there
emerged a damp, chilly, but not unpleasant smell, composed of
many separate elements. It was composed of wet moss, of old
dead leaves, of yet older dead wood, of long submerged, slime-
coated masonry, of clammy river weeds. The gurgling sound and
the rushing sound came forth hollowly together, producing upon
the ear a kindred effect to that produced upon the sense of smell
by the damp wafture.

The idea of a wild otter caught in a trap by his bearded com-
panion suddenly became unbearable to Sam Dekker. For the first
time in his life this much-enduring youth found himself trem-
bling from head to foot with a desire to kill. He imaged to him-
self the precise nature of the sudden, violent shove which would
precipitate this burly offspring of the Marquis of P. into the
rushing blackness.

"There may be one of them in it, you know. There may be one
of them in it," William Zoyland kept obstinately repeating.
Probably nothing would have happened. Probably some other
excuse would have presented itself for refraining from a piece
of silly violence that might not even have proved fatal, for it is
likely enough that Zoyland was a powerful swimmer. But the
excuse he did obey was the hoot of an owl coming from the direc-
tion of the cottage, and two or three times repeated. Sam an-
swered the owl's cry, imitating it exactly, and the thing was re-
peated again and again.

"He wants us back at your house," Sam said. "So we'd better
go. That's my father; that's not an owl."

"One minute, then--you go ahead, Sam! I'll be with you in
a moment."

But Sam had not waited for this permission from his host and
rival. He was already hurrying back with a shambling speed that
nearly broke into a run. He felt he was escaping, not from the
bearded man but from his own dark impulse. He was surprised
to hear strange voices when he neared the house and as he reached
it he observed, in the narrow lane behind it, the lights of a motor
car. When he entered the little sitting-room, he found it pleasantly
illuminated by the large green-shaded lamp to which his host
had recently referred; and there were red coals in the grate.

Talking eagerly to his father and Nell, and all of them stand-
ing in an animated group in the centre of the room, were Mr.
Philip Crow and Mr. Tom Barter. Sam shook hands awkwardly
and mechanically with the newcomers but all his attention was
concentrated upon Nell. Ever since the moment when some mys-
terious vibration had passed between the girl and that white
planet in the western sky, Nell's mood had completely changed.
The nervous tension that had been growing week by week ever
since she refused Will Zoyland his nightly embraces, seemed, at
any rate for the present, to have fallen away. In some remote
place in her heart, in some hidden chamber there, not far from
the spot where she had just now been so grievously wounded by
his words, she was, as a matter of fact, experiencing a reaction
in his favour. The realisation that she could leave him, if only
Sam would risk all, satisfied her inordinate mania for romance,
while the fact that it was clear that Sam never would risk all
helped her reaction towards her husband. Like Helen of Troy,
upon the high tower of the wall, she permitted Aphrodite to be
her guide. And the harlot goddess persuaded her to keep both
her man and her lover!

In Sam's simple brain it had been lodged as a ghastly and
tragic fact that Zoyland's love-making was odious to her. She
had been subtly and gradually impelled to lead him on to this
sinister view. And she had done it half-unconseiously; never ex-
actly lying to him; half-believing the fancy herself, as she yielded
to his pathetic and inexperienced advances. Men, especially young
men, because of something fastidious and idealistic in their own
nature, are always prepared to be touched to the heart by the
idea of a girl's physical loathing for another man. Indeed it is
given to few men, whether old or young, to understand the pro-
found part played by what might be called "the universal prosti-
tute" in every woman's nature. It is indeed always a puzzle to
men, the physical passivity which women have the power of sum-
moning up, to endure the inconvenience of an amorous excite-
ment which they do not share. Few men realize the depth of the
satisfaction to women's nature in the mere possession of the
power to cause such excitement. When a man sees a sensitive
girl with what he considers a thick-skinned, brutal mate, he expe-
riences a twinge--perhaps quite uncalled-for--of the sort of
imaginative pity which is the inverse side of male sadism.

Whatever passivity it was that Nell Zoyland gave herself up
to now, it had something about it of that mysterious passivity of
fate which the women of antiquity knew. And doubtless this
mood had been fortified in this case by the girl's talk with Sam's
father. Mat Dekker had risen to the occasion with a weight and
an insight that surprised even himself. To beg her to postpone,
to delay, to think, had been his intention when he spoke to Nall;
but below his grave and practical words there had been such a
clairvoyant tenderness, such a direct man-to-woman, as well as
priest-to-daughter vibration in his tone, that her nervous revolt
against her dilemma mounting up to such a pitch of blind anger,
and then soothed by the Planet of Love, ebbed altogether under
his influence.

"What I really came for," Philip Crow was saying, "was to
see whether there was a chance of Mr. Zoyland's helping me out,
over at Wookey Hole, as he did last year when I was in diffi-
culties. I know of course"--this was said with a little stiff bow
in Nell's direction--"that the remuneration is nothing to him.
But the work is interesting--he found it so last Spring--and I'm
prepared to pay him a little more this time."

"You mean you want Zoyland to act as official guide in Wookey
Hole?" threw in Mat Dekker. "By Heaven, Crow, if Zoyland
won't do it for you, I believe my Sam here would be just the
person! He's read everything there is to be read on Wookey, and
he's better up on neolithic weapons than anyone round here.
You'd help Mr. Crow, wouldn't you, Sam, if Zoyland refused?"

Sam, abashed by his father's words, threw a humble glance
like that of a bewildered horse in the direction of Nell but uttered
no sound at all.

"William may be pleased to do it," the girl said hurriedly,
speaking to Philip but replying to Sam's look. "But I think Sam
would be just as good a guide in those caves--perhaps better.
William's inclined to be flippant and off-handed with people
when he doesn't like them and there must be lots of very teasing
people who come to visit Wookey."

Philip Crow, whose habit was not to beat about the bush, now
looked straight at his business companion. He felt no necessity to
propitiate, for any direct purpose of his own, any of these peo-
pie; and that being the case, his narrow, clear-cut, war-axe con-
sciousness simply eliminated them.

"I wish you would do it for me, Tom," he said in a hurried,
quick voice. "I'd far sooner not trouble Mr. Zoyland; or anyone
else for the matter of that"--and he gave a quick, rather deroga-
tory glance at Sam.

"I don't...know...that I could deal with...Wookey Hole, Father,"
murmured Sam nervously.

What he really felt at that moment was an extreme reluctance
to deal with Mr. Philip Crow.

Tom Barter surveyed his employer with complete aplomb. He
was a shortish, squarish man of clear complexion and with a
round, fair, bullet-shaped head. He was the only person under
that green-shaded lamp who seemed entirely at ease and carefree.
He had been gazing at Nell Zoyland with a shameless glance of
covetous impersonal lechery.

"Can't leave the office, Phil," he said. "You people never know
where your own machine is tricky and jumpy. If I left that office,
for Wookey Hole, even for a fortnight, 'twould take six weeks
to get things straightened out."

Philip Crow made a humorous grimace directed towards Mat
Dekker. His gesture said, "You see what a good subordinate I
have; and how prettily he plays the role I've composed for
him." ^

At that moment Will Zoyland came clattering in, boisterous,
burly and jovial, and plumped down his gun against the wall.

"No otter, Sam!" were his first words as he shook hands with
his two visitors. "You needn't tell me what you've come for.
Crow," was his next remark, "for I see it in your grasping slave-
driving eye! You want to kidnap poor Will as your damned
showman! That's what he's after, isnit, Nell! Isnit, Sam?

"Well, Zoyland," snapped Philip sharply, evidently disliking
intensely the burly giant's familiar tone, "will you come out
there for a couple of months? I've got a chap from London, an
official antiquary and all that sort of thing, for the summer; but
people are beginning to come already and I've got no one there
now but just my ordinary workmen to show 'em round.

"Can't answer off the reel like this, Crow. Can't do it!

He leaned heavily upon a sort of mahogany sideboard that
stood against the wall. Three silver salvers, bearing the arms
of the Marquis of P., clattered down from their propped-up
position; and the whole sideboard groaned under his weight.
Philip turned instinctively to Nell. How many times had he not
been forced to get what he wanted from a rebellious man by
wheedling a practical woman!

"By the way, Mrs. Zoyland," he said, "I hope that wild step-
brother of yours hasn't heard about the trouble that started last
week among my people at Wookey. Don't you tell him, if he
hasn't! The very last thing I want to see is Dave Spear and his
fanatical wife down here at this juncture."

It was a good thing for Philip at that moment that the sus-
picious and malicious ears of Cousin John didn't catch this speech.
John would certainly have translated these words in the very
opposite sense from that which they apparently bore. "Write at
once," John would have translated them, "to your step-brother,
Dave and hold out to him the lure of a possible strike down here,
so that he'll bring his wife at once." Nor would John have been
greatly mistaken. The truth is that the main motive that brought
this Norman conqueror to Whitelake that evening had nothing at
all to do with William Zoyland or with Wookey Hole. William
was only the official motive. The true dynamo that brought this
electrifier of Wookey Hole posthaste to Queen's Sedgemoor was
the maddening temptation of Cousin Percy's slender waist.

Astute business man though he was, Philip had, when it came
to his passions, a swift-plotting recklessness that stopped at little.
Besides, his contempt for the practical ability of Cousin Perse-
phone and, for the matter of that, of the ability of her husband
also, was unbounded. No! He'd get Percy down here and give
her all the rope she wanted. Let the sweet creature "agitate" as
much as she liked. He'd settle the strikers and cuckold the Com-
munist! It was precisely the kind of dangerous human game that
suited his Battle-of-Hastings temperament. Did he divine in some
sly diplomatic cranny of his secret heart that either Nell Zoyland
or William Zoyland would be certain to tell the Spears the very
thing he so arrogantly bade them not to tell? He probably did;
but as with all daring and successful men the tricks and devices
of his subconscious nature were much more formidable than his
rational schemes; and so by a sort of automatic protective instinct
he kept them subconscious!

Had Nell's wits not been purged of idealistic vapour bv the
white rays of the great planet she might have missed the singu-
larity of this request. As it was, she was shrewdly struck by it.
With quick feminine craft she concealed her surprise. But in her
heart she actually formed the words with which she would com-
ment upon this episode to William Zoyland.

"Manufacturers don't as a rule try and stave off the arrival
of agitators by appealing to their relatives, do they, Will?" And?
she could hear the bellowing "Ha! Ha! Ha!" with which William
would receive this sally.

"No, I'll be careful, Mr. Crow," she said. "I'll be careful! Not
that I often write to poor Dave. We're only half-brothers, you
know."

Tom Barter, his eyes fixed on his own old-fashioned gold watch
chain from which hung the good upper-middle-class, county-
family seal of the Barters of Norfolk, thought to himself, "Think
of that funny little Johnny Crow turning up in town! Aye, but
I'll be glad to see the little urchin again." And then Tom Bar-
ter's mind ceased suddenly to think in definite words. The "little
river" and the "big river" at Northwold, the Bridge at Didling-
ton, were more than words. Such memories as they held could
not be put even by the practical, cynical, lecherous Tom, into any
human sentence. Whitelake Cottage vanished away, as he fum-
bled with his father's ancestral seal, a tall heron standing on one
leg. All these people vanished away. He only felt the presence
of little Johnny Crow. He only felt the cold strong wind in the
reeds of the Wissey. There was no longer any well-run office, no
longer any factory by Wookey Hole. The smell of the bottom
of a boat came over him so vividly that if he had not been the
practical manager of three factories, he would have walked
straight out of that house.

"Tomorrow I shall see little Johnny," he thought. And then
he thought, "I'd give a hundred pounds to sleep one night with
this girl here!"

Philip himself had now resumed his direct attack upon Wil-
liam Zoyland. Somehow it rather tickled his fancy to be able to
say, “My guide at Wookey, related, so everyone maintains, to
the Marquis of P."

Meanwhile Nell, seeing him so engaged, had managed to pull
Sam out of the open door into the river-scented garden.

“Don't you mind, little Sam," she was saying, “don't you mind
the way things are!"

It was fortunate for some of the persons in that small group
that the sudden passing of an airplane over Whitelake Cottage
completely absorbed the general attention. It was tacitly assumed
that it was to watch this illuminated air-equipage that Sam and
his hostess had wandered off in the darkness; and soon they were
all staring up at it beside the obscure, melancholy shapes of
empty chairs, dim tables and shadowy tea-cups upon the chilly
lawn.

“Barter! It's the man from Wells!" cried Philip, with nervous,
intense interest. “Or it's a plane exactly like his. We ought to have
stayed in tonight."

Tom Barter moved in the darkness close to the side of his
employer. “All planes look the same, Phil, at night," he said in
a low, emphatic tone. He spoke so quietly that no one but Nell,
who chanced to be nearest to Mr. Philip, caught these words and
this tone.

“He doesn't want Mr. Crow to give away something," the girl
thought. “Ill tell William about his hushing him up so. I
shouldn't wonder if they aren't buying an airplane."

When the plane had vanished, Philip and Tom Barter moved
off towards their car, Zoyland striding alongside of them and the
rest following. They soon formed a loquacious group around the
car, uttering those spontaneous and lively genialities which among
human beings imply instinctive relief at being able to get rid
of one another. It was at this moment that Mat Dekker said, “I
sometimes have thought of a queer thing, my friends."

Sam, who had been in a sullen daze since the episode of the
river bank, pricked up his ears at his father's tone. It was very
rare for Mr. Dekker to adopt this sermonising manner. Never
was a priest less pontifical than he.

"What, Father? murmured Sam dutifully, when none of the
others took the least notice of this remark.

"I've thought that the conquest of the air," Mat Dekker went
on, is such an enormous event in the history of the human race
that it is probably responsible for these reckless and chaotic
impulses which we all feel nowadays. What do you people think?
I'd go even further," he continued, raising his voice in the dark-
ness, “I'd go so far as to say that all these strange spiritualistic
occurrences that we hear so much about are the result of Man s
having found out how to fly."

"Tom here would give his head to be an airman," threw out
Philip with an explosion of motiveless malignity.

“Get into your seat, Phil, and let's start!" was the quick retort.

Barter's words were simple but his tone was black with indig-
nation. Philip Crow, from the very first time his Norfolk friend
had used his Christian name, disliked being called “Phil" by
his head-manager. In his displeasure now he was prepared to
go on teasing him.

“Barter's the most normal person I've ever met," he said, with-
out moving a step, “but when it becomes a question of flying, he's
as jumpy as a girl who hears her lover's name."

“Why don't you go in for flying, Mr. Barter? You could so
easily take lessons," said William Zoyland with innocent-wicked
mischief.

For a second the reserved Norfolk man was quite silent. Then
he burst out.

“Get into the car, Phil, can't you? I'm catching cold!"

But Philip suddenly swung round.

“Can't I take you two home?" he said.

Tom Barter at once echoed this. “Of course we must take
them home. There's easy room for three; and I'll sit on my
heels."

Philip repeated his invitation. “Please get in, Mr. Dekker;
please get in, Sam!"

The husband and wife-- his arm had slipped round her waist
now, and only peevishly, not with any repulsion, she tossed it
from her--joined their persuasions to those of the two motorists.

It took quite a little while for these four men to crowd them-
selves in so that Philip, who was driving, could use his brakes.
But they started at last; and the last word was Philip's.

“Think over that offer of mine, Zoyland. And remember I can
give you a few shillings more than I scraped up for you last
year."

Mat Dekker begged the manufacturer to drop them opposite
St. John the Baptist's Church, and it was an incredible relief to
Sam when at last, alone with his father and in complete silence,
he walked up the path to the church porch. To their surprise,
although it was well after eight o'clock, they heard voices in the
nave as soon as they pushed open the door and inhaled the
familiar musty smell. The verger had left a gas-jet burning in
the vestry under the great tower, and the little red light of the
Real Presence was suspended above the altar, but otherwise the
church was completely dark. And yet it was not! The father and
son, with the easy movements of long usage, opened the door
so quietly that they caught the sacrilegious striking of a match
in the western aisle. By the little yellow flame of this match
shaded between human hands, they perceived that two men were
bending over the lidless and empty sarcophagus of Joseph of
Arimathea. One of these men was on his knees, evidently tracing
out, in concentrated absorption and with his index finger, the
famous initials J. A. which are so deeply cut upon the northern
end of this huge receptacle. Whether it was a visual illusion due
to the flickering of the match, or whether it really occurred, Mat
Dekker could not be sure, but he fancied he saw this man, the
one whose fingers were fumbling at those formidable initials,
bow down his head as if praying to this empty tomb!

The priest swerved reverently at the sight of this real or imagi-
nary act of devotion and, followed by Sam, moved hurriedly to
the vestry, where with instinctive and discreet disregard of what
he felt to be a legitimate gesture of impulsive piety, he proceeded
to do what he had come to do. This was to rinse out a small glass
chalice and fill it with wine, ready for the morning's consecra-
tion. While he did this, Sam sat down on a wooden chair by the
vestment cupboard and stared sombrely up through the vestry
door at the dimly lit receding pillars of the perpendicular nave.
He kept feeling again and again the pressure against him of that
beautiful girlish body. With this feeling there returned too the
damp and deathly smell of the river weir and the murderous
desire he had had at that spot. He lowered his gaze from the
dim vista of high carved arches and with his vision still framed
by the vestry door he let it rest upon the red altar light, signify-
ing the living presence of the Body of God. He could hear the
trickling of water being poured from one glass into another in
the preparation for tomorrow's Mass, and he could catch a little
faint squeaky sound, like the voice of a new-born mouse, of a
cloth being rubbed against the edges of glass vessels. To what
precise point did his father carry his belief in the miracle of
Transubstantiation? It went much further anyway than his own
vague superstitious uneasiness.

“I feel just like a dog barking at the moon," he thought, “when
I see that red light." The pit of his stomach suddenly seemed to
sink inward then for he thought to himself, “She is going to sleep
with him again! I could feel it in the air when we came away."
That little, squeaky, rubbing sound behind him seemed to be go-
ing on forever. “She's probably taken off all her clothes now,"
he thought, “and she's holding up her nightgown with her bare
arms to slip it over her shoulders. He's got her now; to work his
will upon...Oh! Oh! Oh!...Sam tried to push this image away from
him but it persistently returned.

“Father! you must stop that rubbing!" he suddenly cried out.
“When a thing is clean, it is clean. It's no good going on and
on like that!"

Mat Dekker stopped what he was doing at once and began put-
ting the sacred vessels away.

"True enough, Sammy," he said with a sigh. "The truth is
I was thinking of something else." He closed the cupboard,
turned out the gas-jet, and they both emerged into the body of
the church. It now became necessary to communicate to the wor-
shippers at St. Joseph's vacant coffin that they were about to lock
up the church. They moved to the door and the father held it open
while the son crossed the aisle.

Since their appearance on the scene the two intruders had
contented themselves with a whispered conversation. They had
not dared to strike any more matches.

"Pardon me, gentlemen," said Sam, "my father wants to lock
up the church."

The man upon his knees struggled stiffly to his feet, emitting
a little groan as his bones creaked. They neither of them spoke
a word, but began following their dismisser meekly and humbly
to the church door. With a mute bow Mat Dekker indicated to
them his gratitude for this obedience and moved aside to let
them pass out. It was such a dark night that although he thought
he had seen both the men before he could not recall their names.
When the key was turned and the empty sarcophagus of the
Arimathean was once more left alone with that Presence under
the red lamp, the father and son followed the strangers down the
flagged path, past the miraculous thorn bush, to the gate into
the street. Here there was a suspended gas-globe, and here the
strangers turned, revealing the black bowler hat and hooked Ro-
man nose of Mr. Owen Evans, and a broad-shouldered, rather
fleshy individual, without any hat, whose grizzled head under
that suspended light seemed to Sam the largest human head he
had ever seen. It was the head of a hydrocephalic dwarf; but in
other respects its owner was not dwarfish. In other respects its
owner had the normally plump, rather unpleasantly plump fig-
ure of any well-to-do-man, whose back has never been bent nor
his muscles hardened by the diurnal heroism of manual labour.

"How do you do, Mr. Dekker? How do you do, Mr. Sam Dek-
ker?" The Welshman threw into these words all the Ciceronian
ceremoniousness of what John Crow called his "first manner."
"I know you two gentlemen, though you don't know me," Owen
Evans went on, "but of course you know my relative, Mr. Geard."

Both father and son looked at "my relative, Mr. Geard," with
unashamed curiosity. It gave them both indeed a queer sensation
to shake hands with this ambiguous person under the gas-lamp in
that silent street; for although Mr. Geard's visits to Glastonbury
had been few since he had left his family and gone to North-
wold, all the air had been recently vibrant with gossip about
him. The money that his employer had left him had been doubled
and trebled by such gossip. Wherever, since his return, his bare
hydrocephalic head had appeared, the envious feeling and the
wondering awe had arisen. "There goes a very rich man!" Mr.
Geard had become in fact a local celebrity, a fairy-story hero;
and the rumours about his purchase of Chalice House, one of the
famous show-places of the town, had kept alive a romantic in-
terest, which, if the man had left the vicinity, would have soon
died down.

"Of course we've heard of Mr. Geard," said the elder Dekker
politely, "and we met only today, at Miss Drew's, a very inter-
esting young man, who told us that he was a friend of yours,
Mr. Evans."

"I must not keep you, gentlemen, for I know it's late," went
on the Roman-faced Welshman, "but I would like to hear which
side you'd take in a dispute Mr. Geard and I have been having,
under the aegis of St. Joseph."

"I'd like to hear about it very much, Mr. Evans," said Mat
Dekker. "Won't you walk a step with us? For I'm a little afraid
that our housekeeper will be getting anxious about us. '

"Well...perhaps...murmured the Welshman, hesitating and glanc-
ing at his companion, "perhaps my relative, Mr. Geard, is feeling
tired."

But they all four set themselves in motion in the direction of
the Vicarage; and it was not long before they reached the mediae-
val front of the Pilgrims' Inn. Although the rest of the street was
quiet, there were lights and the sound of raised voices inside the
mullioned windows of this old building.

"I was trying," said Mr. Evans, "to convince my relative that
the fact that so many visitors come to this spot from all over
the world is no proof that it is miraculous; but it is a proof that
something important can at any moment occur."

"Occur where?" enquired Mr. Dekker.

"In the mind!" cried the Welshman, raising his hand to his head
and giving his bowler hat such a violent jerk downward that its
brim rested on the bridge of his great nose.

Very gravely, as they all four stood still upon the illuminated
pavement outside the ancient inn, Mat Dekker extended his hand
to this bowler-hatted oracle.

"Good-night, Mr. Evans," he said. "We won't take you further,
but it interests me profoundly that you should make that re-
mark, because it's what I've been feeling for several years. I
associate it myself, as I told them just now at Whitelake, with
the conquest of the air; but as you--" Mr. Evans did not let
him finish the sentence. He had already taken the priest's hand
and was shaking it vigorously; but he dropped it now as if it
had hurt him.

"The air?" he murmured gloomily. "Did you say the air?"

And pushing back the brim of his hat, as if it had been a
visor, he snuffed with angry nostrils at the element referred to.

"No, Mr. Dekker, no! What I was referring to was the mind.
When the mind is clean, the change we are looking for will come.
It's to clean the mind, Mr. Dekker; to purge it, to wash it, to
give it a New Birth, that all these people"--he removed his hat
altogether now and waved it, without finishing his sentence,
towards the illuminated windows.

"You do see a little what I mean?" he added then, addressing
the enormous cranium of Mr. Geard.

But the beneficiary of William Crow's fortune was engaged
just then in a private quest of his own. He had advanced cau-
iously towards one of the lighted windows and was peering in.
His air was so exactly the air of an inquisitive servant, gazing
with aloofness and yet respectful curiosity at a remote revel of
his masters that Sam was betrayed into a jest.

"Are they behaving decently or indecently in there, Mr. Geard?"

The Canon's friend swung round upon his heel and surveyed
the young man. The lad was astonished at the look of affectionate
reproach on his large face. Had Sam been an impertinent young
Sadducee addressing an insolent remark to some great Rabbi
whose Holy Innocence confounded him, he could hardly have felt
more ashamed of himself and more of a flippant fool than he did
at that moment. Mr. Geard, however, made no audible reply to
these rude words. It was the descendant of the House of Rhys
dio answered for both of them as they all nodded a final good-
ight.

"My relative, Mr. Geard," he said, "intends to bring a great
many people to Glastonbury...more than have come since
...since the time of the Druids...and we must pray that
all who come will be allowed to...to wash...their winds
clean!"

These singular words, spoken in Mr. Evans' second manner,
kept repeating themselves inside the hollow skulls of all his three
listeners, as they walked silently home to their different pillows.

When Mr. Evans took out his latch-key and let himself into
his little Antique Shop, he was disturbed by a particular sadistic
image that he had not been troubled by since he saw John Crow
embrace the Hele Stone at Stonehenge. This image was con-
cerned with a killing blow delivered by an iron bar. Mechanically
he closed the street door; mechanically he lit a candle; me-
chanically he met the marble gaze of an alabaster bust of Dante;
mechanically he ascended the flight of narrow stairs to his bed-
room above. Once in his chamber it was with the same automatic
movement that he laid the flickering candle down on a rosewood
chest of drawers and clicking open the stiff latch of the casement
gazed out into the empty street. He saw nothing of the massive
chimney across the way. He saw nothing of the carved Gothic
doorways. He caught no floating essences of diffused sweetness
from the beds of jonquils in the little gardens beyond these
houses. The mystical breath of sleep rising from the summit of
the Tor and from the pinnacles of Saint John's Church and from
the broken cornices of the ruined Abbey arches passed him by
untouched. One single image of homicidal violence, at once a
torment of remorse and a living temptation, wiped out completely
all these impressions.

Had the soul of that planet of love which had done so much
that night for Nell Zoyland been made aware of this figure of
a lean, hook-nosed man at a window, with a bowler hat upon an
unmade bed behind him, what would its attitude to such a one
have been?

"He has taken my own violence of ravishment, natural and
passionate and sweet," that planet might have thought, "and has
turned it into a crime against nature and against life. Never can
he be forgiven!"

But long after that star of the west went down behind Brent
Knoll, Mr. Evans' tormented murmur floated out over the Glas-
tonbury roofs -- "If only I could see it once....just once...
with my own eyes...what Merlin hid...what Joseph found ....the
Cauldron of Yr Echwyd...the undying grail...this madness would
pass from me....but...but...."

He craned his neck out of the window, pressing the palms of
his hands upon the sill. His pose was grotesque. It was as if he
were about to address a crowd assembled on the opposite roof.

"But," Mr. Evans screamed in his twanging, quivering, twitch-
ing nerves; and although no sound but a lamentable sigh passed
his open lips it would have been hard for anyone watching him
not to believe he was shouting, "but...but...I...don't...want...to
see it!"



THE LOOK OF A SAINT



Mr. John Geard lived in a house in Street Road, a road
branching westward out of Magdalene Street which itself lies to
the west of the Abbey Ruins. In their old sewing-room at the top
of their father's ramshackle brick house--a building which seemed
completely unaware of the unexpected riches of its owner--there
were talking eagerly together, one mid-March day, and with in-
tense absorption in what they were saying, Mr. Geard's two
daughters, Cordelia and Crummie. These were "the great spraw-
ling girls" to whom Philip Crow had made such contemptuous
reference at the Norlhwold tea-table.

The sewing-room where they were talking was also Crummie's
bedroom, and Crummie, the younger of the two, was certainly,
at that moment, answering Philip's description. She was lying on
her back in the bed, her fair, wavy hair disordered, her violet-
coloured eyes full of sleepy petulance, her skirts rumpled, her
skin showing white between her drawers and her stockings, her
slippered feet kicking peevishly the already crumpled coverlet
of the bed.

Cordelia, on the other hand, was in no sort of way fulfilling
Philip's unkind picture. A very plain, very dark girl, with nothing
lovable in her face except an occasional smile of melancholy
amusement and wistful indulgence, and with a thin, awkward,
bony figure, Cordelia Geard was an unsympathetic critic of her
father, a practical support to her mother, and at once the ad-
viser and the confidante of her lively sister. At the present mo-
ment she was sitting bolt upright in front of a little working-
table engaged on a piece of embroidery.

"I'm not indiscriminate! How dare you call me indiscriminate,
Cordy!"

"Do you want me to count them all for you?"

"I'm talking about, now, now, now!" cried Crummie. "There's
only Mr. Barter and Red Robinson now. And Red is afraid of
me now we are supposed to be rich; so he doesnt count!

"If by ‘now,' you mean since we got rich," said Cordelia
gravely, "I believe Mr. Barter would marry you tomorrow if
you'd have him."

Crummie toyed coquettishly with her skirt; and then began
caressing, with the conscious narcissim of a girl inordinately
proud of her legs, the soft flesh above one of her knees. "I'd
like to marry Mr. Barter--in a way," she said meditatively.

Cordelia shook her head. "He would never be faithful to you.
He's too indiscriminate himself."

"I hate the way you say that--every time," protested Crummie.
"I could keep him faithful, you'd see! He's never lived with me.
So he doesn't know."

"If he's never lived with you, you've never lived with him.
You'd find it horrid, Crummie, when he went off with other girls!"

"What about you yourself?" retorted Crummie. "You know
perfectly well what Mr. Evans said the other night to Mother
about your being what he calls ‘Cymric.' Cordelia dug her
needle into her work and sat up very straight. Her pale cheeks
had flushed a little.

"I told you last night, Crummie," she flung out, "I won't hear
anything more about Mr. Evans! Mr. Evans is Dad's friend and
it's not right to make fun of him."

Crummie removed her soft hand from her satiny flesh and
pulled down her skirt with an abrupt jerk. She was a good-na-
tured girl and next to her own rounded limbs she loved Cordy
better than anything in the world. But she adored chattering
about men; and for Cordelia to rule out of court as a topic for
gossip any living man was an annoyance and a vexation.

"You've never stopped me before," said Crummie. "We always
discuss Dad's friends. Besides, Owen Evans isn't Dad's friend.
He's a cousin of Mother's. He's our cousin--so I can say any-
thing about him I like."

Cordelia bit her lip. She felt at that moment that the one
thing she could not bear was that her sister should draw her
into a discussion of the only man who had ever--in all her vir-
ginal life of thirty years--taken any real notice of her. If Crum-
mie loved Cordelia, the elder girl's devotion to Crummie knew
no bounds. Megan Geard, their mother, was a reticent woman,
even with her children. She was uniformly cold to both and the
girls had long ago decided that in her heart she was dissatisfied
because neither of them was a boy.

"What...I...think...is" went on Crummie, "what....I...think ... is that
Mr. Evans and you--"

"Don't!" cried Cordelia. "I won't have you say it!"

"Well ... if I mustn't say...you know what," went on
Crummie obstinately; "at least I can say that I think Dad is
fonder of Mr. Evans than Mummy is. I believe Mummy thinks
that Mr. Evans is after your--"

This was too much for Cordelia. "If you dare once again,"
she cried, "to talk about Mr. Evans to me. I'll begin talking
about you and young Mr. Dekker!"

It was Crummie's turn to be outraged now. And she was evi-
dently quite as much astonished as she was hurt. She rose up
on the bed, propped herself on the palms of her hands, and
stared open-mouthed at the dark girl before her, whose uncomely
features were at that moment rendered almost beautiful by wrath.
"What?" Crummie cried. "What can you mean, Cordelia? Who
told you I ever met Sam Dekker--or had anything to do with
him? Except at school-treats of course!--and sometimes when
I've taken a few cowslips, in cowslip time, for the church--or
gone with Red to a cricket match at Street--or maybe at Michael-
mas Fair where everybody meets everybody--and if you dare to
say I'm sweet on Sam Dekker or have ever spoke to Sam Dekker
--except of course as a girl naturally does speak to a clergy-
man's son when she's helping the clergyman to distribute prizes
or to carry those texts around that have those big red roses on
them--I've only one thing to say of you, Cordelia Geard, and
that is--you're telling absolute lies!"

At this point Crummie pulled up her legs under her, with the
complete abandonment of a very little girl, bent her head till
her wavy hair fell in loose wisps and loops upon her lap, and,
covering her face with her hands, burst into passionate sobbing.

If Cordelia had intended to use a formidable weapon, she had
never expected that it would prove as deadly a one as this. Her
unconscious instinct, as often happens with women who want to
hurt each other, had gone to the mark quicker and surer than
any reasoned attack could have done. In a flash the elder sister
recognised the truth. She saw to her confusion how possible it is
to live intimately with a person all one's life and at last be abso-
lutely confounded by some revelation as to her secret sexual
life.

So Crummie was in love with young Mr. Dekker; really in love;
just in the same sort of way as she herself was in love with
-- but Cordelia pulled her thoughts up with a jerk. That was day
dreams and speculations too dear even for herself to dwell upon!
Little Crummie! Why, this was nothing less than tragic. Gossip
had already whispered to the sisters that young Mr. Dekker had
been "keeping company with this Zoyland woman out to Splott's
Moor." And in any case a marriage between the child of Johnny
Geard--even of a rich Mr. Geard--and the son of the Vicar of
St. John's was an unnatural consummation. She laid her em-
broidery down and went across to her sister's side. "Forgive poor
Cordy!" she murmured self-reproachfully. "Of course I know
that young Dekker is nothing to you. I was just cross, Crummie
darling,"--and she laid her hand caressingly on her sister's
head and bent down to kiss her--"your Cordy was just cross.
But I'm not cross any more, and you mustn't be cross with me!"

Crummie's cheeks were still wet, but her full red lips parted
in a faint smile. "We're a silly pair, Cordy!" she murmured as
they kissed each other, and she threw her arms tenderly round her
sister's neck and drew her close. After a second's tight hug the
younger girl swung her legs off the bed and they sat side by side
upon the ruffled bed-clothes.

"Better tidy yourself up now, Crummie. Sally will be ringing
that bell for tea."

"And Mr. Evans is coming to tea!" laughed the other roguishly.

Cordelia moved now to the table and began folding up her
embroidery.

"I must go down and put on my coral necklace," she said to
herself, "and brush my hair a bit; but what's the use? If he
doesn't like me for myself, he won't care. And if he does he won't
care, either!" And then the queer thought came into her head--
"If a man wants to marry a girl, when he likes her for her mind
alone, does he get any pleasure from kissing her and embracing
her? So deep did this queer and troubling question sink into
her consciousness that she let her embroidery lie where it fell,
unwrapt in its usual piece of blue tissue paper! She herself
sank down on her sewing-chair and stared in front of her. She
stared at the particular one of the pictures of "The Four Sea-
sons" which represented Autumn. Quite automatically she read:
"We too have Autumns, when our leaves fall loosely through
the misty air, and all our good is bound in sheaves, and we
stand reaped and bare." She had read these words in their fa-
miliar place on the wall of the sewing-room since she could
read at all.

Crummie was now clutching tight in her fingers the midstream
of her mass of fragrant hair, pulling it round her white neck and
passing the comb, with many little cries at the tangles, through
its down-shaken wavy curls. To twist it round her head and stick
the hairpins into it was a matter of a second or two. Then she
slipped off her dress and bending over the chest of drawers sought
leisurely for this and the other garment; weighing, rejecting, ap-
praising, selecting. Hovering there, all in white, with bare arms
and bare shoulders, she proceeded to smooth down with indolent
outspread fingers the creases of her slip, preparatory to pulling
her dress over her head.

Like a patient nun in a courtesan's tiring-room Cordelia
watched her, a little twisted smile on her lips. No! Of course
Owen Evans couldn't love a person like her. But if he really
thought she was "Cymric" in her ideas, and liked her for her-
self enough to marry her, why! she would marry him.

Crummie was sitting on the bed now, changing her stockings,
and if she had looked winsome and alluring before, she looked
even more so now.

As Cordelia watched the delicate softness of Crummie's limbs
during this lengthy ritual, and the whiteness of her flesh thrown
into tender shadows by the ruffled hem of her garment, there did
come over the plain girl's mind a faint, flickering spasm of
revolt. Why should her own poor knees be so bony and rough-
textured? Why beneath her bony knees should her legs be like a
pair of broom handles? If God had willed everything from the
very Beginning of the World, why had He willed that all this
exquisite delight in one's own body--Crummie was at the mirror
again now, turning this way and that way, as she tried on her
new party dress--should be given to one girl, while another girl
felt her body to be a troublesome burden to be carried about?
Oh, it didn't depend on having men to admire one, or to embrace
one. "It is the feeling," thought poor Cordelia, "of being beauti-
ful to one's own self that matters!"

The younger sister was ready now. "Cordy," she cried, re-
luctantly turning her head from the mirror, "aren't you going
to change anything?"

But Cordelia, rising to her feet, only gave two contemptuous
little pats to her dark hair, only gave a contemptuous shake to
her black skirt, only picked off the front of it a few coloured
threads left by her embroidery. Instead of glancing at the mirror,
she glanced, over her sister's head, at the coloured representation
of Spring, the first of those Four Seasons, hanging on the wall.
At the bottom of this picture, which had always been the younger 's
favourite of all four, was a little card, stuck in the edge of the
frame, carrying on its surface a childish sketch of a small girl,
done in crude pinks and blues, the hair just an enormous smudge
of chrome-yellow, which bore the inscription "Crummie by Crum-
mie, Aged Six." "Come on," she said, "let's go down and help
Sally."

The presence of Sally in the house--Mrs. Geard would hardly
allow her to cross the threshold of her sacred kitchen--was one
of the few tokens of domestic grandeur that had appeared in
Cardiff Villa, Street Road, since Johnny Geard's accession to
wealth.

And Sally--a daughter of Mrs. Jones of the High Street tea-
shop--was anything but a smart or experienced servant. But Cor-
delia was rather relieved not to be perpetually answering the door-
bell; and sometimes, when, in one of her bad moods, she was
lying supine on her bed upstairs, she did get a faint, malicious
satisfaction in hearing Sally repeat her most difficult lesson--
the inhospitable decree, "Not at home."

"Bloody Johnny," as the tavern-cronies in Glastonbury loved
to call Mr. Geard because of his preachings in the street and his
repeated references to the Blood of Christ, was evidently not in-
tending to use William Crow's money for the embellishing of
Cardiff Villa either with new paint, or furniture, or plate, or
servants! Cordelia wondered now, as they entered the kitchen and
found Sally Jones staring mute and awestruck before Mrs. Geard's
preparations, whether Mr. Evans realized yet how unlikely it
was that any large portion of this money would come to her

Even if she did marry him. "Never, never, did any man want tak-
ing care of more than Mr. Evans does!" she thought. Oddly
enough she never thought of her antiquarian suitor as anything
but "Mr. Evans." She had reached the point--no very easy point,
considering the ponderousness of the Welshman's second man-
ner!--of calling him Owen. But she never thought of him as
Owen...


"I really brought Mr. Crow to see you," said Mr. Evans, re-
ferring to John Crow, as they all sat around the tea-tray in the
front parlour, "because he's in difficulties." At the word "diffi-
culties" Megan Geard's mouth closed tight and she glanced
furtively at the preposterously big skull of her reckless husband.
She had known too well--and only too recently!--what to be "in
difficulties" meant.

But Bloody Johnny seemed to have no such memory. He
turned his hydrocephalic head on the pivot of his neck with the
slow gravity of the ghost in Punch and Judy and gazed at John
across the table."Your grandfather was a good friend to me,"
he remarked. "But I served him well. If you'll excuse the word,
Mr. Crow, and not think me presumptuous, I believe I can say
that I made your grandfather's last years very happy ones."

John reduced his eyes to two narrow slits. Through these aper-
tures he scrutinised Mr. Geard very closely, giving him the ap-
praising glance of a professional beggar, surveying a new coun-
tenance at a well-known back door.

"What I don't think is understood by any of your family, Mr.
Crow," the ex-preacher went on, "is that I regard your grand-
father's bequest in the light of a Divine Responsibility."

At the sound of these surprising words from his host and
namesake John Crow's eyes almost closed entirely, while the
hereditary twitch in his face became like a tiny jumping-jack
under the skin of his lean cheek. "You mean you're going to
give the oof back to us, Sir?" he said.

Bloody Johnny was the only person at that table who remained
completely at ease under the shock of this rude speech. "Well,
Mr. Crow," he remarked serenely, "not exactly give it back to
you, you know, nor to any of you; not, that is, exactly, as you
might say, give it back. But I do intend--and my friend Mr.
Evans agrees entirely with my intention--to spend your dear
grandfather's gift, or at least the bulk of it, on a purpose in no
way connected with myself or with my family." Mr. Geard's
voice raised itself a little as he uttered these final words and
his great head seemed to obey an interior command as it swung
resolutely round on its pivot. What it faced now under this in-
terior command, and John Crow seemed to hear an audible
creaking of its machinery as it turned, was the extremely agi-
tated countenance of Megan Geard whose mouth, at the words
"with my family" had become a thinly outlined half-circle whose
drooping horns were surrounded by twitching wrinkles.

"Mr. Evans thinks," went on Bloody Johnny, "that it would
be wrong of me not to take my wife and my girls, especially my
daughter Cordelia, into my confidence, though, as you know,
my treasure,"--here he fixed an unwinking gaze upon his wife's
wide-open eyes--"I am not one to reveal my designs till they
have matured." The reverberations of these grand words "designs"
and "matured" had scarcely died away when Bloody Johnny fol-
lowed them by a deprecatory murmur, addressed, not to his fam-
ily but to his God. "I mean," he added, "till they have been
blessed from Above."

A lack-lustre film formed over John's eyes, and he said to
himself, "If this fellow turns out to be a superstitious fool, in-
stead of a hypocritical knave, I shall get nothing from him. There
goes my easy job, up in smoke!"

"My relative, Mr. Geard," said Owen Evans, with a respectful
glance at Cordelia," has come to the conclusion that there are
ways of bringing to Glastonbury, by the wise expenditure of a
little money, shoals and shoals of pilgrims. They will come from
France, from Germany, from Russia. They will flock here in
such increasing numbers that Glastonbury will once more rival
Rome and Jerusalem as a centre of mystic influence. It only re-
mains for"--at this point, to Cordelia's complete astonishment,
though she thought, as she had said to Crummie, that she "knew
Mr. Evans through and through," his gaze dropped from her at-
tentive eyes and sank to her clasped hands which rested on the
table, while his voice became broken, spasmodic, intense--"for
some...for some...for some event to happen...and a new Religion...
different...from any that's ever been...will...will...will make a crack
in the world!" They all turned their eyes upon his contorted face;
all except Crummie who glanced wonderingly at her sister.

"What do you mean by 'a crack in the world'?" enquired John
Crow, the film of hopelessness passing from his lineaments and
his whole attention aroused.

"A crack in Cause-and-Effect," cried Owen Evans, his voice
rising; "a crack in the Laws of Nature, a crack in Matter! And
Something will break out, through that crack, that will take away
our torment!"

The word "torment" was uttered from such twisted lips that
it was as if it really came from a spirit in hell and Cordelia
Geard's heart began to beat. The others, except the profane John,
averted their eyes, as if from some apparition that was as ob-
scene as it was tragic. But as Owen Evans slowly recovered him-
self, the girl unclasped her hands and very lightly, and with a
gesture that no gentlewoman in the land could have surpassed
for dignity and grace, laid her fingers on the sleeve of his coat.

John, who was intently watching Mr. Evans, could not decide
whether the man even noticed this movement of the devoted girl,
whose fingers were withdrawn as soon as her friend was master
of himself again, but to the sly scrutiny of the "run-down adven-
turer" the incident was very significant. "He's not out for her
money," he thought, "but he's certainly out of her depth. I must
get at the fellow's secret. He's got some devilish spike sticking
into his midriff; but what it is the Lord only knows!"

As for John Geard, under this explosion from his Welsh ally,
what he did was slowly and deliberately to turn, not his head, but
his eyes, in their hollow motionless sockets, completely away from
the agitated man. Mr. Geard had his mouth full of sponge-cake,
of which he was particularly fond, and his voice sounded blurred
and thick. "What we ought to have in Glastonbury," he said,
"and Midsummer would be a good time for it--is a Religious
Fair, or Passion Play, that would attract people. There has not
been a Passion Play here for years." He paused and shut his
eyes. "Nor a Miracle either," he muttered. "No, not for three hun-
dred years; hut the time will come, and the Miracle will come!"

It was at that moment that Crummie, who was much more
aware of what Sally was doing than of what any of her father's
guests were saying, jumped up from her seat and ran into the
kitchen. From the kitchen--for the impulsive girl left the door
wide open--everyone could hear her scolding the little maid for
inattention. It was clear from the first words that ensued that
Crummie found the domestic truant standing in Street Road con-
templating the passers-by; but a moment later they heard Crum-
mie's own voice raised in lively salutation. Sally herself came
back, shamefacedly enough, into the dining-room and whispered
something to Cordelia; but there was such a draught of chilly
air entering the room now, that Mr. and Mrs. Geard and their
two male guests kept their faces tunied and their attention di-
rected towards the two open doors.

"It's young Mr. Dekker," said Cordelia presently, "I know his
voice." At the name Dekker there occurred that curious moral
stiffening, that gathering together of relaxed social awareness,
which always happens in England when an upper middle-class
person enters the company of a group of lower middle-class per-
sons. Cordelia had hardly uttered the words, "I know his voice,"
than Crummie herself came back into the room bringing Sam
Dekker with her.

There was a general rising and shuffling and shaking of hands;
and in the midst of the confusion, while Sally was pouring luke-
warm water upon stale tea-leaves, Cordelia slipped into the
kitchen and began to make a fresh pot of tea and to cut fresh
bread and butter. Sam Dekker sat down, awkwardly enough, by
Crummie's side. Here he was at the end of the table, next Mrs.
Geard, but also next the door. He refused to put. down his hat
and stick and kept protesting that he must not stay and that he
had already had tea.

"Oh, Cordy! How nice of you to think of that!" cried the
younger sister, when after a few nervous generalities about the
balmy mornings and the chilly evenings of this unusual March
the ice was broken by the appearance of fresh tea and fresh
bread and butter.

Sam did now consent to allow Crummie to take his hat and
his stick away from him. He had begun to look at John Crow
with a stealthy, silent, lowering curiosity, as if John had been
a fellow badger in a gathering of foxes.

"May I tell Mr. Dekker," John now found himself saying,
"about the grand plot that you two gentlemen are hatching to
make this place a sort of English Oberammergau?"

"I could hardly hope," remarked Mr. Geard, with an imper-
ceptible nod of approval towards John, "to convert Mr. Dekker
to my immature Design; considering the position held by his
father."

"Mr. Geard has the idea," John went on, addressing himself
now to Sam Dekker alone, "of holding a sort of Pageant, a sort of
Religious Fair at Midsummer...I believe he has the twenty-
fourth of June in his mind,...in the Tor Fair-field, eh, Sir?
His idea is to make this such an event, that people will come to
it from France and Germany, as well as from all over England.
It will, of course, be entirely friendly to all religious bodies. It
won't be a church affair. It won't be a nonconformist affair. It'll
be...I'm right in this, aren't I, Mr. Geard?...a Glastonbury Revival,
absolutely independent of the churches. I can see you're in-
terested in the idea, Mr. Dekker; and so will everybody be when
we've got it advertised a little. Oh, I wish you'd make me your
secretary, Sir, or your master of ceremonies--anything of
that sort! I know I catch exactly what you have in your mind.
And it would hush up all gossip too, and look well in the papers,
if you had one of us Crows as your chief lieutenant. And in-
cidentally 'twould give me a chance to"--he was going to say "to
upset Philip," but as he surveyed Bloody Johnny's face he recog-
nised that malice towards an enemy was completely alien to the
man's nature, so he concluded differently--"a chance to marry
and settle down. I can see you're surprised, Mr. Dekker, to see
me here at all; considering my family's grievance against Mr.
Geard, and our envy and our jealousy of Mr. Geard; but I'm a
black sheep, you know. I don't mind confessing to all you kind
people"--here he raised his voice and glanced at the round, red,
hypnotised face of the maid Sally, who, standing behind Mrs.
Geard's chair, had long since been hanging upon his lips with
as much attention as if he had been the Human Chimpanzee
talking in the Magic Booth at Somerton Circus--"that I came
here hoping that Mr. Geard would let me help him in some way.
I even thought that his employment of me would act as hush-
money to all this gossip...a sop to Cerberus, as you might say...
but Mr. Geard reads my thoughts...you know you do, Sir! Yes,
you really do!"

He stopped now, quite out of breath; and Sam Dekker glow-
ered at him in sulky silence. Sam's attention had been wandering
from the beginning to the end of his discourse. He had been
saying to himself, "I know what it means, seeing Zoyland going
up Wells Road. He's walked in to see Philip! This means that he
is going to Wookey Hole. He wouldn't come to see him otherwise.
He didn't last year; and I fancy he couldn't very well...not
on a job like that." At this point, hearing the words of John as
if they were perfectly meaningless sounds, his mind ceased to
think in words. He felt himself sleeping with Nell in William's
bed. He felt the pressure of her breasts against his chest. This
voluble fellow opposite him, chattering about a Midsummer
Pageant was of no more significance to him than a quacking duck
in a farm-yard when he was on his way to Queen's Sedgemoor.
In fact as he glared at John, John's nose became the road be-
tween the two great oaks and the hamlet of Wick, while John's
forehead became the path over the water-meadows. "I must know
the truth, one way or the other," he said to himself. I must know
if she's going to bed alone out there when he goes to Wookey
Hole."

It was touching to Cordelia to watch the way Crummie was
behaving. She was no longer the wanton, playful, toying girl,
who delighted in tantalising the senses of men. She was a grave
maiden, a tender, drooping-eyed, watchful maiden, who did all
she could, by a thousand little attentions and tactful considera-
tions, to win favour with her absent-minded lord!

"He's a gentleman," Mr. Geard was thinking to himself. :and
he's a clever rogue. Of course he's an atheist. He doesn't believe
in anything. You can see that with half an eye. But ifs the
Blessed Lord who's brought him to me. He's the very man for
my Design--the very man! A believer would be difficult. A
churchman would be impossible. This lad will treat my Design
as a masquerade. He'll have no prejudices. He's what I‘ve been
looking for ever since I got back from Norfolk. And he is his
grandchild too--yes, he's perfectly right about the fortune. It'll
make a very good impression on all concerned, for me to have
one of these Crows as a sort of partner! Hell have a share in
spending his grandfather's money. With his help I shall...I shall
do...I shall have...I shall be...I shall make...an absolutely New Thing
--sobbing happiness--black earth--rain--dew--peace--"

By this time the towers of his New Jerusalem, thus built to the
Glory of the Blood, were rising clear and crystalline to his view,
piling themselves up, buttress upon buttress, rampart upon ram-
part, beyond his wife's windowbox of begonias! Castles of crys-
tal, islands of glass, mirrors and mirages of the invisible, hiding-
places of Merlin, horns and urns and wells and cauldrons--hill-
tops of magic--stones of mystery--all these seemed to Bloody
Johnny's brain at that moment no mere fluctuating, undulating
mind-pictures, but real things; real as the cracked wood of the
old windowbox, real as the indented frown upon Megan's fore-
head! John Crow could clearly see what an impression his words
had made upon his host; but be waited patiently till this fit of
absent-mindedness should come to an end.

Crumrnie had by now reached the point of daring to express,
in gentle, hesitating tones, her growing absorption in the study
of natural history. She was asking Sam if there were not some
easy books that she could buy on such things as aquatic plants,
water beetles, pond weeds, and so forth; for these, it seemed,
had for many years been Crummie's secret delight; though, for
the sake of peace in the family, it had been necessary to conceal
her obsession.

"Don't you think, John, it would be wiser," burst out Mrs.
Geard at last, finding her opportunity in one of those curious
long silences that seem especially to fall on groups of human
beings of just about the numbers that occupied that room, whereas
fewer people or more people would have been free from that em-
barrassment, "don't you think, John, it would be wiser to wait
till we moved into Chalice House before employing anyone else?"

"Mother dear!" interrupted Cordelia. "Mr. Crow doesn't mean
that he wants to live with us! Father will only pay him a small
salary for his help. It'll save Father a great deal. It'll save Father
taking an office."

At the word "office" Megan Geard crumpled up. She sank back
in her chair and gasped. The idea of the golden stream of this
great Northwold legacy being deflected into an "office" seemed
to her almost the worst that could happen. In the moving pic-
tures which she sometimes attended the word "office" was syn-
onymous with dissipation and deception.

Sam Dekker at this moment rose stiffly to his feet. He had
decided upon immediate action. He would go himself that very
second--it could only be about half-past five--and call upon
the Philip Crows. He shook hands hurriedly with his host and
hostess, nodded to John Crow and Mr. Evans, and was escorted
by the silent Crummie to the front door where she reluctantly
handed him his hat and stick. He was so obsessed with what was
in his head to do that he took his things from her with a mere
"thank you," gave her an abstracted nod, and hurried off up the
street. As he approached St. John's Church, on the way to Wells
Road, it occurred to him with extreme vividness that it was likely
enough that Nell had walked into town with her husband from
Queen's Sedgemoor. He had seen William alone, but that meant
little; it was Nell's frequent custom to separate from Zoyland
when they were together in Glastonbury, do her shopping in
peace, and meet him afterward at the Pilgrims' Inn. Sam well
knew this habit of hers and had ere now taken advantage of it,
meeting her in the Ruins, and once, even, but that was a danger-
ous risk, in a field at the foot of the Tor. His heart beat fiercely
now, therefore, but more from love than from any startled sur-
prise, when he perceived her figure passing under the iron gas-
lamp arch into the churchyard. It had been a grey day; and with
the approach of sunset the air was beginning to grow both chilly
and dark. He took hurried steps in pursuit and reached the
churchyard just in time to see her entering the church porch.

There were several people moving in and out of the church
at that hour. There were still more people passing up and down
in front of the churchyard entrance; and among these latter, as
Sam was about to hurry under the iron arch that held the gas-
lamp, was a figure in working-mans clothes who hesitated not
to stop him and address him. Sam could hardly endure this delay.
The man was polite enough and his general demeanour had the
air of a foreman or a master plumber. But Sam's soul was al-
ready inside the church. And what on earth was this pale, intense,
red-haired young artisan talking about? He had caught hold of
him by the lappet of his coat. He was agitated about something.
"I beg your pardon," Sam blurted out at last, "but I'm in rather
a hurry. I've got to go, if you don't mind, into the church. I've
got to go!" At that moment such a bitter sneer contracted this
excitable young man's face that Sam did notice it and stopped.
What was the matter with this fellow? Why was he so agitated?

"So you're the gent she can't sigh 'arf enough about," the man
began, in a strong cockney accent "She sighs you 'ave the look
of a sighnt. Well, Crummie, I sighs, the next charnst I gets I'll
tike a good look at 'im. It ain't every die yer sees a bloomin'
sighnt on 'Igh Street. But I'll arst 'im, I sighs, if 'ee won't speak
up for a poor dog like yours 'umbly. A sighnt's word, I'll tell
'im, ought to go pretty far with a gal if he cares to give a bloke
a 'and-up in 'is courtin'."

A light for the first time broke upon Sam's impatient mind.
This must be Red Robinson, the cockney Communist, who was
always plotting troubles and strikes in Philip's factories. Sam
now remembered the fact that Red Robinson's mother, with whom
he lived, was an old charwoman of the most rigid conservative
principles, who worked regularly in the church. Sam knew her
well and had often heard her speak sorrowfully and tragically
of the wicked opinions of her infidel son. The whole episode was
a revelation to him of how poor the Geards had been before
they inherited their legacy. It seemed hard to imagine this well-
to-do workman aspiring to Crummie's hand!

"You've come to see your mother home?" he murmured feebly.
cursing both mother and son, and thinking to himself, "If this
chap comes in with me now it'll be the last straw!'" And the last
straw it was. For Red Robinson, clapping his workman's cap
firmly on his head, as if to show that a churchyard was no more
sacred than any other yard, resolutely followed as Sam moved
away, and as he followed continued to talk of Crummie. Sam's
desperation grew worse and worse as they approached the church
door. He had never heard a cockney accent carried to such a
limit. The truth was that Red's accent was more cockney than any
living Londoner's. A deep vein of what might be called "philolog-
ical malice" in him had come to emphasise this way of speaking
as a form of spite against the Glastonbury bourgeoisie.

"She sighs you 'ave the look of a sighnt," Red kept repeating.
"She sighs you 'ave haltered 'er whole life. She sighs that since
she's known you she's a different gal. So all you've got to do,
Mister, is to sigh the word and she'll marry me tomorrow!"

"Well I don't see what I can do for you, Mr. Robinson; but
I don't mind speaking to Miss Geard." These words were auto-
matically jerked out of him, like peas shaken out of a bag. But
at this moment they passed into the church and Red Robinson
and his exaggerated cockney speech became for Sam's mind far
less important than the dust now being raised by Red's mother as
the old woman swept her brush about between the pews with her
long black skirt pinned up above her grey woolen petticoat.

For there before his eyes was Nell Zoyland! The girl was lying
back in one of the pews nearest to the font in an attitude not of
piety nor of peace, but of apathetic weariness. One of her arms
was thrown over the back of the pew. Her face was so shaded by
her hat that in the dusk of that interior it was a mere white blur.
She did not look unhappy. No one would have taken her for a
tragic figure. No one, on the other hand, would have taken her
for a care-free visitor to Glastonbury. She might have been a sis-
ter of Sam's, some tired daughter of the priest of this very church,
resting after a long country walk.

"Are you ready, Mother?" he heard Red Robinson exclaim.
"'Urry now, for I wants my tie! Say good-night to Jesus and
hunpin yerself quick!"

Sam went straight to the girl's side and greeted her in a whis-
per. She caught up her hand quick to her throat and gave a little
gasping cry. Sam was so excited that he did not modulate his
voice as he greeted her while she sprang to her feet and faced
him. "Has he gone to see Philip?" he asked eagerly.

Nell Zoyland nodded, clutching three paper parcels which she
held, tight against her bosom, and not offering him her hand.

"Is he going to Wookey Hole?"

Again she nodded without a word.

He did lower his voice now to a low whisper that she could
hardly catch. But well did she know the drift of that desperate
question! Had she gone back to him--since that night? Her eyes
assumed a strange, weary, indifferent look, in that dim light, and
they seemed to leave his face and gaze into the far distance.
"Have...you...gone...back...to him?" he repeated with almost brutal
insistence. For the third time she nodded; and then, moving her
feet a little, as if the ground was slippery beneath her, she
straightened her body and looked him full in the face; and he
thought as she did so that there was a reproachful flash in her
eyes.

"Come...this way," he said, pulling at her jacket. They moved
out of reach of the ears of Red Robinson and his mother;
and Sam soon found that he had led her quite unconsciously to
the great empty sarcophagus bearing the initials J. A. Here they
stood side by side, she with her body pressed against the outside
edge of the stone, he with his fingers clutching its inside rim.

"How soon is he going to Wookey Hole?"

"In two or three days," she answered, looking at him with an
inscrutable expression. "By Saturday," she murmured, "he's cer-
tain to be gone." She paused and then added humbly, poking the
end of her umbrella into a crevice between two stones, "I can't
understand how either of you can put up with such a weak, un-
certain creature as I am. I was telling William that, just now, all
the way from Wick Hollow to Maidencroft Lane. I know I shall
bring a curse upon you both! What I deserve is that you both
should go off and leave me alone! Oh, Sammy, Sammy, how
much nicer men really are, at bottom, than women!"

Sam sighed. "I'd chance all the badness you could call up,
Nellie," he said, "if only I could get you to myself."

It was her turn to sigh at this. "Why didn't you just carry me
off, Sam dearest, that evening on Queen's Sedgemoor? We'd have
managed somehow. I'm not a fool; and you've got such strong
arms!"

Sam drew a deep breath; so deep that it shook him from head
to foot. He felt a leap in the pit of his stomach, as if a fish had
risen there. He felt the blood throb above his cheek-bones. "We
....might...still...do it, little Nell," he stammered huskily.

"It's too late now, my dearest," she said.

"Why is it?" he groaned.

"Because...because he's made me give myself to him...as I've
never done...before this."

Sam was silent, pondering in his brain the inscrutable twists
and turns of women's hearts. He thought to himself, "What am
I to believe? That day we went to Pomparles Bridge and looked
at the dace in those pools, and she told me about Arthur's sword,
she made me believe he had ravished her the first day they met;
and now she says this! Do women delight to make themselves out
victims? She first says this and then that...I cannot tell what
the truth is!"

"But you still love me, Nell?" he pleaded. "You haven't turned
against me? You haven't gone over to him completely?"

"I shall always love you beyond all else in the world," she said.
He now led her towards the altar and they seated themselves in
the very front pew of all and before their pew was an open space
of time-worn floor, carrying several quite illegible and absolutely
flat tombstones. Beyond these were the altar rails. But the girl
kept her eyes fixed on the ground and ceased not to draw her
hand up and down the polished edge of the seat. "But to give
myself to you after giving myself to him as I've done since that
night has something"--she spoke even more slowly now, but
never seemed to hesitate for a word--"something about it that
I can't bear." She lifted her eyes from the ground and fixed them
shyly and humbly upon Sam's troubled face. "I wouldn't blame
any woman," she went on, "who lived with two men, if one was
her earthly friend and the other her ideal friend. But you and
Will--you mustn't mind my saying it, Sam!--are both earthly
friends. It was because of that...that I...that I made Will sleep
alone. I wanted to belong to you altogether."

Sam spoke hurriedly and eagerly. "But I must come over and
see you when he's away. It'll be madness, Nell, to let such a
chance go."

A spasm of anger crossed her face. "Chances, Sam Dekker?
You talk of chances? Why didn't you carry me off when you had
the 'chance'? No, no! A girl isn't a bottle of wine for a man to
lock up in a cupboard, to take a sip from whenever he wants to!
Will's a genuine man anyway in these things. He doesn't wait for
a 'chance.' He goes right ahead and takes risks." She stood erect
before him, her parcels pressed against her waist, her umbrella
clutched crosswise against her bosom.

Her electric flash of anger communicated itself to him in a
second and he too got up upon his feet. "If you feel like that,"
he grumbled sulkily, "perhaps the best thing would be for me to
give up altogether going out to see you."

He gave a quick glance round the darkening church. But the
stone coffin of Joseph of Arimathea lay undisturbed, a vague blur
of insubstantial whiteness in the gathering dusk, and the Robin-
sons, both mother and son, had disappeared. "I never thought a
time would come," he said fiercely, "that we should have a chance
like this, only to throw it away! Have you forgotten everything
we've done together, and where we've been together? Have you
forgotten that reed-hut on Splott's Moor? Have you forgotten
Hartlake Railway Bridge? Have you forgotten that withy-bed at
Westholme and the Palace Barn at Pilton?"

"I never thought," she said, "that you would ever come to speak
of such things in such a tone! I've been a fool to treat you as one
of the few men that a girl could trust not to behave like a cad!"
This word "cad" she brought out with vibrant relish like a pet
dagger from a hidden sheath. She glowed in her indignation to
see the twitch of his poor, funny chin as she plunged it in.

"I only spoke of those places to remind you of things," he
retorted with flashing eyes. "What you've done in going back to
him when you belonged to me was far worse than talking of our
little things. It was a kind of...a kind of...well! I won't say that to
you. But you know what I mean! You've never put him out of
your heart--never!"

"How can you say that to me after everything?" she inter-
jected.

"Because that's what you're like! Because when you went back
to him you were acting like a whore." (I've done it now, he
thought. I've dropped the last straw on the heap by calling her
that!) "Where does he want you to meet him? Can't I take you
anywhere?" he said in a toneless mechanical voice. He took her
hand. He repeated this hopeless formula. His lips seemed to have
gone dry. He dropped her limp fingers, but she held him back for
a second by the look on her face.

"You've...made...me...very...happy...Sam," she whispered, while her
eyes brimmed with tears. Sam ought to have had the wit to realise
at this moment that had he swallowed his pride and changed his
tone all would have been well. Apparently a man can call his love
a whore and be forgiven! But he was at once too aggrieved and
too simple-minded to take advantage of the tears that were now
pouring down her face.

"Good-bye," he repeated doggedly; "good-bye, Nell."


A little later that evening, Red Robinson sat talking to his
mother and Sally Jones in Mrs. Robinson's kitchen in an alley in
Bove Town, a district of Glastonbury situated south of Old Wells
Road and Edmund Hill Lane. Red was questioning Sally about
the tea-party at the Geards', while his mother, in a clean dress, a
clean lace collar, a clean blue apron, was preparing supper.
"Why do you torment poor Sal so grievous, sonny?" protested
the old lady. "You'll be the death of me with your hinsurrec-
tions. List to a hold 'ooman, Sal, and leave not the paths of God's
'oly Word. Lot of good me son's 'Party' will be to 'im, with 'is
Rooshian Spies when 'is ole Mother be dead and gone! And this
Crummie Geard 'ee pines for! Your mother and me, Sal, have
known Crummie Geard, and Bloody Johnny 'er dad too, since she
were a tot in harms. Could Crummie dish up a nice tighsty dish
'o liver and 'am and fried tighties such as ye'll tighst in a min-
ute? Not on your little loife!"

"But, Mother," protested Red Robinson, "Crummie's dad is a
rich man now. Since I 'eard of that I ain't gone near 'er. I 'as me
own pride, Mother; and dahn't yer forget it!"

"Pride be 'anged!" cried the old woman, banging his supper-
plate down in front of him and pouring water into the empty
frying-pan, "you and 'er were keeping company; or I dunno
what helse it were! "

"Well, anyway," went on Red, hungrily beginning to eat his
supper, "whether I get Crummie or not, Crummie's promised to
'arst 'er dad--and she can twist the old boy round her little
finger--to hinvest 'is cash in 'elping us bankrupt this Crow con-
cern. She says he told the Almighty 'Imself at family prayers that
Crow was 'eading for ruin. He 'ates Crow, 'ee must 'ate Crow,
because of his filling the town with factories; whereas Bloody
Johnny wants to preach to the visitors; and visitors don't like
factories. With a little of Geard's cash to back us up we'll mike
the brute 'owl and maybe get the Town to tike over his concern.
That's the idea anyway they've got at 'eadquarters."

"But didn't you hear what I said?" put in Sally Jones. "Don't
I keep telling you he's going to employ Crow's cousin? Crow's
cousin be a tidy lad and a nice-spoken gentleman too; and old
man Geard be goin' to hire he to bring a girt Fair into Tor Field
with a grand Roman Circus and a Golden-Jerusalem Theayter and
a 'normous Guy Fawkes Pope, and more o' they gipoos and For-
tune-Tellers than have been seen since the King cut off Abbot
Whiting's head!" Sally's cheeks flamed and her eyes glittered as
she described these wonders.

Red Robinson spat into the stove. "Don't yer make no mistake.
Baby Sal," he said; "there won't be no Fair in Glastonbury in
our time except the regular Autumn one."

"Did Mr. Geard really talk like that?" enquired Mrs. Robin-
son, as she removed her son's plate and substituted another with
a plump piece of pudding thereon. "There's no telling what a man
will do, who's been poor, when he grows rich. Common folk like
that ain't no notion how to spend money. It tikes the real gentry
to spend money as it ought to be spended."

"You shut yer hold mouth, Mother!" cried Red with a chuckle.
It was the cause of endless pleasantries between these two that the
revolutionary ideas of the man were countered by the inflexible
Toryism of the woman.

"Don't you go on. then, putting these crazy notions into Sal's
mind. Don't you 'eed 'im. Sally, me gurl. Red's not been as I've
'a been, 'ousekeeper to the Bishop of Bath and Wells what was a
Lord--rest his sweet soul!--in's own right, seeing 'ee was uncle-
born to the Marquis of P."

"Is it really true, Mrs. Robinson," asked Sally timidly, "that
Mr. Zoyland, out to Queen's Sedgemoor, be thik Markises wicked
by-blow?" The two women, the old one and the young one,
pulled their kitchen chairs closer to each other; while an identical
expression of complacent awe animated their faces.

"That's what I've 'a 'eered from folks what do know, Sal. 'Tis
true I've never arst Mr. Zoyland 'isself. 'Tis a thing a gent like
that--as I knows from my hexperience with 'is Lordship--be apt
to be ticklish about. Not that in 'igh society, Sal, them by-blows
be rare. They be common as hidiots be with us. There haint no
great family, from on 'igh down, what 'asn't got 'en, Sal. Tis
nature with they to have 'en."

By this time, in surprisingly few gulps, Red Robinson had dis-
patched his pudding. He now pushed back his plate and rising to
his feet proceeded to light his pipe. That done, he took down his
woolen scarf from one nail and his cap from Another. "Don't yer
sit up for me, Mother," he said. " 'Tis quarterly meeting tonight;
and the Comrades from Wells and Wookey will be there and
high'm the one delegated for the chief haddress."

"I'll stay and help Mrs. Robinson wash up," said Sally brightly.
She made no move, however, to rise from her chair. She was
clearly anxious to satisfy at one and the same time her nat-
ural kindness of heart and her longing to hear more about the
Marquis of P.'s by-blow.

Red was on the point of laying his hand on the door-handle
when the door itself opened from without. It opened with the
peculiar impetus that inrushing children give, and no fewer than
four lively youngsters precipitated themselves into the room.
Sally did not rise from her chair now; for the leader of this little
gang was her brother Jackie. Jackie was accompanied by Nelly
Morgan, a wild, dishevelled little girl of eight. Sis was ten, as old
as Jackie himself, and an incorruptible devotee of Jackie's; but
being a heavily built and heavily witted child and burdened,
furthermore, by the care of her brother Bert, an infant of five,
who in placidity and appearance resembled a giant mushroom,
Sis was outplayed, outrun, outdared, outjumped, outclimbed, out-
fought, outpassioned by Nelly Morgan, in spite of her advantage
over Nelly of two whole years. Nelly's mother was a charwoman
and was always at work; which gave the little girl an independ-
ence from parental control envied by all the rest. Jackie had Sally
to order him about, in addition to their mother; and the little
Coles, although orphans, had a very active and formidable grand-
mother. Nelly Morgan had no one; for her charwoman-mother,
although an incredibly good worker during the day, had the pe-
culiarity, indeed the unusual gift, of being able to drink gin with
no bodily ill-effect every night until she was completely fuddled
Every day she would rise again by five o'clock; get her own and
Nelly's breakfast, and go off cheerfully to her laborious work.
She never uttered an unkind word to Nelly; far less ever struck
her. But on the other hand she was wont to fall into a sentimental
trance, as soon as she had washed up after supper, from which
she never emerged again that evening. During this trance she
would shed silent tears, sigh repeatedly, and talk in mumbling
tones of Nelly's dead father; but Nelly herself became to her
mother at these times as if she were totally invisible, inaudible,
and non-existent. For a little girl of eight to become non-existent
to her only relation every single day of her life at seven o'clock
was an experience likely to have a noticeable effect; and Nelly's
nature got steadily more and more self-absorbed and more and
more eccentric. Though still only eight, the child had the intelli-
gence of a girl of eleven ; and on the few occasions when even the
bold Jackie showed the white feather, Nelly--lieutenant of this
robber band--played the devil with all strategy and all prudence.

Bert Cole--that titanic mushroom--was at once awed and
entranced by Nelly, who, in Sis's occasional absences, dragged
him, pushed him, carried him, transported him, upon undertak-
ings of fearful excitement. Bert never cried, never laughed, never
smiled, and very rarely uttered a word; but, although the young-
est of the robber band, he could not be called the least inter-
ested, for of all the people in Glastonbury, including even Mr.
Wollop, the draper, who had been three times Mayor, none--I
say none--contemplated the Dream of Life with a more concern
trated gusto. A little bewildered, but not, even then, profoundly
disturbed, when Nelly Morgan insisted on carrying his enormous
weight upon her slim back, Bert Cole surveyed the panorama of
existence with an unpossessive, grave-eyed relish that would have
put Diogenes himself to shame.

The inrush of this hurly-burly of excited children delayed for
a moment Red Robinson's departure. Sis and Nelly were both
favourites of his; and there was a general hullabaloo in that
peaceful kitchen while he "'unted," as he said, "'igh and low"
for a bag of sweets he had secreted somewhere. Mrs. Robinson
had even to move to another place her pile of mending from the
stately black-oak hall-chair, which came from the Bishop's Palace
and which served her as a work-table. She had to disarrange, too,
her reproduction of Constable's "Hay-Wagon"--another relic of
the Bishop's Palace---which was balanced on the top of her
dresser. All was joyous confusion; with Bert, like some ideal
prize boy, surveying life from Sally's knees, his plump legs
hanging down, his plump fists clutching together some bits of
blue glass he had picked up, and his grave eyes taking in the
Platonic Essence of the whole unique scene.

As for Jackie, a slender, fragile-looking but passionately in-
tense little boy, with chestnut-brown hair and hazel eyes, he had
begun a dramatic story to his sister Sal, the points of which he
had continually to emphasise, when Sally's attention wandered,
by tugging at the locket round her neck. Long experience had
taught him that the threat of a broken locket was the most atten-
tion-provoking of all gestures on the part of a younger brother.
"I seed she over Tor and over Wirral. I seed she again over
Chalice and over Stonedown. 'Twere a girt big 'un she were; and
'un flew low, like 'twere goin' to turn topsy. 'Twere the biggest
flyer ever made, out of Ameriky; and Nelly says she knows for
sure 'tis Mr. Tom Barter what be steerin' of 'er. 'Tis Mr. Crow's
airplane, Nelly says, and Mr. Barter be pilot on she."

‘'Didn't I tell you, Mother?" broke in Red Robinson, who had
been listening intently to all this. "That's what he's doing with
the money he takes out of the labouring man's sweat! You're main
right, Nelly, you're main right! Barter is the pilot. And that
means that he's letting the office down. And that means that the
whole business will be a washout. I'll tell 'em at the Quarterly
tonight what you've seen, Jackie. You wait, Mr. Crow! You wait!
You'll find Red Robinson isn't a fellow to spit upon, little though
you may think of his dependableness!" This word referred to a
personal quarrel which Red had had, just a year before, with
Philip Crow. Philip had dismissed him without proper warning
and when angrily challenged by the man had coldly told him that
he did not find him "dependable." The truth is that Red Robinson
-- although politically a Communist--was temperamentally a
Jacobin. A rankling personal hatred of Philip Crow had grown
by degrees to be the dominant passion of his life, stronger even
than his devotion to Crummie Geard. That "not dependable" had
become a kind of vicious quartering on the great, heraldic
blazon of Mr. Robinson's revolutionary faith.

Automatically replacing his mother's basket of mending for the
church upon the stately hall-chair, which bore upon its back the
episcopal arms of Bath and Wells--God knows how the ex-
housekeeper had got hold of it!--Red Robinson picked up for
the second time his cap and scarf and let himself out into the little
dark street. On his way to the small upper room in Old Jones'
Antiquity Shop, which had for years been the Comrades' meet-
ing-place, Robinson found it necessary to pass quite close to a
low stone wall, over which--at a single field's distance--he could
not escape from seeing in the starlight the richly carved ruin of
that oldest and most sacred building in Glastonbury, the Church
of St. Mary, usually known as Saint Joseph's Chapel. On this
spot stood the original Wattle Church built by Joseph of Ari-
mathea. Here was the stone church erected much later by Saint
David of Wales; and here too was discovered, in comparatively
modern times, the carefully preserved Well, into which a blood-
red stream of magical water once trickled down from the very
slope of Chalice Hill. It was to the monkish guardians of this
mystical spot, doubtless carrying in its enchanted soil, fed by the
bones of untold centuries, the psychic chemistry of religious cults
far older than Christianity, far older than the Druids, that King

Ina's charter was given, the charter which still exists, an actual
piece of material parchment, inscribed by an unknown human
hand in the year seven hundred and twenty-five. One of the most
familiar of the constellations--was it Cassiopeia?--Red Robinson
was weak on the subject of the stars--hung suspended just above
this famous fragment of antiquity. Red surveyed this stellar sign
with approbation. It was useful; it afforded light--though in a
primitive form and not very freely--to the delegate who was to
address the Comrades that evening. There was no nonsense about
it. Those twinkling celestial orbs might have been electric bulbs,
inaugurated by some disillusioned Lenin of the Ether. Thus did
Red Robinson set the seal of his revolutionary approval upon
the stellar system. But the shadowy Norman arches of St. Mary's
Chapel, as he surveyed them now, filled him with anger and con-
tempt. He went so far as to spit over the low wall in the direction
of that Bastille of Superstition. That his spittle only fell on the
back of a small snail that was travelling across a dockleaf by the
light of those same stars was an incident of small importance. He
had expressed his disgust with Saint Joseph, Saint David, Saint
Patrick, Saint Dunstan, Saint Indractus, Saint Gildas, Saint Be-
nignus. He had expressed his disapproval of King Edgar the
Peace-Maker, of two King Edmunds, and of more Abbots than he
could possibly name! As to King Arthur--but he swallowed his
wrath now and moved on.

He was soon entering the little shop of Old Jones. Old Jones
was still in hospital. The little cyst, referred to by Penny
Pitches, had been successfully cut out of Old Jones' withered
frame; but the shock of the operation delayed his recovery. Mr.
Evans was still, therefore, playing the role of his representative.
It was in a bare room, filled with school-forms, and a little school-
platform--for it served on Sunday as a meeting-place for a hand-
ful of Plymouth Brethren--that the quarterly gathering of
Comrades was held. This room was on the third floor and was
just above the bedroom occupied by Mr. Evans.

The Welshman was now seated at his open window finishing for
exactly the twenty-fifth time, the “Morte d'Arthur" of Sir Thomas
Malory. The indescribable sadness of those final pages was wrap-
ping him round in a delicate melancholy, when he became aware
of the hustle and the clatter of the meeting above his head. He
tried to render himself oblivious to these intrusive sounds. He
even placed his pair of guttering candles upon the broad window-
sill and the book between them. But to no avail! The voices of the
Comrades, the scraping of their feet, the vigorous clapping of
their hands, entered his window, descended his chimney, and
came down through the cracks between the creaking boards of
his ceiling. The voice of Red Robinson raised in indignant de-
nunciation, lowered in Machiavellian persuasion, clear and in-
cisive in practical suggestion, presently drove the sorrowful piety
of the repentant Lancelot completely off the field.

The unfortunate thing was--but such was Mr. Evans' psychic
constitution--that he no sooner lost his sacred and sweet melan-
choly under this downpour of communistic reasoning than his old
fatal temptation began to trouble his mind. It attacked him
vaguely, mistily, atmospherically, with a sort of deadly diffused
sweetness of indescribable poison. And what was the worst thing
about the way it attacked him was the fact that it made the
project of being married to Cordelia Geard an expectation of
such withering dullness that it made him groan to think of it.
And yet he did genuinely love Cordelia. Not with any kind of
physical love. That was impossible. But with a feeling of pity that
shook the foundations of his nature. He had never pitied anyone
as he had come to pity Cordelia. His pity for her had grown step
by step with his admiration for her mental and spiritual qualities.
Why then this intolerable sense of dullness--oh, much worse
than dullness!--this sense that the very leap of life in his deepest
fibres would perish of sapless sterility if he were to live forever
by her side, day and night, night and day by her side! How
could he have permitted this corrosive poison so to soak, with its
fatal fungus-juice, every nerve of his being? Struggling with this
vague temptation now, he began to dally with the ghastly idea
that apart from some element of sadistic feeling it would be im-
possible for him not to shrink away with infinite loathing from
any physical contact with Cordelia. He had thought at first, on
finding how fond he was getting of Cordelia, that here--in this
one single point--he had the advantage over normally amorous
people. Since with him the natural urge towards feminine beauty
as feminine beauty was less than nothing, surely he might be
permitted to indulge his pity--this pity, that was the magnetism
of his love--to the limit, without fear of feeling repulsion? If,
without the sadistic shiver, if, without this infernal Nightshade
juice, all flesh was literally grass, why couldn't he “make hay"
in human pastures from which normal people would shrink in
sick aversion? But the ghastly doubt began assailing him now;
suppose he had so drained away every drop of magnetic attraction
to natural human flesh that the daily presence of another person
would strew his life with the dust of the ultimate boredom to such
a degree that everything he felt, everything he saw, everything he
tasted, everything he heard, would exude a withering dry-rot?

He began inadvertently to listen to what Red Robinson was
saying in the room above. He had been hearing him, it seemed,
for hours; but he began to listen to him now. He blew out one of
his candles and moved the other one, and the volume of Malory
with it, back into the room. Sitting at his table, with the candle
and book in front of him, he set himself to listen attentively. But
it was hard to listen attentively. Oh, it all seemed so unimportant
--this problem of what became of mankind in general--compared
with what he was feeling in his own solitary being! Well! Any-
way that perilous quiver upon the air was drifting away now!
What brought it at some moments so much more strongly than at
others? Were there really powers of good and evil moving about
in the ether and touching us all at their own will, not at ours,
and at the strangest moments? He closed the book and pushed the
candle further from him. Through the open window came the
sound of a single, old, cracked bell. He couldn't imagine where
that bell hung. In some little neighbouring nonconformist chapel,
he supposed!

Still the voice of Red Robinson went on, arguing and proving
and denouncing and cajoling and persuading; and it was a curious
thing that in his public oratory the man largely succeeded in
dropping his cockney accent. "Incorrigible heretic! Curse him
with bell, book, and candle!" thought Mr. Evans. The Welshman's
triadic mind dived like a plummet, then, to the sea-bottom of
loathing from which he was always trying to escape. How queer
that that fainting sweetness, that quivering, shivering, swooning
sweetness, that was all about him in the air now, making every-
thing not touched by itself an ash-bin of intolerable dullness,
should be the thing that led him on and on and on till he incurred
this undying Horror!

Owen Evans leaped up upon his feet as if Something far worse
than any conceivable hell-torture had come into his head. He
stood still for a second and then swung round and faced the
window". And by slow degrees it came over him that what he
was really seeking from Cordelia was punishment. If he punished
himself enough, might not the Horror be disarmed, be repelled?
"Christ!" he murmured, staring out at the darkened windows on
the opposite side of the street, "if it is like that to live with her,
why should not that be my punishment? Why should not that
save me?" This sudden unmasking of a secret motive in his own
action which had hitherto been concealed from him gave Owen
Evans such a consoling sensation after his recent self-torture that
he lit his second candle again and sitting down once more at his
table re-opened Malory. He was careful to open the book this
time not at the end, but at the beginning; and he turned over the
pages till he came to a particular passage about Merlin which
always stirred him profoundly. Everything that he could discover
about Merlin sank into Mr. Evans' mind and took a permanent
place there. Scraps and morsels and fragments, mythical, histori-
cal, natural, supernatural, as long as they had some bearing,
however remote, upon the life of Merlin, filtered down into Mr.
Evans' soul. He had already begun to write a life of Merlin more
comprehensive than any in existence. In fact Mr. Evans' "Life
of Merlin" was to include all that has been written of that great-
est of enchanters in Welsh, in English, in French, and in Old
French. As all Merlin's disciples well know, there is a mysterious
word used in one of the Grail Books about his final disappear-
ance. This is the word "Esplumeoir." It is inevitable from the
context to interpret this as some "Great Good Place," some mys-
tic Fourth Dimension, or Nirvanic apotheosis, into which the
magician deliberately sank, or rose; thus committing a sort of
inspired suicide, a mysterious dying in order to live more fully.
As he sought for one of his favourite passages--for "Esplumeoir"
does not appear in Malory--he kept murmuring that particular
invocation under his breath, pondering intently on the occult
escape offered by this runic clue from all the pain of the world,
an escape so strangely handed down from far-off centuries in
these thaumaturgic syllables.

While Mr. Evans was thus occupied, Red Robinson in the room
above where the Comrades were assembled to hear his speech
was thinking to himself that he must conceal one little fact about
his grand message to them and the scheme he intended to lay
before them. This was the fact that it was really none other than
Persephone Spear, who, through her husband's mouth, had first
broached the idea of starting a Municipal Factory in Glastonbury.
It needed the wit of a woman to think of such a simple thing. But
Red Robinson, like many another masculine politician, was re-
solved to take all the credit to himself of this flash of feminine
inspiration! It was not long before the cockney's penetrating voice
began to make itself again audible to the ears of Mr. Evans, lifted
up to a yet shriller pitch as Red approached his main argument.

As a propagandist Mr. Robinson always aimed at a disciplined
art that resembled that of a Catholic peasant-priest carefully
trained in a Seminary; but it often happened that his art broke
down. "We have several Comrades," Mr. Evans heard him ex-
claim now, "who are on the Glastonbury Town Council. I appeal
to these Comrades; I beg these Comrades, to use every means
at their disposal to familiarize their colleagues with the prin-
ciples of municipal ownership. These factories depend upon
natural resources. The Wookey Hole one depends on the sub-
terranean River Axe which flows from beneath the Mendips. The
Glastonbury one depends on the waters of the River Brue. Does
this man Crow, does this selfish, luxurious rich man, cause these
rivers to flow, or create the rains and the springs that fill these
rivers? We are all Comrades here; and I may talk freely here. I
have come to learn that this religious fanatic we are accustomed
to hear called by the name of Bloody Johnny"--here there was
a terrific stamping of feet and loud hilarious laughter above Mr.
Evans' head!--"is intending to use his legacy of ill-gotten bour-
geois money, of which all the Comrades here have heard, to bring
crowds of visitors to the town. You know, Comrades, how such
bourgeois visitors dislike everything industrial, their dislike
is not shared by the man I refer to. Now this is what I propose
to you, Comrades; I propose that some one among us should be
delegated to approach this man Geard, who is evidently prepared
to throw his money away, and try and persuade him to lend the
Town Council, of which he is now a member, funds large enough
to buy out this devil Crow! I propose that this delegate from the
Party persuade Geard to buy for himself the factories, if he can-
not induce the town to purchase them. Anything is better than
leaving them in the hands of such a devilish enemy of the work-
ing-man as we know this Crow to be. And they'll go for a song,
I tell you, Comrades. They'll go for a song; because a really big
strike will throw the concern into bankruptcy.

"Don't interrupt me. Comrades from Wells! This is only half
my plan. As you all know this is the year for the election of our
Mayor. Geard is a fool. But he is a well-meaning fool. He is
sympathetic to our cause. He is almost one of us. He is further-
more the sort of man that could be persuaded into anything! I
have myself the entree into his house...I needn't say any more
at this moment...and if this Quarterly Meeting of the Com-
rades of Wells and Glastonbury delegated me to approach him as
their representative, I believe there would be a good chance of
persuading him. We would have to make his name prominent--
that's what all bourgeois philanthropists want--to be talked of,
to be heard of! The Comrades on the Town Council would then
propose him for Mayor--to succeed that prize ass, Wollop. Noth-
ing would please him better than to be proposed for Mayor. With
Geard as Mayor, and the Party behind the Mayor, we might
municipalise the water, the gas, the electricity and finally these
factories! This, Comrades, is simply common sense. Some Com-
rades here may object that this is a wild-goose scheme; that
in proposing it to them I am departing from practical pol-
itics. Let such Comrades bethink themselves a little! Here
is this sum of money, inherited by this incredible fool who
wants to spend it on being talked about. Why should not we
elect him Mayor when the elections come on? No Party but
our Party would bother with such a catspaw. But that's just
why we must win in the end. Because we despise no means!

The Conservatives of course will oppose him. But the Liberals
and Labour men will support us if we take a strong lead. That's
the great thing; to take a strong, clear lead! Half the Town
Council are sick to death of Wollop. He's been Mayor of Glaston-
bury so long that everyone wants a change. The drinking men
would all vote for Bloody Johnny, just for the sport of it and to
stir things up. All the Nonconformists would vote for him. Crow
hates the mere thought of the fellow. Crow will get angry and
say wild things and make some howling blunder; and then the
Town Council, with our Party in the background, will have Glas-
tonbury in their--"

It was clear to Mr. Evans, who had begun at last to grow seri-
ously interested in this discourse when he realized how closely it
concerned "his relative, Mr. Geard" that the meeting had called
the speaker to order and shouted him down. Some other voice
was speaking now in cold, low, sarcastic tones. Evans caught the
words "personal ambition," "fancy scheme," "fairy-tale poppy-
cock," "wasting the Party's funds," "Menshevik-claptrap." He
even imagined he heard the name of "Crummie" coupled with a
very gross epithet. The Quarterly Meeting evidently regarded it-
self as free from eavesdroppers and was permitting its speak-
ers untrammelled licence. After a while Red Robinson's voice
was audible again. Evans had met him once at the Geards' and
was sure he was not mistaken as to his identity.

This time it was clear that the cockney orator was trying to
carry the day by an emotional appeal. "We shall never have such
a chance again, Comrades," he was saying. "Geard is a fool but
Geard has a good heart. By electing Geard as Mayor we shall be
electing ourselves into the power behind the throne. And what
could we not achieve then? Away with all these mediaeval super-
stitions! Away with all these pious Pilgrimages! Glastonbury is.
only one town among other towns. There's nothing wonderful
about Glastonbury but the health and freedom and happiness of
its men, its women, its children! While this fellow Crow exploits
the natural resources to his own profit, and while our bourgeois
tradesmen exploit all this mediaeval superstition to their profit,
what becomes of the real men and women, able-bodied Somer-
setshire men and comely Somersetshire women? They can't afford
meat or butter! They can't afford fresh eggs! Their children are
underfed. Look at them, Comrades! Look at the children in Beck-
ery and Bove Town. Look at the children in Benignus Alley! and
Paradise! There you have the whole issue! On the one hand Crow
and Wollop exploiting the people's bodies; on the other these
pious mountebanks exploiting their souls! And all these fine
bourgeois gentry, Lawyer Beere, Doctor Fell, Parson Dekker and
so on; and old Wollop the worst of all; what are they doing?
They are burning toy candles to the 'oly Grail! Yes, they are
burning incense while women and children haven't enough to
eat!

I tell you, Comrades, Geard is our man. I've talked to him al-
ready...I have already...I needn't go into that...though the
Comrade from Wells did use insulting language I scorn to an-
swer him....I have already a certain influence over Geard
through his favorite daughter....I've already made Geard see
the light upon many economic points...I have already made
Geard open his mind to many bourgeois tricks. Geard has had
the working-class mentality opened up to him. It is the Com-
rade from Wells, not I, who has departed from the Party's prin-
ciples in his abuse of me and Geard. The time has come for
real action. The election of the Mayor comes on in a few weeks.
We can't elect one of ourselves Mayor. The Comrade from
Wells knows that perfectly well. But we could elect Geard; and
then work the Council through Geard. My plan is not a wild-
goose plan; it's a carefully thought-out scheme based upon
psychology . That is the reason, no doubt, why the Comrade
from Wells found it so hard to understand!"

Mr. Evans heard uproarious laughter and applause as the
speaker ceased. It was evident that that finai hit at the opposition
was very popular with the Comrades. He himself sneezed vio-
lently at this point and the sound must have ascended to the room
above, raising the disturbing question as to their conclave hav-
ing been overheard. After a profound silence he heard the sound
of steps descending the stairs and there were whispers outside
his door. In order to make clear to the whisperers that he knew
what they were up to, Mr. Evans began clattering with his fire-
irons among the cold ashes of his grate. No sooner had he done
this than the steps receded up the stairs again. All subsequent
discussions in the room above were henceforth quite inaudible
and it was not long before the Quarterly Meeting broke up.

When Mr. Evans was at length in bed, with the little table and
one of his two candles convenient to his hand, he proceeded,
while he smoked his final cigarette, to take stock of what he had
overheard. "I shall tell Cordelia all they are plotting," he said to
himself. "But I don't see why they shouldn't elect my relative
Mayor. I think he would make a very good Mayor." And before
the Welshman's mind, as he squeezed out the fiery embers of his
cigarette on a broken china saucer that he had brought up from
the shop below, there floated an exciting dream of a communistic
Glastonbury, presided over by his relative Geard; a Glastonbury
in which he himself would play a sort of court-magician part and
with Cordelia--that free spirit of the Cymric race--inaugurating
the laws and regulations! As he finally turned over to the wall
and shut his eyes, he felt happier, thinking of this, than he had
felt for many a long "week. "If these working-men decide upon
this," he thought, "I suppose it'll really happen. I wonder whether
it's the Town Council, or the Church, or the Government that
gives a person leave to excavate?" He saw himself possessed
of John Crow's hazel-stick with its queer root-handle. He remem-
bered how John had assured him that with such a stick a person
could find anything buried in the earth.

"Hie jacet Artur us...Hie jacet...Artur us...Hie jacet...hie..."



CARBONEK



TWO OR THREE DAYS AFTER THE QUARTERLY MEETING ABOVE
Old Jones' shop, the Bove Town robber band, that is to say
Captain Jackie and his infantile followers, were deploying, if
such a word may be used for the movements of so diminutive
a troop, in loose marching order up the narrow Godney Road.
They had left all the decent houses far behind when they de-
bouched from the Wells Road. They had long ago passed the
drive-gates of The Elms where Philip Crow' lived. They vrere
now on the edge of what was called Common Moor and were not
far from Backwear Farm which is the site of the British Lake
Village. The road they followed did not carry much traffic along
its hard, tarred surface; but the weather was so warm that the
robber band was exhausted. The air would have been dusty if
the road had not been so polished and so hard, but wherever the
brown earth showed between the clumps of rough grass by the
roadside it was dry and sapless and unsympathetic and depress-
ing. The day was one of those early Spring days that for some
mysterious reason, very hard to analyse, are felt to be ill-omened
and unpleasant. Something was certainly wrong with this day!
All animal nerves felt it. All human nerves felt it. All living
things were irritable, restless, disturbed; sick without being sick;
sad without being sad; annoyed without any apparent cause for
annoyance!

Sis was already carrying Bert on her back. "Plo-chuck...plo-
chuck..." went her sturdy legs, under the weight of the com-
placent and impervious infant. Nelly and Jackie were a little
in advance; but even they were walking in single file, silent and
grim. Nothing but the indomitable will of Captain Jackie could
have kept this exhausted cortege on the move; or brought it so
far afield on that nervous, touchy, irritable March afternoon.

At last they came to a standstill by a low, ancient, broken iron
railing which separated an object from the Godney Road. This
object could hardly be called a house. It was a tiny, little, stucco
building of two storeys, each with two windows, one looking
towards the road and one looking away from the road. The stucco
was of a whitish-yellowish colour and was peeling off. It was
stained here and there, too, with stains of a rusty brown. Only
an expert in the decline of material substance under weather
invasions could have interpreted these stains. They were not
lichen. They were not moss. They looked like rusty blood; but
they could not have really been blood; for no one would have
thrown blood against the wall of a house eight or nine feet from
the ground? Weather stains they obviously were, of chemical
origin; but this did not lessen the strangeness of the fact that
these rusty stains upon this stucco house had seen fit to assume
the surprising shape of a map of North and South America.

On the left-hand side of this tiny house was an open shed, one
portion of which served as the roosting-place for half a dozen
white fowls who were now wandering in the adjoining field.

At the back of the house was one of those large dykes or rhynes
on the edge of which grew three pollarded willows; and between
this little stream and the back door of the one single ground-floor
room there was a small vegetable garden, the leafy promise of
which was a good deal further advanced above the loamy clay
than in either of the grand bourgeois gardens tended by Mr.
Weather wax.

Seated in his shed, sharpening a faggot of sticks for the support
of his young peas, crouched the owner of Backwear Hut, a very
old man called Abel Twig.

No sooner did Jackie catch sight of Mr. Twig than he caused
his lieutenant Nelly to proclaim a halt.

It was not difficult to obtain obedience to this command, so
exhausted was the main body of the Alley Gang; and Bert, slip-
ping like a sack of flour from the back of Sis, was soon propped
up against the iron railings, through which his round eyes stared
in wonder at the map of North and South America.

The small hands of Jackie, Nelly and Sis clung in a row to the
topmost railing of Mr. Twig's sole line of defense while the hat-
less heads of Jackie, Nelly, and Sis looked down in unabashed
curiosity upon the interior of Mr. Twig's shed.

"Hullo!" cried Jackie in a shrill voice. "Hullo, Number One!"

In every town of the size of Glastonbury there are produced
by great creative Nature certain laughing-stocks, or butts of de-
rision, for the amusement of the rabble. Old Jones of the An-
tiquity Shop--now in the local hospital--and Old Twig, now be-
fore us in his shed, were the butts of Glastonbury. Thev were
bosom cronies, these two old men, and not a child in the poorer
district but had not at one time or other followed these queer ones
down the street mocking and shouting. They were always called
Number One and Number Two; and so widely spread were these
nicknames that in some of the bewildered heads of the contempo-
raries of Young Bert the two great excretory functions of our
poor animal organism, so prominent in children's lives, were
confusedly associated with these venerable old persons.

"Hullo, Number One!" repeated Jackie.

"Number Two be in Orspital!" echoed Nelly.

"Bert wants a glass o' water, Bert do," added Sis in a less com-
bative voice.

"What did I tell 'ee, eh? What did I tell 'ee, ye young sca-
mooches? I told 'ee yesternight I'd set Bumboggle at ye if ye
came again. Hi there! Good dog! Hi there! Hi there, Bumboggle!
Hi! Bumboggle! Ye girt sleepy beast! Come and eat up these
three impidents!"

Captain Jackie did not budge. Lieutenant Nelly did not flinch.
It is impossible, however, to conceal the fact that after this alarm-
ing invocation there were only five little hands clutching the rail-
ings. Sis, concerned for Bert, had thrown one arm round her
small brother's neck. Bert himself, however, to the honour of the
Alley Gang, replied to the challenge in a momentous sentence.

"I baint afeard o' no fancy dogs, I baint."

"Bert wants a glass o' water, Number One, Bert do!" repeated
Sis in a singsong monotone.

"Oh, he does, does he?" growled Old Twig. "I'll water him.
I'll firk him! I'll ferret him! Oh, he does, does he?"

Talking to himself all the time in the manner of a ferocious
ogre, Old Twig got up and retired into that square object which
went by the name of Backwear Hut. He returned almost imme-
diately with a tin cup, full of water, which he handed to Bert
between the railings, not relinquishing it himself, but tilting it
up, while the child drank long and deep. No sooner had the old
man returned to his shed and his task of whittling his pea-sticks
than Nelly lifted up her high-pitched voice.

"Tell us some more about they funny men what lived in Lake
Village in your grand-dad's time."

Muttering and chuckling the old man moved up to the railings
and leaning over tried to lift Bert across. But Bert, far too heavy
for him, was already pushing himself under the lowest bar. The
three 'older children were now scrambling over the top of the
railings; and in about three minutes after their first "Hullo" they
were all seated at Old Twig's feet in the front of his shed listening
spellbound to what he was saying.

"'Twould be in me wone field," he began, "this here Lake
Village if all had their rights. Grand-dad sold 'un to Lawyer
Beere's father and Lawyer Beere's father sold 'un to Mr. Crow up
at Elms, and Mr. Crow, they say, is goin' to turn sheep out and
make it a visitors' field. He've a-brought one party here already
this season and so have Mr. Barter. Other folks say he be going to
turn this wold field into one of they landings for airboats. If this
be true 'twill be terrible disturbing for them old ghosties in Lake
Village."

"Have you ever seed one of they funny men's ghosties, Mr,
Twig?" enquired Sis.

"Don't interrupt, Sis!" cried Nelly. "Number One ain't begun
his story yet! His story ain't about Mr. Crow."

"It ain't about any of the like of us," echoed Captain Jackie,
taking the cue from his lieutenant. "'Tis about they old men
theyselves."

"Be I telling this 'ere tale or be ye telling this 'ere tale?" said
Abel Twig. It dawned upon him rather sadly that his listeners en-
visaged the ancient heroes of Lake Village as so many feeble
replicas of Number One.

"Bert be a good boy, Bert be!" ejaculated irrelevantly the
owner of that name.

"When I tell this 'ere tale to Bumboggle," said Mr. Twig,
"Bumboggle do prick his girt ears and say nothink."

There was a complete silence among the Alley Gang at this,
and Old Twig went on.

"'Twas years and years afore King Arthur that they Ancient
British funny men lived in Lake Milage. Them funny men were
terrible feared of beasties in they days, beasties as big as my
house."

"Your house baint as big as my mummie's be," interrupted
Jackie.

"Number One's house be a very nice house," threw in Sis. evi-
dently feeling for a second as if Mr. Twig were a larger edition
of Bert.

"Were it afore your grand-dad sold thik field that they Ancient
Britons lived in they reed-houses?"

Nelly looked with astonishment at her gallant captain when he
made this unintelligent remark. She began to recognise, as many
romantic young women have been forced to do before, that high
military achievement is compatible with very crude historical
perspective.

But Mr. Twig was rather pleased than otherwise at this refer-
ence to his grandfather's hasty disposal of landed property.

" 'Twere a little while afore poor old Grand-dad s days," he
said, "that they Ancient British lived."

"Bert's got pins and needles," said Sis. "He be waggling wi'
his foot."

"Sit ride-a-cock on Number One's knee!" rejoined Old Twig,
placing the little boy upon one of his thin legs.

Seated solemn and erect, without moving an eyelid, Bert con-
templated the countenance of his host while Sis began rubbing
the child's instep.

A faint smile flickered over the little boy's face.

"Bert be pee-ing his trowsies," cried Sis with concern.

"No, I baint," retorted the infant indignantly.

"Why did yer look like that then?" argued his sister.

The child got very red and said nothing.

"You be," the girl reiterated.

"I baint," shrilled the youngster. And driven by the injustice
of the world to break his own rule of politeness--"He be like
Guy Fawkes!" he brought out, while the corners of his mouth
went down.

It was an unusual event for Bert to smile; it was no less than
a historic event for him to show signs of tears. Sis lifted him
from the old man's knee, took him upon her own little lap and
hugged him against her sturdy frame.

"There was one of they funny men in them times," went on the
old man hurriedly, "who killed a girt beastie wi' a flint arrow.
Thik beastie was called Giant What's-his-name on account of his
name bein' so hard to say; but when the funny man killed it he
took off all its skin and made a fire and his sister, who was his
wife too, cooked thik girt beastie."

Bert lifted up his head at this exciting point.

"Sis be Bert's wife," he remarked with intense gravity.

Sis slapped him sharply and turned reproachfully to Mr. Twig.

"Those times baint our times," she protested.

"I wish I lived in those times!" cried Nelly with flashing eyes.
"I'd have helped Jackie to shoot thik girt beast. I'd have carried
a bundle of they flinties!"

"My grand-dad's field what he sold to wold Lawyer Beere
baint the only field he had. Yon field, over thik dyke, were his'n,
and it be mine today."

Into this chorus of boastings it was natural enough that Cap-
tain Jackie should fling his contribution.

"When Mr. Barter do fly from this here Lake Village 'twon't
be with any ghosty, 'twill be wi' I!"

The whole robber band regarded their leader with wonder-
ing awe.

"I'll be there to wave to 'ee!" cried Nelly. "And I'll throw sum-
mat at 'ee, maybe, for luck!"

"Will you fly above your mother's chimney, Jackie?" enquired
Sis.

"Sis be Bert's airship," remarked the wide-eyed infant, glanc-
ing obstinately at his sister in full expectation of being slapped
again.

But it was old Twig, not Sis, who broke up this happy colloquy.
He suddenly clapped his hand to his head and beat on his hard
skull.

"Oh, the duck-a-duck!" he cried. "In sense! Out foolishness!"
And still beating his old pate he set himself to run with sham-
bling gait into Backwear Hut and up the single flight of stairs.

"Be off! Be off! B'off! Quick! Quick! If ye love Old Twig the
price of a bright penny, be off! Out of here! Afore they come!"

These remarks were addressed to the robber band from the
upper window of Back wear Hut, out of which the old man's with-
ered neck and grizzled head protruded.

It was clear that Captain Jackie was seized with panic--the
bravest are subject to such emotions once or twice in their lives--
for forgetting entirely about his little army he scrambled at top
speed over the railings and bolted up the road in the opposite
direction from the town. It was then that the heart of the band's
fiery lieutenant was torn in two; for while both fear and love
urged her to follow Jackie, an impulse in her girl's breast stronger
than fear and love constrained her to help Sis get Bert out of the
shed and over the railings. Then, however, she waited not a sec-
ond, but followed her lord on flying feet!

Poor Sis! The stolid little lass suffered a most evil moment, as
under the eyes of the frantic old man leaning out of the window
she tried in vain to get the panic-stricken Bert to mount upon her
back. Desperately she propped him up upon the lowest bar of the
railings and, turning round, clutched wildly at his legs. Each time
she seized his legs he toppled back against the railings. In vain
she lost her temper. In vain she slapped him. The panic of Jackie
and Nelly, the old man's frightened voice out of the window, her
own unusual agitation, quite broke down the philosophy of Bert.
The little boy, for the first time since he was two years old, burst
into a howl of desolate crying.

Two events now occurred simultaneously, while Sis, on her
knees by the blubbering child, soothed him with words and car
resses. The old man withdrew from the window, stumbled down-
stairs and rushed into the road. At the same moment two
extremely neat young ladies, both in elegant black, one with a
blue ribbon round her neck, and the other with a pink ribbon,
advancing side by side from the direction of the town, arrived at
Mr. Twig's gate.

They surveyed the sobbing Bert, who was making up for the
rarity of his departure from philosophic calm by his difficulty in
regaining it, with aloof distaste. This was the sort of thing that
both Louie and Lily Rogers--for such they were--had become
handmaidens to escape. The mere sight of Sis and Bert brought
back vividly to their minds their own early experiences. They
edged away from the little girl and the little boy and one of them
began fumbling rather nervously with the dilapidated latch of the
still more dilapidated gate. This gate had not, as a matter of fact,
been opened for years--perhaps not since the death of Mr. Twig's
grand-dad--and it became apparent to Louie, for in Miss Drew's
absence no human creature addressed her or thought of her as
"Rogers," that whatever entrance or exit Uncle Abel may have
possessed this rusty gate was not it.

Meanwhile Uncle Abel himself, full of the most obsequious
apologies, had appeared upon the scene and was now hovering
like the bewildered physician at Dunsinane, between the mental
trouble of one claimant on his attention and the physical impasse
of the other.

"'Tis here, my dears! 'Tis here I steps over," he cried, waving
to his dainty nieces to follow him and hurrying along the edge of
his domain till he reached a place where the top rail was non-
existent. "Here's the place, my precious ducks, 'tis only to lift
your pretty skirts a trifle so's not to get rust on 'en. 'Tis here, 'tis
here, my sweethearts! Up she goes, and over the hurdle! Here!
'Tis here I goes in and out!"

But the two elegant creatures--for they were really good-
hearted girls--had both of them by this time drifted up to where
Sis knelt by the prostrate Bert. The philosopher's sobs were over,
but his deep shame remained; and this emotion, as often happens
with wise men who have been unwise, displayed itself in irra-
tional anger towards his nearest and dearest. Bert, lying on his
face in the grass, kicked obstreperously every time Sis touched
him. Matters were further complicated at this moment by the re-
turn of Jackie and Nelly. Nelly in a moment jerked Bert upon
his feet; and once in a perpendicular position the child's interest
in the surprising scene around him made him forget his disgrace.

"Who are these children, Uncle?" enquired Louie of Mr. Twig.

"Hadn't you better be taking that little boy home to his mother,
child?" said Lily to Sis.

"'Tis Grannie," replied Sis. "Mother be dead and buried."

Abel Twig was now scrutinising with sly interest a paper bag
carried by Lily. The girls were accustomed to bring him some
casual token of Mr. Weatherwax's activity and it presented itself
very strongly to his mind that here was a providential chance of
getting rid of the children.

So he spoke up. "They be good children, they be, my rosebuds.
'Twere the sight of such good children, walking quietly along
road, while their decent mothers cleaned house, that made Uncle
Abel call 'em in. But now be time for ye all"--he turned to Sis
as being the one among the group who was most grown-up--"to
begin traipsin' home-along."

He gave Lily, who carried the paper bag, a little twitch of the
sleeve and pulled her a few steps aside.

"Have 'ee brought some o' they sweet apples what old Weath-
erwax do keep so long in hayloft?" he whispered craftily. "If 'ee
have brought they, I be terrible thirsty for 'en. Me stummick be
watering to get me teeth into 'en--them nice little firm sweet
fruities. Poor old Uncle have a girt fancy to taste, now and quick,
what his pretty nieces have brought to he in thik little bag."

"Of course. Uncle Abel," said Lily sweetly. "You shall have
them at once. There! I haven't had my kiss yet," and she touched
his bristly cheeks with her lips. "Of course they are all for you!
Eat them, keep them, cook them They're yours entirely! Louie and
I brought them for you with our love."

She gladly enough handed the paper bag over to him and
smoothed out with her cream-coloured, neatly gloved fingers the
ruffled front of her black dress.

Once in possession of this great bag of Hesperidean fruit the
astute owner of Backwear Hut felt himself to be master of the
situation. He took out five beautiful apples, one by one, and
began munching with hurried bites, though not without difficulty,
for his teeth were few, the first of these. The other four with a
cunning leer he handed over to Captain Jackie.

"These apples," he said, "what these young ladies have brought
be the cause why them funny men, what I tell 'ee of, called our
town Avallonia which be ancient British for orchard." Here the
wily old man addressed himself to Lieutenant Nelly. "Ye be a
robber band, ye be, same as they fierce invaders what plundered
poor old King Avallach. These apples be rich plunder. Robber
bands do march, robber bands do, slow and quiet, carrying their
plunder, till they be round thik corner of road; then they do eat
what they've taken from frightened natives!"

He had said quite enough. Without a second's hesitation, in the
most resolute order and in profound silence, the four children
went off hand in hand along the footpath by the roadside in the
direction of home.

Louie and Lily, now safely inside the railings, watched with
wonder the surprising exhibition of discipline in this well-exe-
cuted retreat. When the four were near the twist of the road
which would take them out of sight, they saw Jackie turn and give
one hurried glance round. He then began running. He was fol-
lowed by Nelly first, then by Sis who carried Bert like a bundle
of something precious and heavy, hugged against her body.

As if ashamed of their prolonged observation of this ragamuffin
crew, Louie and Lily now devoted themselves to being as ladylike
and patronising as they could to their eccentric uncle. They were,
however, so attached to the old man that it was not long before
they were unburdening their bosoms of a thousand intimate
troubles, triumphs and grievances. It appeared they were due in
an hour's time to take tea with Emma, the confidential servant of
Tilly Crow T; and much that they had to relate had to do with the
Philip Crow establishment.

Uncle Abel on his part had a good deal to say about the recent
experiences of his ancient crony and ally, Old Jones, in his ward
in the hospital. To anything concerning the hospital both the
girls lent a curious ear, Louie being especially interested in the
culinary economies, which were notoriously generous in this in-
stitution, while Lily kept enquiring about the bed-covers, the
linen-chests, the nurses' caps, the doctors' white coats, the slippery
floors; and whether it was from Miss Bibby Fell's daffodil-beds,
or Mrs. Crow's conservatory, or Mayor Wollop's greenhouse, that
the best gifts of flowers were received.

"Emma says that poor Mrs. Crow is very concerned about all
this flying," observed Louie.

"Yes," threw in Lily, who being the younger was more roman*
tic than the buxom cook and if possible more ladylike, "yes,
Emma says that the mistress cries her poor self to sleep night
after night thinking of all the money they're spending."

"But they be rich, baint they?" commented Number One, think-
ing to himself, "I be a wonderful comfortable man--I be! I
baint one for envying they rich." And full of complacency the
old man surveyed the tops of the budding willow trees, the brown
and white back of the cow Betsy and these two gracious visitors
seated side by side on his kitchen chairs.

"Emma says," went on Louie, whose character it was to give
the practical details of life their due proportion, leaving to the
more pensive and more romantic Lily the psychological aura of
the events under discussion, "that Mr. Crow made certain he was
going to have all Canon Crow's money; and that he's been spend-
ing more than he could afford on Wookey Hole alone."

"He likes electrifying things," murmured Lily dreamily. "They
tell about the Wookey Hole witch up in Wells. Do you remember,
Louie, what that woman said when we were out there on choir-
treat day, how that she'd once been down there, where those
stalagmites and stalactites grow, and that she ran out in hysterics,
thinking she saw the witch?"

"It's this flying he's started on now," went on Louie, holding
the topic resolutely down to facts, "that's the main trouble. Of
course on the top of his well-known electric schemes it does mean
a very considerable expenditure."

As she uttered this judicial remark Louie crossed her knees, as
if her neat shoes were resting upon an embroidered footstool in-
stead of upon Number One's brick floor, and folding her gloved
hands over her knees she began rubbing her right hard very
slowly over her left hand.

It must have been with this precise gesture, with these exact
words, and with this identical intonation combined with a frown-
ing glance given to some remote object--in the present case, alas!
to nothing more dignified than Number One's swill-pail, turned
upside down--that Miss Euphemia Drew had received the town
gossip about Philip Crow's financial state.

"Who was that wild-looking child you had here just now.
Uncle?" enquired Louie, dropping her Miss Drew airs.

"Eh? Who? Which on 'em do you mean?" muttered the old
man with startled embarrassment. He had been secretly hoping
that no more would be said about his previous visitors.

"The thin little girl, with great black eyes, and her hair all un-
combed, and her clothes so dirty."

"As far as I knows that be Nelly," replied Abel Twig.

"But Nelly what, Uncle?" insisted Louie. "She must have a
surname."

"I talked to my friend Jones in hospital about Nelly," con-
fessed the old man reluctantly. "I told him all about she, and
how she went round with Jackie Jones and Sis Cole; and he did
say that her mother's name was Morgan. So I suppose--though,
mind ye, I baint sure--that her name be similarwise." He was
silent and then muttered under his breath, "Morgan, Nelly Mor-
gan, Eleanor Morgan," as if he were wondering how to give to
these syllables some special rhythmic secret. At the name "Mor-
gan" he was surprised to notice the two sisters exchanging a
swift, significant glance. Louie actually nodded at Lily, as who
should say, "You see! That's just what would happen, that that
child, of all children, should be picked up by Uncle!"

Full of greater fear than ever, after he had caught this inter-
change of glances, that by continuing the topic he should bring
harm in some way upon his little friend, Number One hurriedly
went on.

"I expect Nelly's name isn't Morgan at all. No...no. When
I come to think of it, Number--I mean my friend Jones--was
sure it wasn't! Jackie calls she Nelly. Sis calls she Nelly. There
be many well-thought-on women in the world what have only one
name." Number One racked his brains to think of some of these
famous monosyllabic females. At last his face lit up. He recalled
his grand-dad's Lake Village. "The Lady of the Lake," he cried
triumphantly, "had only?" He stopped in dismay; for there
came into his head a conversation with old Mr. Merry, the Cura-
tor of the Glastonbury Museum, from whom he had sought to get
information about his grandfather's historic field. This authority
had told him that the real Lady of the Lake was none other than
Morgan Le Fay, the very ambiguous sister of King Arthur!

"It's Nelly Morgan that was here with Jackie Jones and Sis
Cole," said Louie with decision. "You've let your kind heart run
away with you again, Uncle. It s lucky no one but Lily and me
knows about this. But we've told you now and you do know, so
you can act according."

"What be talking about, me pretty?" stammered Uncle Abel.

Lily meanwhile had assumed a sad, poetic expression. "What he
feels, 'tis strange to think," she interrupted dreamily, "as he lies
pondering on a poor betrayed girl, and on a little child who be-
longs to him and yet doesn't belong to him."

"Stuff and nonsense!" cried Louie. "All he thinks about is
electricity and flying machines and asking Mayor Wollop to drop
in to dinner. He doesn't think of anyone's feelings."

"Will it be best to tell Emma about that child being with
Jackie and Sis; and about her having been in Uncle's house?"
Lily put into this question as much dramatic gravity as if she
were taking a personal part in some great cause celebre.

Louie knitted her brows in solemn consideration.

"It will be wisest," she replied, in the very manner of Eu-
phemia Drew, "to leave what we say till we see how things ar-
range themselves. I would not like to upset Emma; and it might
make it harder for Emma too, if she knew what Mrs. Crow
didn't know."

Number One could stand all this no longer. His awe of his
nieces broke down completely under the pressure of his mental
bewilderment. He rose up from his chair. "What the holy terror,"
he cried, "are you gals gabbling about?"

Lily's expression was a masterpiece of refined protest, senti-
mental relish for the whole situation, and an irresistible desire to
be the one permitted to tell him all.

But she was not that one; for that one was Louie.

"Don't get agitated, you poor darling, and do please sit down.
It's all very dreadful"--the intonation of Miss Drew was mingled
here with a vague mimicry of certain lady-visitors--"but we must
be as collected and sensible as we can. The truth is that Emma
has found out a very unhappy story. It appears"--here Louie
took breath and fidgetted in a modest manner with her ribbon--
"that Mr. Crow misconducted himself some eight years ago with
Jenny Morgan. Jenny seems to have forgotten herself completely
and the result was that she had a baby."

The style in which Louie delivered herself of this grand climax
was, it is needless to point out, entirely her own. No one but
Louie would have used that derogatory and indeed disagreeable
word "misconducted." No one but Louie would have used the
expression "forgot herself" for the normal lapse from the vir-
ginal state.

"Jenny has taken to drink," Louie went on, "since then, but she
works for the child. She couldn't bring herself to dispose of the
child. She used to hear such terrible things of those institutions.
Emma thinks he sends her a little money every second Wednes-
day. Emma knows he always goes to the Post Office on that day.
That's what Emma thinks , mind you,--that he sends her a little
regularly. Emma doesn't know for certain whether he does or not,
but she is almost sure he does."

Number One's countenance had begun to beam with relief and
satisfaction. He had feared he knew not what; and now to learn
that all this agitation was only about Nelly's illegitimacy com-
pletely reassured him.

"Nelly Morgan," he repeated cheerfully. And then, thinking of
the Curator's words, "Morgan Nelly," he added.

"Mr. Crow isn't altogether a wicked man," threw in Lily. "He
is a strange man though. I believe he lives a wild life unknown
to the world." Her voice sank and ceased. She looked away into
the distance, far away beyond the pollarded willows. A skilful
observer might have read in her face that she felt that shame and
even desertion would not have been without their own melancholy
compensations if it had been her lot, in place of Jenny Morgan,
to "forget herself" with so Byronic a seducer as Philip Crow.

Number One, who had quite recovered his spirits since he had
learned that his elegant nieces had nothing against Jackie's lieu-
tenant except her birth, suggested now that before they left Back-
wear Hut they should see his "garden."

In pursuance of this design he led the way through his back
door, past the post to which Betsy was tethered, till he reached
a little square plot surrounded by a low, whitewashed fence.
Here were several rows of young peas and scarlet-runners and
one row of freshly sprouting celery. But at the corner of the
garden--a reserved space of about a square yard--waved in the
warm air a fragrant patch of pheasant-eyed narcissus. Number
One clicked open a little toy gate into his garden and stepping
carefully over the young vegetables picked with reckless impetu-
osity at least half of these lotus-scented flowers. These he divided
into two bouquets of exactly the same size; and when, after a few
affectionate good-byes--for Louie and Lily felt very protective
to their only male relation--the girls went off, up Godney Road
to where it joined Wells Road, these white flowers, pinned on
their black dresses and matching most felicitously their black and
white Easter hats, gave them a really charming appearance.

It must have been about an hour later that the discreet Emma
was serving tea in her immaculate kitchen to these pretty wearers
of Abel Twig's nosegays. Emma was also dressed in black but
over her dress she wore a spotless white apron and upon her
head, the most carefully brushed and tidied head in Glastonbury
she wore an old-fashioned cap trimmed with handmade lace.

Emma, unlike her visitors, had never made any attempt to copy
her mistress' manners or speech. Emma's manners were digni-
fied, but they were those of one, who as she always expressed it,
"knew her place," and her speech was as local as a Mendip
quarry. She was the kind of servant who in place of losing her-
self in her employer's fortunes or way of life made of those
things the background for her own resolute character. The char-
acter of Emma was not eccentric like that of Penny Pitches.
Emma detested eccentricity. She was no worshipper of the aris-
tocracy either, like Red Robinson's mother. What she really was
was a strict Professional; and her Profession was that of the
Perfect Servant. In Tilly Crow she had found what she con-
sidered to be the Perfect Mistress. Mrs. Philip's deplorable lim-
itations, obvious to all the rest of the world, were not limitations
at all to Emma. They were virtues high and rare; and for the
sake of these virtues she was as devoted to this neurotic and shrew-
ish recluse as any old-fashioned lawyer's clerk was ever devoted
to a narrow-minded, pettifogging scrivener.

In this great turbulent universe, wherein ships at sea, certain
farms on land, certain soldiers' camps, certain outposts of civili-
sation, conducted under scrupulous authority, become oases of
order in the midst of chaos, the miniature polity entitled The
Elms, ruled over by Emma and Tilly Crow, was in its own way
almost without rival. The kitchen tea-party which was now pro-
ceeding would have been as much disturbed by the presence of
any of the "gentry"' who were contemporaneously taking tea in
Tilly's drawing-room as any of Tilly's guests would have been
had Emma, in place of answering the bell, sat down on the sofa
beside her mistress. But the domestic ritual in the drawing-room
under the rule of Mrs. Philip was no less punctilious than the
ritual in Mrs. Philip's kitchen under the rule of Emma; and be-
tween these two women, on this nice professional point, there
was a uniformity of opinion too deep to be expressed in words.
Their mutual ideal was, as a matter of fact, as different from the
aristocratic way of taking things as it was different from the pro-
letarian way, or from the easy-going, lower-middle-class way of
Mr. and Mrs. Geard. It was upper-middle-class. And not for
nothing does one note that it has been from houses conducted
under the Emmas and the Tillys of life that such characteristically
English characters as Charles Darwin and Horatio Nelson have
projected their world-shaping opinions and their heroic deeds.
Indeed it might with justice be said that two oases of perfect
order and peace, and two alone, existed in Glastonbury at that
epoch--the draper's shop of Mr. Wollop, the Mayor, and the
home of Tilly Crow! Outside these harbours of tenoned and mor-
tised security everything ebbed and flowed. These were, so to
speak, the Parmenidean rafts of stillness in the Heraclitean flux
of Glastonbury life.

The lights had been lit in both drawing-room and kitchen be-
fore the visitors departed. In other houses they would not have
been lit! In other houses people would have been too absorbed
in talk, too enamoured of the twilight, to have sent for lamps and
candles, or thought of closing shutters, drawing curtains, pulling
down blinds! This closing out of the twilight was indeed a char-
acteristic Norfolk habit. The great green curtains in Northwold
Rectory were always drawn close, had been drawn close for years,
when twilight began. So no doubt had the old Vikings, when they
landed at Wick, gathered round their bivouac fires and turned
their backs to the ghostly Druidic light lingering in the west!
This closing of the shutters at The Elms was in fact a Norse cus-
tom. All the West-Country servants hated it, except Emma, whose
own people in their high Mendip farms, had practised the same
habit.

Tilly Crow's guests were William Zoyland, who tonight was to
be transported to Wookey Hole in Mr. Barter's airplane, and
Dave and Persephone Spear, who had arrived that morning from
Bristol and had taken lodgings in High Street.

William Zoyland rather enjoyed the thought of a couple of
months' showmanship in Wookey Hole. A descendant of a long
line of attendants upon kings, there was nothing unpleasant or
undignified to Will in the office of lord chamberlain to a subter-
ranean river. Yet another cause of the delicious feeling of well-
being that flowed through him at this moment was the frank and
shameless delight he took in the society of the dark-haired girl
now occupied in amusing their hostess. The man he was talking
to was Nell's half-brother; so he had every justification in treat-
ing the husband as cavalierly and the wife as gallantly as he
pleased. There was indeed something piquant about keeping up
a conservative argument with a passionate enemy of society
while at the same time he played the courtier with his opponent's
lady. The more deeply he got entangled in argument with Dave
the more frankly unashamed were the glances of admiration
which he bestowed upon Persephone. He experienced at this mo-
ment a feeling as if, with that firelight warming his great limbs
and the boyish hips of this curly-haired girl warming his proud
soul, there was nothing in heaven or hell he wouldn't enjoy
facing! If this cropped skull and patient eyes opposite him were
to condemn him to the guillotine at dawn as a cumberer of the
earth--he'd still be happy. If this enchanting girl would slip into
his bedroom tonight, undress before his eyes, and be off before
he touched her--he'd still be happy. If he knew he were to be
compelled that very evening to eat a basketful of otter's dung
while Sam Dekker embraced Nell before his eyes and they both
mocked at him--he'd still be happy.

"There's something almost awful," he said to himself, using
those exact words, "about my power of enjoyment. I believe I
could enjoy smelling a bunch of violets if I were on the rack.'
He began lazily throwing into his retorts to Dave's careful logic
a little spice of this savage aplomb; and as his roving blue eyes
caught the fact that the treacherous girl was listening, and even
encouraging him, they commenced to darken in the candlelight
with feline zest. But the sense of having carried the proletarian
gonfalon into the very heart of the enemy's camp was inspiring
Dave Spear that evening beyond his wont, and it was not long
before both of the women, as well as the life-loving adventurer,
were gazing at him in reluctant respect. It was when he dropped
his logic and became oracular that this crop-headed, prosaic
young man swept the field.

"Nature is on our side," he was saying, "and the dark, blind,
non-moral creative tidal wave. The inarticulate masses of man-
kind are only beginning to wake up. The millions of the Orient
are only beginning to wake up. We use reason and we are pre-
pared to use force without a shred of compunction. But in reality
we are only the ‘mediums' of destiny. Communism is the destined
next phase of evolutionary, planetary life. Nothing can stop it.
That is why the stupidest, the silliest, the clumsiest among us has
something that you vainglorious individualists completely lack.
We are the still, small voice of the next phase. We may be un-
imaginative, undistinguished, lacking in all sense of humour. We
may even be inhuman. We can afford to be what no one else can
afford to be; for the simple reason that we are the solidifying of
the intention of evolution

While this argument was going on in the most perfect of upper-
middle-class drawing-rooms, in the equally perfect kitchen a
somewhat similar discussion was proceeding. Destiny found its
voice here, however, in the dreamy, sentimental utterances of
Lily Rogers. Louie and Emma both strongly upheld the view that
the longer the existence of Nelly Morgan was kept secret from
Mrs. Crow the better it would be for all. Lily, on the other hand,
advanced the startling and disturbing doctrine that "since things
which are hid are fated to become known, and things which are
dark are fated to be made clear"--this was the girl's own phrase-
ology--"it would be kinder to make Mrs. Crow acquainted with
the sad truth." This "kindness" presented itself to the temporis-
ing, Mendip-bred mind of Emma Sly as plain cruelty, and a con-
troversy began between them that almost spoilt the taste of
Emma's famous pear-ginger jam in the connoisseur-mouth of
Louie. Thus, in both drawing-room and kitchen of The Elms there
gathered on the horizon certain clouds of danger to the master of
the house. In the one case, these vanguards of evil women were
held off by Lord P''s bastard; in the other case, by the daughter of
Amos Sly, Lord P.'s shepherd, but in neither case, for all the
closing of shutters against the blue twilight, were the clouds
altogether dispelled. They did not advance; but night fell leav.
ing them undispersed.


Perhaps the two persons in all Glastonbury who caught most
fully the essence of this cool blue twilight, falling at the end of
so unnaturally warm a day, were Mat Dekker and Miss Elizabeth
Crow. The Vicar, upon whose conscience it was to enter every
house in the town, had invaded the domain of Doctor Sodbury,
the parson of St. Benignus. Miss Elizabeth had already done
what she said she would do at the reading of the will in North-
wold Rectory. She had taken one of the smallest of all the Town
Council's workmen's houses--a tiny little place with a tinier little
garden with the word "Rosemary" inscribed on the top of the
wooden gate. Here she lived with a little maid of eighteen, called
Tossie Stickles, the plumpest as well as the most good-tempered
young woman who ever put on an apron. She paid Tossie five
shillings a week, and every penny of this Tossie put into the sav-
ings bank, "to bide there till she were bedded or buried."

Miss Elizabeth had seen Mat Dekker's tall figure passing down
the street and had sent Tossie to call him in to partake of an
early tea. No one but Mat Dekker himself knew the effort that it
cost him to accept this thoughtful invitation. He particularly
wanted to finish his visiting in Benedict Street in one afternoon
and Penny expected him back to his own high tea--for they dined
early--at half-past six. He was counting on an afternoon quite
free from visiting on the morrow, for a treasured walk with Sam
over to Butleigh Wood, beyond the village of Street, which was a
favorite objective of his; and this summons from Rosemary
meant not only the spoiling of his appetite for his evening's
meal, which he enjoyed more than any other, but made it likely
enough that in place of this excursion he would have to return
tomorrow to this row of little houses. Once launched, however,
in a deep colloquy with his old friend he began to feel that neither
of these sacrifices was wasted. Miss Crow was the only woman
he could confide in, in all Glastonbury, on the point where he
most wanted feminine advice, and he found himself, as he sat
opposite her in the bow-window side by side with boxes of yellow
pansies, talking more freely to her than he had done to anyone
for years.

Not only did Miss Elizabeth forbid Tossie to touch the window-
blinds, but she even opened one of the windows when she saw
her friend arrested by the beauty of the evening. Thus together
they sipped their tea, inhaled the fragrance of the yellow pansies
and were soothed by the mystical blueness in the air.

"It's exactly the colour those early Venetians always used,"
said Miss Crow, "for the Madonna's dress. I shouldn't be sur-
prised if it had some peculiar effect on human nerves, this par-
ticular blue."

"I've seen it in many places, Betty," said Mat Dekker, "but
never as deep a shade as here in Glastonbury. It's nice to think
we live in a place that's famous for its twilights."

Miss Elizabeth adored to be called "Betty," and here, sitting
opposite her in her bow-window, was the only person she would
have allowed to do it.

"By the way, what's this I hear about Philip turning away
some of his hands and threatening to close up one of his mills?
Why can't he come to terms with his men? All the old wives
I've been talking to in Benedict Street say that their husbands
don't want to strike and it's only this Barter fellow who's making
the trouble. What's up with Philip, Bett? Is he getting under this
fellow's thumb?"

Miss Elizabeth tossed up her head. Every woman, old and young
alike, has certain gestures, whether of anger or surprise or sad-
ness or detachment, that only one or two persons in the world
are permitted to see, and this smile of hers now with her head
held high up and a little back, and her eyes half closed, was one
of Miss Crow's gestures that no one in the world, except her
mother and Mat Dekker, had ever seen.

"It's no good coming to me again to interfere between Philip
and his hands," she said. "You remember how angry he got when
I did it before and how it hurt the men rather than helped them?
My advice to both sides would always be--come to terms."

"Do you think Philip realises what a lot of feeling there is
in the town against him?" went on Mat. "They told me today
that there's a movement going on to elect a new Mayor; and, of
all people in the world, do you know who it's to be?" Miss Eliza-
beth shook her head. "Your father's Mr. Geard"

"No, no--Mat! You're fooling."

"Yes, I say yes...Mr. Geard!"

"Impossible, Mat Dekker!"

"Ask any of your neighbors and you'll soon see!"

"Does Philip know this? Does Mayor Wollop know this?"

"I can't tell what Philip knows. Old Wollop certainly knows
for he told me himself."

She made an impatient movement with her hands. "I'm tired
of town politics," she said.

Mat's face assumed the rather sulky expression that is natural
to a man when his interlocutor changes the conversation. But it
was then that she soothed this sulkiness away by beginning to
talk of Sam.

"Has he been over there lately?" she asked.

"Not since the woman began living with her husband again,"
said Mat Dekker; "but now they tell me Zoyland's going to leave
her alone out there while he's at Wookey Hole." He sighed deeply.
"I like the girl, Betty," he added gravely.

Miss Elizabeth smiled. "I have seen that for a long time,"
she said. "But you wouldn't like her so well if she made him
carry her off."

He frowned and sighed deeply again. "No, I suppose not," he
said, "though one feels ashamed sometimes at interfering with a
real love-affair. I'm a believer in love, Bett, my dear. All passion,
I know, is not love, and lechery, of course, is lechery. But all the
same there is such a thing as love and I have a fixed and rooted
notion that when a man and woman really love each other it
becomes, Bett, my dear--" He lowered his voice.

"What does it become, Mat?" she asked, moving his cup a
little further from the edge of the tray and brushing off with
her fingertips a few crumbs which were adhering to its beautiful
pattern of inlaid mother-of-pearl.

"It becomes a transaction...a transaction...He broke off with a
shrug.

"What kind of a transaction?" she enquired in a calm, con-
trolled voice.

"I only meant," he said, "that just as what I call the Mass is
an act that belongs to more than one plane of existence, so any
great love between two people may have an importance beyond
the world we know."

Miss Crow's hands began nervously fidgetting among the ob-
jects on the tray. Her portly figure had erected itself very straight
as she sat in her chair, but it seemed as if her fingers found it
difficult to be as reserved and as dignified as their mistress.

"I cannot imagine what Sam is feeling or thinking these days,"
Mat Dekker went on. "His mind is working it all out in its own
way, I think, but I am quite in the dark how he's working it
out."

Miss Elizabeth looked her friend straight in his troubled eyes.
"You've changed yourself, Mat," she said, "over all this. You
seem prepared to let them go off. Surely it would mean disaster
to you if they did?"

He rubbed his great, ruddy face with both his bony hands, as
if to rub off the sticky remnants of a discarded mask.

"I thought it was just a wanton child's caprice, her taking
up with him," he said, letting his hands drop down heavily on
the table. "But I soon found, when I talked to her, that it was
much more than that."

Elizabeth shot a quick, sharp glance at him. "You've not
gone and fallen in love with that woman yourself. Mat, have
you?"

He rose from his chair noisily, making the contents of the tray
rattle. "Shut up, do, Belt!" he groaned. "I'm worried by all this.
It's too serious to jest about. But I must be off now. You know
what our Penny is!"

He went over to get his hat and stick from her little parlour
sofa. She opened the door for him and held out her hand. "I
wasn't jesting, Mat," she said. "I believe you are a little bit in
love with that girl."

An electric shock of fury made his big frame tremble from
head to foot. "I won't...allow...anyone...to talk to me like that!"
The words burst from him before he had the remotest idea that
he was going to be seized by this rush of blind anger. He exper-
ienced a little difficulty in the gathering dusk over the latch of
the small gate.

Miss Crow was soon standing by his side. "I didn't mean to
tease you, Mat. I ought to have known better," she whispered.

He bowed his head so that she could see only his rough eye-
brows sticking out beneath the frontal corrugations, like those
of a Neanderthal skull, of his heavy forehead. He regained his
composure by staring at a minute ant that was making a dead
moth move as if it were alive upon the ground under the gate.
He swallowed his saliva in a fierce gulp and raised his head
with a jerk. "We are a pair of old fools, Elizabeth," he said,
"and that's the long and short of it. You're much too good to
me, and don't you ever think I don't know it! Well! Take care
of yourself and don't 'ee carry that heavy coal-scuttle any more.
Tossie's got twice the strength you've got. I suppose you earn
your own water upstairs too?"

"Not always, Mat dear; not often! Good night and God bless
you." And she turned and re-entered her door.


While Mat Dekker, the father, was parting from Elizabeth
Crow to return to the kingdom ruled over by Penny Pitches,
Sam Dekker, the son, was unwillingly tearing himself away from
the lodgings of John Crow, Elizabeth's erratic nephew.

It was John, now the salaried secretary of Mr. Geard, who had
made the advances. It was part of his new job to make advances
in every direction. John had already "approached" nearly a
third of the educated citizens of Glastonbury and it had become
time to approach the younger Dekker. He had given Sam tea in
his new room, and Sam too, like his father, had cursed himself
for eating so much bread and butter while the despotic Penny
waited for him in the offing. And he had cast a complete glamour
over Sam. Sam, unlike his father in this, had no living soul to
whom he could tell his troubles. His heavy, brooding nature had
been gathering emotional, volcanic lava for three days, and this
night--the night of Zoyland's airtrip to Wookey Hole--his whole
being was seething and fermenting with contending passions.
While the father sat in Miss Crow's bow-window on Benedict
Street, the son stood at John's casement- window at the back of
Northload Street. The window looked across a level meadow and
across Dye House Lane to the fields lying north of the district
called "Paradise," and from it could be seen not only the Polden
Hills but, rising up against the horizon, beyond the Bridgewater
fens, the far-off blue ridge of the Quantocks. The heavy, power-
ful youth and the lean, emaciated man were standing side by side
looking out upon this scene. A cheerful fire was burning in
John's little grate and something about his shelves, his chairs,
his books, his pots and pans, his gas-stove, his couch-bed with
cushions on it, his few cheap prints, his yet cheaper rug, his
shining fender, bore witness to the hand and brain of Mary;
while the fact that he was there at all, with everything so com-
fortable round him, bore witness to the liberality of Bloody
Johnny.

"I'm not saying I've ever practised or ever could practise
what I'm talking about," Sam was asseverating in an excited voice.
"All I'm saying is that there's no life that frees anyone so com-
pletely from unhappiness as does the mystic life. If you give up
possession, if you give up trying to possess what attracts you, a
lovely, thrilling happiness flows through you and you feel you're
in touch with the secret of everything. There are only two mortal
sins in the world; one of these is to be cruel and the other is to
possess, and they are both destructive of happiness."

"I agree with you! I agree with you!" cried John. "The only
thing is that the opposite of what you say is true too. No, no!
There's a great deal in your Christian method, there's everything
in your Christian method; but it must be applied for heathen
ends! That's the great doctrine of the Tao, which no one under-
stands--except me!" A positively diabolic light gleamed in
John's glaucous eyes and his sinuous, feeble form seemed actually
to curve in tiny ripples of magnetic coils, like the coils of smoke
which followed his cigarette.

"You're too subtle for me," growled Sam, extending his grey-
stockinged legs and looking down at his enormous dirty boots
and at the bright rug, chosen so carefully by Mary at Mayor
Wollop's shop.

"I'm only subtle because I'm simple," replied the other. "Listen,
Dekker," he went on, "you mustn't think I'm meddling with your
private affairs if I give you a piece of advice."

A spasm of annoyance crossed Sam's face and the muscles of
his chin contracted. For a second of time the two men regarded
each other, like animals of a different species, who have met by
accident in a forest glade. The twitch in John's left cheek made
its silent signal to Sam's wrinkled chin very much as the quiver
of a rat s whiskers might answer the sniff of a badger's snout.

"Lord-a-lord! " ejaculated Sam, beginning to stride up and
down his host's room with his hands in his pocket. "So it's come
to it, then? Come to what I always feared--that everybody in
Glastonbury would know about my troubles. Lord! how I do
loathe and hate the human race! That's the 'advice' I'd like
you to give me, Crow. I'd like you to say ‘escape from it all,
Sam, you blundering dizzard, escape from it all and try and
imitate those old mediaeval saints!' "

John Crow looked away. It was one of his peculiarities to be
able to stare into people's eyes with a shameless, unsympathetic
scrutiny; but Sam's emotion gave him a peculiar feeling of
shame. To look at Sam's agitated face any longer at that mo-
ment seemed like eavesdropping at a confessional-box. So he
glanced at the now faintly observable ridge of the Poldens and
thought to himself, "There's something in spiritual excitement
that makes me uncomfortable. I must have the heart of a stone!"

"My advice would be, Dekker," he said, in an obstinate low
voice, still staring out of the window, "my advice would be to
do what hares do when they catch sight of something dangerous--
that's to say, freeze . You know that word? Turn, pro tem., into
the inanimate...turn into a stump, a post, a clod of clay. Then,
after a while, when things have worked themselves out, you can
scamper back to your feeding-place!"

He got up from his chair-arm and stood hovering at the win-
dow. As Sam paused in his sentry's march and threw a glance
at him out of his screwed-up bear-eyes, his figure at the window
seemed made of something less solid than flesh and blood, seemed
as if it would need very little to turn it into one of those drifting
vapours that floated over the ditches.

"It's like this, Crow," he began; but he felt so much as if
that trampish figure at the window, even as he addressed it,
might decompose, dissolve, disintegrate, that he couldn't go on.
The chemistry of human bodies, even apart from their shape,
is an extraverted manifestation of the souls that animate them,
and doubtless in all Glastonbury there couldn't have been found
souls more different than John's and Sam's.

When he began saying--"It's like this, Crow," Sam could feel
his own lanky, lumbering frame gather itself together, to express
his new-grown purpose. But to set the seal of his solemn inten-
tion upon this feeble and fluid apparition at the window was as
hard as if he were to shoot an arrow into a bundle of feathers
or write a "credo" upon flowing water! Nevertheless he made
one more attempt. "It's like this, Crow. For me the whole thing
is dualism. It's a perpetual war between good and evil. Whichever
side you take you get inspiration from outside the visible world.
But inspiration from the outside evil means in the long run
anguish and insanity, while inspiration from the outside good
means an ecstasy that grows and grows! To possess is evil. The
whole idea of private property is evil. It comes from the devil.
What made those mediaeval saints so happy was that they always
said to themselves ‘Let the beautiful girl go free!'"

"What's that? What's that your saints say?"

It was as if a mild mist-phantom had been transformed into a
mocking goblin. Crow slid back into the room, lurched towards
the fire, crouched dowm on a stool by the grate, and leaning
forward towards it, as he crouched, struck a match for his
cigarette against the bars.

Sam watched him gloomily. The man seemed to be worship-
ping fire. Sam took his great fist from the mantelpiece and
stepped hack a pace or two. Damn the fellow! That it had been
such a hot, dusty sort of nondescript, unpleasant day made the
fact of there being a fire at all in that room a grotesque thing.
The chap had seemed to be melting into the twilight outside the
window; and now he seemed to be on the point of diving into
the flame!

He raised his hand to his chin. "He said she said I had the
look of a saint," he thought to himself. And then there came over
him the realisation that tonight Zoyland was reallv off--piloted
by Barter or some London crony of Barter's--to Wookey Hole.
Everybody in Glastonbury knew it! Everybody in Glastonburv
knew that Nell was all alone on Queen's Sedgemoor. "I could
bear it," he thought, "if she'd never leant against me with her
breasts. Who could bear that and not want to 'possess'; and not
have to 'possess'?"

The wild idea came surging into his head that he would wait
till his father and Penny were asleep; and then let himself out
of the house, and hurry over there; even if it were the middle of
the night, even if he didn't get there till dawn!

"Well, Crow, I've got to be off," he said. "I'm late as it is.
Thanks awfully for the Lea. God knows how I'll be able to drink
any more. We'll go on with this another time."

The demon by the fire leapt to its feet and became once more
the drooping, feeble, nervous beneficiary of the bounty of Mr.
Geard.

"Good-bye," he said, "and don't forget to tell your father
that I want to see him about the Midsummer Fair. The only
person who won't like our Fair will be my precious cousin. And
I can promise him we're going to give him a reason for not
liking it. We're going to 'larn' him, as we say in Norfolk, to
turn Glastonbury into a factory-town! We're going to shake up
his capitalistic complacency--you'll see! Well, good-bye, Dekker,
and don't forget to 'freeze' like a hare and let chance and destiny
fight it out for themselves!"

While father and son were slowly gravitating back to Silver
Street, snug in the Vicarage kitchen sat Penny Pitches and Mr.
Weatherwax. If Penny was all body, and a very square body
too, Weatherwax was all face. He was like one of those absurd
political caricatures that represent some familiar physiognomy
enlarged to monstrous size and unnaturally balanced upon a
manikin's frame. The face of Isaac Weatherwax was a large, flat,
sunburnt expanse, like an ancient map of some "Terra Incog-
nita." Arranged at traditional distances in this expanse were
eyes and nose and mouth. There were also various excrescences
of a less usual kind, "mountains," one might say, in this sun-
scorched moon, to which Mr, Weatherwax was wont sometimes to
refer, as "these here bugg-uncles what do grow out of me cheeks."

All the preparations for the Vicarage high tea were awaiting
the return of the old and the young master; but meanwhile the
two ancient gossips, as if a Square were entertaining a Circle,
were enjoying themselves well enough, independent of the
tea-pot. Mr. Weatherwax was tasting in advance a bottle of
cognac, so that whenever the Abbey House sideboard should be
debtor again to the Vicarage cellar, there should be no abrupt
or disconcerting change in the nature of the loan!

"So us be going to have a new' Mayor, come election-day,
among they councilmen," remarked Mr. Weatherwax dreamily,
"all of we work-folks be requested by some as we do know to
nudge they councilmen and stir 'em up. 'Tis said by some as we
do know that Mr. Wollop and Mr. Crow be out to turn our
quiet town into a girt city Borough by increasing the population.
But whatever they says, my gal, I holds by authority. I holds
by Mr. Crow. Tis said this here Geard, a man no different from
I, a man what can pray high and drink deep like any common
man, will be for letting visitors in and keeping hindustry out;
but I holds with Mr. Crow and his hindustries. Do 'ee want to
know, my gal, why I holds wi' he?"

"Will 'ee have a taste of me 'gorlas,' Isaac?" interrupted
Penny. "'Tis better than usual today."

Mr. Weatherwax permitted a faint sign of affirmation to flicker
across his political gravity while Penny rose from her chair.
She proceeded to make some rapid changes in the relative posi-
tion of pots and the lids of pots upon her great stove while her
visitor finished the brandy. This flat expanse of rusty iron sur-
face with its many round-lidded apertures, was Penny's Colos-
seum of Encounters with Brute Matter. It was an older stove
than that used by Emma Sly up at The Elms and it was handled
in a more primitive manner. The Elm's stove was always kept
well blacked. Like Louie's stove at The Abbey House it possessed
polished knobs and shining ornamentations, whereas the Vicarage
stove might have been the stove of a tribe of gipsies. All sorts
of things would be spilt on it. Penny didn't care. Penny was as
sylvan in her ways as if she had been the Salvage Man of The
Faery Queen fresh from some primordial Arcadia.

At the back of her stove there rested a large simmering cauldron
that she used for making a particular kind of broth. This cauldron
was literally never empty. It was like the cauldron of "the Head
of Hades" in the poetry of Taliessin. Penny had a name of her
own for this perennial brew of hers. She called it "gorlas."
Whether this extraordinary word had come down to her in
some very old Glastonbury tradition and was really a corrup-
tion of the word "gorlasser," which seems to have meant a dark-
blue, livid color, and was used to describe a mysterious "corpse-
God" or "Rex Semi-mortuus" in the old Cymric mythology, is
a question that Penny, less lucky in her introductions to learned
men than Abel Twig, had never had a chance of referring to the
Curator of the Museum.

"Do 'ee know, Penny," said Mr. Weatherwax, as he partook of
his friend's brew, "what be the pivot of life upon earth?"

Penny smiled the smile of all women at all philosophy, but
she shook her head obediently.

"Well, me good soul," Mr. Weatherwax continued, "I be the
one what be tellin' thee what thik thing be. Thik thing be Au-
thority. When I sees true livin' Authority I knows vegetables
grow, and hens lay, and cattle breed, and poor folk be fed and
clothed." His voice sank into a low, confidential whisper--"There
be only one true, livin' Authority in our town and that Authority
be Mr. Crow. If so be as your silly women and your fly-by-night
preachers do turn our town from serving Mr. Crow to serving
idols, then I says, 'Look well to it! The end of all things be at
hand.' " His voice ceased. He lifted up the bowl of gorlas to
his capacious mouth and leered tipsily over its brim.

"Folks be queerer than ye wold bachelors do mindy," retorted
Penny enigmatically. "Folks 'ud rayther brew their own broth
theyselves than be fed wi' all the Milk o' Paradise."

When Sam returned to his father's house it had grown quite
dark. He heard old Weatherwax muttering tipsily as he shuffled
down the hack drive, and he himself, to avoid the gardener,
moved on to the front-drive gate. He felt so disturbed in his
thoughts that when he laid his hand on the handle of the great
iron gate it came over him that it was almost impossible to face
his father. Heavily and slowly he drifted on a little way further
up the road. He soon came to the end of Silver Street, and
wavering there a moment finally turned to his right and fol-
lowed the outside eastern wall of the Abbey grounds down the
ancient road leading to the Tor that bears the historic, but con-
fused, name of Chilkwell Street. When he reached the turning
into Bere Lane he saw before him the vast Gothic shape rising
rich and dim in the darkness, of the greatest Abbey Barn in
England. This edifice is still used as an ordinary farm barn,
but Sam knew every lineament of its faqade so well that through
the darkness, as he now approached it, the four mystic creatures
of the Evangelists that protect its ramparts seemed to murmur at
him and signal to him. Sam scowled gloomily back at these
Apocalyptic Beings. They had watched so many huge wagonloads
of hay, of straw, of oats, of wheat, of barley, so many litters of
pigs, so many cartloads of turnips and mangels, being carried
under that Gothic archway, that they seemed to call upon Sam
also to bring them something, to bring them anything! But Sam
had only one offering in his heart just then, and that offering he
felt he could not offer! Sullenly and heavily he dragged himself
a little further along Chilkwell Street, till on his left hand he
saw the stone walls of Chalice House--at that time completely
unoccupied and on his right the lighted windows of St. Michael's
Inn. Both these buildings were still many hundreds of yards away
and the paved footpath he was following was raised about six
feet above the level of the road. There were a few small stone
houses here abutting upon this footpath and, behind these, sev-
eral small garden-paths. These paths, ascending between low
mossy walls, led up to the lower slopes of Chalice Hill. Sam
was unfamiliar with that far-rumoured version of the Grail story
which places the enchanted Castle of Carbonek, where the Mys-
tery was guarded, upon the summit of Chalice Hill; and he now
turned his abstracted gaze, as one by one these dark ascents be-
tween the shadowy lines of masonry came into his scope, upon
the Hill's higher reaches as if it had been any ordinarv upland.
At the base of one of these ascents, however, he was suddenly
arrested by the sight of a dusky figure leaning against a low
wall. The manner in which the outlines of the figure resolved
themselves into what surrounded it, into the soil, into the stones
into the stone-crop, into the darkness, enabled Sam, though he
had the eye neither of a Rembrandt nor a Hardy, to recognize
it for that of a woman. His poor head was so full of one par-
ticular woman that it was natural enough that his first thought
was: "She has come to me!" But he soon realised that the figure
was that of a lean, ungainly person, as totally unlike his Nell
as a raven is unlike a dove. It then came vaguely over him that
he had seen this person before and not very long ago either.
Who the devil did she make him think of? He stared sullenly
and gloomily at this solitary, motionless form till at last it
began lo strike his mind that whoever it was it was someone who
had no wish to be watched. Then he knew in a flash who it was.
It was Cordelia Geard! Simultaneously with this knowledge it
came over him that Cordelia had been seated by the side of
that queer-looking devil from Old Jones' shop when he met her
in that funny Geard room. So that was it! She was waiting for
that fellow now. They were keeping company; and he'd left
her for a minute for some reason; probably to relieve nature.
They were no doubt prowling round the environs of Chalice
House. Her father had very likely been buying up these little
cottages. The shock of seeing Cordelia when he so little ex-
pected it pulled his wits together with a jerk.

"God! how selfish of me to keep old Dad waiting for so
long! I must get back at once!"

He disappeared, and Cordelia, who had been watching him
from above, far more intently and nervously than he had been
watching her, breathed a sigh of relief.

She was alone again. "Shall I go on?" she thought, "or go
back? Crummie wants me. Mother wants me. Dad will be fussing
about me. If Mr. Evans comes and I'm out, he'll think my feelings
were hurt by the way he acted this morning. Oh, let them all want
me! I've been considerate to everybody too long. I've thought of
everybody except myself too long." She looked round, pondering.

"No, no, I don't care if they do want me!" and she turned
resolutely to the dark hillside above her. "I don't care if they do
have to wait for me! I don't care if I never see any of them
again; if I never go back, down there, ever again!"

She began rapidly ascending the hill. The air seemed to grow
fresher as she advanced. What a dusty, colourless, neutral day it
had been! But the blue twilight had been strange! And what
queer vapours, though there was nothing damp in the air, had
kept gathering, separating, rolling away, in confused retreat, over
the banks of the Brue and over the gardens of Street Road. It
had been partly the strange twilight that had lured her forth--
that and this new restlessness in her blood....

This slope of Chalice Hill had been one of her favorite resorts.
When her "bad" moods were upon her she always went off alone
to one or other of such places. "It's one of my resorts," she
would have said, if Crummie had questioned her.

In every little town in England there are probably several
eccentric women who habitually break loose from their family
and realise their inmost selves by excursions to certain particular
spots. Such people often end by becoming half-crazy. Sometimes
they end by committing suicide; but it is without question that
in the interim between their slavery to their family and this mad-
ness or this suicide, as they visit these favorite resorts and
carry there their inhuman, contra-human thoughts, they expe-
rience raptures of a dark, strange quality such as so-called "con-
tented" people may go through a whole life and never know!
What a destiny these lonely resorts of these lonely people
come to know! There can hardly be a village in England or a
small town in England--the great cities of course drown all such
things by the washing of their huge tides of humanity--where
there are not certain isolated spots loaded with the wild thoughts
of these solitary ones. They have a fate like Io, the heifer-maid,
these women, driven mad by the gadfly of Hera! Every one of
them is a prophetess, a companion of Prometheus! Every one
of them has been spiritually ravished by the great unmerciful
Father of all Lies! How those lonely spots must be impregnated
with these women's rebellious imaginations! How they must carry
these strange, rapturous thought-children, watered by floods and
deluges of releasing, melting, dissolving obliterating tears, and
leave them there to be nourished by the Mother of us all!

The lonely meadows and orchards of this particular hillside
and especially certain bare patches of common land, without
hedge, or railing, or furrow, or crop, or bush, or tree, had long
rendered Chalice Hill one of Cordelia's favorite refuges. These
had been her escape years before her father inherited the Rector
of Northwold's money. Of late, since the local chatter about their
buying Chalice House, she had rather tended to avoid the place
and to select others. Tonight, however, she felt that nothing but
Chalice Hill would ease her mind. She had fancied that she
knew the spot so well that she would attain with ease a certain
bare expanse of grass that she held in her thoughts; but she had
not allowed, as we seldom do allow, for the psychic pressure of
the darkness itself, like a living entity surrounding her. This
invasion of the bewildered senses of a day-dweller by the enfold-
ing presence of night is a unique phenomenon in human expe-
rience. However frequently it may have been felt it always returns
with a shock of disturbing surprise. The darkness becomes a
polymorphous amorist, irresistible, not to be stayed! We beat
it back with blinded sight, paralysed touch, confused hearing.
But there is nothing of us that it does not invade! When it is
a woman who is in its grasp it seems to arouse something in the
feminine nature corresponding to itself, so that the recessive
mystery of darkness in the woman--that underground tide of
the old ancestral chaos that ebbs and flows at the bottom of her
being--rushes forth to meet this primal sister, this twin daughter
of the Aboriginal Abyss, whose incestuous embrace is all about
her! Cordelia seemed unable to escape from the apple orchards
on Chalice Hill. She was perfectly familiar with these in the
daylight and had often lightly and quickly clambered over the
low walls that surround them; but tonight they seemed to extend
like an enchanted forest. Insula Avallonia! She was certainly
wrestling with a soil and with the growths of a soil that were
more soaked in legends than any other hillside in Wessex.
Legends seemed to thicken around her as she struggled blindly
on between these budding apple trees. The fresh spring grass
at the feet of these trees seemed in that darkness to be growing
out of an earth that yielded to each step she took, an earth that
was porous with mystery, an earth that was descending into
supernatural dimensions where it had its unrealisahle roots. How
soft to her touch, as she stretched out her arms and her bare
hands, were the branches and the trunks of these apple trees!
Would she never escape into the high bare uplands? These apple
trunks that she encountered seemed to grow thicker around her
as she struggled up the grassy slope. They seemed to respond to
her groping hands with a magnetic effluence of dark, rich, in-
scrutable vitality. They were like a sisterhood of invisible beings
about her, full of sympathy with her feeling, impeding her
progress with their mute conspiracy of understanding. Her brain
was whirling with wild imaginings. Tears were now pouring
down her cheeks; not unhappy tears, but sweet, relieving, aban-
doning, delicious tears. She wanted to free herself from these
sister-arms, but the darkness itself was weakening her resistance
to them with its own sister-passion, a passion older than the
world. The master thought that drove her on was the thought of
the unhappiness of her lover. "What is it? What is it?" her
brain kept repeating. "He is unhappy; and I know not what it
is! I thought I knew him through and through--but oh, I know
not what it is!"

Cordelia had almost reached the point of feeling as if she had
become enchanted, or, in a more realistic sense, as if she had
gone crazy and were going round and round in a circle instead
of ascending, when she suddenly found herself on the top of the
hill and in open ground. Not only was she now in a bare field,
but she knew exactly where she was. She was near the place
where a footpath over the other side of Chalice Hill led to the
lane where the two giant oaks grew. Mr. Evans had talked to
her many times about these oaks. He of course associated them
with the Druids. But Cordelia had heard quite a different story
from her father's new secretary who had informed her that they
had been planted to mark the spot where the Vikings had landed!

Mr. Geard's daughter now became aware that some large and
mysterious release had come to her vexed spirit.

There came a change in the weather too as she made her way
across Stonedown and approached the hamlet of Wick. She felt
it at once as she swung along, walking so fast and free, some-
times with her hands tightly clenched, and sometimes with her
fingers so loosely extended that they trailed amid the chilly
umbrageousness on both sides of the little lane. Cold gusts of
wind she felt rising. She felt them blowing, not regularly, but
intermittently. They blew over Wick Hollow, over Bulwarks
Lane, over Maidencroft Lane, and whenever they reached her
body they swirled round it as if they would have washed her, or
laved her or exorcised her! Intermittent and erratic as they were
and though they veered a little according to the lay of the land,
they came on the whole from the northwest. From the Bristol
Channel they came, and from further away than that. They came
from Mr. Evans' native country, from the native country of her
own ancestors; they came--like those strange stones at Stone-
henge--from South Wales.

Cordelia reached the nearest of her great oaks--whether Viking
or Druid--in what seemed to her so short a time that she felt
as if she had been spirited there in the teeth of these western
gusts. She came upon the oaks from the top of the eastern hedge-
bank, for she had come, on her wild approach, recklessly across
the country. Here on the top of this hedge-bank she rested, clutch-
ing a sweet-scented hazel-branch with one hand and a bitter-
scented elder-branch with the other. The wind rose about her as
she stood there, in wilder and wilder gusts. And then Cordelia,
gazing directly into the wide-flung branches of the biggest of
the two giant trees, was aware of something else upon the wind.
Those enormous branches seemed to have begun an orchestral
monotone, composed of the notes of many instruments gathered
up into one. It was a cumulative and rustling sigh that came to
the woman's ears, as if a group of sorrowful Titans had lifted up
their united voices in one lamentable dirge over the downfall
of their race. It kept beginning afresh, this solemn moan upon
the air--a moan which always mounted to a certain pitch and
then sank down. Sometimes, such were the vagaries of the wind,
before this portentous requiem started afresh, there was a singular
humming and droning in those huge branches, as if the tree
wished to utter a private secret of its own to Cordelia's ears,
before it recommenced its official chant. Yes! the peculiarity of
this humming sound was that it shivered and shook with a special
intonation for the woman standing upon the bank! And Cordelia
knew well what that message was. The great tree was telling the
hillside that there was rain upon the wind; but it was telling
Cordelia something else! Then all was absolutely still; and in
that stillness, a stillness like the terrible stillness of uttermost
strain in travail, there came the first cry of birth, the fall of a
single drop of rain. That first drop was followed by another
and that again by another. Cordelia did not hear them in the
same place. One drop would fall upon the roadway beneath her;
one upon a dead burdock leaf; one upon a faded hart's tongue
fern of last year's growth. Then the sound of the falling drops
would be drowned in a reawakening of that orchestral dirge.
Then the wind would die down over all the upland, and once
more an absolute stillness would descend; and in the stillness
again--only now in an increased number--the big raindrops
would splash to earth, one falling upon a dead leaf, one upon
a naked stone, one upon a knot of close-grown twigs, one upon
Cordelia's bare forehead. Her feeling at that moment was that
some deep psychic chain had been broken in her inmost being.

Hola--Hola! She could not restrain herself from giving vent
to a wild cry of exultant delight as the first bursting deluge
followed these premonitory drops. She waited for a minute or
two with upturned head and closed eyes, letting the water stream
upon her face. Then, slithering down the wet bank she reached
the lane; and without a glance in the direction of the oaks,
which were now totally invisible, she began, with head bowed
down and fingers tightening upon her jacket collar, to make her
way back to the town. Only once, on her way back, did she pause
and glance upward at the down-pouring blackness. This was when
she distinctly heard the drumming of an airplane somewhere
above her head. "That's Philip Crow," she thought to herself,
"travelling like the devil through the Black rain! He's off to
Wookey Hole."



WOOKEY HOLE



The Mayor of Glastonbury had finished his breakfast
and was reading the Western Gazette. Mr. Timothy Wallop was
an honest man. He had never deliberately cheated a fellow-
creature of a farthing. He was a self-controlled man. He had
never, since the death of his father, Mr. Constantine Wollop., lost
his temper with any living soul. To his father, now in his grave
in the cemetery on the Wells Road, Mr. Wollop had been irritable
on several occasions. But old Constantine's ways towards the
end had been past all bearing. A saint would have cursed the
old wretch. A philosopher would have done worse. An ordinary
man would have murdered him. But Timothy had only been just
perceptibly cross! Mr. Wollop had neither wife nor children.
His servants were kept at such a respectful distance that they
may be said to have been non-existent. They were the hands that
kept his house clean and warm and that brought him his moderate
meals at reasonable hours. Had they been the Ravens that fed
Elisha, or the invisible attendants who waited upon the Prince
in the fairy story, they could not have been more de-humanised.
Mr. Timothy Wollop lived to himself. To say that because he
was lonely he was unhappy would have been to utter the extreme
opposite of the truth. Mr. Wollop was one of the happiest men
in Somersetshire. He neither smoked, nor drank, nor whored.
He never gave way, even in the solitary watches of the night, to
the feverish pricks of sensual desire. As soon as his head touched
the pillow he fell asleep. Of what did Mayor Wollop dream? He
never dreamed; or, if he did, he forgot his dream so completely
on awakening, that for a man to say, "I dreamed like Mayor
Wollop," would be tantamount to saying "My sleep was dream-
less." Of what did Mayor Wollop think as he walked from his
house in Wells Road to his shop in High Street? He thought of
what he saw. In truth it may be said that with the exception of
Bert Cole no one in Glastonbury regarded the Panorama of
Things and Persons with more absorbing interest than did its
Mayor. Not a stick or a stone, not a bit of orange-peel in any gut-
ter, not a sparrow upon any roof, not a crack in any window,
not any aspect of the weather, wet or fine, not any old face or
any new face, not any familiar suit of clothes or any unex-
pected suit of clothes, not any dog, or cat, or canary, or pigeon,
or horse, or bicycle or motor car, not any new leaf on an old
branch, not any old leaf on a new roof--but Timothy Wollop
noted it, liked to see it there, and thought about its being there.

The Mayor was one of those rare beings who really like the
world we all have been born into. More than that; oh, much
more than that! The Mayor was obsessed with a trance-like ab-
sorption of interest, by the appearance of our world exactly
as it appeared. What worries some, disconcerts others, agitates
others, saddens others, torments others, makes others feel re-
sponsibility, sympathy, shame, remorse, had no effect upon the
duck's back of Mr. Wollop beyond the peaceful titillation of
surface-interest. Below appearances Mr. Wollop never went. Be-
low the surfaces of appearances he never went! If the unbear-
able crotchets of his father had been confined to the old man's
thoughts, Mr. Wollop would never have been ruffled. People's
thoughts were non-existent to the Mayor of Glastonbury; and if
there is a level of possibility more non-existent than non-existence
itself, such a level was filled (for him) by people's instincts,
feelings, impulses, aspirations, intuitions. The servants in his
house, as far as any interior personality was concerned, might
have been labelled A. B. C. and the assistants in his shop, in
the same sense, might have been named D. E. F. When B. (shall
we say?), a female servant in a fit of hysterics, put on her cap
back to front, Mr. Wollop was as interested as when on his walk
to his shop he mildly observed that a well-known tabby-cat's
ear had been bitten off. When E. (shall we say?), a male shop-
assistant, appeared one morning tricked up for a funeral, Mr.
Wollop enjoyed the same quiet stir as when on his walk down
High Street he noticed that a black frost had killed all the
petunias in old Mrs. Cole's window-box. Mr. Wollop had once
overheard one of his younger shop-assistants--a young man in
whose sleek black hair he had come to take a quiet interest,
wondering what hair-wash the lad patronised--refer to some-
thing called "Neetchky." From the context Mr. Wollop gathered
that "Neetchky" could hardly be the name of a hair-wash. It
seemed rather to be some pious formula used by the young man.
by which he threw off responsibility for having got some young
woman into trouble. At that point Mr. Wollop's interest ceased,
just as it had ceased when the question arose as to how the
tabby-cat had lost its ear. Mr. Wollop had no quarrel with young
men who had formulas for dodging responsibility, as long as
they did their work in the shop. What he was conscious of was a
certain puzzled contempt for anyone whose selfishness was so
weak and shaky that it required a pious formula! Mr. Wollop
needed no formula, pious or otherwise. The appearance of things
was the nature of things; and all things, as they presented them-
selves to his attention, in his house, in the street, and in his shop,
fed his mind with slow, agreeable, unruffled ponderings. Mr.
Wollop was not greedy at his meals, though he frequently thought
of his meals; and, as I have hinted, he was totally devoid of
specialised sensuality. No man, no woman, no child could ever
have said, if they spoke the truth, that they had caught the
Mayor of Glastonbury fixing upon them a lecherous eye. The
truth seems to be that the Mayor was exactly like young Bert
Cole. Bert and Mayor Wollop diffused the projection of their
amorous propensities over the whole surface of their world; and
their world was what they saw.

Little did the more intelligent inhabitants of Glastonbury
realise what a happy life was lived by their Mayor. Mat Dekker
pitied him for never taking any exercise (beyond his daily walks
to and from the shop) and for not smoking a pipe. The young
men in his employment pitied him profoundly, when they thought
of him at all, for having no lady to flirt with by day and no
lady to sleep with by night. Philip Crow pitied him for having
no spirit, no initiative, no adventurousness, no River Axe and no
airplane. Mrs. Philip Crow pitied him for having no Emma. Emma
herself had announced once to Lily Rogers that of all the houses
in Glastonbury that poor lonely Mr. Woliop's was the unhome-
liest she'd ever set eyes on, outside the workhouse.

In his dealings with his fellow-citizens upon the town council
the Mayor held his own very well. He did this by the enormous
advantage he possessed over people who believed in the reality
of thoughts and feelings. Sometimes when a thief or a liar came
into conflict with him the offender was bewildered by the Mayor's
penetration. In reality it was not penetration. It was common
sense. But it was common sense of such prodigious proportions
as utterly to confound the victim of its shrewd judgment. Mr.
Wollop had only twice, in his life of sixty years, "taken," as they
say, "to his bed." On these occasions he had been pitied by every
gossip in the place. "Thik poor old gentleman, wi' his silver
whiskies and his girt stummick, 'a has no soul to care for 'en,
whether 'a lives or dies!" The Vicar of Glastonbury had arrived,
on one of these occasions, when the patient had a dangerous
attack of pneumonia, to pay an official call upon the Mayor. It
was Mat Dekker's notion that the hour had come for the man
to think of his immortal soul. In place of such thoughts he
found Mr. Wollop's placid countenance, his great silver whiskers
extended on either side of the pillow, irradiated with absorbed
interest in the movements of three wasps upon the ceiling.
"They keep going round and round," he told the Vicar; and the
visitor was sadly awrare that when he finally uttered the words,
"In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,"
the sick man was still rapt in interest in those three soulless
insects.

For two whole days after the rainstorm that Cordelia had
watched beginning, by the great oaks of Wick, the rain had
fallen almost incessantly. Towards the close of the third day it
began to show signs of clearing off; and about four o'clock, al-
though it was getting so near tea-time, quite a number of people
drifted into the draper's shop. Wollop's was well known all
over that part of Somersetshire; and the business did not depend
upon local patronage; but since the great, quiet, cavernous place
had plenty of seats, both against its broad counters and other-
wise, there "were often quite a number of ladies, who knew one
another well, chatting together there with their parcels in their
hands. Since the old shop did not depend altogether on local
trade, activity at Wollop's had the power of languishing without
serious loss to its owner. But these idle hours hung heavily on
the heads of many of the assistants. The older ones suffered the
most. The younger assistants had so many thoughts of love,
thoughts hidden away in that non-existing world which Mr.
Wollop disregarded, and so much to tell each other about these
thoughts, that they did not mind these interims of ebb-tides
among the customers. The older assistants--and some of them
had acquired a peculiar look, that Mary Crow told John Crow
was the Wollop "grievance-look"--not having love-affairs to
share, were wont to have the meanest, bitterest, most indurated
quarrels among themselves that existed in all Glastonbury. Mr.
Wollop being occupied with the apparitional world was certainly
not oblivious of these seething recriminations, for Mary's "griev-
ance-look" was quite apparent; but he must have accepted it as
a mysterious ultimate, just as he accepted the fact that Tor Hill
was opposite Chalice Hill, and regarded its cause as belonging
to that world of non-existent essences which a sensible man ruled
out of court. On this particular afternoon Mr. Wollop ?was seated
serenely (as he always was) on a polished swivel-chair in a small
iron cage. He had bought this cage from a bankrupt bank in
Taunton, bought it at an auction for next to nothing. No living
person except the Mayor and Bert Cole would have been as much
interested in a man-cage as in a bird-cage. But Mr. Wollop, cast-
ing his Bert-like eye round the auction-room, had been agreeably
struck by this object, and had promptly bought it. That he
bought it for no sinister purpose was soon obvious; for the
person he put into it was himself. The Mayor's shop-assistants,
especially the younger ones, seemed to have the privilege oi wan-
dering all over the place; but once in his cage for the day, the
Mayor himself never came out except at such times as nature
compelled him to do so. His lunch was brought to him in the
cage.

Close to the great man's retreat, a day or two after Cordelia's
visit to Chalice Hill, while in his contentment Mr. Wollop was
murmuring over his accounts like an amiable sea-elephant, there
sat on a stool at one of the counters none other than Mary Crow,
She had come to buy a tablecloth for John's room in Northload
Street. As the young man who waited upon her was the young
man who took hair-wash for his appearance and "Neetchky" for
his conscience, it may be believed that the buying of this simple
thing was a slow business. The young man and Mary Crow dif-
fered in every point of taste and choice where tablecloths were
concerned.

"Have you heard the news, Miss Mary?" These words came
from the cage. The Mayor was addressing his customer.

"How do you do, Mr. Wollop! I hope you've been well lately?"

"Some folks in this town, Miss Mary," the man in the cage
went on, "are so solicitous for my health that they've decided
on my retirement from public life."

"Pardon me--no! Oh no! I don't like that at all." This was
addressed to the young man, who promptly went off, whistling.
"Pardon me, Mr. Wollop, did you say your retirement? I don't
quite understand."

"These folks want for me to stop being Mayor," explained the
caged man. "They want for me to turn into a Hex-Mayor."

"Why I thought you were Mayor for life, Mr. Wollop," cried
Mary sympathetically.

He shook his head; and then in a lowered voice, bending down
towards her so that his forehead touched the bars of his cage--
"It's that Mr. Geard who's to he the Mayor instead of me, so
that I can keep my good 'ealth hunimpeded."

Mary had no need to pretend her astonishment at this. She
was genuinely amazed. "I can't believe it, Mr. Wollop. Surely it
isn't true! The councilmen elect the Mayor, don't they? They'd
never, never elect Mr. Geard instead of you!"

"That's what they're going to do. I can see it as plain as a
map, Miss Mary."

"But it's a shame! It's a scandalous shame! Why everybody
in Wessex knows the Mayor of Glastonbury. Why! Weren't you
Chairman of that grand Public Meeting when the Bishop bought
the Ruins for the Church?"

"It's what they're going to do, Miss Mary."

"But Cousin Philip is on the council, isn't he?"

"Only as one among the rest, Miss Mary. And though I don't
want--" he lowered his voice to a penetrating whisper--"though
I don't want to he a Halarmist, what with 'is trouble with 'is
workmen and one thing and the other, I'm afraid Mr. Crow is
not altogether the Hinfluence in the Borough that he once was."

"But...Mr. Wollop " she stopped in sudden consternation, re-
membering John's close association with Mr. Wollop's rival.
"But, Mr. Wollop, my cousin, John Crow, would have told me
about this if there'd been anything in it. He's working for Mr.
Geard now over this tiresome Midsummer Fair they're getting
up, and he's never told me a word."

The Mayor of Glastonbury permitted a broad smile to flicker
across his face. He pulled back his head from the bars and
stretched out his cramped legs as far as they would go. ‘"Peo-
ple don't tell people everything, Miss Mary, even when they are
engaged to be married."

The word "married" came as a second authentic shock to the
sympathetic young lady. She had never guessed that the gossip
about her and John had gone so far as to reach the ears of the
Mayor. Obstinately she returned to the main issue of the discus-
sion. "They would never do it! They would never dare to do it!"

"The Liberal and the Labour councilmen, Miss Mary, if they
vote with these Bolsheviki, 'ave the majority, and if the majority
says so, so it has to be."

The sleek-haired young man now returned with a great pile
of tablecloths over his arm. Mary impulsively got up and ap-
proaching the cage thrust her arm through the little aperture in
front of it. "I can only tell you, Mr. Wollop," she said, "that
"whatever John thinks, or is bound now to say he thinks, I shall
always think of you as the Mayor of Glastonbury!"

The white whiskers bowed low over the outstretched hand.
For a second Mary had the wild fancy that he was going to kiss
it; but instead of that he shook it vigorously. "I expect I'll see
you next week, Miss Mary," he said, "at Mrs. Philip's tea-party.
Look after Miss Crow well, Booty!"

This remark from his employer had become really necessary;
for on her return to her seat at the counter Mary found such an
array of highly coloured tablecloths, all after the taste of Mr.
Booty and none after her own, that her difficulty recommenced
with accumulated weight. She bought something at last, how-
ever; and nodding to the Mayor walked away with her parcel
down the central aisle of the shop. The "Wollop grievance-look"
had left most of the faces she passed, for the clock was moving
round towards closing time, but the smell of the place, that
peculiar smell of rent fabric, especially of rent-linen fabric,
sank like a thin, delicate dust into her nostrils, into her throat,
into her consciousness.


I'm glad I don't work here yet," she thought, "but if Miss Drew
turns me out, when I'm married to John, I swear I'll ask tne old
chap to let me come to him. I could sell tablecloths, anyway,
better than that conceited boy." Once on the pavement she
hesitated as to whether she had time to take John's tablecloth to
his rooms in Northload Street before returning to tea with Miss
Drew. Pondering on this point she remained in front of Wollop's
shop staring into the window. It happened that the light fell in
such a way upon the window-glass as to throw back a reflexion
of her face. Mary was startled at its pallor and its haggardness.
How many weeks had she been looking like that?

"Girls ought not to have anything to do when they're in love,"
she thought. They ought to be let off everything!"

She turned away now from her reflexion in the shop window.
"I'll just leave this parcel with the landlady," she said to herself.
John was not expecting to see her today at all. She assumed he
was spending all his time today with Mr. Geard. "No; I won't
go up those stairs," she thought. "I'll leave this with the
woman." She hurried down the street, turned to the right by St.
John's Church, followed the railings of the cattle-market, turned
to the left down George Street, and finally arrived at the door
of number fifteen, Northload. She could not find the landlady.
Always present when she would have given anything for the
woman not to be there, today when she wanted her she was
nowhere to be seen. Nor were there any neighbours around. Over
dre whole of number fifteen hung a sinister and unnatural silence.
The street door was wide open, and just inside it was the land-
lady's door; but all was silent, forbidding, desolate. Three times
she rang the bell. Not a sound! She went back upon the doorstep
and rang the outside bell. Not a sound!

"Well I'll just run up and leave it outside," she said to herself
and began ascending the stairs. What was her astonishment
when she heard voices up there while she paused to take breath
on the first landing. At the top of the second flight she could catch
actual words. She stopped there hesitating. Yes! He had someone
in there with him; and she knew who it was too! It was Tom
Barter. She stood for a second, resting herself, with her parcel
propped upon the balustrade. She did not pause there to listen;
she paused because she felt unable to enter and equally unable
to go away. It was one of the most wretched moments of her
life in these last agitating weeks.

"I'm going to make a little money," she heard Barter say.
"and then I'm going to clear out of this blasted hole. That was
what Mary and I used to do all the time when we were so thick.
We used to curse these bloody superstitions! It's all a fake. It's
only to draw visitors. Your precious boss, Geard, is the greatest
humbug of all. But of course you know that! You're out for
making a little money, just as I am; and then, Holy Moses!
you'll do a bunk just as I shall!" There was a sound of shuffled
chairs and the clatter of china. Mary Crow became suddenly con-
scious that her attitude to Glastonbury had changed of late. It
was Tom Barter she hated now, not Glastonbury.

John's voice uttered the next words, and they did not improve
matters. "Where on earth has she put my whiskey?" she heard
him cry. "Oh, I wish to God women wouldn't always tidy things
up!"

Then came Barter's voice again. As far as she could catch his
words he seemed to be criticising John's biscuits: those Huntley
and Palmer biscuits that she had bought with such care a week
ago! "It's just as if it were a rough-and-tumble undergraduate's
room in Oxford," she thought. Yes, Tom was criticising her bis-
cuits. He was strewing her rug with them too, no doubt, and
trampling them into it! They had now apparently found the
whiskey and were hunting for glasses. Then ensued more clatter
and more half-humorous and half-peevish groans. Then when
they had seated themselves again, still worse ensued.

"Don't be later than nine, Tom, will you?" she heard John
say. "And I'll get another bottle of this when the pub's open
again. If they're funny, where you live, about your coming in
late, you can sleep here with me. I've got a double bed."

She was unable to catch Tom's reply to this, but presently her
whole frame stiffened and a cold shiver ran through her.

"I suppose Mary's often told you what friends we were," she
heard Tom Barter say.

John's voice was a little indistinct. "Something of the sort,"
she thought she heard him murmur.

"I ought perhaps to tell you that I got so fond of her," went
on Tom Baiter, "that I once even spoke about our being married.
I suppose she never told you that, did she?"

"No," John's voice replied. And oh how she dreaded the tone
he was using now! It was not a frank, single-hearted, trusting
lover's tone. "No," said John, "she never told me you'd spoken
of that."

"It came to nothing, of course," said the other, "and I changed
my mind about it before you came along....Are you going to marry
her?"

At this point Mary let the parcel containing the tablecloth slip
down to the floor between her body and the balustrade. She
thrust her fingers into her ears and ran hurriedly down the stairs.
Down both flights of stairs she ran, and it was not till she was
out of the house that she realised that she'd dropped her parcel.
Her misery of mind rose up now out of all proportion to its
cause.

She had come to feel towards that room of John's a peculiarly
tender feeling, the feeling that a woman naturally gets towards
her first real possession. To find that that room, which had been
of late the centre of all her thoughts by day and by night, was
being turned into a ramshackle bachelors' rendezvous was an
outrage to something so deep in her that her emotion about if
puzzled herself. She felt as if she were an outsider--a light-of-
love--whose visits to number fifteen were devoid of all lasting
significance. And Tom's tone about Glastonbury--how she dis-
liked it! Those many secret meetings with John she had had in
St. Mary's ruined Chapel had recently, by a natural process of
association, begun to convert her to the ancient place. And this
room--her room with John, their menage together--to have it
henceforth associated with Barter's rough cynicism and super-
cilious brutality was the last straw. For herself she cared nothing
about his thinking of her as a girl he had decided against marry-
ing. It was only John's hurt vanity she was nervous about. She
herself was only too thankful he had decided against it. Be-
sides--always was she Mary Crow. Her personal pride was far
too deep to be affected by the opinion of her held by any man.
No, it was none of these things that rankled now in her heart
and made her face so white and tense as she hurried back to the
Abbey House. It was something much deeper, something that she
had secretly been dreading ever since those two sacred Northwold
days. It was in fact a dark, bitter, suspicious, corrosive and yet
intangible jealousy of Tom Barter. She knew--none better than
she what a deep vein there was of erotic attraction to men in
John's nature. She knew--and she had good cause to know--how
little of the normal, passionate lover there was about him. She
and he were bound together by imponderable cravings, by inex-
plicable, magnetic lusts, which were as sterile as they were in-
tense and unsatisfied. Had he already possessed her as men
possess women, what would she have to fear, what to be jealous
of, in his love for Tom? She would belong to him as Tom never
could belong to him. It was because she knew that she might
never be possessed in that sense, even though they were married
by the most apostolical of priestly hands, that she felt the ghastly
fingers of cold fear fumbling at her vitals. Not a single tear
trickled down her cheek as she walked resolutely home. Home she
walked with steady lips and a swift, quiet tread. Home to Miss
Euphemia Drew!

When Miss Drew, a quarter of an hour later, asked her, "Was
it not a nice, warm day for March," she found she could not re-
member one single moment when she had been conscious of
warmth or of the absence of warmth. That, however, did not
prevent her giving the old lady a lively and picturesque account
of her visit to Wollop's.

"What did you go in to buy, my pretty?"

"I went in to buy some hairpins, dear.'

Miss Drew took up a little piece of one of Louie's most suc-
cessful tea-cakes and nibbled at it elegantly with her false teeth.
There was a physical stir at the bottom of Miss Drew's stomach
as she delicately lifted up her tea-cup, her little finger fastidiously
extended, to wash down--for otherwise she would have had diffi-
culty in swallowing--this honey-sweet fragment. Well did she
know that Mary was lying when she spoke of hairpins. And
Mary, sitting opposite her, every now and then taking a whiff of
eau-de-cologne from a little green-edged handkerchief, made for
her by Miss Drew, knew that she knew that she had lied. Miss
Drew's inmost feelings at the moment when Lily answered the
bell and went away, in dreamy sadness, to bring more hot water,
might have been described in the following manner: "She is buy-
ing things for that male brute to furnish some slum-room in the
town. She's either married him already or she's going to live with
him as if they were married. It's almost more than I can bear, but
I must be strong! If I lose her--but I can't think of it, consider
it, imagine it--for a minute! I don't know why God has laid this
upon me. But I've come to depend on her; and if " Miss

Drew, even to herself, was forced to cover up the passion of her
love for her companion by the use of the vague word "depend."
As a matter of fact, she loved Mary with a love like that which
John would have had to content himself with if he had been for-
bidden by some inexplicable mandate to make love to her. Every
movement of Mary's was delicious to Miss Drew. Every word she
uttered entranced the poor lady. Every garment she wore was as
sacred to her as the paten that held the bread at Holy Communion.

Lily was longer than usual fetching the hot water, and when she
finally came in it was with a much quicker movement and a less
dreamy gesture than usual that she laid down the little silver jug,
a jug whose lid had been soldered once under the regime of Miss
Drew's grandmother, and once more under the regime of Miss
Drew's mother, beside the silver tea-pot.

"Please, Miss, Louie wants to know if you'd mind if we ran
out for a minute to King Edgar's Lawn to see Mr. Crow's air-
plane. It's passing now, Weather wax says, and Louie's never seen
it close by."

"Certainly; of course; run off; both of you!" replied Miss
Drew; and she turned to her companion with the same look of
benevolent superiority to the tastes of the lower classes that her
grandmother displayed when her servants ran out to see the first
bicycle and which her mother displayed when her servants ran
out to see the first motor car. "King Edgar's Lawn" was a popu-
lar name that had locally arisen when a famous modern anti-
quary--guided, he himself declared, by supernatural agency--
had traced the foundations of that great monarch's chapel.

"Lets go out, child, and see this wonder ourselves!" said Miss
Drew, after filling the tea-pot from the silver jug.

The two ladies left the room together, picked up their cloaks
in the hall, descended the terrace-steps, stepped carefully across
a thin strip of crocuses and a sunken wall, and joined their
maids and old Weatherwax on the smooth-cut expanse of velvety
grass beyond which rose the ruins of the Tower Arch. It certainly
was a startling sight to see the airplane, like a colossal dragon-
fly, cross the empty air-spaces above these historic Ruins.

Mr. Weatherwax, however, gave the thing the most brief and
cursory glance. "Me broad-beans be going to make a fine show
this year. Have 'ee been round to see 'em, Miss?"

Euphemia Drew took her arm away from the wrist of Mary
and turned her eyes from the calm expanse of the sky to the
lesser but by no means negligible expanse of the countenance of
Isaac Weatherwax. "Are they as high as our good friends' across
the road, Isaac?"

This remark somewhat nonplussed the gardener. Between the
two gardens which he presided over he liked to keep up a pre-
tended rivalry. He was "Weatherwax" to the Vicar, and "Isaac"
to Miss Drew; and between "Isaac" and "Weatherwax" there was
a lively competition. "Well, Miss," he confessed, after a disdain-
ful glance upward at the stupendous humming of the flying-ma-
chine, "Well, Miss, 'tis true they broad-beans across the way
may be a miserable couple o' inches taller than ours. 'Tis when
us considers the 'ealth and 'spansion o' the plants that ours do
take the prize. They be vigorous growers, they beans of ours, and
them tall ones can't hold a candle to 'en."

Mary was thinking to herself, "Tom must have left John
directly after I ran away, or he couldn't he piloting this thing
now!"

The afternoon was slowly turning into evening. A delicate
golden glow filled the western and the southern quarters of the
firmament In the midst of this glow a number of rose-coloured
clouds, floating filaments of vapour, air, feathery wefts, undu-
lated, fluctuated, thickened, dissolved, as the chance-strewn cata-
falque of that particular day's obsequies limned itself in space.

Totally disregarding Tom Barter, who was gravely piloting the
machine in the control of which his whole being seemed satis-
fied, Philip Crow was looking down intently at the moving pan-
orama below them. How unfamiliar those ancient Ruins looked
as he saw them now gliding away beneath him--aye! and how
unimportant, how negligible! Surely it was the round earth itself
that was moving; not the shining, steely projectile in which he
was being hurtled through the sky! He snatched a second to stare
straight down at St. Michael's Tower on the top of the Tor as they
shot drumming and droning over it. Philip's thoughts were dis-
turbed at the moment. Three separate dangerous blows had been
struck of late at him and his factories. Red Robinson's machina-
tions had consummated in a formidable movement among the
town-councillors to make Geard Mayor. Dave Spear had got
twice as long a list of the factory-hands ready to strike than had
been expected by either party. And now this crazy ne'er-do-well
cousin of his, John Crow, had opened an office near the station
and was feverishly advertising some sort of religious hocus-pocus!
This last blow struck him the hardest; though it would have been
hard to explain exactly why. Perhaps he himself could not have
explained why. One thing was clear, all his own activity, all his
own effort, all his own prestige were connected with turning Glas-
tonbury from an idle show-place into a prosperous industrial
centre. On this particular point he was at one with Red Robinson
just as he was at one with Tom Barter. To beat down this pious
Glastonbury legend, this piece of monkish mummery, to beat it
down and trample it into dust. He longed to do this beyond every-
thing in the world except electrifying the entrails of the Men-
dips; and he would do it too! He would do it alone if the labour
element--short-sighted as it always was in regard to their true
interests--betrayed him for this sneak-thief, this crafty hypocrite
Geard!

He hoped at this moment that Barter would be minded to
extend his circular hovering for hours so as to give him a long
hawk's flight over this idyllic Somersetshire. He would conquer
it, this effeminate flower-garden of pretty-pretty superstitions and
mediaeval abracadabra! He would plant factory upon factory in
it, dynamo upon dynamo! He would have mines beneath it. rail-
ways across it, airlines above it!

If Barter had not been a novice at flying and consequently
afraid to remove his attention for a moment from his task, he
might have divined his passenger's mental state and humoured
him by staying up longer. But Philip was in no mood openly to
confess such feelings. He had told his subordinate laconically
enough to take him to Wookey Hole; and to Wookey Hole Barter
must take him! There was a good field for landing on the :Men-
dips side of the Hole, away from the direction of Wells; but
he decided to make a small detour first. Philip recognised the
general lie of the land tonight and its natural landmarks more
quickly than most passengers would have done in one of their
first ascents. So might some hawk-eye among his Norman ances-
tors have surveyed the landscape from the high keep of some
newly built castle and known it hill by hill, stream by stream,
valley by valley, forest by forest, for what it was.

As he looked down upon the earth, that clear March evening,
and watched the chess-board fields pass in procession beneath
him, and watched the trees fall into strange patterns and watched
the villages, some red, some brown, some grey, according as brick
or stone or slate predominated, approach or recede, as the plane
sank or rose, Philip's spirit felt as if it had wings of its own
that were carrying it over this conquered land independent of
Barter's piloting. They passed over Havyatt, where the monks on
one occasion persuaded the Danes to draw back and refrain from
plundering the Abbey; they passed over West Pennard, and over
Pylle and Evercreech; they passed over Batcombe and over Wan-
straw and over Postlebury Wood; and it was not till they reached
Marston Bigot where they could see to the eastward the livid-
grey waters of the Somersetshire Frome that Barter swung the
plane round and headed west again. Due west, they flew now, over
the stone roofs of Shepton Mallet, straight to the city of Wells.
When they were above Wells and they could look down on the
Cathedral directly beneath them, they turned northwest; and soon,
without trouble or mishap, they descended in the precise place
they had aimed for, between Wookey Hole and Ebhor Rocks*

The impressions which rioted in Philip's brain as he clambered
out of his seat, and stretched his legs upon solid earth in that
darkening meadow, resembled the release of a charge of elec-
tricity. How small and unimportant Wells Cathedral had looked
from up there in the air! It was of the planetary earth, a sen-
sitised round orb circling through space, not of any calm earth-
mother, lying back upon her secret life, that his mind was full.
It had all passed only too quickly! It seemed only just a minute
ago that he had scrambled into his seat on the back of this shining
torpedo with dragon-fly wings. But what thoughts, what sensa-
tions! His brain whirled with the vision of an earth-life domi-
nated absolutely by Science, of a human race that had shaken
off its fearful childhood and looked at things with a clear, un-
filmed, unperverted eye. He said to himself, as he walked out
of the field with Barter--for they were intending to stay the
night at Wookey Hole--that this conquest of air had reduced
those Glastonbury Ruins to nothing. And how utterly unimpor-
tant and irrelevant all this disputing about capital and labour and
private property! Science must soon, he thought, give into the
hands of every individual so much power--power of creation,
power of destruction--that this dogmatic doctrine about com-
mon ownership will cease to have any meaning.

"Don't wait supper for me," he said to his companion as they
closed the gate leading into the highway. He and Barter had
their own particular bedrooms, in a little wayside inn called the
Zoyland Arms, close to the entrance to Wookey Hole Cave. The
factory there held no accommodation for travellers, for though
its wheels were turned by the River Axe as it emerged from its
underground caverns, it was not much more than a series of large
workshops. The working-people came on foot or by lorry from
the Wells suburbs which were only a couple of miles away and
people who wished to remain overnight were at the mercy of the
landlord of the inn. The two men were expected that evening to
supper, and Will Zoyland was already seated at the parlour-table,
with an uncorked bottle of wine at his side, enjoying his soup,
when they entered the place.

Philip was still in an unusual state of excitement as he ran
upstairs to his little room, where the gas had already been lit.
His window looked out on the white road, and opposite it in the
darkening hedge there was a small ash tree, whose black, sticky
buds had already burst here and there into the blurred shapes of
embryo leaves, shadowy and indistinct against the livid western
sky. A strange exultation still throbbed in his pulses as he found
himself alone in this small chamber looking out on the silent
road and on that tree. He felt in no hurry to join the others.
Let Zoyland entertain Barter as he pleased till he chose to go
down! He was their employer. He would dine when he felt in-
clined. He pushed his way past the heavy, cheap dressing-table
with its great, ugly looking-glass and jerked aside the sham-lace
curtains that obstructed his view. He made an effort to open the
window at the top. In the flare of the gas-lamp suspended from
the ceiling he saw a couple of dead flies on the narrow ledge
where the window-latch was. Something about these flies, com-
bined with the lace curtains and with the fact that he found diffi-
culty in opening the window, brought his spirits down to earth.
When he did jerk the window open, one of the dead flies fol-
lowed it, but the other one remained upside-down, its legs stiff,
its small cuirassed head inert, its body drained of all life-juices,
husk-like and hollow. He flicked the dead fly with his finger-
nail out of the window, and resting his elbows on the woodwork
leaned far out. A faint odour of funguses came to him, mingled
with that peculiar smell of road-dust that bears upon it the first
weight of the falling night. A rustling sound followed by a series
of sleepy, peevish clucks and then by more rustling indicated the
presence of roosting fowds. The little ash tree against the dying
fragments of steely whiteness in the sky stretched out its
branches; stretched them out with that particular upward clutch
of the twig ends that characterises its tribe.

Philip's face at that moment would have presented a mask of
stony human fanaticism to the senses of that little tree if they
could have pierced the dark. From this air-flight, one of the
first he had ever taken, he had gathered a momentum that no
dead fly, however discouraging, could retard. He used it now to
shoot his mind, like a rock-shattering projectile, into those re-
mote caves of Wookey Hole out of which rolled the subterranean
river that turned the wheels of his factory. A grim smile crossed
his mouth when he recalled how contemptible, how unimportant,
the massed towers and buttresses of Wells Cathedral had ap-
peared as he flew above them! His thoughts clanked harshly
along the up-curving branch in front of him, like a proud brigade
of arrogant tin soldiers. A cold fury of destruction possessed
him when he thought of Glastonbury. Arthur and the Holy
Grail, Abbey Ruins and Saint Joseph--he was the man to blow
them all sky-high! Communism? A thing of mere distribution
of spoils! What did a meticulous economy of that kind matter?
On, on, on!--destroying the past, creating the future--on, on!
The hard light of his electric bulbs on the stalactites in Wookey
Hole could not have glittered more fiercely, the steel surface
of his new plane could not have shone more coldly than the
narrowed eye-slits of Philip Crow as he drew his head back,
under the hanging gas-globe, and walked over to the wash-
basin.

Damn! Another dead fly in his soap-dish! He tossed out
the soap and carried the dish to the window and shook it there
with a vindictive sweep of his arm. He felt as if his glittering
onrush through the world, engine after engine after engine, and
himself yanking them forward with an iron heart, was outraged
by the mere existence in the world of dead flies. That fellow,
John--damn him, oh damn him!--was a dead fly come to life.
Geard was another. Those ridiculous Dekkers were others too.
Tilly, in his own house, with her black beady eyes, was yet
another! All were buzzing flies, whose existence stung him in
life and dispirited him in death. What was that line, in some
old poet, that he had had to learn by heart at school and that
he'd never forgotten? "Heads without name, no more remem-
bered than summer-flies!" "Heads without name." His head
had a name. Devereux--that was a name for a man to face life
with!

He hurriedly washed his hands and face; plastered down
his iron-grey hair over his narrow skull, grinned like a wolf
at himself in the ugly looking-glass and ran downstairs. An
unexpected shock was awaiting him as he entered the little
parlour full of small supper-tables. There were Zoyland and
Barter, laughing together, already warmed by Zoyland's wine;
but there at another table--and they rose at once to greet
him--were Dave and Percy Spear! They must have been agi-
tating all day and collecting names in his Wookey Hole plant.
But he could not restrain his pleasure in seeing them there.
How perfect she looked in this dim inn-parlour light! He thought
Dave looked a trifle embarrassed--and no wonder, the revo-
lutionary rogue!--as they shook hands; but she--she was his;
her eyes told him she was his! He knew it in the marrow of
his bones as she leant towards him, giving him--not only her
ungloved hand, but everything! Yes; she was like that long
swaying ash-tree branch, just budding, in the night out there.

He hurriedly crossed over to his own place, jested coldly
about Zoyland having opened the bottle, murmured something
sarcastically to Barter about "propitiating his Bolsheviki rela-
tives" and carried his chair to the Spears' table.

"Have you brought your stiletto for the wicked Capitalist?"
cried Will Zoyland.

"Aye, what's that, Will?" threw in Dave.

"I asked Percy if she'd got her dagger hidden away in her
underlinen to give Crow his quietus," repeated Lord P.'s bastard,
winking at Barter.

Barter's face at that moment was indeed one in which could
be read "strange matters." The wine had heated him; other-
wise he would have found the whole situation bristling with
discomfort. His cautious upper-middle-class respectability had
already been outraged to its foundations by Zoyland's noisy
camaraderie. Zoyland and his brother-in-law's wife had by
this time exchanged not a few strokes of reckless roguery.

Barter's lecherousness had for years been roused to a fever
of aggravation by Percy Spear. He had seen more of her in
their Norfolk childhood than he had seen of any of her cousins
and he had used her young figure on many a sex-starved occasion
for the satisfaction of his amorous thoughts. But Percy had
never let him touch her. She disliked him mentally and she
loathed him physically. But she was ready enough to chaff him;
and when she did this she always bewildered him by her clever
modernity.

Barter had felt a horrible sense of social inferiority just
now as he had sat sullenly drinking William Zoyland's wine.
His family was in reality quite as "good" as that of the Crows;
hut he totally lacked the suppleness of the Crow mind. He
was in fact socially old-fashioned; and to be old-fashioned
at this date meant being made a fool of by clever women.

It was still more uncomfortable for him when Philip
appeared and began his dinner at the Spear's table. Zoyland
had called for a second bottle and had begun to grow slightly
tipsy; and with his tipsiness extremely confidential. Even
so, he didn't treat Barter--at least so Barter thought--
like a real equal. He confided in him blindly, grossly, cal-
lously; a good deal as a gentleman would confide in a faith-
ful servant of whose discretion he was sure but towards whose
personal reactions to what he confessed he felt complete in-
difference.

Tom Barter had not one single relative of any kind living.
He had never been to the university. His diploma of social
position went back to an earlier date; for he had been to Grey-
lands School. He had entered an office at nineteen and since
then had lived for two things, lechery and money. He had seen
to it that these two things did not clash by habitually taking
his pleasures cheaply. This he did by eschewing harlots and
mistresses and by enjoying constantly new adventures with
flirtatious middle-class girls. With shopgirls, business-girls,
waitresses, barmaids, Barter always won favour, partly by rea-
son of his being a gentleman, partly by his shameless advances,
but most of all by a certain direct, unassumed, cynical but
very honest interest in all their professional problems. They
felt at home with him. They trusted him. And except for de-
priving them of pretensions to "purity," he really was to be
trusted!

"She's alone there; and of course he may have gone over. He
may be over there now, as I clink this glass! But I don't think
so. A person has instincts in these things, don't you agree, Barter?
Instincts. You know what I mean. Barter? But perhaps you
don't! Perhaps you despise instincts! You rather look like some
one who despises instincts. What would you do. Barter, if you
were married and your wife fell in love with a young chap of her
own age? Eh? What would you do? Would you let him pull
your nose and say nothing? Have you ever had your nose pulled,
Barter? I mean really and truly pulled? Would you let him do it?
Tweak your nose, and give it a good pull?"

Tom Barter's fingers itched to give his aristocratic friend what
at school was called a bloody nose. Short of hitting him, how-
ever (and what chance would he have in fisticuffs with such a
fellow?), he could not just then think of any method of putting
him to rout.

"That's my way, Barter, and so now you know it. It mayn't be
a good way; but it's my way and when it comes to women it's
no good unless you're playing your own hand. They don't give
a fig for book-learning, Barter. Perhaps you've never seen thro'
their pinnies far enough to know that? But that's the truth. Not
a fig! What women like is bed-rock-bottom--every time! You
can't go wrong with them--from Queen Gargamelle to Maid
Marian--if you talk facts and think smut. You seem to me a
downright man-to-woman kind of chap, Barter, so I expect you've
found that out for yourself. But perhaps not. Perhaps you've
puritanical and have never meddled with the hussies. I don't think
so, though--you look to me as if you knew a hawk: from a
hernshaw! "

Tom Barter could only drink more and more wine, as he did
his best to carry off this uncomfortable situation. In his heart he
longed to be back at number fifteen, Northload Street, drinking
whiskey with John. How different John was from this bearded
ruffian! If hatred had the power to kill, Lord P.'s bastard would
certainly not have played guide again to any more stalactite
caves! "Not one of these people cares a fig what becomes of poor
Tom," Barter thought, as he grew more and more sulkily mono-
syllabic, under Zoyland's heavy joking. "At this moment, as I
sit here, not one single human being is giving me a thought. None
of the wenches I make love to in Glastonbury care a tinker's dam
for me really! Mary used to think of me sometimes; a little; just
a little; but God! now John's appeared, I am out of it there, too.
Crummie turned on me like a spitfire pussy-cat the last time I saw
her. Who have I got in the whole bloody world? Nemo, nihil,
none! Not a living soul!" And then his mind went back to the
Northwold River and the talk he had had with John about those
childish times. John was something. He was the Past and that was
something. "I like old John," he said to himself. "By God I be-
lieve when I'm fooling with old John I don't feel as if I were quite
alone. 'Twas a queer idea of his though--what he hinted at this
afternoon--that I should get a job under Geard, when they make
him Mayor, and give Philip the go-by! I must talk to John a bit
more about that. There'd be nothing permanent in that though.
But, by Jiminy, it would be almost worth it, just to watch Philip's
face when I told him!"

"Why do you say 'yes' like that, Barter? You think I'm drunk.
You're not listening! I asked you whether you thought I was a
fellow who could be cuckolded with impunity. And you said
'yes.' "

"I meant 'impunity' for a time, Will; while you led the person
on; and let them make a fool of themselves."

A dangerous gleam shot forth between the candles from Zoy-
land's drunken Teutonic eyes. It annoyed him to be called "Will"
by Barter, just as it annoyed Philip to be called "Phil." "Fool be
damned! You don't know what I'm talking about, Barter. When
I give up my girl to her lover I'm not revenging myself on any-
one; I'm...I'm...I'm acting altogether outside the wretched herd
of common human animals! I'm...I'm...I'm acting like a god, little
man!" His drunken voice was so loud that Dave and Percy and
Philip ceased talking among themselves and stared at him. Philip
got up and came towards him, followed after an interval by the
husband and wife.

"Don't you start bullying our friend Tom, Zoyland," said Philip
coldly, fixing a Norseman's eye upon the gigantic toper.

"Oh, you shut up!" growled the other. "For a very little I'd
chuck both of ye into the bally road!"

Philip shrugged his shoulders and turned to Spear. "Dave," he
said, while Barter got up sulkily from his seat and went over to
Persephone, who stood regarding the whole group with dreamy
amusement, "do you mind, Dave, if I took Cousin Percy out for
a stroll down this 'road' he talks about?"

The girl gave a start and glanced quickly at her husband. A
look, quick as lightning, from her dark, languorous eyelids, said,
"May I go with him? I'd rather like to go with him, Dave. But
I won't if you don't want me to!" While a look, a little slower to
come, replied from Dave's ruddy face,. "Go, by all means, if you
want to, my dear; why not?"

"Hullo, Dave, are you going to lecture me, too?" drawled
Zoyland, as if he had noticed the presence of his brother-in-law'
for the first time. "Tu Brute, Dave! Then Big Willy must reallv
behave himself and be polite to these solemn money-grubbers."

"Dave will amuse you, William, while Philip and I get a
breath of air," said the girl cajolingly. "And mind I'll speak to
Nell about you, if you drink any more tonight! I'll be seeing her
at Tilly's party, if not before."

Dave obediently sat down by the man with the great beard. He
looked, as he did so, just as if he had been some sagacious young
clerk-in-holy-orders taking his seat at the dais by the side of an
angry Charlemagne.

"I like you, Dave Spear," said the Bastard, "your bloody Com-
munism is all poppycock, but I'm damned if you're not more
of a man than any of us here; and you can tell Nell I said so."
He stretched out his hand as he spoke, and laid it on Dave's knee,
while an effusion of melting German-student sentimentality made
his blue eyes moist.

"I think I'll adjourn, if you people don't mind," said Tom
Barter, addressing the whole company and making a little nod
with his head as he leaned his hand against the back of a chair.
"Philip can bear witness," he glanced furtively at his employer,
"that I've got a lot to do at the office tomorrow; so I think bed is
the place for me. Good-night, Mrs. Spear, you'll excuse me,
won't you?" He had isolated himself completely from the rest of
them by this time; not exactly by what he said but by the way he
looked at them. He might have been a Frenchman in that group,
instead of the descendant of a family of Methwold squires who
were landowners when the Crows were just Isle-of-Ely farmers.

Some visitor from Venus or Mars, interested in human social
differences, would have been puzzled to know what the real
psychic cause was of Barter's repeated humiliations. How could
such an one know that the sole and simple cause of it was the
manner in which, when a boy, he had been bullied at Grey lands
School? But this was the cause and none other. Barter had been
so humiliated at Greylands, at Gladman's House there, that in
his heart he felt himself to be inferior to every educated man
he met. And this feeling in his own mind every educated man he
met, without knowing why, was compelled by some invisible urge
to take advantage of! "Bullied at Greylands--always bullied"
might have been a truth-speaking Wessex proverb. It was only
at rare moments, when he lost his temper, that he dared to look
Philip straight in the face; and yet, curiously enough, Philip
came much nearer being afraid of Barter than of anyone else in
Glastonbury. It was that Greylands bullying, those memories of
what went on at Gladman's House, that made a neurotic catch-
pole of this sturdy descendant of Norfolk fox-hunters.

Philip ran immediately upstairs to his small bedroom. Here he
snatched a rough overcoat from a nail and an old sporting cap of
the same faded cloth. This latter he instinctively--as if bound
for some dark adventure--pulled low down over his narrow fore-
head. The ugly looking-glass by the window made him think of
dead flies. His angry contempt for Barter, "going to bed like that
because he'd been insulted by a hulking zany," made him think
of "heads without name, no more remembered"--and with this on
the mute lips of his mind he turned the gasjet low and hurried
down again. Here, in the porch of the little inn, he found Perse-
phone, wrapped, she too, in a long cloth coat, and wearing over
her fuzzy, dusky hair a boyish cap. They went out together in
silence. In silence he led her up the road, round a turn to the
right, till they came to a closed gate in the hedge. This he opened
for her, lifting it bodily off its latch and replacing it by the same
main force when she had stepped through. He now led her, still in
a sort of guilty silence, up a narrow winding hill-path on each
side of which grew large, indistinct trees, their roots in the sloping
bank. At this point Philip produced an electric flashlight from his
overcoat pocket and held it so as to illuminate their way.

Persephone became aware now of the sound of water, down
somewhere in the darkness to their right, and it was not long be-
fore he made her stop and look between the tree trunks, upon
whose rough surface he threw the light of his flashlight. There she
saw a single bright lamp burning, throwing morbid shadows upon
an expanse of grass. By this radiance a little lawn with chairs
and tables set out became apparent, al! these things motionless
and deserted, looking ghostly, and even ghastly there. "I keep
it lit," whispered Philip in her ear. There was no obvious need
for him to whisper. It was hard to raise his voice just then.
"It's my electric plant. That's where we serve tea to visitors.
I expect you've been there yourself, only you came in a different
way."

They went on again, the path they followed growing steadilv
narrower and steeper. They walked closely side bv side and
presently Philip without a word possessed himself of her hand.
At last she saw before her the upward rise of a precipitous rock
covered with moss and last year's ferns, and right before them,
at the base of the rock, a little square doorway. Philip took
from his waistcoat pocket a large key, like the key to a drive gate,
and using his flashlight turned it in the lock and pushed the door
open. When once they were both inside he locked the gate again
put the key in his pocket and drew a deep breath. "Perse, Perse,"
he whispered, and hugging the girl fiercely to his heart kissed
her with a long clinging kiss full on the mouth. She hung limp
and yielding in his arms. His kiss was of the kind that needs
no response, that could be aware of no response except a des-
perate resistance. But there was no flicker of resistance in
Persephone's yielded mouth and abandoned body. She yielded
to him utterly, as dark water yields to the plunge of a diver.
When he let her go she appeared so drugged by his embrace
that for a second she swayed and staggered. But he caught her,
with a strong clutch round the waist, and holding her so led her
forward. Up and up they climbed, and then, after stopping to
breathe at ease for a moment on a little level platform, down,
and again down they went. This was repeated, in spiral curves
of progression, several times. The girl seemed still too dazed
to realise the curious character of the path he led her by, and
though he often flashed his light to the right and the left neither
of them breathed a syllable.

They were isolated from human interference as completely
as if they had descended into some cavern at the bottom of the
sea. There was only that one entrance to Wookey Hole Caves,
at least only one known to modern man, and the key to that
one entrance lay in Philip's pocket. It was his money that had
opened these caves. It was his money that would presently
electrify these caves. He was like a solitary magician, whose
secret kingdom hidden in the bowels of the earth and guarded by
invisible demons, was as impenetrable to invasion as the private
thoughts in his own mind were impenetrable. Philip had never,
in all his conscious days, known a moment to compare with this
moment. He had got her! The rapacity of his desire to possess
her wholly, to ravish, not only her body, but her inmost soul,
compelled him now to exercise an adamantine restraint upon
his passion. He suddenly became a Fabius Cunctator of erotic
strategy. A cold and calculating calm rose up from the crater
of his desire, as if a volcano had engendered a shaft of ice. He
supported her now down a long, narrow, winding flight of rough
steps and not until they reached the bottom of these steps did
he utter a word. Once at the bottom, however, and on the edge
of a limestone platform leading into a vast cathedral-like cavern,
he raised aloft his flashlight and directed it against the amazing
walls that surrounded them.

These were walls composed of enormous stalactites hanging
from the roof and of equally monstrous stalagmites rising up
from the floor. These strange things--objects for which, since so
few of mortal men ever beheld them, there are in our language no
adequate descriptive words--showed themselves to be, under the
beam of light which he threw upon them, of the most staggering
variety of iridescent colours. A livid greenishness and a livid blu-
ishness were what predominated; and next to these a ghastly
kind of phosphorescent orange.

Philip found it possible to lift up his voice now; but it was
still an effort for him to speak above a whisper and he yielded to
this weakness without shame. "See those two, over there, Perse?"
he said, holding out his flashlight with one hand and pointing his
other towards what he wanted his companion to see. What he
pointed at were two of these barbarous shapes that had advanced,
one from below and one from above, in slow accretions, until they
were within an ace of each other, their extreme points, in fact,
almost touching.

"How long did they take?" whispered Persephone.

"To grow, you mean?" he whispered back. "I forget exactly.
About an inch in a thousand years. Those two things would only
have been separated from each other by about two inches when
Christ was crucified!"

"Stop! Is that water?" she cried suddenly, breaking the spell in
her excitement. Her cry was caught up by a singular echo that
did not confine itself to a single note but repeated her last four
syllables.

"Is that water?" reverberated the echo. Is that water?"

"It's uncanny!" she cried, catching hold of his arm.

"Uncanny!" repeated the echo.

The girl still clung tight to his arm, but child-like she wanted
to show off her courage. "Who are you?" she shouted at the top
of her voice.

"Who are you?" returned the echo.

"Are you a devil?" cried Persephone Spear.

"--you a devil?" threw back the echo.

Philip interrupted this dialogue by directing his flashlight to-
wards the water. It was of an indescribable tint, this water. It
might indeed have been the Styx, that mysterious river by which
the gods swore their only inviolable oath.

"Is it the Axe?" she asked.

"A tributary from it, I think" he said. "One day I'm going to
make it carry me to the Axe!"

The girl yielded to a delicious shiver. "Down there, do you--
oh, there's a boat, Philip! There's a boat!"

"Yes, that's my boat," said Philip Crow in a tone wherein
Jason might have said, "my Argo."

"Let's go down to that water," she said. "Can we do that?"

Since this was precisely what he had long since decided upon,
he promptly acceded to the girl s request. They walked with
careful steps down to the very edge of this prehistoric estuary.
He was trembling too much with the near approach of the con-
summation of his desire to have time for such imaginations; and
she was too excited by the sight of the boat down there; otherwise
they might have wondered what strange shapes of what neo-
lithic cavemen, long before the epoch of Abel Twig's Lake
Dwellers, had bent down to drink, or to wash the blood from
their hands, in that Stygian flood. "In the bowels of the Mendips,"
his wild feelings ran, "my girl...my pleasure...I, I, I,...taking my
pleasure...conquering this land underneath the earth...as I con-
quer it in the air...I, I, I, stamping my will on life...on woman...
on...on...on the Future!"

"Can't we get into the boat, Philip?" she whispered. Her sub-
dued voice made his pulses beat. Had her girl's instinct already
divined his proud intention?

He made no reply, but seizing the rope which moored the boat
to an iron stake at their feet pulled it to land. At the bottom
of the boat were lying a pair of oars. He helped her to get in and
to sit down on one side of the two small benches. Hauling the
rope after him he sat down himself on the other bench and gath-
ered up the oars from where they lay. He handed the flashlight into
her keeping. She put up her free hand and touched his shoulder
as he began to row, taking long, hard strokes.

"You are Charon!" she whispered into the back of his Bayeux
Tapestry skull.

He panted in quick little gasps as he rowed. The light from the
flashlight which she held fell upon the water and upon the black
stones of the shore.

It suddenly occurred to Philip's mind as he rowed--what
if their little flashlight went out? He let his oars rest on the
surface of the livid water, where strange terrific shadows kept
moving, shadows that might well have been the upheaving forms
of monstrous, antediluvian creatures--ichthyosauri perhaps--
that had escaped the doom, down here below the Mendips, of
the evolutionary process of a hundred thousand years. With
feverish fingers he searched his pockets. Thanks be! In both his
coat and his overcoat reposed boxes of good Swan Yesta matches.
So that was as it should be. He knew the place well enough
to be perfectly safe, with all those miniature torches in his
possession!

"Why don't you go on, Philip? You make me nervous. What
are you looking for? Cigarettes?"

"You shall have your cigarette presently, my girl," he thought.
But aloud he cried, "Careful, Perse! Careful! Hold it a bit
higher!"

Their craft grounded now upon a broad, low slab of prehistoric
limestone. Above it a great, slippery, precipitous wall ascended to
the roof. Here there was a very strangely shaped formation of
petrification such as would have required the grossest of modern
minds to endow with a human image; although Dante might not
have hesitated to find words for it. "They call that," he said,
pointing at this curious stalagmitic conformation as he helped her
from the boat, "tbey call that, the Witch of Wookey Hole. They
say a monk from Glastonbury turned her into--I say! What's
the matter, child? What is it? Oh, for God's sake, what is it.
Perse?"

The girl had fallen into a hunched-up crouching position upon
the slippery limestone slab by the water's edge and had covered
her head with both her hands. He was convinced she was weeping
by tbe movement of her shoulders, though she did not utter
a sound. There was not in all Philip Crow's profoundest being
one least little grain, one tiniest atom, of what Mr. Evans
suffered from. With all his maniacal lust for power, his was probably
the least cruel human soul within a radius of twenty miles from
that singular spot. That his high-spirited Percy--his secretest,
most private "possession"--should suddenly be seized with
an excess of trouble to which he lacked the clue, shook the
foundations of his pride. There was something nobly courteous,
nobly tender, in the timorous gesture with which, having tossed
the oars back in tbe boat and pulled its prow up the shelving rock,
he bent down and folded his long fingers round that head in the
boy's cap. What was his astonishment and relief when, under
this grave caress, the extraordinary girl rose to her knees before
him. Persephone Spear was shaking with laughter! She had not
been weeping at all. For a second he thought she was hysterical;
but when, through the contortions of her childish paroxysm,
she put out her tongue at him, he was assured. So disturbed
had he been, however, that for a minute or two all the erotic
feelings in him became as petrified as that stone image of the
Witch that stood over against him. The girl could see he was
disturbed and the sight of his gravity increased her mirth.

She dropped the flashlight upon the ledge of rock and clutching
at her sides she stayed to and fro in a breath-taking laughing-
fit. Every time she came near to stopping, something about
her lover's face would send her off again. It almost seemed as
if the pent-up little-girl gaiety of her whole mature life had broken
loose by the waters of this miniature Styx!

Philip simply could not understand this exhibition of school-
girlishness at this particular moment and in this particular place.
But he was too relieved that it was not any emotional reaction
or any distress in her, to feel angry with her as she struggled
to regain her composure. He felt a slight sensation of being
made a fool of, but not to any embarrassing extent. How could
he know that the deepest rift between his cousin and her hus-
band had been that during the whole three years of their marriage
Dave Spear had never once shown one single flicker of humour.
And here, in her seducer of this mad night under the roots of
the Mendips, she had suddenly recognized the same lack! It
was the contemplation of Philip's portentously grave face--
grave with the gravest of all emotions in the world!--that,
combined with the strangeness of her surroundings, had brought
on that fit of laughing. She had laughed exactly as a child laughs
in church; simply because she knew it would be outrageous,
unseemly, inartistic, and even a little monstrous to get a laughing-
fit at such a moment! Of course, the fact that Persephone could
laugh like that, under the circumstances, was a revelation of
her character. It showed the detachment of her soul from her
senses. It showed that, at the core of her being, there was a
profane mocking demon, that scrutinised derisively, in cold
blood, every situation in which she found herself.

But Percy's burst of laughter only shamelessly expressed
what many and quite normal women have often felt; namely,
the grotesque gravity of masculine lust. It is possible that
Aphrodite herself was called "laughter-loving" by her lover
Ares when he was furiously angry with her. In any case, it was
queer enough to hear such a ringing peal of shameless girlish
mischief rising up from the plutonian edge of that ghastly
water.

What gave the whole scene, too, an element of fantastic
bizarrerie was the fact that the fallen flashlight illuminated at
this moment only the girl's legs, leaving the rest of her figure in
dark shadow.

Philip held out his hands to her at last; and she became quiet
and quite calm when he lifted her up upon her feet. He allowed
their flashlight to remain on the ground. He pulled her hack a
little way, where the rock was smoother, under the dark wall of
the cavern. "Do you see where the water disappears. Perse?*' he
said, making her sit down by him. Their backs were now resting
against the side of the cavern; and from this position they coidd
follow the long beam of the prostrate flashlight which now illu-
minated for them a strange phenomenon. Not more than a dozen
yards from where they crouched, the water flowed under a low,
flat bridge of solid stone. There was only about three feet of
hollow space between the outflowing water and the massive rock
that hung above it.

"One day. Perse, I'll have a barge made, flat enough to carry
me under that rock, and back again. No one can tell what I may
not find if I follow that water!"

She threw her arms round his neck and gave him a quick, pas-
sionate kiss. "I'll go with you, Phil, if you do!"

The horizontal beam projected by their fallen light was wide
enough, before it reached this vanishing-point of the illuminated
water, to throw into evidence a strip of soft greyish sand a little
distance off. As a contrast to the weird colours thrown out by the
copper, iron, lead, and manganese in the walls of the cave, this
strip of grey sand assumed an appearance of Cimmerian neutrality.

Persephone showed no surprise and no reluctance when he
took her by the hand to lead her there.

The level beam of flashlight fell upon the hem of her dress and
upon her feet, while the rest of her remained in shadow. Her
slender ankles, resting motionless there side by side, suddenly
struck Philip's mind with a sense of extreme human pathos. They
looked like a doll's ankles; and they hit his fancy as being so
quaintly irresponsible, so oddly detached! They had to carry all
this burden of a girl's turbulent heart, her blunders, her errors,
her triumphs, through the long track of her days; and what had
they done?

He opened one of his precious boxes of Swan Yestas, casting,'
as he did so, a fellow-bandit's leer in the direction of the flash-
light. "You've served me well, old boy," his look said, "but
I'm glad I'm not quite dependent on you!" He lit her cigarette
and then lit one of his own. The tortoise-shell case that had
held them took on in his eyes at that moment the welcome
reassurance of a familiar possession in a strange surrounding.
For a few minutes they smoked side by side in a delicious languor
of contentment and peace. Certainly, if the girl had held up a
lighted match to his face at that moment she would have seen
upon it what William Blake says women love best of all to
see.

Philip's fierce predatoriness had melted into the sweet security
of possession; while Percy's proud wilfulness had melted into
the delicious passivity of being possessed. No thought of their
treachery, no thought of Dave or of Tilly came to disturb their
peace. The satisfied physical desire of each of them had trans-
formed itself into an indescribable tenderness for the bodily
presence of the other one. It was as if their two souls--like
the souls of a pair of triumphant chemists brooding above the
successfully mingled elements in a passive crucible--awaited
the creative act of the occult life-force. Their bodies felt as
though they were still linked together in an indescribable sweet-
ness of identity, while their minds felt a profound reluctance
to allowing any hasty movement of thought to tilt the brimming
cup of their bodies' satisfaction and spill the precious ichor.
So strong was the bent bow of their proud contentment that
in the twanging of its string it shot their spasm of gratitude
straight to the heart of the Cause of Life. And unlike the prayer
of John and Mary from the surface of the sun-lit Wissey, this
singular cry from the banks of the Styx reached the good in
the nature of the Eternal Being and dodged the evil. By pure
chance--as in the other case--did this occur; but in its ocur-
rence it brought a backwash of profane delight down there to
that strip of grey sand such as that ancient spot, in all its pre-
historic longevity, had never known before. The luck which
that spasm of gratitude from these two cousins stole from the
double-natured Cause of Life continued to soothe their nerves
even after they had risen from their Cimmerian bed and re-
crossed their Styx.

The girl's cynical detachment neutralized this luck in the
end; but all the long journey back it remained with them. It
remained with them even when they had finallv parted at
their adjoining doors on the little upper landing of the Zoyland
Arms, he to re-enter his solitary room of the dead flies, she to
clamber across the sleeping, or apparently sleeping, body of
her husband and to stretch herself out and make herself as
imperceptible as she could close up against the thin, hard,
wooden partition that now separated her from the owner of
Wookey Hole.



THE UNPARDONABLE SIN



Mr. Owen Evans, seated by the gas-stove at the back of
Old Jones' shop, was enjoying a late breakfast. It was the day fol-
lowing the one wherein Philip Crow conducted Persephone to his
subterranean kingdom. Mr. Evans' breakfast differed a great deal
from the breakfast partaken by Mayor Wollop on the preceding
morning. It lacked the Mayor's invisible attendants. It lacked the
Mayor's Dundee Marmalade. It lacked the Mayor's Western Ga-
zette. In place of this latter purveyor of topical items, Mr. Evans'
bodily refreshment--consisting of a pot of tea and three stale
rolls--was heightened by the presence of an old edition of the
Inferno in the original Italian, open at the page that describes
the blasphemous obstinacy of the heathen giant, Capaneus.

"As I was then," howled this unconscionable rebel against the
Emperor of the Universe, "such am I still!"

Mr. Evans found no difficulty in translating this passage, even
though the lettering of the old book was such a stumbling-block
to modern eyes; and in his troubled response to its terrible im-
port he placed no less than half of all the butter he possessed
upon the piece of roll-crust which he now proceeded to munch in
absent-minded voracity.

He was disturbed by a heavy knock upon Number Two's shop-
door. He cursed audibly and glanced angrily at one particular
clock, among all the old ticking timepieces, which he had grown
accustomed to consulting. He consulted this one not because it
kept better time, but because he pitied its woebegone face. He
cherished the fancy--in his confused South Wales mind--that he
might restore the prestige of this silly old clock among its
grander companions if he made this little diurnal preference. But
the clock only confirmed the knock. The knock and the clock said
the same thing. "Reading done...business begun," said the
clock and the knock.

Mr. Evans angrily opened the shop-door. This proceeding took
more time than one would have supposed the stock-in-trade of
Number Two justified. Never were there so many or such rusty
bolts! But the Welshman got them all drawn at last: aud red in
the face and panting hard he opened the barricaded door. Into
the shop stepped Sam Dekker. Sam's face, to anyone who saw it
less frequently than his father and Penny Pitches would have
displayed a startling change. It had changed from the face of a
lad to the face of a man. Sam had come to know something of
the terms upon which the happiness of being alive has been of-
fered us.

"How do you do, Mr. Evans," he said. "Oh, you are having
your coffee! Im awfully sorry I've disturbed you."

He made no motion however to go away; but proceeded to re-
move his coat and hat, and lay them both, together with his stick,
upon one of Number Two's best specimens of the art of eight-
eenth-century chair-making. Then he sat down; and Mr. Evans,
bringing up his own chair from the rear of the shop, sat down too.

"I've come to ask you rather a funny question. Sir," the visitor
began, "but if you knew how few people in Glastonbury have
books, or care anything for books, you'd understand my coming
to you. By the way, do you people--does Old Jones, I mean--sell
books as well as antiques? Has he got any old books here? Any
old...you know?...any old theological books?"

The Welshman's face assumed a very odd expression. "Yes!"
he said with a sort of resigned hesitation. "Oh, yes! There are
quite a lot here. I've been going through them. They're down in
the basement. It was chiefly because of them that I consented to
undertake this shop. Oh, yes! There are quite a lot of interesting
books down there, Mr. Dekker. But I don't know "

There was a moment's silence during which the shrill cockney
voice of Mrs. Robinson addressing herself to Grandmother Cole,
as the ladies moved slowly downtown on their way to St. John's
Church, entered through the closed door.

"If 'twere only a rat what gnawed 'en 'twill be a heasy bit o'
'emming; but if what 'ee seed to-die be goin' to be worse tomor-
row, then 'tis more nor rats! Then 'tis moth. And if 'tis moth,
'twill be 'ell's own job. If 'tis moth. I'd sigh 'No, Mr. Vicar!
Not hon your little life will I hundertake sech a 'eart-breakin'
job!'"

Sam couldn't restrain a faint grin at this overheard revelation
of a labour-revolt in the ecclesiastical sphere; but Mr. Evans
lacked all sense of humour in such matters. The man's hooked
nose, sardonic eyebrows and long upper lip looked as impene-
trable to High Street back-chat as the bust of Dante itself which
he was now regarding with a secretive eye. The charwoman and
the sewing-woman of St. John's Church passed on down the street;
and Sam became as grave as the Welshman.

"I may as well be quite open with you, Sir," Sam said. "For
more than a year now my father has been hoping that I'd accept
his offer to send me to a theological college. I've refused to go;
and I never shall go. But I ought to...I want to...read a
little more. When I was at Corpus "

Mr. Evans interrupted him. "Corpus!" he cried, leaping to his
feet, "do you mean Corpus Cambridge? I was at Oxford myself,
but you Corpus people at Cambridge have got a library...I
say you've got a library...that would madden Paracelsus him-
self. There are folios and quartos there that are " He lowered
his voice and lifting the second finger of his left hand tapped
with it the bony knuckle of the first finger of his right hand.
"There are Welsh manuscripts there, my good Sir, that are price-
less. They are prejudiced against me there; but that's nothing.
I'm nothing. But if they'd let me have those manuscripts and
take them to South Wales with me and compare them with--Why!
my good man!--They are prejudiced against me there; but that's
nothing. What am I? Nothing. Nothing at all! But they've got a
number of Bardic Triads there...in an underground chamber
...a Welsh bedmaker told me all about it...that give incredible
details of Merlin's life! Think of your being at Corpus! They
are prejudiced against me there...a trifle...a little ... They mean
well...but of course!...but that's nothing ... for what am I? Ob-
viously nothing!"

Sam Dekker watched Mr. Evans' back as he moved about in
that stuffy little shop, looking for something. A cold watery sun
filtered into the shop through the street-window. This window was
full of an extraordinary assortment of ill-chosen objects. One
could hardly have called them objects of art. They were more like
a Noah's Ark or a raft of candidates for Limbo. There was a
cracked Chinese vase decorated by a series of she-dragons each
of whom was apparently giving birth to, or being suckled by a
double-tailed goldfish. Next to this vase there was a pepper-box
of unnatural proportions on the top of which, where it was per-
forated for shaking, gaped the head of a preposterous Punchi-
nello. A rusty faucet, of ornamental brass, serviceable now for no
conceivable purpose, was propped up against the pepper-box. At
the base of the vase reposed a white-feathered shuttlecock with
a vermilion centre; while between the pepper-box and the win-
dow-frame was a small croquet-mallet of a kind that had become
quite extinct. Resting on the handle of this croquet-mallet was a
large Pacific Ocean shell, on the back of which some meticulous
Miss Drew of a hundred years ago had painted a sad little land-
scape wherein a diminutive goatherd and a gigantic goat contem-
plated a sinking ship from a green island. Leaning against the
rim of this painted shell was a big, old-fashioned shaving-cup,
upon the side of which was sketched a distant view of a castle on
the Rhine, seen between two nameless trees and above the back
of an overloaded mule.

The watery sun which struggled into Old Jones' shop, through
what portion of the window was not obscured by these objects,
enabled Sam to watch every movement of Mr. Evans.

The man was standing on tiptoe against a shelf and struggling
to open a little china pot which stood there without removing a
marble paperweight which rested on its lid.

Sam got hesitatingly up from his seat; but remained with his
hand on its arm. There was something distressing, teasing to the
nerves, something that set one's teeth on edge, about Mr. Evans'
effort to get his fingers into this little oblong pot.

"Ah!" he ejaculated at last, "I feel it now. Ah!"

Sam had never seen the human form stretched to such tension
as was the form of Mr. Evans with his fingers in that small re-
ceptacle. He couldn't help looking at the man's bare heels, both
of which were protruding now, as his feet rose out of his slip-
pers, through large round holes in his knitted socks. His feet
came back into their shoes as he uttered this exclamation, and he
himself turned with a tiny key in his hand.

"Come," he said. "Come...come...come!"

He led the way to the back of the shop where on the opposite
side to the narrow staircase going up was a still narrower stair-
case going down. At the top of this he paused; and taking a
candlestick from a little bracket began fumbling awkwardly with
a matchbox.

His helpless struggles with all these inanimate objects had now
got on Sam's nerves to such a pitch that he rushed forward to
assist him. Between them the tiny key fell upon the floor. Sam
picked it up and handed it to him. A faint stream of sunlight from
the window, full of little wavering motes, fell upon Mr. Evans'
countenance, as, with the key clutched in the palm of his hand, he
at last managed to light the candle. Sam was shocked by the nerv-
ous trouble upon the man's face. Was it due only to the obduracy
of all these little teasing inanimates, vexing like demons the
movements of a philosopher? Or was his request for these books
the most ill-advised demand with which he could have come
upon him?

Once more he had an opportunity of studying Mr. Evans' back
as he followed him down that dark little staircase. The lifted
candle the man carried caused that hooked nose of his, as he
turned to warn Sam of a particular step, to become like the nose
of an extremely old miser visiting his hoard of ducats and guil-
ders. The one eye too, which was all Sam could see in that shad-
owy profile, as he went down after him, was like the eye of a de-
mented goshawk.

They reached the cellar at last. It was small enough. It was
tidier than the shop above. It was a little low room lined with tall
book-shelves. Sam saw at once that most of the books were of no
interest to him. They were almost all of them ancient magazines
bound in leather covers and interspersed with tattered school edi-
tions of the classics. One shelf, however, had glass over it; and
it was to a key-hole in this glass door that Mr. Evans applied his
little key.

What was the matter now with the man? His legs were shak-
ing. His knees were knocking together! His fingers must have been
shaking too; for the candle grease began dripping over the front
of the glass case as he tried to open it with his key.

Sam stepped forward and made as if he would take the candle
from him. His gesture was a very natural one under the circum-
stances. Why then did the Welshman turn upon him a look of
contorted fury? But the latter got the glass doors open finally;
and Sam, peering over his shoulder, surveyed the exposed books.
They were indeed "theological" works! Sam had never seen so
many parchment-covered and vellum-covered and leather-covered
folios. He read the names. There were Bonaventura, and Duns
Scotus, and Thomas Aquinas, and Albertus Magnus, and Avi-
cenna, and Bernard, and Jerome, and Anselm.

Sam could not restrain a weary, disappointed groan. What good
were these to him?' He was no scholar. What he wanted was
something--well! He really didn't know exactly what he had
wanted; for in the world of theological books Sam had the simple
imagination of a student of minnows and butterflies.

But he saw Mr. Evans' hand now hurriedly withdrawn from the
shelf with a beautifully bound book clutched in his fingers. There
was a big gap where he had just removed this work and another
book, that had been standing erect by the one he had taken, top-
pled sideways now across this gap, and lay there diagonally,
resting against some thick mediaeval tome with an obscure Latin
title. Towards this book Sam's attention was at once attracted, for
it was different in appearance from the rest. His sharp, observant
bear's eyes caught its title in a second. It was called "The Unpar-
donable Sin."

Mr. Evans now turned upon him hurriedly.

"Here's the one for your purposes," he said, emphasising the
"your." "They didn't teach you at Corpus to read Church-Latin
I'm afraid," he went on. "But this is the 'Confessions' in English
... the best modern edition...it's worth twenty pounds...I don't know
how Jones ever picked it up."

He was beginning to close the glass doors again when Sam
made a motion towards the book fallen across the gap. Mr. Evans
jerked his arm away but in such a manner as to make it appear
that he did so by accident. He might have done it by accident; for
here he was, fumbling as helplessly as ever, with his precious key!

Sam had grown really impatient by this time--Saint Augustine's
"Confessions"! Why his father had got that book on a shelf
that Sam had known from his childhood, side by side, not with
"The Unpardonable Sin," but with Bewick's "Birds." Whatever
it had been that he had in his mind when he came here this morn-
ing it certainly had not been Saint Augustine. No! It had been
just a vague craving to make one more attempt to find some pos-
sible attitude, less sceptical than the one he had grown to adopt,
towards his father's creed.

He felt indignant with Mr. Evans for rousing his hopes like
that and then presenting him with undecipherable parchment-
folios and with "The Unpardonable Sin."

But he hadn't lived cheek by jowl with a priest of God for
nothing. He had wit enough to know now why Mr. Evans' knees
had knocked together! Either that book was some monstrous
Aphrodisiac of Obscenities or it was some pseudo-Biblical fantasy
that had turned, or was in process of turning, this poor lonely
devil's head. But what was the astonishing fellow doing now? Mr.
Evans had put down his candle upon the floor and was on his
knees by a carved chest, on the top of which was something tied
up in brown paper. The man was cursing under his breath as he
tugged at a knot in the string of this large flat parcel.

Sam received the impression that he was under the guidance of
a non-human puppet, for whom the least attempt to cope with the
obstinacy of matter was an impossible task.

But Mr. Evans summoned him now to his side. He had com-
pletely recovered his equilibrium. He was once again the long-
winded antiquary.

"Merlinus Ambrosianus," Sam proceeded to spell out from the
cover of the large volume now presented to his view.

"Is this your own make-up?" he asked, using a word that his
foster-mother Penny might have used.

"You mean my own composition?" said Mr. Evans, turning to
his interlocutor the bland, bewildered, blinking face of a harmless
Dominie Sampson.

"Oh, no! My Vita Merlini, when it is finished--I have only
just begun my collection of notes--will include elaborate details
of the Magician's life that this blundering idiot here does not
seem even aware exist. Oh, no! This is a reprint of an eightpenth-
century compendium of excerpts from the Bodleian. It has certain
documents that they won't let you take out of the Bodleian. For
instance, it has the famous Pontyprid version of the disappear-
ance of Merlin; proving conclusively that the Turning Castle
called Carbonek was not at Bardsey, but here at GIastonbury,
probably on what you people call Chalice Hill; but it is not an
important book. I would never have purchased it if those Oxford
fools--they are worse at Oxford than at Cambridge--hadn't got
suspicious of me. I don't know why it is. Mr. Dekker"--he now
scrambled to his feet, and Sam was relieved to see that he relin-
quished all attempt to tie up those strings again--"but I seem
to excite suspicion when I go about. It's something to do with my
appearance. I don't inspire confidence."

He stretched himself up to his full height as he spoke. He had
re-possessed himself of the candle and also of the volume of
Saint Augustine, worth twenty pounds. He now rose and fell in
his loose slippers as if performing some species of gymnastic
exercise.

"Have you any idea why it is? Is it my nose, do you think?''

He lifted his hand, apparently quite forgetting that it held the
candle, towards this feature of his face; and as he did so he
smiled at Sam with such an ingenious, Don Quixote kind of
smile, that Sam felt singularly disarmed.

But Mr. Evans shook his head whimsically and hugging the
big volume of Saint Augustine and carrying his candle, he led
the way up the stairs, back into the shop.

"Well, I must be off, I suppose," murmured Sam vaguely. "I
certainly can't afford twenty pounds." After a pause he added
rather sadly: "I can't afford twenty shillings."

"I'll lend you the book," cried Mr. Evans. "You'll never find
another edition as pleasant to read; and if you haven't read it
lately you'll get a lot out of it. It's an interesting book; only
rather morbid. But you are morbid yourself, just as I am! I
should think it would rather suit you."

Sam remained, for what seemed to him an interminable time,
staring at the back of the Punchinello pepper-box in the window.

Mr. Evans was engaged in one of his perennial struggles with
the inanimate. He was wrapping up the Saint Augustine in card'
board boards, making as he did so such facial contortions as
would have been extravagant in a wrestling bout.

When the Welshman at last handed him the parcel, Sam re-
marked nervously, "Are you very busy this morning, Mr.
Evans?"

Number Two's representative looked at him in surprise.

"Not especially," he said.

"I only asked you," wavered Sam, laying his fingers on the
shop-door handle, "because my father wanted me to go to the
station to see your friend Crow, who's sending round all these
queer announcements. He's sent you a lot, no doubt."

Mr. Evans nodded. "You want me to go with you?" he asked.

"I thought it would be nice," returned Sam.

"All right. Why not?" said Mr. Evans. "I've got nothing to do
but lock the door! People don't often drop in in the mornings."

"When the two men reached the little office, down by the station,
they found John preparing to sally forth on a private expedition
of his own. It was difficult to catch his explanation of the purport
of this expedition, because the wooden shanty he occupied was
invaded at that moment by a violent outpouring of steam from the
engine of a luggage-train that had stopped close behind it.

Geard's office having been the temporary office of a coal com-
pany and consequently situated in the goods-yard of the Great
Western station, it had been to the accompaniment of the day-long
shunting of trucks and puffing of engines that John Crow had
composed his extravagant advertisement of their Midsummer
Pageant.

As the three men stood together now at the door of the little
office, Sam was unable to avoid a sidelong glance at the majestic
proportions and almost personal dignity of the great green en-
gine towering above them. The vast Creature carried its name in
clear gold letters upon its belly. It was called "Sedgemoor." It
may well be imagined how the appearance of this particular word,
in so unexpected a place, gave to all these polished pistons and
cog wheels a symbolic significance to the enamoured heart of
Sam!

Just for the sake of that word "Sedgemoor" there floated--like
the "disarrayed" Loveliness that so tantalised Spenser's stern Sir
Guyon--the white limbs and the tender bosom of Nell, in and
out of the iron entrails of this majestic monster.

"I've got to go to Tor Field," John Crow was saying, "before
I can get on with my next set uf circulars. I musl see the lie of the
land. Why don't you two come with me? At any rate as far as the
Vicarage? I don't want to drag \ou any further; but it'll be easier
to talk if we get away from here.'"

Sam and Mr. Evans both signified their willingness to accom-
pany him.

"I really came," said Sam. with a disarming candour, "as my
father's plenipotentiary. He's read your first batch of circulars
and he's anxious to know more about the whole business. You
mustn't think it's just impertinent interfering; but my father
could really be an immense help to you if he got interested and
liked your ideas--as I'm sure he would!"

"Well, I'll tell you how far we've got," said John, '"and then
you'll have something definite to tell your father. I ought to have
called on him about it long ago and asked his advice, before it
got as far as it has. Mr. Geard wanted me to. But these last days
have slipped by with such speed that I don't seem to have had
time for anything.

"What we propose," he went on, as they all three walked
slowly up Benedict Street, "is to have a mixed entertainment.
Part of it will be just an ordinary Fair, like what you have here,
at Michaelmas, only more lively, I hope! Part of it, though, will
be quite different from that. We propose to have"--he peered
craftily and furtively into the faces of his companions--"a Glas-
tonbury Passion Play."

John had a suspicion in his Isle-of-Ely mind that the words
"Passion Play" would excite annoyance in both these men. He
forgot the indelible egoism of human beings! Because his own
head was just then so full of this scheme of Geard's, It seemed to
him that the mere mention of it would arrest lively attention, and
evoke either hostility or sympathy. He was not prepared for
casual indifference. But casual indifference, tempered by polite-
ness, was precisely what his grand news received.

Sam's brain was full of Nell and of his struggle with his own
passion.

Mr. Evan's head was full of the sinister thoughts which his
visit to that bookshelf had stirred up.

Thus John's mentioning the historic Passion of Jesus passed as
lightly over both their heads as if he had been referring to *
famine in China.

Twice on their walk through the town, from Benedict Street to
Chilkwell Street, Mr. Evans was on the point of leaving them and
going back to his shop. When they passed the Vicarage gate in
Silver Street, Sam was on the verge of bidding them good-bye.

It was one of those occasions when a casual group of people
seems held together by some invisible bond, contrary to the in-
dividual desire of every person composing the group. The dreamy
passivity of both Mr. Evans and Sam was partly due to the fact
that their own fate seemed to them to be hanging in the balance.
Sam retained an obstinate clutch upon the edition of Saint Au-
gustine which he had borrowed. This he could sweep into the
master-current of his feelings more easily than any vague purpose
of John Crow's in Tor Field.

Mr. Evans was able to get rid of every embodiment of his dark
temptation, except one single passage in "The Unpardonable
Sin," which some supernaturally crafty devil might have com-
posed especially to devastate and overwhelm him. Certain images
called up by this particular passage were so seductive that his
knees grew weak as he thought of them. The worst of these
images had to do with a killing blow delivered by an iron bar.

The three men had reached the Abbey Barn at the corner of
Bere Lane when things came to the worst with Mr. Evans.

The wild and desperate thought seized him...as it had done
only once before since he came to Glastonbury..."Why not
fling away every scruple?"

His mind seemed at that second absolutely balanced on a taut
and twanging wire between two terrible eternities, an eternity of
wilful horror, and an eternity of bleached, arid futility, devoid of
all life-sap. He could feel the path to the horror, shivering with
deadly phosphorescent sweetness. He could feel the path to the
renunciation filling his nostrils with acrid dust, parching his
naked feet, withering every human sensation till it was hollow as
the shard of a dead beetle! The nature of his temptation was such
that it had nothing to redeem it. Such abominable wickedness
came straight out of the evil in the heart of the First Cause,
travelled through the interlunar spaces, and entered the particular
nerve in the erotic organism of Mr. Evans which was predestined
to respond to it.

The unhappy man now surveyed with a sick eye those symbols
of the Evangelists which endow this ancient barn with such a
majestic consecration. He felt a sudden loathing for the human
spirit, so hampered by matter as to be driven to shifts like this--
to the ransacking of the kingdoms of terrestrial life for their clue
to the beyond-life.

Drifting forward up Chilkwell Street went the three men: and
it was between the Barn and St. Michael's Inn that the bloody
sweat of Mr. Evans' mental struggle poured down till he felt
actually faint.

"If I yield," he said to himself, "what then?"

Oh, with what blasting clearness he saw that terrible alterna-
tive! He saw himself obsessed again with the old bite, the old
itch, the old sting, the old insatiable torture of desire

"The thing has no end," he thought. "The other way leads to
places where you can rest. This goes on...and on...and on
... without an end. The struggle to renounce it is pain. Each
day new pain. The pain of unspeakable dreariness. But if I don't
struggle against it, it is worse than that. These men don't know
whom they are walking with. They don't know! Oh, why should
there be such a thing in the world as this?"

His mind recoiled from an attempt to envisage the nature of
what it was that had first engendered the poison-seed which had
attracted to itself so much kindred evil from the heart of the
universe.

"If I yield to it--if I yield to it--" he kept repeating; while
the image that worked the madness in him slid again into the
fibres of his being and nestled, nestled there, like a soft-winged
bird. And his imagination, as they drew near St. Michael s Inn,
settled itself like a dung-wasp upon the nature of his conscious
life if he did yield to it. He saw his soul in the form of an un-
speakable worm, writhing in pursuit of new, and ever new mental
victims, drinking new, and ever new innocent blood. And he saw
the face of this worm. And it happened to him now that he ob-
tained what is given to few to obtain, an actual certain knowledge
of what thoughts they were, if they could be called thoughts, that
would come to stir in the darkness under the mask of that face
that was no face!

Absolutely alone except for its consciousness of a certain little,
round, red eye--the eye of the Evil in the double-natured First
Cause--fixed upon it with a bottomless enjoyment of its suffering,
the worst of the thoughts of this creature would be the intolerable
effort required of it if it were to struggle to escape its doom. It
would know that it could escape if it struggled. But the effort
would be worse than what it suffered. And it would know its
doom. It would see Remorse slowly changing its nature and be-
coming Something Else in the process of self-torture. It would
know that its doom was no crashing annihilation, but a death as
slow as the disintegration of certain mineral deposits which
under chemical pressure gradually lose their identity and are
converted into amorphous dust.

They were now passing the entrance to St. Michael's Inn, a
simple little tavern, frequented chiefly by the poorer class, and
possessed of only two storeys.

As Mr. Evans cast his eye upon the windows of the upper
storey he saw the muslin curtains of one of them pulled aside.
They were not pulled far...only a little way...and the hand that
pulled them remained clutching them tightly, as if in fear of
being interfered with. Between these curtains Mr. Evans saw
a face looking out at him, apparently the face of a woman. The
head of this apparition shocked Mr. Evans and indeed caused
him to feel queasy in the pit of his stomach; for it was totally
bald. An ordinary observer would have regarded this face as that
of an idiot; but Mr. Evans knew better. It was the face of a re-
morseful sadist. Yes! it was a face of unspeakable cruelty, but
the nature of its cruelty had changed. The mind behind that face
was still occupied with devices for causing suffering; but the
object of these devices was no longer--by the blessed interposi-
tion of chance--external to the woman herself.

He imagined her, or rather he saw her, for the woman looked
at him and he looked at the woman, slowly torturing herself to
death; and this by a process that Mr. Evans completely under-
stood. It was a process of pleasure-killing. He knew the part
played in this process by everything in the woman's room. He saw
her refusing to pick up crumbs from the floor, although to re-
move crumbs from the floor was a pleasure to her. He saw her
draw the muslin curtains across the window when it rained--and
he knew she liked rain--and drawing them back when the sun
shone; and he knew' she loathed the sun. He could see the chair
she longed to sit upon and never. allowed herself to sit upon. He
could hear the ticking of the clock which she wound up so care-
fully every night; although it was the ticking of this clock more
than anything else that she found intolerable.

Mr. Evans was well aware of the efforts that the people of the
house must be making all the while to persuade the woman to
cease this maniacal self-punishment, this slow murdering of all
the little diurnal sensations of pleasure. But these efforts were
doubtless of no avail. Oh, no! They were wrong to call her an
idiot. Mr. Evans knew all about her. He knew how she poured
water out of her washing-jug over the red coals in her grate the
minute she caught herself getting any pleasure from the warmth.

He knew--but he had already lingered ridiculously long behind
John and Sam. He must catch them up.

They arrived now at an old rickety gate on their right which
led direct into Tor Field where at Michaelmas for a thousand
years, the great Glastonbury Fair had been held; although of
recent years it had been moved to a meadow on the further side
of the town.

Sam opened the gate and they all three entered the field. When
Sam turned to his companions, after lifting the gate back into
place, he was met by a somewhat bewildered, vaguely appealing
stare from both of them. It was entirely instinctive, this movement
of theirs. It must have been a deep unconscious impulse. Just in
this manner, on countless forgotten pilgrimages, men must have
turned to some fate-appointed leader, drawn by what Mr. Weath-
erwax would have called "natural authority."

It was as if they both secretly in their hearts expected Sam to
say: "Follow me up the hill."

Sam, however, said nothing of the sort. He laid down his parcel
on the grass and began searching about at the side of an ancient
fallen tree for a certain kind of moss that he knew grew here, of
a rather uncommon variety.

John and Mr. Evans both turned their eyes to St. MichaeFs
Tower. The Tower upon Glastonbury Tor varies in appearance as
much as any hill-erection in Wessex. This is due to the extraor-
dinary variety of atmospheric changes which the climate of that
district evokes.

On this particular day the weather conditions had assumed a
cloud-pattern, an air-pressure, a perspective of light and shadow,
such as dwellers in Glastonbury recognized as more natural and
normal than any other. Over the surface of the sky extended a
feathery white film of vapour. The effect of this filmy screen upon
the sun was to make it seem as if it shone through a roof of
water. As a matter of fact, this vaporous film reduced the sun-rays
to so mild a diffusion that they ceased to be rays. The sun's orb,
thus shorn of its outpouring of radiance, came to resemble the
disk of the moon. The great Luminary was so reduced by this
film of clouds that, like Agamemnon in the toils of Clytemnestra,
it could hardly be said to shine at all. It peered helplessly forth
over the green meadows of Avalon; so that stubborn Christian
spirits, such as Mat Dekker, had the satisfaction of being able to
confront the great Light-Lord, and stare him full in the face with-
out blinking.

The result of this veiling of the sun was that only a watery
suffusion of liquid luminousness flowed over every object that
emerged into prominence at all, over every object that had any
form or any outline.

All were equally blurred and softened. Thus it came about that
a moon-like circle of pallid whiteness looked forth upon a world
from which every harsh projection, whether of stone, or wood, or
metal, or horn, or scale, or feather, or bone, or rock, had been
obliterated; a world of flowing curves and sliding shadows, a
world of fluctuating shapes and melting contours.

What this veiling of the sun further did was to heighten the
effect of colour. Colour as a phenomenon in the world became
doubly important. Every shade, every richness, every variety of
colour, lent itself to this colour-invasion of the kingdom of form.

Thus as these three men stood together at the foot of Glaston-
bury Tor the grass of the hillside seemed of an incredibly rich
depth. It was like a mounting wave of palpable greenness into
which, if you began to walk, your feet would sink down.

"My idea is," said John at length, when Sam had risen up from
his search for mosses on the underside of the prostrate tree,
"my idea is to have the regular Fair down here, on this level
ground. But the Miracle Play, or whatever you like to call it I
want to have on the slope of the hill, with that Tower as mv
background. Do you catch my idea?"

"Let's sit down a second," said Sam, taking his seat on the
fallen tree.

"What I want to do," said John, looking around him, "is to try
and realise this place with a crowd of people moving about, and
booths and tents and bands and so on. I can't imagine it! But.
after all, when you cross any ordinary fair-field at this time of
the year, it's impossible to see it as it is when it's crowded with
people."

He seated himself by Sam's side as he spoke and Mr. Evans
sat down, too. The position of the three men when thus seated was
as follows: John was nearest the Tor; that is to say, southward of
the others; Mr. Evans was nearest Chalice Hill; that is to say,
northward of the others; while Sam had the middle place, oppo-
site that spot in the horizon where the gap called Havyatt breaks
the ancient line of trenches, thrown up to repel the Danes.

Mr. Evans sat starkly upright on their log. His black overcoat
hung about his thin knees like a priest's cassock. His black bowler
hat was pulled so low down over his forehead as to resemble the
hat of a Jewish comedian on a music-hall stage. He leaned for-
ward on a nondescript cane, picked up anywhere, but he bent his
head over his folded hands as if he had been a chieftain out of
Ossian's poetry, brooding over some irrevocable doom.

Sam wore a very rough, thick, Norfolk jacket. His knicker-
bockers were stained, worn threadbare, very faded, his woolen
stockings were slipping down, and as they slipped they no longer
concealed his heavy woolen drawers. Sam's cap had been pushed
back off his forehead, and his wrinkled, animal physiognomy
scowled forth in a puzzled and nonplussed protest at a world that
contained both good and evil to a degree beyond the fathoming of
his simple spirit.

As for John, he had bought by Mary's advice an overcoat at
Wollop's which was really a bargain. Not that this new overcoat
destroyed his trampish appearance, but it made him look more
like a thief or a rogue or even a furtive-eyed cardsharper than he
had done when tidied up for his English adventure by his French
grisette. Mary's attempts to give him a gentlemanly air had only
given him a shabby-genteel air; an air that was very disconcert-
ing to the girl, and for which she could not quite account.

John looked, in fact, exactly like the tricky showman he was,
calculating the possibilities of his Midsummer Circus. The over-
coat which Mary had chosen for him hung on his lean figure like
a garment he had stolen. It was as if some well-dressed man,
passing down a road, had tossed that coat over the wooden cross-
beam of a dilapidated scarecrow. He sat sideways, in a hunched-
up posture, prodding the earth with his hazel-stick and looking
first at one of his companions and then at the other. Every now
and then, however, he glanced stealthily at St. Michael's Tower
on the top of the Tor, as if that were a Fourth Person in this
colloquy, whose temper, just as incalculable as that of the other
two, had to be kept an eye upon, lest it should make trouble.

It was after one of these surreptitious glances that he suddenly
broke out--"You see that ledge over there? That's where I'm
going to have my Crucifixion."

The terrible word came with a shock to the ears of the other
two men.

"Will it be allowed?" asked Mr. Evans.

"How do you mean, 'allowed,' " said John.

"By the police, Mr. Evans means," said Sam, "and by public
opinion. You must remember, Crow, this is a Protestant country.
You seem to have forgotten how they killed Abbot Whiting on
this very hill."

"I really meant by the Glastonbury people themselves," ex-
plained Mr. Evans. "But it's true they let that devilish king kill
their Abbot here."

"He was a Welshman like you," said John.

Mr. Evans surprised them by the depth of the sigh he gave at
this point

"What a sigh was there!" quoted John. "The heart is, surely
charged."

Mr. Evans sighed again.

"Whose is not?" he muttered.

Sam was now lost in heavy ponderings, as he stared at the
brown-paper parcel containing Saint Augustine which he had
tossed down on the grass when he began searching for that speci-
men of moss.

His was not a nature to be carried away by any sudden idea.
The feelings that had been fomenting within him of late had only
been stirred up. They had not been created by his passion for
Nell. But the girl's having gone back to Zoyland's bed had been
a shock to his deepest pride; and by his new gesture of complete
renunciation he was, in some subtle way, recovering his threatened
life-illusion.

As for Mr. Evans a most singular idea had just entered that
Roman skull under the Jewish-comedian black hat. Why should
he himself not play the part of the Crucified in the blasphemous
mummery of this mountebank?

In the agitation of this thought Mr. Evans actually took off his
bowler hat and standing up on his feet stretched out his arms in
the manner of a crucified person. That one of his hands held his
hat while he did this was nothing to him. He was startled by the
magnetic wave of emotion that poured through him as he made
this sudden gesture.

Sam did not notice what he was doing. John thought he had
got cramped and was stretching himself.

Mr. Evans let his arms drop and addressed John in an eager
voice.

"I'll go over to your terrace, Crow," he said, "and play the
Crucified for you; so that you can see how it looks."

John was delighted with this offer.

"Isn't. that splendid!" he cried in a high-pitched tone. "Bravo!
That's the very idea! How decent of you, Evans! What a good
thought!"

Sam regarded this transaction with a very uneasy eye. If he
found it hard to say the Creed with the simplicity of his father.
anything that smacked of blasphemy brought an evil taste into
his mouth.

Mr. Evans walked up the hill till he reached the grassy ter-
race. This time he put down both his hat and his cane. He also
buttoned up tightly his long black overcoat. In this guise he raised
himself to his full height, flung back his head and stretched out
his arms.

John leapt to his feet in an ecstasy.

"Wonderful! It's wonderful!" he cried. He came hurrying up
to Mr. Evans.

"Seriously, Sir," he blurted out, "you'll have to play Christ in
my Pageant. You will! You will! You're not exactly the type
... but that doesn't matter a bit. Oh, you will! You will! Why,
you'll beat that Oberammergau person hollow."

Mr. Evans picked up his hat and nondescript cane and advanced
hurriedly to meet John. In his secret heart he was astonished
and even puzzled by the feelings that again poured through him
as he made the terrible symbolic gesture.

"I...don't...mind," he panted in a hoarse voice. "Only you'll have
to make it as real as you can."

John regarded his friend through shrewd, screwed-up, medita-
tive eyelids.

"Oh, we'll make it real enough," he said. But he was too occu-
pied with an imaginative picture of that future scene to care
very much what he was promising Mr. Evans.

"Come on up to the top of the hill, you two, won't you?" he
pleaded now.

"Can I leave this book here?" said Sam, looking first at Saint
Augustine and then at Mr. Evans.

The Welshman surveyed the parcel which he had done up so
carefully. He evidently remembered that it was worth twenty
pounds.

"I'll carry it," he said. "Boys might come. You never know."

The fear of "boys" was one of Mr. Evans' peculiarities. In fact
he was nervously scared of all children.

But Sam tucked the big parcel under his own arm.

"It's not heavy," he said.

It must have been about thirty minutes after twelve when they
all reached the top of the Tor. They surveyed the great entrance
to the hollow tower and John tapped with his stick at the hoard-
ings with which it had been closed up.

"Mayor Wollop had that done," he remarked savagely. "0ld
Sheperd found a boy and girl making love inside; and that was
enough for our precious procurator. Boarded up it must be; so
that the king should not have to fight his enemies with bastards!"

"Let's sit down for a minute," said Sam.

They all obeyed him, sitting side by side on the grass, with
their backs leaning against the western flank of the cold, slate-
coloured base of the tower. Before them to the westward stretched
the green water meadows, among which, a mile or so out of
town, could be detected the wide Lake Village Fen and even the
little shanty of Abel Twig; while to the southwest, beyond the
fens, rose the blue-grey ridge of the low Polden hills. All these
were softly suffused by the cloud-latticed vapour-filmed sun; a
sun which, though riding at high noon, lacked the potency to
dominate what it bathed with that glamorous and watery light.

Here under St. Michael's Tower sat these three figures, the lean
shabby-genteel John, the hulking weather-bleached Sam, the
black-coated Mr. Evans--all atheists towards the life-giving
Sun-God, and all expanding now, in their thoughts, their feelings,
their secretest hopes, because of the victory of vapour over light
and of dampness over heat!

A landscape of green and grey, a landscape with all hard out-
lines obliterated, was what just suited these three fantastical
human beings. A common relaxation, a common inertia, a com-
mon languor descended upon them as they sat there, gazing down
on that pastoral scene.

And as they sat there they each thought of a particular girl.
They thought of these three feminine identities so intently that
by the automatic preoccupation of their feelings the souls of all
three girls were drawn towards them; three wraithlike eidola! Ah!
How little do the feminine creatures of the human race realise
what long journeys they are compelled to take...what long,
rapid journeys...swifter than light...under the compulsive magic
of their men's imaginations!

To the supernatural eyes of that veiled sun as he dreamed his
indescribable planetary thoughts, vaguely hostile and vaguely
menacing, one of these feminine forms came naked to the waist--
that was Nell; one came naked from the thighs downward--that
was Mary; and one came garmented like a nun, from head to foot
in black--and that was Cordelia!

Together these three men represented--in Remorse, in Renun-
ciation, in Roguery--everything that separates our race from na-
ture. Their three intelligences floated there, on that hilltop, above
their clothed and crouching skeletons, like wild demented birds
that had escaped from all normal restraint.

Any student of ancient mythology might well have fancied that
Gwyn-ap-Nud, with a host of his elementals, finding these three
detached intelligences--Remorse, Renunciation, Roguery--sepa-
rated from natural human life--had cast his immemorial spell
over them; that oldest of supernatural spells against which St.
Michael's aid had been so often implored in vain.

"What slaves we all are," remarked Mr. Evans suddenly, "to
traditional ideas! People say we ought to be always admiring Na-
ture. God help me! There are endless occasions when I loathe
Nature. I think the truth is that God is outside Nature...alto-
gether outside...creator of it...but often loathing it as much as
I do! I feel sometimes that Matter is entirely evil...and that to
cleanse our minds we must destroy its power...destroy...its power."

He repeated these last words in his most serious tone; that tone
which John had noticed when they first met; that tone in which
each word seemed torn out of him like the deep-burrowing dock
root.

Sam's hulking form swayed like a gnarled thorn bush in a
high wind.

"I protest against what you've just said, Evans, with every instinct
I have! That's the essence of the Incarnation...that's the...

He had become so excited that without knowing what he did he
was plucking great handfuls of the turf -grass from between his
huge thick-soled boots.

"That's what they really killed the Abbot for," he went on, "be-
cause he wouldn't let anything come between him and It. It's the
whole secret It's where the most commonplace Christians can
refute the greatest sages. Matter must be redeemed: and only
Christ can redeem it. Christ, I say; not Jesus. Verbum caro fact-
um est. Your making Matter evil undoes the whole thing. It's he
Incarnation that transforms Nature. It has been done once.
Nothing can reverse it. Something has come into it from outside;
rom that Outside you talk about. But Its in it now! You can't get
rid of it. The simplest person has an instinct about this, wiser
han the greatest philosophers. Something has taken up Matter
into Itself. Two and two can now make five! It's the Thing Out-
side breaking into our closed circle. And every atom of Matter
eels it. Matter is no longer separate from Spirit. It has become
he living flesh of Spirit. Verbum caro factum est!"

Sam stopped. He gazed with confused surprise at the little
weeds he had grubbed up in his agitation. He began planting
them again in the hole he had made. He squeezed them into the
fielding sod. He pressed them down with his strong thumbs;
vhile his retreating chin, with all its quivering muscles, seemed
to echo his discourse, in a mute ripple of the Matter whose re-
lemption he had been defending.

John regarded him with intense curiosity, as if he had been
Balaam's ass suddenly endowed with the gift of speech. "I sup-
pose," John said, "you would call the Mass this kind of miracle?"

Sam's reply to this was a vague groan.

"Maybe you're right," he muttered. "Maybe you're right."

"I suppose," said John to Sam, "you don't want to come to our
rehearsals of the Miracle Play? The chap I'd meant for the cen-
ral figure will be glad enough to give it up to Evans. Shall I make
the lad who is doing St. Peter, hand that part over to you?"

Sam felt at that moment as if he were a child whose secretest
md most private game, a game he'd never revealed to a living
souI, had become the sport of a noisy dormitory of jeering boys,
He lowered his freckled face and drew down the corners of his
mouth. Three times he swallowed his saliva; and then he said
vith a forced unnatural chuckle, "I'll pay the entrance-fee and
come and see your Circus, Crow. But nothing you could give me,
nothing; not all the fortune of your Rector of Northwold, would
nake me take part in it."

"Oh, don't say that, Dekker! What makes you say that?"

"We'll...call...it...shyness...Crow," said Sam slowly, but in a tone
that was decisive.

"Well, gentlemen," said Mr. Evans rising to his feet, "I'm afraid
I must get back to my shop! There's always a chance of visitors
after lunch and it's half-past one already."

"Don't you have lunch yourself, then?" enquired John. "I was
just going to suggest that we all have lunch together at that little
tea-shop in George Street "

Mr. Evans pondered. He felt very hungry and there was nothing
in his larder except half a roll and a small piece of butter.

Sam had felt so restless that morning that he had told his father
not to expect him back to their mid-day dinner. If he hadn't
found Mr. Evans in his shop he would have probably gone off
on a long solitary walk--perhaps in the direction of Queen's
Sedgemoor and perhaps not.

He got up slowly upon his feet, as also did John. They were all
three erect now under the tower of St. Michael; that same tower
against which the murderous Tudor's executioners had leaned as
they prepared for butchering Abbot Whiting.

Sam spoke up boldly.

"You two have given me so much to...to think about...that I...that
I shall...have to walk off...my excitement. I wonder ...he hesitated
for a second with bowed head and working chin. Then his words
came out with a rush...I wonder if you'd mind leaving this book at
the Vicarage as you go by?"

There was no difficulty thrown in Sam's way by either Mr. Evans
or John, and he strode off alone down St. Michael's Hill. In order
to leave them abruptly while it was easy for him to do so', he de-
scended the Tor by its eastern slope. He had indeed stated no
less than the exact truth when he said he wanted to walk off
his excitement.

His gaze swept the countryside as he climbed down into the
valley. He glanced at Pennard Hill and Folly Wood and at the
fields and hedges round Stony Stratton. He glanced at the low-
lying downs near Chesterblade; and thought to himself--"That's
the source of the Alham; and where the Alham runs into the
Brue is only a mile south of Hornblotton."

Thus was the little river Alham compelled to be the bearer of
a lover's memory. For it was at Hornblotton that Sam had ridden
with Nell when at that circus, so fatally remembered by Penny
Pitches, he had taken her on the roundabout.

When he reached the valley he struck across country heedless
as to lanes or paths. His instinct for geography was only second
to that of his father; and it was easy for him by following the
meadows beyond the town-reservoir, between Norwood Farm and
Havyatt, to reach the village of West Pennard without touching
any road. Here he turned due north; and still crossing every
hedge and ditch with the same animal-like straightness of direc-
tion, he made his way over Hearty Moor, across the tracks of
the Burnham and Evercreech railroad, till he came to Whitelake
River at Whitelake Bridge.

This he reached when the watch in his pocket pointed at seven-
teen minutes past three. He had no idea what the time was. In
fact he did not give the matter a thought. His thoughts followed
one another like horses round a treadmill. Anyone reading his
thoughts, and contemplating the motion of the hands of his watch
in his pocket might have been tempted to an extremely deter-
ministic view of life. The mainspring in the one case was made
of metal, and the other case made of the brutish sting of desire;
but there was in both cases the same monotonous revolution
around predetermined figures of demarcation.

The filmy screen that hid the sun had grown thicker since
high noon. The surface of the small river reflected now what
appeared to be a very cloudy sky and the willows and alders
were not mirrored there at all. Staring at the water, he tried to
summon back every link in the dragging chain that had pulled
him to this place. He meditated on the curious difference which
exists--when you consider the life of a river--between the out-
lines of reflections in its flow and the outlines of shadows.

He sat down on a willow stump and stared at the river as
intently as if it held a secret for him that at all costs must he
drawn forth. At what point, since he stood by Mr. Evans' side
in that queer basement of Old Jones' shop, had the determination
seized upon him to come out here? Was it when he was looking
at that surprising volume...he could envisage its dirty-whitish
modern binding now...that fell across the gap in the shelf
left by the extraction of St. Augustine? Was it when he was
looking for that "fairy-cup" moss by the log on which the three
of them had sat down? Was it at the very moment when he had
that sudden inspiration about the secret of Christianity and the
redemption of Matter?

The willow stump on which he sat now had one living sprout;
and from this sprout a little cluster of emerald-green buds had
burst forth. These buds now became a portion of what he was
feeling and thinking. One conclusion certainly had formulated
itself in his slowly moving mind, during that ascent of the Tor;
the conclusion, namely, that it was unnecessary to trouble him-
self one way or the other about his father's Creed; since the
essence of the thing lay in the conduct of life rather than in any
intellectual doctrine.

"She said you had the look of a saint." What a funny remark
that was of Red Robinson's; and how hard to associate it with
any impression he had ever received from Crummie Geard! Well,
the look of a saint or the look of a satyr, he knew what he could
not help doing now! For good or for evil he must see Nell
Zoyland that day.

He got up from the willow stump, crossed the bridge, and
began tramping westward, along the opposite bank, which, at
that portion of the river's progress, resembled a natural tow-path.

When John and his Welsh companion came out of their tea-
shop on George Street, they encountered Tom Barter. John had
taken the opportunity of carrying further his sudden inspiration
as to using "my good friend Evans" as the central figure of his
profane Passion Play. The idea of this appealed to a vein of
sheer devilry in his impulsive nature. The less there appeared
of the Christ-like in the degenerate Roman physiognomy of his
Celtic ally the better pleased and the more tickled did this nerve
of roguery in him become!

Having agreed to the wild scheme in his "second manner,"
the Welshman was now prepared, it seemed, to throw into the
notion all the ponderous, pedantic weight of his "first manner'';
and the more he talked about it with John the fuller of dramatic
possibilities did the plan seem for John's lively imagination.

But Mr. Evans went off to his shop now; and the two old
friends, of the far-off Northwold days, were left together in that
drowsy Glastonbury street. It came back to John, as he drifted
by his friend's side towards the office of Philip's factory, how full
of this man's personality every glittering, rippling reach of that
"big river" had been. It came back to him how he had thought
of Tom as he stood with Mary at the mill-pond looking at
those great salmon-trout. It came to him how he had recalled,
without realising the full import of it, their vicious play that
hot Sunday afternoon at the bottom of the boat! Vicious with
every sort of East-Anglian sensuality had they both been; and
John was surprised at himself, glancing furtively at Tom's stolid
profile, to find what an intense thrill it still gave him, what a
delicious, voluptuous sensation, to feel himself weak and soft,
where Tom was strong and hard!

Their way took them--John knew he ought to return to his
office but he simply could not tear himself away from his friend
--past some of the worst of the Glastonbury slums. These were
altogether minor slums compared with those of any big city;
but such as they were they were not a pretty sight. Here in
these back alleys lived the failures in the merciless struggle of
life. At this present moment many of the people who lived in
these houses were men and women who would have found em-
ployment if Philip Crowds factories had been working full-time.

The sight of the two leisurely men, both of them absolutely
sure of two more pleasant meals that day, and of good clean
sheets and a quiet bedroom to sleep in, when that day was over,
strolling past, did not enhance the peace of mind of such dwellers
in "loop'd and windowed raggedness" as chanced to watch them
go by.

They had scarcely got past this quarter when they were hailed
from behind; and on turning round found Dave Spear hurrying
after them. Dave's cheeks were less rosy than usual and there
was a dangerous glint in his eye,

"Do you mind if I walk with you a step or two?" he gasped,
panting a little, like a dog that has been overtaxed.

"I'm always glad to see you, Spear," said John. "You know
Mr. Barter, of course?"

"Why I troubled you, Crow," said Dave, when he had nodded
gravely at Tom Barter, and they had moved on together, "was
that I've just been reading some of your circulars. They're very
good, man. They're topnotch in their way, let me tell you! And
I'm a connoisseur, being a Communist, of the art of propaganda."

"I'm glad you like 'em," said John, mightily pleased at this
unexpected praise from so experienced an expert.

"But what I want you to do, what we want you to do"--it
was not clear to John whether this "we" referred to Persephone
or to the Bristol headquarters--"is to mention in your circulars
that in addition to her other interests, your town here is going
to try the experiment of running a municipal factory. You might
mention it as an important experiment in the economic life of
the town and suggest that visitors come to see it."

John's eyes gleamed with malicious delight at hearing these
words.

"Certainly, certainly, certainly!" he cried eagerly. "I'll have
what you say printed in my new set that I'm getting out next
week."

"Would it he a philistine thing, Mr. Spear," put in Tom Barter
in a casual and supercilious tone, "if I enquired where this mu-
nicipal factory of yours is?"

"We'll have it in working order by the time Mr. Geard's vis-
itors are really here. You'll know where it is then, Mr. Barter."

John looked a little glum at this remark.

"At first we did think of June the first," he said, "but we
decided that it would be better to have more time to prepare.
Fm in favour...for reasons of my own...of St. John's Day."

They came in sight of the factory where Barter's office was.
There was a wooden gate leading to a narrow lane between high
"walls here, which was the access to his labours usually employed
by this Norfolk manager of a Somerset mill.

The others leaned over this gate with him for a moment out
of politeness; for he didn't wish them to come any further. There
was a very wretched house adjoining this gate, an old house,
probably built during the Wars of the Roses. for its stone but-
tresses and lintels still carried deeply cut Gothic foliations, and
its crumbling walls were thick as those of a castle. But its rafters
were rotting, its thatch dilapidated and full of holes, its broken
panes stuffed with rags, and so many bricks were missing from
the top of its chimney that one interior side, covered with black
soot, was open to the air.

Out of the interior of this house there emerged at equal inter-
vals a low moaning sound, a sound that had something in it that
was peculiarly disconcerting.

"Hear that?" said Barter in a flat, toneless voice.

"Is anything wrong?" said John.

"Oh, no...all is in order," said Dave Spear. "I heard this
noise the other night, Mr. Barter, when I was calling on the
people round here. All is quite regular. No one is being tortured.
Oh no! nothing is wrong. It's only an old woman who can't
afford any comfort, dying of cancer. I can even tell you, gentle-
men, her name. Her name is Tittie Petherton. She is not entirely
unhappy, in spite of that sound; for her only fear is to die in
the hospital. She'd be in the hospital now if the Vicar didn't pay
someone to look after her. I've been in there. I've seen her. And
though she can't help making that noise her mind is reasonably
satisfied. She has no fear of death. All she fears is the hospital.
Our good cousin Philip would have sent her there, too, if the
Vicar hadn't come to her rescue. Oh, no, gentlemen, all is quite
in order."

"Aren't you making rather too much of one sad case, Spear?"
said Barter.

Dave Spear gripped the gate with both his hands and began
to shake it. This proceeding arrested the full attention of John
who was one who always took note of such manifestations of
sudden feeling.

"Besides, my good Sir," Barter went on, "your Communistic
State wouldn't prevent people from getting cancer."

A curious thing occurred then;...or at least to the insatiable
nervous attention of John it was curious...for it was as if this
short, broad-shouldered, sturdy, little man, without any over-
coat, and in a neat navy-blue suit of serge, spoke in a voice
like the voice of a terrible prophet. John, for his part, never for-
got that moment. He was himself standing close to his friend
Barter. He even had his arm over Barter's shoulder and the smell
of Barters leather coat was in his nostrils. But what he kept his
eyes upon, as he stood like that, was a broken corbel that must
once have supported some kind of stone shaft, belonging perhaps
to a vanished archway between this ruined house and another
house. This disfigured fragment of stone came to resemble, as
John gazed at it, a face whose eyes were at the end of its snout.

"Maybe it was a face once," he thought, "a gargoyle-face, de-
liberately carved by some mad workman in those old days to
ease his mind of some frightful thing." .

Every time that the moaning sound from the interior of the
house came again, an invisible hand upon his twitching cheek
seemed to turn his face towards the petrified snout, endowed with
eyes.

"Come now, Spear, that really is going a bit too far!" were
the words that lay, like a tedious meaningless scripture, upon the
counter, so to speak, of Tom Barter's practical mouth. But he
could not utter them in a convincing tone.

"Come now, Spear!" he began again. And then he flung out
"Going a bit too far!" And then his voice could be heard in a
sort of stage aside--"Now, Spear, that really is--"

"The pleasure we get from chaos," Spear was saying, "is not
a patch upon the pleasure we get in reducing chaos to order.
Life will never be really pruned and clipped and trimmed, what-
ever we do to it. It will always brim over and escape us. The
Communistic State is the only way that's ever been found for
using force on the side of the weak. The whole system of human
life depends on two things; on work and on pain. Communism
takes our power of work and our power of bearing pain and,
puts these two, like the immortal horses of Achilles, into the
harness of the State. Politics are intolerable to all sensitive
people. But why are they so? Because they don't touch the real
quick, the real nerve, the real ganglia, of the situation! The
situation is not political. It's economic. It isn't want of a Napo-
leon. It's want of a world-machine, run by impersonal force, on
behalf of the Weak. When I say "weak' I mean the poor and
the children of the poor. Money is strength, power, comfort
leisure, thought, philosophy, art, health, liberty, freedom, faith,
hope, peace, rest. Money is sleep. Money is love. Money is ease
from pain. Those who deny this are lower than men or higher
than men. They are rogues or madmen. They are liars or mad-
men. They are fools or madmen. Money is the blood of life.
Life is created out of work and pain. Life is defended by force.
The Communist State is the organised force of humanity. Evo-
lution has been fumbling, groping, staggering, through blood,
through tears, through torture, to this organising of human force
to human ends. Evolution has created money and it has created
the Communistic State to monopolise money. Money--the engine
of life--is an engine of death when it is in the hands of indi-
viduals. Put it in the hands of the Communist State and what-
ever blunders are committed the whole situation is transformed!
The individual has no more right to own money than he has to
owm earth, air, water, fire. We are all a herd of gibbering mon-
keys in a madhouse of inherited superstitions; and the maddest
and wickedest of all these superstitions is the idea that private
people have a right to be rich! No one has a right to be rich.
It is crime to be rich. It is a perversion, an obscenity, a mon-
strosity. It is an offence against nature, against intelligence,
against good taste. To be rich is to be a moral leper. To be rich
is to be on the side of Cancer!"

"--a bit too far, Spear!" came the voice of Barter, like the
sound of a rain-gutter dripping on a tin roof.

"I wish Mary could have heard that," thought John; and he
found himself taking his arm from his friend’s shoulder and
feeling a certain nausea from the smell of the leather jacket.

His nerves were so much on edge at that moment, that, as Barter
quietly unlatched the gate and let himself through, he burst out
is if they had been alone:

"Don’t forget, Tom, that, if you get fed up with Philip, Geard
would willingly take you over. You’ve only to say the word!
Only to say it, Tom!"



GEARD OF GLASTONBURY



THE TWILIGHT OF THAT DAY HAD TURNED INTO DARKNESS BE-
FORE Tom Barter returned to his lodgings in High Street to wash
his hands preparatory to his going out to supper. Tom very rarely
had a chance to enjoy any tea. His diurnal relaxation was his
mid-day dinner at the Pilgrims, which he relished with the ap-
petite of a fox-hunter. The waitresses there, with every one of
whom, especially with a girl called Clarissa Smith, he had a
separate and complete understanding, rivalled each other in ca-
tering to his taste. Tom's taste was all for freshly cooked meats
and substantial puddings. Any petticoat fluttering about these
solid viands was sauce enough for him: and when he blew off
the froth from the top of his pewter flagon of brown Taunton
ale and followed with his eyes these buxom attendants, passing
in and out of the old red-baize swing-door into the mediaeval
kitchen, a massive sensual satisfaction, worthy of any of those
tall Vikings who grounded their keels at Wick, filled the veins
of this short, broad-shouldered man.

Tom was no adventurer like his tyrant vagabond-friend John.
He was no devil-may-care swashbuckler like my lord’s bastard.
He would have made a first-rate sergeant-major of a regiment,
a first-rate boatswain of a ship. Something...a certain pride,
a certain fling, a certain chivalrous magnanimity...had been
knocked out of him forever by those bullies in Gladman’s House
at Greylands. They had found Tom Barter a frank gentleman--
they had left him a secretive cad. It was only with John, whose
friendship antedated those Greylands days, that this reserved man
let himself go; only with John and with any petticoat of the
lower classes!

How often had he stared into the bottom of his pewter-pot,
where a little brown liquid made a fairy moat around the bubbles
of white froth! "I have not got a soul in the world that really
cares," he would think then, "except John; and he’s nothing
much to rely on!" and then he would sigh, put his finger and
thumb into his waistcoat pocket, where he kept his silver, and
place a sixpence beside his plate. Aye! But how he did sympa-
thise with these working-girls: Oh. what kind, sweet creatures!
Oh, what pretty ways of making a man feel that he was a man!

As he entered his comfortless room at the top of a saddler's
shop, and poured out the water from the bare white jug and
selected the thin little bit of Pear's soap, which he had been
using for a fortnight, rather than the big new square yellow
piece, with such hard edges, that his landlady had put there this
morning, it came over him that he really was leading rather a
desolate sort of life. "But if I can get Tossie Stickles to undress
for me somewhere or other, or even to let me play with her in
one of those Spinneys beyond Bushey Combe, it'll make up for
a lot! It’s certain that if I were married and had a nice fireside
and my books and a garden, I couldn't enjoy myself with these
girls any more. And they are so sweet and unexacting! Oh, they’re
so different from these finicking bitches who think themselves
ladies!"

He ran down the stairs and out into the street. The remainder
of the hours from now on, till he was asleep in his chilly room
above the saddler’s, seemed invariably to fall below the average
of normal human experience. The day did not become actually
miserable, but it was far from gathering any glow or lustre as
it waned. It was just a day dying out; of no more interest, of
no more importance, than a bonfire of cabbage stalks, over
which someone has thrown a bucket of water.

The bruise in his nature never hurt him except when con-
fronted by a man or by a woman of his own class. It was this
bruise which Mary, all unwitting, must have struck again and
again. It was because of this bruise that he had never dared,
in the whole course of their platonic friendship, to attempt to
make love to Mary or even to kiss her. "Will you marry me?"
lie had blurted out one day, on the side of Tor Hill, and Mary
--reacting from her morbid slavery to Miss Drew--had mur-
mured a reluctant "Yes, if you want me to, Tom!"

Once in the street today, Barter made his way, as usual, not
to the cheerful tea-shop in George Street, where John and Evans
had had lunch, nor to the one presided over by Sally's mother
in High Street, but to a common little restaurant called the
Abbey Cafe where a waitress whose name was Joan brought him
a plate of fish and potato chips. This overworked attendant re-
sembled that Joan in the song, "While greasy Joan doth keel the
pot," and no other educated man in Somersetshire would have
flirted with her as Barter did. But it was but a poor pleasure
he got from this--indeed, night after night he would swallow
his ill-chosen supper and answer the wench in sulky monosyl-
lables while he stayed on and on; merely putting off the moment
when he had to face the sight of his cold bed, his portmanteau
on the floor, and the picture of Tel-El-Kebir over his fireless
grate. Tonight, he managed, by his extraordinary power of sym-
pathy with the economic side of a waitress' life, to put off his
moment of rising from that hard seat at that dirty tablecloth
till nearly nine o'clock.

Again in the lighted street, he was seized with a sudden loath-
ing. for that wretched bedroom of his, and something like a
spasm of bitter distaste for his whole life in Glastonbury.

"I'll go and see Mary," he thought. And then he thought,
"What's the use?" But when he came opposite the darkened
windows of the saddler's and heard, through the open side door,
the sound of his landlady's voice scolding her husband, his feet
began automatically taking him to the Abbey Horse.

When Lily Rogers opened the door to his ring, she smiled
more pleasantly upon him than she would have done upon any
other surprise-visitor at that late hour. Barter had long been
the chief favorite, out of all the gentlemen in Glastonbury, with
Miss Drew's servants, just as he was a great persona grata with
Miss Drew herself.

"We've got company in the drawing-room," Lily said. "Mr.
Dekker has brought that man Geard here, to see Miss Drew. She
never would have seen him if the Vicar hadn't told her it was
her duty. They're all in there now! Would you prefer that I
called Miss Crow out, Sir, and brought the lamp into the dining-
room?"

Barter nodded; but seemed in no hurry to dismiss Lily, who,
in the dim hall-light and in her black dress and white apron,
looked a sweet picture of domestic security.

"How's Louie?" he asked. "Have you been up to The Elms
lately?'' he asked. "You two had such pretty hats on last Sun-
day," he said. "One day I must take you up in the air with me."
he said. "Would Louie be frightened?" he asked.

It was with a rosy spot in each of her soft cheeks that the
girl finally escaped, and with the utmost discretion ushered Mary
into the dining-room, lit the candles there, and closed the door
softly upon them. Once back in the kitchen with Louie, she burst
out:

"It's that nice-looking Mr. Barter, I declare, that Miss Mary
ought to marry! Whats the use of her keeping company and
acting soft with a queer one like that Mr. Crow? Mr. Barter
is a real gentleman, he is. She's gone to him now--don't make
such a noise, Lou! Maybe if you stopped gollumping round on
those creaky shoes we could hear them talk in there."

The sisters Rogers advanced into the passage and stood listen-
ing. Not otherwise might a pair of white doves, perched upon
a roof, have watched their young lady's casement close tight
behind an adventurous gallant. Lily had forgotten, in her appre-
ciation of the sly Barter, to fetch the lamp she had referred to,
so it was by no brighter light than that of two tall silver candles
standing between several vases of daffodils, that the two natives
of Norfolk exchanged their confidences over the dying fire. Barter
sat in the faded leather arm-chair of Miss Drew's father, while
Mary crouched on the rug at his feet.

The girl was sadder than usual that night She spread out her
strong hands over the fading coals and lifted her chin towards
the figure of the man in the arm-chair. The flickering glow ir-
radiated her dusky hair, touched the sad circles under her grey
eyes, fell upon her parted lips and made her white teeth shine.

"No, she isn't as pretty as she was," thought Barter and a
shameless comparison between what it would be like to have
Mary "between him and the wall" and Lily Rogers, passed
through his mind.

"My goodness!" he thought. "But I suppose Lily would be
like a cold flower-stalk; whereas this girl--"

"I've come to think I'm one oi the biggest fools in town,"
he remarked.

"Why, Tom?" she murmured wearily.

"I was an ass not to rush you off, Mary, and get married be-
fore old John turned up! You'd have had your friend Tom,
wouldn't you, you lovely creature?"

"What's wrong with you, Tom?" she asked abruptly. He looked
at her sharply.

"Nothing," he said, "what are you talking about? Nothing's
wrong with me."

"When I think of your life sometimes," she said, "between
the office and that awful room of yours, I can hardly bear it."
This she said gravely and intensely, looking in his face; and
every syllable of it was true; for this man had become like a
brother and more than a brother to her; and yet as she looked
at him now, in that familiar, grey office suit, actually wearing
a purple tie she had chosen for him at Wollop's, when John
was no more than a name, she could have found in her heart
to wish that she had never seen him; never known that such a
person as Tom Barter was in the world. It was an odd feeling to
look up at him now, sitting there so easy and natural in old
Mr. Drew's leather chair, and say to herself--"There's the man
who couldn't bring himself to marry me!"

He had been, all along, a fatal apparition in her life. Yes,
he was an unconscious nemesis; although their relations had
been so innocent.

She remembered an occasion at Thorpe, near Norwich, when,
sitting with her mother by the river bank watching a barge go
by, the older woman had suddenly said, "You're a deep nature,
Mary. Your danger won't come from any little ripples on the
tide of your life. It will come from large things bearing down-
like that barge."

This man sitting there opposite her now was just like that
barge on their native river, which her mother had noticed, com-
ing so strongly and massively forward with the tide.

"It's no good hiding it from each other, Tom," she began
now, "we old friends had better be frank with each other. Neither
of us are happy in our life. You're sick to death of running
Philip's business for him and flying his plane for him. You long
to be on your own; to whistle Philip and his affairs down the
wind and be your own master. I'm bored to death by Miss Drew
and everything in this house. Sometimes I think of lea^inc: John
and all the rest of them here, and of getting a place somewhere
else. Glastonbury doesn't suit me any better than it suits you;
though I have, I confess, come to like these ruins a little better
than we did at the beginning. Do you remember how we hated it
all, Tom?"

Her eyes shone so strangely now as she looked up at him, that
the wild idea came into Barter's head that if he pressed her in
one grand coup she might even, out of pique for John's neglect,
throw John over and allow herself to be carried off by him, car-
ried back to Norfolk perhaps, if he dared to chance it!

"No," she went on, "no, old friend. You and I are both pretty
miserable, this fine Spring! Come, confess to me, Tom. wasn't it
because you were feeling lonely that you came to me tonight?
I'm feeling lonely myself, to tell you the truth, and it does me
good to see your solid, old Norfolk face in this weird place!
What would we not give, Tom, you and I, for a breath of real
east wind, coming up sharp and salt from the North Sea?"

His face had something about it at this moment so like the face
of a reticent school-boy who wants to cry but is ashamed to cry,
that, moved by an impulse that surprised herself, she scrambled
to her feet and coming up to him sat down on the arm of his
leather chair, placing her hand lightly on his shoulder to balance
herself, and smiling sadly down upon him.

"A breath from the East Coast is what we want, Tom, old
friend! Am I not right? This holy earth with its hundreds of
saints and its scores of kings is a bit sickly to us sometimes, isn't
it? That arch-conjurer Geard has got such a hold on John, that
he doesn't seem to feel the oppression, does he? He's got John
as fast as he got our grandfather. He's in there now--Lily told
you, I expect? Even Miss Drew treats him with---with--But I
don't like him. There's something about him that makes me feel
shivery and funny--as if he were a great toad. Poor old Tom.
This isn't a very nice world, is it?"

She did a thing then that astonished herself as much as it
astonished the object of her gesture--she lightly touched the
man's forehead with the tips of her firm fingers, pushing back
his stubbly hair. He made a sort of fumbling movement to take
possession of this friendly hand; but the girl slipped quickly
then off his chair s arm, and went over to the mantelpiece against
which she leaned her elbow.

"John is fonder of you in one way than he'll ever be of me--
even if we were married," she said gravely.

Barter thought he had never seen grey eyes look so large and
dark and appealing as hers looked now.

"She's getting at me, to make it up between them," he thought;
and the idea that all this kindness in her tone was just to cajole
him, made something grow rough as a peat-brick beneath his
ribs.

"What the deuce are you talking about, Mary?" he said sulkily,
rubbing his face with both his hands as an angry, independent,
proud boy might do, who had been kissed by a woman who was
attempting to play the mother over him.

"You're not such a fool," she said, "as not to know that he's
desperately fond of you?"

"Oh, old John's all right," he muttered awkwardly, thinking in
his mind, "This is the worst of these clever women. They're always
probing people with what they call psychological questions. I'll
never come and see her again! I'll take Tossie Stickles out to
Bushey Combe tomorrow night. It's no use! I ought to have
known it was no use coming to her. She only wants to play some
game with me to get at John--John'll be helpless in her hands
if she does get hold of him."

Her next question made him jerk up his back very straight
in the leather chair and draw his eyebrows together till they made
a continuous line across his brow.

"What made you think you liked me enough to want to marry
me, Tom?"

He looked first to the right of her dark-flashing eyes and white
cheeks and then to the left. His expression at that moment so
exactly resembled that of a great Newfoundland dog, whom she
had troubled with her gaze, that she smiled at him with renewed
sweetness.

"You're a dear. Tom; do you know it?" she said, taking her
elbow off the chimney-piece. "I like you a lot better than you
ever liked me. I could have made you happy, Tom, if I'd married
you: a good deal happier, I'm afraid, than I'll ever make him.
And yet, my dear. l‘d see you dead in you: coffin...if:...if...
...if I could pluck out of you...whatever it is"--her heavv.
lower lip began trembling a little-- "whatever it is that John
likes in you so much more than--"

She bit her lip and lifting her head back, stretched out her
arms, clenching her hands.

"Oh, dear, it's a business, isn't it, old Tom, this affair of being
alive?"

She let her arms drop to her sides with a sigh that heaved
through her whole body. Tom Barter rose slowly to his feet. He
felt now that he had wronged her with his vulgar suspicions. After
all, she was laying bare her heart to him. She was a good, honest
Norfolk girl. Perhaps what she said was true. Perhaps she could
have made him happy.

He moved up close to her. She could see by his eyes that he
was going to touch her.

"No, no! No, no!" she murmured. "You and I are too old for
that, Tom. Listen, my dear! Why don't you do what John is al-
ways talking to me about? Why don't you chuck Philip and
work with John for a bit? That man wants you; you know he
does. He'd jump out of his skin to have you with him!"

They stared at each other with a long, puzzled stare, after
these words had left her lips. Both of them, with an unconscious
movement, glanced towards the door. Mary had not had the least
idea that she was going to suggest what she had just suggested.
It was as if the presence of Mr. Geard under the same roof had
confused her wits.

"No! Of course you can't leave Philip," she said hurriedly.
"It's your work; I know--and there's your plane too. I can't
think what made me say that, just then It was only...it was
only...Oh, I feel that both you and I, Tom, want something
to change...something to go to smash in our life; so that we
can start again. Isn't that true? But, you needn't speak. I know
too well it's true!"

They looked at each other then with another of their long,
heavy-eyed, puzzled, unyielding, East-Anglian looks, those old
heathen, sullen looks, full of the obduracy of rooted poplars in
driving sleet.

They each needed something from the other--something which,
in all the world, that other alone could give--but between them
there seemed to emerge, emanating like a monstrous offspring
from their sterile psychic embraces, a huge, dark obstacle, not to
be overstepped.

Mary had come out of that room, where the presence of Mr.
Geard was so odious to her, and where the whole aura reeked
of these Glastonbury morbidities; she had come out 'with a reck-
less urge of forlorn hope to get some help from Tom.

He had come from his wretched vigil in that cafe, at a des-
perate run and with a blind leap, like a frantic prisoner catch-
ing at one chance in a thousand, to get he knew not what from
this Norfolk girl. But, their mutual plunge ended here...they
both knew it...ended here with this long, sullen, helpless look
. . . ended here with the same baffled frustration with which their
friendship had always ended, when it tried to break away from
the impeding limits set by the fatality of their own characters!

"Can I get out of here?" he said, when his eyes had drawn
up the great empty plummet-net he had let down from the unan-
swering depths of her eyes, "Out of this place, without meeting
anyone?"

She gave a quick sigh as if aroused by his words from a trance
that was obscurely baffling into a reality that was labour and
struggle.

"Of course, Tom," she said. "Come this way! I'll let you out
through the back."

She blew out the two candles on the table and with his nostrils
full of the sour taste of carbonic-acid gas he followed her to
the door. There was one moment, as she touched the door-handle
by the dying flicker of the fire, that he felt a longing...not
sensual nor passionate, but simply sad and love-starved...to
clasp her well-known form in his arms. But he did not dare. The
moment perished forever in the white smoke of those two tall
candles, and he followed her on tip-toe through the dim-lighted
hall. He was not unaware of the irony of his passing now, with
only a silent nod and a casual glance, those two pretty figures
seated at the kitchen-table enjoying their supper. Purged he
surely was, at that moment, of his wonted lechery.

Mary opened the door into the garden and shivering a little,
for she had forgotten to put on any wrap, led him, across the
daffodil-bed and the fading crocuses, to the edge of King Edgar's
Lawn.

Here she gave him her hand and let him squeeze it in his
strong air-pilot's fingers, till it tingled and smarted.

"You know that place in the wall," she called out softly after
him, "where it's easy to climb?"

He made no answer. He only turned and lifted his hand to
his head, saluting her thus as he w^ould have saluted some superior
officer if he had been...what would have suited him so well
to be!...the careful sergeant-major of a garrison of besieged
soldiers.

She watched his short sturdy figure, after that, as it vanished
with never another look round.

A tide of inexpressible sadness flowed through her heart. Tom
was gone; and she had got scant comfort from him--and Tom
was gone; back to his wretched quarters in High Street! Or
would his lonely, unsatisfied mood put into his stubborn head
to drift on, past his own door, to that cheerful Northload room,
which was her own prepared bridal-chamber?

She glanced up at the great broken tower-columns of the van-
ished nave of the Abbey Church. Would other girls, all the way
down the centuries, she thought, look up at those two stupendous
pillars and fill the space between them, in their sad imagination,
with the high carved arch full of wafted incense and choir-
echoes and deep-voiced prayers? What had she hoped to get
from Tom, or he from her? Neither of them had seemed to know!
It had all ended anyway, just as so many of their old encounters
had done, in a sense of weary frustration.

Ruins! Ruins! It was not only in ancient stone that baffled
human hopes held up their broken outlines, their sad skeleton-
patterns, as resting places for the birds of the night! She was on
the point of turning, of retracing her steps across the dark
flower-beds where fading crocuses and new-sprouting tulips drank
in, in silent long-breath'd draughts, the secret influences of the
darkness, when she was suddenly caught up, completely caught
up, out of herself, as she never in her life had been before by
any natural power.

There, very low down In the western sky, about a couple of
yards, according to human measurement, above the bounding
wall of the enclosure, was the coracle-like crystal shell of the
crescent moon in her first quarter.

There was nothing to which it could be compared! Unique, in
all the universe of matter, if only by reason of the associations
hung about it of twenty-five thousand years of human yearning,
it floated there before her, daughter and darling of the dark ter-
restrial orb, elf-waif of the infinite night! What hands, what
arms, had stretched forth to it, out of their human misery--
brown arms, white arms, black arms--what heart-cries, "I want!
I want! I want!" had been tossed up towards it, from groaning
hairy chests and soft-swelling tender breasts and the troubled
nerves of bewildered children! And ever, and especially, had it
been the comforter and the accomplice, and the confederate of
women, gathering their life-streams towards itself, guarding their
mystic chastity, nourishing their withdrawals, their reticences,
their furtive retreats and denials, companioning them when all
else failed!

It would draw the vast, bottomless salt tides towards it--this
slender night-waif, this leaf of tender sorrow, this filmy weft of
hope against hope--ere it had rounded to its full! Shoals of
glittering fins would follow its pathway across the Atlantic...
on far-off untraversed moorlands its reflection would turn the
ripples to silver. In pools where even the wild geese in their
equinoctial migrations, never disturbed the silence, its frail image
would rock among the reeds. On no different, on no changed a
shape from this, upon which she now gazed and trembled, the great
magicians of antiquity had stared and muttered; their predictions
confounded, their inspirations perverted, their wits turned! Here
floated the virgin-mistress of the tragic madness of maids, the
patroness of all defiers of man's law's! Here was the girl-child
from the dim shores of ancient anarchy, at whose bright and
horned head the kings and the priests of man-made tradition have
always shivered and quaked in their sacred sandals! She has
been the tutelary mistress of all sterile passions, of all wild re-
volts against "the Mothers," that have led the virgins of prophecy
to shatter this world's laws. That shapeless conch of dangerous
whiteness, tossing herself, through the scudding drifts of ship-
swallowing seas, rocking like a sea-mew in the rigging of doomed
ships, gleaming in the cold dews of uncounted dawns upon
blood-stained Golgothas and lost battlefields, and now shining
down, calm and lovely, upon hillside fairy-rings and upon
smooth, wide-stretching, glittering sands, has always been the
forlorn hope of the impossible; has always been the immortal
challenge to What Is, from, the wavering margins of What
Might Be!

The popular opinion that the moon is a planetary fragment,
broken off from the earth or from the sun, is probably a gross
and clumsily conceived error! Much more likely is it that she
is the last-remaining fragment of some earlier stellar system, a
system of material forms and shapes now altogether lost, but in
its origin nearer to the beginning of things in the ambiguous
imaginings of the Primal Cause.

Surely, not only in the Religions of this planet has she played
a dominant and inextinguishable role. But she has always been
on the side of the weak and the sick against the strong and the
well-constituted! With her silvery horns of Mystery gathered in
the folds of that blue robe or bearing up those divine feet of the
Maid-Mother of the Crucified she has challenged the whole
authoritative reign of Cause-and-Effect itself. And it was this
whiteness beyond all whiteness; it was this whiteness, like the
wet curves of unimaginable sea-shells and like the spray about
the prows of fairy ships, that now came with its magical touch
to bring healing to Mary Crow.

The girl stood transfixed on the chilly edge of that bed of
cold, pale-leafed immature tulips. She stared and stared at the
celestial visitant, as if she had never before seen the moon,
under any sky.

"What does it make me feel?" she thought. "Is there something
about it that every woman who has ever lived in Glastonbury
must feel? Something that the Lake Village women felt? Some-
thing that immured, mediaeval nuns were comforted by?"

Her body as well as her spirit fell now into a wordless prayer
to that white, floating, immortal creature. "Bury. oh. bury your
strange secret in my breast!" the girl's heart cried out. "Bury it
deep, deep in my womb, so that henceforth to the end of my
days, something cold and free and uncaught may make me
strong!"



As soon as Mat Dekker and Mr. Geard were out of the house,
the former explained to the latter that he had an important visit
to make that night before he retired, "to a woman dying of
cancer near the Crow factory."

Mr. Geard seemed, in spite of this information, very reluctant
to part from the Vicar of Glastonbury. He proposed to Mr. Dek-
ker that they should stroll up Chilkwell Street together and take
a glance in the darkness at Chalice House. "I'd like to know what
you think, Vicar," he said, in his thick, unctuous voice, "about
my scheme for altering the old place. If I don't buy it it may
fall into the hands of the Papists again. And yet they're asking
a fancy price. Just come and take a look, won't you, Sir?"

Mat Dekker permitted himself to be led past the Tithe Barn
and up Chilkwell Street.

"What I had in my mind," said Mr. Geard, in a self-satisfied
voice, when they had skirted the high blank wall of Chalice House
and had reached the particular garden hedge beyond which lay
the Sacred Fount, "was to build a wall here that would be worthy
of the Blood. He uttered this last word in a casual, matter-of-
fact way, as if he had said, "worthy of the view" or "worthy of
our age," and a certain flavor of unctuous gusto in his tone was
especially repellent to Mat Dekker.

"With an entrance, I suppose?" said this latter.

But it now transpired that Mr. Geard had not considered an
entrance. What he had been thinking about was guarding, pro-
tecting, defending, consecrating "the Blood," as he called this
chalybeate spring. He had been so preoccupied in keeping sac-
rilege out, that he had not considered how to bring devotion in.

Mat Dekker as a professional priest naturally had his flock
in mind. "You won't charge any entrance-fee, I hope?" he went
on. "Since the place has been empty the caretaker has been tak-
ing tips; but I don't like that at all. Everybody ought to be free
to drink of this water!

Mr. Geard approached the thick hedge; and ascending the little
bank below it plunged his arms and his face into the early spring
freshness--the hedge exhaled a delicate fragrance as he touched
it; a fragrance that flowed out into the darkness on all sides.

"No--no," said Bloody Johnny, stepping back into the road.
"I'll have a Saxon arch and a heavy door with a bell inside--a
loud bell--with a rope hanging down.'"

"Why a Saxon arch?" remarked Mr. Dekker. "I don't think
there were any Saxon arches--wasn't it the Normans who "

"Brought the Devil with 'em," cried Mr. Geard, "and the
Devil's gentlemen! No, no. There's going to be one Saxon arch
at any rate in Glastonbury. Our oldest charter is a Saxon Charter.
Our oldest real Abbots are Saxon Abbots. Our oldest real kings
are Saxon kings. If King Arthur comes back--as my wife's cousin
says he will--he'll have to ring my Saxon bell in my Saxon wall.
My own folk haven't one drop--not one drop--of gentlemen's
blood. I'm going to give back Chalice Well to the People, Mr.
Dekker!"

The man's hoarse voice had risen to that rich, rolling tone of
rhetorical unction that the Glastonbury street corners had come
to know so well before he went away to Norfolk.

"Give back Chalice Well to the People," sounded over and
over again in Mr. Dekker's ears, as the two men retraced their
steps. Outside the Vicarage gate they stopped to say good-night
to each other. They instinctively turned round, as they did so,
to catch a glimpse of the tall elms growing in the Abbey enclosure
between the boundary wall and those foundations of the Chapel
of King Edgar that had been discovered by supernatural aid.

The new moon had long ago gone down but the sky was
clear; and over their heads stretched the long, faint, whitish
track of the Milky Way.

Geard snuffed the night air like a great sick ox, that had been
kept too long in its winter-stall. As Mat Dekker looked at him
now he got an impression of a reserve of power--of some kind
of power--that was actually startling.

"This Religious Fair of mine," said Mr. Geard, "will be some-
thing quite different from the Oberammergau Passion Play. Mr.
John Crow, who by the way. is a most intelligent young man,
(Mat Dekker smiled in the darkness at this) "with a good deal
more religion than he thinks he has--has received so many re-
plies from all over the worid. that I really think this occasion
is going to he quite an important one in the history of our
country."

"That's just what I wanted to know. Sir," said Mat Dekker--
"only I mustn't keep you now; and my son, if he has come in,
will wonder where I am. But I did want to know what your real
inmost purpose was. Of course, if you don't care to speak of
such things. I would not press you; but I'd be happier if I knew
what was really in your mind. But won't you come in for a min-
ute. Mr. Geard? Please do! We can talk quietly in my little
museum if my son is at home, I know he'll be delighted to see
you: for he has heard so much about you. Indeed, he told me
he had been to tea with you. Your second daughter...she is
your second, isnshe?...has been a great help to us, quite
often, in so many ways. Do come in, Mr. Geard. I've got to go
out later to see that woman with cancer; but I told her nurse not
to come for me till late, so that she would know if the poor thing
was going to get any sleep tonight. Please come in now anyway."
The ex-preacher of the gospel hesitated for a moment.

"I don't want to intrude." he murmured: but Mat Dekker swept
this aside.

It is really important, Sir," he said emphatically, taking the
other by the arm, "that I should hear everything about your
scheme. I may be of use to you; more use to vou than you
realise."

Bloody Johnny permitted himself to be persuaded; and soon
found himself seated in a comfortable wicker chair by a warm ?
fire in what the father and son called their "museum. " The door
of this chamber having been left ajar, the legatee of Canon
Crow was enabled to listen to a rather singular conversation in
the kitchen-passage.

"Master Sam ain't come in," he heard the voice of Penny
Pitches saying, "and Weatherwax were in kitchen just now with
a tale of having talked with gamekeeper's young man from West
Pennard, come in for pheasant-feed, or summat o' that, and
Weatherwax said 'a told 'un that 'a seed our Sam walking across
Hearty Moor like as the Deil were arter he. Twas Tomnn Blake,
the young man were, what used to live down Bere Lane, so he
know'd our Sam as 'twere his own kin; and ye do know, thee
wone self, Master, what be beyond Hearty! Whitelake River be
beyond Hearty; where thik Missy Zoyland do live. And so. I
reckon our Sam be gone to see she; gone to see she while shes
old man be out to Wookey Hole."

"He may have been walking in that direction, Penny, without
going to that house."

Mr. Geard uncrossed his legs and purposely made his chair
creak by shifting his position in it. One of the grand secrets of
the man's magnetic power was that he forced himself to see noth-
ing, to hear nothing, to think nothing of other people's affairs.

"Direction be shot!" cried the old woman, "\oung men will
do it, an' they come to 't! Direction, say ye? He'll direction her,
and direct her too; don't 'ee make no mistake. Master."

"Well, I hope she'll give him a good supper anyway, Penny,"
threw out Mat Dekker, with a forced smile.

"Don't lock the front door, Penny, when you go to bed," he
went on, "and will you bring me some brandy into the museum,
the very best, you know, one of those bottles you hid from
Weatherwax last Christmas?"

He returned to his guest and sat down opposite him. He too
had a very creaky wicker chair; and for a little time, while Penny
waited on them, in sulky silence, there was nothing audible in
that ramshackle room but the creaking of those two chairs under
their heavy bodies.

Mat Dekker's mind was away at Whitelake Cottage. A spasm
of unreasoning anger against his son kept surging up in the
depths of his being and a wild imaginary dialogue between him-
self and Nell Zoyland began incoherently to shape itself on the
tongue of his hidden soul-- "She turned to me," he kept think-
ing, "she turned to me in her trouble. She looked at me more
than at either of them. She would do exactly what I told her.
She said as much as that with her eyes." The dangerous hidden
waters in this man's rock-rooted Quantock nature began now to
toss and foam and churn, as he thought of Sam and his sweet
adultress.

Mat Dekker repeated to himself now what his old flame, Elizabeth
Crow, had said, as he looked at Mr. Geard's greenish-black trou-
sers--"I believe you are in love with that girl yourself." A dusky
flush of anger came into his ruddy cheeks as he recalled this. But
if it was all nonsense, why did the thought "Sam will probably sleep
with her tonight" cause him such singular perturbation? Not be-
cause of any moral distress about Sam behaving badly. Mat had
absolutely nothing in him of the congenital Puritan; and his long
association with birds and beasts and reptiles had given him a very
natural and earthy attitude towards erotic emotion--nor had he any
particular concern about William Zoyland's feelings! He had always
regarded Lord P.'s bastard as something of a ruffian and a bully.
Secretly in his heart he was rather proud of Sam for having been
able to steal away a girl's heart from a handsome rogue like that.

It may be well imagined that with all these stirrings and upheavings
going on in his mind it was very hard for Mat to give any concen-
trated attention to Mr. Geard and what the bar-rooms of the town
called Bloody Johnny's Midsummer Kick-up.

Mr. Geard was not one to miss the preoccupation of his host; but
such was his nature that it caused him no particular annoyance,
He enjoyed the Vicar's brandy: and kept re-filling his glass and
sipping its contents with a quiet relish, while he talked on and
on, apparently quite as much for his own edification as for that
of his abstracted hearer. His eyes, as he talked, kept wander-
ing about the room, which was more like the play-room of a
whole family of young naturalists than a theologian's study,
though on one side of the apartment there was a large gloomy
bookcase full of standard Anglican works.

What arrested Mr. Geard's attention most was an enormous
aquarium standing on a bench in the middle of the room. There
was a lamp, not far from this object, on a table littered with
magazines, and the light from this, falling on one side of the
aquarium, made an illuminated segment of bright water through
which some very energetic and very large minnows kept darting
and hovering. These lively fish, circumscribed in a luminous void,
associated themselves very vividly with what Bloody Johnny was
feeling as he rambled on. "Someone must make the start," he
was saying, "and why should not I? Life advances by leaps and
bounds, and so does Religion. There's no doubt that this is the
moment for something drastic...for something"--he hesitated for
a word, while a soft-mottled loach, lifting its white belly from the
gravel at the bottom of the aquarium, pressed an open mouth
against the illuminated glass side of the vessel and fixed upon
this singular Prophet a cold fish-eye--"for something...miracu-
lous. There are only about half a dozen reservoirs of world-magic
on the whole surface of the globe--Jerusalem...Rome...Mecca...
Lhassa--and of these Glastonbury has the largest residue of
unused power. Generations of mankind, aeons of past races,
have--by their concentrated will--made Glastonbury miraculous.
But since the time of that incredible fool, Henry the Eighth, the
magic of Glastonbury has been unused."

Bloody Johnny permitted his host to refill his glass. The bottle
was two-thirds empty already. Here was an unexpected rival for
poor Mr. Weatherwax! The lower the liquor sank in the bottle, the
less water did the visitor mix with it. And the more he drank the
more metaphysical he became. Mat Dekker kept replenishing his
own pipe from an earthenware jar of Craven Mixture which stood
between the lamp and the aquarium. There were no other sources
of light in this study-museum beyond the fire and this one lamp,
and the two men's massive physiognomies were lit up by this two-
fold radiation in a manner that would have delighted any connois-
seur in the mystery of lines and contours, of plane surfaces and
carved-out hollows. Bloody Johnny did not, apparently, make use
of tobacco in any form. This was one of those Nonconformist
traits in his curious character that a little disconcerted his host.
The brandy-drinking, however, carried to such a surprising length,
and producing no sign of tipsiness, was a considerable comfort to
the priest's Quantock-bred mind. If only the fellow had smoked too!
But with these queer chaps one couldn't have everything. If the
man had neither smoked nor drank the priest-naturalist would have
experienced a positive physical distaste for this alien presence in
his museum. He would have snuffed the air suspicious, like a hound
who smells a weasel in place of a fox.

"Why shouldn't the Lord have chosen me," Mr. Geard was
now saying. as he leaned forward in his wicker chair, hugging
his legs and wagging his hydrocephalic head, "to bring back an
Age of Faith to our Western World? The way I am doing it will
seem heresy to some, blasphemy to others, pure hocus-pocus
to most. But that's exactly, my dear, what all new out-spurts of
the Real Presence have seemed. Do 'ee think anyone can put a
stopper on me?"

Mat Dekker had never, since Sam's mother's death, been called
"my dear'' by any living soul: but it was such a quaint word
for the man to use just then, at such a moment, this word
"stopper." that he looked at him with something like real respect.
The chap could not be a humbug! No humbug would say "put a
stopper on me."

Mat Dekker now began scrutinising his guest's great bowed
head as Bloody Johnny grew somnolent, and the way his huge,
plump, clenched fist lay on the rough little garden-table by the
edge of his bottle and glass. "There's the head of a heretic,"
he thought. "No doubt the great Marcion, with his skull full of
spiritual errors, had a head like that. But it's all wrong! Christ
has chosen to reveal Himself through the traditions of His
Church, and in no other way. When the Church's authority is
undermined life falls back into chaos...into the blind gropings
of Matter or at least of Nature."

"The Lord...has...filled me . . rumbled Bloody Johnny again in
his hoarse voice, "with the power of His spirit, my dear, and
nothing can stop me from doing His will! I feel His will pouring
through me, my dear, by night and by day. Let the glory go to
whom He pleases! I am but a reed, a miserable pipe, a wretched
conduit, a contemptible sluice. But never mind what I am!
Through me, at this moment of time, the Eternal is breaking
through. Yes, dear, dear Sir, for I admire 'ee and respect 'ee.
it's breaking through! I'm going to make Glastonbury the centre
of the Religion of all the West. I feel it in me. this power; I feel
it dear, dear Mr. Dekker, and nothing can stop me, nothing!" He
lifted his heavy fist and emptied the remainder of the bottle into
his glass, and tossed it, this time without one drop of water, down
his capacious throat. After this, the man's chin sank down again
upon his chest and his host had time to abandon himself in peace
once more to his troubled thoughts.

Mat Dekker, noticing at last that his guest's eyes had actually
closed, brought out his great old-fashioned watch with its blue
enamelled back and looked at it with puckered brows. A deep
sigh came from his heart as he replaced this timepiece, for he
had seen the little hand approaching eleven and the big hand
approaching ten. Ten minutes to eleven--and Sam not back. He
must be staying with her, sleeping with her. His hands, old
clumsy Sam's rough hands, the hands that had hammered to-
gether the little garden-table on which that empty bottle rested,
must be now caressing her naked satiny limbs. Mat Dekker's
face positively contorted itself with suffering as this image or
rather as this imaginative projection of his own feelings into
those of his son's, went on dominating his senses....Suddenly
there was a loud ring at the front-door bell. Mat Dekker started
up upon his feet. John Geard jerked up his head, and pushing
away the empty bottle with the back of his knuckles, gathered him-
self together to face whatever new incursion into the museum
this sound portended. The clatter of Penny Pitches' heavy shoes
came echoing down the passage.

"Is it your son?" broke in Mr. Geard, but the priest shook his
head.

"He'd never ring," he murmured. "The door's always--"

]His voice was lost in the noisy opening of the front door
while an alarming colloquy, overheard by both of the men, be-
gan to take place on the doorstep. "She can't abide the pain one
hour longer, and Doctor said she couldn't 'ave no more morphia
till he comes tomorrow. I've run near all the way, for I can't
bear leaving the pore thing like as she is. She be crazy with pain,
and that's the truth."

Mat Dekker was out into the hall now; and Mr. Geard, his de-
serted chair creaking like an anxious goblin, was in the museum
doorway. "This is Nurse Robinson. She is a niece of our Mrs.
Robinson whom I expect you know. Nancy, I call her," said Mr.
Dekker; and, as Penny Pitches retreated down the passage to her
own domain, the nurse and Mr. Geard shook hands. The new-
comer was certainly more like a "Nancy" than like a nurse. A
red-faced lusty creature she appeared, when she threw back her
hood, but her face betrayed a natural agitation at this moment
that was more humane than it was professional. "But this is out-
rageous!" cried Mr. Dekker: and by the light of the hall-lamp,
hanging from the ceiling, Geard could see a vein in the priest's
forehead swell and swell, till it resembled a little thin snake
beneath his skin. "This is unbearable! Have you called the
doctor up? Have you talked to him?"

Nurse Robinson nodded. "'Ee says 'tis the law," she responded.
"'Ee says Hi've 'a given 'er already more'n the law allows. 'Ee
says if the chemist gave me more for 'er till hate tomorrow, I
should be 'eld responsible if anythink 'appened."

"You must excuse me, Mr. Geard," cried Mat Dekker, snatch-
ing his coat and hat from a peg. fc 'TH come straight with you to
the doctor's, Nancy, and stir him up. Til take the responsibility
myself. It's outrageous. It's intolerable. Penny!" The square
servant advanced down the passage at her master's summons.
"Don't go to bed till Mr. Sam comes in. Penny, and keep some-
thing hot for his supper. He may have been walking miles and
miles."

"We do know where he have been ^walking!" grumbled Penny.
"I'll stay up for he, right and certain, Master, and when he
comes in, it'll go hard but I'll give he a piece of me mind, gal-
lumping over they girt moors, to the disturbance of our decent
house--and all because of a whey-faced missy what's another
man's wife!"

"Hush! Hush, Penny!" commanded her master, nodding to-
wards Mr. Geard to indicate that they were not alone. "Help the
gentleman into his coat, Penny, can't you? Our way lies in the
same direction, doesn't it, Sir?" he went on. "Ready, Nurse?
You've got your breath again? That poor woman...left alone
in positive torture...Perhaps you'd prefer to walk more slowly,
Mr. Geard? But Nurse and I must hurry on!"

Bloody Johnny proved himself able to walk quite as fast as
his companions, though it is true he covered the ground in rather
an eccentric manner. He walked with a sort of dot-and-go-one
step, and in addition to this mode of progression he also had a
kind of sailor's lurch, as if he had just landed from a rolling
deck. "What doctor are you going to disturb?'" he enquired
breathlessly 'when they reached the town.

Doctor Fell, Sir, Doctor Fell," replied the nurse. ‘^Doctor
Fell be a kind-'earted man, but he lives with 'is old sister Miss
Bibby who be reglar devil. And if we ring at Doctor's door it
won't be the doctor well see. Well see old Bibbv for sure and
Bibby'll knock our 'eads off waking of 'er up."

"I'll have the doctor out of bed," muttered Mr. Dekker grimly,
"if once you get them to open the door for us, Nurse."

But at this point Mr Geard laid his hand on the Vicar's arm.
"Let me go with Miss Robinson and sit up with this woman,"
he said. "You can telephone to my family when you return home,
so that they won't be alarmed. I can sleep wherever I am. It's a
trick I possess."

Mat Dekker showed some impatience at this. "It isn't a question
of sitting up with her, Mr. Geard. It's a question of stopping the
torture she's enduring. It's a question of giving her sleep! Mor-
phia alone can do that."

"Christ alone can do that!" cried Bloody Johnny in a voice
that sounded like the voice of an angry boatswain, so resonantly
did it reverberate through the empty street! "Pardon me. Sir,"
he went on. "Pardon me, Miss Robinson. When I said just now
that I would sit up with this woman, I meant of course that in
the Power of the Blood I would send her to sleep. Please take
me there quickly, Nurse! There is no reason why we should
trouble Mr. Dekker any more tonight. Only don't forget, Mister,
to telephone to Mrs. Geard."

Nurse Robinson looked from one to the other. They were all
three now standing outside Saint John's Churchyard, in the ob-
scurity of which the Holy Thorn was just visible and the vast
bulk of the shadowy tower. But Mat Dekker's face was clouded
with indecision. He kept turning his head, first to the right and
then to the left under the pressure of Mr. Geard's words, exactly
as a large dog might have done under a human eye. He seemed
unwilling to look at Mr, Geard. He struck the pavement with the
end of his stick once ur twice, muttering. "Well, I don't know,
on my soul. I really don't know." Then, with a deeply drawn
breath and a queer, little, fluttering movement of one of his big
hands, "Come," he said. "and see what you can do. But for God's
sake let's be quick! She may be crazy with the pain."

Walking fast up George Street they were soon at Tittie Pether-
ton's ruined Gothic cottage. Nurse Robinson opened the door
and went in first. A small oil-lamp was burning on the kitchen-
table and a black, sooty kettle simmered feebly upon a coal-stove
whose fire had almost gone out. Nurse Robinson had begun to
turn up the wick of the little lamp when they were startled by a
moan of anguish more horribly acute than Mat Dekker had ever
heard in his life. He had heard Tilde's groans before, under her
abominable affliction...but never a sound quite like that. The
blood rushed to his face. "Damn these doctors!" he cried. Nurse
Robinson glanced at Mr. Geard to see what effect this horrible
sound had upon him. She was astonished to see his face twisted
in a spasm of physical pain. She was so startled by the twisted
mouth of Mr. Geard that she found herself expecting to hear
from it the same cry of torment as that which they had just heard
from the room above. But the spasm was over in a second of
time and she turned to the door which concealed the steps that
led to her patient's bedroom. Up these steps she now climbed,
followed first by Mat Dekker and then by Mr. Geard. There was
a second little oil-lamp, identical with the one downstairs, upon
a table by the bedside, above which the massive eaves of the
roof sloped down.

A gaunt woman, propped upon pillows, who had pulled herself
up so desperately to a sitting posture that the bed-clothes
were clinging in a disordered mass about her knees, was leaning
forward with a terribly fixed stare. She began at once an inco-
herent and piteous pleading. "Have you the stuff? Have you
brought the stuff? Oh, for Jesus' sake, give me the stuff! Is it
there? Have you got it?" At this point she gasped and struggled
for breath, clutching at her body with her fingers. Then she began
again. "Give me the stuff. Nurse, give it to me quickly! If I don't
have it, this minute, I shall curse Them Above. Oh, the stuff! the
stuff! I want nothing but the stuff!"

Mat Dekker was aware of a sleepy twittering above the gutter-
pipe outside the window. "Sparrows," lie said to himself" "but
too early for nesting...a little too early; but they must be
thinking of it...they must be pairing." The oil-lamp reeked
vilely, and from the tortured woman's bed there emanated a
sweetish-sour and very sickly smell, which made Mat Dekker
shudder as he stood there mute and helpless. It was as if, beyond
and behind the living-room, some unspeakable Entity of Pain
writhed in the darkness, and it was from the substance of this
thing and not from any human flesh and blood that this abomin-
able smell issued forth.

Nurse Robinson approached the bed. "Lie down now, Mrs.
Petherton. It'll be better if you lie down. There! Let me turn
your pillows." The woman opened her mouth and drew in her
lips. Her expression was that of a despairing animal who would
blindly bite at the whole world. But she allowed herself in her
weakness to be laid flat upon the pillow by the strong hands of
the nurse.

Then Mat Dekker approached the bed and folding his great
knuckles together and bowing his grey head began praying: "In
the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,
give unto this woman, thy poor stricken servant, O God, strength
to endure the grievous sufferings which Thou in Thy wisdom
hast been pleased--" He got no further, for the woman's eyes,
which she had momentarily closed, opened again and a look of
renewed torment, combined with wild hatred for the priest, came
into her face. Nor was this all. Unable in any other way to ex-
press the abyss of her defiance she made the motion of spitting at
the worthy man. Her wretched drop of ejected saliva did no more
than drip down the wrinkles of her own cheek. But Dekker caught
her intention and it froze his heart.

It was at this moment that Mr. Geard came forward. Unob-
served by his companions he had removed his coat and waist-
coat, and now showed himself in his purple braces and grey
shirt. He did not even look at the woman's face. To the astonish-
ment of the others he stretched himself out flat by her side upon
the bed, using the little table as a support for one of his great
elbows. Mat Dekker could not help noticing that the bulge of
his stomach had burst the top button of his trousers. But from
this position he rolled his eyes towards the nurse. "Put summat
under me head, will 'ee, kindly," he muttered, relapsing into
the broadest Somerset. The nurse promptly obeyed him, snatch-
ing a faded cushion from a chair on the further side of the attic.
"Take thik lamp away, one o' ye, if ye doant mind. No! No! Put
the little bugger on floor. Missus, where't woant shine in our
pore eyes." Again the astonished nurse obeyed this singular au-
thority, placing the lamp in the centre of the floor, and turning
the wick down as low as she dared. "Now, Tittie, old gurl, thee
and me be 'a goin' to have some blessed sleep. I be drowsy as
a spent bullick, I be. Night to ye both; night to ye all. Tittie and
me be all right. Us 'ull be safe and sound till mornin'. And then
maybe ye'll bring up a cup o' tea for we to bless the Lord in!"

With the lamp placed where it was, it had become impossible
now for either Mr. Dekker or Miss Robinson to see anything but
two blurred human faces, laid side by side. "Are we really to leave
you like this, Mr. Geard?" enquired Mat Dekker. Not a sound, not
a movement came from the bed. The priest picked up Mr. Geard's
overcoat and his other clothes from where the man had let them
fall on the floor. These objects he carefully stretched out over
Bloody Johnny's prostrate form. "Come, Nancy," he muttered.
"For God's sake let's do exactly what he says. L really think
that, by the mercy of God, he's done what I couldn't do; and
perhaps"--here he sighed deeply--"what no doctor could do.
Come, Nancy! Better leave them just as they are." He led the
way down the narrow stairs, and Nurse Robinson followed after
him. The nurse looked at a dilapidated arm-chair covered with a
big red shawl full of holes which stood by one of the Gothic
windows. Mat Dekker lifted up the sooty kettle and peeped into
the stove. "Wait a second, Nancy," he said. He opened the back
door of the wretched room, from the rafters and walls of which
the damp of centuries seemed to emanate. A draught of chilly
midnight air entered and made the little lamp flicker and the
shadow of Nurse Robinson move portentously across the yellow-
ish strips of torn wallpaper that hung from the opposite wall.

He returned in a minute, carrying a bundle of small pieces or
wood pressed against his black waistcoat. These he piled up by
the side of the stove, and then threw into the aperture the most
auspicious-looking of the pieces, "Well! I'll be getting home,
Nance," he said. "You'll be all right, won't 'ee?" He moved up
to a small cupboard and shamelessly opened it. "Yes, you've got
some tea and some biscuits, I see. Have you got anything to
read?" He looked round, but could see nothing except Tittie
Petherton's great family Bible. Being the man he was, this par-
ticular work seemed in some way inadequate for a night-long
vigil. He searched his great overcoat pockets and giving a grunt
of satisfaction extracted from one of them a small copy of White's
Selborne. This he presented to the watcher with many nods and
smiles. "'Twill help 'ee awake or send 'ee to sleep, Nance, just
as 'ee do have a mind!" Like Geard of Glastonbury, Mr. Dekker
was always ready to revert at a pinch to the West-Country turns
of speech. In sheer physical relief at escaping from the strain of
Tittie Petherton's suffering the good man now rubbed his big
hands together and chuckled benevolently. For the last quarter
of an hour he had forgotten Whitelake Cottage! Thus, in the huge
compensatory ebb and flow of great creative Nature, one tension
of human feeling has the power of ejecting, or completely can-
celling, another strain of feeling. For the emotional tension of a
frustrated passion there is no better cure than to spend an hour
or two in the presence of terrible bodily anguish. Mat Dekker
was not an idealist, but he was a man of a proud and stormy
heart, and what he had seen tonight had had the famous Aris-
totelian effect upon him. As he walked rapidly home, however,
down George Street and High Street and Silver Street, this
catharsis relaxed its calming force. By the time he reached the
gate of his Vicarage, poor Tittie and her heretical hypnotist were
forgotten. He found his heart beating, his pulses throbbing, to
the old fatal tune .Had Sam come back?

He strode up the winding driveway and burst into the hall of
his house. "Penny!" he shouted. "Penny!" The old servant came
grumbling and blinking out of her kitchen where she had been
asleep in her chair. "Has Sam come home?" he enquired sternly.

"Not that I knows, Master," the woman answered; "not unless
he crept upstairs on his stockinged feet."

Mat Dekker ran upstairs just as he was, too perturbed in mind to
take off either his hat or his coat. He hung open the door of
Sams bedroom. Empty it was with that indescribable look of
desolation that bedrooms of the absent and of the dead so quickly
assume; and Sam's father stood for a second on the dimly lit
landing, chewing the bitter cud of remediless loss. Then he went
slowly to his own bedroom; and having telephoned to the Geards'
house to tell them what had become of their man, he undressed
and sought his pillow.

But the priest's rest that night was feverish and disturbed.
Nor was its Vicar the only troubled sleeper in Glastonbury. Under
many of her roofs, from the brick tilings of the Town Council's
houses in Benedict Street, to the slate roofs of the tradesmen's
villas in Wells Street, outraged and wounded hearts kept human
souls awake.

Perhaps in one house alone there was absolute peace, in one
house alone a deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill," and that
was the house m which Bloody Johnny and Tittie Petherton slept



CONSUMMATION



When Sam Dekker reached Whitelake Cottage that day
it was nearly four o'clock. He had remained standing motion-
less once or twice during his rapid walk; standing in that fixed
position and in that same abstracted trance into which it is re-
corded that the philosophic Socrates fell at certain crises in his
life; and he had no idea how long these moments of abstraction
had lasted. Once at the place, however, he knocked resolutely at
the door. There was a sound inside which made him think that
the young mistress of the house was upstairs, cleaning the floor;
and when the girl came running down to let him in, this suppo-
sition proved the correct one, for she was garbed in a long,
green linen over-all, covering the whole of her dress.

"Sam...oh, Sam!" She was in his arms in a moment; and
for a brief space of time their simple, unadulterated craving for
each other's presence, satisfied now so deeply, drowned every
other consideration. "Sit down, Sam: oh my dear, oh my dear!"
And she pulled, with violent tugs, at her linen over-all till she
had got it over her head. She tossed the thing down on the sofa
first; and then, to make room for them to sit side by side on that
piece of furniture, she quickly folded up the garment and flung
it across the back of a chair.

They sat side by side, now, his hand clasping hers; too happy,
simply to be together, to do anything but drink up each other's
identity. "I thought this morning," she murmured, "Sam may
come today! But I never thought you really would."

"Oh, Nelly, my little, little Nelly!" He lifted up his hands
and pushing back her hair from her forehead drew her face
towards him. The girl's lips parted under his passionate kiss;
and when he let her go her head dropped forward like a flower
whose stem has been broken. Not a flicker, not a ripple of
shame, not a shadow of the least awareness of any change in
his recent mood swept across his consciousness when he kissed
Nell Zoyland like that!

It must be remembered that Sam's idea of what it meant to
struggle to live "the life of a saint" was a very different thing
from any notion that his father would have entertained, had
Mat Dekker aimed at such a state! Not that it would be any easier
to be a saint in Sam's way than to be a saint in his father's way.
In some respects it would be more difficult. For one thing it
would require a casuistry more sharp-edged, more flexible, more
searching and yet not less exacting! Sam's whole attitude towards
his feelings as he sat on Nell's sofa turned on the point--though
he did not analyse it--as to whether this ecstasy he got from the
girl was just sensuality or something quite different from sen-
suality. Without analysing his feelings, he knew in his heart that
it was very different: and this knowledge, penetrating his whole
being, saved him from any pricks of conscience. In his unanalyti-
cal way, Sam was not so blinded by passion, as he breathed in
and breathed out the paradisiac air of her presence, as not to be
vaguely conscious of a delicious surprise. It was a surprise to
him to find that he was not torn by any moral conflict. He had
pushed back the thought of such a conflict to the furthest margin
of his mind. But somewhere in his spirit he had been expecting it;
and now it had not come! There was no conflict. His thrilling
happiness with Nell, since the girl was as she was, brought him
nothing but a great flooding wave of absolute peace. The trouble
between them had risen from Nell's nature then, not from his?
It was the woman, not the man, whose conscience had been torn?
Well! if Nell felt no shame now; if Nell felt no division in her
heart, all was well. The personality of Will Zoyland on the moral
horizon of Sam's life was no more to him than the willows and
poplars of Queen's Sedgemoor on its physical horizon.

As for the girl herself, her recent decision in Zoyland's favour
and her return to his bed had been all along of a very special and
peculiar nature. The girl's real unconscious motive in this action
--an action whose immediate repercussion upon herself had pro-
duced that terrible turmoil of mal-ease which had seized upon
her in Saint John's Church--had been revenge upon Sam for not
taking a bold, drastic and final step in their relations, in other
words, for not carrying her off!

It is women's fatal susceptibility to passionate touch that hyp-
notises them into by far the greater number of their disasters;
for under this touch-hypnosis the present transform itself into
the eternal, and their grand sex-defence, their consciousness of
continuity, their awareness of the future as an integral portion
of the present, is shattered and broken up. The ideal love-affairs
for women are when it is easy for them, after these momentary
plunges into the eternal, to fall back again upon their realistic
sense of continuity; whereas the ideal love-affairs for men are
when their feeling for novelty and for adventure is perpetually
being re-aroused by the bewildering variability of women's
moods.

"I've been thinking of you all the while, Sam," she said now.
as Sam leant over her, clutching one of her hands with both his,
and pressing it deeply into the fold of her lap. "The other day--
was it the day before yesterday?--Yes! I think so...hut I
seem to have lost all sense of time...I started re-planting
some wild-flowers, out there on the bank...meadow orchises
they were...and suddenly I couldn't bear it, not seeing you.
and I came running in and fell on the sofa and cried and cried. It
was this very sofa," she went on in a changed voice and with
what was evidently a swift, sudden vision of the vagaries of time,
"where we're now sitting. Oh, my dear, oh, my dear, I never
thought it would all come true!"

She cried from pure happiness now, letting the tears fall upon
the back of his fingers as he pressed her clenched hand deep into
her lap; and she got a wild, exultant pleasure from the very
shamelessness of her tears, not attempting to stay them, but let-
ting them roll down her cheeks even while she lifted up her bowed
head and looked at him.

"Have you been cooking properly for yourself, Nell?" Sam
suddenly enquired. The question mightily amused her; and she
laughed out loud as she wiped away her tears.

"Why yes, Sam...yes, I have," she answered, "only I don't
quite know what you mean by ‘properly.' I've got a large bit of
cold boiled bacon. That's the only meat I've been having just now
. . . but I've been making myself some cheese omelets and...
oh, I don't know! Why are you so inquisitive?"

Sam didn't smile. With some reason he felt he had got upon
shaky ground. That bacon had been, no doubt, provided to suit
the taste of the master of the house! "I went this morning," he
said, "'with John Crow and that man Evans, who's at Old Jones'
shop, to the top of the Tor. Crow's working for Geard; you know
that? They're going to have some sort of a Passion Play on
Midsummer's Day. Crow asked this fellow Evans to act as the
Christ in it. He's been sending off their circulars far and wide
. . . even abroad, so he says. I am sure I can't imagine what
Father will make of it all."

^Geard's working against Philip and his factories, isn't he?"
she responded. "'Do you know, Sam, I'm sure there's something
between Philip and my sister-in-law, Percy. My brother sees
nothing. He'll never see anything, till it's all too late!"

Sam pondered; but not on the misdoings of Percy Spear. "I
like what I've seen of your brother, Nell," he said. "But he
doesn't really think there's a chance of England becoming com-
munistic in our lifetime, does he?"

The girl gave a little sigh. "Oh, I don't know, my dear! I've
never thought much about it...one way or the other. I sup-
pose he does. But I oughtn't to speak for Dave. I'm afraid he
doesn't find me clever enough to talk to, about things like that.
Sam, have you heard any gossip in town about Philip and
Persephone?"

Sam smiled grimly. "I've heard gossip in town about Mrs.
Zoyland and Sam Dekker," he said.

Her eyelashes flickered under his word and she turned her
head; but a second later she tore her hands from his grasp and
flung them round his neck. "Love me, love me, Sam!" she whis-
pered. They forgot everything then in a much more passionate
kiss than their first one.

When they drew apart at last, Sam could not help murmuring
a very naive question. "How on earth was it that you ever came
to care for me, Nell? Except one poor little town-girl at Cam-
bridge, that I ought never to have meddled with, no woman has
ever bothered herself about me. You're far too beautiful for a
clown like me, Nell. You ought to be the pet of the greatest
prince on the earth!"

The oldest of all feminine smiles crossed her face. Towards
her lover's high-pitched worship a woman can grow as tenderly
humorous as the slyest cynic in the world. His infatuated rap-
ture in her beauty becomes as nothing, in comparison with the
desperate sweetness of her surrender to him. There are levels
of feminine emotion in the state of love entirely and forever un-
known to men. Man's imaginative recognition of feminine charm,
man's greedy lust, man's pride in possession, man's tremulous
sense of the pathos of femininity, man's awe in the presence of
an abysmal mystery--all these feelings exist in a curious detach-
ment in his consciousness. They are all separate from the blind
subcurrent that sweeps the two together. But with women, when
they are really giving themselves up without reserve, a deep
underflow of abandonment is reached, where such detachment
from Nature ceases completely. At such times the woman does
not feel herself to be beautiful or desirable. She does not feel
her lover to be handsome or strong or clever or brave. She might
be the most abject of the daughters of her race. He might be the
least admirable of the sons of his race. His body, his face, might
be disfigured, deformed, dirty, derelict: his personality might be
contemptible. She has reached a level of emotion where every-
thing about him is accepted and taken for granted; and not only
so, but actually seen for what it is, without a flicker of idealism.
She has reached a level where in sublime, unconscious humility
she takes as her possessor this image, this simulacrum, this poor
figure of earth; and as she does so, she accepts in exactly the same
way her own most grievous limitations, discounting ironically
and tenderly, with an understanding that is deeper than cynicism
itself, all his erotic amorous illusions.

There is thus, in a woman's love, when it has sunk to this level,
no illusion left. He is what he is and she may be what she may
be! Infirm, cowardly, conceited, stupid, he is her man. She has
given herself to him as a free gift. He is her possessor. She be-
longs now, not to herself, but to him. The danger implicit in this
absoluteness of a woman's love, when she really gives herself
up, is that a man should get a glimpse of its sublime realism.
Architect of illusion as he is, it is only in the full volume and
top crest of his love that a man can bear an inkling of how
realistically his woman regards him below the surface of her
flattery. His love for her will probably weaken before hers does
for him. And this will happen just because his love depends on
an exaggerated admiration of her, which, if he is not something
of a Don Quixote, will pass away by degrees. The tragic danger
of the "absoluteness" of her love will arrive when he has really
got tired of her and has come to regard her as a stranger to his
mind and a burden upon his spirit. At this point his vanity will
soon teach him, and her "crossness" and "sensitiveness" will soon
teach him, that she is completely free from every illusion about
his personality. And then another element will enter. The slow
cooling of his love for her will rouse in the woman a blind anger;
an anger directed, not so much against the poor, weak man him-
self, as against all men, and incidentally against all the laws of
Nature; and yielding to this anger she will not care how much she
hurts his feelings. Let him suffer a little on the surface--which
is all he understands!--while she is suffering such tortures in
the depths! In this mood how can she resist taking advantage of
her knowledge of his character? How can she help prodding and
stinging him where she knows it will hurt the most?

What in any woman renders a union lasting is the power of
letting her man see that she likes him extremely in addition to
loving him. What in any man renders a union lasting is this
element of the rational-irrational "Don Quixote" in his mind and
soul. And wherein consists this Don Quixote element? It con-
sists in an act of the imaginative will; an act of the man's soul
that is actually creative; an act by means of which he sets up
his particular Dulcinea del Toboso in an indestructible and im-
perishable niche. The act of the imaginative will to which I refer
gives a man, in fact, the power to treat his ivoman, in her life-
time, as if she were dead...which is the rarest essence of hu-
man relationship and the supreme triumph over matter of the
human spirit.

It was when Sam looked at her after he had said, "You ought
to be the pet of the greatest prince upon earth," that Nell Zoyland
knew that if she could belong to him, and to him alone, they
two would be constantly and permanently happy. For the girl
saw in his look at that moment that deep, obstinate, half-mad
creative look, the look of the artist, of the saint; the look of
Something which the ebb and the flow of her woman's moods
would have no power to change: and which nothing in life could
change; for it sprang from that Don Quixote element in a man's
spirit which transcends the astronomical universe.

The girl became very silent and quiet after she had caught that
look on Sam's face. Her realistic woman's mind was now running,
like a little ash-coloured mouse, from plank to plank of the drift-
ing barge of their imbroglio, hunting for the least cranny or crack
or hole, by which they could slip overboard and change their
destiny .Sam naturally mistook her rapid concentrated thinking
for the descent of sadness upon her; and to change her mood
he asked her what she thought of Tom Barter. He had arrived
at this gentleman, as a topic of harmless conversation, by recall-
ing how the man had been present with Philip on the last occa-
sion when he himself was in this room. It seemed a whole year
ago, tonight, that feverish encounter, and he had no wish to
dwell on it now. But Mr. Barter of the Crow Dye Mills would
serve as well as anything else to distract a sad mistress! She
awoke from her abstracted train of thought with a start; but
could not help smiling at his question. "He thinks Pm only in-
terested, like all women," she said to herself, "in personal
matters."

"I heard Dave talk about him the other day," she remarked,
while Sam rose to his feet and stood with his hands in his pockets
gazing at her in a peaceful ecstasy. "He said the Corporation of
Glastonbury was going to start a factory of their own...a fac-
tory belonging to the working-people of the town...to every-
body in fact, but of course the poor people are the majority. He
says this man Geard is going to be the new Mayor and going to
see this through. He says Geard's going to get Mr. Barter to
leave Philip, and be the manager of this new concern. He says
their Midsummer Pageant will he the opening day of it; and
that it'll be a real communistic experiment. He says John Crow
has made this man Geard quite enthusiastic about it; and you
know how rich he is!"

Her words ran on with a lively fluency, but to both of them
at that moment they were like the sound of the ripples of the
river of fate, on whose calm tide they were being irrevocably
carried forward. Behind her words she was thinking to herself,
"It's nearly half-past five. It'll soon be dark. I must be alone
to think what Fm going to do. I would...like...to give...him...a
surprise...a sort of...celebration...of this day." And behind list-
ening to her words--which, to confess the truth, interested
him very little--Sam was thinking--"I'm the luckiest man in
all Somersetshire. How beautiful she is, that exquisite Being
over there...and she's my girl! Yes, you old Sam, you've got a
real girl of your very own and one that's worthy to be the pet
of princes!"

Slowly, then, she too got up upon her feet. "Sam, darling,"
she said. "I want to be alone for a little, to collect my thoughts
and get things straight. I'm going to get you a nice tea, too, a
real high tea, such as I know Penny gets for you and your father.
Where did you have your lunch, Sam?"

He stared at her. "Lunch?" he murmured. "They went...they
said...I told them...yes," he said, "I believe I could eat something
presently. Do you w^ant me to go out for a little while, Nell? Is
that what you mean?"

As soon as she found that he had caught the drift of her
wishes, though still in complete darkness as to her mood, she
became calm, competent, radiant. "Run off then, my dear," she
said, opening the door for him, "and give me an hour, will you?
Have you got your watch?" She gave him a quick, unimpassioned,
practical kiss as he went out; but the minute she had shut the
door on him she fell on her knees in front of the fire and clasped
her hands together in an ecstasy of gratitude to the gods.

Nell now realized, for the first time, how completely her heart
belonged to Sam; and with this knowledge all outside things
became comparatively unimportant. The portentous figure of her
husband loomed, indeed, like a distant mountain range upon the
background of her thoughts; but the present hour seemed to be
hers with such an absolute benediction, that no fears, no doubts,
about the future could assail or spoil it. Yes, she would give
herself to Sam; now that at last he had come to her. All the mo-
ments that she had endured alone, since Zoyland had gone to
Wookey, gathered now, like an airy squadron of strong-winged
birds, to push her forward to this consummation. To let this
chance go by untaken would he to betray, through weakness and
feebleness, the very stride of fate itself.

The first thing she did was to look at the clock to see exactly
how much time she had at her disposal. "He'll be away just as
long as I said," she thought. "Poor old Sam, what a shame to
send him off!" Then she retreated into her kitchen and hurriedly
filled her kettle with fresh water for their tea, transferring what
water there was already in the kettle into an enamelled saucepan
for the boiling of their eggs. She glanced then at the fire in
her sitting-room to make sure that her lover had not spoiled
the glowing redness of it by his absent-minded putting on of
more wood. "I'll make the toast the last thing!" she thought,
and returning again into her kitchen she cut up half a loaf into
neat slices of bread. She then set to work with rapid, deft fingers
to lay the table. This proceeding, swift though it was, gave her
as deep a satisfaction as Sam's father was wont to derive from
his preparations for the Sacrament. She did not precisely think,
as she put a teaspoon in each of their two saucers and an egg-
spoon by each of their two egg-cups, how over all this darkening
quarter of the planet, female forms of the same love-demented
race were doing just this same thing at this same moment. But
she was fully aware of a delicious atmosphere of romantic sen-
suality in wiiat she did. Their more dangerous passion hovered
like an invisible incense round the sugar-bowl, the slop-basin,
the milk-jug, and round all these little silver spoons, some with
the great Zoyland Falcon and some with her own Spear crest
upon them! She proceeded then to set light in her parlour to
candles, bringing a veritable illumination of them from every
other part of the house to throw lustre upon her love-feast.

The expression on her face when all this had been done and
when she had finally placed two chairs opposite each other, on
either side of the little card-table covered with a white cloth, was
of the kind that only one of the great early masters could have
done justice to. Its dominant note was an earthy, irrational, al-
most stupid complacency; a complacency that doubtless derived,
in a long atavistic retrogression, from aeons of passive, brooding
female contemplation of the imperishable elements of continuity
in the turbid torrent of life! Leaning for a while against the
back of the chair she intended for Sam. she allowed herself to
fall into the waking trance of a very young girl. Zoyland had
destroyed her physical virginity: but he had not touched--no,
not so much as ruffled--that virginal dream-state in a young girl's
consciousness wherein she awaits her first lover; and the bloom
of which she keeps, like a handful of soft, white swan's-down, or
dandelion-seed. to lull the sleep of Eros when he really does at
last come to her and pitch his tent.

The clock on her mantelpiece now struck the half-hour from
when she had sent Sam away: and she had other things to do.
Leaving the table she stared long and long at the sofa where
they had been sitting together. This sofa had no back. It was, in
fact, a large-sized, single-bed couch, standing against the wall of
the room. With shining eyes she ran upstairs and came down
with a great armful of fresh bed-clothes, snatched from her linen-
chest. These she stretched out carefully upon the couch, tucking
them in between it and the wall. With the gleam in the eyes and
the quiver on the lips of one mischievous young girl making
sport of another, she brought down, after a second run upstairs,
a single pillow and a single pillow-case. When all was ready and
she had made the bed she cast the same stupidly happy stare
upon this achievement. The next thing she did was to give an
anxious glance at the clock and then run upstairs for her final
act of preparation. It was almost dark outside the window now;
and she had carried downstairs every available candlestick. But
her personal preparations were of such classic simplicity that
they could be done perfectly well in this grey, perishing light.
She kept both the door at the top of her stairs and the door at
the bottom wide open, so that up there in her bedroom the dying
light of the natural day and the ritualistic light of her Fete
de Amour mingled together with that peculiar and mysterious
charm which candlelight and daylight assume when they are
associated with each other at either of the two twilights.

Once more she ran downstairs, and filling a small hot-water
can from her enamelled saucepan, which had by this time begun
to steam a little, she hurried back to her twilit chamber, poured
out the water into her basin and stripping herself with eager
fingers of every shred of clothing set to work to sponge her bare,
soft skin from head to foot. She felt, as she did this as if her
flesh and blood were something entirely apart from the deep con-
sciousness wherewith she loved her lover. It was as if her body--
after the tea-table and the bed--were a sort of final and trium-
phant offering, the last and the dearest thing she could give to
him, so that he might take his full pleasure on that sacred night.
Violently she rubbed herself after this, all over, with her Lath-
towel, till her limbs glowed warm and sweet: and then pulling
on stockings, slippers, and a night-dress she had never worn
before, she threw over herself a long. warm, dark-blue dressing-
gown. Snatching up her brush and comb she now descended to
her illuminated sitting-room, where, by an old-fashioned mirror,
she combed out her hair, and then fastened it back, much more
carefully than she had ever done in her life before. She removed
carefully the strands of her hair adhering to the comb: and as
she threw them into the fire she remembered what an old nurse
of her mother's had once told her--not her childhood's nurse, but
a very old woman who used to stay with the Spears when she
was a little girl--that if a girl's hair makes a sound as it burns--
a sound that the girl herself can hear--she will lose her maiden-
hood within the year. "Mine's gone already," she thought, "but
not really!"

She was ready for him now; and behold! as she looked at the
clock the hour she had given him was all but five minutes used
up! She looked anxiously at her bright array of burning candles.
Then she looked at herself, in her blue dressing-gown, in the
mirror. For a passing second she got a real thrill of pleasure
from the shining eyes and bright cheeks which she saw reflected;
but a sudden memory of one evening when she had been waiting
for Zoyland swept over her and she turned hastily away.

Meanwhile Sam had been walking slowly through the twilight
in the same direction as that from which he had come. He was
conscious of a vague feeling of fertility in the damp spring air
and of the hidden stirrings of vegetable juices in roots and stalks
as his feet sank in the soft turf of the river-bank, where thick
swaths of last year's grass, lying along the ground and trodden
by the feet of cattle, were interspersed with patches of young
spring shoots and with the immature foliage of yarrow and bed
straw. He felt, as lie walked along, that life was at once far
more exciting and far more dangerous than he had ever sus-
pected. The freedom of conscience with which he had twice kissed
Nell this afternoon, giving full rein to his feelings, was not
threatened, even now, by any moral scruple. His heavy, sluggish
nature, once roused to the magic of sex, had so little that was
vicious in it--in the sense of being isolated and detached from
tenderness and pity--that it brought with it no sense of guilt.
It justified itself: and he felt pure and simple exultation in it.
The strange thing was--and as the twilight darkened about him
this was what he found hard to understand in himself--that the
renunciation of all "possessiveness," which was his new ideal,
did not debar him from snatching at this chance-given moment of
love. The real reason was that Sam's devotion to Nell--as his
unique true-love--was so unqualified and heart-whole, that his
feeling, at this heaven-sent moment, did not carry with it that
sense of ‘Taking" which he had set himself to renounce. To love
Nell, now that he felt she really loved him, seemed to him quite
as much a giving as a taking. What did a little trouble him, as he
burst through the river-mists and dug his heels and his stick into
that magnetic springtime soil, was the quivering exultation of
his own mood. Life seemed to him, just then, almost too exciting,
almost too charged with electric dangers and raptures. Sam was
no coward, but he was essentially a slow-moving, slow-witted,
timid animal. The even tenor of his ways, until Nell appeared,
had been so unruffled and so solidly earthy, that he felt scared
at this new riot in his nerves, at this new quicksilver, running
like an unknown "perilous stuff" through every vein! As he strode
blindly on in the grey dampness he actually dared to articulate
that word "saint" that was carried in the remotest portion of his
consciousness. "I will be a lover and a saint!" his heart cried.

He never afterward forgot that hour's w r alk by the side of
Whitelake stream. Carried along upon the cresting wave of his
delicious adventure what Sam resembled most nearly was a boy
who has "run away to sea"; and who suddenly finds himself
in the midst of an overwhelming predicament; a predicament
which realizes at the same time all his desire to he "heroic," and
all his craving for romance. At the bottom of his nature Sam had
no small modicum of phlegmatic common sense; and in the
very whirl and splash of the adventure to which he was re-
sponding, he retained a certain background of bewildered surprise
that it should be himself--the timid, plodding, unenterprising
self he knew so well--that had been given such a disturbing
privilege! Compared with what Nell was feeling at this moment
of time, Sam's emotions were pathetically youthful. The Don
Quixote in him had been stirred. But that was really the only
thing in him upon which the girl could lean. For the rest he was
in a mood of such turbulent bewilderment that the occasion with
all it brought was only half-real to him. In most love-affairs be-
tween men and women this element of "reality" is unequally
distributed; but in this case it was especially so; for whereas
every aspect of what was happening was vividly clear to Nell,
to Sam it was all wrapped in a vague mist. Not exactly in an
idealistic mist, however; for the sly Quantock fox in him kept
up all the time a sniffing scrutiny of what was going on! Nell's
whole being, on the contrary, was melted into "realism," on this
momentous night. Everything was twice as real to her as usually
was the case; and things were always real enough. While Sam
kept thinking to himself--"What a puzzling confusion life is!
Here am I, longing to be a saint and yet with a chance of spending
the night with the sweetest girl in Somersetshire!"--Nell thought
simply and solely, "I want to give everything I've got to Sam."

When Sam paused at last, close by Whitelake Bridge, and lit
a match to look at his watch, he saw that he had already allowed
forty minutes to pass since he had left the house. This vexed
him; for he could hardly traverse in twenty minutes fields that
had taken him forty minutes to cross. His chin began to work
as he put his watch away and he cursed himself for his absent-
minded blundering. The moment he swung round, however, he
noticed a faint, dim, filmy light in the western sky. He knew at
once what that sign hung in the heavens was--the young moon!
The mist from the river, and the still more insidious vapours
wafted across Queen's Sedgemoor, so obscured this fragmentary
luminary that it was no bright object that he stared at. He was
standing almost due east of Whitelake Cottage now; so that
this dim white blur in the darkness hung directly over the dwell-
ing of his Love. To his excited feelings at that moment that
phantasmal object seemed much more than a natural phenome-
non. Eagerly he grasped with one of his hands a tuft of willow
sprigs growing out of the head of an old bowed pollard, whose
roots were in the wet earth at his feet, and leaning forward
raised his stick exultantly in the air. The dark earth beneath him
seemed to him then like a vast, wild-maned horse, upon whose
broad back he was being borne through space! A poignant smell
of musk rose up from where his heavy boots pressed against that
huge living creature. Young plants of common water mint must
have been growing there to cause this scent: but its aromatic
sweetness added yet another element to his enchantment.

From that fragment of white mystery there slid across land and
water into the soul of Sam Dekker a thin, long-rippling con-
federate stream of sweet disturbance. Where John Crow would
have subtly reasoned upon the mythical significance of this frail
vessel of "furious fancies," Sam just gave himself up to its
palpable power. He became a wave in the Bristol Channel, a
bracken-frond in the Quantock hills, a crystal in a Mendip stone
wall, a black-striped perch in the Brue under Pomparles Bridge.
Sam and that old bent pollard, whose youthful sprouts he was
clutching with such blind intensity, gave themselves up together
so completely to the power of that obscured moon that an identical
magnetism poured through the mans flesh and blood and shiv-
ered through the vegetable fibres of the tree. Yes! Sam felt as
if he were a reckless rider, awkward and stiff, in his new release,
but mounted on the dark equine back and behind the streaming
mane of the revolving earth; and carried wildly through the wet
mists towards his desire. He little knew what superhuman Natu-
ralists were watching him then, as interested in his present antics
(and not less sympathetic) as he himself had so often been over
tbe aquarium in his father's museum. That shapeless white blur,
that still delayed to sink below the reedy horizon in the Sedge-
moor vapours, was to these watchers like the candle which Sam
would hold sometimes above some favourite finned pet! In a uni-
verse so thrilling and so aching with teeming consciousness, the
man and the bowed pollard tree strained and yearned together
towards that misty image in the west. Cold against his clenched
fingers were those smooth twigs. Cold against his mouth was the
river's breathing. Wild and yet faint in his ears were the gurgling
sobs of the water as it rippled in the darkness around hidden
roots and around the hollow stalks of last year's reeds.

He boldly broke up his trance now, tearing at it as if he were
some prehistoric dinosaur, rending its way through a matted en-
tanglement of monstrous moonlit vegetation. Clenching his stick
by its centre and closing his fists, he now set himself, in an ob-
stinate jog-trot, to re-cross those long meadow-reaches in less
than was thus onlv about a quarter of an hour later than the hour
his Love had given him when he arrived panting at the door of
Whitelake Cottage and gave a series of quick low knocks. She
didn't let him wait out there for one second. She had been sit-
ting on that couch she had turned into his bed, listening and
listening! It was not her destiny to see the moon that night.
When Sam, all blinking and panting, threw down his hat and stick
on an empty chair and hugged her to his heart he thought to
himself--"If life goes on like this, my heart will burst from too
much joy.'' But he need not have been afraid! The great suction-
process of cosmogonic matter--always waiting to drain up in its
huge, blind, clay belly, these rapturous overtones of its foster-
children--was soon at work, sucking up the spilt drops of his
happiness.

They sat down to their incredible meal. Wise had Nell been
to restrict their portion that night to the simplest elements! Tea,
eggs, butter, bread, honey, and black-currant jam. The taste of
each of these things--and Sam swallowed them all in rapid,
boyish gulps of heavenly greediness--carried nothing but the
very poetry of mortal sustenance into their amorous blood.
She kept pulling the loose front of her blue dressing-gown tightly
round her classical breasts; so that Sam remained, all through
this delicious meal, in complete ignorance of the fact that she had
stripped herself naked for him save for her flimsy night-gown.

As to the difference between the sensations of Sam and Nell,
as they ate their meal in the midst of this blaze of candlelight
and with their bed prepared, the situation was reversed from what
it was under former conditions. It was Nell who had become the
self-conscious, detached one, savouring every morsel that both she
and her lover put into their mouths and lingering out their tea-
drinking when their hunger was satisfied. Sam on the other hand,
with healing heart, could not keep out of his mind the thought
that when their meal was over he would be allowed to embrace
her. He had noticed on his entrance the changed aspect of the
couch and though with a lover's tact he had avoided any refer-
ence to this transformation, it was evident to him that the girl
was tacitly assuming he was going to stay the night; and this was
a fact in itself enough to stir his senses. Thus, though he ate
his food hungrily and with an eager, nervous greed, he found
himself far loo excited to enjoy with the whole-hearted contentment
which the girl experienced the progress of their perfect meal.
The Theban prophet may have been right when he said that in
the act of love the woman feels a greater thrill than the man;
but he would have been wrong if he had said this about the ex-
pectation of such a consummation. A girl's physical love, ex-
cept at the moment of actual contact, is much more diffused than
a man's. While they were enjoying their tea, therefore, Nell
kept saying to herself--"This is my Sam! My Sam has come at
last! My Sam belongs to me and I to him! There is no girl in
the whole world happier than I. He has come to me at last with
a free heart! He loves only me and I love only him! How beau-
tifully those candles shine! What a good thing Sam likes black-
currant jam. Always, henceforth, when I see black-currant jam,
I shall think of him. How glad I am I've put on my blue dress-
ing-gown."

But Sam's felicity was all this while a little marred by the
impetuous craving of his tingling senses. "Will she let me em-
brace her to the uttermost presently? How soon shall I dare to
embrace her? Will she sleep with me all the night on this bed
she has made up? Or is it only for me; and will she insist on
going upstairs in the night and leaving me here alone?" He
finally got so impatient that he could not wait to give her time
to finish her second cigarette. He rose up and came round the
table and snatched it from her hand. He threw it into the fire.
He lifted her up to her feet. He blew out the brightly burning
candles on the chimney-piece even while he still clutched her
wrist!

This was the moment, as she felt herself pulled across the
room by her wrist, that she knew her first real spasm of fear of
her man; that delicious fear which is an element in every authentic
encounter between the sexes. For all William Zealand's amorous
brutality, though Nell had felt embarrassment and even physical
distress when he was embracing her, she had never felt this in-
describably delicious quiver of fear. The awkwardness, the ma-
terial shock of ravishment under Zoyland's violence, had been
mitigated by a certain passive inertia, as of the original re-
sistance of matter itself to the stir of blind creation. But now
as she felt her blue dressing-gown torn from her body and saw
the impersonal glint in Sams bear-like eyes, she knew a fear
much deeper than the mere fear of a girl in the hands of a
ravisher. She knew the fear of seeing her Sam, her own well-
known Sam, transformed into something unknown and sweetly
dreadful! This fear, however, only lasted till he had carried her
to that carefully made bed. Then with incredible rapidity it en-
tirely vanished! The cause of its vanishing--though she analysed
it not--was that there had been aroused in her, at last and for the
first time, the strongest, the most poignant, the most transporting
sensation which exists in the world--the sensation of a feminine
body abandoned to the man she loves! To the man; not to the
man's body. For the curious thing is that while at this supreme
moment she for him had become absolutely impersonal--a
woman's flesh in empty space--he remained for her the actual,
personal , conscious man she loved . The extremity of her sensa-
tion--that sensation which Teiresias (to his own disaster!) had
placed above the man's--implied a vivid consciousness that she,
Nell, was being possessed by him, Sam.

But with him it was altogether different. His authentic love
for her, his pity, his tenderness, his feeling for her beauty, had
simply opened wide the gates of ecstasy. Through these gates
there rushed now a rapture of bodiless, mindless, delirious sen-
sation. This sensation, dominating now the whole field of his con-
scious and unconscious being, was much blinder, simpler, less
complicated than anything which she felt. Both their sensations
centred in her body, not in his. His body was merely the engine
of the well-known personality that was now enj oying her. His
body might have been ugly, coarse, deformed, grotesque. It might
have been made of wood, of iron, of stone, of cement, of peat,
of clay. It was her man's dear body; and that was enough! If it
had been the body of a leper, it would have been the same. But
with him, once again, it was otherwise. His consciousness, even
at the beginning of his delight, could only have expressed its
rapture by the concept--"She is too sweet." Then there came a
further point in his ecstasy when he could not have even articu-
lated as much as that; when he could perhaps have said no more
to describe what he felt than some perfectly incoherent gibberish,
some subhuman gibberish that would be identical with what a
bird, a beast, a reptile, would utter, or try to utter, as it plunged
into that sweet oblivion.

In spite of the unnumbered occasions of erotic satisfaction--
paroxysms of normal and of abnormal claspings--which are
forever reaching their consummation on all sides of us in the
great swirling life-tide, it is surprising how few encounters be-
tween amorists, whether human or subhuman, attain to the sub-
lime and absolute ecstasy which was reached tonight by these
two. Much more is needed for this than mere physical attraction,
or mere mental reciprocity--or even both of these things together!
It would almost seem as if every one of us hides in the secret
recesses of his being a potentiality for this supreme rapture--
but a potentiality that can only be roused by one particular per-
son. It may be an illusion, this feeling that lovers so often have,
that they have found the one solitary "alter-ego" in the universe
whose identity supplements their own, but it is certainly not an
illusion, but a tragic fact, that many human beings--and not by
any means sex-starved persons either--go down to their graves
without ever having known this indescribable transport. Sam and
Nell certainly knew it to the full this night of the New Moon!
They took such spacious draughts of it; they plunged into it so
desperately, so utterly, that in the mingling of their identities
there seemed no portion of either of them--body, soul or spirit--
left over, that was not merged and lost in the other.

What Lord P.'s bastard would have seen if he had flung open
that door upon them--a man and a girl struggling to return to
a primal platonic unity that some terrestrial curse had inter-
rupted-- would have been a poor, false, meagre, crude parody of
what their submerged consciousnesses were feeling. It was not
in any bodily form that reality presented itself to those two at
that moment. Their ecstasy itself was the reality, the truth, the
essence of what occurred between them! Yes; the "entelecheia,"
so to speak, of their desperate claspings upon that couch, was
not in the idea of their bodies; was not in the form of their bodies.
Such aspects of this event in time and space would have been
false if taken as the real reality of that moment. The "reality"
of that moment--of that infinite series of moments--was what
they felt; and what they felt was beyond all human symbolism.
What they felt was more rapturous than a rain of blinding, daz-
zling meteors falling through eternity. It was an iridescent cloud-
burst, rushing down from unknown translunar regions, and meet-
ing a toppling tower of deep-sea waters, flung up from the abyss!

Nell was a natural, simple girl; and as far as her intellect went,
a commonplace girl. Sam was a natural, simple man; and as far
as his intellect went, a commonplace man. But compared with
the projection of delirious ecstasy which their encounter that
night lodged in the atmosphere around Whitelake Cottage the neu-
rotic intensity of the attraction between John and Mary Crow--
baffled, tantalised, provoked, throbbing with unrealised and
perhaps unrealisable cravings for a consummation that mocked
them with its nearness only to withdraw from them again--was
something as sad as it was sterile.

It was the girl who, when night fell, slipped from his arms and
blew out the spluttering wicks of the two dying candles and
balanced the fire-guard against the bars of the grate. He hardly
awakened when she returned, so drowsy was he. It was not only
the happiness of love that made sleep cover him with such
swan's-down feathers; it was the excitement of the last two
weeks, weeks that had been full of a mental agitation entirely
new to his earth-bound nature. Into this heavenly forgetfulness
Nell too was soon sucked down as she nestled close against him;
and had Lord P.'s bastard rapped loudly at the door which di-
vided these lovers from that hushed spring night, it would have
been long seconds of time before their two souls, so deeply in-
volved, yes! involved down into the very profoundest subcon-
sciousness of each of them, had risen up to deal with this fatal
intrusion! But no knock at that locked door, no tap at that dark-
ened window, disturbed the peace of those two sleepers. Like
poor Tittie Petherton, sleeping now with an expression of felicity
such as she had not worn since her disease first attacked her, they
slept the sleep of such as are "free among the dead." The sleep
of consummated love has indeed nothing in the world comparable
to it except the sleep of mother and child.

As these two slept, the shapeless moon sank down over the rim
of the Polden Hills. As these two slept, little gusts of midnight
air, less noticeable than any wind but breaking the absolute still-
ness, stirred the pale, green leaf-buds above many a half-finished
hedge-sparrow's nest between Queen's Sedgemoor and the Lake
Village flats. Here and there, unknown to Sam Dekker or any
other naturalist, a few among such nests held one or two cold
untimely eggs, over whose brittle blue-tinted rondure moved in
stealthy motion these light-borne air-stirrings pursuing their
mysterious journeys from one dark horizon to another. Drooping
over the rich, black earth in Mr. Weatherwax's two walled gar-
dens hung motionless the heads of the honey-sweet jonquils and
the faint-breath'd narcissi, too heavily asleep in that primordial
sleep of green-calyxed vegetation, deeper and older than the sleep
of birds or beasts or men, to respond, even by the shiver of the
least petal among them, to these light motions of the midnight
air. The sensitised earth-nerves of that portion of the maternal
planet upon which these beings lived responded, as she swung
forward on her orbit, to the sleep of her numerous offspring by
a drowsy deliciousness of her own in the arms of the night, en-
closing them all in those interstellar spaces and comforting them
all with a peace greater than their peace.



THE DOLOROUS BLOW



In the Green Pheasant Inn at Taunton, a little out-of-the-
way tavern in a back street of that ancient town on one of the
chilliest mornings of this eventful March, Persephone Spear sat
on the bed where she and Philip had been spending the night.
She sat there in her white slip, her straight Artemis shoulders
bare, pulling on her black stockings. Philip had just gone to the
end of the passage to take a bath and the girl could detect now
amid the other early morning sounds in that small hostelry--such
as the bootblack replacing the commercial travelled boots at
their several doors, such as the house-girl bringing cans of shav-
ing-water to their doors and giving bold, shameless knocks, such
as the barking of dogs in the cobbled yard, the trampling of an
old horse in its stable, the scrubbing of a motor car in an open
garage by a whistling boy, the sound of the rush of water from
the bath-faucet. The girl's whole nature felt as if it were drawing
itself together into a little round ball, tying itself up into a little
tight knot, and making itself as small and hard and unattractive
as it could possibly make itself. She treated her slim boyish legs
very roughly as she pulled on her stockings. She thought, "Oh, if
I can only get my stockings and skirt on before he comes back he
won't touch me any more!" With vicious jerks she did get her
stockings on; and then, heedless of the dust on the carpet, she
stepped into her skirt, allowing it to trail upon the floor. The
pattern upon the carpet consisted of big, bunchy roses, each rose
encased in a square frame of dull, brown lines. The disgust she
felt at seeing her nice grey skirt in contact with this horrible
carpet made her prick her fingers as she pinned its black band
with a big safety pin. "My waist has never looked so small!" she
thought, and indeed the use of the safety pin had come about be-
cause, after the excitement of her experience in Wookey Hole, the
band of her skirt had become too wide. Hurriedly she rushed to
the chair where her grey jacket was lying and pressed one arm--
and then another--breathlessly and violently into its reassuring
tailor-made protection.

Artemis-like, she had found that by far the worst part of her
affair with Philip--and it had been, just the same with Dave--
was the fact that she had to undress and be made love to without
the defence of her sweet-smelling Harris-tweed jacket and skirt.
"I like driving through the lanes," she thought, "by Philip's side,
while he gets fonder and fonder of me, but can't touch me! I like
his kissing me and hugging me so hard the moment he gets me
alone when the long drive has excited him to such a pitch. I like
the way his cheeks smell of the wind and of the fresh dust of the
road. I like the dinners we have together in these places with the
shy young waitresses at table and the impudent hussies in the bar
and the yard-boys touching their cropped foreheads and sneaking
a look at my ankles and staring so respectfully at Phil! It's these
nights that are so awful. Oh, why are men made as they are?
Why are they made as they are? What's the matter with me that
I shrink from these nights with Philip so...and yet enjoy the
days with him? Do other women feel what I feel? Is there some
deep, secret conspiracy among us to be silent about this loathing
of skin to skin, this disgust of the way they are when they have
their will of us? Am I betraying some tragic silence that Nature
from the beginning has imposed in dark whispers upon her daugh-
ters? Is the pain of ravishment only one of the inevitable suffer-
ings of girls...laid upon us since the dawn of time? Is this
shrinking, this loathing, something that every girl feels?" She took
up the comb to comb out her short, clipped curls. "Damn!" she
muttered aloud. Her anger rose up suddenly against all the intol-
erable things a person had to put up with. Her anger rose against
the washing-stand--with the two white basins side by side and the
soap-dish into which she had put a piece of lavender soap which
Philip had now carried off to the bathroom.

"I wonder," she thought, "whether those double-dyed asses of
Glastonbury aldermen, now that they've elected Geard, will do
what I suggested to Dave and try and start a real communistic
factory...something on a much bigger scale than this silly
souvenir business?" She stood in the middle of the room holding
the comb in her hands. Impelled by a lurid fascination, she moved
to the door and opened it gently...gently...biting her lower lip as
she turned the handle. She was met by that combination of curious
stuffy smells which a bedroom passage in a small inn always ex-
hales. The passage was full, too, of that particular morning light
that seems to have nothing to do with the sun at all. that seems
to come from some reservoir of pallid, terrestrial illumination that
is neither natural nor artificial, but is a light especially dedicated
to inn-passages when only the Boots and the oldest of the house-
maids are stirring, and a smell of cigar-smoke and stale cheese
pervades the staircase. She continued to hold the door ajar, as
she leaned forward listening, her unwashed eyelids still heavy with
sleep and her chestnut curls all tumbled and rumpled.

There was the sound of Philip's splashing! It came from behind
that door, with a white marble plate upon it carrying the word
"Bath." Persephone listened to it with petrified attention. "Do
all girls," she thought, "feel these queer sensations of lurid attrac-
tion and nervous disgust towards men? How much more conscious
a girl is than a man of the relations between men and women! I
know that at this moment Phil is enjoying his bath, its precise
depth, its exact heat, the fact that he brought his big sponge, just
as a child might enjoy these things! He's forgotten altogether
about my jumping out of bed and staying so long at the window
in the middle of the night. He's practically forgotten that I exist!"

She was not far wrong. Extended at full length in the bath,
luxuriating in its hot water--for there was no bathroom at The
Elms--Philip's thoughts might be expressed as follows: "Warm
...nice...soap...nice...stain on wall shaped like Barter's profile...
start digging at Wookey...Except for old Merry, not a soul
knows...a lot of tin in Wookey...diabolus metallorum...plumbum
candidum...Hermes ...stream-tin...alluvial deposit...tourmaline...
spar...quartz...stannic oxide...cassiterite...stannic chloride...purple
precipitate...purple of Cassius......tin salt...tin crystal...tin- ash."
He began to derive extraordinary satisfactory from taking up his
great sponge, filling it with water and squeezing it over his knees
with both hands. The sponge became the hill above Wookey where
he intended to mine for tin and his knees became jagged frag-
ments of this precious alluvial deposit and the water on either
side of his thighs was the subterranean river. "Let Geard have
his Pageant," he thought. "Let him dig for Merlin's tomb! I'm
going to dig for tin ...diabolus metallorum...I'll turn this town into
something different from a humbugging show-place! I'll sell my
dyes and I'll sell my tin to all the dealers in Europe...What a good
thing I'm not responsible for Perse! Let Monsieur Agitator sup-
port my sweet Coz, while I enjoy her at my leisure!"

He began to squeeze his sponge with still fiercer pressure and
still deeper satisfaction. He found that there was a little window-
pane opposite him where the coloured glass had been replaced by
ordinary glass and out of this window he could see quite a long
way over the roofs of Taunton. He even fancied he could see the
ridge of the Polden Hills between two chimneys. He propped
himself up in the hath on the palms of his hands. But the ridge
vanished then, and in its place rose one of the great Taunton
Church Towers celebrated all over Somersetshire and only riv-
alled by St. John's at Glastonbury. The sight of this religious
edifice, so tall and massive, disturbed the current of his thoughts.
He sank back in the bath. Once more that little far-off line be-
tween the chimneys re-appeared. Automatically he began squeez-
ing his big sponge again, but the water was getting cold and the
sight of that tower had broken up his complacency.

"What did she do that for?" he asked himself, thinking, with
a frown, of the incident in the night when the girl had jumped
out of bed and stayed so long at the window. "I don't believe
she'll bear me a child," he said to himself. "There's something
about her No! she's not the maternal type, my sweet Perse,
there's no getting over that!" He gave himself up then, as he got
out of the bath and began hurriedly drying, to his own peculiar
and favourite voluptuous thoughts. Every man has his own set of
voluptuous images with which his mind tends to dally at such a
moment when his body is glowing and refreshed. Philip's thoughts
had to do with Persephone's bare shoulders as they looked--not
in her night-gown, for she dreamed like a boy at night and though
this would have pleased John it did not suit Philip, but in her slip.
It was therefore no little blow to him--for he had anticipated quite
the contrary--when, on his entering their room with a quick.
sharp knock, he found her fully dressed and sealed again by that
accursed window.

That moment was indeed a fatal and memorable moment in
the history of their relations. It was as if in the process of his
bath and of her combing her hair a deadly gulf had yawned
between them. She was seated on the arm of a chair and leaning
against the window-sill. Her pose was withdrawn, chaste, re-
served, remote, her face cold and pale, her eyelids half closed.
She was intently surveying the head of the old carriage horse
whose hoofs trampling on its stable floor had drummed a bitter
tune into her mind at certain intervals during that night. The old
horse was peering out of a small square window and the lad who
had been cleaning the motor car was stroking its neck. He was
still whistling the same tune, and as Philip paused at their window
to follow the girl's gaze he started singing, "I've made up my
mind to sail away...sail away...sail away...In the Colonies I mean to
try...mean to try . . The lad sang in a silly drawling voice. "He's
heard that tune on a roundabout," remarked Percy, drawing in her
head and evading the arm with which Philip attempted to capture
her. "I used to hear it when I first came to Somerset."

They stood side by side for a moment without touching, watching
some pigeons that were fluttering about on the stable roof. Philip
felt obscurely angry with these sleek birds whose wings gleamed
like the metallic shimmerings in Wookey Hole. Their chucklings
and croonings made an orchestral accompaniment to the lad's
voice. Persephone said to herself:' "Damn! Damn! Damn! How
can I get out of having to submit to this sort of thing with him
again?" As she turned back into the room their eyes met and
both of them knew without the passage of a word between them
that a barrier had sprung up which it would be very hard to
destroy.

"Well! Well!" he now remarked with forced jocularity, "if you're
satisfied with your concert, run down, while I dress, and see how
long we've got to wait for breakfast! I'm due at the office by nine
this morning. There's a lawyer from Yeovil coming in, by the early
train, to see me."

She looked at him coldly and quizzically. "What trouble are
you in now, Phil? Have you been found out at last?" She spoke
at random, but when she had spoken she wished that she hadn't
said just that.

Philip's swarthy cheeks had darkened, and she saw that this
"lawyer from Yeovil" was coming on some unpleasant errand.
As a matter of fact Philip had summoned him because of a para-
graph in the Western Gazette that looked extremely like a coverL
reference to Jenny Morgan and her child Nelly. "Good Lord,
Perse!" he cried, pushing her to the door. "Don't begin invent-
ing reasons for my legal interviews. Why, I've got a whole series
of lawyers coming to the office this week. Today's is the most
harmless of 'em!"


The day that had begun for Philip and Persephone with the
croonings of these pigeons and the sing-song tune of "I've made
up my mind to sail away," waxed unusually hot for the last fort-
night of March when it reached its noon hour.

Sam and his father, having had occasion to visit a house in
Hill Head, which is a street leading to the foot of Wirral Hill,
happened to be making a short cut home to their early dinner
across the grassy expanse of the Abbey Ruins. They had carefully
avoided the dangerous topic hitherto that day, being occupied
with an attempt to bribe, threaten, cajole, persuade, or terrify,
one of their recalcitrant choir-boys into giving up his habit of
waylaying the girls of Hill Head as they passed a piece of com-
mon land out there on their way home from school. There were
several ancient thorn bushes growing on this patch of Waste
Land, some of them the merest stumps, which Mr. Evans, in his
daily ramblings about the place, had already decided were far
older than the more famous one in St. John's churchyard. In-
deed, in the heat of his frenzies and his fancies, Mr. Evans had
got so far as to persuade himself that this particular tract of land
-- which certainly wears even at our epoch a somewhat forlorn
look--was the actual site of that Terre Gastee, of the mediaeval
romances, which became withered and blighted after the Dolorous
Blow delivered by the unlucky Balin upon King Pelleas, the Guar-
dian of the Grail.

Young Chinnock's "Dolorous Blows"--aimed from the shelter.
of these desolate thorn stumps--were directed not against any
man, king or otherwise, but against anonymous and youthful fem-
ininity. and took the form of rudely flung sticks and stones and
still more rudely flung taunts of a kind more grossly obscene than
even these sturdy wenches were accustomed to. The mildest of
these taunts of which Chinnock was accused was the repetition of
the phrase--shouted in the ears of several grown-up young women
as well as children: "I'd like to, Dolly!" "I'd like to, Lettie!" "I'd
like to, Rosie!'' accompanied, on each occasion, by the flinging of
some kind of natural missile. It was in a visit from old Mr. Sheperd,
the aged Glastonbury policeman, that Mai Dekker was informed that
his sweetest-voiced choir-bov was in serious danger of arrest,
and in his anxiety to suppress this outburst of barbarity, while he
saved the boy from jail, he had begged Sam. whose power over
boys--though he did not like them--was always great, to accom-
pany him on His disturbing errand.

In nothing does the grotesque injustice and thoughtless self-
righteousness of human beings show itself more blindly than in
these matters of sex-abuse. The two Dekkers were certainly jus-
tified in their invasion of the retreat of this perverse thrower of
sticks and stones in the Terre Gastee of Hill Head Road. But
when their own dialogue touched the dangerous topic of Nell
Zoyland there was just the same "I'd like to, Nell!'' at the back
of their rugged skulls. And between this"I'd like to, Nell!' felt
by these two grown men and the " I'd like to, Rosie!"' shouted by
Tom Chinnock, there could have been very little difference in the
eyes of that Christ worshipped by Sam who uttered those search-
ing words: "Whoever looketh at...to lust after...hath committed...
already...in his heart." It was as they were passing the north door-
way of St. Mary's ruined church that this dialogue began to take
its dangerous "I'd like to" form. Confronting this old edifice of
the end of the twelfth century the two men paused, their eyes
attracted automatically by the lavish blaze of sunshine which fell
from that cloudless noon sky upon this richly carved entrance.
An arcade or frieze of interlacing arches cut in bold relief, alter-
nately round and pointed as the curves intersect, and decorated
with Norman zig-zag ornament, is broken, in the centre of the
doorway, by a pyramidal cornice of delicate moulding, which covers,
like a high peaked helmet, the interior arch-mouldings. These are
in four concentric rings, containing numberless medallions of
deeply cut carvings, telling the story of the Nativity and of the
Massacre of the Innocents. Only trained experts in such matters
can today interpret this dim, confused, obscure entanglement of
animals, leaves, flowers, angels and impassioned human figures.
Neither of the Dekkers was an expert of this kind, and to their
simple naturalist eyes it was comfort enough to contemplate in
that rich confusion of organic shapes a general impression of
earth-life that resembled some sumptuous entanglement of moss
and rubble and lichen, amid the twisted roots of old forest trees.

It would have been better for Mat Dekker, at that moment, if
he had been endowed with a little of the analytic irresponsibility
which John Crow possessed. He would have known better, then,
what was going on in his deep, heavy, massive nature. He would
have known better, then, why it was that he burst out upon his
only-begotten son, as he did, in such a spasm of blundered, ill-
chosen words! Gazing through that richly storied arch into the
body of the Virgin's Chapel and out through a south window
into the sunlit branches beyond, Sam listened to his father with
lowering astonishment, his chin working frantically, and his little
green eyes full of queer lights. In the roaring, raving, towering,
cresting, cascading whirl of its huge centrifugal flames the super-
human consciousness of that noon-day sun recognised, amid the
billions upon billions of other organisms that floated through its
non-human awareness, his brief-lived biped enemy--the stalwart
priest of Christ. The sun's awareness of any particular living
creature may be for good and may be for evil, but towards these
two men, each of whom, deep in his heart, was crying out--just
like poor Tom--"I'd like to, Nell!" it was certainly for evil.

The sun indeed blazed down in unusual strength for a Glaston-
bury March day. It turned all this mass of complicated stone
imagery into something as radiant as it was obscure, into some-
thing resembling the checquered patterns of dead leaves and dead
twigs, mingled with little mosses and funguses, that are suddenlv
revealed in a forest opening, and yet into something so hot and
dry and dusty that it suggested the carved stonework in classical
southern countries, across which lizards slide and above which the
air seems to droop and gasp and pant. That unique stonework
doorway under which for at least seven hundred years human
skeletons, clothed in flesh, had been passing, was on this March
day a proof of what far-removed opposites in Nature the mind of
man can reduce to an imaginative unity. While the hot and dusty
texture of these deep mouldings suggested that languorous feeling
of burning noons under copper skies when the hot bosom of the
air lies sweltering and swooning upon the slabs of shadowless
stone thresholds, and where upon the marble brims of dried-up
fountains the coiled snake scarce seems even to breathe in its
glittering sleep, the actual shapes and forms of this limestone
imagery were born of dripping forest boughs and dark rainy
moorlands and the wind-swept ramparts of Gothic castles.

As Sam gazed now at these four concentric rings of convoluted
sculpture, listening to his father's troubled voice, he could not be
called conscious that these sun-warmed intricacies of obscure
carving represented the birth of his Man-God...that magical
Event which could thus bring together the tents of the South
and the chilly ramparts of the North...but a feeling did come
over him that he was staring into the very roots of the earth,
where the creatures that he so loved were engendered by the
mingling of primordial heat and cold.

"We have to renounce," the priest was saying with a dangerous
quiver of his long, clean-shaven upper lip, "and she is the test
given unto you now, my son, as to whether you can renounce."
His words burst out in a jerky, violent, spasmodic manner, for
the force behind them was nothing less than that "I'd like to!
rd like to!" which, in Tom Chinnock's case, had been accom-
panied by sticks and stones. He was secretly proud that this child
of his sturdy Quantock loins had made the son of the great Mar-
quis of P. a shamefaced wittol. In those imaginative senses below
the senses which create that terrible glamour-world of thrilling
illusion wherein all exquisite temptations lie, Mat Dekker had
derived a wild and savage joy from the thought that his son had
lain in bed by the side of those unequalled breasts.

The conventional phrases, "desire of the flesh"..."sins of the
flesh"..."lusts of the flesh" are totally at variance with the real
phenomena of erotic temptation. In real temptation the "flesh"
does not enter at all. There is the generative nerve where like
a twisted serpent the scales of the embryo Lust-Dragon sim-
mer and ferment, and there is the brain nerve towards which that
quivering forked tongue sends out its cry of confederacy! The
repercussions of both these things are mental, spiritual, ethereal,
astral, immaterial, psychic and as utterly removed from the "flesh"
as they are from "matter." It is a thing of nerves, this "brutish
sting," this erotic obsession, of nerves and of the psyche, the
soul, the self! The flesh is pathetically, beautifully, grotesquely
innocent . It is in the nerves that all lecheries, all lusts, all
passions lie...in the nerves and the imagination. It is the erotic
nerve, the tightly coiled snake with the flickering tongue, al-
ways waiting to leap, that creates that under-sea of fluctuating
images, wherein Matter and Flesh have been reduced to tenuous
and filmy wraiths, but from which the "nerve perilous'" can feed
with its vibrant tantalisations the excited soul! All good springs
from the nerves and from the mind. All evil springs from the
nerves and from the mind. Innocent, neutral, harmless, beautiful,
neither good nor evil, is the mortal flesh of men and of beasts and
of the grasses of the field!

"She is the test for you, my son," went on Mat Dekker while
his erotic nerve kept repeating: "I'd like to, I'd like to!" like a
rat gnawing in a hollow wall, "she is the test for you. You have
done what you wanted to do. But it must go on no longer. Any
man can give way to physical temptation once. Where a man
shows his mettle is where he refuses to go on yielding." As he
spoke Mat Dekker took off his hat and wiped his forehead. This
gave his superhuman enemy, the sun, his supreme opportunity,
and he poured down his burning noon rays upon that bare grey
head with redoubled concentration. "Not to go on with a fleshly
sin," continued Mat Dekker, "is the great victory of the spirit
over the body. None of us can help yielding once. It...is ...too...
sweet. But after the excess of the first plunge a man with any
character must pull himself together and climb back into the
trench of the faithful."

"Don't, Dad!" muttered Sam sulkily. "I've got to think. You
only worry me, talking like that."

They moved away together now out of the Abbey Grounds and
by a short cut, permitted only to residents of the town passed
into Silver Street. Sam surprised his parent by his imperviousness
to a new appeal. "Sorry. Father," he muttered presently, "I was
thinking of something else...I didn't hear vhat you said!"


As the two Dekkers were turning into Silver Street. John Crow
playing truant from his little office by the station, was dawdling
in front of the old men's almshouses and staring up at the Leli-
cot of St. Margaret's thirteenth-century chapel.

It was part of John's deep "selfishness," of this egoism which
he deliberately and shamelessly cultivated, that he always pre-
ferred to allow his imagination to be stirred by little out-of-the-
way buildings of this kind rather than by more famous ancient
erections. The aura of "visitors" gathered for him round any
notable show-spot, and was enough to turn him against it. But
a fragment of old wall, a broken piece of old coping, or, much
more, a building like this that had retained its own humble, pa-
tient identity throughout so many generations, always held his
imagination in a dream-heavy trance of curious felicity. As he
now surveyed this old bell-cot of St. Margaret's Chapel, out of
whose stones grew intermittent stone-crop and green moss, the
thought of how long this little tower, with its two bells and its
statue of the saint, had been mingled with the thoughts of the
generations of life-broken, life-weary, life-sated, life-hungry old
men, going in and out of these men's almshouses, gave the selfish
John a thrilling rapture of delight. Like a lovely wine, light and
dreamy, made out of old, old mosses softer than sleep, this in-
corrigible and mischievous wanderer drank deep of these ancient
men's long secular lives under St Margaret's bell tower. He had
drifted now to where Street Road branched off to the west, and
instead of walking on to Hill Head and crossing that strip of
waste land which was the arena of Tom Chinnocks erotic activ-
ities he turned down Street Road. He had in his mind a little
dairy-shop, not far from Cardiff Villa where the new Mayor lived.
This meant a furtive and foxy shuffle, for the misanthropic John,
along the other side of the road. It might indeed be said that the
whole of John Crow's life was a sequence of "other sides'--
"other sides" of roads, "other sides" of thoughts, "other sides"
of ideas, religions, labours, activities, in the whole great, dusty,
bustling panorama of life. It was the same thing, even when he
held Mary in his arms, for he liked better to hold her as if he
had caught her escaping from him, than as if she had rushed to
meet him with outstretched arms.

He pretended to be extremely interested in the small suburban
gardens on his right as he advanced hurriedly and surreptitiously
along the path. He was seized, however, with such a strong feel-
ing of being waved at and called to and summoned to stop from
the single upper window, the window of Crummie's bedroom,
visible between the tall bushes, that he raised one quick nervous
glance at that dark aperture. But though his fancy filled that
small space with the heads of the whole Geard family he knew in
his mind that no one was there and he hurried on, trailing the
point of his stick along the hedges, the gates, the railings, the
walls of "the other side" of Street Road. At last he came to the
little isolated dairy-shop. It stood close to the road, this little
shop, and occupied the whole ground floor of a small square
Jacobean house that made an odd contrast to the Victorian
tradesmen's villas that formed its neighbourhood.

The hot sun beat down on the front of this little establishment
where the ground before the open door had been strewn with
gravel. There were two wooden benches on either side of the
entrance, and inside there were several little wooden tables. The
spot had an old-fashioned, mellow look, and yet the fact that milk
in place of beer was the beverage sold gave a peculiar character
to the whole place which it would have been hard to define.
John had discovered this innocent refuge several weeks ago and
it had grown to be a favourite retreat of his, though so far he had
not revealed its whereabouts to Mary. The blending of Jacobean
brickwork with warm dusty sunshine and both of these with
large, cool, white receptacles full of milk, made of Othery's
Creamery in Street Road an oasis of senuous, West-Country
peace for such as did not require the more biblical stimulant of
alcohol to bathe them in enchantment. John walked in and or-
dered a pint of milk and a couple of cheese sandwiches. These he
carried himself to a place at the back of the room, from whose
cool dark shelter he could see the hot sunshine outslde, not so
much lying upon, as absorbing into itself, the gravel, the wooden
benches, the strip of road-dust. John had not settled himself for
very long enjoying the look of that shimmering picture framed
so caressingly in the doorway, a picture whose only background
was a tiny space of misty blue between two ramshackle sheds
across the road, when he became aware of a stockily built young
man with an open countenance correcting a piece of manuscript.

The fingers which held this person's pencil were those of a
manual labourer, but the face that alternately bent down and rose
to stare into vacancy was that of a refined scholar. Panic seized
the misanthropic John and he thought to himself: "All is lost...
all is spoilt." He began gobbling his sandwich and gulping his
milk. "I'll clear out of here before he speaks. He's sure to speak
if I stay. He's a born hailer of strangers!" But the fair young
man, who must have been about ten years younger than John,
showed no sign of speaking. He continued to stare alternately at
his manuscript and at space. John's mind worked in a most char-
acteristic manner now. "My good meal has been spoilt, my good
moment has been ruined. But in for a penny in for a pound. I
may as well take the plunge."

"Are you a visitor to Glastonbury, Sir?" he asked in a friendly
tone. The young man did not seem surprised at being addressed,
nor did he seem to take it in ill part. He laid his glass of milk on
the top of his manuscript to prevent the wind from ruffling it and
pulled his chair a little nearer John's table.

"In a way I am, and in a way I'm not. I'm Edward Athling, from
Middlezoy. I live at Haw Bottom Old Farm out there. But per-
haps you are a stranger? It's nice on a day like this in Glas-
tonbury, isn't it?"

John, in his easily acquired manner of Pageant Advertiser,
began at once talking about the new Mayor and his scheme of a
Passion Play. Edward Athling listened with extreme interest

"I believe I could help you over this if you'll let me," he said.
"I helped Mr. King with that Greylands Pageant, in which the
Headmaster played Saint Aldhelm."

"We're negotiating," said John, "with two people from the
Abbey Theatre in Dublin to come and do the directing for us.
What we are in want of--though most of the affair will be just
pantomime and dumb show--is a little fragment of libretto. Is
that a poem you're writing. Sir. may I ask? It looks like poetry
from here."

But the young man waved aside the topic of his immediate oc-
cupation. "I'd like uncommonly well," he said, "to try my hand at
that bit of libretto for you. Is it about Arthur you'll want it?"

So differently do events work out from what we anticipate that
the evasive John, who had locked up his office and was looking
forward to a couple of hours of solitary mystic-sensuous en-
joyment, now found himself confronted by a regular circus mas-
ter's dilemma--fear of losing a unique talent and fear of fatally
committing himself to the untried!

Ned Athling must have read his thoughts. "I know the kind of
poetry you want," he said eagerly. "It must be easy to recite; it
must be a bit rhetorical; it must be grandiose; but it must have a
touch, a flavour, somewhere about it, of genuine magic."

John experienced a shock of an extremely unpleasant kind
when he heard these words. Deep in his sidelong, shifty, dodging,
sheering-off nature there was lodged an invincible distaste for all
artistic theories. He could recognise genius in the raw; but a cer-
tain particular expository tone made him feel as if his stomach
was full of grey ashes.

Ned Athling scrutinised this lean, uncomfortable person who
was now occupied in making little bread pellets of the crumbs
of his meal. With every trace of absent-mindedness gone, the
young man had the wit to see that his last remark had made the
Mayor's secretary wince. He got up boldly therefore and brought
both his manuscript and his chair over to John's table.

"I'm going to take the liberty of reading to you the poem I've
just written. Its landscape is an imaginary one, like that of Kubla
Khan. I've called it ‘Merlin, the Enchanter.' "

"One minute, if you don't mind!" cried John, getting up him-
self and hurrying to the counter. Here he scrupulously and me-
ticulously paid for his milk and cheese, prolonging this transac-
tion all he could, and commenting in the ears of young Pet Othery
--a dreamy maid with a Pansy novelette always on her lap--on
the unseasonableness of the day's heat. John rushed to pay his bill
at this moment because of the mingling in him of an unalloyed
impulse to escape from this lad and an invincible dislike of hurt-
ing anyone's feelings. It was his private doctrine, based on con-
stant experience, that if you could postpone a disagreeable event
even by three minutes, the chances were in favour of something in-
tervening that might save you from it altogether!

Pet Othery, however, as she laid her novelette down on the
counter, between a great bowl of milk and a smaller bowl of
Devonshire cream, closing a pair of scissors within it, and even
her thimble and thread, so that her place should not be lost, began
to address John in an excited whisper. "Don't 'ee know, Mister,
who that gentleman be who's talkin' to "ee ? Tis Mr. Athling
from Middlezoy, who everybody says be keeping company with
Lady Rachel, the Marquis's only girl. Her father won't have none
of "im, so they say, though the Athlings be a good Somerset fam-
ily; but Lady Rachel, from all accounts, do bide by her own
choice and small blame to her, I say!" Having uttered her grand
piece of communication Miss Othery picked up her novelette
again and spread it out luxuriously upon her lap. Her place now
proved to have been kept, not only by thimble and thread and scis-
sors, but also by a bit of chocolate, done up in silver paper, which
she now proceeded to enjoy. The idea that Mr. Crow might prefer
her conversation to that of Lady Rachel's young man never for
a single second entered her romantic head. Ever afterwards indeed
Pet Othery associated this particular volume, which was called
"Lizzie Upton's Temptation," with this encounter between the
Mayor's secretary and Lady Rachel's lover.

John was compelled therefore to return to his little, round,
china-topped table, upon which, heedless of spilt milk, Edward
Atliling had spread out his poem. The Middlezoy poet read Ms
lines in a low chanting sing-song that mounted up to a quite stir-
ring climax at the end.

Pet Othery lifted her rounded chin from her sewing and from
her story, and regarded him with eyes of soft and melting tender-
ness. The sunlight flooded the gravel outside the open door with
such a warm dusty glow that it gave to the interior of this, little
shop a dim cloistral coolness that lent itself well to this occasion.

"This wind has blown the sun out of his place!
I look towards the West and lo! a vast.
Lost-battle-broken bastion covers up
The natural sky: to what rain-ramparted
Region of huge disaster, do these hills.
Toppling above each other, ridge on ridge.
With trees that in the night are heaped like moss s
With trees that darken into tapestries
Of vaporous moss, with roads that travelling
Thro' terraces of twilight lose themselves
In green-black tumuli of mystery,
In piled-up mounds of moss and mystery,
Lead my soul thro' the silence? Not a stone
But talks in muffled tongue to other stones.
There's not a wild, wet-beaked, night-flying bird
That does not scream upon this tossing wind
To other, darker birds, my cry, my cry,
Of rumours and of runes and reckonings,
Of rain-whirled storm-wrack rolls of malediction!
And I the Enchanter, riding on these hills,
And on the stags that trample on these hills,
And on this twilight and on these heaped mounds
Of mystery and on these wild birds' wings,
Death-runes, death-rumours, ruins and rains of death
Am now myself this wind, this wind, this wind.
This wind, that's blown the sun out of his place!"

John Crow's countenance would have been worthy of the stage
as it changed from nervous boredom to startled surprise and from
surprise to imaginative arrest and from imaginative arrest to a
rush of excited resolution. But it was characteristic of him to
jump at once--without any intervening steps--to the main issue.
"Come on, Mr. Athling, come on, Sir!" he cried, rising to his
feet, and, clutching at the poet's modest bill, which was inscribed
on a slip of paper with the words "Othery s Dairy" printed on the
top of it, he rushed over to the young lady. Unfortunately for this
impulsive motion of premature hospitality John's pockets con-
tained no more than a penny half-penny, whereas Athling's debt
to the shop was fourpence.

But the farmer-poet produced sixpence, and ignorant of the
fact that he was tipping the daughter of the house he left the
change, in addition to John's penny half-penny, upon the counter.

"Have you time to come to the Mayor's house?" said John
eagerly. "It's quite close. I was going lo watcb the boys playing
rounders on Wirral Hill for a bit. and then go back to the office,
but I know Mr. Geard will jump at your help if he hears that
poem. It's exactly the sort of thing we want! It's almost as if you
were thinking of us when you wrote it. You must come to our first
rehearsals. Those Dublin people won't be able to come till we've
got pretty far advanced and there are...I don't know quite how to
put it...several ways of taking the Grail-Cult...which...which...the
Mayor and I...don't want to appear at all! There are...a few things
too...that I am very keen to get put in...and if you--"

Never has any cardsharper, never has any pickpocket, never has
any scallywag of a circus camp-follower, leered as craftily as
John did then, into the open countenance of Edward Athling. The
young man himself was struck by the look, and he had penetra-
tion enough to detect the fact that this excess of exaggerated cun-
ning was really as transparent as the lying of a child.

"I feel," Athling said to John, as they approached Cardiff Villa,
"as if I were the Player King Being taught my sjprinkling of mich-
ing mallecho."

"This Pageant," said John with a quick sidelong glance to see
how the youth would take it, "is going to upset a great many
people."

"Of course," said Athling, "any original work of art is upset-
ting to the mob."

John held his peace at this point. It was not his custom to weigh
a person's character by anything that he said, least of all by any
of these rather sententious remarks that Mr. Athling seemed to
have a tendency to utter. John had his own secret and peculiar
method of sounding a stranger's intellectual and emotional nature.
It was a kind of etheric, psychic embrace, but not necessarily of
an amorous character. The truth is that for John the soul of every
person he met was something that he was doomed to explore. His
own soul was like a vaporous serpent, and it rushed forth from the
envelope of his body and wound itself round this other, licking
this other's eye-sockets with its forked tongue, peering into its
heart and into its brain, and pressing a cold snake-head against
its feverish nerves.

The resuit of the coiling of John's soul round the soul of Ath-
ling as he walked by his side along this hot dusty path, towards
Cardiff Villa, was that he realised that nothing could conceivably
ever make Atliling understand the mystical ecstasy of destruction
and the deep metaphysical malice with which he longed to under-
mine the Grail Legend. The whole tone of the lad when he said
that original art was upsetting to the mob was distasteful to John.
John's instincts were profoundly anti-aesthetic. When he enjoyed
anything it was by direct contact, as if the thing were a physical
sensation, and the laws, principles, rules, methods, purposes, in-
tentions, and above all the opinions that led up to this especial
thing, seemed to him nothing but exhausting and tedious pedan-
try, devoid of all value.

They came now to Cardiff Villa, and John, opening the iron
gate with a click, led Edivard Athling up the little path between
the privet bushes to the front entrance. Sally Jones, who had been
watching their approach through the kitchen door, ‘which opened
straight upon the street, hurried through the hallway in a fever
of excitement to let them in. She too, like Pet Othery, knew Ned
Athling, as a local celebrity, and like all the Glastonbury girls
had been thrilled by the rumours connecting him with Lady Rachel
Zoyland, the daughter of the Marquis of P.

The master of Cardiff Villa gave his visitors a very cordial
welcome when he found them in his dining-room, and John lost
no time in making his captured poet recite the lines about Merlin.

The Mayor listened with his big head sunk on his chest and his
eyes closed ; but when Athling had finished it was clear that some-
thing in the verses had touched a kindred chord in him, for he
clapped his plump hands together and uttered several times a
sound which it is impossible to represent in print otherwise than
by the syllables "urr-rorr...urr-rorr...urr-rorr!" This sound was
eminently satisfactory to John, and apparently not less so to the
author, for the latter plunged at once into an impassioned des-
cription as to what he would do if they gave him a free hand
with the libretto.


One of the most practical results that followed from this in-
troduction of young Athling to Mr. Geard--and John was not one
to suffer from jealousy--was the fact that a few days later the
whole place was placarded with posters announcing a public
meeting in the Abbot's Tribunal to consider "a new scheme for
increasing the prestige of our ancient Town." This public meet-
ing was announced for eight o'clock on the first of the month, and
as a result of this choice of a date the word circulated among the
frivolous that the Mayor-elect was to address his fellow-citizens
adorned with a fool's cap. It was characteristic of the man that in
order to gather together his ideas for this momentous oration--
the first that it was his destiny to deliver to the general public since
those early street-corner harangues--he should make a private
visit on the morning of April Fool's Dav to the recesses of Wookey
Hole.

Intentionally or not Mr. Geard paid his sixpence at the gate of
Wookey Hole at such an early hour that the person who received
it was not Will Zoyland but Mr. Lamb, the landlord of the Zoy-
land Arms, an individual who, though he had heard of the new
Mayor of Glastonbury, had never set eyes on him, and had not,
therefore, the least idea that he was admitting to his subterran-
ean domain Philip's grand antagonist. Bloody Johnny had never,
as it happened, visited the cavernous shrine of the Witch of
Wookey since Philip had electrified the famous caves and it was
an exciting experience for him to wander down that illuminated
pathway, watching the amazing metallic colours which these bril-
liant globes of light drew forth from the stalactites. He had the
whole place to himself, a thing that Zoyland, when he was at the
gate, always tried to avoid, being afraid of people losing therm
selves, and also afraid of the intrusion of tin-mining agents from
alien firms; but Mr. Lamb, naturally a very easy-going person,
was not one to have his wits about him at nine in the morning.
What he ought to have done was to make this early visitor sit
down in the little shanty at the entrance and wait till more
strangers arrived, before turning on the lights, but Mr. Geard got
the full benefit, as he often did in the general drift of things, of
this example of human negligence.

He descended slowly between the rows of stalactites till he came
to the level floor in the biggest of the caverns where ran that
tributary of the subterranean River Axe. Here he saw Philip's
boat, pulled up on a shelving bank of sand and left exactly as it
was 'when Persephone had stepped out of it. After a moments
hesitation, for he was no oarsman, Mr. Geard entered this boat,
and with a good many blunderings and splashings, contrived at
last to row himself to the strip of shingle beneath that huge
array of phallic symbols over which the formidable stone image
of the Witch of Wookey held her obscene vigil of immeasurable
aeons. Here Bloody Johnny awkwardly disembarked, feeling,
though he knew nothing of Dante, very much what that mediaeval
Harrower of Hell felt, when he, still a man of flesh-and-blood,
moved among the infernal wraiths. He advanced under the precipi-
tous wall of the vast cavern, his feet sinking, as he walked, in the
loose shingle of that Acherontic shore. Here he seated himself on
a strip of dry sand and leaned his hack against the wall of stone.
He could not help wondering to himself what it would feel like
if these electric lights were suddenly to be extinguished!

Staring into the face of that stone image, in that place lighted
up by the science of his enemy, Mr. Geard found it easy enough
to restore to Wookey Hole the thick, long darkness into which it
had fallen after the last human tribe deserted it. It was out of the
midst of this long darkness rather than in the new electric light
that his nature now expanded. His large hands lay palms down,
and with the fingers spread out, like two great, white starfish, on
the shingle at both sides of him. No sign of life was there, no
grass-blade, no insect, no bird. He was alone with the metallic ele-
ments out of which all organic entities are formed.

Mr. Geard was not good at concentrated thinking. His deepest
thoughts always came to him, as the author of Faust declared his
did, crying, like happy children, "Here we are!" and the result
of this was that a brief half an hour spent in composing his speech
for that night exhausted him far more than the most protracted
physical exertion would have done. He found himself caught and,
as it were, pilloried, in the repetition of certain particular phrases.
This happened to him every time he deserted his vague, rich,
semi-erotic feelings and tried to condense his scheme into a ra-
tional statement, and it became really troublesome when, with his
eyes tightly closed, he set himself to call up that audience of
people and to imagine their response to what he said. The thought
of the audience and of this accursed appeal to reason seemed to
throw a thin dust of unpalatable sand over his whole life-purpose.

He continued to sit in the same position, with his fingers out-
stretched on that subterranean shingle, and his eyes closed: but
the rational effort his mind had begun to make brought about him
all the unpleasant aspects of his normal life. A certain little
piece of lead-piping scrawled with a mark that always looked to
him like a crocodile s snout, and which he invariably caught sight
of from the window of the water-closet on the landing of Cardiff
Villa, now presented itself before his closed eyes as he began to
phrase his speech. A certain stair-rod that had got hopelessly
loose and that caused a peculiar rumpling of the stair-carpet
obtruded itself before his vision. A certain indescribable familiar-
ity which hung about the old doormat at Cardiff Villa and the
scraper--as if these things had been placed at his gate by the Evil
One himself, especially to keep down the tempo of his mystical
thoughts--came stealing over his mind. The painted metal cover
of a certain matchbox which was kept on the dining-room mantel-
piece and which always seemed to evoke the sterile aridity of
hours of flat, spiritless repletion hove also in sight. Certain
physical aspects of his wife and his elder daughter, certain tones
of their voices, when they were least sympathetic to him, rushed
pell-mell into his head. The gigantic phlegm of Mr. Geard and
his massive, lumbering, lubberly passivity seemed to bring it
about that these trifles adhered thus viciously to his memory, like
burrs and prickles to the fur of some great drowsy beast. With
what repulsive clearness too, as he went on struggling to formu-
late his ideas, a certain glittering and yet curiously insipid light
appeared before his fast-shut eyes, the "two o'clock' 9 and "three
o'clock' 9 light, falling on the galvanised-iron roof of the unused
toolshed in his neglected garden!

Teased to the top of his bent by what he had evoked in his
dangerous gesture of damming up the sluices of his feelings by
the machinery of reason. Bloody Johnny had recourse now to
the grand human panacea for all mental aggravations. He did
what he ought to have done at once, before he started worrying
his mind about his speech at all; he allowed his chin to sink
down upon his burly chest and subsided into a deep and dream-
less sleep. Down upon the bowed head of Geard of Glastonoury
fell Philip's electric light. Over his head the Stone Witch stared
at her morgue of petrified indecencies. Beneath his feet rolled
the swift, silent, metal-gleaming current of that water of Lethe.
Noon came upon those Somersetshire spring-meadows above his
sleeping-place, with their cuckoo flowers and marsh marigolds,
and gave place to an afternoon of rain-threatening cloud-racks
that gathered heavily upon the western horizon. But still Mr.
Geard slept. Several times he changed his position without awak-
ening, and at last his head and his shoulders actually slid down
to the stalagmite base of the Stone Witch, and instinctively sought
there a smooth concavity against which to lie at rest.

The long cloudy afternoon of April Fool's day ebbed slowly
away. Those cloud-racks, gathering above the distant Welsh
mountains, grew more and more ominous. Long swaying arms,
outstretched hooked fingers, hooded shoulders, nodding plumes,
far-streaming tattered banners, huge-tilted swords and monstrous
axes, towrered there over the Western Channel and neither ad-
vanced nor dispersed! In this portentous hovering and lingering
they resembled those spirits of the departed in the ancient British
Isles, of which Plutarch makes mention, quoting from the travel-
ler Demetrius: "Demetrius further said, that of the islands
around Britain many were uninhabited....He went to the is-
land which lay nearest to those uninhabited and found it occu-
pied by few inhabitants...who were, however, sacrosant and
inviolable in the eyes of the Britons. Soon after his arrival a
great disturbance of the atmosphere took place, accompanied by
many portents, by the winds bursting forth into hurricanes and
by fiery bolts falling. When it was over, the islanders said that
some one of the mighty had passed away...moreover there is
there, they said, an island in which Cronos is imprisoned, with
Briareus keeping guard over him as he sleeps, for, as they put it,
sleep is the bond forged for Cronos. They add that around him
are many deities, his henchmen and attendants."

And when that threatened and menaced day drew to a close at
last, if Will Zoyland before turning ofl the electric light had
decided to take a stroll down these passages and had got as far as
the edge of the subterranean water he would have been astonished
to see a second figure, "couchant, in-bend, sable," lying beside
that stalagmitish sorceress.

There was quite a large audience collected together that night
to hear the first public speech of the new Mayor. The Abbot's
Tribunal did not offer very extensive accommodation nor a Yen-
liberal number of seats for those who did get in, but, as the en-
tertainment was given gratis, the late-comers to the meeting had
no cause for grievance if they found themselves somewhat un-
comfortably crowded.

The only representative from The Elms was the redoubtable
Emma Sly who came, in a very literal sense, to "spy out the
land," for it may well be believed what a shrewd account, and a
more succinct one than any other Glastonbury hand-maid could
have given, the mistress of The Elms looked forward to receiving
while she ordered Philip's dinner on the following day.

Miss Drew, too, refrained from attending "this silly speechify-
ing"; but the Misses Rogers came from the Abbey House just
as Penny Pitches, escorted by Isaac Weatherwax, came from the
Vicarage.

Both the Dekkers were there, as were also Dr. Fell and his
formidable sister, Miss Bibby.

Old Lawyer Beere turned up, rather to John Crow's surprise,
bringing with him his daughter Angela, who had never looked
paler, colder, more unapproachable, and more completely bored
than she looked as she took her seat between her father and Mr.
Stilly, the cashier of the bank.

Miss Elizabeth Crow arrived in very good time, escorted, in
true old-fashioned style, by her plump maid, Tossie Stickles,
who, once in the hall, separated herself from her mistress and
became all eyes to get a glimpse of her gentleman-admirer, the
nympholeptish Mr. Barter. In this hope, however, the girl was
disappointed, for Barter was not present.

Megan Geard was in the front of the hall, taciturn and indiffer-
ent, wearing a velvet gown cut and flounced according to the
fashion of at least a decade ago, and treating the whole occasion
with a withdrawn disdain more worthy of the house of Rhys than
of the position of Mayoress. Crummie, in a dress of bewitching
simplicity, was turning her beautiful chin all the time to steal
hurried and furtive glimpses of Sam Dekker, whose own atten-
tion was focussed upon the entrance-door, for he was at once
hoping and dreading that Zoyland might have taken it into his
impulsive head to bring Nell into town for this one occasion!

Among the humbler members of the crowd there were present
Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Cole, Sally Jones and her brother Jackie.
Jenny Morgan, the once lovely Glastonbury charwoman, had
come too, bringing Number One's little friend "Morgan Nelly"'
with her, but from the manner in which this woman's large tragic
eyes kept closing and her sad underlip kept drooping and her
shoulder kept leaning against the wall by one of the windows, it
looked as if the Mayor's speech would have to be very lively in-
deed to keep her from falling asleep.

The old cronies, Number One and Number Two, were seated,
in anticipatory bliss, side by side. Red Robinson sat at the back
of the room, in what he felt to be the precise strategic position
for the art of heckling, but he never once looked at Crummie. If
he looked at any girl at all, all that evening, it was at the Geard
servant, Sally, but even these glances were quickly exhausted.
Red s head was so full of politics that he had scant energy left
to include love.

Mr. Evans and Cordelia sat at the edge of one of the aisles in
the centre of the room. Mr. Evans seemed to be as much with-
drawn into his thoughts as Mrs. Geard was withdrawn into the
pride of her South Wales blood, for it was only once or twice
that he glanced at the platform, although he was seated so near it.

John and Mary, the former arrayed--as the insignia of a Mas-
ter of Ceremonies--in a neat dinner-jacket, borrowed for the oc-
casion from Tom Barter but which was at once much too short
and much too loose for him, were seated in the front row, which
was occupied, otherwise, by old Mr. and Mrs. Stilly, the parents
of the cashier, by the Reverend Dr. Sodbury, the Rector of
St. Benignus, and by Mr. Wollop, the ex-May or. It cannot be said
that Mr. Wollop looked quite as happy seated in the front row
of his rival's audience as he looked in his cage, but he looked,
all the same, about twice as happy as anyone else in the Tribunal.

Dave Spear and Persephone sat just behind the ex-Mayor; and
it gradually became a cause of much suppressed giggling and
tittering at the back of the room to notice the manner in which
the worthy obese man kept twisting his head round to talk to the
beautiful Percy, whose brown boy-curls and white shoulders--
for though Dave was in plain ordinary clothes. Percy for some
caprice of her own, appeared in evening dress--seemed of great
interest to him.

Towards the roofs of Glastonbury, towards the Gothic roof of
the Abbot's Tribunal, advanced that black cloud-rack from the
western sea, but although every now and then there was a deep,
rolling peal of thunder, not one single drop of rain fell. These
heavy jagged clouds, this first of April night, were like the evil
clouds spoken of in the Scriptures, for they were "clouds with-
out water."

But the big church-clock in St. John's Tower struck eight,
Iiich was the hour of the meeting, and there was no sign of the
Mayor, nor of any move to supply his place if he did not come.
There were three Aldermen in the little waiting-room at the back
of the platform, and these worthy men were now beginning to
perspire with perturbation. On the empty platform were five
empty chairs, one for the Mayor, one for old Mr. Bishop, the
Town Clerk, and the others for these anxious and nervous officials
who were now growing distressingly conscious of their boots and
trousers and socks and were continually retiring to the little lav-
atory in the rear of their room. There were quite a number of
young people at the back of the hall, some seated, some standing,
some moving restlessly about, and every now and then there would
arise from this turbulent element various cries and laughter and
even clappings and hissings, as this or that crude jest was bandied
about in connection with the absence of the Mayor.

St. John's clock now chimed the news laconically and briefly
that it was a quarter past eight. The unruly element in that tightly
packed little hall began to grow seriously troublesome. The jokes
grew grosser and broader. "Mayor be drunk!" cried one. "Better
send they Aldermen to look for he in Michael's Inn!" cried an-
other. "Mayor he making April Fools of us poor dogs, now 'ee
be so rich and so set up!" growled a third. "Mayor be enjoyin
isself wi' wold Mother Legge in Paradise!'' declared one lad,
bolder than the rest. "Shush! Shush!" cried several voices. *

Meanwhile Abel Twig and his crony Bart Jones were whisper-
ing together in high excitement. "Them Posters said 'twas for
Glast'n 'ee were holdin' meetin'. Seems to I 'twere for to see how
much foolin' Glast'n folk could stand, afore us cast he down,
back where he were afore us lifted he up." Thus spoke Old Jones
in the ear of his friend, but Number One was kinder in his inter-
pretation. "Maybe Mayor have been taken wi' the dizzies, like
what woming do suffer from, when 'tis near their time. 'Tis a
hard thing for even a Preacher like he to stand up afore such a
proud assembling!"

Penny Pitches who had taken her seat without shame by the
side of Mr. Weatherwax now addressed a personal appeal to that
potentate. 'Twould be a moment for thee to strike up wi' one
o' thee pretty songs, Isaac," she declared stoutly. "Thik Bloody
Johnny baint the only one what can lift up voice."

"Chut, chut, woman!" murmured the gardener reproachfully.
"This be a time for Authority to speak. The man I be wantin'
to hear from, be Mr. Philip Crow. He'd be the gent to send all
these gabbling geese to the right-about."

A long rolling thunder-clap responded to the gardener's words
from those slowly gathering clouds above the Tribunal. "Hark
to't!" cried Penny Pitches, "he'll have to come quick or he'll be
drenched to the skin!"

The sympathetic Sally Jones, seriously concerned about the
fate of her master, murmured anxiously in Jackie's ear: "I can't
keep me eyes from Missuses' back, I can't She must be shiverin'
and shakin' inside, poor dear! 'Tis turble 'sponsive to be sittin'
up so straight and Master not here."

"You don't think, Sal, do 'ee," whispered the excited Jackie,
"that the thunder have hit 'im in the eyeball like it used to hit
they bad girt men in Bible?"

St. John's deep-voiced clock now chimed the half hour and its
sound died away in the midst of a thick, deep, reverberating peal
of sullen thunder.

"Why isn't there any lightning, Father?" said Angela Beere to
Lawyer Beere. "I haven't seen one single flash all the evening."

The girl let her eyes rest, as she spoke, upon the beautiful nape
of Persephone's neck. Those brown boyish curls were beginning
to touch a vein of perilous susceptibility in that reserved nature.

It is, in fact, at moments of this kind, when a company of
fellow-townspeople are gathered in close proximity, with nothing
to do but to stare at one another, that all sorts of unexpected re-
lationships leap up into being.

"We needn't have hurried through our dinner after all. it seems,"
was her father's characteristic reply to this question about the
lightning.

"Not a drop of rain, Sam," said the Vicar of Glastonbury to
his son.

"I'm glad of it," murmured Sam, thinking to himself that his
Nell might, even yet, be on her way to the Tribunal.

It was at that moment that old Mr. Sheperd, the Glastonbury
policeman, moved up to the back of the Town Clerk's chair.
"Hadn't 'ee better begin. Sir?" he said earnestly. "Maybe his
Worship ain't coming, and these young rogues will be getting
out of hand soon."

The Town Clerk nodded wearily, got up with difficulty from
his creaking chair, for he was past eighty, and made his way
dowm the hall. He paused for a minute by the side of John Crow,
with whom he held a brief consultation, watched with intense
curiosity by everybody in the place. Then he entered the room
at the back of the platform. Here he found the three Aldermen,
who advanced to greet him in trepidation and consternation.
"Come on, gentlemen," he said, in the tone of an aged warrior,
who has weathered crises far worse than this trifling one in the
course of his long life. "On to the stage with ye! I'll open the
meeting and call on the Mayor's secretary." Herding the three
nervous magnates in front of him, like three reluctant and sulky
bullocks, the gallant Mir. Bishop scrambled up the platform steps
after them and took his seat in the Mayor's chair.

The four men were greeted with uproarious applause, and the
clapping and shouting continued for at least three solid minutes.
"Three cheers for Mr. Bishop!" shouted one young scaramouch
who had perched himself upon the high sill of one of the great
mullioned windows. The Town Clerk rose to his feet and advanced
to the square table in the centre of the platform. Here he raised
his hand for silence. The general relief at the presence of some-
one was so great that he was responded to by an impressive and
startling hush.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Mr. Bishop began, "we have come here
to listen to our distinguished fellow-citizen, the newly elected
Mayor of Glastonbury, Mr. John Geard."

"'Ear, 'ear!" came the magnanimous and comfortable voice
of Mr. Wollop from his place in the front row.

"But since," Mr. Bishop went on, "the inclement weather, or
some other cause at present unknown, has prevented our much-
regretted Mayor from being present at this meeting which he
himself called together, it behoves me, as his humble official sub-
ordinate, to call upon his secretary, my young friend, Mr. John
Crow, to tell us, or read to us, if possible, in the Mayor's own
words, a resoomy"--this was the only long word in the Town
Clerk's repertoire of public speaking that he pronounced incor-
rectly--"a resoomy of our distinguished friend's inspiring ideas
with regard to the future of our beloved town. I therefore call
upon Mr. Crow to--"

There arose at that instant such a curious hubbub at the
back of the room that the three Aldermen leaned forward from
the edge of their chairs and craned their necks to see round the
speaker's back and under the speaker's armpits what it was that
caused the disturbance. When the worthy men did realise what
was the cause of the confusion, they gazed at one another and at
the back of Mr. Bishop in sheer dumbfounded stupor. The people
in the front of the audience began themselves turning round now,
and some among them when they realised what was occurring
began to raise that hoarse, grating susurration which indicates, to
any experienced speaker, the complete impossibility of receiving
a quiet hearing.

"I therefore call upon Mr. Crow," went on the old Town Clerk,
"to--" John Crow, who was on his feet now and facing the
back of the room, realised in a flash the bitter humour--as far as
he was concerned--of what had occurred, but his first feeling
was one of indescribable relief. He felt like a hunted fox, with
all the pack at his heels, who unexpectedly finds a hole--and a
hole with a second exit! When Mr. Bishop told him he would have
to speak he had had a spasm of sick terror and had come near to
flatly refusing. Then he had thought: "After all. why not? Geard
will probably come in while I'm getting up steam. And there's
nothing really to funk in these people! "

But now it wasn't Geard who had come, but Philip!

"I therefore call upon Mr. Crow " the Town Clerk had said, and
some anonymous voice, in the crowd at the rear of the hall, had
cried out "He's here! Mr. Crow be here!" and everyone who
turned round saw Philip standing there, in the leather jacket
of a flyer, motionless and with a grim smile on his face. "He's
here, Sir; Mr. Crow is here, Sir!" shouted a second voice.

Philip's contemptuous smile changed its nature in a moment.
He threw down his leather cap, and stepped rapidly down the
centre aisle towards the platform.

The three Aldermen, hypnotised by their inherited West-Country
respect for the richest man of their town, rose from their
chairs to welcome him. Mr. Bishop, who still stood by the speak-
er's table, murmured rather feebly : "I am sure that everyone here
will be glad to learn if Mr....if Mr. Philip Crow has any opinions
which he would care--" But here his voice was drowned in a
resounding and quite unpremeditated salvo of clapping.

Every audience, however hurriedly collected, quickly takes to
itself a queer identity of its own and becomes a living organism
whose reactions are as spontaneous and incalculable as those of
a single human being. There had naturally arisen a certain obscure
feeling against the newly elected Mayor for his non-appearance, a
feeling that they had been fooled and cheated. This was com-
bined with a hardly conscious sense that Geard, as a man risen
from the ranks, demanded less consideration at their hands than
the well-known manufacturer. Philip's unpopularity, too, was
much more serious with the poorest and least educated in the
town, an element that was hardly represented in the Tribunal
tonight.

Thus when, encouraged by the applause with which he was
greeted, Philip mounted the platform and advanced to the table,
while Mr. Bishop and the three Aldermen sat down, there was
given to him--in one of those psychological up-burstings of feel-
ing to which the crowd-organism is subject--a terrific ovation, by
far the most spontaneous he had ever received in Glastonbury. It
may well be believed that it was the conservative Mr. Weatherwax
-- excited beyond all measure by the actual appearance of that
"authority" he so greatly admired--who now lifted up his manly
voice and shouted loudly: "Three cheers for Mr. Crow!"

The uproar that followed was deafening. When silence was at
last obtained, Philip leaned forward across the table and made
one of the cleverest political speeches of his life. When it was
over, and Mr. Bishop rose to make a few polite comments, John
whispered to Mary: "What a fellow he is! I hate him, but I can't
help being...in some odd way...you know?...our old Norfolk blood...
able to...assert itself still...and make...these fools...sit up a bit!"

Philip's hard, cold, clear voice was indeed ringing in the ears
of everyone present. "And so," his final words had run, "the best
way to make our town the sort of place we would all be proud of
living in is to make it independent of these precious visitors from
Europe and America. A living wage for every man who wants
to do a good honest day's work is what I am aiming at. Not old
fairy stories but new factories is what I want to see; not fake-
miracles but solid hard work; not fancy toys and mystical gibber-
ish but smoking chimneys and well-filled larders! Let these
visitors, when they come to Glastonbury, find in place of vague
chatter about Chalice Hill a prosperous, independent community;
a community that does not need to beg or dance or 'sing,' as the
old song says, for its supper'; a community that can afford to
hire its theatrical performances; a community that is too busy
and too well-employed to have its head turned by crazy preachers
and self-appointed Popes!"

It is not contrary to the weakness of human nature to enjoy the
spectacle of a crafty blow aimed at an absent adversary, but if it
had not been for his audience's obscure sense that their dignity
had been outraged by Mr. Geard's non-appearance, Philip's ma-
licious words would not have had the effect they had. He was
vociferously applauded as he sat down, and when, after Mr.
Bishop's diplomatic closing of the meeting and after everyone
had risen up to sing the first verse of "God save the King," there
was a general feeling in that audience's mind, intensified rather
than diminished by the distant thunder--still unaccompanied by
a single drop of rain--that a leader who allowed himself to be
betrayed into deserting his post at so crucial a crisis had received
no less than his due from this hawk-faced despot in a leather
jacket, who advocated laborem et panem, rather than any kind of
circenses, as his panacea for the ills of their town.

Thus in the criss-cross currents of this eventful April FooFs
Day, dominated by "clouds without water," Bloody Johnny and
his ambiguous Grail received a Dolorous Blow from which it ap-
peared possible that neither of them might recover. In that se-
quence of spiral recurrences--in which past events are eternally
returning, but with momentous difference--the same psychologi-
cal situation had been produced as when in those long-vanished
mysterious days the wistful and audacious Balin wounded the
Guardian of the Grail in both his thighs with the terrible Spear
of Longinus.

Every person, as that motley audience left the Abbot's Tribunal,
was conscious that something deep had been stirred up, ready
to respond to Geard of Glastonbury's communication, and that
this Something had been suppressed by the malice of super-
ficial human nature, played upon by a practised hand. There
was a feeling among them all as they went off as if they had
stretched out their arms to grasp a Golden Bough and had been
rewarded for their pains with a handful of dust.

It was with a queer, vague, irritated sense of uncomfortable
remorse that they went home, with the murmur of that strange
spring thunder in their ears that brought neither rain nor light-
ning. And as the night fell on the roofs of Glastonbury it was as
if She Herself, the historic matrix of all these happenings, had
been thwarted and fooled at the critical moment of her mystic
response.

The generative nerve of Her body had descended into Her
womb, but all to no purpose! Cold and hard and pragmatic, the
vrords of the Norfolk iconoclast had cut off the consummation of
Her desire. From the forlorn thorn stumps of Tom Chinnock's
Terre Gastee at the foot of Wirral Hill the effects of this Dolorous
Blow seemed likely to spread over the whole psychic landscape.
Let Her labor and let Her eat, but let the Stone of Merlin remain
a stone, and the Fountain of Blood remain a chalybeate spring!

When Mrs. Geard and her daughters reached Cardiff Villa that
night they found the master of the house seated alone by the fire
in the dining-room, with a glass of gin and water by his side.
Above him on the mantelpiece lay, in its accustomed place, the
little ornamental matchbox. From the water-closet window on
the landing above he had heard the familiar lead-piping give
itself to the night once more, with its wonted word--"the unessen-
tial shall swallow up the essential!" The well-worn doormat and
the rusty scraper outside his door emanated the same spiritless
and domesticated monotony. As all these things had looked before
he went to Northwold, so they looked now, when, after extricating
himself with characteristic phlegm and obstinate patience from
a darkened Wookey Hole, he had come straight home to his
empty house.



King Arthur's sword



The first hesitating sproutings of chilly, dumb, whitish-
green vegetation had forced their way into the clear air and es-
tablished themselves above ground. The mysteriously released
saps and life-essences, faint, mute and fitful, had now risen high
enough to fill the cold stiff stalks and fling a new smoothness and
a new resilience into their upward-striving curves.

The early, perilously sweet blooms, such as those greenish-
yellow calyxes of the first daffodils, catching the spouts and jets
of the chilly sunshine from between the wind-tossed clouds, and
bowing their wet petals to the brown earth under the heavy
showers of rain, had given place to the far sturdier, if less poig-
nant, growths of the later spring season. Tulips were now out
by the edge of most of the Glastonbury lawns and the heavy
waxen towers of the garden hyacinths--purple and pink and
white and blue--had already passed their apogee of inebriating
sweetness and were sinking down day by day into their rich death.
The more innocent and more childlike scent of lilacs too was
already on the air; and the renewal of the earth had even ad-
vanced far enough for the great drooping sprays of the laburnum
trees in Mr. Weatherwax's two old gardens to be bursting out into
delicate buds. Peonies also--those unrestricting, unwithholding
orbs of lavish wholesomeness--were now to be seen in many
warm parterres; while across the old masonry of the smaller
gardens where bright-cheeked girls flitting in and out of their
houses into the sunshine, like moving flowers themselves in their
fresh Easter frocks, kept laughing and challenging one another
as they heard that familiar sound, came on the southwest wind
the mocking cry of the cuckoo.

Three weeks had slipped by since Sam Dekker had lain with
Nell Zoyland upon that carefully prepared couch by the White-
lake waters--three fecund weeks; and hours sweet as honey, and
hours bitter as coloquintida, had slid down the same fatal slope
into everlasting oblivion.

Glastonbury had the air, in that halcyon weather, of being
some ancient mediaeval city, enclosed in paradisiac green
pastures; a city that Fra Angelico might have painted, giving it
a foreground of watercresses and long-legged herons.

April was now more than a fortnight old and a late Easter
was approaching. On the morning of Maundy Thursday, after a
windless night when the moon, already nearly full, had flooded
the hazel copses and the withy beds with such liquid radiance
that every brittle primrose stalk and every sap-heavy bluebell
stalk had cast its own particular shadow' on wet clay or cold
stone, Cordelia Geard, dressed herself like a blue hyacinth and
with her plain face quite illuminated by the regenerative stirrings
on all sides of her, opened the street door of Old Jones' shop in
the High Street and plunged boldly into its cluttered and century-
mellowed obscurity.

The sun was warm upon the High Street pavement outside;
but a kind of misty eidolon of the sun--a sort of secondary sun,
more golden, just because it was more dimmed, than the first--
poured its rich glow, crowded thick with gleaming air-motes,
upon all the entanglement of bric-a-brac within the shop wails.
This secondary sun, more golden than the first, as if Number
Two's shop had been a forest glade in some fairyland where roots
were old chairs and where branches were old copper candlesticks,
fell in long streaming rays from above the dragon vase and the
Pierrot-lidded pepper-pot and the red-feathered shuttlecock and
the unfashionable croquet-mallet and the shaving-mug with the
Rhine castle upon it and made a thick, dim, rusty glory, full of
portentous curves and colours and contours, of the piled-up furni-
ture and twisted brasses of that dim place. It was an arcana of
the crazy imaginations of old anonymous craftsmen, this shop of
Number Two. Old Bartholomew Jones was not a modern virtuoso
or a sophisticated connoisseur. He was a Glastonbury character.
But something deeply instinctive in the man had led him for
years and years--for something like half a century in fact--to
collect his objects with a personal predilection all his own, a
predilection which, while neither very learned nor very aesthetic,
had a certain pathos of choice peculiar to itself. The shop was
in fact a limbo of the characteristic symbols of the life of former
times.

Glastonbury here, layer by layer through the centuries, was
revealed in certain significant petrifactions, certain frozen ges-
tures of the flowing spirit of life, as it was caught up, waylaid,
turned into silk, satin, brass, iron, wood, leather, silver, china,
linen, pictured books, printed books, play utensils, kitchen uten-
sils, timepieces, wine decanters, toys, traps, walking-sticks and
weapons.

It was not an Aladdin's cave for children: and indeed about
many of the objects, warming-pans and bird-cages and fire-dogs
and so forth, there was something that suggested besotted and
miserly old age rather than youth. But it was a treasure-trove for
the type of imagination that loves to brood, a little sardonically
and unfastidiously perhaps, upon the wayward whims and caprices
of the human spirit.

Mr. Evans had even discovered--for Number Two's system of
collecting curiosities was evidently rather philosophic than ar-
tistic--certain quaint objects, much more recent than the numer-
ous antimacassars and artificial fruits under glass which he had
selected, objects that the owner apparently thought significant of
the age of his own early youth, such as rusty bicycle handles and
tricycle wheels and parlour games like Lotto and Spelicans.

The thick, golden light seemed to reach the eyes through some
indescribably rich medium, like old sherry wine, which hung
above all this chaos. And it was as if it had gathered to itself
some magical potency that particular morning.

Cordelia Geard, for all her new blue dress and over-ladylike
hat, could not resist a queer sensation as she looked round the
place as if she had entered a magician's cave, and had exposed
herself to some unknown possibility of bodily transmutation. She
felt as though Number Two's shop, in the same way as it could
make mid-Victorian parlour games look like Roman antiquities,
could transform a girl of the second decade of the twentieth cen-
tury into some platonic symbol of erotic expectation. It had been
the southwestern wind and the lilac-scented air that had brought
her into her fiance's domain; but she had not suspected that this
leaping up of life outside would be answered reciprocally among
the littered simulacra inside! But as she stood waiting now, seeing
no one and afraid of lifting her voice, she felt as if she were
greeted in that sun-illumined space by a chorus of muted whis-
pers. The carved knobs of an early- Victorian bed murmured ex-
traordinary things to her. A blue vase with big white basketwork
handles became still more voluble.

The girl in blue fixed a frowning glance upon this latter object.

"He must be upstairs making his bed," she thought. "I would
dearly like to make his bed for him!"

And then, gathering up all her forces into one terrific resolve,
"I'll make him love me like other men love their women," she
said to herself. "I'l make him love me like Crummie makes Red
and Mr. Barter love her. Women can do these things! Women
can make themselves like tinder to a match, like filings to a mag-
net, like straw to a spark!"

Cordelia's dark eyes began to gather a strange, excited light as
her heart went on telling her heart what she would do to rouse
the desire of Mr. Evans on this Maundy Thursday morning. She
set herself to listen intently; and she thought she did hear sounds;
but oddly enough these faint sounds that she heard seemed to
come from under her feet rather than from above her head
and they resembled the scraping of a nervous heel against a bare
board rather than the rustling of sheets on a bed.

Cordelia had never heard Mr. Evans refer to the chamber be-
low stairs where reposed that curious volume--now separated
from the Saint Augustine, its aforetime companion--that was such
a danger to the Welshman's peace of mind; but she began to ex-
perience a vague sense of feminine uneasiness, totally without
any rational cause, about her friend.

"He ought to be in the shop by this time," she thought. "It
must be nearly ten o'clock."

The sudden opening of the street door made her swing round.
It made her heart give a wild jump. The figure who entered was
Red Robinson.

The man gave Cordelia a nervous nod; but he neither took off
his cap, nor offered her his hand, nor even closed the shop door.

"I'm looking for his Worship," he said, with a sneer upon
the syllables "Worship." " 'E's not at 'ome. 'E's not at Town-
5 All. 'E's not at 'is Hoffice. Where his 'is Worship? That's what I
want to know. I've got somethink himportant to harx 'im."

"Can I give my father any message. Red?'' asked Cordelia.
"Hell no doubt be home for dinner...our mid-day dinner,
you know, Red."

The man hesitated.

"Well! You might tell him that I'll say nothing more to that
Morgan woman; since that his 'is Worship's pleasure. Nothing
more to 'er, tell 'im; and hall shall be has 'e wishes!"

Cordelia bowed gravely. "Surely, Red, surely! Yes, I'll cer-
tainly tell Father that. You'll say no more to the Morgan woman
according as my father wishes."

Red nodded, took out his pipe and lit it in the doorway, and
then cleared off.

When Cordelia turned round after his departure, there was Mr.
Evans standing before her. Mr. Evans looked at her in astonish-
ment; as well he might. She was not only prettier than he had
ever seen her; she was much better dressed. Cordelia had in fact
gone with Crummie to Wollop's three days before--a thing which
she had done only two or three times in their life--and had de-
lighted her good-natured sister by the unusual interest she had
shown in the new Easter display. The ex-Mayor himself had
come out of his self-appointed cage to wait upon the supposedly
rich daughters of his ambiguous successor; and both girls had
done all they could to soothe what they felt must be his deeply
wounded feelings.

Crummie had positively forced Cordelia to buy a really be-
coming costume, and since their father had given the girls a
hint that he wished them "to deck themselves out well and do
credit to their mother," this costume, including a specially grace-
ful and very ladylike hat, now showed Cordelia, as the golden-
moted rays surrounded her figure, to an advantage that surprised
and bewildered Mr. Evans.

The beautiful April weather--for seldom had Glastonbury
known the approach of a more auspicious Easter--had quickened
the blood and heightened the colour of Mr. Geard's eldest child.
Ever since she had put on this dark-blue, charmingly cut dress,
and this neat, grey coat with a gentian-blue lining, the girl had
felt as if she were a different person. A faint sense of spiritual
shame at her own unexpected pleasure in these new clothes height-
ened the charm of her manner as she now talked to her fiance;
gave her, in fact, an air of virginal shyness and timorous self-
consciousness which Mr. Evans had never seen in her before.

The boniness of her rather haggard face, the height of her
rather sullen forehead, the forward-drooping tilt of her awkward
shoulders--all these things seemed mitigated to a point where
they almost became the interesting characteristics of a woman of
original distinction.

For some reason--better understood doubtless by the Nietz-
schean young man, who was Mr. Wollop's buyer, than by Mr.
Evans or the young lady herself--the coat-lining, and the blue
dress with its thin braid of Brussels lace, when she threw the coat
open, made the skin that covered the girl's collarbones seem as
satiny and white as the sweet flesh of any much more favoured
daughter of Eve.

Whether from pure shyness or whether some subtle feminine
instinct warned her to be careful at this important crisis in her
life, Cordelia refused to do more than throw her cloak back as
she took the seat in the rear of the shop offered her by her lover.
Mr. Evans hovered over her there and exchanged casual unim-
portant remarks with her about he scarcely knew what, while
his burning eyes, flashing forth from beneath his bushy eyebrows,
devoured this little expanse of feminine whiteness. Something
like a fresh-water stream of quite new feelings towards this quiet
girl surged through the man's poisoned and brackish senses. With
an interior movement of his will--and the dire necessity of his
distorted nature had endowed Mr. Evans' will with engines of
iron--he now closed down a formidable mental portcullis upon
his dark congenital perversity. Not a trickle, not a drop, from
that deadly sluice must be allowed to poison this new feeling.

For he recognised in a flash that if he could, at that very mo-
ment hustle his guest off to his unmade bed upstairs, it would not
be a penance at all but a spontaneous pleasure to embrace her
there. This was the first time in Mr. Evans' life that such a nor-
mal and natural impulse had ever come upon him. And it re-
mained. Yes! It remained at the background of all the torrent of
words which he now poured out, in spasmodic spurts of volcanic
agitation, at the back of that sun-illumined shop.

"I've been going on reading Dante, Cordy,--how sweet you do
look today!--and I tell you, my dear, he's the only one of the
great poets who really, to my thinking, understands life. Life's a
war-to-the-death, Cordelia,--that's the truth, my precious!--be-
tween the Spirits of Good and Evil. These Spirits are everywhere.
They are encountering each other in every crevice of conscious-
ness and on every plane of Being. Life springs from their conflict.
Life is their conflict. If the Spirit of Good conquered entirely--
as one day I hope it will--the whole teeming ocean of life would
dry up. There would be no more life!"

Cordelia watched him carry off his breakfast things--for he
had evidently risen hurriedly, for some purpose, from his tea and
rolls--and lay them in a row on a little shelf above his gas-
stove. A dedicated stream of sunlight, thick and mellow like
sunlight in a monk's cell, kept turning his Roman profile, with
its great hooked nose and long upper lip into a dusky bronze
image that flickered vaguely before her, first on one hand, then
on the other, as she listened and pondered in a passive trance of
content.

"This is happiness," she thought to herself. "This is what
Crummie must often have known." And a great wave of pity
ransacked her heart on behalf of all the old maids in Glastonbury
who had no man; no hulking, blundering Incompetent, fumbling
helplessly with truculent inanimates! Oh, how easily she could
have done what he was even now so gropingly trying to do! And
how near she had come herself never to have had one of these
creatures who could talk so excitingly and--crash went one of
Mr. Evans' plates upon the floor!--could find the task of clearing
a table so pathetically difficult.

He came back to her side now, lugging a great carved arm-
chair after him, and upon this throne-like object he compelled
her to sit, while he himself took possession of the small, upright
Sheraton chair which she vacated.

"What none of you people in Glastonbury seem to understand,"
Mr. Evans went on now, "is that this place is charged and soaked
with a desperate invisible struggle."

"Isn't there the same confusion," Cordelia dared to remark in
a low voice, "in ourselves?"

"Certainly there is!" Mr. Evans cried, leaning forward over
the girl s blue skirt and pressing the palm of his left hand upon
the arm-knob of her antique throne.

There's the whole pit of Hell in ourselves, fire, smoke, sul-
phur, pitch, stench, burning! Some souls have a firm floor,
Cordelia, that anyone can stamp on and it makes no difference!
But other souls have trapdoors in their floors leading down to
...to...to places unthinkable!"

The girl's mouth was a little open and the black pupils of her
eyes had grown round and large. She was sitting up very straight
in that antique chair with her gloved hands--he hadn't thought
ot asking her to take her gloves off and she had hesitated to do so
lest it should seem a too familiar gesture--holding tight to the
wooden arms; but there was a space of several inches, between
her hand and his fierce grip upon the arm-knob.

I'm an unhappy man, Cordelia," he whispered hoarsely.

Her eyelids contracted. A faint return of the exultant strength
which had seized her that night on Chalice Hill shivered up
through her rigid body. Now was the moment to let him know
how he could depend on her-how she was ready to sacrifice
everything for him But fear and shyness made her numb, mute,

"Unhappy ," he repeated in an almost inaudible voice.

Her bloodless lips moved. She formed the words, "I'm so
sorry," but whether they reached him or not she could not tell.

I've felt things, I've done things," he burst out, "in my life
which have put me..."--he drew his hand away from the arm
of her big chalr and leaned back, making the inlaid woodwork
of the delicate piece of carpentry he sat on creak ominously--
"put me outside the pale!"

Then thrusting his hands deep in his pockets he gave vent to
two. emissions of sound which he meant to be a cynical laugh.

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Cordelia?"

The girl responded--it was a sign of more devotion than he
realized--by slipping off her new jacket and struggling to pull
off her new gloves.

"I am sorry...Owen," she murmured.

The way she said "Owen" tickled the fancy of Mr. Evans and
he smiled at her grimly.

"I know you are, my dear," he said. "I would have told you
about this weeks ago, if I could. There's no earthly reason why
I shouldn't tell you everything...except...that I cant."

"I am sorry...Owen," she repeated, folding back with frowning
intensity the second of the two gloves and finally pulling it off
and laying it on the chair by her side.

"Why I should have ever been born like I am," said Mr. Evans,
"is what I can't understand. But that's what the worst men
who've ever lived might have said."

He got up from his seat and began walking up and down the
small space at the end of the shop. Every time he swung round he
looked at the handle of the door leading to the room below. How
often had he struggled against the irresistible temptation to turn
that handle and steal a few feverish moments of reading from
that bookl!"

"Cordelia, do you think there are forms of evil so horrible
that nothing can wash them out?"

The girl was sitting sideways now in her dusky gilded throne.
A long quivering stream of reddish sunlight fell full upon her
profile and gave to all its eccentricities an emphasis that was
startling;

"Wash...them...out?" she repeated stupidly.

"I mean, do you think there are certain things anyone can do
...cruel, abominable things...which bring in their train undying
remorse? Listen, Cordelia! Do you think when Christ sweated
that bloody sweat it talks about, He felt the weight of things
like that? Not what He'd done himself, of course; but what,
before He died, He had to take on Himself? Shall I tell you
something, Cordy? I can tell you that much anyway...John
Crow has asked me to play the Christ in your father's Pageant;
and I said I would, if he'd let me be really tied to a Cross.
You can see why I said that, Cordelia, can't you. It'll be hard
to bear"; he emitted those same unpleasant guttural sounds
again that he evidently supposed resembled a brutal guffaw,"it'll
probably be more painful than I've any idea of; but I thought
I'd realise in that way how He really did take such things on
Him."

"It has been terrible for you, Owen, all this that you have
gone through," she said. "But I can't believe that there are any
things so awful that Christ cannot pardon them."

He stopped in his walk and faced her, his hands still deep in
his pockets.

"People...don't...seem...to realise," he said, "what Evil is. They
don't...seem...to realise how far it goes down! It has holes...that
go down...beyond the mind ...beyond the reason...beyond all we
can think of! Something comes up from these holes that gives
you powder when you're in certain...in certain moods...and it's
then that you feel things...and...Do Things"--his voice rose here
to such a pitch that the girl started up and made a movement of
her hand towards him--"which nothing in Nature can forgive!"

He moved backward away from her now with a lurching motion
until his shoulder struck against a tall walnutavood bureau. The
shock of this seemed to calm him a little.

"Of course," he murmured, turning his back to her and passing
his fingers up and down along the bureaus edge, "Christ is out-
side Nature; and that's my chance! He's outside, isn't He, Cor-
delia...outside altogether?"

Cordelia did somehow find the courage now to move up close
to him and lay a nervous hand on the sleeve of his coat. He
started at her touch and the expression of his face frightened her;
but he must have pressed at once in the dark machinery of his
mind one of those iron engines of his morbidly active will and
it was with quite a courtly gesture that he raised her hands to
his lips.

"You're sweeter to me than I deserve, my dear," he said gently.
"I wish indeed, for your sake, I were a very different person."

"I am quite happy with you as you are, Owen," whispered Cordelia
with a beating heart."Oh, why," she cried in all her nerves, "oh,
why doesn't he take me in his arms?"


While these events were occurring in Number Two's shop, Num-
ber Two himself, namely Mr. Bartholomew Jones, already a little
recovered from the extraction of what Penny Pitches called &
"sisty" in his lower regions, was out of the hospital for a morn-
ing's drive. One of the doctors had offered to take the old man
wii.li him on a trip to Godney; but had dropped him instead for
an hour's visit to the house of his aged crony. Abel Twig. Here
at the door of the latter's woodshed, the two old gentlemen were
exchanging comments upon life, Just as they had been accus-
tomed to do for the last fifty years.

"Me grand-daughter Sally do din me ears with talk about our
new Mayor. The gal gives herself as much airs as if she were a
she-mayor; and yet 'tis only because of her being their maid-of-
all! 'Tis wondrous, Abel, how they pettykits do take on about
Public Doings. In them old days, brother, 'twas upon pasties and
apple turnovers and sech-like that their mindies rinned."

"Fill up thee pipe, Bart; fill up thee pipe and think no more o'
such pitiful goings-on," said Mr. Twig firmly. " 'Tis thoughts
such as these thoughts what bring poor buggers like we into
hospitals and infirmaries. When sun do shine and birds do zing,
'tis best to stretch out legs, brother, and hummy and drummy!"

"But 'tisn't only of thik new Mayor that my grand-darter talks
to I of; 'tis of sad, wicked, fleshly doings what would bring some
girt folks into trouble if all were known."

The two old heads moved closer to one another now and the
two old caked and crusted briar pipes were tapped simultaneously
on Abel Twig's wood-chopping stump.

"Be they the fleshly doings of they that be Mayors, or of they
that baint Mayors?" enquired Number One evasively.

" 'Tis Sally Jones what sez so, Aby, not us, thee knows," mur-
mured Number Two, casting a wary eye up the road and down
the road, "but she tells I that thik little gal what plays with our
Jackie be an Illegit of Mr. Crow up to Elms. She do say there
were hintings and blinkings in the Gazette, about thik little job.
'Twere in last Wednesday's number or thereabouts, she said, and
she herself reckons 'twas Red Robinson what put 'un there."

Two matches were simultaneously held to two charred and
blackened orifices; and two thick clouds of blue smoke erupted
from beneath a bird-like nose and a dog-like nose.

"Our Midsummer Day Fair, partner, be making this Nation
ring and ting, so I hears," said Abel Twig.

"So it be, brother, so it be," said the other. "For me wone part,
I've never been one for they roundabouts and they May-pole
junketings and they Aunt Sally throws and they spotted men and
pink-headed women. I were born over-modest, the Head-Doctor
at hospital told Nurse Robinson, which were a way of saying
that me stummick be easy turned. Thik Head-Doctor be all for
they spick and span inventions, 'sknow, and I do seem to be an
old-fangled man what were better in grave."

"Don't 'ee say such words, brother Bart," protested Mr. Twig
hurriedly, "don't 'ee say 'em! Ye'll be stretching thee's legs in
me woodshed, this pretty Spring-time, come seven years away,
when Head-Doctor be turned to midden-dust."

"But 'tisn't only of cock-shys and merry-go-rounds and fat men
and cannibals that Mayor Geard be thinking!" went on the other;
"Thik young John Crow, what he brought over from France, be
teaching all the lads and gals of our town to act in a Play what'll
show God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost,
walking and talking like common men! Tis bloody Blasphemy
most folk says. Others say 'tis True Religion brought back to
earth! I do shiver and shake sometimes o' nights in hospital, Aby,
when I do think of what be in the air, and what be in the future,
for this wold town, and for me and thee's wold bones."

"Ye've allus been a nervous man of your heart, Bart," said
Abel Twig consolingly, laying his scrawny fist upon the neat
Sunday trousers of his friend, from which emanated the extremely
musty smell of a ready-made man's counter, of the days of Mr.
Wollop's father, "but there be nothing in thik Midsummer Fair
to worry we."

Number Two shook his head. He assumed the haughty and
melancholy air of a famous pathological case, about whose bed's
head the greatest doctors in Europe had disputed for years in
vain.

"I be afeared of what the future will bring to our wold town,
Aby," he said. "There do come to I, of nights, the shaky-shivers,
as ye might say, when, as I lies awake in thik girt white ward,
where thro' they cold windies be blowin' every draught of
Heaven; and I do hear they ghosties come out of they Ruings,
brother, and go whush. whush, whush over all the roofs, and I
feel, for sure, that some girt change be coming over this town."

"Thee's talk be silly talk, brother," said Mr. Twig. What do ‘ee
mean by a girt change?"

"I do mean what the planks and the stones of this town do feel
in their wet innards, when night be over they, and all be sleep-
ing! I do mean the shivery-shaky of they wold posties and
windies and chimbleys and rafties, when dark be on ‘un. Say
what ye will, brother Aby, say what ye will, "tis the nature of
stones and timber to know when changes be coming upon the
earth. 'Tis the same with they dumb beasties afore a storm. Thee
knows, for thee be a farmer, how it be with they slugs and snails
when rain be coming. And yet mortal man, brother, sees naught
of it! 'Tis hid from 'un; and 'tis hid from his women too;--
tho' sometimes 'tis true that one o' they will talk terrible wise, if
so be as a man had the patience to listen."

Abel Twig shifted his position a little to ease himself from the
hardness of the wood-bench he sat upon, for being a man of
singularly lean flanks his bones were unprotected.

"Have 'ee ever knowed a day, brother Bart, when these here
prophesyings of rafties and chimbleys and wold church-roofs,
what 'ee do hear in hospital, have brought summat to pass that a
man could name, summat that newspapers and history books
could mention, summat that girt noblemen like our Lord P. could
lozey and dozey over, as they sips their cellar wine after their
black-cock pasties?"

Number Two contorted his countenance into a hideous carica-
ture of humanity, in the sheer effort of ransacking his memory.
Then the outlines of his face relaxed and a tremulous smile
curled his lip.

"So I do, Aby; so I do," he murmured complacently. "I recol-
lect clear as daylight now, when there was three bad harvests in
session; yes! and whole factories closed down. They were Hyde's
Dye-Works then, what now be Crow's, and many sons of bitches
were nigh to starving in they days; and vittles was so scarce
that even the rich tradesmen could scarce afford sauce to their
meat; and these terrible starving times was prophysied, just as I
be telling ye now--by creakings and groanings in the wold stones
o' they Ruings! Something be coming upon our town, Aby, sure
as my pore side be suffering from Head-Doctor's whimsies. Tis
coming, brother, don't yer make no mistake! Tis coming; and
all these changes of Mayors, and proclaimings of Fairs, be the
outwaTd signs, as Catechism do say, of some Holy Terror. It
may be Pestilence and it may be Famine, Aby. Fm not saying It
will be shortage of bread and the burying of human skeletons;
but I'm not saying it won't be they things. But something it will
be; for the moanings and groanings in they Ruings be getting
worse and worse. They keeps a person awake, brother. Not but
what I sleeps well in hospital when I do sleep....Don't 'ee let
on nothing of that to Head-Doctor, Aby,...but 'tis when I don't
sleep that they prophesyings do bring death and judgement to
me wold ears."


The relaxed warmth of the April weather that had brought
Cordelia into Number Two's shop and had brought Number Two
himself into Mr. Twig"s woodshed, was not devoid of its effect
upon the susceptible temperament of John Crow, as he sat in his
noisy little office, down by the whistling and creaking luggage
trains, composing more and ever more daring advertisements in
regard to his Midsummer Pageant. He had been working in this
hot, dusty, little room since half-past eight that morning; and
it was now five minutes after eleven.

He looked round; he flung open the door of the little office; he
snuffed the air. The air tasted so delicious that he did not hesitate
for a second. If his thoughts had assembled themselves in words,
which they did not do on this occasion, the words would have
been "Green...sky...air...cool...mud...grass...willows...water...green...
air...space...mud."

He snatched up his plain straw hat surrounded by a black rib-
bon. He snatched up his hazel-stick with its queer-shaped root-
handle. The handle of this stick of John's resembled the horn of
a rhinoceros; and John, with his ineradicable superstition, had
already endowed it with as much identity, and perhaps a little
more, as any young girl pours out from her own soul upon her
sawdust-filled doll.

Armed with his stick and wearing the same clothes that he had
worn at his grandfather's funeral with the band of crepe round
the arm that his French friend had sewn on some seven weeks
ago, he now set out, at a pace as rapid as its direction was mo-
tiveless, towards the southwest. He soon found himself following
the road which led to the village of Street. The road John fol-
lowed now may have been as old as the days of the Saxon King
Ina, whose charter to the Benedictines of Glastonbury is still ex-
tant; but the chances are that in those early times all cautious
travellers leaving Glastonbury for the south followed the Roman
Road, the remains of which lie less than a stone's throw away
from the one upon the surface of which John's stick was now so
sharply and so motivelessly tapping.

But whether he followed a Roman or a Saxon road it is certain
that before he arrived at the village of Street John found him-
self crossing the River Brue at Pomparles Bridge. Mentioned in
a Court Roll of the second decade of the fifteenth century as Pons
Periculosus, it was from this spot or near this spot, Pons Perilis,
Pontparlous, Pontperlus, Pomparles, that the mysterious per-
sonage known as King Arthur threw away his sword Excalibur.

John leaned against the parapet and surveyed the trickling
water of the Brue. There was much mud there, and several ex-
traneous objects carrying little association with Excalibur, rested
half-buried in this mud, while a pathetically small stream of
tawny-coloured water struggled with weakened impetus to deliver
itself of such degrading obstacles. John's eyes, roaming in search
of anything that might recover the ambiguous romance that hung
about the spot, fell eventually upon a dead cat whose distended
belly, almost devoid of fur, presented itself, together with two
paws and a shapeless head that was one desperate grin of despair,
to the mockery of the sunshine.

Still suffering from a violent reaction against all his mystical
praise of Glastonbury, and suffering also from a too vivid
memory of a dangerous quarrel he had had with Mary the last
time they were together, this encounter with the distorted face
and up-blown belly of this poor corpse caused him a diabolical
twinge of mental and even physical misery. A strange vibration
of malignant revolt against the whole panorama of earth-life took
possession of him. What he felt was this--"I would be content
to endure a good deal if I could convey to the conscious intelli-
gence of any sort of Deity my contempt for the terms upon which
our life has been offered to us."

John's scepticism as to the dogmas of pseudo-scientific ma-
terialism was abysmal but he had gone so far in his role as a
circus-manager retailing all the Glastonbury myths with a twist
of his own, that his mood now was one virulent atheistical fury.
He pressed his lean stomach against the parapet in a bitter sym-
pathy with that hairless belly in the mud; and he replied to the
despairing grin of that scarcely recognisable head with a grin of
his own that was not less unredeemed.

Thus across the Bridge Perilous of the old romances a stare of
desperation out of Somersetshire mud met a stare of malice out
of a Norfolk skull. In the super-consciousness of the blazing sun,
now almost at its zenith for that day, the whirling and thunder-
ing, the crackling and growling and blasting and exploding of
that orbit-revolving body of flame was accompanied by no con-
sciousness of the existence of John Crow. And with the Earth it
was the same! Below the mud of the Brue there was a bed of
clay; below the clay, the original granite of the planet's skeleton;
below the granite an ocean of liquid rock upon which the granite
floated; below this again, black gulfs of hollow emptiness full of
smouldering gases, and down below these--as the plummet of
John's mind dived and sank--this "down" became an "up," and
the liquid rock-basis of the "antipodes" of Glastonbury, like the
root-sea of Dante's Purgatorial Mount, fumed and seethed and
bubbled.

But neither in her granite bones, nor in her fiery entrails;
neither in her soft, wet, rank vegetation, nor in her burning
sands; neither inwards nor outwards, from centre to circumfer-
ence, as her diffused super-consciousness accompanied the pulses
of her material envelope, and followed the wind of her material
revolution, did the mind of the Earth grow aware of the existence
of John Crow. Nor finally was there potency enough in the cold
fury of the man's mephistophelian malice, as he answered the
mindless despair in that decomposed cat-head in the filthy Brue-
mud, to draw the least, remotest flicker of awareness from the
double-natured, ultimate First Cause of the world!

On this particular noon-day not one of these great Elemental
Powers became aware, for the flicker of a single second, of the
existence by Pomparles Bridge, between the town of Glastonbury
and the village of Street, of the entity known as John Crow'. But
the Great Powers among the natural forces possessed of conscious-
ness no more exhaust or fulfil the innumerable categories of the
supernatural than the Great Powers among the nations of the
earth exhaust or fulfil the categories of humanity. There are
countless supernumerary beings--all sons and daughters of the
First Cause--whose meddlings and interferences with the affairs
of earth have not received the philosophical attention they
deserve.

It must have been by some mental movement of which he was
totally unconscious that John Crow, in his present sullen and
cynical mood, brought down upon his head a supernatural visita-
tion from one of these lesser potencies in the midst of that warm
noon-day sunshine. Yes, it must have been by some unconscious
mental gesture; or else it was brought upon him by the whole
trend of his activities for the last month!

There undoubtedly appear in every generation certain por-
tentous human beings to whose personalities some mysterious
destiny gives abnormal power, abnormal capacity for emotion
and finally an abnormal closeness to the secret processes of na-
ture. Such an one must that personage have been whose ghostly
figure, gathering to itself so many kinds of occult significance, so
many kinds of vital life-sap, as the centuries rise up and fall
away about it, passes still, among such as have the least interest
in such things, by the familiar name of King Arthur.

In all the old books about these matters it is recorded that
from some bridge across the Brue at this spot--some Bridge
Perilous corresponding to the Castle Perilous where Merlin con-
cealed that heathen prototype, whatever it may have been, of
the Grail, this Arthur of the histories threw away his sword. This
particular action of this singular Person must have been one that
was accompanied by some intense convulsion of human feeling
in his own mind parallel with the shock in Caesar's mind when
he crossed the Rubicon, in Alexander's mind when he slew his
friend Clytus, in Our Lord's mind when He was in the Garden of
Gethsemane. It is doubtless these violent storms of intense feeling
in great magnetic human personalities that are responsible for
many of the supernatural occurrences vouched for by history and
so crudely questioned by scoffing historians.

Pomparles Bridge, although on the road to Street, is much
nearer the town on its north than the village on its south, and it
is probable that most of the refuse, such as old cans, old pieces
of rusty iron, drowned cats and dogs, human abortions, vegetable
garbage, tramps' discarded boots, heads and entrails of fishes,
brick-shards, empty tobacco tins, broken bottles, and so forth,
which are to be seen sticking in the Brue-mud, comes from Glas-
tonbury rather than from its smaller neighbor.

An overgrown river-path, on the stream's northern bank, that
once may have been a tow-path but now was only used by casual
pedestrians, followed the river northeast where it flowed between
Cradle Bridge Farm and Beckery Mill, across Glastonbury Heath,
under Cold Harbour Bridge, by Pool Reed Farm, till it reached
the village of Meare. The same path, on the Brue's north bank,
followed the river southeast as it flowed under Cow Bridge and
across South Moor, Kennard Moor, Butt Moor, then a mile below
Baltonsborough, till it reached the villages of West Lydford and
East Lydford.

Out of the midst of a dazed condition of his senses, John
stared down at the abominable despair in the hollow eye-sockets
of that decomposed cat-head. A whitish-yellowish cabbage stalk
lay buried in the mud near it; vegetable decomposition and ani-
mal decomposition taking place side by side. The man's senses
were so drugged by the sunshine that his mind, as happens to
anyone awakening from real sleep, narrowed its awareness to
one single groove. This groove was the suffering that the dead cat
must have undergone to stamp such a ghastliness of despair upon
its physiognomy.

In all normal suffering there are certain natural laws such as
mitigate what the entity in question is enduring. When these laws
are broken an element enters that is monstrous, bestial, obscene.
John began to feel that what the First Cause had chosen to inflict
upon this cat belonged to this No-Man's-Land of outrage; and
an anger rose up within him against whatever Power it was that
was responsible for the creation of such sensitive nerves in such
a torturing world, an anger that was like a saraband of raving fury.

He felt that the cat-head was exactly sharing his feelings. Its
swollen hairless belly...its paws that resembled the claws of
a bird...the snarling ecstasy of its curse...something at once
bestial and eternal in the protest against the Firtst Cause
which it lifted up from the Brue-mud...all these things made
John aware that if, like the Pistoian in the Inferno he should
"make the fig" at the Emperor of the Universe, this cat-head
would be wholly with him.

It was while the bow-string of his malediction was still quiver-
ing that John was struck, there, leaning as he was against the
sun-warmed parapet, by a sudden rending and blinding shock.
He had been thinking about King Arthur a good deal in the
course of his recent advertising but only in a childish and very
ignorant way. He had never read the romances. But at this sec-
ond, in the blaze of Something that afterward seemed to him to
resemble what he had heard of the so-called Cosmic Rays, he
distinctly saw...literally shearing the sun-lit air with a whiteness
like milk, like snow, like birch-bark, like maiden's flesh, like chalk,
like paper, like a dead fish's eye, like Italian marble,...an object
resembling a sword, falling into the mud of the river! When it
struck the mud it disappeared. Nor was there any trace...when
John looked later...to show where it had disappeared.

Under the stress of the shock, at the moment, John lurched
sideways, scraping his hands and knees against the stonework of
the parapet. He would certainly have fallen on his side if he had
not been clutching tightly the root-handle of his hazel-stick, with
which, automatically stabbing the surface of the road as he stum-
bled, he just saved himself. What he saw at that moment cer-
tainly flashed into his brain, in one blinding, deadly shock, as
being a supernatural event. Something it was that quivered and
gleamed, as it whirled past him, and vanished in the mud of the
Brue! To the end of his life he was obstinate in maintaining that
he really saw what he felt he saw with his bodily eyes.

When Mary asked him, for he told only Mary and Mr. Evans
of this event, how it was that he knew it was Arthur's sword, he
could only say that the same shock that staggered his bodily
senses like a bolt of noon-day lightning, staggered his mental
consciousness with a rending and crashing certainty.

He whose life was now occupied with turning the whole Glas-
tonbury Legend into a mockery and a popular farce had no
reason to offer now as to how he knew what this thing was. But
that it was a definite and perhaps a dangerous sign from the
supernatural and that it was directed towards himself alone, he
never had any doubt. That of all the persons he knew, he never
told anyone about it save those two, was itself significant. His
choice of Mr. Evans as his confidant was not surprising; for the
fact that it was with Mr. Evans that he had visited Stonehenge
gave to the quaint figure of the pedantic Welshman a certain
disarming glamour.

"What was it like, John?" Mary kept asking him when, for
the fiftieth time, he described the occurrence; but all he could tell
her was that what he saw was milk-white and that it had a dusky
handle. That the handle was dark instead of bright and glittering
was certainly a peculiarity of the appearance that did not fit in
with the atmosphere of the old stories. All the authorities who
spoke of that sword indicated that its handle was shining gold.
But then these famosi fabulatores were poetical romancers; and it
was possible that a real weapon with something queer and dark
about its handle was thrown into the Brue at this spot by the
person who subsequently became known as Arthur, quite inde-
pendently of what the romancers said.

The object which John saw thrown into the Brue from Pom*
paries Bridge was undoubtedly thrown from some point in space
that lay behind his back; but it was from the appearance of the
thing itself that he staggered away and came near falling; not
from any consciousness of a supernatural presence behind him.
The first thing he did, when he saved himself from falling by
stabbing at the ground with his stick and leaning upon it till he
got his balance, was to clamber through some railings by the
roadside, climb down the road-bank and standing on the northern
tow-path of the Brue, search the river with an intense, disturbed,
bewildered curiosity. But nothing could he see except the ac-
customed rubbish! From this position he could not even see the
face of the dead cat. There was one large shiny-leaved marigold
growing down there; but its round golden flowers were all gone.
They must have been picked long ago by someone or other. He
grasped his stock tightly by its curiously moulded handle, that
handle which had grown into its shape by the mysterious chances
of underground life, and set out with rapid steps northeast fol-
lowing the course of the Brue in the direction of Meare.

Preoccupied with what had happened to him, he rejected totally
as he walked along such explanations of this startling occur-
rence as would have dispensed with the supernatural. The first
and the easiest of these explanations was that he had been the
solitary witness of the descent of a meteorite or thunderbolt. An-
other was that his protracted mental playing with all these legends
had resulted in some sort of nervous hallucination. But without
laying any stress upon Arthur or his Sword, John felt that
something had touched him from beyond the limits of the known.

As his footpath along the bank wound its wray through the low
water-meadows, with the red-tiled roof of the workmen's houses
of Northover on its right, John's mind began to he invaded by
doubts and worries about his whole life. It was as if he had been
living for the last five weeks in an enchanted dream. The heady
opiate fumes of the Glastonbury legends, even while he misused
them and abused them with deliberate irony, had obsessed him to
such a point that in all the other affairs of his life he had just
drifted. It was this mood of drifting that had been the cause of
one sharp quarrel after another that he had had with Mary.

"I'll tell Mary everything at our tea, today," he said to him-
self, as he stiffened his back and ran the end of his stick up and
down through his fingers, to make sure it was clean, "I'll tell her
that it won't make any real difference our having to wait to be
married till after Midsummer. The truth is we must wait till then.
Surely Mary will see we must! But oh, dear! Girls are so funny
in these things."

He set himself to walk faster now, following the Brue across
water-meadows that not many centuries ago must have been sub-
merged every spring--and are still submerged in floodtime--by
brackish waters from the Bristol Channel. He had crossed the
Somerset-and-Dorset railway track and had found himself ap-
proaching Lake Village Field, when he came suddenly upon a
group of children who apparently were engaged in some ex-
tremely violent quarrel. One of these children, a passionate, dark
little girl, with bare head and dirty clothes, was balancing herself
on a small landing-stage which jutted out into the river, while,
on the muddy bank beneath this wooden erection, three other
children--a boy, a girl and a much smaller child--were shouting
insults at her, and even throwing various missiles, such as dried
horses' droppings and handfuls of loose earth, picked up from
the shelving bank, which, if they missed her thin little legs, hit
very often, as John could see as he drew near, her faded and
ragged skirt.

The children on the bank had their backs turned to him and
the little girl, though her face was directed towards him seemed
too intent in defying her enemies to take any notice of his ap-
proach. Thus John, leaning on his stick and taking breath--for
he had been walking fast--had time to listen for a minute or two
very closely to what was going on before his presence made any
difference at all.

"Thee baint got no proper father, thee baint!" cried the virtu-
ous Jackie, throwing the muddy root of a last year's bulrush at
his former lieutenant. "This here robbers' band, of which I be
chief, don't want any gals in it what have no proper fathers!"

"What about thee own father, Jackie?" retorted the flushed out-
law from her point of vantage on the shaky wooden promontory.
"What about having a father what went to prison all along of his
making a nuisince of 'isself?"

The sedate Sis joined in at this point. "Thee's mother never
had no weddin' ring, and thee's father have never said, 'I thee
wed.' "

"You can't say nothin', Sis," flung back Nelly Morgan fiercely,
"when you and Bert have got neither the one nor 'tother...only
Grandmother Cole with a girt wart on her nose! Why, Bert, I
be 'shamed of 'ee. Oh, yer little fat scrub, what do 'ee mean by
throwing mud at me who's carried ‘ee so often on me back?
What do 'ee mean by‘t, yer little staring owl? Yes! You may
well run to Sis to save 'ee. yer little cry-baby! Tis to thee I be
talkin, you Baby Bunting! Aren't 'ee 'shamed of yerself?"

Bert did indeed show signs of discomfort when this fusillade
of fiery words, from so high above his head, came rattling down
like grape-shot upon him. His philosophic gusto at the contem-
plation of the Visible World had evidently not yet allowed, in
its cosmic repertoire, for female wrath when directed quite so
bitterly at himself. Like many another male philosopher he now
hid both his astonishment and his chagrin in the nearest folds of
a kindlier feminine lap. And from this refuge, it must alas! be
confessed, there shortly arose the sound of sobs.

But while the mischievous Jackie hunted about for a lump of
horses' dung that would be a better missile than any he had yet
found, the sedate Sis, over the head of the weeping Bert, flung
out the most dangerous and deadly word yet uttered. "Thee's
mother be a whore, Nelly Morgan, and thee can't deny it! Thee's
mother let Mr. Crow do it. Yes, she did! She did let Mr. Crow
do it, and all the town knows how thee be a Bastie!"

"Oh, you great coward!" cried the little Valkyrie from her
plank above their heads. She was addressing Jackie now, who
had just missed hitting one of her thin shoulders with his frag-
ment of weather-dried manure. "Oh, you great, lumping, com-
mon coward! Ye be a pretty robber captain, ye be, to join three
to one, and against a girl too! I'll tell yer Sister Sally on ye.
That's who I'll tell! And she'll larn 'ee to throw shit at anyone,
she will, and quickly too! Jackie Jones did run away, run away,
from Number One's dog"--in her genius for invective Nelly was
inspired to utter this biting reproach in the form of an impersonal
chant--"run away, run away, when there weren't no dog at all!"
The infuriated child, as she chanted her war-song, pointed her
fingers at her former leader with such wild and witchlike ferocity
that her words sounded to John's ears like an incantation. He
began to feel almost sorry for this young Boadicea's three ene-
mies, all of whom were now apparently heading for something
like complete collapse.

Jackie was indeed spluttering with indignant denials and had
grown red in the face, as, with his hands on the edge of her
platform, he proceeded to try to shake her down. The daughter
of Philip Crow finished his discomfiture, in a very summary
manner! With the electric rapidity of a born dancer she ad-
vanced one of her little untidy feet and trod viciously upon the
boy's exposed knuckles. Jackie, tumbling on the grass and licking
his injured hand, howled now like the Homeric Ares wounded by
Diomed. Berts sobs and Jackie's howls were at once punctuated
by a quick interchange of feminine artillery between Nelly and
Sis.

"I'll tell your mother on 'ee, ye nasty, ugly, dirty little bitch!"
cried the protective maternal heart of the sturdy sister. It was at
this point that Nelly began consciously to be aware of John's
presence and she glanced at him almost coquettishly, while she
proceeded to chant triumphantly, shooting out her tongue, be-
tween the strophe and anti-strophe of her triumph-song, at the
fallen Jackie,

"Sissie Jones at Sunday School,
Answered Teacher like a Fool;
Teacher said, ‘you little silly.
Shut your mouth and dilly dilly!'"

As she uttered this dithyramb over her defeated rival, the ex-
ultant little girl began to dance up and down upon the shaky
plank. It was at this moment that John came forward. He came
forward with the same sort of blush upon his twitching cheek that
Dante displayed when Virgil caught him taking a wicked pleasure
in an obscene and venomous quarrel. But he held out his arms to
lift Nelly the Conqueror down from her perch, with a surprised
sense that if these children's accusations were true, he and she
were blood-relations, both of them drawing their devilish Norman
spirit from William Crow's wife, the proud Devereux woman.

Certainly it was with the very gesture of a Devereux now that
Philip's little daughter--"Morgan Nelly" as Number One called
her--offered her hand, as soon as John placed her on her feet,
to help the fallen Jackie to arise. It was a whole psychological
drama--a drama beyond the reach of any living European pen--
when Jackie's blubbered features came in view, the knuckles of his
wounded hand pressed into his mouth and his little black eyes
darting furtively backward and forward between Joan's face
and Nelly's.

"Stop that, can't you?--you great baby--stop that now!" Thus
did Sis, with an accompanying violent shake, vent her indignation
with her successful rival upon the nearest and dearest object
of her maternal affection. Bert received this shaking with his
accustomed phlegm, and his sobs instantaneously ceased. His
round eyes fell upon John's figure and as they surveyed that ob-
ject the old insatiable gusto came back into them. Exactly as it
would have been with poor ex-Mayor Wollop, what interested
Bert most about this new human apparition was that it had put
its cap upon its head back to front! This accident had no doubt
resulted from the shock of the sword-incident at Pomparles
Bridge, but John was now fortunately saved from looking ridicu-
lous when he got into the streets again.

"Bert be telling 'ee, Mister," said Sis eagerlv, for the situation
was one that exactly lent itself to her protective-corrective
passion, "that thee's cap be put on back-to-front. You mid 'scuse
Bert for mentioning it, Mister, but Bert be one, Bert be, for
noticing things what's topsy-turvy. He do notice when Nell or
me have left our ribands at whoam or haven't got no safety pins.
He do notice when his Grandma have forgot her false teeth, or
when she's put she's best blue cap on when her wanted her com-
mon purple. He do notice his Teacher, Mister, so close and
thorough that her do punish he for 't, like as if he'd misbehaved
on school-room floor. 'Tis 'markable what Bert do notice when
people--" Her proud volubility was suddenly broken off by
Morgan Nelly, who, while Sis was talking to John, had been
whispering to Jackie. She addressed herself sternly to Sis now.

"Jackie says that tomorrow I be going to be the Captain of this
Robber Band, and he be going to be my Court-Martial. Jackie
says that you've got to be lower nor a Private, and Bert's got to
be the Band's Pack-Horse."

Sis glanced quickly at John's face as she heard this summary
bulletin from the conqueror's tent. Seeing him smile a little, she
planted her sturdy ankles firmly in the grass and bending down,
as if they had been playing at daisy-chains rather than at bandits,
she picked several of those whitish cuckoo flowers that John had
already noticed and with a certain brusque sagacity, acting as she
must have acted a thousand times with Jackie and Bert, handed
this little nosegay, along with a spray of hedge parsley, for like
all neophyte housekeepers she felt that blossoms without leaves--
the leaves of cuckoo flowers being very inadequate from this par-
ticular point of view--were in some way wanting, to this stranger
whose cap, caught so deplorably awry, was now pulled down, as
it should be, over his amused and submissive eyebrows.

"Well! Good luck to you all, and many thanks!" cried John,
making a feeble effort, almost worthy of Mr. Evans himself, to
stick this collection of sap-wet stalks into his buttonhole, "I've
got to get back to work. How is it you're not at school?"

It was Jackie who replied to this, taking his wounded knuckles
out of his mouth, "Mr. Dekker came yesterday when Teacher
were cross, and he said she ought to have more holiday; and she
said she'd like to go to Yeovil where her sweetheart be and Mr.
Dekker told she to shut up school till after Easter Monday and
she did get red as fire when he said that and when Mr. Dekker
were gone she made faces behind her hands and then she cried
behind her hands; but I did see what she were doing I did."

"And our Bert saw Teacher cry too," threw in Sis, at this
juncture, anxious that the Cole family should have its equal
share of drama.

"See Teacher cry, I did!" echoed Bert himself.

The faint uprising of a remote sympathy with this unknown
woman weeping for joy that she could go to Yeovil on Maundy
Thursday instead of Good Friday, gave place now in John's
mind to a curious sensation that he had experienced only once or
twice before in his life. He saw this little group of children, out-
lined against that ricketty landing-stage--which must have been
built in the days when there were still barges on the Brue--
under a sudden illuminated aura. He saw them as a recurrence,
a recurrence of a human group of vividly living bodies and
minds, with cuckoo flowers and hedge-parsley and dock leaves
and river-mud gathered about their forms, as if arranged there
by a celebrated artist. The badness of the children, the sweetness
and charm of the children, with these spring growths all about
them and a solitary invisible lark quivering in the blue, seemed
to carry his perturbed spirit beyond some psychic threshold,
where the whole pell-mell of the mad torrent of existence took on
a different appearance. "Good-bye and good luck!" he called out
to them as he went off.

He had hardly time, however, to reach a spot at the curve of
the river that was near to his friend Barter's airplane landing-
place--and there, across a field or two, he could see the motion-
less air-vessel--when he heard a panting breath behind him and
the sound of little running feet. He swung round and found
Morgan Nelly at his side. The child was too breathless to speak
at first, but she caught the flap of his overcoat with her hand and
kept pace with him as he walked slowly on. "Going my way.
Nelly?" he said. He had heard them call her "Nelly" in their
quarrel; but the syllables "Morgan" had escaped him.

"They tease I terrible. Mister, in school-yard," announced the
new captain of the robber band. "They call I ‘Bastie, Bastie.'
They did run after I in dinner-hour yesterday, till I bit Amy
Brown's wrist so she bled awful bad."

"They mustn't tease you, Nelly, and you mustn't bite people's
hands," murmured John helplessly, thinking to himself that if,
when Bloody Johnny got on his nerves, he could bite him, "so
he bled awful bad," it would be an immense clearing of the air.

"Red Robinson made me mother go up Wells Road one time
and ring at The Elms' front door. He told she to 'Harx' for the
bleeding son of a bitch and make 'im cough up. 'Harx'--that's the
way he talks, Mister! 'Tis London language they tell I, though
me mother says 'tisn't as King George do speak. Do you think
King George do say 'Harx' instead of 'arst,' Mister?"

"Did your mother go?" enquired the inquisitive John, post-
poning the problem of King's English till he had learned more
of this rich piece of scandal.

"Yes, she went, and I went with her," explained Morgan Nelly
eagerly, "and Emma Sly--that's one of the servants at The Elms
--gave Mother port wine and plum cake, and she gave me lime-
juice and Selective biscuits, and I did select they kind what has
sugar on 'em and 'H. P.' in pink stripes. Emma told me and
mother what 'H. P.' stands for. She said her Dad who be shepherd
for Lord P. up Mendip way did think thik 'P' stood for his mas-
ter's wone self. But Emma told me and Mother what folks as
knows knows what it really he. Do you know what it really be,
Mister? Sis Cole doesn't know, 'cos I baint 'a told she, and I
baint a-going to tell she, nor Bert either, what ‘H. P.' stand for.
You wouldn't, would you, Mister? Ignorant, common, ordinary
kids, like what they be!"

"Did your mother ask to see Mr. Crow?" enquired the in-
satiable John.

"She did say summat about it," replied Morgan Nelly, "but
she never called 'un no names, as ‘bleeding son of a bitch' and
such like; and she just sat down again, by kitchen-fire and went
on drinking thik wine and eating thik cake, when Emma Sly said
her master had company that evening."

"I'll talk to a cousin of mine who's in town over the holiday,"
pronounced John, thinking in his mind of Dave Spear. "He knows
this chap Robinson well, and I'll tell him to make the fellow
stop worrying your mother. Did she say anything to this servant
about ‘coughing up' and so forth?"

"Mother were so thick with Emma Sly when we earned away,"
replied Morgan Nelly, "that she hadn't the tongue-- oh, there's
Betsy got loose and Number One running after she!"

The diplomatic John cast his eyes over Lake Village Field to-
wards Backwear Hut and there, sure enough, was the distracted
figure of Abel Twig, looking, for all the world, like the old man
in Mother Goose who had lost his crooked sixpence. Mr. Twig
was frantically limping after the mischievous animal, who was
tossing up her heels and leaping into the air as she evaded him,
in a manner more worthy of a frolicsome heifer than a calm,
mature giver of sacred milk.

"He aint got no girt dog, really and truly," Morgan Nelly in-
formed her new friend. "Sis thinks he have, and Bert do dream
he have. But he hasn't, has he, Mister?"

All the way back to his little office John's thoughts kept hover-
ing around that startling episode of the milk-white sword with
the dark handle. "I don't care what they do; I don't care what
signs and omens they fling down; I don't care how much I in-
furiate them. They stopped those old Danes at Havyatt, but by
God! they shan't stop me! I'm going to blow this whole unhealthy
business sky-high. And I'm going to do it through this Pageant
of Geard's!"

In the depths of John's consciousness something very lonely
and very cold began to congeal itself into a little, hard, round
stone. "I am myself," he thought, "I am myself alone." His
mood, as he advanced down that narrow little cobble-stone road
called Dyehouse Lane, towards the station, became, for some
reason more and more anti-social and more and more inhuman.
Miss Drew would have said he showed himself to himself at that
moment, as the lecherous, cold-blooded, slippery, heartless,
treacherous reptile that he was! "Mary belongs to me," he
thought. "I'm the only man who'll ever suit her. She couldn't let
Tom touch her finger! I know her. And the feeling I get from
making love to her is far beyond anything I could ever get from
any other human being. But I won't let Mary think she can rule
my whole life. I'm not one to stand that kind of thing. The truth
is that though I like making love to her, in my own way, I'm not
at all sure that I would like sleeping with her every night! She's
an absolute necessity to me. I know that. But there's something
about giving up my liberty in that room that worries me. And
Tom too--I like to have Tom all to myself! What I really am is
a hard, round stone defying the whole universe. And I can defy
it, and get what I want out of it too! It's a lovely feeling to feel
absolutely alone, watching everything from outside, uncom-
mitted to anything. Why should I accept the common view that
you have to 'love' other people? Mary belongs to me; but some-
times I wonder whether I 'love' even Mary. I certainly don't
'love' myself! I'm a hard, round, glass ball, that is a mirror of
everything, but that has a secret landscape of its own in the
centre of it. O great Stones of Stonehenge, you are the only gods
for me!"

He caught sight of a little round, light-coloured pebble at that
moment half-embedded in the rough cement wall of an old shed
that abutted upon the narrow footpath of Dyehouse Lane. He
stopped and ran the tips of his fingers over this little object. It
had once evidently been a unit, a portion, of some anonymous
heap of pebbles taken from a sea-bank, to be used, as it was used
here--for there were others like it embedded not far off--with
mortar and gravel in building inexpensive walls. It was, however,
very unusual to find such pebbles used in this way in Glaston-
bury, and this was the first in the town that John had set eyes
upon. The afternoon sun shone bright and warm upon the shed
wall, as John touched this small, round stone, and in a yard be-
hind the building some unseen tame pigeons began making a low,
sweet, unctuous cooing full of sensual contentment. But the touch
of the pebble carried John's mind far away from this peaceful
spot. A dark, wild, atavistic sea-spirit stirred within him, a spirit
that reinforced and nourished afresh all the pride of his inmost
being. "This morbid religion of renouncement, of penance, of
occult purgations and transformations"--so his reckless thoughts
ran on--"I'll never yield to this betrayal of life! If I am weak
and nervous and timid, I'll win by cunning. And I won't compete
either! I'll steer my life in a region of values totally unknown to
any of them! I won't fight them on their terms. But I'll conquer
them all the same! I'll become air, water, fire. I'll flow through
their souls. I'll flow into their inmost being. I'll possess them
without being possessed by them!" He scrutinised the pebble still
more closely. It was not exactly round; it was hard to tell its
precise shape, because it was so firmly embedded in the mortar.
It was of a dull pinkish colour. Where did it come from? From
Chesil Beach? John had never seen either of the two coastlines
nearest to Glastonbury, but he knew vaguely that the southern
coast was steep and rocky, while the shores of the Bristol Channel
were flat expanses of tidal mud. That was all he knew. But never
mind where it came from! As he stared at this hard opaque ob-
ject an indescribable rush of nervous maliciousness and vehement
destructiveness coursed through his veins. Oh, it would please
him, oh, it would satisfy him, if a great wild salt wave coming
out of the dark heathen sea, were to sweep over this whole morbid
place and wash the earth clean of all these phantasms!

He had now reached the railroad crossing, but he found the
gates closed. An interminable luggage train had to jerk, and
thud, and rattle, and groan itself by, before those gates would
open. He allowed his eyes to wander with a sudden penetrating
attention--an almost savage attention--over each one of these
lumbering goods trucks as they clattered and clanged past him.
"Real!" he muttered viciously. "That's what you think you are!
Real and true...the only undoubted fact. A luggage train. taking
Philip's dyes down to Exeter. In old days it would have been a
Roman convoy taking tin to the coast from the Mendips, I ex-
pect that damned Sword was really made of tin...tin swords! Tin
shields! Tin souls!" Clutching one of the bars of the railroad
gate and shaking it, he now relinquished all restraint and burst
into a childish doggerel:--In my Midsummer Pageant I'll mock
the Grail; mock the Grail; mock the Grail; in my Midsummer
Pageant I'll mock the Grail; for Arthur's sword is tin!" When
the train had passed at last and the gates were opened he
walked very slowly over the dusty, sunny tracks, thinking, think'
ing, thinking. John's character had altered considerably, and he
had begun to realise it himself during these weeks of working
with Mr. Geard. A certain chaotic tendency to drift in him--the
drifting of the congenital tramp and the recklessness of the anti-
social adventurer--had tightened and hardened into a kind of
psychic intensity of revolt, of revolt against all the gregarious
traditions of the human crowd. "There must be destruction," he
said to himself, as he entered the Great Western station-yard, "be-
fore any fresh wind from the gods can put new life into a place
like this!" So he said to himself in the fierce strength which the
pebble from Chesil Beach had poured into his heart; but when
he put his hand on the handle of his little office door there came
filtering up to the surface of his mind the old chilly sediment of
sceptical contempt. "Let these things of gilded vapour," he
thought, "these things of tinsel and tin have their day! Let the
savage opposites of them have their day too. They are all dreams,
all dreams within dreams, and the underlying reality beneath
them is something completely different from them all."



MAUNDY THURSDAY



THE PROCESSES OF ALL CREATIVE FORCE ARE COMPLICATED,
tortuous and arbitrary. They are also infinitely various. The
simple notion of one single vital urge displaying itself in spon-
taneous generation from inorganic matter and then thrusting
forth, in its chemical transmutations, all the astounding forms of
evolutionary life, does not cover one-half of the dark continents
of real creation. None knoweth the beginning of things; but un-
der the anarchy of present existence are galaxies of warring
minds; and the immense future depends upon the wills of multi-
tudinous hosts of minds. But not, alas! upon well-meaning,
tender, indulgent, generous, forgiving, considerate, man-loving
minds! The mind of the First Cause was twofold, self -contradic-
tory, divided against itself. The multifarious minds that stir up
the chemistry of matter today are all descended from the First
Cause and share its dualistic nature, its mingling of abominable
cruelty with magnanimous consideration. Many of these minds
have far more simple goodness in them, more simple pity, more
simple tenderness, than the double-edged mind of the First Cause;
but none are reliable, none can be trusted. While none of them
are entirely evil, none are entirely good. There is no creative
energy divorced from some level either high or low of what we
call consciousness; and there is no consciousness, whether of
demiurge, demon, angel, elf, elemental, planetary spirit, demi-
god, wraith, phantasm, sun, moon, earth, or star, which is not
composed of both good and evil.

It was about seven o'clock in the evening of this same Maundy
Thursday, when John had the vision--if such it were--of Arthur's
sword at Pomparles Bridge, that a company of cheerful human
beings were gathered together, snug and warm, full of chittering
gossip, full of lively hummings and buzzings of released roguery,
in the kitchen and scullery and museum of Glastonbury Vicarage.
Mat Dekker's high-church doctrines had always been of a nature
to admit large, generous, and even eccentric undertakings; and
on this eve of the anniversary of his Man-God's cruel death he
had seen fit to give to the inner circle of his parishioners what
he was pleased to denominate as the choir-supper. This name was
absurdly inappropriate; for most of the best actual singers in
St. John's Church were uninvited to this homely and secular feast.
They were uninvited because they would have refused to come.
They were of the type of Anglican piety that regards fasting
rather than feasting as appropriate to the eve of the Crucifixion.
Mat Dekker, although fully as Catholic in his dogmas as his most
austere parishioner, had the natural easy-going earthiness of an
old-fashioned French cure. There was something in the deepest
part of his spirit that the word "homely" could alone describe.
He loved little, ordinary, negligible things: little, ordinary events,
little, casual objects in Nature. This choir-supper on the eve of
Good Friday would not interfere with the humble devotion with
which he would labour, patiently and solemnly, through the long
invocations and supplications of the morrow's services; but there
was something about it that peculiarly satisfied Mat Dekker's
whole personality. He took a profound, but perhaps quite uncon-
scious delight in the various degrees of glowing idiosyncrasy
which illuminated the physiognomies of his guests. It was indeed
a scene worthy of Teniers or Jan Steen or Breughel, this choir-
supper at Glastonbury Vicarage. The centre of it was the kitchen,
where Penny Pitches, standing at her famous and ancient stove,
played the part of the arch-sorceress of the occasion. On an old
nursery chair, with a low wicker seat, was seated, next to the
stove, the portly form of Mr. Weatherwax. The forehead of Mr.
Weatherwax shone with amiability and heat. He had found a
corner of the great stove--which was really like a world in itself
--where he could deposit his glass of brandy. His enormous face
at this low level--and exposed to periodic emissions of extreme
heat from the oven--looked larger than human there. He looked
like a colossal gnome or goblin present at the cooking of an
ogre's meal. Indeed when Penny placed a special morsel from
some dainty dish upon a plate on his lap he looked, it must be
confessed, like the ogre himself. Moving about with the dishes in
support of Penny was quite a phalanx of serving-maids, all of
them with their Sunday clothes on, but covered up in big loose
overalls. Sally Jones was here and Tossie Stickles. Lily and Louie
Rogers were here. Even the redoubtable Emma Sly, as an especial
honour to Mr. Dekker, who was her favourite official in the town,
was among these amateur and yet these professional ministrants.

Let no humorous adept in the whimsicalities of human manners
think that there were any fewer exquisite morsels of class distinc-
tion, of character distinction, of distinction in social prestige, in
this group of Glastonbury servants, than there would be when
Tilly Crow, up at The Elms, gave her next grand tea-party to
their mistresses. Emma, of course, was the grande dame of the
occasion. Lily and Louie did their utmost to monopolise her at-
tention; but this, by reason of Emma's long training in the diplo-
macy of parties, proved quite an impossible task. The little
elderly woman was the only one of the servants there whose dress
would have been appropriate if they had all been suddenly sum-
moned to carry tea-trays into the drawing-room. And yet it was
not her ordinary service-dress. Its quietness and modesty retained
somewhere about it--perhaps in a tiny piece of dark-blue ribbon
round Emma's neck--the impression that it was put on to do
especial honour to somebody or something outside the routine of
her diurnal labours. That touch of blue round Emma's neck was
a delicate intimation that the great professional was an amateur
that night. It had doubtless been put on partly in honour of tomor-
row's being Good Friday and partly in honour of Mat Dekker 's
being Emma's Vicar. The roguish blue eyes of Sally Jones were
always flinging furtive glances of mischievous girlish understand-
ing into the soft, dark-brown, lethargic eyes, constantly growing
misty with tender, self-conscious sentiment when her friend teased
her about Mr. Barter, of Tossie Stickles. Tossie was undoubtedly
the favourite amateur waitress, on this occasion, with the lively
crowd of guests assembled round the big trestle-tables set up in
the museum. Her plump figure, irradiated by her love for her
gentleman-seducer, threw about her, wherever she went, a warm,
amorous cloud of magnetic attraction; while her ready jests, as
she carried the rabbit pasties and the pigeon pies and the great
bowls of Irish stew--which were Penny's particular achievement
and which filled the museum with a fragrant onion-heavy steam--
from one to the other of the men and women seated round the
table, were continually starting fresh guffaws of laughter and
causing various old gossips to nudge each other and wink as she
pushed her way among them.

The candles on the chimney-piece, as well as on the table,
threw over all these faces a soft yellow glow that seemed to draw
out something peculiarly individual from their folds and creases
and wrinkles and heavy meaningless surfaces of flesh, all of which
in daylight might have been inexpressive and insignificant. Every
now and then Mat Dekker's eyes wandered to the old-fashioned
pictures of his father and mother on the mantelpiece and to the
faded, wistful picture of Sam's mother. These faces did not seem
as alien to the scene that was going on as one would have sus-
pected. But then all these Vicarage guests, however ugly and
deformed, possessed a certain winnowed quality of sensitiveness
which had come to them through their ancestors--common or
gentle--down the long centuries of Glastonbury's life. Nowhere
else indeed in the town that night--certainly not at the Pilgrims'
Inn and not even in St. Michael's Inn--was there assembled such
a characteristic group of Glastonbury people.

This accounted for the fact that towards the roof of Mat Dek-
ker's house, through the hushed envelope of the earth's moonlit
atmosphere, all manner of subhuman and superhuman influences
were directed. Cold, mute, silent in the moonlight rose the Tower
Arch of the ruined Abbey. From the fluted columns, from the
foliated capitals, from the broken stone bases in the hushed grass,
indestructible emanations of the wild liturgical calls of the old
tune--"Save us from Eternal Death! Save us from Eternal
Death!"--that these carved stones had known, vibrated forth over
the smooth lawns, over the treetops, and then, floating away upon
the moonlight, were attracted, as if by a lodestone composed of
living souls, down into that hot, noisy, steamy, candlelighted room.
"Save us from Eternal Death! Save us from Eternal Death!" This
chant was wailed faintly above them all in that place, drifting
through the high trees of King Edgar's lawn, from those myriads
of dead, mediaeval throats! And mingled with this faint wailing, of
which it was unlikely enough that any one among these revellers
would catch the least echo, came a vast shadowy Image. Between
the moonlight and the Vicarage roof it came, the Image of the
Man-God of the West, the Image of the Being whose death by tor-
ture was to be celebrated that next day. It was as if this Image,
with those unspeakable eye-sockets wherein quivered the deaih-
cries of all the victims of the cruelty of Man and the cruelty of
Life and the cruelty of the First Cause, had been itself created by
the unpardonable suffering of all sentient nerves from the zenith
to the nadir of the physical universe. It brought with it through
that moonlit night, as it floated over the treetops, a terrible smell
of pain; a smell that was sweet as burning sticks of cinnamon, a
smell that was bitter as burning branches of laurel, a smell as
of a sponge soaked in the hyssop of a dead sea of anguish! But
as none in that room noticed that cry above the roof--"Save us
from Eternal Death!"--none noticed that floating Image, none
smelt that indescribable smell. In fact, the good, humble natu-
ralist-priest, who was the entertainer of this noisy gathering and
who, in the absence, for the next ten or eleven hours, of his
enemy the sun-god, was so sturdily radiating around him his high'
spirits that everyone was conscious of some especial reassurance,
decided now, while Emma--for that was her task--was carrying
round numerous little cups of coffee to the more epicurean of
the guests, that it would be a good thing to have a little music.

His first thought was of Tossie Stickles who possessed a man-
dolin upon which she often played various little tunes. Tossie
had been so gay and lively during the first part of the evening
that it was a shock to the good host when he learned from Sally
Jones, whose blue eyes as she came to confess it were themselves
blubbered with crying, that Tossie had been "taken funny-like,"
and been carried upstairs "to rest."

Mr. Dekker's ruddy countenance lost its complacency and an
extremely anxious frown gathered about his eyes. Tossie Stickles
would never be "taken funny" at choir-supper if there weren't
something seriously amiss. "That girl's in trouble," he said to
himself, "as sure as I'm a priest.

"Listen, Sally," he said gravely, "tell Tossie from me, when
you're alone with her, that I'm not angry with her and I'll talk
to her before she goes." He still kept the young woman by his
side with a penetrating stare from beneath his bushy eyebrows;
but though he had spoken to her in a low whisper their colloquy
had not passed unobserved. Several of the older women had
stopped sipping their coffee and were watching them intently.
"Run off to her now, Sal; there's a good girl; and stay with her,
will you? And pack all the others out of the room, won't you?' 5

But as soon as the girl had left the room he shut his eyes tight
and rubbed his face with the palms of his hands, uttering a faint
husky sound, that was not exactly a groan, but which was near a
groan. When he took his fingers away he sighed heavily, drawing
up this long breath from the depths of his broad chest, as if it
had been a bucket of water out of a garden well.

Sam Dekker, who had been all this while silently and gravely
carving a large joint of hot bacon--fragrant slices of which he
placed upon the edges of various people's plates, already well-
filled, while Crummie, seated beside him, added to the same
plates certain quotas of pickled walnuts and roast chestnuts--
was the only person at the long table who received the real sig-
nificance of this deep sigh of his father's. He caught his father's
eye as soon as he could. "Aren't we going to have any music.
Father?" he said. Mat Dekker regarded his son tenderly from the
end of the table and with an affectionate narrowing of his great
eyebrowrs answered that he had just sent their mandolin-player
on a mission that he feared would prevent her from performing.
"But if you think it would be all right, Sam, my boy, we could
get old Weatherwax in from the kitchen to sing us one of his
catches. I suppose it would be no use trying to persuade Miss
Geard"--he smiled at Crummie as he spoke--"to help us out
with a song or anything?"

This word from the head of the table attracted the general at-
tention to poor Crummie--who had already taken a certain risk
of publicity by assenting to Sam's courteous request that she
should sit by his side--and now she could not stop herself
from blushing scarlet. It was one of the most charming signs of
Crummie's essential innocence, amid all her flirtations, that when
she was embarrassed she got as red as a little girl of ten.

"I'm afraid I couldn't possibly--Mr. Dekker; oh, no, I
couldn't possibly," Crummie murmured. "There! a few more
pickles for this one, Lily. Who is it? Oh, Jackie Cole! Yes, I'm
sure Jackie likes pickles"; and the girl did her best to distract
the public attention away from herself,

"Perhaps you wouldn't mind, Louie," said Mat Dekker, "ask-
ing Weatherwax to come in and give us a song. He'll do it if a
pretty girl like you asks him." This remark was greeted with guf-
faws of laughter from many in the company; for the goatish
disposition of the Vicarage gardener had become a popular by-
word. The silence following Louie's exit was now interrupted by
the opening of the kitchen door at the end of the passage. From
that portion of the room came a hubbub of voices, Penny's witch-
like tones rising above the rest and mounting up in shrill spirals
of sound above the murmuring growls of Mr. Weatherwax. The
old rogue hesitated not to precede Louie into the museum--Louie
following after him with an expression of self-conscious pride,
as if he'd been a puppet whose strings she was pulling from
behind.

Sam, who had cut by now the last slice of bacon that anyone
could possibly call for, turned to Crummie and whispered in the
girl's ear, "Isn't that just like my father? He knows perfectly
well that the old villain will shock half the people here and
yet he persists in lugging him out from where he's as happy
as a cricket, and where Penny's there to look after him."

Crummie expressed the complete identity of her opinions with
those just expressed. Her eyes lingered for a moment, clinging
timidly to Sam's, like a goldfinch to a thistle-head, and then,
dropping her soft eyelashes till they nearly rested upon her
cheek, she looked down at her hands which were clasped very
tight upon her lap. She began wondering if there would be any
possible chance that he might offer to take her home that night.
None of her family was here. She prayed to God that there might
be thunder and lightning, so that it would seem a monstrous thing
for her to have to go alone! How lucky that Sally Jones lived
in the opposite direction and that there was indeed no one here
who came from her end of the town! "If he only thinks of it, or
if his father thinks of it I believe he will!" But she had no sooner
begun to imagine what it would be like walking in the darkness
at Sam's side or clinging to his arm amid terrific claps of thunder,
than she was seized with a fit of shivering; not violent shivering
but a constant recurrence of that sensation of cold shivering
which is described as "a goose walking over your grave." Crum-
mie became afraid lest Sam would notice that this queer irresis-
tible shudder kept running through her body. To herself it
seemed so terribly apparent that she was intensely grateful to
old Weatherwax for not waiting to be seated but commencing
his ditty from the middle of the floor between the fireplace and
the table. There was a really intense stillness round that candle-
lit disordered table covered with half-empty cups and wine glasses
and with orange skins and nut shells as the great perspiring coun-
tenance of the satyrish gardener composed itself into what he felt
to be his singing expression. Mr. Weatherwax's singing expression
was as a matter of fact little short of maudlin. What might be
called a radiant imbecility beamed from that great face, the eyes
of which were tightly closed.

In the silence that awaited his first note, Sam Dekker, whose
ears were as sharp as the ears of a fox, caught distinctly the
sound, from some room on the landing above, of a low-pitched
miserable weeping. Sam had been all that evening aware of
many things that had been unnoticed even by his father. He alone
among them all had not been oblivious of that insubstantial
shadow forming in the moonlight, melting away in the moon-
light, and then reshaping itself there; swaying and hovering above
the Glastonbury roofs, in vaporous convulsed movements, as if
the atmosphere of that night contained an element that could
gather itself up, condense itself, solidify itself, and take the form
of the beams of a vast cross upon which that shadowy figure was
hung. But Sam's consciousness of this vaporous shadow, twisting
and turning in pain up there, now began to be blent and con-
fused in his mind with a definite human suffering that was going
on, below the roof of the Vicarage but above the ceiling of the
museum. Old Weatherwax's rumbling bass voice singing the fol-
lowing stave seemed to his ears to be a fit symbol of the world's
attitude to both these griefs.

"The Brewer, the Malster, the Miller and I
Had a heifer, had a filly, had a Ding-Dong;
When Daffadowndillies look up at the sky;
Pass along boys! Pass along!

"The Brewer, the Malster. the Miller and I
Lost a heifer, lost a filly, lost a Ding-Dong:
When oak-leaves do fall and when swallows do fly;
Pass along boys! Pass along!

"The Brewer, the Malster, the Miller and me
Found a heifer, found a filly, found a Ding-Dong;
They weren't the same pretties, but wdiat's that to we?
Pass along boys! Pass along!

"The Brewer, the Malster, the Miller and I
Left a heifer, left a filly, left a Ding-Dong;
Down in a grassy green grave for to lie; ?
Pass along boys! Pass along!"

Many of the older men present seemed to know this ditty well.
They must have often heard the old man humming it in the bar
of St. Michael's Inn. Several voices therefore joined in that rather
brutal chorus of "Pass along, boys! Pass along!"

Mat Dekker, who himself was so congenitally ignorant of music
that he could not distinguish "God Save the King" from "The
British Grenadiers," kept swaying his rugged grey head from
side to side, not retaining any sort of time, but with a general
idea of helping matters forward by this token. Crummie kept a
sly, sideways watch upon Sam's face; and when she saw that
he had begun to work the muscles of his chin up and down, and
to lower his head over his plate and over the mutilated joint of
bacon in front of him, she too allowed her expression to assume
an air of weary melancholy; and instead of looking at old Wea-
therwax she looked with tender sympathy at the pathetically
wagging head of the master of the house at the end of the table.
The close of the gardener's song was greeted with resounding
applause. "Hen-cor! Hen-cor!" screamed Mrs. Robinson in a
shrill voice. "Give us another, Mister!" cried the Nietzschean
young man from Wollop's. Old Weatherwax cleared his throat,
passed his hand over his brow, straddled his gaitered legs more
widely, planted his leather boots more firmly, turned his head to
wink at the square form of Penny Pitches which was now block-
ing up the door into the passage, shut his eyes tightly once more,
lifted his chin a little, and began:--

"With backside and so 'gainst they bars, Peggee,
With backside and so ‘gainst they bars.
With a flagon o' Zomerset ale in me hand.
There baint none as merry as we in the land,
Beneath they twinklin' stars, Peggee,
Beneath they twinklin' stars.
Hips and haws: and up and down dale!
And the Devil may fill the wold ooman's pail!
"With a doxy like thee on me knees, Peggee,

With a doxy like thee on me knees
And his Lordship's plumpest bird i' me pot,
And a Sedgemoor-peat-fire to baste 'un hot,
There be luck in the barrel's lees, Peggee,
There be luck in the barrel's lees.
Hips and haws, and up and down dale!
And the Devil may fill the wold 'ooman's pail! 5 '

Like the crafty comedian that he was, Isaac Weatherwax paused
at the end of this second verse in order to enjoy to the full the
exquisite savour of rich response to which he knew himself entitled.

It was at this point that Sam, under cover of the beating of
heels on the ground, the knocking of knife-handles on the table,
the clapping of hands, the well-satisfied chuckles, the boisterous
"bravos" and "hear-hears," got up from Crummie's side and be-
gan making his way to his father's end of the table. Crummie
followed him with a gaze of intense concern; but she discreetly
kept her place, and indeed moved up a little closer to Grand-
mother Cole, whose seat was on the further edge of Sam's empty
place. She saw him ask some question of his father and caught
a surprised look on the older man's face. This look was followed,
however, by a grave nod, as if he said--"Do what you please, but
I cannot see any good that can come of it!"

Sam paused at the top of the stairs to ascertain from which
of the rooms that sound of crying proceeded--had his father let
them take the girl into his mother's room, the one he always
kept unused?--and, as he stood there listening, he became con-
scious once more, as he had been intermittently conscious all
that night, of that vast, outraged shadow, hovering there in the
moonlight above the roofs of the town. He also became conscious
-- as if it were the executioners themselves, at that official assassi-
nation, bawling out some bawdy ditty from the Suburra of Rome--
of the thick-throated gardener's finale:--

"There be Gammer Death at the sill, Peggee!
There be Gammer Death at the sill!
And the Lord, his wone self, be a-hanging for we;
And Leviathan be coming up out of the sea;
And Behemoth over the hill, Peggee,
And Behemoth over the hill !
Hips and haws, and up and down dale;
But the Devil may have we for wold 'ooman's pail!"

No, it was not from his mother's room; it was from the spare-
room that the sound was coming. It was not the sound of cry-
ing now, either; it was the sound of several voices, some of them
raised quite high. He strode down the passage, knocked sharply
at the spare-room door and entered without awaiting a reply.

Tossie Stickles was lying on the great four-poster bed under
the curtained canopy. She had not disturbed the embroidered
counterpane. She had not disturbed the carefully folded ends
of the curtains whose fringes, matching the valances that touched
the floor, lay at the outer edges of the two pillows. This bed had
come from their ancestral home in the Quantocks. William of
Orange had been one of those who had slept under that canopy.
Perhaps that wise and indulgent ruler had been, in his hour,
as careful as Tossie herself not to disturb those elegantly folded
fringes.

"Mr. Dekker said as ye was all to clear out and leave I with
'er and none body else!" was what Sam heard Sally Jones saying
as he opened the door. Sally's blue eyes were flashing with indig-
nation on behalf of her friend; but standing immovably before
her, not budging an inch, was--or had been until Sam entered--
the slender and virginal figure of Lily Rogers. Lily's melancholy
gusto for romantic situations, her almost maniacal penchant for
seduced maidens, as long as their seducers belonged to the class
known as gentlefolk, were emotions that had been satisfied this
evening as they had never been satisfied in all Lily's conscious
life. The fact that the general gossip of the town pointed its finger
at Mr. Barter as the Villain in the case was a coincidence that
heightened Lily's excitement to fever-pitch. She herself had been
kissed more than once by the dissolute East Anglian: and it had
been much more the propinquity of Louie--who also liked him
--than any ice-cold resistance in herself that had kept her rela-
tions with this gentleman at such a discreet point.

Sam was not by any means a virtuoso in the delicate entangle-
ments of female quarrels, so that all he did at this moment was
to continue holding the door wide open as if he took for granted
that Lily would retire. But Lily--who had known "young Master
Sam" a good many years and was several years older than lie
was--showed no sign of retiring. "Penny thought I'd better come
up to see " she began. But Sam cut her short. "My father
told me to amuse these young ladies till he could leave the table."
he said. "I wish you'd tell Penny, Lily, not to forget those boxes
of sweets that I bought for dessert. Please run down now and
tell her--there's a good girl!"

Lily cast a final gloating look at the youthful sufferer stretched
out on William the Third's bed, a look that was replied to by a
glare of fury from the blubbered face and brown eyes of Tossie.
She then gave her graceful head a delicate little toss and went off.
Sam came straight over and sat down on the edge of the bed,
motioning to Sally to subside into a stately Louis Quatorze chair,
whose gilded arms and embroidered roses had hitherto kept this
slum-born niece of Number Two at a respectful distance. "Don't
'ee cry about it, little girl," he said tenderly, laying his hand on
one of the plump knees of the prostrate victim of East Anglian
incontinence. "Dad'll be up to see you soon. Won't he, Sally?
And as long as I've known Dad's ways, and that's as long as I've
known the difference between girls and boys, I've never known
him not to make everything easy for anyone who's in your
trouble."

"I be 'shamed to look 'ee in the face, Mr. Dekker, and that's
the truth and Sal do know it. I never thought 'twould come out
about me at choir-supper, making a reproach to all present and
the singing and speeching scarce begun and all. I never thought
'twould be like it be or I never would " And the corners of

Tossie's mouth dropped into the threat of another burst of
crying.

" 'Twere Lily what upset she, Master Sam/' threw in Sally
spitefully. "Her had stopped yallering and were nigh sweet-
asleep, when Penny and Lily came in. Emma Sly sent 'em all
away, and told I to go and tell the Master; but Lily Rogers, she
come hack again, soon as Emma's back were turned; and 'twas
more than Toss could bide, being as she be, to see thik white-
faced ninny starin' at she out of her girt owl-eyes."

"Don't you cry, kid," said Sam, quietly patting the plump
hands which were now folded in the very style of one of Greuze's
ambiguous Innocents, "don't cry, there's a brave girl! Dad'll do
everything for you. And what's more he'll not let Miss Fell or
Miss Drew or Lily Rogers, or anyone else, say one single nasty
thing about you."

"Toss do say what worries she worst nor any think, be lest your
Dad want she to tell on the gent she's kept company with. Be I
right, Tossie; or baint I right?"

Tossie snatched her hands away from under Sam's and covered
her face. "I won't tell a thing...not if I goes to prison for
it! I won't! I won't! I won't!" The girl flung out these words so
passionately that both Sam and Sally looked nervously at the
door.

"That's all right, little one," said the former soothingly. "Dad
doesn't believe in telling tales."

"He ain't so rich as they all say he be! He baint looked after
at all. He baint got no girl to be nice to he, 'eept me--and
now he'll have no one, he'll have no one...never no more...
when I be in workhouse!" The bitter crying that had disturbed
Sam's peace in the room below began again now, under those
white, short, plump fingers.

"Listen, Tossie Stickles, listen to what I say," quoth Sam
sternly. "Take your hands from your face and stop that now!
Do you hear? Stop that now, and listen to me!"

Sally Jones was so astonished at this unexpected tone of
severity that she found the courage to lay her sticky fingers on
the gilded arms of her Louis Quatorze chair as she leaned for-
ward. Tossie permitted Sam to remove her hands from her face
and swallowed down her sobs.

"That's right," he said. "Now listen. No one's going to put
you in the workhouse. No one's going to separate you from your
friend. Dad's not one for forcing people to marry each other
when they don't want to, though! You must get that clearly into
your head. He'll ask Miss Crow to keep you just as you are; and
you can go to the hospital here when your time comes; and then
well see what's to be done."

"I don't want to go to no horse-pital!" wailed Tossie, begin-
ning to cry again.

"Well! You don't have to...yet...child," Sam responded with some-
thing like a faint smile. "You're going to be all right, anyhow. No
one's going to say a word; and you must go on being a good, hard-
working girl at Miss Crow's, like you've always been."

"What will I tell Auntie, out to Greylands?" murmured the
figure on the big bed.

"She needn't tell her auntie nothink, Sir, need she?" threw in
the considerate Sally.

But the problem of "Auntie, out to Greylands" was at that
moment a little too complicated for Sam's wits. "Plenty of time,
Tossie, plenty of time for all such matters," was all he could
say. "And now I must go down; and Sally shall stay with you.
You feel much better now, don't you?" He rose to his feet and
turned to the girl in the gilded chair. "You can lock the door if
you like, Sally, and not open it till my father comes up. Good-
bye, Tossie. Everything's going to be all right."

It was nine o'clock when Sam went back to the museum and
he found the company grown much more lively than it was when
he left the scene. The extreme heat of the room, the guttering of
so many candles, the mingling of so many steamy and unctuous
smells, the loud boisterousness of the voices, all combined to
make him feel a little sick in his stomach. Instead of returning,
therefore, to Crummie's side, he went straight up to his father.
"I hate to desert you, Dad," he whispered, "but I must get out
for a breath of air. I left Sally to look after Tossie and told
her to lock the door till you came. They've been bullying her
already. It's that chap Barter, I suppose. But it's only beginning--
I don't know! She's a nice little thing, but very simple--terribly
simple. But he's a fairly decent chap. He won't marry her, of
course; but he'll fork up. He won't run away."

"You do look white, me boy," responded Mat Dekker with
much concern. "Here--drink a drop of this! Emma rescued it
for me from old Weathenvax. This beer and this port together
are enough to upset anyone. This is my father's stuff." And he
handed his son a wine glass of richly fragrant, neat brandy.

Sam drank off about half of what his father had offered him.
"Finish it yourself, Dad," he murmured affectionately. "It'll be
our loving cup. I'll go out for a bit now. I'll be all right. Louie
and Lily are going to stay to help Penny, aren't they? Yes, I
thought so. Well, I'll be back when the decks are clear, Dad.
Don't worry." He left the room without a thought of Crummie. In
his haste to escape he did not give her so much as a nod.

The girl watched him through the half-open door putting on
his overcoat. Her soft cheeks were tightly drawn, her white teeth
were biting her underlip; her large eyes were wild and dry and
miserable. This was the end of her chance that he might take
her home! Where was he going? On what errand had his father
sent him? She had watched their conversation just now and had
not missed their affectionate look when they pledged each other
in the same cup. Probably Mat Dekker had sent him to fetch the
doctor to see Tossie Stickles! Crummie had heard of Tossie's
fainting-fit. Indeed she had listened on all sides to many unsym-
pathetic explanations of that event. And where was their own
Sally? She must be upstairs with the sick girl. Oh, what a difficult
world it was! What a world of harsh, stabbing, scraping, jarring
events; when everything could be so lovely!

When Sam opened the front door without a thought of his sup-
per companion and walked quickly down the moonlit drive, not
a breath of air was stirring. Delicate fragrances rose and sank
around him as if they had been aroused and as if they had been
suppressed by their own mysterious volition. There were two
big lilac bushes and several clumps of white peonies on the edge
of the dew-wet grass; and near the drive gate was an ancient red-
blossoming hawthorn tree. There must have been scents from all
these upon the air; but what Sam felt in his troubled fancy was
that the tormented body of his Redeemer Himself, bathed, in its
nakedness and its blood, by the waves of the cool moonlight,
was diffusing this almost mortal sweetness through the atmos-
phere of the night. Once out in the road this fancy of his took to
itself a more intimate aspect. He began to feel as if this tre-
mendous shadow over Glastonbury of the martyred God-Man were
calling upon him to fulfil some purpose, to make some decision.
He crossed the road to the base of that high wall of the Abbey
Grounds over which hung the tall elm trees that from his earliest
childhood had been associated with certain turning-points of his
life. He turned to the left now and walking sometimes in the
roadway, and sometimes on the uneven grass under the walk he
followed the outskirts of Miss Drew's garden until he reached the
entrance to Abbey House. In his mind he thought now: "I'll go
as far as Tithe Barn and then swing round to the right, where
there are those open fields on the east side of Bere Lane." But
just at this point he heard several footsteps and voices behind
him and he lessened his pace to let these unknown persons pass.

While so large a group of the respectable proletariat of Glas-
tonbury was listening to the rumbling bass tones of Isaac Weather-
wax, John Crow was making love to Mary Crow in his snug room
in Northload Street.

Panting hard and fast, in an interval of his absorbed and
vicious love-making, while the girl, with dishevelled hair and
rumpled garments, leaned back with closed eyes in his leather
arm-chair, John Crow opened the window and gazed out over the
water-meadows. How he did drink up those damp odours of water-
mint and watercress, of reed beds and mossy hatches, of dew-
soaked grasses and river mud! The moonlight was flooding every-
thing that night; but it seemed to irradiate with some especial
kind of benediction those vast level fields, where the ancient Lake
Village had been, and which John had crossed that very morning
with little Nelly Morgan at his heels. By leaning far out of his
window he could just make out a little red light to the north of
the Lake Village Field which may well have shone from the
upper window of Backwear Hut where at this very second Abel
Twig, seated on his iron bed, was pulling off his trousers. Whether
it came from Abel's bedroom or not, there was something in the
sight of that little red light, shining across the dew-soaked, moon-
lit expanse of fields and ditches, that thrilled John with a keen
ecstasy. He turned to give a swift glance at the girl behind him,
and the look of her figure as she rested there, her dark eyelashes
lying softly on her white cheeks, her long legs outstretched from
beneath her disarranged and disordered clothes, her slender arms
raised up and her sturdy, competent fingers clasped behind her
dusky head, increased his sensation of predatory rapture. "I
won't compete with anyone," he thought. "I won't fight these
monkish phantasms with material weapons. I'll pillage the place
with my wits. I'll snatch the beauty of their pastures from them,
while I lay bare their hocus-pocus. My girl is enough for me!
Her body is more delicious than all their fancies. I'll drain up
the magic of this spring night, and of every night, as it sinks
dowm on these pollards and poplars and reedy ditches; but I'll
fight these dead saints with a devilish cunning beyond anything
they've ever encountered! I'll ransack the beauty of their moons
and their marshes. I'll drink it up! I'll drain it to the dregs; I'll
penetrate all their secrets too! I'll twist like a serpent into their
deepest souls! I'll become what they are; and then I'll betray
them! And all the while I'll make love to Mary. Mary belongs to
me. She belongs to me as much as my hazel-stick belongs to me.
Oh, how sweet she looks over there at this moment. Those enchant-
ing knees are my girl's. Those maddeningly sweet ankles are my
girl's ankles. That white neck is my girl's neck. From head to
foot my girl belongs to me. I've eaten her up tonight! I've eaten
her up just as I've drunk up this moonlight floating over Lake
Village Field."

As he gazed at Mary, what John noticed now was that one of
the ribbons that held up her slip across her shoulders was hang-
ing loose and exposed. This minute and trifling disorder about the
girl's person was more provocative to his senses than any drastic
disarray could have been. It seemed pathetic that a little thing
such as this, so natural to her, and which she had refastened so
many times with her needle on its return from the laundress
should be so disturbing to him and should excite in him such a
triumph of possession. He pressed the palms of his hands against
the windowsill and breathed intoxicating draughts of what seemed
to him like melted moonlight. "I have possessed her," he thought,
"far more completely by making love to her like I have than I
ever could by going to the normal extreme. It is her soul I have
taken. Yes! her nerves, her veins, her fibres. I have possessed her
so completely that henceforth she will be compelled to dwell
within my soul. Wherever I go she will go! Whatever I hate, she
will hate. O great Stones of Stonehenge, let me keep her, let me
hold her, let me possess her, for years and years and years as I
do at this moment, for this is the secret of life!"

The natural reaction from this ecstasy of his came only too
quickly. At an attempt he made to renew his love-making Mary
grew touchy and even cold. They drew away from each other and
some bitter words passed between them.

John said to himself in his heart:--"This is your girl, this girl
will always be your girl. What is the use of quarrelling with
her?" But although his deeper nature knew that he was making
a fool of himself, knew that he would regret it afterward, his
superficial nerves seemed to take delight in contending with her
and he now proceeded to carry on this tiresome dispute, in a
peevish, querulous, grievanced, complaining whine. "You know
perfectly well, Mary, that you've been sulky for the last three
weeks because I've been forced to put off our marriage."

She really did flash out at him now with a more dangerous
glint in her grey eyes than he had ever seen. "You won't...
find...me..."sulky,"' she hissed out between her strong,
large, white teeth, "ever again...on...that...point...my...friend!"

"You needn't take me up like that," he went on more queru-
lously than ever--although in the lower levels of his nature
something kept crying out to him--"Stop that, you fool ! Stop that
now!"--"It's just like a woman to go and bring up a thing like
that and get furious about it! You know perfectly well that what
I say is true. Why can't you be generous and considerate to a
person, when he's worried like I am now with all I've got to
think of?"

"No," she said in a low, hard, cold voice. "I'm an idiot to beg
a man to marry me, when he doesn't think enough of our love to
stop from calling me sulky when I'm sad at our being separated
so long."

"Mary, you are too absurd! And you know you're being unfair.
I'm not accusing you. You take the words out of my mouth.
I'm only saying that something's changed in you lately; so that
you don't trust me like you used to. Tom was telling me only
yesterday what...what you said about old Geard's having got
me under his "

"Stop there!" the girl cried, snatching her arm from the mantel-
piece and clenching both her hands. "Stop just there! And don't
bring other people into this! Oh, I thought...I thought...oh, I
never thought," here her voice did really begin to break,
"that we'd be bringing him into our quarrels with each other!"

"I'm not bringing Tom in," he cried, "and, if I were, Tom's a
friend of us both, isn't he? But of course that's what you women
always do. You can never remain content till a man hasn't a
friend left that he can talk to!"

Mary gave him a terrible glance at that, a glance that was as
piercing as if she'd thrown a sharp knife at him. She then swung
across to the olive-coloured couch and sat down there, desperately
and wearily, resting her chin on the palms of her hands and her
elbows on her knees.

John got up from the arm of the leather arm-chair and walking
in silence to the window closed it with a bang. He tapped a vicious
tattoo with his knuckles upon the very sill that he had gripped so
tightly, in a rapture of exultation, so short a time before.

Little did John guess how far from the echoes of their angry
quarrel her thoughts had wandered, behind those staring grey
eyes, behind that forehead where the dark hair was generally
parted so evenly, but where tonight a loose tress of it hung so
disorderly. John did at any rate make a kind of movement, how-
ever, towards relieving the tension, for he walked across the
room to where he had pushed their unwashed tea-pot in a hurry
among the glasses on the shelf and taking it up in his hand asked
her if she wouldn't help him to wash up before she had to go.

"Why, what on earth's the time?" she asked with a start.

"Oh, about a quarter " he began. "Who's that?" he cried,
for heavy and rapid steps were now heard ascending the stairs.

He had barely time to put down the tea-pot and she barely time
to rise from the couch and smooth back the errant lock from off
her forehead when, with a couple of loud, easy knocks, such as
those that a young collegian might give at a colleague's door on
any familiar academic staircase, Tom Barter burst into the room.

"Hull...lo!" His tone expressed genuine surprise, not un-
mingled with a certain dismay at finding his two friends to-
gether on Maundy Thursday evening. "Well! Isn't this splendid,
vou two!" He growled out these words with a certain aplomb
as he pulled off his overcoat and cloth cap; but when he added.
"By God! I never guessed I'd kill two such birds with one stone!"
as he accepted a cigarette from Mary's case--for he did not shake
hands with either of them--there was an unmistakable ring of
the hollow, propitiatory bonhommie of the manager of a factory
about the sound of his words. Mary herself hurried to the fire
and threw on some more coals. John, having made the visitor sit
down in the leather arm-chair, began clattering with the tumblers
on the shelf so that he could reach a bottle placed behind them,
and finally, putting three glasses on the tea-table as well as this
bottle, cried out in an excited, high-pitched voice, "LeCs all have
a loving-cup. That's the thing! Let's all have a loving-cup! Eh,
Cousin? Isn't that an inspiration?"

Mary shot a quick glance at him. He'd never called her "cousin"
since that first day when they met at their grandfather's funeral.
Was it a token of rejection? Were they to be only cousins
henceforward?

But John seemed to be seized with an almost unnatural excite-
ment. He filled up two of the glasses with whiskey and cold
water but into the third, in place of the water, he poured milk
from the milk-jug on the table. "Here are three human beings,"
he cried wildly, while Barter watched him with a phlegmatic but
indulgent smile, and then turned to Mary with a lift of one of his
eyebrows, as much as to say; "We know him, don't we? He's not
as crazy as anyone would suppose!"

"Here are," John cried out, "three human beings; what they
call in France, a situation a trois! Two of us, in this a trois, must,
the French think, by a law of Nature, be plotting against the
third. They need not consciously be doing this, you understand
They can't help doing it! So now you see--Cousin Mary--so now
you see--my dear Tom---why I've filled up one of these glasses
with milk. The one with milk is the weak one. The one with
milk is the one that the other two--unconsciously, you under-
stand, always unconsciously,--are plotting against. I hope, by the
way, that neither of you loathes milk with whiskey: I rather like
it myself. There are the three glasses...I'll shuffle them a bit...
like this....Now do you two, keeping your eyes tight shut, choose
a glass...and I'll take the one that's left over."

Such was the hypnotism of John's mood, or such was the affec-
tionate indulgence towards him of his friend and his girl, that
they obeyed him literally. They both ran their fingers blindly
along the edge of the table till they encountered the glasses; then
blindly chose one and held the choice high up in the air. "You
see! You see!" John cried triumphantly. They certainly did see ,
when they opened their eyes, that the glass left upon the table was
the one with milk in it; but they were both so convinced that
John had arranged this result that all the portentousness was
taken out of it. John swallowed his whiskey and milk in two or
three gulps and put down the empty glass. "Come," he said, "if
I'm the weak, idiotic fool that you two are plotting against, let
me at least enjoy the voluptuousness of it!" And he poured him-
self out an excessively stiff glass and tossed it off with the same
impetuosity.

It soon came to pass that Mary and he were sitting side by side
on the olive-green couch, while their guest, with his grey office
trousers and striped blue socks very much in evidence, was
stretched out in the leather chair.

"I say! But you keep this place pretty hot," said Mr. Barter
brusquely.

"Open the window, John, will you?" said Mary. "It's you
coming in from outside, Tom; but it has got rather warm." There
was an awkward pause while John went to the window.

"It's too warm...I think...to have a fire at all today," said Mr.
Barter. "I haven't got one at the office; and I've never
had one all this winter in my lodging....Oh, yes, I did once
and that was when I had a visitor!" As he said this he smiled
significantly at John to indicate that this visitor was none other
than Mary. Mary knew from the back of Mr. Barter's head, he
and John were exchanging a long look as the latter returned
from opening the window.

"They have talked about me," she thought. "They are always
talking about me."

She and her lover were now seated again side by side on the
couch.

"Your lamp is smoking," said Tom Barter.

"Let it smoke," murmured John.

But Barter rose from the armchair, went up to the red-shaded
lamp, turned it low, and blowing violently down its funnel ex-
tinguished it altogether. "You're too fond of red, you two," he
blurted out rudely. "This room, as I've told John before, is like
a damned Chelsea studio."

"You're fairly bullying us tonight, Tom; aren't you?" said
Mary.

"He wants to show that our room is as much his as it is ours,"
said John. "And so it is, old chap! And so it is! Whats ours is
our old Tom's, isn't it, Mary?"

"I'm not . , . quite...so...sure...that...Tom ....wants it to be like
that," said Mary slowly as she got up from the couch and went
to fetch a third candle. There were two burning on the man-
telpiece already. She lighted this third one and laid it on the
crumb-strewn table. "Three persons," she thought, "and three
candle-flames."

There was a long pause; for the same thought had entered
all their three heads simultaneously, the awkward, ticklish, em-
barrassing thought about Barter's leaving Philip. Barter said to
himself, "Shall I tell them that I've signed up today with Geard?

They both hate Philip; but, after all, they are his cousins; and I'm
playing him a dirty trick." Without putting his feelings Into defi-
nite expression his treachery to Philip remained in his nerves as
an unpleasant taste. What Barter craved for at that minute was
some humorously cynical talk to encourage him in his betrayal
of his employer or at least condone it.

John said to himself, "When is he going to confess he's come
over to Geard? It was a bit funny his doing that at Geard's word
when he wouldn't do it at mine. Did old Geard bribe him a lot
higher than he told me he was going to? Aye! But I'd like to see
Philip s face when he hears about it. I'd like to see his face!"

But Mary thought:--"I hope old Tom hasn't decided to leave
Philip. I don't believe this municipal factory will last. I'm
afraid it's only a fad of Geard's, and Geard cannot be Mayor
forever. Besides, it will mean that John and Tom will be closer
than ever; and my life will never be happy till I've got John to
myself."

Their three pairs of eyes were turned simultaneously to the fire
now, where at last there had appeared a solitary tongue of
orange-coloured flame dancing up and down on the top of the
black coals. And there fell upon them all, at that moment, that
mysterious, paralysing quiescence, full of inertia and a strange
numbness, which sometimes seizes a group of human conscious-
nesses when conversation flags. It is an inertia made cubic, so to
speak, by being shared. It was, at that second of time, as if the
souls of these three East Anglians had suddenly clung together
and plunged down the great backward slide of biological evolu-
tion. They had become one vegetative soul, these three conscious-
nesses, weary of their troublesome misunderstandings.

John was the first to shake himself clear of this inertia. He
moved to the window and laid his hand on the sill. "Did you
hear that?" he said. "That was a bird's cry from the banks of the
Brue. I've never heard that cry before. Listen!" John leaned for-
ward as he spoke and stared out through the oblong window-space,
on each side of which Mary's rose-coloured curtains--looking as
if the mist had dimmed them--wavered slightly in the night air.
But the bird cry, if it were a bird cry, was not repeated.

"It must have been a spirit," said Mary.

"The spirit of one of those old Lake Village men," said John,
"come to warn us three heathens not to fuss ourselves about
tomorrow!"

"Tomorrow?" questioned Barter, pulling in his legs and yawn-
ing, "why tomorrow?"

"Have you forgotten tomorrow's Good Friday, Tom?" said
Mary; "and that reminds me," the girl went on, jumping up
from the couch, "that it's fully time I was getting back! Eu-
phemia's been expecting rne already for an hour and more. I
told her I might be out for dinner; but if I don't get back soon,
it'll be her bedtime, poor dear."

The two men exchanged glances. Their look said, as plain as any
masculine look could say anything, "When she's gone we'll have
some more whiskey, and a real good talk about this affair of leav-
ing the dye-works."

But Mary said, "Which of you is going to take me home?"

They both rose to their feet. All three were standing now in the
centre of the room. The twitch in J ohn's cheek became very active
as they stood there. Barter said to himself, "I believe there was
something funny about that onion soup I had tonight."

Mary said to herself, "Heavens! I hope I'm not going to develop
influenza or anything. I feel a bit shivery."

What had happened was this: that with their rising to their
feet, the sensation of oneness which their staring together into
the fire had generated fell to pieces. They were like children who
had erected a house of play-bricks into the hollow space of
which their minds had retreated. They were like birds in a nest,
warm and snug against each other, their individualities over-
lapping and interpenetrating, feathers and beaks all confused, till
suddenly the nest was torn down and they were astray and agog
and accurst, some on the boughs and some on the ground. Any
small group of human beings gathered close together acquires a
certain warmth of protectiveness against the Outside, against all
those unknown angers of which the outside world is full. A curi-
ous psychic entity--like a great, fluffy, feathery hen-breast--is
evoked at such times, under which these separate beings crouch,
into which they merge, beneath which they are fused. Every hu-
man creature is a terror to every other human creature. Human
minds are like unknown planets, encountering and colliding.
Every one of them contains jagged precipices, splintered rock-
peaks, ghastly crevasses, smouldering volcanoes, scorched and
scorching deserts, blistering sands, evil dungeons from behind
whose barred windows mad and terrible faces peer out. Every
pair of human eyes is a custom-house gate into a completely for-
eign port; a port whose palaces and slums, whose insane asylums
and hospitals, whose market-places and sacred shrines, represent
the terrifying and the menacing as well as the promising and the
pleasure-giving! But when once any small group of persons has
been together for any reasonable length of time the official
warders of these custom-house gates are withdrawn. Each indi-
vidual in such a group feels he can wander freely through the
purlieus of these other enclosed fortresses! He does not neces-
sarily move a step. The point is that the gates into the unknown
streets no longer bristle with bayonets, are no longer thronged
with "dreadful faces" and "fiery arms."

What happened, therefore, when John and Barter and Mary
stood up, knowing that they were now going to separate, or at
least going to leave the psychic shelter of that room, was that
they each fell back upon the isolated worries of their individual
lives.

Thus it was that Tom Barter began to recognise that he was
suffering from indigestion because of the onion soup of that
miserable eating-house. Thus it was that John Crow remembered
the annoying fact that he had been constipated of late, and should
have, that very evening, to do something drastic about it. Thus
it was that Mary, as both the men helped her into her cloak,
thought to herself, "I believe I have caught a chill from that
open window." Unable to shake off their selfish preoccupations,
they all three went out into Northload Street in a fretful, troubled
mood.

"Hullo! Who's that?" murmured Barter as they caught sight
of the figure of Sam Dekker advancing along in front of them
under the wall of King Edgar's lawn. They soon realised who it
was, for Sam, hearing their footsteps, swung round and awaited
their approach.

Sam had never got on very well with Mary; though the subtle
causes of the coldness between them would offer psychological
material enough to fill a volume. Perhaps the basic cause was
that Sam's erotic nature was--like his father's--as simple and
primitive as a cave-man's, while Mary had enough of the con-
torted perversity of the Crow temperament to arm herself with
invisible spear and shield at his mere approach. Thus as they
encountered in the moonlight on this eve of Good Friday, the
Mary who shook hands with him was, for Sam, a hard, reserved,
contemptuous, designing woman, a woman whose aim, if he had
been driven lo speak out all he felt. was to inherit old Miss
Drew's money and carry on meanwhile, without being found out,
a furtive intrigue, devoid of all noble feelings, with her cousin
John! And if the Mary who gave a limp, unsympathetic, gloved
hand to Sam was a cold-blooded adventuress, the Sam who save
a perfunctory squeeze to Mary's fingers, as he blinked suspiciously
with his little bear-eyes at her two companions, was a lazy self-
indulgent crank who spent his do-nothing leisure in an attempt to
corrupt that silly little fool, Nell Zoyland.

Thus, on the eve of the Crucifixion of the Redeemer of all
flesh, did the two noblest hearts in Glastonbury weigh, judge,
condemn, and execute each other! They dropped the silent Mary
at the drive gate of Abbey House. "Good-night, John!'" was all
she was allowed to say to the man whose body she would have
liked to cling to, with frantic unappeasable desire, all night long.

"Listen, you two!" cried John, when the girl's figure was lost
behind the big laurel bushes, each leaf of which shone like a
goblin's shield in the moonlight, "I've never been up to the top
of Wirral Hill on a moonlit night. Tomorrow's a holiday. Barter's
office will be closed tomorow and so will mine. Let's climb up
there together, eh? It'll be exciting on such a night as this!"
His eagerness was so intense, and the appeal in his voice so
much stronger than any word he used, that the two men con-
sented without demur. They all walked on, still in the middle of
the road, while the noise of their footsteps as they walked was
mathematically increased by the substitution of Sam's heavy
boots for Mary's light ones. They passed the Tithe Barn, where
the mystic symbols of the four Evangelists seemed supernaturally
large in the moonlight; they turned down Bere Lane and skirted
the eastern side of the Abbey Grounds; they turned southwest,
not far from the little Catholic chapel; they took a short, back-
yard cut to gain time; and in less than twenty minutes from the
moment John had suggested it they were halfway up Wirral
Hill.

"That dead tree by that post, up there," panted John, "is the
queerest dead tree I've ever seen! Evans swore it was a thorn
...in fact a descendant of the original thorn...but Mary maintains
it's a sycamore. When I saw it the other day with Evans I exam-
ined it pretty closely and came to the conclusion that it was
some tree completely unknown to me."

"I've been puzzled myself," began Sam, "about that dead tree
up here. Father said, what Evans said, that it was the Saint's
Thorn. But, as you say, it's clearly not a thorn, whatever else it
may be. I'm sometimes inclined to think--" He was interrupted
by the raised voices of some other people who were climbing
Wirral Hill that eve of the Crucifixion. Two of these were ap-
parently extremely aged men who had only that moment just
stopped to address some remark to a grotesque female figure who
was seated on one of the municipal iron seats that adorn the
slopes of Wirral. Sam, who knew every soul in the town, became
instantaneously aware of the identity of each one of this little
group of night-wanderers. He realised in a flash that one of the
old men must have overtaken the other in this ascent, and that
neither of them had any connection with the female they were
now so earnestly addressing. Sam, in fact, was sure he knew, what
it would have been difficult for either John or Barter to know,
that each one of these three wanderers had reached this spot inde-
pendently of the other two. But they formed, as the new-arrivals
slowly approached them, a singular and even a monumental
group. Had Mr. Evans been present he would have been re-
minded of one of those eternal vignettes in his favourite poet's
Purgatorio; for the hill was steep at this point; its ascent took
the breath of the three men and dulled their apprehension, while
the flooding moonlight, giving to all objects both near and far a
certain unearthly grandioseness, rendered their visual powers
dreamlike and distorted. When they reached the iron seat they
also stopped and stood, all three, side by side with the two old
men, surveying the solitary female who remained calmly seated
in front of all the five of them.

With the same speed with which it had turned upon its axis,
millions of years before the event occurred which gave to the
immemorial Grail of Glastonbury its new and Christian sig-
nificance, the old earth turned now, carrying with it Wirral Hill,
like the hump of a great sacred dromedary, and upon Wirral Hill
these five male bipeds, each with his staff of office decently con-
cealed, each with a wooden walking-stick, cut from the vegetable
world, as an additional masculine prerogative, each, with his
orderly and rationally working skull full of one single thought.
This thought might have been summed up in the words which
the oldest, and certainly the poorest, of all the five, now addressed
to the woman on the seat.

"What be thee doing out o' bed, Mad Bet? 'Taint Zummertime,
'ee seely wold 'ooman; 'tis cuckoo-time, 's know! Bed be
the pleace for crazy folks. Wurral Hill, of a shiny night, baint
a pleace for thee. Wurral Hill be a pleace for quiet bachelor
men, not for a crazy wold 'ooman like thee!" The speaker was a
tall grey-haired man dressed in clothes that looked as if they did
not belong to him.

"He's a good one, he is, to talk to the likes of she." expostu-
lated the tall man's recent companion, edging himself as close
as he dared to the newcomers, with evident grateful relief at
their appearance upon the scene.

"Why, Mr. Jones," cried Sam, for the tall man's companion
turned out to be none other than Number Two himself, "what
are you doing out of Hospital? Have they finished your cure?
Are you taking a walk?"

Number Two glanced uneasily at Mr. Barter, whom he recog-
nised with infallible instinct as the official one, the unbending
one, the pillar of society, in this little group.

"I be going back...I be going back...I be going back,"
he mumbled. "Doorman be a friend of mine. I be going back."

"What brought you out so far?" enquired Sam.

"Can't sleep o' nights, Mr. Dekker, and that's the truth. If
'tisn't one thing, 'tis another. 'Twere they winds and rains 'afore,
and now't be this shining moon. I've never knowed such carry-
ings-on as come to me in thik horse-spital. As I were telling Mr.
Twig, only this morning, there's something going to happen in
this here town 'afore long, or my name's not Bartholomew Jones!
What with ghosties coming out of they Ruings on rainy nights,
and spirits coming out of they Ruings on shiny nights, that
horse-spital aint a place for a quiet tradesman like I be."

"You oughtn't to have climbed up a steep place like this, Mr.
Jones," expostulated Sam.

Number Two came close up to him and whispered in his ear.

"He helped me. I dursn't have done it alone. I knew he when
'a were a self-respectin' tradesman his own self. Don't 'ee go
spreading no tales, Mr. Dekker, about me and him. 'Tisn't right
I know for he to help a decent person; but I dursn't have come
so far, with my poor 'innards and all, if I hadn't met he. Don't
'ee worrit about me, Mr. Dekker. He'll take me back where I
came, for a copper or two. He'll take me back for less than a
sixpence and nothing said!"

"Where does he sleep nowadays?" asked Sam.

"He? Young Tewsy? Why, Mother Legge, what bought Miss
Kitty Camel's wold house, lets he sleep next door. He do open
next door for she when couples come for a short-time bed or
summat ungodly like that, and she gives he a bite, along o' her
girt tabby-cat, what she calls Pretty Maid, though it be as ugly
as an abortion. You do know Mother Legge, down in Paradise,
Mr. Dekker? Her be a real bad 'un, her be; but what decent-
living party, I'd like to know, would let a scarecrow like Young
Tewsy into 'is cellar?"

While Sam was whispering to Number Two a very different
conversation was going on between Mr. Barter and Young Tewsy.
Young Tewsy was a man of incredible age. Number Two was
correct in his statement that he remembered him as a respectable
Glastonbury tradesman. He had been, as a matter of fact, a well-
established chemist in the days of Mr. Wollop's father. Mr.
Wollop's father was another of these "respectable" tradesmen
who were always on the verge of coming to grief; but old Wollop
had his redoubtable son to keep things going, whereas Tewsy,
who had lost his offspring, just as he had apparently lost even
his Christian name, came to disaster by frequenting, day in and
day out, the "Paradise" of that epoch of Glastonbury's history.
Young Tewsy's face was more lank and lean than the face of
Don Quixote. It was the face of a walking skeleton. And yet it was
--strange to say--engraved by no savage lines of revolt. Whether
if a human being lives cheek by jowl with utter desperation for
half a century he acquires a kind of abnormal resignation resem-
bling that of maggots in carrion no outsider can possibly tell.
Probably Young Tewsy would carry the secret of his real attitude
to the world hidden behind his cadaverous countenance to the
end of his days. But the attitude that he presented to the world
was a perpetual grin. This grin of Young Tewsy's may have been
the grin of the clown of the Pit...always beaten, always tram-
pled on, always derided. On the other hand it may have been the
grin of the death-skull itself, revealed during Young Tewsy's
lifetime, by reason of the extreme cadaverousness of his face.
But, whatever it was, it was with this eternal grin, that now. in
the bright moonlight upon Wirral Hill, the aged protege of Mother
Legge turned his face to the dry and cautious questionings of
Tom Barter.

There was more in this brief dialogue than the rest of that
group could possibly guess, for, as a matter of fact, it had been
in Mother Legge's most expensive bedroom that Mr. Barter had
come of late to meet Tossie Stickles; and it was a striking evi-
dence of the old gaol-bird's diplomatic self-control that never
for one eyelid's flicker of his corpse-like face in that bright moon-
light did he betray a recognition of which both of them must
have been perfectly aware. Young Tewsy had many a time pre-
sented the same inscrutable grin in the presence of the great
Philip himself, when he begged of the manufacturer at the street-
corner; though Philip, less master of his facial muscles than his
manager, had been unable, on several occasions, to refrain from
a swift, recognisant glance, before he produced his sixpence. For
Mr. Crow of The Elms had also found, in his day and hour, a
convenient use for Mother Legge's best bedroom. Young Tewsy
with his death-skull grin must, in fact, have been known to the
tutelary spirits of Glastonbury as a sort of Psychopompus, or
inverted Charon, of Limbo. For both Morgan Nelly, and the
little nameless embryo now forming in the womb of Tossie, owed
their start, in the long human march, to the door-opening and
lamp-bearing service of this once "respectable" tradesman of
South High Street.

"Did you find her like this?" said Tom Barter to Young
Tewsy as they all stood helplessly and rather foolishly before
this disconcerting representative of the sex that had conceived
them.

"Sure and I did, Mister," replied the grinning old man, "that
is this gentleman and me did, what I've 'a 'elped up this 'ere
"eavy ill. What be doin' of, out of yer bed, ye seely wold bitch,
at this time of the bloody night?"

In these words of the old man were hopelessly confused the
North London accent of his childhood and the broad Somerset of
his youth and later life.

"I've never been up here in full Moon before," said John,
addressing Mad Bet.

"'Tisn't full tonight," said Mad Bet.

"I meant practically full," said John. "Haven't you noticed,
lady, how the moon looks full for almost four days if the sky
is free of clouds?"

"I be mighty fond of thik moon," said the woman, "when it's
new."

"I agree with you; I certainly agree with you, lady," asseverated
John eagerly. "It's when it's neither round like it is tonight, nor
new like you describe, but all funny and shapeless, that it's not
nearly so nice."

"It don't melt a person's sorrows away till it be big and round,"
said the woman.

"Do you suppose people in all ages have climbed up Wirral
Hill in moonlight like this?" enquired John.

"Shouldn't wonder, young man, shouldn't wonder," replied
Mad Bet. "You and me be come and that be summat, baint it?
And these other folks be come, baint they? But some folks do
come in they's bodies but leave they's souls down in street. Don't
'ee be like one o' they, young man, don't 'ee be like one o' they!"

"I certainly will not, lady," announced John in the most em-
phatic tone of malicious finality,

"Come on, you two," said Barter addressing his friends. "Let's
go on now! I want to get to the top of the hill. I want to look
at that tree you were talking about."

"But what about this woman?" said Sam.

"Dekker thinks an unknown woman is more interesting than
an unknown tree," remarked John.

"Be it the Tree of Life, you gents are seeking?" threw in Mad
Bet.

"Precisely, lady," said John. "That's just it! Don't yon want
to come on, too, up to the top, with us?"

"Don't be a fool, Crow," whispered Mr. Barter. "Can't you see
she's mad?"

"Mad...mad...mad," murmured Young Tewsy with his everlasting
grin.

"This is Mr. Jones of the old Curiosity Shop," said Sam, ad-
dressing his two friends, in reply to a glance from Number Two
which seemed to say--"These gentlemen don't seem to be very
alert to the situation"--"the shop that your Welshman is looking
after, Crow. He's got to go back to the hospital, Barter/'

"It be the Tree of Life what be up there," reiterated the
woman.

"For a silver sixpence I'd take 'er 'ome myself," interjected
Young Tewsy, "if you gents 'ud see the Old Party back to
'orsepital."

"Come on, come on," grumbled Barter. "These people can
take care of themselves."

"Somebody must see this woman home," said Sam.

"She'd like to come to the top of the hill with us," said John,
"Wouldn't you, lady? She's only resting...halfway up....Why
should she have to go home on such a night as this? Why
should anybody have to go home?"

"Mad...mad...mad," murmured Young Tewsy dreamily, contem-
plating with a lack-lustre eye the revelation of the woman's
bald head, as her black-beaded, black-feathered hat slipped
awry.

"Me niece Sally what works for our new Mayor," threw in
Number Two, "do say that there'll be no peace in Glastonbury
till either Geard or Crow be on top; and me wone thought be
that they ghosties from they Ruings, what do worrit I in horse-
spital, be comed out o' grave to see which o' they two 'twill be."

"For God's sake, come on!" expostulated Mr. Barter.

"Shall I dance for 'ee, me pretty gents all?" cried Mad Bet,
rising unexpectedly from the iron seat and catching hold of the
heavy flannel skirt which she wore and exposing her wrinkled
woolen stockings. "Here we go round the Mulberry Bush!"
chanted the old woman, skipping up and down with an expres-
sion of childish gravity, while the loose, beaded tassels hanging
from her hat bobbed this way and that over her ghastly white
skull.

"It's like seeing moonlight on a gibbet," thought John. "Well,
lady?" he said aloud, "Are you coming up hill with us or going
down hill with these men?"

But Mad Bet waved away the arm which John had half-con-
sciously stretched out towards her. "In and out the window,"
she now piped in a shrill scream, tossing up her withered shanks
and wagging her bald head from which the hat soon fell to the
ground, "in and out the window...as you have done before!"

Young Tewsy limped forward now and picked up the woman's
hat from the grass. The effect of the moonlight, the presence of
three gentlemen and one tradesman, thus transformed perforce
into an embarrassed audience, seemed to go to the head of this
Psychopompus of unwanted infants from Limbo, for, waving
Mad Bet's hat in the air, he began to hop up and down on one
foot.

"Over the garden- wall," chanted Young Tewsy as he hopped
up and down, "I've let the baby fall, and missus came out and
gave me a clout, and asked me what the row's about...over
the garden-wall!"

"If you chaps won't come on with me," cried Barter, really
quite angry now, "I'll go on alone. These people are all right.
These people can take care of themselves. We can't take all Glas-
tonbury home."

"You go on with him, Crow," said Sam. "And don't forget to
tell me what tree you think it is, up there. My father will hold
to it, through thick and thin, that it's a Levantine thorn tree!"

"And leave you here till we come back?" said John.

"No, no. I'm going to take this woman with me. She lives at
St. Michael's Inn. It's on my way to the Vicarage."

"I be going with my sweetheart," cried Mad Bet, suddenly
clutching hold of John's arm. "I be going with my dearie to eat
o' the Tree of Life!" There was an awkward pause.

"Well, I'm off, anyway," said Barter, "I'm tired of this," and
he strode away up the hill without looking back, his shadow ac-
companying him. His outward shadow! There was, however, as
Barter ascended the final slope of Wirral Hill, an interior shadow
that also accompanied him. "I am like Judas, though Philip is
certainly not like Christ,'' he said to himself.

John's countenance in the moonlight must have expressed any-
thing but pleasure at the woman's grip on his arm, though, to
do him justice, he made no effort to free himself. He even placed
his other arm around Mad Bet's shoulder. But either because
her woman's instinct had survived her insanity and she caught
this look upon his face, or because, as Mr. Evans would explain,
she was bent upon forcing herself to do the one thing she didn't
want to do, she now flung herself loose from John, pushing him
violently away from her with the enigmatic words, "Spit it out,
spit it out, or it'll grow into a Death-Tree!" And then crying out,
just as King Lear did on the cliffs of Dover when he was crowned
with fumitory--"If you get me you'll get me by running!" she
started off rushing wildly down the hill.

Sam flung a hurried farewell to the others and set off after
her, leaving Young Tewsy, who had now sat down by Number
Two's side, so tickled by this spectacle that for a minute or two
his death's-head countenance became positively grave. Sam had
no difficulty in overtaking Mad Bet and she behaved with exem-
plary quietness all the way to her home. She was indeed so lost
in some particular thought that she allowed Sam to take her not
only into the inn but up the stairs to her own chamber above the
signboard. Here he left her seated on her bed in a kind of dream,
a dream so deep that when he bade her good-night, the only thing
she said to him was, "'Tis so, 'tis so," repeated incessantly till
he went away. After he had left her and was walking towards
the Vicarage his own thoughts began voyaging over strange seas.

He said to himself, "It must be near midnight now," and the
impression came upon him that the actual identity of Christ--
like a vast, shadowy, tortured ghost hovering over the moonlit
town--was summoning him to make some final inward decision.
It would have been impossible for him to put into words what
this decision was that he felt he was being inevitably, irretrievably
led to make. But it was a decision which, if he made it before
midnight, that is to say, before the first minute struck of the day
when Christ died, he would never be able to retract.



MARK'S COURT



Mr. Geard woke up before dawn on Easter morning. The
outer levels of his consciousness were at once assailed by two
annoyances proceeding from opposite directions.

The first of these annoyances was connected with Mr. Barter.
The teasing memory of Mr. Barter's face, the rankling impres-
sion of the man's materialism, the extravagant salary he had been
compelled to offer him, the unpleasantness--as if he had touched
some sticky and poisonous plant,--left in his mind by the fel-
low's hatred of Philip; all this became something that descended
on him like a leaden weight the moment he opened his eyes.

The second vexation that rose up in his mind assumed the
shape of a letter, with a peer's coronet on it, which he had re-
ceived by yesterday's afternoon post. This letter was from the
Marquis of P. asking him whether he couldn't manage to "run
over"--the great nobleman expressed himself very casually--
and "have a bite with me incog." at Mark Moor Court, this very
Easter Sunday.

Mark Moor Court was a small but very ancient farmhouse,
which this owner of half the Mendips kept as a private pleasure-
house of escape; allowing few of his own family and absolutely
none of the conventional county people to cross its historic
threshold.

Save for the crypt beneath Saint Mary's ruined chapel in Glas-
tonbury and the foundations of the Roman Road between Glaston-
bury and Street, there was not a fragment of masonry in all
Somersetshire older than this little solitary grey farm standing,
like Mariana's moated grange, upon a sort of fortified island in
the vast expanse of water-meadows that followed the movement
of the Brue, as that river flowed northwest towards the sea-flats
of Burnham.

Mark Moor Court could be easily reached from Glastonbury.
It was exactly seven miles away, beyond Meare Heath, beyond
Westhay Level, and beyond the Burnham and Evercreech branch
of the Somerset and Dorset Railway. Save for the river and the
railway, the only connection between Glastonbury and Mark
Moor was this one winding, grass-grown road, a road that no
modern traffic ever disturbed: for although it was just possible for
initiates in the rhynes and hatches and weirs of these queer flats
to reach by its means a path to Highbridge and thence to Burn-
ham, this particular road lost itself completely in the desolate
marshes of Mark Moor.

The old farm-house called Mark Court, or Mark Moor Court,
was, according to a local tradition unbroken for a thousand years,
the site of a terrible final encounter between Mark, King of Corn-
wal, and the Magician Merlin. This particular tradition declares
that Merlin--long after he had disappeared with the original
heathen Grail into the recesses of Chalice Hill or into the sea-
inlets of the Isle of Bardsey--returned once, and once only, to
meddle with normal human affairs. This was when he visited
King Mark at Mark Moor Court and punished him there for all
his misdeeds by reducing him, in the wide low chamber that runs
beneath the heavy stone roof, to a pinch of thin grey dust. With
this dust...so the legend ran...Merlin, standing at one of the nar-
row windows between two stone buttresses, and sprinkling it upon
the air, fed the eastward-flying herons that came--as indeed
they still come--hunting for fish in the ditches of Mark Moor,
from their nests in the beech-groves at the foot of Brent Knoll.

The grass-grown road, disused for so long between Glastonbury
and Mark Moor, must have witnessed many a strange mediaeval
pilgrimage; and, in its long history, worse things than that; for
it was along the embankments of this road that the Norse Vik-
ings, following the spring floods up the estuaries of the sea, were
wont to push the beaks of their pirate ships as they sought for
plunder and rape in the fields of the unknown.

The hurried, informal invitation to lunch this Easter Sunday at
Mark Moor Court was only one of a series of such invitations
that Bloody Johnny had recently received from the Marquis of Pc
He owed these remarkable summonses to the fact that in his boy
hood he had been a servant at the great Elizabethan House in hi
native Montacute.

At this house Henry Zoyland, tenth Marquis of P., had frequently
been a guest; and the striking originality--and, it must also be
confessed, the curious physical magnetism--of the young
servant had made an indelible impression upon the peer's mind.

The Marquis had been reminded of this early infatuation by
reading in the Western Gazette of Mr. Geard's unexpected for-
tune; and as he was attached to Glastonbury, and more than at-
tached to his lonely shooting-lodge amid the dykes of Mark Moor,
he had become still further interested in his former friend's career,
when he heard rumours of his having been elected Mayor.

Mr. Geard now set himself to call upon those deeper levels of
his consciousness that would be undisturbed by these various
vexations, whether material or immaterial, that were now be-
sieging so viciously his awakened soul.

He turned on his back and stretched out his arm, extending it
beneath his sleeping lady's head; while in immediate response
to this affectionate movement, the woman, without awakening,
nestled down confidingly upon his shoulder. With his free hand
he jerked up the bed-clothes till they were tight under both their
chins; and from this snug security he watched, in motionless
contemplation, the gradual processes of the dawn.

The familiar feeling, unlike all other possible sensations, of
his wife's grey head resting on his shoulder was soon further ac-
centuated by the woman's turning towards him still more closely
in her sleep so that their bodies came into contact below the sheet
that covered them. By giving her shoulder a few little shakes
with his left hand Bloody Johnny now changed the rhythm of her
breathing to an easy and silent respiration. His power over his
own sensations when once he was really aroused was so dominant
that although they had slept together for forty years he still was
able by saying to himself "this is my woman" to evoke feelings
not only of tenderness towards the grey-haired figure he thus
held, but even--strange though it may sound--of actual amor-
ousness.

If Mr. Wollop--the ex-Mayor of Glastonbury--was the most
childlike of all the dwellers in the town in his simple zest for
the visible world, Mr. Geard--the present Mayor--was possessed
of a bottomless richness of sensuality that put to shame every fre-
quenter, high and low, who made use of the services of Mother
Legge and the attendance of Young Tewsy, in that quarter of
the town known as Paradise.

Bloody Johnny's rival, Philip Crow, was undeniably fond of
his wife Tilly, a woman at least ten years younger than Megan
Geard; but never for one second, for fifteen long years, had Philip
experienced a single erotic thrill from contact with her.

As the light grew stronger it became obvious to Mr. Geard
that this Easter morning was destined to prove cloudy and windy,
if not stormy; but this did not prevent him from discovering
somehow a scent of primroses upon the air or even from hearing
--and it was almost as if his will-power was so great that he
called up this long-tailed grey bird from the orchards beyond the
Brue--the cry of the cuckoo upon the blowing gusts.

When he had made up his mind that the sun, although quite
concealed by wildly driven clouds, must have arisen beyond the
Tor and beyond Havyatt Gap, Bloody Johnny gently lifted his
still unconscious lady from his shoulder and proceeded cautiously
and silently to get out of bed. Retiring on tiptoe to his dressing-
room which adjoined their bedroom he shut himself in with his
cold bath and his shaving materials.

Emerging thence in about half an hour he presented to the
eye of all observers a figure that might with equal congruity have
been described as an undertaker, a head-waiter or a congregational
minister. His big white face, which, unlike the countenance of
Mr. Weatherwax, looked smaller, if anything, than it really was
owing to the unnatural size of the back of his great head, showed
whiter than ever in the greyness of this Easter morning by reason
of the diabolic intensity of his dark eyes.

The pupils of Mr. Geard's eyes, like those of the author of
"Faust," had the power of dilating until they left only a very
narrow margin of white. But this white rim, just because it was
so reduced, gleamed with an incredible lustre as he rolled his
eyes--for this was a trick of his; and a trick shared by many
prince-prelates of the Roman Catholic Church--without moving
his head.

He now went downstairs, every stair creaking under his heavy
weight, and shuffled, in his soft carpet-slippers, into the kitchen.

No sign of Sally Jones at present! Well! he could find what
he wanted on Easter morning without any help from any Sally.
He did in fact lay his hand upon an uncut loaf of bread. This he
conveyed into the dining-room, where the family had all their
meals, and placing it on the table, now covered with a tablecloth
such as one sees in the illustrations of Dickens, he opened the
mahogany sideboard and lifted out therefrom a decanter of port
wine. Finding no wine glass--indeed no glass of any description
--upon the sideboard, Bloody Johnny uttered a growling ex-
pletive that sounded like a single syllable much more condemned
in polite society than the word "damn" and retired into the
pantry; from which retreat he presently emerged with a large
tumbler.

He now stood for a moment in puzzled hesitation. What he
muttered under his breath at that second was--"The East...
the East...the East!"

Carrying loaf and decanter and tumbler pressed, all together,
against his stomach, he now sought the small postern of his
suburban villa and drawing a couple of rusty bolts opened it
wide.

The East welcomed Mr. Geard with a rush of extremely chilly
air; but undeterred by this reception, after listening intently to
make sure that Cordelia and Crummie were as fast asleep as
their mother, he sank down on his knees in the presence of a lit-
tle square patch of grass, a few privet bushes, and a tiny round
bed with three dead hyacinths in it, and in this position began,
with a sort of ravenous greed, tearing open the loaf and gobbling
great lumps of crumb from the centre of it. These mouthfuls he
washed down with repeated gulps of port wine. As he ate and
drank, with the cold wind blowing against his white face, his dia-
bolically dark eyes kept roving about that small garden. So queer
a figure must he have presented, and with so formidable a stare
must he have raked that small enclosure, that a couple of wagtails
who were looking for worms in the grass instead of flying off
hopped towards him in hypnotised amazement, while a female
chaffinch that had alighted for a second on one of the privet
bushes left the bush and joined the two wagtails upon the patch
of grass.

The more greedily Mr, Geard ate the flesh of his Master and
drank His blood, the nearer and nearer hopped these three birds.
That other smaller dwellers upon this clouded earth, such as
worms and snails and slugs and beetles and wood lice and shrew
mice joined with these feathered creatures to make up the con-
gregation at this heretical Easter Mass, neither the celebrant him-
self nor anyone else will ever know.

"Christ is risen! Christ is risen!" muttered Bloody Johnny,
with his mouth full of the inside of his loaf. "Christ our Pass-
over," he went on, "is sacrificed for us; let us therefore keep
the Feast!"

As he uttered these words he tossed off his third tumbler of
port wine; and then, emptying the remainder of the decanter
upon the gravel outside the threshold where he knelt, he strug-
gled up, heavily and awkwardly, upon his feet and closed the
garden door.

He was only just in time; for the voice of Cordelia was heard
from the top of the stairs near his own bedroom;--"Is that you.
Dad?"

"Come down, Cordy...come down, my pet!" cried Mr. Geard in
reply. But without waiting for her appearance he hurriedly
conveyed the mutilated loaf and the other things into the
kitchen and deposited them on the dresser.

He was just emerging from the kitchen when Cordelia came
running downstairs. She was in her dressing-gown and was clearly
only just awake.

Mr. Geard, his eyes blazing from out of their deep sockets in
his white face, hugged her to his heart.

"Christ is risen!" he mumbled rapturously as he kissed her
again and again; surrounding her as he did so with an aura of
port wine that was like a purple mist.

"Dear old Dad! Dear old Dad!" was all she could find breath
to say.

"Crummie awake?" he asked as soon as he let her go.

"Not yet," she replied, smiling into his burning eyes, "I've
come down to get her tray ready; and then I'll wake her and
we'll have our cup of tea before she gets up. She wants me to
come to the early service at St. John's with her."

"Early service? Crummie?" murmured Mr. Geard in astonish-
ment.

"She's taken a fancy to the Church, Dad, ever since you came
back from Northwold. Oh, dear ! I doubt if either of your daugh-
ters will ever get married! You and Mother aren't any good at
matchmaking, Dad."

"Well...well...well," muttered Mr. Geard with a heavy sigh.

But as Cordy guessed shrewdly enough it was not the virginity
of his children that was worrying him. Her surmise was justified
by his next word.

"Well...well...you'll have the Wine and the Bread...you'll have
Christ's Blood and His Body. They'll give it to you of course in
those silly little biscuits that don't look like bread at all...but it'll
be the Master's Body...and that's the chief thing."

He stopped and sighed heavily again.

"Oh, Cordy, my child, my child!" he groaned, while a film like
that which would cover the eyes of a dog that saw its master
being executed crossed the irises of his dark eyes, "there aren't
many Christians who feel Him beside them and yet He's nearer
us now than we are to each other!"

"Yes, Dad dear," murmured Cordie.

She always felt extremely embarrassed when her father spoke
in this way. The peculiar weight and mass of the man's mystical
realism confused and disturbed her. Her own vein of "spiritu-
ality," or whatever it was, was invariably associated with aspects
of life that were imaginative or at least intellectual.

Mr. Geard's gross and staggering actuality in these things not
only disconcerted her, but, to confess the truth, a little disgusted
her. It was certainly not in these mystical moods of his that she
felt most drawn to her father. That happened when she heard him
issuing tactical instructions, like some great strategic general, to
John Crow; or when she heard him disputing with Owen Evans
on some debatable point of Glastonbury mythology.

Mr. Geard followed her into the kitchen now and sitting down
upon one of the extremely hard chairs there--Cordy's mother was
not one for pampering a wench like Sally Jones--he continued to
embarrass her, while she lit the fire in the stove and began pre-
paring the thin bread and butter, by talking about Christ.

"He is with us, of course, all the time," Bloody Johnny said,--
while the physical accident that this singular evangelist was in-
terrupted now and again by a hiccough increased his daughter's
distaste--"but today He is with us more powerfully...much
more powerfully...than any other day in the year."

"More powerfully, Dad? I don't quite understand," protested
Cordelia, as having poured quite a lot of water out of the kettle,
in order to accelerate its boiling, she began spreading the butter
upon an oblong, square-edged "tin-loaf," of a different appear-
ance altogether from the one which the master of the house had
just ravaged.

As he watched her quick, competent movements, Mr. Geard
thought to himself--"Mahomet easily converted his wife to his
prophesying. Did he have just this same trouble as I have with
a daughter?"

Somehow the cutting of that practical tin-loaf, with its sharp
edges and uninteresting crust, brought down the ecstasy of
Bloody Johnny more effectively than almost anything else could
have done.

The Mayor of Glastonbury felt at that moment as if he were
disturbing the work, not of a mere daughter, but of all the com-
petent executives in the world.

"I mean by more powerful, Cordy," he went on, the film over
his eyes growing thicker and thicker as the kettle began to sim-
mer, "that He has more direct power over matter today than on
ordinary days. He's always ready to work miracles if you call on
Him strongly enough; but today, when He broke loose, He can
change everything if you only make a sign."

Getting up from his seat and moving across the room, to his
daughter's dismay, Mr. Geard opened the kitchen door and looked
out to the westward. As he turned his face towards this quarter
where, beyond the terrace of tradesmen's houses,' a milk-cart was
standing in front of Othery's Dairy, he could see high up in the
air a great flock of starlings, tossed up and down in disordered,
broken masses, and darkly outlined against the driving grey
clouds.

"Do shut the door, Dad!" cried Cordelia crossly, "and either
come in, or go out !"

Mr. Geard came in and closed the door with extreme gentleness.
He did not say to himself--"How careless of me not to think of the
poor girl being in her dressing-gown!" He said to himself--"She
must have an instinct that that fellow Evans told me he was en-
gaged for dinner today...or at any rate couldn't come. Poor
little girl! It's a shame! The only man she's ever had...a madman
like that...with God knows what on his conscience ...possibly a
murder."

But the tea was made now, the bread and butter cut and the
tray ready to be carried upstairs.

"I've put out four cups ," said Cordelia; "for I thought I'd get
Crummie up and we'd come into Mother's room. Mother loves a
cup of tea in bed and never lets herself have one !"

It must be confessed that neither of the girls expressed any
great disappointment when they heard of the absence of their
father from today's mid-day meal. Cordelia still entertained a
hope that Owen Evens was coming. Crummie knew that Red
Robinson was not coming; but that, on the contrary, Mr. Barter,
who had spoken to her on the street yesterday, had said he might
call in the early afternoon.

Since Mr. Geard had spoken severely to Mr. Robinson on the
subject of his officious activity with regard to "the Morgan
woman ," there had been a definite estrangement between Red and
Crummie which Crummie's mood, when she met him after the
choir-supper, had not helped to remove.

No, the girls were not sorry to hear of their father's visit to
Lord P. His presence was always a restraint on these occasions
and not infrequently a positive embarrassment; so that in their
hearts both daughters felt a thrill of gratitude to the Marquis for
his eccentric partiality. It was always a puzzle to both of them
what the secret was of their father's success when he went out into
the great world; and this particular interest in his personality,
displayed by Lord P., was a complete mystery to them.

"He said in his letter that there was no one with him at Mark
Moor but Rachel," announced Mr. Geard.

The three women's faces lit up at this piece of news. Hitherto
they had displayed only the faintest interest in his excursion. But
the mention of Rachel brought down on Mr. Geard's head a volley
of questions. How old was she? Why was she at Mark Moor? Was
it true that she was very fragile and almost an invalid? Wasn't
Mark Moor Court a rough-and-tumble kind of place for a deli-
cately nurtured young girl to stay in? Did Lord P. bring any
servants with him? What did Lady Rachel do with her time when
her father was out shooting?

Chuckling over these questions as he lurched heavily out of the
room and down the stairs, Mr. Geard was soon making his way.
with an old faded semi-ecclesiastical ulster, that had once be-
longed to Canon Crow, thrown over his black clothes, towards
the Pilgrims' Inn.

"I'll go leisurely," he thought to himself. "Lord P. won't be at
church anyway...that's certain, but if he can't see me till
noon, I'll look about a bit, over there."

Mr. Geard was indeed successful beyond his own private ex-
pectations, which were a good deal less optimistic than he had
allowed his family to suspect, in his quest for a quiet steed that
day. His ostler-friend supplied him with an old roan mare, who
had been a famous hunter in her time and was still a very hand-
some creature.

"Wouldn't trust her," avowed the man, winking, "with anyone
but your Worship. But us do all know what a firm hand you has
with the females, old and young, and Daisy-Queen's got the
int-lect of a bitch dawg."

With his canonical ulster buttoned tight under his chin and
a heavy riding-crop, lent him by his ex-convertite, clutched in his
ungloved fingers. Bloody Johnny mounted upon Daisy-Queen
took the road for Mark Moor Court. The wind came from the
southeast and he was riding almost due northwest. Directly in
front of him, about ten miles away, he could see the strangely
shaped protuberance of Brent Knoll, drowsing there in the midst
of the level fens like a great sleepy amphibian, whose sea-skin
was too tough and slippery to feel the rush of the wind, that was
now careering like a host of demons over the reedy expanse.

The only drawback to Mr. Geard's immense feeling of libera-
tion was the flapping of his ulster, which the wind, blowing
violently behind his back, kept lifting up and whirling about his
ears. But he rode on at a steady pace, every now and then rubbing
the thick handle of his crop against his horse's neck, as he leaned
forward in the saddle, and murmuring her name with chuckling
endearments--such as "That's the time o'day, Daisy-Queen! Best
lass in the stables thee be, Daisy-Queen! Clean straw and a peck
of oats, Daisy, when old John and thee gets safe to King Mark's
lodge!"

The mad rush of the southeast wind, whistling past the rider's
head, lifting the mare's mane and tail and causing her to turn her
ears now and again, as if she were listening to invisible and
ghostly hoofbeats behind her, gave to the green spring landscape
across which they trotted--horse and man, in this turmoil of the
elements, grown as close as if they had been one creature--a curi-
ously phantasmal appearance.

The groups of poplars bowing themselves westward were so
blown down by the wind that the normal fluttering of their thin-
stalked leaves was taken up and absorbed in one long, wild strain-
ing, as if each leaf were trying to escape from the burden of
clinging any more to its parent twig and as if the whole soul of
the tree were trying to escape from its rooted posture and float
away, over the dykes and ditches, till it lost itself in the Bristol
Channel.

The green, thickly grown tops of the pollards, as they too were
blown westward, became the wild heads of armies of girl-witches,
while great beds of reeds where the young shoots were mingled
with tall dead stalks and brown feathery husks, set up, as the
wind swept through them, an accumulated shivering cry, a cry
like the cry of the Cranes of Ibycus, that ran from weir to weir,
from gate to gate, from dyke to dyke, and kept gathering strength
as it ran.

It was hard to restrain Daisy-Queen from breaking into a gallop
as this shrieking demon drove them faster and faster towards
Mark Moor. But the man and the horse had now become, for
Bloody Johnny, in spite of his weight, had the true instincts of
a rider, enough of one solid unit on the crest of this raving wind-
wave to enable the man's desire not to shorten the ride by any
such speed to be strong enough to rule the occasion.

Thus it was nearly eleven o'clock...about the time when the
"five-minutes bell" in the towers of all the Somerset churches
from the Quantocks to the Mendips was calling the loiterers in
porch and purlieu to enter the building and take their places,
when John Geard rode into the long avenue of sycamores that
led up the steep slope to the eastern entrance of Mark Court.

The old trees were groaning in the great wind as he rode up
this slope; and in several places Daisy-Queen had to veer aside
to avoid fallen branches. The greenness of these broken boughs,
as Geard pulled up to walk his mare past them, had a lividness in
the grey light that struck him as startling and unusual. It was
extraordinary how that grey light between these massive trunks
responded to the wind. It seemed itself to be in the process of
flying through the air, along with ragged-winged rooks and
hoarsely crying jackdaws!

Before he caught sight of the grey walls of Mark Court it-
self, hidden round the third curve of the leafy ascent, he heard a
series of shrill discordant screams from somewhere in front of
him, the crying, as he well knew from his old experiences at
Montacute, of peacocks wildly excited by the wind.

"Queer that he should keep them out here," he thought to him-
self. They swung round a bend of the drive now, the mare panting
a little from the steepness of the way and from the weight of the
man on her back. Then, all suddenly, she plunged and swerved to
the right of the path.

There was a high, dark bank just here, out of which the pol-
ished roots of some tall white-trunked beeches stretched forth,
patched with clumps of emerald-green moss. It was perhaps well
that Daisy-Queen was somewhat spent. It certainly was well that
her hasty shying brought her bolt up against the clay slope of this
steep bank.

Twisting his body round to see what had frightened the mare,
Mr. Geard became conscious of the slight figure of a bare-headed
young girl watching him with excited brown eyes and a faint
smile of nervous concern. As soon as he got his horse under
control again and was safely back on the level path quite close to
where she stood, he took off his battered felt hat with a sweeping
bow. The girl was the sort of figure that a visitor might expect to
come upon in a glade at Fontainebleau or Blois or Chantilly.

Mr. Geard had never been out of his native land, but it was
with the sort of historic glamour that these names summon up
that he at once surrounded this frail apparition.

"Lady Rachel?" he murmured, bending low down over Daisy-
Queen's neck and whispering the words.

The girl smiled up at him, stretched out her arm and touched
his fingers. Then she began caressing the roan mare and mutter-
ing hurried endearments to her.

"What a lovely horse!" she said, looking up again into the
face above her.

There must have been some truth in what his friend the ostler
had remarked about Bloody Johnny's power over females of all
kinds, for the reassurance that this slim little creature--she was
really eighteen, but she looked no more than fifteen--received
from the steady gleam of his dark eyes, was so deep that they
became friends at once.

"She came from the Glastonbury stables," explained Mr. Geard.
Obeying some occult instinct in his unconscious nature he con-
tinued to address the girl in tones so low as to be practically
whispers.

The wind was blowing her clothes, her hair, her scarf, as it
whirled, rustling and eddying between the tree-rooted banks of
that green glade.

"Let me take you up," he now found himself saying, raising his
voice a little against the swishing and soughing of the wind
around them.

"Hold her still and I'll come!" she said; and thrusting herself
between Daisy-Queen's rump and the high mossy bank she made
use of a beech-tree root as one step and the man's foot in his
stirrup as another and in a second was mounted behind him,
perched sideways in the rear of his saddle, her thin arms round
his waist and her fingers clutching tight to the flaps of Canon
Crow's old Ulster.

Daisy-Queen, feeling this new burden on her back, leaped for-
ward with a wild bound; but the path being steep just there, it
did not require any great display of horsemanship on Bloody
Johnny s part to bring the mare again under control. They trotted
forward now comfortably enough under the swaying archway of
the tossing and creaking branches.

It was a wild-blown arcade of newly budded leaves through
which they burst, the smooth beech trunks rising up like pillars
at each side of them and the fallen twigs and broken branches
trodden in the mud below them by Daisy-Queen's hooves.

In Bloody Johnny's nostrils was the sweet spring sap of the torn
foliage above and beneath them and the fainter sweetness, but not
less spring-like and youthful, of the young girl's chestnut-coloured
curls, that were now blowing loose and free, after her struggle to
attain her seat.

They were soon in full sight of the grey stone roof and grey
buttressed walls of the Cornish King's hunting lodge. The place
resembled one of those Gothic turrets, with low-flanking heavy
masonry, that one sees in roughly engraved vignettes of German
fairy tales. Its small, compact size rather increased than dimin-
ished the Nordic massiveness of its time-battered cornices, its
moss-grown ledges with grey carved balustrades, its narrow, foli-
ated window-arches, its lichen-covered battlements. The emerald-
green grass blades that were sprouting freshly between the time-
worn stones and the torn twigs with soft young leaves upon them
that the wind was tossing against the masonry enhanced, like
new-plucked petals against an aged skin, the hoary antiquity of
this strange building.

The moment they reached the entrance, the young girl slipped
lightly from Daisy-Queen's flanks and running up the steps
opened the massive door. This she held open, clinging to the iron
handle in the wind and calling loudly to someone within, while
Mr. Geard slowly got down from his saddle and moved to the
mare's head.

Two servants came hurrying out at her call, a nervous little old
man with a straggly white beard and a sturdy, soldier-like, mid-
dle-aged man with a rugged, solemn face and grave eyes. The
ex-soldier took Daisy-Queen's bridle from Mr. Geard's hand,
touched his hat politely to Mr. Geard, and led the mare round the
corner of the building, while the old man entered into a hurried,
low-toned colloquy with Lady Rachel.

Bloody Johnny struck his crumpled black trousers several
times with his riding-crop, gazed round him with calm interest,
and then removing his hat and wiping his forehead with the back
of his hand, came slowly up the time-indented steps.

When they were all three inside the hallway where burned a
large open fire and where the visitor became aware of all manner
of trophies of hunting and of fishing hung about rough, smoke-
begrimed walls, the old man assisted Bloody Johnny to remove
his ulster, gave a glance at his feet as if he expected to have to
pull off heavy boots as well, and pushed up a great carved chair
to the side of the hearth.

"Do you smoke, Mr. Geard?" enquired Lady Rachel, bringing
him a box of cigarettes and holding it out to him with one hand
while she gathered up her disordered curls with the other. She
came close up to the arm of his chair pressing her young body
against the side of it with something of the wild-animal's coaxing
movement in her gesture and smiled down into his face, as he
leaned his big head back, against the escutcheon of the family
carved in smoke-darkened oak, and stretched out his feet towards
the blaze.

One of Mr. Geard's deepest characteristics, a characteristic
wherein his long line of Saxon ancestors, preserving their obsti-
nate identity under centuries of Norman tyranny, had provided
the basis, and his own singular psychic aplomb the magnetic
poise, was his power of relaxing his whole being and enjoying
his physical sensations without the least self-consciousness or em-
barrassment in anyone's presence. This characteristic, this com-
plete absence of nervous self-consciousness, always had a
reassuring effect upon women, children and animals, as it doubt-
less would have had upon savages.

It was this deep secret of physical ease, this curious freedom
from bodily self-consciousness, that gave Mr. Geard his advan-
tage with the real aristocracy, who strongly resemble women and
savages in their contempt for corporeal uneasiness.

Thus as Rachel Zoyland--whose ancestors in the male line had
fought under Charlemagne and in the female line had been
Varangian henchmen of Byzantine Emperors--bent over the fig-
ure of Bloody Johnny, resting after his ride in that heraldic
chair, she felt completely untroubled by his crumpled black
trousers, by his absurd tie, that looked like the tie of an under-
taker, by his grey flannel shirt, the cuffs of which protruded so
far beyond the sleeves of his coat, and by his rumpled woollen
socks fallen so low over his boots that the skin of his ankles was
clearly visible.

She turned now and spoke to the old servant who was still
hovering about the hall.

"Tell Mrs. Bellamy she can begin dishing up. John," she said.
"Father's only gone down to the end of the South Drive, to see if
Mr. Geard was coming that way. He'll be in any minute now."

When the old man had vanished she finished adjusting her hair
at a tall gilt-framed mirror between a stuffed fox's head and a
stuffed pike.

"We had a bet which way you'd come, Mr. Geard," she said
after a pause, seating herself on a footstool close to the fire, and
rubbing the palms of her hands slowly up and down over the
surface of her brown stockings which were in danger of being
scorched.

She became thoughtful then as if a very serious and risky idea
had come into her head.

Geard watched her silent profile with the firelight playing upon
it and he thought to himself--"It would be a wicked thing if
these enchanting looks of girls...these grave looks when their
thoughts are lost in the life-stream...should just pass away
and be forgotten forever!" He turned his consciousness inward
and sent it rattling down like a bucket...down and down and
down...into the black, smooth, slippery well of his deeper
soul.

But Lady Rachel was not thinking any vague, inarticulate
thoughts. She was thinking hard and desperately about a most
concrete and practical question. Should she confide in this man?
She knew her father had an unbounded respect for him. But after
all--to speak of such a sacred thing...her whole inner life...the
consecration of all her days...to a complete stranger ...five min-
utes after she had met him--was it possible to do such a thing
as that? Wouldn't it be like one of those reckless girls in Russian
stories who pour out their burning heart-secrets at a touch, at
a sign, at a glance? No; not altogether. There was a difference.
The difference consisted in Mr. Geard! A young girl is like a horse
or a dog. She judges by a man's eye. Mr. Geard's eye inspired
confidence. Rachel, staring gravely and dreamily into Mr. Geard's
eye, as she turned from the fire, felt she could trust him with
her secret life, as she could not have trusted anyone of those
she had known from childhood. But if she were going to say
the word, she must say it at once! Her father would be in any
second now. Old Bellamy would be in, telling her lunch was
ready.

Hark? Was that a door opening? No; only the wind in the
chimney. Oh, it would be too late in one minute now. Perhaps
her whole future...yes! and Ned's whole future depended on
her being brave now. It was like putting her horse to a fence! He
looked trustworthy. If not for her own sake, for Ned's sake, then,
she must do it now...Ned...Ned...Ned...

She leapt to her feet and came up to Mr. Geard's side. She was
closer to him now even than she had been before. Her hands were
clasped behind her back. Her little-girl breasts tightened and shiv-
ered. She pressed herself against the edge of his chair.

"Mr. Geard!"

"Yes, Lady Rachel."

"When my father talks about me to you, about my drinking the
waters at Bath or Glastonbury, and about Mr. Edward Athling--
he's my friend, you know, and my father doesn't approve of him
for me---will you promise to take my side, Mr. Geard? Quick!
He'll be back in a second. Will you promise to take my side?"

Bloody Johnny found his cold plump fingers clutched fiercely
by two hot, feverish, little hands. He turned his dark eyes towards
her, without moving his head. It was exactly as if the eyes of an
Aztec idol had followed the gestures of a worshipper.

"All right, child," said Mr. Geard, "I'll take your side; as long as--"

A door at the end of the hall opened and old Mr. Bellamy came
shakily in.

The girl was standing upright in a second and as proud as a
young Artemis.

"Is my father back?" she flung out.

"Yes, my lady, he's gone upstairs to wash his hands. Luncheon
is served, my lady. His lordship said not to wait for him/"

They had hardly sat down at the table, and Mr. Geard had barely
tasted his soup, when the master of the house came hurrying
round the table. He shook hands warmly with Mr. Geard and
would not allow him to rise from his seat, pressing his hand on
his shoulder to prevent such a movement; although to confess
the truth, the phlegmatic Mayor of Glastonbury had shown no
very energetic sign of getting up.

The meal did not last long and when it was over Lord P. sent
his daughter away. "Don't be cross, child," he said. "I want to
talk blood and iron with our good friend."

The girl rose obediently; throwing, however, a quick sideways
glance at Mr. Geard from beneath her long eyelashes. The Mar-
quis got up from the table, led her to the door, opened it and
dismissed her with a kiss. Seated again at the table he poured out
more wine for both of them, cleared his throat with the impres-
siveness of an ambassador and began to speak frankly.

The Marquis of P. had a high, thin retreating forehead, an
enormous nose, not bridged in the Roman way like the nose of
Mr. Evans and not thinly curved like a hawk as was the nose of
Philip Crow. It was a very massive, bony nose; but it had nostrils
that quivered with nervous excitement when the rest of the face
was quite calm; nostrils like those of an old war-horse. On his
short upper lip Lord P. wore a clipped, grey, military mustache,
and on his chin a pointed, grey beard.

"What I really wanted to see you about, Geard," he said, "was
simply this. Rachel, as you know, has no mother. My eldest boy
is in the Embassy at Budapest, the other one at Prague. My son
William, whom I'd like to legitimise if I dared--for he's been
more to me than both the others put together--is working for this
man Crow at Wookey Hole; acting showman, so he tells me, for
the British Public there. Anyway his wife, from what I hear, is
a flighty little bitch and no possible help. Well! The point is this.
My little Rachel has fallen in love with a young farmer, over at
Middlezoy, called Ned Athling. Athling's a good old Saxon name,
none better I believe and the boy's people are well-to-do yeomen.
But, apart from everything else, my girl's only eighteen; too
young for marriage, too young for anything serious or permanent.
The women-folk of my family have heard of this lad and they're
all up in arms--jumpy in fact, jumpy and vicious. They want me
to pack the kid off to the Continent with some terrible old dra-
gon. ...Then another thing. Geard...The child's health's not
good...not enough red corpuscles in her blood or something
...and the doctors say she ought to take the waters at Bath,
or some damned place. I'm no doctor, Johnny, my friend, and I'm
no psychologist; but I do know this, that to tear her away, bag
and baggage from any glimpse of this Athling boy would be just
to finish her off. My sister Lady Bessie lives at Bath and wants to
have her there. But Bess is a positively ferocious old maid. She'd
kill the child's heart in a month! I can see it like a map.

"Now what I was wondering was this. Isn't there anyone I could
send her to in Glastonbury? Those Chalice Hill waters of yours
have enough iron in 'em to put red corpuscles into a hundred
anaemic little gals. For God's sake, tell me, Johnny. You're
Mayor of the confounded place! Who could I send the kid to, in
your town? Who would look after her and feed her properly and
see she didn't get into trouble? Mind you, it's a bit of a delicate
situation and wants rather nice handling...I want her to go on
seeing this young chap; not often, you know, but once in a while.
I don't want her to get into her little head that I'm acting the
enraged papa and trying to separate 'em! What I'd like, of course,
would be for her to get a glimpse of those people of his, out at
Middlezoy, and have her own reaction--as I'm pretty sure she
would; for she's a regular little Zoyland--against the whole tribe
of 'em.

"That's my line, you see, Geard; not to bully her, not to play
the tyrannical parent; but, if possible, by giving this Athling boy
full rope, to let him hang himself with her! These are not the days
for acting the feudal baron. These are days when young people
do what they like. My own feeling is that if my women-folk had
not started worrying her about it and insulting young Athling, it
would never have got as far as it has. What I was wondering,
Johnny, was this...whether...perhaps...you could see your way...
to take her into your own house...for a time? You've got an
official position in the place. My savage sister in Bath wouldn't
say you were an irresponsible person to a voung girl with.

"My niece is staying with the Mayor of Glastonbury and taking
the waters there," I can hear the old spitfire retail ins it to
her cronies. ‘My brother's put his foot down at last on this Bo-
hemian life of hers at Mark Court.' Well, my boy. what do you
say to all this? We could tell the dear ladies that the child was
helping you with your Pageant...the rag-doll factory and so
on...eh?"

Bloody Johnny's face had been a scroll of flickering enigmas
while this surprising discourse flowed from his entertainer's lips.
He had had time to imagine with intense vividness the stir that
it would make in his quiet menage, this sudden introduction of
Lady Rachel under his roof. He was more than a little tempted
to cry out an immediate assent to Lord P.'s complimentary sug-
gestion. How thrilled his faithful Megan would he! How she
would murmur about the antiquity of the Rhys family and their
connection with the old Welsh princes! Why, before he knew it,
the good lady would be discovering some remote cousinship be-
tween herself and their noble guest.

But it would never do! He saw awkwardness, difficulties, com-
plications at every turn

"No, no," he said emphatically, looking straight into the peer's
little, piercing, sky-blue eyes. "No, no, Lord P., I cannot take
Lady Rachel into my house. Nor do I wish even to talk about it.
I beg you to let it rest at that. It would never, never do! But"--
and he laid his hand on his host's wrist who had impatiently
pushed back his chair and was apparently about to rise--"I can
tell you someone who would be the very person to send your child
to and leave her with; someone about whom you'd have no
reason to worry at all."

"I've no intention of thrusting my daughter on any of you
good Glastonbury people!" replied the Marquis in a huff. "I
would never have talked to you about this at all if I hadn't
supposed--"

"Enough, my Lord," interjected Mr. Geard sternly. "I assure
you I am serving you well in this. Let me at least talk to the
person I have in mind. I believe she would be overjoyed to take
Lady Rachel. And I swear to you, she and she only, in all our
town, would serve your purpose as I understand it."

"Hum...hum...hum ," mumbled the Marquis, allowing himself to
melt a little; but still taking a high and mighty tone. "And who
is this very kind and condescending lady, if I may take the
liberty of asking?"

"It was Miss Elizabeth Crow, Lord P., that I had in mind. She's
an aunt of the manufacturer; but she takes after her mother, the
wife of my old Norfolk friend, a woman who was a Devereux, a
woman who was, Sir, entirely and utterly, if I may say so, a lady
in your most intimate Zoyland sense of that word. She is in fact
... I whisper this in your ears, Lord P....the only real lady, in
your sense of the word, in all Glastonbury. Your sister, Lady
Bessie Zoyland, could not take exception to her. Miss Elizabeth
talks and feels and acts like a Devereux. You yourself would feel
it in a second ."

The Marquis smiled grimly.

"But it seems to me, my good Johnny, that you missed the
whole drift of my long oration. The point is that I dont want
a Devereux for my daughter. Your Miss Crow would be just the
same as if I sent her to Bessie, in Bath! The child would run
away, I tell you. She'd run away; and elope with her Middlezoy
farmer!"

Mr. Geard held his own, obstinately and calmly.

"Well, my Lord, we don't know yet that Miss Crow would be
willing to take your daughter. This I do know; that if she is, she
would fill the bill ex--actly. I did get all you implied in what
you said just now...everything...and I swear to you that in no
single point could you do better than Miss Elizabeth. She is--
if you'll allow me to say so--a lady after your own heart, Lord
P ."

The Marquis pulled up his chair to the table again and re-filled
his own and his guest's wine glass. His fierce, little, blue eyes
kept wandering uneasily about the room as if he expected at any
moment to learn that Mr. Edward Athling of Middlezoy was wait-
ing to see him.

"Well, Johnny, you go ahead and test your woman out. You
know exactly what I want from her. I don't want Rachel separated
from Athling. But I don't want her affair with him encouraged.
What I really want is for Rachel herself to get fed uo with the
boy! If your Miss Crow can catch the nuance uf all that, she
certainly is, as you say, a woman after my own hear!."

The Mayor of Glastonbury had won his little game of chess
only just in time; for at this moment the door opened and old
Bellamy came shuffling in to announce that ‘Mr. William" had
driven over from Wells and was waiting in the Hall.

"Is Lady Rachel with him?"

"Yes, your Lordship."

"Tell him we'll be down at once."

It was some three hours later that Mr. Geard and Will Zoy-
land, together with Lady Rachel and her father, were drinking
tea by the library fire.

The library at Mark's Court was a room very seldom used. In-
deed Lord P's orders to have the fire lit there this Sunday
afternoon were received with sheer indignation by Mr. and Mrs.
Bellamy. If the persecuted Sergeant Blimp--who pined for Lon-
don as a tropical animal pines in a Nordic zoo--had not offered
to light the fire himself, it may well be that his lordship's com-
mands would have led to a mutiny in the kitchen. The walls of
this room were brown with old folios. There were no modern
books in these shelves at all. Folios and quartos of every shade
of brown and yellow and dirty-white, but principally brown, com-
bined in some of the upper shelves with a few-duodecimos,
bound in the same manner, presented to Mr. Geard's eye and
mind a most curious and almost dreamlike impression.

The presence of these books had a peculiar effect upon him
as he sat sipping his tea and listening to these three Zoylands
talking of their family affairs. He became suddenly conscious,
with a grim exaltation, of the long history of the human race. And
he felt as if every movement in that history had been a thing of
books and wouId always be a thing of hooks! He thought of the
great books that have moulded history--books like Plato, Rous-
seau, Marx--and there came over him an overpowering sense of
the dramatic pliancy, suggestibility, malleability, of the masses of
human beings.

The three Zoyland heads fell, as he looked at them, and looked
past them at those huge shadowy brown shelves, into a symbolic
group of human countenances. The high thin brow, big nose and
pointed beard of the Marquis, the roving blue eyes and great
yellow beard of Will Zoyland, the white face, clustering brown
curls and long black eyelashes of the young girl, became to him
an allegorical picture, rich with Rembrandt-like chiaroscuro, of
the three ages of the journeying human psyche.

Their three extended shadows--with a huge toadlike image of
watchful detachment, hovering above them, that was himself--
became to him the dreamlike epitome of what those silent, brown-
backed creators had projected, had manifested in palpable form,
from their teeming Limbo of bodiless archetypes.

It was beginning to become for Bloody Johnny, as he drank
cup after cup of strong tea and withdrew more and more into his
secret thoughts, one of the great ocean-wave crests of his con-
scious life. Something seemed pouring through him, a strange,
unconquerable magnetic force, pouring through him out of that
piled-up mystery of printed matter. He seemed to visualise hu-
manity as a great, turbid stream of tumultuous waters, from the
surface of which multitudinous faces, upheaved shoulders, out-
flung arms, all vaporous and dim, were tossed forth continually.

And he was standing there with wide-straddled legs and deep-
planted feet, armed with a colossal spade. And with this spade he
was digging the actual river-bed--the new river-bed--along which
this wild, half-elemental, half-human flood was destined to pour!

And there flowed into Mr. Geard's soul, as he gazed at the
brown books above the silver candlesticks and above those three
Zoyland heads, a feeling of almost unbounded power. He felt as
though he possessed, in that invisible, ethereal Being at his side,
a fountain of occult force upon which he could draw without
stint. He felt that his own personal will--the will of John Geard
--was "free" beyond all limitation, beyond all credibility, be-
yond all expectation. And it was "free" because he had faith in
its freedom.

It was extremely distasteful to Mr. Geard when these three
Zoylands began to grow aware that they had been neglecting
their guest. Lady Rachel was the first to grow conscious of this
and she piunged at once into the most dangerous of all common
topics just then: the character of Mr. Philip Crow.

"How do you get on with your boss. Will?" the girl asked during
a pause in their talk with a gleam of roguery in her soft, gipsy-
like eyes.

"You won't like it very much, if I tell you everything I think
of Philip Crow," growled the Bastard in his deep base voice, ad-
dressing Mr. Geard point-blank.

"Why should I mind?" murmured Mr. Geard casually. But he
began frowning and turning away his smouldering black eyes
rather awkwardly from the careless blue ones of his adversary.

Like all possessors of magical power, Mr. Geard was liable to
be thwarted, baffled, frustrated, nonplussed, by the simplest de-
fiance; whereas with complicated and subtle antagonisms he
would be all alert. The shameless candour and rough dog-and-gun
manners of Will Zoyland had always rather worried Mr. Geard;
not exactly frightened him, but confused and discomfited him.

The Bastard now laughed loudly till his great yellow beard
wagged.

"Why should you mind? Lordy! Lordy! but that's funny! It's
as though I were watching two great hound-dogs fighting like
mad and when I kicked one of 'em with my foot it tried to make
out that it was only playing. Why should you mind? Oh, my dear
Sir, only because all the county knows that you and Philip Crow
are like a bull and a bull-dog!"

"Which is which?" enquired Lady Rachel. "I mean which is
the bull and which is the dog?"

Bloody Johnny turned an almost reproachful look towards the
girl; as if she had betrayed him by joining in her half-brother's
buffoonery.

But Zoyland had worse bolts than that in his arsenal and he
was in a mood to use them all. He turned to the Marquis now.

"I think you're a fool, Father," he said, "if you let our busi-
ness-like Mayor here entangle you in his grand row with Crow.
No, no! hear me out, Father; hear me out! I know very well what
old friends you and Mr. Geard are. That's not the point. The
point's hard, bed-rock business. The point's politics, Father, local
politics; of which, if I may say so, you know very little!"

"William's not being offensive to you, Geard. I hope?" broke
in the Marquis, "If you are, William, I won't have it. I won't
have these modern manner at m:y tea-table. Do yuu hear, boy?"

"I don't think William means to be rude to Mr. Geard, Father.
I think it was a sort of challenge to him like those old days.
Wasn't it. William? You feel you are bound to be faithful to Mr.
Crow: isn't it that. William?"

All three men stared at the young girl. They stared at her with
the puckered foreheads of grown people irritated by a child's
simplicity and with the screwed-up eyelids of men wondering
what a woman was going to say next.

Rachel had managed somehow, in a manner at once feminine
and childish, to take the wind out of all their sails. Mr. Geard
looked at her with deep reproach.

The Marquis thought in his heart: "Sensible infant! She won't
let Wiill bully Johnny. But Johnny's getting touchy.. By God, he
is! That's where hoi polloi comes out! Doesn't know how to deal
with a blunt rascal like our William! Damned if his eyes haven't
already got that shifty, resentful, mean look you see in any low-
class person when you've kicked his shin or hustled him a bit!
Gad! I'd have thought old Johnny was above getting that look!"

"It seems to me that I'm doing Mr. Geard a good turn," went
on Will Zoyland obstinately, "by telling you what I think about
his quarrel with Crow straight to his face rather than waiting till
he's gone and can't defend himself. Anyway, I'm one, as you
know. Father, for throwing down all the cards."

The Marquis stroked his little pointed beard pensively. The
yellow-haired ruffian was evidently a pet of his and held a role
in his house, whenever he turned up, parallel to that of the an-
cient court-jester; only the Zoyland Bastard was more realistic.

"No doubt you've agreed to let him have your name for his
Midsummer Fair! No doubt you've agreed to take an interest in
his communistic factory! But has it occurred to either of you,
either to you. Mr. Mayor, or to you, Father, what this struggle
really implies?"

The Marquis looked sharply at Bloody Johnny who was now
rapidly recovering his usual sang-froid .

"Do you want me to shut this lad's mouth, your Worship?" he
said with a chuckle, "or shall we follow the fashion of the hour
and give youth its free fling?"

"By all means...its fling," replied the Mayor of Glastonbury
gravely. "Go ahead. Mr. Zoyland! I like your frankness. I'll
repay it, never fear, when you've had your say, in the same
coin, if I can.

"Bravo, Geard, bravo!" cried my Lord, his little sharp eyes
glancing with relish from one to the other. He began indeed to
assume the expression of a virtuoso at a bear-baiting or a cock-
fight.

Lady Rachel, who knew her father pretty well, began to feel
sorry for her rider upon the roan mare. "He has no idea how
wicked and willful Father can be!" she thought.

"Our wily Mayor here has doubtless already committed you.
Father--and you too, Rachel, I'll be bound!--to his precious mid-
summer antics and to his communistic experiment. All I want to
point out, both to him and to you, is simply this." As he spoke
the great yellow-bearded swashbuckler shifted his position in his
hard-backed library chair and flung one leather-gaitered leg over
its arm. "Simply this--that you're both on the losing side! In-
evitably, by a law' of nature impossible to evade, Philip Crow is
going to won. No Midsummer Fairs, no rush of tourists to Glas-
tonbury from overseas, no municipal factories filled with sou-
venirs. no bribing of dirty cads like Barter, can prevent Philip
Crow' from wanning. You'll only make an ass of yourself before
the whole County, Father, if you go into this; just as you will, of
yourself--if I may say so--Mr. Geard!

"It won't do. You're heading for disaster. This strike that's
beginning now, engineered by that little fool of a brother-in-law'
of mine, will be utterly broken in a month or two. The labouring
men of Glastonbury aren't idiots. They'll see, quickly enough,
on w'hich side of the bread their butter is.

"Crow has the brains. Crow has the cash. Crow has the banks
behind him and the great upper middle class behind him. He has,
above everything else, the economic traditions of England behind
him. You can't beat Crow, my good Mr. Geard. Hire all the play-
actors you please; you can't beat him."

He jerked his leg back, from across his chair arm, and stretched
it straight out by the side of his other, thrusting his hands deep
into his pockets.

"I'll tell you a secret. Father: a secret of high politics: and
you can make all the use of it you please, my good Mr. Geard!
Philip Crow doesn't want Glastonbury flooded with visitors from
overseas. That's not his taste and I don't blame him. All this
demi-semi-religious hocus-pocus doesn't in the end do any good
to a town. What does good to a town is to have plenty of work--
real work, not this sycophantic, parasitic sponging on visitors,
not all this poppycock about the Holy Grail. I tell you I can see
the whole thing as clearly as if I were a bloody oracle. You can
smile as much as you like. Father: what I'm saying is the truth.
This strike in Crow's factories will only hurt the people. Dave
Spear's a young idealistic fool--a mere bookish doctrinaire. So
are you too, my good Mr. Geard, if you'll let me say so, with
your Midsummer Fairs. Whet you've managed to do is simply
this. You've divided the place into two camps. On your side are
all the faddists and the cranks and the soft heads. On Crow's side
is hard common sense. And let me tell you that in our old Eng-
land, even yet, it'll be common sense that'll win!"

He stopped breathlessly and pouring out all the milk that was
left in the milk-jug into the unused slop-basin swallowed it in
a couple of gulps.

The Marquis of P. exchanged glances with his daughter. The
Mayor of Glastonbury clasped his plump hands on the edge of the
table and leant forward as if to speak. Then he changed his
mind, unclasped his fingers, and sank back in his chair.

Lady Rachel said: "This new factory of Mr. Geard's is going
to manufacture little figures. They are going to be figures of
people like Arthur and Merlin. I'd sooner put my faith in these
little figures. Will, than in all your common sense!"

William Zoyland emitted a merry laugh,

"Merlin forsooth!" he cried. "Well, Rachel, I suppose this is
the right place for bringing Merlin in; but I've never yet heard
of the Mayor of any modem town who would pin his faith upon
Merlin!"

A long silence fell upon this group of four persons; a silence
that was only broken by the crying of the wind in the great chim-
ney above their heads. Then the Marquis said:--

"It's all very well for a healthy materialist like you. Will, to
scoff at our old superstitions. I've noticed, however, that neither
vou nor anyone else I've talked to, who've come to this house,
will ever agree to sleep the night in King Mark's Gallery here."

"Do you mean the big room, Lord P.." enquired Mr. Geard,
"that they say extends along the whole top floor of Mark's
Court?" He paused for a minute--"I've often heard of this big
room," he went on, "but I've never met anyone who's seen it."

Will Zoyland got up upon his feet, with a movement that
shook the tea-table, and made the cups and saucers rattle.

"I tell you what, you Mayor of Glastonbury," he muttered in
a queer husky voice, "if you'd sleep a whole night in that room
up there, I'd--I'd--well! I'd say there was something, some
bloody spunk at any rate, in this precious Pageant of yours!"

"William!" protested the Marquis, "you're going a bit too far,
my boy."

Rachel's face had gone white and her eyes had grown large and
very dark.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Will!" she murmured
in a tone that was scarcely audible.

But Mr. Geard's aplomb and self-possession had completely
come back to him . He looked quietly at his host.

"I don't want to intrude," he said slowly, "or to outstay my
welcome; but if there were...any way...of getting...a message
to my family...I'd be... honoured...I say honoured...to sleep
tonight...in the room you're...talking about."

"Don't let him, Father! Oh, you mustn't let him!" cried Lady
Rachel with passionate intensity.

Bloody Johnny stretched out one of his plump hands and
touched the young girl's knee.

"Listen, child," he said solemnly.

Rachel, still very white, looked him in the face.

"I swear to you. Lady Rachel," said the Mayor of Glastonbury
slowly, "that I shall be all right up there."

He was the first, of the two of them, to remove his eyes. As
soon as he had done so the girl drew a long breath and smiled,
and a rush of blood, flooding her cheeks and even her soft, thin
neck with a lovely rose tint, suffused her pale skin. Mr. Geard's
own gaze encountered now the bold, restless, unsympathetic
stare of Will Zoyland.

The Marquis of P., who after his fashion, was no mean dis-
cerner of spirits, thought to himself. "Hurrah for old Johnny!"
I'm damned it he hasn't picked himself up. There's nothing of
the bounder about him now. He's standing up to Will now."

"I don't...mean...to say." pronounced Mr. Geard emphatically.
"that there are not terrors which are beyond my powers to
overcome or to exorcise. I'll confess at once, Mr. Zoyland.
that if there are bugs and fleas and spiders and dust up there.
I here and now retract my pledge. But if your people, my Lord,"
and he turned to the Marquis, "have cleaned up that room fairly
lately, and if you can get your Sergeant to carry up some kind
of a bed there. I'd love to spend the night under your roof...
only someone must tell my family."

The Marquis gave an imperceptible shrug of his shoulders, as
much as to say, "I'm beginning to wish I were alone here with
my daughter; as I intended to be!" but he rose stiffly to his feet,
went to the mantelpiece and rang the bell.

Sergeant Blimp must have been driven out of the warmth of
the kitchen by the spiteful hatred of the old couple; for he an-
swered his master's ring almost as quickly as if he had been
standing on the threshold like an old-fashioned man-at-arms. The
way he now presented himself within the restricted radiance of
the candlelight, and stood erect and silent there, suggested to
Bloody Johnny's mind the idea that he carried a hauberk or at
least an arquebus.

"Blimp," said the Marquis laconically. "I want you to go up
to King Mark's chamber and see if the Bellamys have been
dusting it and scrubbing it lately."

"Yes, my Lord. Certainly, my Lord," murmured the Sergeant.

"Run off then!...King Mark's chamber," repeated the Marquis
peevishly.

But Sergeant Blimp showed no sign of stirring.

"Off with you, man! Are ye deaf?'" cried my Lord crossly.

"It's...it's...it's," stammered the powerful henchman.

"It's what?" enquired his master grimly. "Speak up. you fool!
Don't stand staring like that, you idiot."

"It's...a long story, your Lordship!" stammered the troubled
servant.

"A long story!" cried Lord P., bursting into an unpleasant,
sneering laugh. "What on earth are you muttering about ? Do
what I tell you."

"Your Lordship's orders were," burst out the man. with a rush
of hasty words, "that I should have the whole place thoroughly-
cleaned, this time; afore you and my Lady Rachel came down.
Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy wouldn't have a hand in it. They said
they'd clean Lady Rachel's room, they said, but nothing more. So
I had the remover's van men come in and do it...the same as
brought down your Lordship's last load from London...and ...and
...to be frank with your Lordship, I haven't been up there since!
The men said as how they had cleaned up wonderful clean; and
'twere a good tidy job, they said; and so, seeing as Mr. and Mrs.
Bellamy were not"

The Marquis of P. jumped incontinently to his feet. Mr. Geard
at first fancied he was going to strike the luckless Sergeant. When
this did not occur he expected him to burst into a torrent of abuse
and order him up to King Mark's chamber on pain of instant dis-
missal. But neither did this happen.

To Mr. Geard's complete astonishment, though not, it seemed,
to the astonishment of his son and daughter, the Marquis took
not the slightest notice of poor Blimp but walked hurriedly to
the door, opened it, went out, and closed it behind him.

The man turned shamefacedly to Lady Rachel.

"I dursn't go up there, your Ladyship. I dursn't do it! I've
served his Lordship for ten years, come good, come ill; and I've
always done his bidding, and more than his bidding. But go into
that room I dursn't...not to save my neck from the rope."

"It's all right, Blimp," said Lady Rachel kindly. "Father won't
really mind. Don't you worry! He knows what he's got in anyone
as devoted as you are. It'll be perfectly all right. You'd better
take away the tray now that you are here."

‘‘Well," began Will Zoyland, as soon as the man had departed
with the tea-things. "I expect I'd better be seeing that Father
doesn't come to any harm up there.' 1

He rose from his seat like a great sulky tom-cat, yawning os-
tentatiously, stretching himself and running his fingers through
his yellow beard; and then he strolled heavily and leisurely to
the door.

"This all comes of your confounded Pageant, Mr. Mayor," he
rapped out harshly as he left the room.

Left to themselves the young girl got up too, and came over to
Mr. Geard's side. There was no room for her to sit on the arm of
his chair; but she leaned against it, bending over him and press-
ing near to him. This tendency of Lady Rachel's to nestle up very
close to anyone she trusted, to touch them with her warm body,
to yield herself to them, was it a sign that the child in her was
not yet absorbed or subsumed in the young woman? Or was it
simply an indication that no cruel life-experience had as yet
warned her against following a natural, almost universal girlish
impulse? Possibly the true explanation of her instinctive desire
to let Mr. Geard touch her would have been found to have had
more to do with him than with her! It is indeed undeniable that
had the Mayor of Glastonbury been free to do exactly what he
liked he would have now pulled her down upon his knees; but he
was not at all a man to followany erotic feeling the moment it
appeared, and in place of doing this he contented himself with
taking her hand.

The girl's feelings were far too vague and floating and ephem-
eral for her to understand why it was that this taking of her hand
at this moment gave her something of a cold chill and partook of
the nature of a rebuff.

But although Mr. Geard kept an iron lid firmly screwed dowm
upon his erotic feelings, some inner disturbance, evoking a tan-
talisingly vivid sensation of what he might have felt had he not
screwed down this iron lid, must have communicated itself to the
girl whose hand he held.

"Did you take my side as you promised to?" she murmured
tenderly.

He pressed her fingers.

"Not much need, little lady," he said. "Your father has no
intention of handing you over to that woman in Bath. I suggested
that you should stop with Miss Crow in Glastonbury...Miss
Elizabeth Crow...and I think I'll be able to arrange that for
you. Its a little house in Benedict Street. You and she will be
great friends."

Lady Rachel disengaged her hand.

"I thought you would have me...in your house...Mr. Geard!" she
cried indignantly. "Didn't Father ask you about that?"

But Bloody Johnny was spared the embarrassment of explain-
ing to her how little he desired to stir up the muddy waters of
snobbishness in his sober dwelling, by the entrance of the Mar-
quis and Will Zoyland.

"Well, Geard," said my Lord, "it's all arranged. Will has helped
me with the bed; and he's told Mrs. Bellamy to do the rest.
Poor Blimp is as terrified of ghosts as you seem to be of bugs
and spiders! But I assure you the place is as clean as our hall.
It's cold though. It's cold as the North Pole. I've told her to light
a good fire for you. But it's clean. Those furniture chaps of
Blimp's must have had step-ladders up there. It's like a church."

"I've got my Ford here," added Will Zoyland, "and I can easily
go back to Wookey round by Glastonbury. No, I can't, Father!
I tell you I can't!"--The Marquis had begun to press him to
stay the night--"Easter Monday's a great day for trippers; one of
the greatest; and I've really got to be on the job."

Some four or five hours later, after a pleasant supper over the
open fire in the great hall, Lord P. and his daughter escorted the
Mayor of Glastonbury up to the chamber of phantoms. They
mounted, an ancient staircase beyond the landing where the Mar-
quis' bedroom was, and where the old couple, as well as the
Sergeant, had their sleeping quarters. Here there was another
small landing, from which a door opened upon the steps leading
to a high turret-chamber of which Lady Rachel had taken
possession.

"Let's show the Mayor my room, Father," cried Rachel eagerly;

The Marquis led the way. He carried in his hand a flat silver
candlestick, from which the yellow candle-flames suddenly grown
large and smoky, streamed backward, as the wind, whistling
through the arrow-slits of the tower, blew about them as they
went slowly up.

A fire was burning in Rachel's chamber and Bloody Johnny,
when he caught the glowing essence of this enchanting room, felt
a sudden clutch in the pit of his stomach while an outrageous and
wild thought seized upon his mind.

Mr. Geard noticed on one side of this vaulted chamber, a sub-
sidiary archway containing a small heavily bolted door.

Lady Rachel intercepted his glance.

"Lets take him over the Bridge of Sighs!" she whispered ex-
citedly to her father.

The Marquis swung round on his heel and glowered for a mo-
ment with a cold glint of something worse than animosity at Mr.
Geard. Lord P. possessed a peculiarity inherited from his an-
cestors, of being subject at times to a savage anti-social spasm,
a spasm of dangerous repugnance, dividing him and his. as if by
a wedge of boreal ice from the particular specimens of humanity
he encountered. This characteristic was one which almost all the
intimates of Lord P.--unless they had blood in their veins recog-
nised by himself as equal with his own--sooner or later came
into collision with.

It is a sentimental mistake to assume that the real aristocracy
is free from snobbishness. It is free from that perturbation of
spirit in the presence of social ritual which is an accompaniment
of snobbishness in ordinary people; but if any psychologist plays
with the illusion that such great gentlemen are simple, natural,
and naive, in their absence of pride, he is making a profound
mistake.

The historic House of Zoyland, descended from Charlemagne
on the one hand, and from Rollo the Varangian on the other, had
certain peculiarities that separated them altogether from the hum-
bler gentlefolk of England. They had qualities that were unique
to themselves and will die with them. One of these was this ice-
cold, blindly pitiless frenzy of scorn for normal flesh-and-blood
when they grew aware of it in a certain condition of their nerves.

This was the first and last occasion, however, in the life of the
Marquis of P. when this projectile of frozen scorn for his inter-
locutor produced absolutely no effect on the person at whom it
was directed.

Mr. Geard was in touch with a Presence that had defeated the
Principalities and Powers of this proud planet centuries before
the Norsemen came to Byzantium or Rolands horn was heard at
Fontarabia!

Thus it was with a slightly weary indulgence, too patient and
unperturbed to be even ironical, that Bloody Johnny returned,
stare for stare, the withering oeilliade of his noble host.

Lady Rachel, however, quite oblivious of this psychic episode,
had begun to unbolt with girlish impetuosity the great iron bars
that secured this archway-door. She pulled it open, inwards into
the room, when she had drawn its final bolt; and Mr. Geard,
whose eyes, leaving those of the devil-ridden nobleman, had wan-
dered over this warm, virginal, mediaeval room, and now met hers
as she held fast to the thing's iron-wrought handle and kept the
door ajar, smiled at her in unembarrassed response. From the
girl's face his eyes now wandered again round the various objects
in this remote little turret-chamber. There was a queer silence
among the three of them while he did this; the reddened smoke
from the fireplace, and the long yellow flame from the candle
which the Marquis held, moving fitfully to and fro, as the wind
rushing in from the stone archway she had uncovered, went
eddying querulously round the walls.

Bloody Johnny noticed that the girl's bed--situated in an arch-
way opposite to the one where she was now standing--was cov-
ered with a dark green coverlet, upon the centre of which the
Zoyland arms, a falcon clutching a bare sword, was worked in
dusky crimson. A small shelf of books--they all seemed to be
unbound French books whose paper backs looked singularly out
of keeping with the rest of that interior--hung at the bed s head,
while over the w^all space of the corresponding archway opposite
the hearth was suspended a strip of faded tapestry, the figures
upon which it was impossible to decipher in that flickering light,
as the wind, stealing behind it, made it swell and bulge like a
heavy sail and then again subside into the level darkness of its
obscurity.

But the silence in that room became itself a tapestry of obscure
figures that lifted and sank, sank and lifted, each one of those
three minds offering its own secret pattern to the occult weaving
of that pregnant moment.

The girl alone, woman-like, was aware of the flowingness of
time. For the others time was static. For Geard it was a static
Eternal, with that wind-shaken piece of old tapestry sinking down
with all three of them into other dimensions. For Lord P. it was
a static Superficial, with the tension stretched taut, like the leash
of a straining dog.

But to the girl, as she held ajar that heavy oaken door, keeping
the wild wind out and yet not keeping it quite out, there came
just then an exultant feeling of lovely, continuous flowingness.

"How strong and mysterious men are," she thought to herself.
"But oh, I'm glad I'm not a man. Ned isn't a man either. And
what a good thing he isn't. Ned's only a boy. He couldn't manage
these strong mysterious men like I can."

It was the Marquis who made the gesture that broke the spell;
but even he did not speak in order to do it. He made a sign to
his daughter to go ahead and he made a sign to Geard to follow
her. He himself followed with his hand over the candle-flame; and
indeed it was necessary for him to give the door a vicious kick
with his foot to close it before he could cross the covered stone-
way after them, and enter King Mark's death-chamber. This they
entered by a similar door to the one he had closed and he man-
aged to get the candle safe into the great empty place without
letting the wind annihilate its tender flame.

Once inside King Mark's room and the little door shut behind
him. Lord P. laid the candle down on a vast piece of furniture
that looked like a long refectory table in a monastery in South
Russia, and, returning to the door through which they had come,
closed it with unnecessary violence.

The young girl ran forward now to the hearth-fire which was
burning very badly. Huge clouds of smoke kept issuing from it;
clouds that rolled across the room and mounted up among the
high rafters. Mr. Geard watched her intently for a second as she
bent down to select a few more inflammable billets of wood to
throw in, on the top of the ones that were smouldering so slowly
and unsatisfactorily there. With the smoke rising up in wisps and
eddies around her, her figure took on an almost unearthly waver-
ingness; as if she had been a sylph of the elements, a Being that
was taking refuge from the wind-demon outside, in the arms of
the fire-demon inside.

He then glanced at the couch that Will Zoyland had carried up
for him. It was just a boy-scout camp-bed; but they had covered
it with a vast, ancient coverlet, like the one that covered Lady
Rachel's bed, only this was of a dark purplish colour; and while
it had upon it, in faded embroidery, the falcon clutching the
sword, an ugly rent in it had rendered the bird headless.

Mr. Geard moved slowly to the fireplace; but he began to cough
as the smoke got into his throat.

"There!" cried the girl with a deep breath, prodding the smoulder-
ing logs with a thick iron rod, hooked at the end, which looked as
if it had served for this purpose in days when iron had only just
begun to be used. She let this Homeric utensil fall with a clatter
on the stone coping of the hearth.

"If the smoke makes you cough when you're in bed," she said,
while a darting red flame lit up her face, "you can lug your
couch under the window and leave the window open. That's what
I do when my fire smokes. These old chimneys always smoke
when they're first lit." She paused and a spasm of intense concern
puckered her brow.

"You don't suppose there were any swallows' nests in the chim-
ney, do you?" she asked.

Her mouth remained open after the words left and her eyes
grew round.

The Marquis, who had been fumbling at the latches of one of
the windows, got it open now, and as he got it open the wind came
in with such a wild rush that he jumped back in dismay. Lady
Rachel observed this occurrence with childish interest; and in
her fit of momentary nervousness, being wrought up by her
anxiety over the possibility of nests in the chimney, she forgot her
good breeding and laughed aloud. Her laughter must have been
the final issue of a long series of suppressed days; for it burst out
through the smoke with the quivering ring of something hysterical.

Through the brain of Mr. Geard there rushed like a frantic swal-
low beating its wings to escape, the word "Nimeue"; and with
this word, the original of the name Vivian. a spasm of mingled
emotions, sweet and troubling.

But the Marquis was really annoyed now. That there should
have arisen all this unusual fuss over his old friend Johnny Geard
of Montacute was in itself not a little inappropriate. But, after all.
he himself had been responsible for it. But the Bastards words,
though rejected at the time, had already begun to work on the
subtle old statesman's mind: and he felt as if there was something
in the air in King Mark's chamber that night which was unsuit-
able, incongruous, and out of control. That hysterical note in his
daughter's laugh, when the inrush of wind made him leap back,
"taunted" his mind, as they say in Somerset. He bit his underlip
as he pushed the casement to again with both his hands and
clicked the two iron latches.

"Women and " he muttered under his breath impatiently.

He meant to say "women and conjurers," but instead of "con-
jurers," the lips within the lips, which people use when they are
obsessed in this curious way. uttered the words--"Caer Sidi";
words which an eccentric Oxford scholar, when drunk enough to
talk freely to him, had once repeated in his ears with tipsy
reiteration.

The Mayor of Glastonbury had himself drawn back from that
childish laughing-fit; and coughing quite uncomfortably now
from the acrid smoke he had swallowed, sat himself down on his
scout bed. But this bed began so to creak and groan under his
weight that he turred to his host and said peevishly, "Mr. Zoy-
land's not been setting a booby-trap for me, I hope?"

"You've not won your bet yet Geard," returned the Marquis
laconically. "You understand, I suppose, quite clearly," he went
on, taking his daughter by the arm and leading her to a different
door from the one they had entered by, "that no one has managed
to sleep in this room? Some mediaeval clerk, called Blehis or
Bleheris, wrote his histories here, they tell me; buc he wouldn't
sleep up here."

But Mr. Geard, rising from his creaking bed, dismissed with a
wave of his plump hand this nervousness of Messire Bleheris.
Placidly he bowed good-night to them both, and was apparently
onlv anxious to get rid of them.

The Marquis, however, with his daughter clinging to his arm.
her white face and dark eyes looking wild and scared in the
candlelight, was seized with the devil's owm malice.

"I met a crazy Oxford scholar, Geard," he said, "not so long
ago; who told me that he'd sooner commit murder than sleep in
this old place. He said that Merlin--"

"Stop, Father; stop! How can you be so cruel?" cried Lady
Rachel, actually clapping her free hand over the man's sneer-
ing mouth.

"Hee! Hee! Hee!" chuckled my Lord. "You won't have won
your bet with Will, your Worship, till Bellamy lets you out in
the morning! I'm to lock you in, Geard, I hope you understand?
And of course the turret-room will be bolted. They say that a
man, in the time of Edward the Fourth, spent the whole night out
there, on the Bridge of Sighs; and another fellow, only a hun-
dred years ago, was found--" but the girl pulled him hastily
and indignantly through the door.

"Good-night, Mr. Geard!" she called out, while the huge mass
of oaken boards, bound with hand-wrought iron, groaned as
it closed.

Bloody Johnny heard the faint metallic clang, muffled and
muted, of the bolts being thrust into place. Then there ensued a
tremendous silence. He sat down again on his creaking scout bed
and surveyed King Mark's chamber. The tall candle, burning
steadily and brightly now on the refectory table, and the red
flames that were coming from a pile of wood on the hearth, served
to illumine the vast, shadowy expanse. The place was like the
interior of an early Norman church and it seemed to the Mayor
of Glastonbury that upon many of the enormous rafters above his
head there were obscure patches and blotches of what must once
have been painted scrolls. He walked to one of the arched win-
dows and gazed out into the night. It was too dark to see more
than the faintest outlines of the trees beneath him, but at one spot
in the sky the wild-tossed racks of swift-blown clouds had thinned
a little, revealing a dim moon that looked sick and giddy; as if she
also, even she, were being blown, like a great pale leaf. before
this devilish wind.

The chamber was certainly clean. The Marquis had not de-
ceived him on that point at any rale. He hesitated a minute or
two; and then, quietly and deliberately, took off his coat, waist-
coat, shirt and trousers. He experienced, as he always did, a
vague, humorous distaste for his plump, unathletic body, as he
looked down upon his ungainly legs, encased in grotesque woolen
drawers, and upon his protruding belly, like the paunch of a fig-
ure upon a beer mug. in its soft, tight-fitting vest.

He walked to the refectory table and took up the candle, plac-
ing it on the floor by his bedside. He went across to the chair
where he had laid his clothes and took from his coat pocket a box
of matches which he placed on the floor by the side of the candle.
Then, with heavy deliberation he got down upon his knees by the
side of that ridiculous little couch, draped in its ragged armorial
coverlet, and shutting his eyes tight and letting his clasped hands
rest on his stomach, which at that moment resembled the belly of
a wooden Punchinello, he proceeded to murmur his usual eve-
ning prayer.

This was a singular one, in that it was addressed to the air on
the other side of his bed.

"Master be with me," prayed Bloody Johnny, "Master be with
me! Give me strength to change the whole course of human his-
tory upon earth! Give me strength to make Glastonbury the centre
of a completely new life! Master he with me! Be with me now
and forever, by thy most precious Blood!"

The image he evoked in his imagination did not resemble in
the least degree the tortured Figure of Pain worshipped by Sam
Dekker, and it did not fade away till he got himself slowly into
bed. He did this most carefully and gingerly and though the little
couch shivered and creaked lamentably under his weight, it did
not let him down. His feet, however, protruded under the cover-
let, like the feet of a corpse under a purple pall, almost six
inches beyond the end of the bed. He then bent down, picked up
the candle, blew it out, and replaced it upon the floor.

He lay flat now upon the bed...on his broad back...his massive skull
on the soft white pillow. With his hands he pulled up the heraldic
coverlet till it was thickly disposed beneath his chin. He tucked its
heavy folds tight about his shoulders, being totally unable to cope
with the smooth compactness in which Mrs. Bellamy had so trimly
turned back the sheet over the stiff blankets.

His eyes watched the flickering firelight as it touched with
warm, rosy reflections the huge dark rafters and the curved oaken
supports of the baronial roof.

A pleasant aromatic smell...the smell of pine wood...began now to
comfort his senses. The smoke was no longer bitter. It had become
fragrant...soothing as incense but more wholesome and natural, al-
most forest-like.

"Master be with me!" his lips repeated;"be with me now and forever;
by thy most precious Blood!"

Mr. Geard's nature was about ten times as thick as most men's.
With the seven or eight under layers of this nature he was entirely
absorbed, by day and by night, in his contact with Christ, which
resembled, though it was not identical with, the physical embrace
of an erotic obsession.

Thus it was only now...when things had at last subsided and he
was left alone...that the two or three upper layers of his thick,
phlegmatic nature became really conscious of the difference
between going to bed in the chamber where Merlin turned
King Mark into dust and going to bed with his faithful Megan.
He recalled Lord P.'s malicious "Hee! Hee! Hee!" as he dragged
his daughter off and the wild, frightened look--both for him and
for the imaginary nests in the chimney--with which Rachel had
been pulled through the doorway.

It was not with a very deep layer of his being, perhaps not
even with the deepest of the two or three uppermost ones, that he
meditated for a while upon the virginal provocativeness of that
soft, slim, girlish body, that he had so nearly pulled down upon
his knees just now. These sensual thoughts were entirely unre-
sisted by Mr. Geard. It was a peculiarity of Bloody Johnny's
"thick" nature, that his religious, and what many people might
have called his "spiritual" feelings, had absolutely no connection
with morality. But although not resisted but rather, on the con-
trary, encouraged by his conscious will, these amorous stirrings
within him were so weak and so languid, as very soon to subside
into a delicious drowsiness.

The Mayor of Glastonbury's drowsiness, however, soon ceased
to be delicious. No sooner had it become an actual sleep, although
a very light sleep, than a fantastic philological problem tormented
the dreaming man.

Was it "Nineue," or "Nimeue," that Owen Evans had told him
was the original version of the popular "Vivian"? These three
words, "Nineue," "Nimeue" and "Vivian," became for him now
three flying herons with outstretched legs. Bloody Johnny's own
heart, escaped somehow from his body, was the sick, giddy moon
that he had caught a glimpse of; and it was this accurst philologi-
cal problem--which heron was Merlin's paramour--that made
this moon-heart of his, as the wild wind tossed it about, so sick,
so yellow, so dizzy.

He suddenly awoke into full consciousness with a violent start.
He had heard a voice...Oh. it was unmistakably real! It wasn't in
his dream at all!...which cried out from beside the hearth, "Nin-
eue! Nineue!" He listened now, fully awake and with a heart that
was most assuredly safe back where it belonged, for it was pound-
ing like a clock with broken machinery.

How the wind was howling! Never had he heard such a wind!
It was a sheer, simple, childish terror that Mark Moor Court was
going to be blown down that night, which was making his heart
beat in this way. Mr. Geard kept telling himself just this. "It's
the wind," he repeated firmly and emphatically. "It's the wind
that's making my heart beat!"

He craned his neck round, staring at the fire that was now very
large and very red. The voice he had heard was that of a man,
and it had come from somewhere behind the masonry of the wall,
just to the right of that burning blaze. And then, without any
ambiguity this time, he heard an unmistakable sound clear and
distinct, in some room just below his floor. He moved his head
back upon his pillow. The sound ceased at once. Again he
stretched out his head, like the head of a saurian, over the side of
the bed. The sound once more became audible. It was an unmis-
takable sound; but it was anything but a romantic sound. It was
in fact the sound of a man making water.

Mr. Geard could not be mistaken. The man was making water
into a metallic chamber-pot: and as he made it he broke wind
several times. The Mayor of Glastonbury continued to crane his
neck over the side of his bed. He now became aware of a crack,
just in that place, between the bare, dark, oak planks of the floor.
A faint, a very faint light was observable through this slit in the
floor. He continued to listen with his whole soul. Never had he
listened so intently to any sound in his life. He heard the man
replace the chamber-pot...it must have been made of tin or
perhaps of iron...and then there were steps and gaspings and
creakings and low grumbling groans. Soon he heard another
sound, similar to the first and yet dissimiliar. A second human
being was making water. This time the flow was noisier, quicker,
sooner over. "It's a woman," thought Bloody Johnny.

He tried to make his awkward position, as he hung over the
crack in the floor, a more comfortable one. He extended his arm
until his fingers touched the floor. Yes! this gave a necessary
support to his outstretched head.

There were more shufflings and groanings, more creakings and
obscure murmurs, then dead silence. He waited, still stretched
out over the crack. He thought to himself, "A man makes water.
A woman makes water. These sounds are being heard all over
Somersetshire tonight, in thousands and thousands of bedrooms.
Other unpleasant sounds are being heard too. The sounds of the
teeth of incredibly ravenous rats inside hundreds of slaughter-
houses. I wonder," so the thoughts of the Mayor ran on, "I
wonder if there are any ears subtle enough to hear the worms at
work in the churchyards? A man making water. A woman making
water. Every sound a vibration. Every vibration a radiation, a
detonation. Every sound travelling from the earth, outward into
space. Will the sound of Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy making water in
their room at Mark Court go on voyaging through space until
it reaches the Milky Way? And not stop even then? No! No!
Why should it stop then? Nothing once started can ever stop! It
can come back perhaps, if space is round, but that's the best it
can do. Here we go round Tom Tiddler's ground! The everlasting
pissing of Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy."

But the silence was broken again now; broken just as the
Mayor of Glastonbury was going to withdraw his outstretched
head. There was a sound of expectoration; and this sound was
a good deal more disagreeable to the ears of Mr. Geard than the
other had been. And then he heard with appalling distinctness
the voice of the old woman saying to the old man. "Spit on the
brown paper, John. Spit on the brown paper I did lay out for
'ee!"

Bloody Johnny drew back his head and once more pulled the
purple coverlet tightly round his chin. "Nineue" he murmured
aloud, trying to recall what it had been in the intonation of that
voice from behind the fireplace that had given his heart such a
shock. Had he dreamed of his heart being sick and yellow, like
the driven moon, before he heard that voice crying out? Yes he
had. He most assuredly had. And he had been dreaming of the
name "Nineue" before he heard it cried. And he had thought of
the word "Nineue"...it had come suddenly into his head in
place of something else...before he dreamed of it. Or had he
dreamed of it and thought of it too after he had heard that voice?

"Damn!" said Bloody Johnny to himself, "It must have been
that old pantaloon, down there, talking to his wife; and in my
dream I made it out to be a voice."

He had reached this point in his cogitations when he suddenly
found himself sitting straight up in the creaking little bed in a
grievous fit of pure fear. He knew that voice was going to be
lifted up again. He knew it was. Nothing could stop it from being
lifted up again. In just one second he would be hearing it again.
It would be crying "Nineue" just as it had done before. "If it
does," he thought, "I shall run out on that bridge. I shall knock
at that girl's door. She couldn't not let me in. She couldn't not!"

But he clenched his hands together stubbornly and stared at the
red fire, resolute, in his massive way, to beat down this fear, to
beat it down and hold it down, so that it should not grow into
panic; so that it should not get into his legs. So far it was only in
his heart and in his throat. But he could feel it descending. It
ran down a funnel...the fear-funnel it was that it ran down
...inside his ribs...no, between his spine and his stomach. Tightly,
tightly, he clasped his hands together staring at the fire. He
thought of various quiet, sturdy people in his life. He thought
of Megan sleeping in their familiar room.

And then, in a flash, he thought of Canon Crow. The Canon had
been accustomed to read Rabelais to him sometimes of a night,
when the servants were in bed. The Canon had laughed at him at
such times and called him "Friar John des Entommeures," "Friar
John of the Funnels." He was all one great Funnel now...waiting
till the repetition of that voice pumped fear into him...out of him...
through him...pumped...pumped...But all might yet be well if this
fear didn't get into his legs!

Now came a second of time when he actually wanted the voice
to come again. "When it's come, it's come," he thought. "It's
past then...come and gone." But it was his own mouth that now
opened like a crack in thick ice. It was his own voice that re-
sounded wildly through King Mark's chamber, till the rafters rang
again; "Nineue! Nineue!"

He did feel a certain relief when he had uttered this rending
and tearing scream. He found he had sufficient self-control now
to ask himself what it had been in the intonation of that voice
that had made his heart so sick. The horror he had felt was not
precisely fear. What it really was was pity. It was pity carried to
such a point by the intonation of that reiterated "Nineue!
Nineue!" that it became worse than fear. The relief he experi-
enced when--impelled by a nervous force he was unable to re-
sist--he had himself cried out that name was like the relief which
some spectator at the Colosseum might have felt, when unable
to endure what he saw, he had jumped down into the arena and
was fighting there tooth and nail among the murderers and the
murdered.

He now found himself mumbling forth a sort of personal ap-
peal to the Being who had cried "Nineue! Nineue! '

"Why don't you come forth? Why don't you show yourself?
Yes, yes, why don't you come forth now, close up to my bed,
near me, near me, so that I can touch you, see you, feel you?"

He uttered these words in a low tone, swaying and shivering
there in the reddish fire-gleams. If any human eye had been
watching him he would have resembled a picture that one could
imagine being painted by Rembrandt if Rembrandt had gone mad.

The fire-gleams flickered upon the tight woolen vest that cov-
ered the exposed half of his protuberant belly. They flickered
upon his great white face. They flickered upon the headless falcon
embroidered on the torn rug about his legs. They flickered on his
stockinged feet, which stuck out grotesquely beyond the end of
his diminutive bed.

"Why don't you let me see you?" he whined again in a voice
that was almost wheedling; and he began suddenly nodding his
great head in a manner that suggested the impulse of a powerful
dog anxious to propitiate a yet more powerful dog by an obse-
quious fawning and wagging of its great tail.

"Let me see you! Yes, yes; let me touch you with my hands!"

It was as if he were addressing a Being whose presence he felt
much more certainly, much more closely than he felt the pressure
of that heraldic rug at which he now began twitching; pinching
it with his fingers and thumbs, much as a dying man plays with
the bedclothes that cover his nakedness. What he felt in all his
pulses was that if this desperate lover of Nineue...this great
and lost magician...were to come forth now from behind that
reddened smoke and approach his bed his heart would have be-
come calm as a saint's.

It was the tone of that cry. He could not bear it. If he heard it
again his heart would crack. Pity carried to that point was in-
tolerable....He ceased his picking at the rug. He bent his great
head as a wrestler or a boxer might have done. And he took
hold of his heavy, phlegmatic soul in the iron pincers of his
massive will and he pressed it down, like a bar of molten metal
into those lower levels of his thick nature where he held fast
hold of his Christ.

And then Mr. Geard gathered himself together. There were
physical movements in his body of which he was quite uncon-
scious. His thick shoulders under his woolen vest heaved and
shuddered. His exposed belly went in and out, sinking and ex-
panding; while the stature of his torso from hips to crown pal-
pably distended. Three times he struggled to utter words; but in
vain. He attempted it the fourth time; but in vain. Then...the
fifth time, of his Atlantean heaving...words came; words mingled
with bloody spume came; forcing themselves out of his mouth
they came; with a wrench as if they brought his entrails with
them.

"Christ have mercy upon you!" gasped Mr. Geard. The words
were no sooner out of his mouth than a relaxed shivering fit
seized upon him and his head fell forward. His whole body
drooped forward, bending at the waist, the arms limp. Had there
been anyone to see his face at that moment it would have ap-
peared like the face of a corpse before its fallen chin has been
caught up and bandaged.

Perfectly still he remained, his eyelids drooping, his whole
frame limp. He was like a person who has been shaken by the
convulsions of some terrible fit, till, in the ensuing stillness, his
spirit seems to have gone out of him.

He remained, for what seemed to his own dazed consciousness
like several hours, in this position. Then, very slowly the life-
energy returned to him. All his dread was over now and a great
peacefulness descended upon him. Leisurely and comfortably and
with an exquisite feeling of sensual contentment he stretched
himself out once more in his little bed and pulled the purple
coverlet over his shoulders.

He began to feel very sleepy and with his sleepiness there fell
upon him a delicious sense of inscrutable, unutterable achieve-
ment. But the Mayor of Glastonbury was not allowed just yet to
enjoy his hard-earned repose.

There came a very definite sound to his ears at the end of the
room, at that place in the wall of King Mark's chamber where
was the door leading out upon the Bridge of Sighs. It was the
sound of that little door opening inward upon its rusty hinges.
With a drowsy and a rather irritable movement he heaved himself
up again in his bed.

And the door was closed carefully and gently, there before
him; and a slender black figure, holding a flat candlestick in its
hand, advanced with bare feet across the floor towards his bed.

Rachel Zoyland did not utter a word till she reached his bed-
side. Then in a voice that trembled on the edge of a child's pas-
sionate crying-fit she said brokenly:

"I heard...I heard...I was listening...I couldn't sleep...I heard...."

The long black cloak she was wearing fell open displaying her
white night-gown.

He stretched out his arm. Not for the first time in his life
Bloody Johnny became uncomfortably aware of the grotesque-
ness of his physical appearance. He took hold of her hand and
tried to make her sit down at the foot of his bed, but she remained
standing there in her naked feet, her long straight night-gown
showing white as her cloak swung open. Her brown hair fell in
tumbled curls over one of her small bare shoulders. Her childish
mouth, twitching in the light of the candle which she clutched,
could not utter a word. The candle was so shaken by the way she
was trembling that its grease began to drip upon the emblazoned
coverlet.

"I heard...I heard you call...and I had to come," she whispered.

Bloody Johnny, blinking with his sleepy eyelids because of the
flame of the candle, made a humorous grimace and pointed to the
floor at her feet.

"The Bellamys are just below," he whispered hoarsely. "For
God's sake don't get me into trouble with the household! If you
heard me shout, I'm afraid they must; and they may be rushing
in now any second!"

He uttered these words in so whimsical a manner and smiled
at her so naturally and so quietly that the girl swallowed her ap-
proaching sobs in a gallant gulp.

"Put down the candle, Lady Rachel," he said gravely, sinking
back on his pillow; "you're spilling the grease on your father's
rug."

She obeyed him with docility now and sat down on the flimsy
couch, which promptly gave vent to an ominous creak.

But he stretched out his arm, in its tight woolen sleeve, and
took her hand.

"It'll stand your weight," he said, "if it's stood all my antics."

Don't make me go to Miss Crow," she whispered. "Let me come
and live with you!"

He looked at her through his half-shut eyelids, while the sylla-
bles "Nineue" floated dreamily through his soothed conscious-
ness. It was indeed the first time in Bloody Johnny's life that the
indescribable magic of a young girl's identity dominated his
mind. It floated forth from everything about her, from the soft
brown curls resting on her exposed shoulder, where her cloak
had slipped, from the fragrant warmth of her light limbs, from
the cold virginal curves of her mouth, from the tiny rondures,
like water-lilies under her night-gown, of her girl's breasts, from
the softness about her childish figure that made it different from
what a boy's would have been, and beyond and above all these
from a flower-like sweetness which emanated rather from her soul
than from her body, troubling the senses of Mr, Geard with an
awakened consciousness of the loveliness which all the young
leaves and shoots and petals out there in that spring wind must
have possessed this Easter night.

It would have been erroneous to say that Mr. Geard experi-
enced any poignant temptation. The appalling struggle he had
just been through had left his vital energies at their lowest possi-
ble ebb. It would have been possible for the girl to have slid
much closer to him than she was, sitting there like a little marble
figure at the foot of his couch, and still he would have suffered
no carnal stir.

Calmly he allowed himself to drink up her delicate beauty; to
drink it up out of the midst of that vast, shadowy chamber; as if
he were drinking it from a great basin of cold black basalt.

"Let me come and live with you. Mr. Geard! Please, please let
me!" she pleaded in a passionate whisper.

He smiled a little; he sighed a little; he pressed her cold fin-
gers tightly; but he gave his big head as it rested on the pillow
an imperceptible shake.

"Don't 'ee say it, girlie," he murmured. "Don't 'ee say it, my
pretty! I dursn't let 'ee. No, no, no; I dursn't let 'ee. But 'ee
shall often come to see I; sure 'ee shall; and see me good Mr.
Barter, and tell he all about they pretty, pretty images."

The tears came into her eyes again and her mouth began
twitching, just as it had done when she first appeared.

"Tell 'ee what, wenchie," continued Mr. Geard, deliberately
reverting to his old Montacute Town's End speech, "tell 'ee what.
Us 'ull ask that fine lad o' your'n, from Middlezoy, to sup wi'
the Missus and me; and ye shall come and meet 'un. Ye'll like
that, girlie, eh? Ye'll like that, won't ye?"

He felt, rather than saw, the hot young blood rush into her
cheeks.

"Well, well," he murmured. "We mustn't tease a good, kind,
little girl, what's come across the cold stones in her bare feet to
save an old man from they ghosties. No, no, we mustn't tease her;
but, say what you will, Missy, you'll be monstrous pleased with
my Miss Crow. And remember this, Rachel, if it hadn't been that
there was a person like Miss Crow in our town I could never have
pressed your father to let you come to us."

"I wish she was at the Devil!" cried the angry child with a
flash of fierce Varangian fury.

"Come, come," he retorted, "for all you know she may be at
the Devil; and it'll be the Devil's own kettle of fish when Rachel
Zoyland comes to Glastonbury!"

But the girl suddenly stiffened all over.

It was now nearly two o'clock, when the resistant power, not
only of young descendants of Charlemagne but of birds and fishes
and plants and beasts is at its faintest, the hour when the very
seaweeds in the deep salt tides shrink inward upon themselves,
when the sap is weak in the forest mosses, when the pine needles
in the frozen hills carry their burden of snow most feebly, when
the fern fronds on a thousand wide-stretched moors are numb
and cold and indrawn.

The girl's nerves were thoroughly jangled. She had been sup-
pressing a fit of bitter crying all that night. This final resistance
to her will, this denial of her intense wish, coming at the moment
when she had been so brave, coming from the person she had
rushed to rescue from God knows what, was for her the breaking-
point. Ned Athling, for that moment, passed altogether out of
her mind's foreground. She only wanted one thing just then; to
live under this man's roof in Glastonbury; and the man himself,
lying there so drowsily before her, was calmly denying her this.
This, then, was what a girl got for getting out of her warm bed,
for crossing the windy flagstones of the Bridge of Sighs, for dar-
ing to face the ghost of the Enchanter. This is what she got--
an easy, unctuous, humorous, grown-up denial of her natural re-
ward! The indignant Zoyland blood froze in her veins. She slid
down from the couch and lay stretched out, face downward on
the floor.

"Oh--oh--oh!" She uttered this "Oh" as if it were a thin,
little jet of saliva, spat out from under the darting tongue of
a small deadly snake.

Mr. Geard stretched out his head from the side of the bed.
like a monster lizard from a primeval mud-ledge, and squinnied
askance at that motionless heap of white and black, lying on the
floor. Then he leaned over and pulled the candle away from be-
side the edge of her night-gown.

"Oh--oh--oh!" Her prostrate body separated that candle-flame
now from the crevice between the oaken boards through which
he had seen the light in the room below and heard those peculiar
sounds.

In the deep shadow between the girl's back and the edge of
the couch, where the folds of the coverlet rested on the floor, he
saw this thin aperture; and he saw that there was a light in the
room below. Mr. Geard did not delay. The last thing he desired,
at that crucial moment, was an inrush into King Mark's chamber
of Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy! He determined to prevent such a
contingency by a decisive move. He got quickly out of bed. The
heap of black and white fabrics upon the floor neither stirred
nor uttered a moan.

He went hurriedly across the floor to the chair where he had
flung his clothes. He pulled on his trousers, buttoning them
tightly round his waist without bothering about his braces. He
put his coat on over his woolen vest. Then he returned to his
bed and snatching up the velvet coverlet stooped down and
wrapped it about the figure on the floor.

Rachel's thin arms resisted him.

"I hate you!"

Mr. Geard prayed in his deep heart.

"Christ, don't let her scream! Christ, don't let her scream!"

He rolled her up in the great heraldic coverlet. The wings of
the headless falcon were round her waist. Thus bundled up he
lifted her in his arms like an infant. A fold of the rug hung over
her face. Kneeling down on one knee and supporting her upon
the other--"So, you have got what you wanted!" something
cynically whispered in his ears--he picked up her silver candle-
stick and then rising to his feet, carried both candle and girl
resolutely to the door. Out upon the Bridge of Sighs he carried
them, that flaring candle-flame and that pride-broken maid; and
he felt upon his forehead the air that comes before the air of
dawn and is chilliest of all earthly airs. He felt it under his
sleeves and between his coat and his vest. He felt it in the
marrow of his. bones.

"Holy Christ, don't let her scream!" he prayed.

And then it suddenly occurred to him that the girl couldn't
possibly have heard his scream...couldn't possibly have heard
a sound carried from his chamber to hers...with this stone
causeway dividing them. Puzzled by this thought and losing now
in this pre-dawn air, so full of a particular sort of dew-heavy
fatality, the sharper edges of his anxiety, he made the excuse
to himself of re-settling the folds of the rug about her throat
and propped her body, all bundled up, all mute and unstruggling,
against one of the stone parapets of the bridge.

Far away in the west he could see the large, low-hanging,
shapeless moon; no longer sick-looking and yellowish, but steely
cold and bright, and sailing scornful and proud in a blue-black
gulf that held not a single star. For less than half a second Mr.
Geard's warm, thick, Christ-supported nature felt the ice-cold
paw upon its throat of the unappeased Cerberus of life-devouring
annihilation.

Holding tightly to his living bundle and unconsciously giving
it little taps with the rim of the flat candlestick whose flame was
being blown sideways so gustily that it was almost extinct, Mr.
Geard stared into the cold blue-black emptiness that surrounded
that distorted moon. He projected his human consciousness as if
it had been a stone slung from a catapult,--such stones no doubt
had been flung in the days of Bleheris from this very parapet--
till it reached the side of that radiant abortion. From that van-
tage-ground in space he projected it again till it reached the
unthinkable circumference of the astronomical universe. From
this dizzy point he surveyed the whole sidereal world...the
whole inconceivable ensemble of etheric and stellar and telluric
Matter. Contemplating this ghastly and mind-bewildering Enor-
mity, Mr. Geard, tapping the dark bundle he held with the now
quite extinct candle, thought to himself, "My mind has something
in it, some background, some basis of secret truth, that is com-
pletely outside the visible world, outside the whole staggering
vision of Matter! Without the existence of this something else
I could not envisage this immense universe at all. Without: this
deeper thing there would be no universe!"

His thought at that point suddenly became something that was
quite different from thought. He felt as people feel when in the
midst of a vivid dream they get the sensation that, if they pleased,
they could wake themselves up! This bundle he held, those beech-
tree tops down there, that huge stone buttress descending into
the moonlit shadows, this sharp-smelling blown-out candle--why,
they were all half-insubstantial, half-unreal! But the Christ by
his side was wholly real. The Christ within him and about him
belonged to a reality that at any minute could reduce all this to
a pinch of dust, of thin dust, to feed the Herons of Eternity!

He was startled out of his trance by nothing less than an
audible murmur from the bundle he carried.

"Please take me in, Mr. Geard," sighed this muffled sound.
"I am good now."

He raised her incontinently from the perilous edge of that
high parapet and bore her over the bridge to the door in the
archway. This door he found ajar. It was easy for him to swing
it open with his foot and carry her forward. Down one step they
went, down another step, then they emerged into her own warm
firelit room.

So brightly was her fire burning--she must have fed it with
fresh fuel before she left the turret--that the sheets of her bed,
rolled up as when she had tossed them back, gleamed white as
swans' down in the rosy glow. He carried her across the floor and
laid her gently upon these disordered sheets. With fingers tender
as a woman's he pulled away the coverlet from her face. There
were her big, amused eyes; there were her brown curls; there
was her tremulous mouth, the lips divided in a reassuring smile!

"Sorry I was cross," she whispered. "I'll go to your Miss
Crow's, and you shall ask Ned and me to supper. Did you see
the ghost of Merlin, Mr. Geard?"

"How long have you been a good girl like this, Lady Rachel?"
he asked.

"Since the moment you picked me up off the floor," she an-
swered. "I thought to myself, it's worth getting into a rage to
be carried to bed by the Mayor of Glastonbury; and so I stayed
still. I liked your carrying me, Mr. Geard. I felt like a doll."

"You'll keep your promise, Rachel, and help Mr. Barter with
those little images?"

She made an effort to get her arms free of the purple coverlet;
but he laid his hand on its surface and stopped her.

"Good-night," he said. "I'll find my way back. It's moonlight
now."

"I believe you will make Glastonbury all you want it to be!"
she cried with shining eyes.

Her face looked so fragile emerging quaintly from the folds
of the rug and resting on the white sheet, that, hardly realising
what he was doing, he bent down and kissed her cold cheek.

"Good-night, Lady Rachel," he repeated.

Back once again in King Mark's vast dusky chamber, Mr.
Geard set himself seriously to think of his grand design. The
girl's words, "You will make Glastonbury all you want it to be,"
had started a train of cogitation that it was hard to bring to
a pause. To confess the truth., too, he felt a little chilly now in
his flimsy bed without that noble covering! But his mind went
back to that vast array of ancient folios in the room where Will
Zoyland had challenged him.

"What those old Scholastics aimed at," he thought, "I shall
fulfil. All their fine-spun logic is dipped in Christ's Blood; and
I shall make of that Blood a living Fountain on Chalice Hill, to
which all the nations of the earth shall come for healing!"

He tried to warm himself by rolling the bed-clothes tightly
around his body, very much as he had rolled the purple coverlet
around...Nineue. There it was! The two Beings, the old
Magician's paramour, and this sweet young creatuure who so
believed in the power of poor Johnny Geard, had at last merged
in each other. Well! That was how it should be. There was des-
tiny in it. He had been well-advised to ride over to Mark Moor
Court on the day of Christ's Resurrection. The old magic monger
had vanished with his heathen Grail--so Mr. Evans said--in the
heart of Chalice Hill. Well! He, Bloody Johnny, the new miracle-
worker, would show the world, before he vanished, that the real
Grail still existed in Glastonbury.

Wrapped up, like a great fat chrysalis, in his bed-clothes, with
his big white face turned to the dying fire, Mr. Geard now awaited
the first approaches of dawn. His long vigil that night seemed
to have left his brain preternaturally clear. He began to review-
in calm retrospect the illumination he had received that night
as he clutched his living bundle on the edge of those moonlit
gulfs of space,

"I know now," he thought, "what the Grail is. It is something
that has been dropped upon our planet, dropped within the
earthly atmosphere that surrounds Glastonbury, dropped from
Somewhere Else...

"I don't know," he went on thinking, "of what substance this
thing is made; or whether it was flung into our material dimen-
sion purposely, or by accident, or by...It is evidently possessed
of radiations that can affect both our souls and...Everyone who
believes in it increases its power. That, at least, is clear--
wherever it came from!"

He stared up at the dark, massive rafters, catching desperately
at a thought which tantalised him and evaded him.

"Sometimes in dreams," he thought, "some little inanimate
thing becomes terrible to us...becomes tremendous and ter-
rible...producing ghastly shiverings and cold sweats...I once
woke up," he thought, "crying out ‘the Twig! the Twig!'
and it was a little twig, from off some bush, that I had seen...
just a little tiny twig! I think it was of a dark brown colour...
sometimes the colour in these things is very important!...it
was bent...yes! I'm sure of that...it was a little, dark-brown
twig and bent at one end."

He once more felt that he was on the very brink of catching
hold of some tremendously important clue.

"Little inanimate things," he thought, "can become great sym-
bols, and symbols are--No!" he thought, "bugger me black!
That's not what I mean at all! I mean something much deeper,
much more living than symbols. Bugger me black! What do I
mean? Certain material objects can become charged with super-
natural power. That's what I mean. They can get filled with a
kind of electricity that's more than electricity, with a kind of
magnetism that's more than magnetism! And this is especially the
case when...when...when ..."

He heard a half-extinguished brand, in the centre of the dying
fire, fall heavily among the red ashes; and for the tick of a
second his heart began to beat again, wildly, helplessly, violently,
just as it had done when he heard...or dreamed he heard...
that terrible voice.

"This is especially the case when a number of people, century
after century, has believed....Thought is a real thing--" Here
Mr. Geard's own process of thought--as he tugged at his
pillow to prop up his head a little--was interrupted by a prick-
ing of his conscience. His effort to get the pillow into a com-
fortable position conveyed his mind, over the seven miles of
moonlit water-meadows, to his sleeping wife. He remembered
how the grey head of the descendant of the House of Rhys always
lay on her own pillow, at her own side of the bed, leaving his
all smooth and undisturbed and never removing it. He remem-
bered how astonished he had been to learn from Crummie--who
loved to play the role of sentimental ambassador between her
mother and father--that all the time he was away in Norfolk
with Canon Crow, Megan Geard had left his pillow untouched
in its place....

But he made an effort of his will and dismissed Megan com-
pletely from his mind, as completely as if they had never lived
together. In these deep interior inhumanities, Mr. Geard was
shameless. This devotee of Christ frequently took up his con-
science by the heels and hung it clear outside the remotest house-
walls of his consciousness. He now worked the interior cogs and
pistons of his mind till, like a great gaping engine, with grap-
pling-irons held outward, towards those dusky rafters above him,
his consciousness adjusted itself to catch a clue that kept teasing
and tantalising him.

"Thought is a real thing," he said to himself. "It is a live
thing. It creates; it destroys; it begets; it projects its living off-
spring. Like certain forms of physical pain thoughts can take or-
ganic shapes. They can live and grow and generate, independ-
ently of the person in whose being they originated.

"For a thousand years the Grail has been attracting thought to
itself, because of the magnetism of Christ's Blood. The Grail is
now an organic nucleus of creation and destruction. Christ's
Blood cries aloud from it by day and by night. Yes, yes," so his
thoughts ran on, "yes, and bugger me black!"--This was a queer
original oath peculiar to Mr. Geard--"I know now what the
Grail is. It is the desire of the generations mingling like water
with the Blood of Christ, and caught in a fragment of Substance
that is beyond Matter! It is a little nucleus of Eternity, dropped
somehow from the outer spaces upon one particular spot!"

Here Mr. Geard stretched out his head, like a mud-turtle, and
peered down at the crack in the floor, through which he had
heard the old couple in the room below relieving Nature.

"I hope," said Mr. Geard to himself, "that that extremely
nervous Sergeant didn't forget to give my pretty Daisy-Queen a
good feed of oats!"



THE SILVER BOWL



"I WANT A CHILD FROM YOU, DO YOU HEAR? WHAT'S THE
matter with you? I want a child, I tell you!"

It was these words of Will Zoyland--flung out angrily at her
as he jumped in his car to drive to Mark Court early on Sunday
afternoon--that kept ringing in the ears of Nell as she moved
about Whitelake Cottage, cleaning and tidying things up, on
Easter Monday.

"What made him think of that just now?" she said to herself.
"He can't read a person's thoughts. He can't know about it...
how could he? Oh no, no, no!" The truth was that the girl was
pretty sure...although not absolutely sure...that Sam's
child had already begun its obscure, embryonic life within her.

She had begged him to come out to see her today, knowing
that the popular holiday would keep Will safe at Wookey Hole.
She had been. longing with a great longing to tell Sam what she
hoped for. But now she was teased by this tormenting question--
should she tell him what Will had said? And should she raise
the agitating point whether or no it was best to pretend to Will
that this child, if it did really come, was his child?

Oh, if only Sam could gather up the spirit and resolution to
carry her off, to find work to do, so that he could support her,
her and their child, somewhere, anywhere, so it were far from
Glastonbury!

Let Will do what he liked then; divorce her; refuse to divorce
her! What did she care, as long as Sam and she were together?

She had been living in one long delicious trance since that
night. Sam had come out only once to see her since; and on that
occasion had seemed absorbed in his own thoughts; but he had
been gentle and sweet to her and she had felt so happy, pressing
him against her, holding him, hugging him, tight and fast, with
this thrilling chance of all chances between them, that she had
not inquisitioned him or persecuted him with her problem. But
this angry challenge of Will's flung out at her after she had
managed to evade any serious love-making, had broken up her
radiant dream.

Troubled and anxious and full of nameless fears she went
about her work this morning. She had risen early, after waking
before dawn, from a disturbed sleep--a sleep in which she
dreamed that it really was Will's child and not Sam's at all that
had just begun its mysterious life-processes within her--and her
mental agitation had been increased rather than diminished by
the nature of the day as it grew light.

It was absolutely still after the wind of the previous twenty-
four hours; but it was grey and damp, clouds in the sky, heavy
mists clinging to the meadows. It looked as if it were going to
prove a very gloomy, if not a disastrously wet Bank Holiday.

Nell was startled at the havoc the great wind had done among
her wild plants, so carefully tended. Her little grass lawn, slop-
ing down to the river bank, was strewn with twigs and leaves
from trees quite far away; and some brick tiles, too, had been
blown from the roof. The dead stillness of the air after such a
wind-hurricane was itself disturbing.

The day was one of those days when human beings who have
anything on their minds, anything on their consciences, cannot
refrain from a certain listening. It was a day when guilty people
could hear their hearts beating, hear their clocks ticking, hear
the faint dripping into sink or barrel of the least drop of water
from tap or pipe.

Nell washed up her breakfast things more rapidly than usual.
She made her bed and tidied her bedroom quicker than she was
wont to do. She dusted her parlour. She went down on her knees
and washed with soap and water the chequered linoleum on her
kitchen floor. All the time she was doing these things she would
glance at the window to see if Sam's figure were approaching
and then draw her eyes hurriedly away from the menacing inert-
ness of the weather outside.

But below her trouble over Will's fierce words...so fatally
well-timed...and below the preoccupation of her .work and
her longing for her lover to come...there kept drumming and
humming in her deeper ears a low refrain of exultation. "It's
begun! It's begun! To me myself, and not another, it has hap-
pened! My true love's child inside me...safe inside me...and
going to grow and grow and grow!"

She sat down on the sofa-couch and picked up a booklet,
bound in paper, that lay there. It was a Marxian pamphlet left
by her brother Dave.

Stubbornly she tried to concentrate her thoughts upon the
formidable argument this little work unfolded. "Children," she
read, "are wards of the State, even in their mother's womb.
Motherhood is an occupation as dangerous, as necessary, as im-
portant to society, as to be a peasant, a factory-worker, a miner.
Religious marriage is a bourgeois superstition, grossly intermin-
gled with the historic iniquity of private property. No human
creature has a right to claim possession of the person of another.
Children are the creation of Nature, but their well-being is the
responsibility of the State. When the life of the foetus is--"

As Nell read these words a sudden panic seized her. Something
leapt up from these compact, official, emphatic sentences that
was much more formidable than their obvious meaning. Sitting
there in her bright, crocus-yellow spring dress, covered with a
loose, light-green over-all, she suddenly began to shiver from
head to foot. Her teeth began to chatter; and she threw up her
hands and pressed them against her ears, as if she heard the
marching feet of an army of executioners. She had not really
understood at all the impact of what she read but something
about the tone of it--its air of irreversible and doom -like finality
--filled her with a blind terror.

Her teeth chattered so loudly that she clapped her hands to
her mouth. Her shiverings made the skirt of the crocus-yellow
gown stir faintly, like the underwing of the moth that boys call
Yellow Underwing, when the wind catches it. She got a vision
of herself as being caught in a long fatal process of Nature from
which there was no outlet, no possible escape. She felt the inti-
mate quality of her own private personality now; she felt the
Nell she had lived with all her grown-up life, the Nell with the
soft hair,, the passionate mouth, the full breasts, the Nell with
the mania for planting wild flowers in a flower garden, the Nell
who loved scrubbing but hated cooking, the Nell who used to
endure a husband and now idolised a lover, the Nell who loathed
reading and liked using her needle, the Nell who preferred
dreaming by open windows to talking by glowing hearths, the
Nell who always found oranges so sweet and marmalade so
bitter, and it seemed to her now, as she began crumpling in her
fingers this odious pamphlet written by men who knew nothing
about women, that this Nell who was so dear to her, whose every
expression in the mirror she knew so well, this Nell whose teeth
she cleaned, whose hair she brushed, whose little ways were her
ways, was no longer hers, no longer her private possession. This
soft body, every part of which held secret nerves of its own, was
now bought and sold. Yes, yes, it was handed over, bound and
fettered, to a long inescapable doom that had been prepared,
millions of years ago--not for the Nell she knew--but for Fe-
males in General; a doom that must needs lead her on, deeper
and deeper, into the raw, heavy, monstrous, impersonal mire of
brutal creation!

She crumpled the unlucky pamphlet into a tight ball of paper
and tossed it into the fire. She felt better after she had done this:
but she still felt as if it were more than she could bear to hear
any man, even Sam, laying down rules for human life. Blind,
and dumb, and inarticulate, she felt something surging up within
her, that, if she only could express it, would blow all the insti-
tutions in the world sky-high. "My womb has conceived," was the
burden of what she ached to cry aloud, "and I tell you this is
something that has broken all your laws. It's a miracle: do you
hear me? A miracle has happened. And I'm the one--not any of
you mutterers and starers and examiners and inspectors--I'm the
one to tell the world what is the secret of life!"

She went into the kitchen and snatched up an orange from a
bowl on her dresser. Into the top of this orange she thrust her
forefinger till she had made a deep round hole. Into the hole
in the orange she now pushed one, two, three small lumps of
sugar; and then clutching the sticky, fragrant, yellow* skin tightly
in her fingers, she pressed her mouth to the hole and sucked
furiously, keeping her teeth sufficiently closed so as to push back
the half-melted sugar but drawing up the sweet juice into her
mouth. She placed herself in front of the fire and stared down
into the red coals squeezing, sucking, swallowing.

She found the warmth of the fire comforting as it reached her
legs and her skin; and when the moment came for her to tear
open the orange and bury her face in its sugary interior, tearing
the sticky pulp from the bitter rind with her teeth, she found
that her whole mood had completely changed.

She threw the orange skin into the flames then and gathering
her over-all tightly about her she moved still closer to the bars,
letting the warmth extend to as much of her person as she pos-
sibly could, and snuffing up with luxurious satisfaction the smell
of the burning orange skin. She began to grow impatient for
Sam now. She thought of how she would kiss him when he held
her in his arms. "I'll kiss his eyes ," she thought. "It's nice when
he shuts his eyes ." And then she thought, "I love him when he
works his chin up and down, when he gets worried by anything."

But Sam did not come. It was half-past one now; and she said
to herself, "I ought to get myself something to eat but I shan't
do it."

She put more coals on the fire and went to the couch and
lay down upon it. She could see a fragment of the garden out
of the window; and how dark it was, and how frighteningly
hushed and still!

She had an abscess in her gum above one of her back teeth;
and this began to hurt her a good deal. The orange-sucking must
have started it. She searched for it with her tongue. She suddenly
began to feel more occupied with this trifling annoyance than
with Sam or her child or Zoyland or the strange nature of the
weather outside. She shut her eyes. At last as she pressed her
tongue against her aching gum a drowsiness stole over her that
almost took her consciousness away. The hurting in her mouth
became a thing entirely distinct from her personality; and when
her drifting thoughts reverted to the embryo life within her, that
also seemed something quite outside of her and independent of
her.

And then before she realised what had happened Sam had
come. Before she was fully awake he had given her a fierce
violent hug, too hard and breathless to be called tender, too
brief to be called passionate; and there they were, sitting on the
couch side by side, staring wildly, confusedly, and helplessly at
each other.

She had told him already about the child.

"Are you absolutely sure?" he had murmured.

And she had nodded emphatically.

Something in his manner had driven her to go on talking about
it in a way she had never intended to do. It was a remoteness
in him different from anything she had ever known I It was as if
he had been clothed from head to foot in invisible chain armour;
and not only so, but had had his vizor down, through which his
little, bewildered, bear-eyes gazed out at her, puzzled, ambiguous,
and with an obstinate film over them.

Everything was so wretchedly different from what she had ex-
pected! Her thoughts as to what he would do had been very vague.
But she had in her dreamy way, been feeding herself with the
fantastic hope that he would cry out to her at once--"Come then,
my true love! Nothing henceforth shall part us!"

But he had done nothing of the kind. And in place of anything
like that from him, she had found herself explaining hurriedly
that Will Zoyland would naturally think, if she acted with any
kind of discretion in so delicate a matter, that the child was his.

"Would he?" Sam had asked; as if, even then, his mind was
not really grasping the significance of what she was saying. It
must have been at that point that the "all-is-equal" wave of
drowsy indifference that had swept over her before he came, once
more had exercised its fatal numbing power; for she had seemed
paralysed, as people are in dreams, and unable to break through
the mysterious barrier between them.

She had found herself taking an almost apologetic tone about
her condition; as if her lover had a right to be angry with her
for it! She had found herself explaining that even if Will Zoyland
were not absolutely convinced, the existence of a doubt in his
mind would not make him act violently or abruptly, if she did
not leave his bed till everything was further advanced.

It was then that Sam had said: "You are sure it is ours?"

The brutality of this question had brought tears to her eyes;
but she had only looked reproachfully at him and had murmured
-- "Of course it's ours, you silly!"

But the revolting idea had crossed her mind, as he put that
point-blank question "Suppose I didn't know myself which
of them it was?"

The relief that she did know--and as far as that went--knew
beyond all question that it was Sam's, held now, for her dazed
intelligence, such a comfort, after that diabolically horrid idea,
that she threw still further emphasis into her plausible argument
that everything would go on quite naturally and as if it were her
husband's.

"But suppose it's like me when it's born?" Sam had scrupled
not to interject with an almost comic solemnity.

"Oh, it's not born yet, you wretch!" she had replied in quite a
flighty tone.

And there had been an interchange of tender, half-humorous
speculation between them, after that, as to whether this unknown
offspring of theirs would be a boy or a girl; and Sam had said
he hoped it would be a girl; and she had said--her mind all the
time thinking, "How different this is from what I thought it
would be!"--that if he really wanted it to be a girl she would
make it a girl, by thinking of nothing else all the time!

And then the trouble between them began. Sam started it by
talking on and on to her about some startling experience he had
recently had...something to do with a mad woman and the
old-curiosity-shop man on Maundy Thursday, when he was climb-
ing Wirral Hill with John Crow and Tom Barter; but he was so
clumsy at expressing himself, and she was so slow in catching
the drift of his thought, that they irritated each other, in the way
simple-minded people so easily do, by their mutual misunder-
standing long before he even reached the real danger-point of
what he was trying to tell her.

"It's something that's been coming over me for some time,
Nell," he said, with his hand tightening so fast upon hers, in his
anxiety to make himself clear, that he hurt her fingers. "It's not
religion in my father's sense; for I don't believe...in anything...
at all."

"I like your father, very, very much," Nell threw in.

"No, no," he went on, "it's not religion in his sense, because I
don't believe in one single one of all those things."

He knew he was expressing himself lamely and badly, in fact
childishly; but all he could do was to go on hurting her soft,
formless, school-girl fingers in his muscular grip.

Her own mind was so benumbed, that the discourse between
them, as the dark, hushed afternoon of Easter Monday wore on,
would have seemed to any eavesdropper as incoherent as the talk
of a couple of inmates in that State Asylum so much dreaded by
Mad Bet.

"It's not that I'm considering Christ simply as an ordinary man,"
affirmed Sam in a high-pitched dialectical tone. "I'm considering
him as a God. But I'm considering Him as a God among Other
Gods. I'm considering Him as a God who is against the cruelty
of the great Creator-God. What has given me such an extra-
ordinary feeling of happiness these last days is the idea that
ever since Christ was tortured to death by the Romans to please
the Jews there has been a secret company of disciples who have
believed in His methods of fighting the cruel Creator-God...
these methods of His...simple and yet very hard to catch the
drift of...till you get...a sudden illumination...like Saint Paul...
only mine came to me on Silver Street, at the bottom of the
drive, where you can see the elms over the wall..."

"Let go my hand, you're hurting me." Up went her fingers to
her sulky red mouth when he released her. He had certainly left
them bloodless.

She began to feel hungry. "I wish," she thought, "I could just
run into the kitchen and put the kettle on without hurting his
feelings. How queer men are. He has already completely forgot-
ten that I've made him a father."

"I don't believe in the Church, Nell," Sam went on, "like Father
does. I don't believe in the Creed at all. But I believe in the Mass;
what in our Church we call the Sacrament; I believe as it says
in Latin, Verbum caro factum est, the Word was made Flesh."

"I think I'll put the kettle on," she murmured, without realis-
ing the irony of these last words so apparently unrelated in his
mind to the "word-made-flesh" in herself! She had grown so
hungry and had come to long so desperately for a cup of tea
that when he came to utter the word "Creed" it was on the
tip of her tongue to give vent to a quivering, long-drawn-out
scream, so that the great Latin syllables fell on deaf ears.

Sam the naturalist had certainly been overlaid by Sam the
theologian; but there was a sturdy animal instinct in him that
now broke through the spiritual chain-armour that he was wearing
like a tight-fitting aura or like an etheric body. It broke through
this aura with such a leap that the girl was frightened.

"I'll put it on for you!" he cried suddenly getting up with a
bound from her side. He rushed into the kitchen, and she heard
him empty and fill the kettle; and then she heard him clattering
with the iron cover of the stove as he pushed it aside with the
short poker she kept for that purpose and settled the kettle in
its place.

"He hasn't even looked to see how the fire is," she thought.
With a weary sigh she got up and followed him.

She caught him staring out of the kitchen window as she en-
tered, an ecstatical stare, like the stare of a village boy watching
the circus clown.

"What is it?" she asked, putting her arm on his shoulder.
She wanted him to fondle her and tell her how wonderful she'd
been to make him a father. Instead of this he drew away from
her touch.

"Oh, you will understand, Nell darling," he said, "when I've
told you everything, why I can't be like I was before?" He turned
his broad back upon her and walked out of the kitchen. He made
blindly for the couch where they had been sitting when she mur-
mured about the kettle. And she followed him submissively to
that familiar couch.

She made a motion as though to sit on his knee, but he warded
her off, clutching her wrist with a rough violence and pulling
her down by his side.

"That's what I really came to see you about, Nell; to be
absolutely frank with you; as we always are with each other,
aren't we?"

She thought bitterly to herself that if she had been less frank
with him this afternoon, never said a single syllable about her
condition, he would not have acted the least differently from the
way he was acting now!

A faint shivering, like the shivering that had seized her when
she read her brother's pamphlet, came over her now. Was Sam
--her dear Sam--going to join that great staring army of men
men, men, men with hairy wrists and hairy chests, men with hard
sharp knees, men with brains like printing presses, between whom
she had to run the gauntlet...and to take her place...and her child
had to take its place...in a regimented State, ordered, not by
Nature, but by tyrannical Science?

What was it that Sam was saying now?

"--and so, though of course I shall always love you, and you
will always be my true love, and we'll be seeing each other just
as much as we do now, I've come to the conclusion that it's wrong
for me to make love to you any more. The pleasure I get from
that kind of thing is so intense for me--it may not be so with
other people but it is so with me--that it kills this new feeling."

Not a tear came to her eyes. They did not open, or shut, or
twitch, or blink, or quiver. Her hands remained lying quietly
on her lap just as they had been when he first let them go. She
did not clasp them now, nor did she fumble with the loose folds
of the green apron which covered her crocus-yellow gown.

She forced herself to look into the eyes of this speaking man,
into the eyes of this man-mask, whose chin as he uttered his un-
kind words imitated the familiar contractions of her dear Sam's
chin.

Her simplicity of nature was such that the blow itself brought
her one recompense. She was not tormented by doubt. Her Sam
had changed into someone else. Her Sam had changed into a Be-
ing who called himself the lover of a God called Christ and who
henceforth would think it wrong to love Nell Zoyland. Nell made
absolutely nothing of what he said about loving her still, though
it would be wrong to "make love" to her. Such was her character,
such was her conception of love, that to "make love" meant sim-
ply to love, and not to "make love" meant simply not to love.

"I don't...quite...understand...Sam dear."

He put his arm about her and pressed her to him and they
stayed like that for a while in sorrowful silence, while outside
their walls nothing stirred except the flowing of the river that
was like a channel without a bottom, so darkly it poured its
flood, as if the sombreness of the low grey skies and their for-
lorn depths, had been transferred to it to augment its desolation.

"Sam dearest, did you like me the first time you saw me?"

This innocent question which had passed between them, ques-
tion and answer, so often already, had become like a familiar
nosegay by this time which was handed from one to another, to
smell at and pass back again, when it was not the moment for
more ardent caresses.

Now, when caresses were to be altogether renounced this in-
visible nosegay gathered to itself a poignant significance.

There were actually tears in Sam's eyes as he lifted her hand
to his lips and swore that he had liked her before he saw her;
that he had dreamed of her, from Penny Pitches' description,
when he had first heard her name!

She made a little movement at this, cuddling up yet closer to
him so that the warmth of her body flowed into his. Her green
pinafore was open at the sides and as she leant against him he
could see--oh, and feel too!--the rounded tightness of her yellow
bodice as a deep-drawn sigh expanded her lovely breasts.

It was only by forcing himself to think of that tortured Shadow
hovering above his father's roof; it was only by forcing himself
to visualise the actual prints of the nails in that Shadow's hands;
that he had the strength to stiffen himself and not to yield, that
he had the strength to hold that clinging sweetness away from
him. But so piteously was his whole nature stirred that big tears
now rolled slowly down his cheeks; several of them actually
reaching his twitching chin. They were tears of miserable pity
for himself and for her; and for more than themselves. In the
pressure of that dark hour there weighed upon him the whole
burden of the round world's tragic grief as it swung on its axis.
The loneliness of the cold-gurgling stream outside, with that
sorrowful sky reflected in it, the silence of that little house en-
closing them amid the larger silence of the wide moors; all these
things flowed into Sam's heart till it felt as if it must break. To
have been given such quivering sweetness, and to have to push
it away with his own hand! He had known that it would be hard;
but this was worse than he had imagined. The feeling that their
passionate mixing together had created a new life--a life that
was the knot of their intertwining--made it seem as if an outrage
was being done to them both, a rending, tearing, remorseless
outrage, that must make a red wound in Time itself, that slippery-
smooth Time, that long black snake, that was gliding away under
their feet! She kept making little heart-breaking movements to
cling closer to him; and he had to put all his will into the arm
that held her back, to keep it stiff, to make it like a sword be-
tween them.

"I thought you'd be pleased when you knew I was going to
have a child."

" I am pleased, Nell. Your child will be the only child I shall
ever have now. And I'm glad it's yours! Zoyland may be gener-
ous...I mean later on...when things are different."

"I can't believe it...Sam...when I look at you sitting so close
to me...that you have stopped loving me...just when I'm sure
about our child."

Sam was the extreme opposite of a moral casuist. It would have
been better for Nell if his conscience had been more sensitive
and his passion less strong. It was the strength of his passion
for her that made the issue between her and Christ so deadly
clear to him.

In these subtle human relations Sam had the blunt obtuseness
of a beast, a beast with far less conscience than a faithful dog.
He was indeed a forest bear at this moment, a bear that was
rejecting a treasure-trove of wild-honey for the sake of a garden-
hive that he had found.

Nell was just then too stunned to feel anything but this fatal
change in him; but later--when she had time to think--she found
herself amazed at the unscrupulousness with which he was pre-
pared to allow her to deceive Zoyland about the child. Whatever
it was that had touched him with its terrible spell it had left him
as non-moral as a savage. There was nothing human left in him
to which a girl could appeal.

In his mind at that moment there seemed to be only two alter-
natives; possessing Nell, or being possessed by Christ. A month-
old conception, a year-old love, what were these beside the ecstasy,
the blind exultation of sharing the sufferings of a God?

"Sam...Sam...Love me again! Love me again!"

He made a funny little gurgling sound in his throat and looked
away from her; looked towards the window. At that moment there
were steps on the brick path outside and a sharp knock at the
door.

They both leapt to their feet; and Neil, after a moment's
hesitation and a quick glance round the room, went to the door
and opened it.

There stood Persephone Spear!

The tall, equivocal girl entered furtively and quietly, closing
the door behind her. Her appearance altered everything in a
moment. It caused to surge up in both Nell and Sam that curious
blind irritation, unique in life, that the invasion of an outsider
evokes in the souls of two people who are in the throes of some
nervous dispute.

Persephone wore her usual rough ulster-cape and below this
a grey jersey and black skirt. On her head was a tight-fitting,
dark woolen cap. She was certainly in an agitated mood and in
a dogmatic, tyrannical one. She moved uneasily about the little
room, disregarding Nell's entreaties to sit down. She went up to
the tiny cottage piano which the Marquis of P. had given the
Zoylands on their marriage and ran her fingers over its wistful
untuned keys. "What's this?" she said, picking up the loose
cover of the pamphlet that Nell had burned. "Did Dave leave
it?" Then she came and stood in front of them, staring out of
the window. "What's it going to do?" she asked, frowning. "It's
the worst day we've had since I've been down here. It's a ter-
rible day." There was a tone in her voice that reduced the weather
to a troublesome appendage to human life, to a tiresome dog
that was behaving badly. Then she left the window and crossed
over to the fire. "Why don't you burn more wood, Nell?" she
said. "It gives out much more heat than this wretched coal."
Then again, before Nell had time to reply, she was pulling out
a book from Will Zoyland's bookshelf. "Does your William read
‘Arabia Deserta'? No! I can see he doesn't. It's not cut." She
turned the pages irritably. "You know what Doughty would, call
a little creature like you, Nell, in this Bedouin tent. He'd call
you a ‘Bint.' That's a good word, isn't it? To describe a sweet
little girl like you!" She returned Doughty to the shelf with a
violent shove and hurried again to the window. "It looks as if
it wanted to rain black rain today. I've never seen anything so
miserable--except my life."

She put into these final words so much bitterness that Nell
was startled out of her irritation and out of her own grief.

"What is it, Percy dear? Are things going wrong? Won't you
take off your ulster?"

Sam got up and made several clumsy attempts to help the
restless intruder out of her cape. When it was off and she stood
before them slim and erect in her jersey and skirt she had a
warm, youthful-bodied look like a young skater with tingling
veins and bright colour, that completely contradicted her
pessimism.

"You look awfully well, Percy," said Nell. "It isn't your health
that's wrong, anyway."

"You're quite out of it, my dear," returned the other. "I've
been feeling dizzy and funny all day. It's this black devilry in
the air, I expect, that won't come down. I'd like to tell this day
how I detest it!"

Her childish way of talking about the weather had something
that was vaguely reassuring both to Nell and Sam. They had
both been feeling an element of fatality in the atmosphere out-
side; and Percy's petulant detachment of herself from the ele-
ments and her concentration upon her personal quarrel with life
brought back that sense that the world was malleable and that
anything was possible which they had both lost.

"You two look as if I'd interrupted a lovers' quarrel!" cried
the girl suddenly, with a forced laugh, throwing back her beau-
tiful head.

Persephone herself had had two fierce quarrels that Easter;
one with her husband and one with Philip; and her present
mood was a furious revolt against all men, combined with a melt-
ing tenderness for all women. With a sudden impulse she now
went across to Nell's little piano and after aimlessly playing
for a few moments plunged into the notes of a wistful song. This
after a moment she began to sing as well as to play. Her voice
was surprisingly moving as she sang the words:

"Woman's grief for a woman's breast--
The winds howl fierce over Dunkery Beacon!
The heart beats faint in its sad unrest
　　　　And the knees weaken.

"Woman's hair for a woman's tying--
The waves break wild upon Lul worth Cove!
Cover your face and quit your crying
　　　　And quell your love.

"Woman's womb by Lodmoor water--
The frost bites bitter on White Nose head!
Best for the child, whether son or daughter,
　　　　It lay dead.

"Woman's tears for a woman's drying--
The long night lingers on Salisbury Plain!
Love can't reach you where you'll be lying
　　　　Nor any pain.

"Woman's bones for a woman's tending--
The wet dawn gathers on Wirral Hill!
No more saving and no more spending,
　　　　She lies still.

"Woman's dust for a woman's wonder--
The cold stars shine on the Mendip snows!
A grassy mound--but who lies under
　　　　No man knows."

The song ended; but its spell was not broken for a couple
of long minutes.

"Is that an old song?" Sam asked.

"Not at all! Don't you realise we've got a Wessex poet of our
own? Haven't you heard of young Edward Athling of Middlezoy?
There's been enough talk going around about him and Lady
Rachel to make him famous if his poetry hasn't done it."

Sam glanced at the clock on the chimney-piece. It was already
nearly four. "I'll have to leave them and start walking back," he
said to himself. "I must be at that woman's house by half-past
five."

He rose heavily to his feet. The movement he made roused
Nell from the woeful passivity into which she had been thrown
by the song.

"You're not going away, Sam?" she cried piteously. "You can't
be going away--and you and I not having had hardly a word
yet together!"

Persephone rose to her feet, too, at this juncture. She was as
tall as Sam as she stood up in front of him; for his slouching
form was bent a little forward and his long arms were hanging
loosely down, like those of a gorilla.

She placed one of her own arms protectively round Nell's neck,
caressing the girl's chin.

"I suppose," she said slowly, staring defiantly at Sam, "I sup-
pose...you've landed her...now...with a child?"

"I didn't tell her, Sam, I didn't!" protested Nell.

"She doesn't know," he cried in a harsh, loud voice. "You know
you don't know for certain, Nell! It's far too soon. It's only--"
But he finished his sentence by repeating his first "words. "It's
much too soon to be so sure!"

"You've hurt her feelings abominably anyway," said Perse-
phone curtly.

"It's always...better . . ." said Sam calmly, accepting the girl's
resentful stare with an impassive front, "for people who love
each other like Nell and me, to settle our difficulties alone."
He paused and there was something approaching a humorous glint
in his little eyes. "Perhaps...you would not mind...going...into the
garden or into the...kitchen for a minute or two ! "

Persephone jerked herself away and retreated across the room
towards the staircase.

"Well, go on, Sam Dekker," she cried sarcastically. "You've
only got a 'bint' to deal with. Go on explaining--without the
faintest notion of what Nell's thinking and feeling." She turned
at the staircase foot and flung her final bolt with uncalled-for
vehemence. "The fact remains that you found one of the happiest
girls in Somerset; and you've made her one of the unhappiest!"

The surly native of Glastonbury, converted into such a singular
kind of a saint, with an exercise of self-control that made his jerk-
ing lower jaw positively subhuman answered her quietly.

"Oh, come now, if you think so little of men, aren't you rather
exaggerating my importance?"

"Well, I hope you'll never have a child!" She gave a little cyni-
cal laugh that yet had a hysterical note in it. "I hope Nell will
have seven beautiful girls by Will Zoyland; and not one of them
will ever let any man come near them!"

"Percy!" gasped Nell in consternation, but noticing how white
Percy looked as she came forward now towards them her tone
changed to one of concern. "Percy, you're ill! What's the matter?"

Percy held out her hand to Sam. "I apologise, Sam. Don't take
anything I say today seriously. The truth is I've had my own
troubles and it's rather upset me. I daresay...you are...all
right."

She sank down on the nearest chair. "Have you any whiskey,
Nell?"

Nell made a sign to Sam to get the drink. When he handed her
the whiskey his face expressed genuine concern and this Perse-
phone did not miss.

"Oh, I'm all right," she gasped, choking a little and spilling the
drink on her grey jersey. Then she handed him the glass and
tilting back her chair stretched out her long arms in a gesture
of utter weariness, her fingers clenched.

"Damn it! I'm sorry, you two," she murmured, letting her arms
sink down again. She jerked her chair back now into its natural
position and covering her mouth with her hand yawned extrava-
gantly. Then she rose to her feet. "I don't know what's the matter
with me today," she said. "No, no, I don't want to sit down,
Nell. I've been sitting down too much today. Look here, you two,
wouldn't you like to ride into Glastonbury? I'll bring you back
here...one of you...both of you...just as you want. But it would
be a change to get our tea in town. Come on! I'll treat you!
Let's go to the Pilgrims' and have an amusing time."

Sam indicated his promise to be at Tittie Petherton's that after-
noon at half-past five. "Crummie Geard has been looking after
the woman today while the nurse takes a holiday," he explained.
"Ever since the Geards have shown an interest in her she's been
better. She gets up now and comes down, though of course she
can't ever get well, and she still suffers a lot. Mr. Geard can al-
ways spirit her pain away; but its a conjuring-trick and I don't
like the man."

Sam began walking up and down the room, a puzzled frown
on his face. The two girls watched him. A quick, feminine glance
passed between them; a glance as old as the camel's hair tents of
"Arabia Deserta"; a glance that said--"See how these masculine
Prophets of the Lord refuse credit to each other!"

"I can't understand it," Sam went on, mumbling his words as
if speaking to himself. "The man talks in an almost jocular
fashion of the Blood of Christ. But he does drive Tittie Pether-
ton's pain away. I've seen it! I've seen the woman fall asleep.
But there's something evil about him to me. Father doesn't feel
like that. Father gave him the Sacrament once. Father rather likes
him and is glad for him to visit Tittie. But I'm not so sure! Some-
times I feel as if, when he sends her pain away, he were doing
it by the power of the Devil--only," here Sam smiled a rather
boyish smile, "only I don't believe in the Devil!"

The two girls had drifted across to the couch now, and were
sitting there side by side, Percy's arm about Nell's waist.

"I could help you with that sick woman just as well as Crum-
mie Geard," was Nell's comment upon his discourse.

"I've promised to take Tittie over to her aunt's, old Mrs.
Legge," Sam said.

"That woman!" cried Percy. She looked at Nell. "Do you know
what Mrs. Legge is?"

"Look here, you two," said Sam disregarding her question,
"why don't you two come with me to Mrs. Legge's? It's in the
slums, you know, but there'll be tea of some sort."

"Oh, I don't want to go at all!" Nell faltered. "I'd much sooner
be left alone here."

"I know you would," said Persephone, "and cry your eyes out
too. I know that! But the point is that's the worst thing you could
do. I know I can't persuade you; but perhaps if you get it into
your head that if you did it would certainly spoil Sam's eve-
ning "

Half an hour later and they were all three speeding towards
Glastonbury; Persephone driving her car at a reckless pace; Nell
watching Sam's countenance with intense, puzzled scrutiny; and
Sam himself anxiously pulling out his watch every minute or two
and exclaiming--"I don't want to hurry you...but if you could pass
that thing we should be--"

Persephone kept persuading Nell that their accompanying him
to Mother Legge's respectable but comprehensive party would
make no difference to the lady who was giving it. "If she expects
him and Miss Geard," she said, "I don't suppose she'll mind our
coming."

Nell was more diffident. "You go with Sam, Percy, and I'll go
and see Dave. He's still in the same rooms, isn't he, where you
were before? I don't really see how we can invade this woman's
place...so many of us...and without a word of invitation."

Percy burst into a wild fit of laughing when she heard this.
They were standing on the cobblestones now outside Mrs. Pether-
ton's dilapidated Gothic house; and the tall girl bent herself
down over the wooden railings, where John Crow had first
broached to Barter the idea of betraying Philip and coming over
to Geard. She gave herself up to such a violent laughing-fit in
this dingy ramshackle spot of pigsties and puddles, that tears ran
down her convulsed cheeks.

"Well! I'll go into the house now," said Sam. "Of course she
may be too ill to come out. I expect you two had better wait here
till I bring her out. I was going to take her round in a taxi; and
even now that may be the best. But I'll go in and see."

He had no sooner disappeared than a taxi drew up beside their
car. There was a huddled figure inside this conveyance; but the
driver got out, touched his cap and asked them if this was the
house where Mr. Dekker was.

"'Ad a call to come 'ere straight from St. Michael's Inn, ladies,"
he declared with some embarrassment. Then he hurriedly
went back to his cab, peered through its closed window for a
second, and returned to their side.

"Is he drunk, do you think?" whispered Nell to her com-
panion.

"I be in awkward case, ladies," the man mumbled. "There be a
'ooman come wi' I, 'gainst all sense. She be wambly in she's poor
head. She were in bar wi' I because 'twere holiday, and she likes
to bide wi' I on holiday, and have a bite o' summat. But she
heard me boss say to I--‘Solly Lew,' says me boss, 'here be a
order from Vicarage. 'Tis to pick up Mr. Sam Dekker at Tittie
Petherton's and take three o' they out to Mrs. Legge's. to Para-
dise." And's soon as this poor crazy 'ooman heard the name Mr.
Dekker what must the glimsey body do but climb into taxi: and
nought that I could do could get she out! And now I be terrible
worried what Mr. Dekker will say to I when I tell he there be a
crazy 'ooman in taxi."

Both the ladies glanced nervously at the taxi window. Yes.
Solly Lew had spoken no less than the truth! There, just inside,
her face actually touching the glass of the window, and her eight
bony knuckles pressed against the bottom of the window-frame,
was the wild, staring countenance of Mad Bet.

She wore a grander hat than usual, all decorated with artificial
forget-me-nots, in honor of Easter Monday; but as she stretched
her thin neck forward to stare at the two ladies this appendage
tilted a little sideways, betraying to their astonished eyes the fact
that her skull was as smooth and white as an uncracked egg.

The girls had moved towards the window of the taxi--Nell
with her trembling hand on Percy's wrist--for Mad Bet was now
making obscure signs to them both, while Solly Lew was gazing
in melancholy interest at Mrs. Spear's car, when three figures
came round the corner from the old house. Crummie was support-
ing the invalid woman on the left while Sam held her up on the
right.

The girls hurried to meet them; as did also the agitated taxi-
driver. A look of aggrieved bewilderment crossed Sam's face
when he learned of this new complication. It had been an effort
to deal with Tittie but this was really too much! However, evi-
dently there was nothing for it but to take Mad Bet along. To
thwart her now seemed worse than any agitation later on.

"But surely," protested Nell, "we can't, we can't all intrude
upon Mrs. Legge! It's too much to expect that anyone could wel-
come so many complete strangers."

Percy intervened again. "You simply don't know Glastonbury,
Nell," she whispered eagerly into Nell's ears while Sam was help-
ing the sick woman into the Ford. "Mother Legge's Easter Mon-
day parties are as fixed a custom as the Lord Mayor's show! The
fact that she has a house next door full of bedrooms, with Young
Tewsy as door-opener, doesn't prevent her from entertaining all
the world in her own house. It certainly..."

She was interrupted by Sam, who came hurriedly across the
dark cobblestones from the Ford to the taxi, anxious to make
a start. "I've got the woman into your car, Mrs. Spear," he said.
"She's in great pain and I doubt if she ought to go."

No sooner, however, had he opened the taxi door than Mad
Bet came scrambling out of it.

"Where be the other gentleman?" she cried wildly, seizing
Sam by the arm. "Where be me sly heart, me high heart, me
pretty laddie, me pecking sparrow, me proper dilly-darling?
Where be the other gentleman? Thee knows who I do mean, Mr.
Sam? The one who did dancy and prancy wi' Bessie when moon
were full? The one who wanted to hurt poor Bessie under thik
Tree of Life, on Wirral Hill?"

"You mean Mr. John Crow, Bet?" replied Sam with the grave,
punctilious consideration of the faithful naturalist, whose speci-
mens must be treated with respect under all conditions. "Well,
jump in here, with me and Mrs. Zoyland and perhaps we'll find
Mr. Crow at Mrs. Legge's party."

The two conveyances at last were really in motion; Persephone
Spear driving Crummie and Mrs. Petherton in her Ford while
Solly Lew took Sam and Nell, along with Mad Bet, in his taxi.

In many quarters of Glastonbury, as six o'clock of this holiday
Monday drew near, there were searchings of heart as to who
should go, and who should not go, to this famous party in Para-
dise. It was indeed the fantastic opinion of Mr. Evans that there
was a non-moral tradition about this part of Somerset that went
back to very old days. He declared that this Easter Monday party
was the last surviving relic of some ancient Druidic custom of
Religious Prostitution; that there was even something of the kind
in the Arthurian days; that the Grail itself was always guarded
by virgins who were no virgins; and that Arthur's sister, the
famous Morgan Le Fay, was not much better in her time than
old Mrs. Legge today.

Mother Legge never invited anyone. Her personal relatives in
the town, of whom there were many and who were mostly poorer
as well as more respectable than she was, flocked naturally there
en masse. It thrilled them to observe the manners of the gentry
who came and the dresses of the ladies, and though Mother Legge
was notoriously stingy over the food, she was fairly liberal--
perhaps on general professional grounds--over the drink!

Red Robinson together with his pious mother, the ex-episcopal
servant, were among those whose minds were focussed on Para-
dise that afternoon. Red was too poor to go to Weymouth or to
Weston-super-Mare for the day as so many of the working men
did, for the municipal factory, where he was now employed, was
not yet able to compete with the Crow Dye-Works in the amount
paid their workers. As soon as she had cleared away their mid-
day meal Mrs. Robinson began talking about Mrs. Legge's party.
Not being Glastonbury people, both she and her son were thor-
oughly puzzled, in fact completely nonplussed, in presence of
this social phenomenon. This queer mingling of rich and poor,
of respectable and disreputable, at a party given by a person
who was--as Percy had told Nell--not very different from a
"Madame," was an inexplicable thing to this family from London.

Nor had Mrs. Robinson--so she now explained at some length
--"ever met the like of it" in her refined experiences at the great
moated palace at Wells.

"Naught 'ud mike me go to see such fantastical doings," Mrs.
Robinson announced. "When high've rested meself a bit, high'll
take a stroll down 'igh Street; and maybe drop in and 'ave a cup
'o tie with Mrs. Cole. If it weren't such an 'ellish-looking die
high'd sit on one of them 'igh hiron seats on Wirral and watch
the sights. This 'ere new Mayor ought to 'ave a band playing on
Wirral 'ill, same as they does at 'abitable towns; towns that 'ave
theayters and Pictures and 'ave some loife in 'em!"

"Well, Mother, I reckon I'll be getting a move on," said Red
Robinson. "I don't sigh as high'll go to this here fandangle in
Paradise any more than you. Reckon high'll 'ave tie out some-
wheres if you're 'aving it with Granny Cole."

He got up, took his cap and coat--for the afternoon looked
decidedly menacing--nodded to his mother and shogged off.

He made his way to a portion of the town that was on the out-
skirts of Paradise; and moving rapidly and cautiously down a
narrow street into a grim-looking dwelling he paid a visit, not
altogether an unexpected visit either, to "that Morgan woman,"
as the Western Gazette always called her, about whose existence
he had been trying to worry Philip Crow.

Red Robinson certainly was, at heart, more of a Jacobin than
a Communist. That is to say, his revolutionary feelings did not
run in a calm, implacable, patient, scientific groove, but were
feverishly eager to hurt and cause suffering to the enemies of
the people, whether it benefited the cause or not!

Red Robinson's hatred of Philip Crow was indeed rapidly
growing to the dimensions of a monomania. It was gall and
wormwood to him to be rebuked by the new Mayor and have
these secret activities of his exposed and sidetracked. He did not
like, he did not understand, Mr. Geard--and it was only the sheer
pressure of economic necessity that drove him to accept a job in
this municipal work-shop. It was hateful to find Barter once
more his boss. He detested the artistic and mythological aspects
of the work he had to do. He distrusted the success of the scheme.
Deep in his heart he pined for a job that had no idealistic non-
sense about it. What brought him to pay these increasing visits
to Mrs. Morgan was an emotion that was on the road to become
an urge beyond his control.

He was trying to persuade the mother of little Nelly--who was
still in her way a beautiful woman--to give herself up to his
lust. "Lust" was the true word for it, for Red Robinson's heart
had been monopolised by Crummie; and Crummie since his mis-
understanding with her father had grown shy of him.

But it was a velvety lust, an orchid-spotted lust, a dark, de-
licious, quivering, maddening lust, which surprised the man him-
self by its intensity. In his heart he had said--"To hell with them
all! As long as I stick to Blackie"--for such was Red's playful
and tender nickname for his would-be doxy--"I'll have one day
my chance of bringing the bewger down!" But the maniacal and
obsessional element in his design soon began to run away with
the practical element. Day and night he told himself stories of
what it would be like when he persuaded Jenny Morgan to give
herself up to him; and these stories were not of a kind that corre-
sponded to any tenderness for the woman. Unfortunately "the
Morgan woman" unless she was drunk loathed Red Robinson.
And when she was drunk she melted into tearful sentiment over
the memory of her dead husband. There was not a chance--
drunk or sober--that the Morgan woman would allow Red to en-
joy her in her own little flat. His only chance was to take her
out somewhere. And it was with the idea of taking her out to that
house next door to Mother Legge's, rumours of which had excited
his cockney lasciviousness, that Red was visiting her todav.

He was nervous of the adventure; and it was because he
vaguely felt that the general stir of the Easter Monday party
would make it natural for him to be taking the woman to that
locality, that he chose this afternoon for his attempt.

On reaching her flat Red found that Nelly's mother was only
in the early stage of her habitual intoxication. Chance was in his
favour so far, anyway! Red was in a feverish state of anticipation.
The idea of satisfying his lust upon the body of Philip Crow's
mistress roused something in him the intensity of which carried
him beyond his control and altogether out of his normal depths.
Red indeed had brooded so long upon his hatred for Philip and
had nourished so passionately the thought of hurting him through
his child's mother, that the idea of enjoying the woman herself--
even if she were tipsy--made him feel literally sick with excite-
ment. His half-engagement to Crummie Geard. now broken off,
he hardly knew why, had tantalised his senses while it kept him
comparatively chaste. It was an added spice to his purpose this
afternoon that he would be--so in his fury he pretended--re-
venging himself upon Crummie as well as upon Philip if he could
only satisfy his tormented desire with this once-handsome drink-
confused creature.

The steady aggravation of his hatred for Philip had indeed so
mingled with his lust for Philip's girl that they formed together
a completely new passion for which there is at present no name.
As he shaved in the morning, as he went to the little wooden
privy in his mother's back-garden, as he paused in his work at
the municipal factory, he would mutter to himself half-aloud--
"I 'ate 'im! I 'ate 'im! I'll 'ave 'er! I'll 'ave 'er!"

There can be no doubt that when in his cockney fashion, he
used the word "'ate" Instead of "hate," this curious difference
between two monosyllabic sounds was not without its own faint
psychic repercussion upon his nervous organism. Between the
human feeling expressed by the word "hate" and the feeling ex-
pressed by the same word without the aspirate there may be little
difference; and yet there probably was some infinitesimal differ-
ence, which a new science--halfway between philology and psy-
chology--may one day elucidate. Some would say that when Red
muttered to himself, as he washed, as he shaved, as he excreted,
as he worked, as he walked, as he lay down, as he rose up, "I 'ate
5 im, I 'ate 'im!" what he really focussed in his mind was the
emotional state--symbolised as a sensation in his lower jaw--
indicated by the dictionary word "hate"; but it seems as if this
were too simple and easy a solution of the problem.

However this may be, it can be imagined how the man's heart
beat as he stood at last, after a prolonged struggle with the girl--
Morgan Nelly's mother was now only about thirty--at the en-
trance to the house next door to Mrs. Legge's!

The woman was of a much darker complexion and much more
foreign appearance than her daughter. Her face was colourless
and so ravaged by hard work and drink that it had the particular
kind of haggardness in the day which moonlight sometimes pro-
duces on human faces. The remains of her beauty were like a
shattered arch whose sculptured figures have been defaced by
wind and sand. Grey eyes, so large as to give at moments almost
a grotesque effect, looked forth from her face contemplating the
world with melancholy vacancy. Red derived a curious satisfac-
tion from his endearing nickname for her, which he only dared
to use to her face when she was in that early favourable stage of
inebriation in which he had succeeded in catching her this after-
noon. Even then he did not pronounce the word as he was wont
to do in his lascivious dreams of possessing her when he would
cry out, "Yes, Blackie! Yes, Blackie! Yes, Blaekie!" over and
over again. He now rapped timidly at the knocker of the door
in front of him; for there was no bell.

"High know what's what, Blackie! You 'old your noise!"

This courtly quietus was delivered at this point because
Blackie--even in her tipsy confusion--began to realise, when
she saw herself being stared at by several passers-by, that Mr.
Robinson, in his ignorance of local customs, had chosen a most
unsuitable hour for their "short time" in this place of resort.
After a most uncomfortable period of waiting, the door at last
opened a little way; and there stood Young Tewsy in the narrow
aperture! The old man let them in without a word, following his
habitual manner--that is to say using a sort of soft rapidity and
opening the door only just wide enough for them to come in and
closing it the very second they were inside.

But once in the hallway where there was nothing to calm Red
Robinson's nervousness but a small battered bust of an expres-
sionless human head, standing on a rickety table and bearing the
word "Peel" upon its pedestal, Young Tewsy became disconcert-
ingly voluble. He began, in fact, explaining, in a hurried apolo-
getic whisper, "that, since it was Missuses party today, the rooms
was all being cleaned, and none was to be 'ad ; no, not if Lord P.
his own self wanted to take one!"

Blackie stared at Young Tewsy in a bewildered daze; while
Red, feeling as he looked at the bust of "Peel" that he would like
to spit upon it, experienced such a craving for a room, that any
room, large, small, cold, warm, carpeted, uncarpeted seemed a
dispensation of providence beyond all mortal hope.

Had the half-tipsy Mrs. Morgan been interested in that deli-
cate nerve-region of the human mind, where philology and psy-
chology merge their margins, it would have been fascinating to
her to note the minute ways in which the North London bourgeois
cockney of Young Tewsy whose bringing up had been in the
metropolis differed from the East London proletarian cockney
of Red Robinson; but in place of any such observations, all that
this sad, old-young woman of thirty felt, as she listened to the
prolonged whispering that now went on between these two men
in that gloomy and dingy hallway, was a wave of infinite, unspeak-
able life-weariness. Morgan Nelly's mother, as her dark eyes
turned from the bust of Peel to the patched trousers of Young
Tewsy, felt indeed just then a very clear and very definite desire
to be dead. When a woman was once safely dead there would he
no longer any need for bargainings about a room, in which she
might be legally and uninterruptedly subjected to indecent usage.

Blackie had at this juncture, however, one great advantage
over both these gentlemen from London. She was Glastonbury,
born. Too drunk at first for it to occur to her to make use of
this advantage she suddenly began to feel, as she became simul-
taneously more sober and more disgusted, that nothing would in-
duce her, nothing, to spend "a short time" in that house alone
with Mr. Robinson. But how to escape? For it was becoming
clear that Young Tewsy, softened by the transference of half a
crown from the pocket of Red's holiday trousers to that of his
own workhouse trousers, was yielding a little. An inspiration
seized her. She turned boldly to Young Tewsy and demanded to
be taken at once into the presence of his mistress!

Red's eyes opened wide. Young Tewsy 's eyes, on the contrary,
screwed themselves up into little points of confused amusement.
He hesitated for a moment, looking from one to the other.

"The gentleman must wait, then," he mumbled. "'Ee must
wait just where 'ee his, till I brings yer back 'ere."

Mr. Robinson's imagination instantaneously pictured a warm,
brightly lit bedroom, free from the intrusion of British States-
men, and blessed, so to speak, especially for his delectation, by
the high priestess of lascivious delights.

"High'll wait with pleasure," he cried eagerly, thinking to him-
self, "She can't charge more than five shillings." "You go with
'im, sweet'eart," he said, "honely don't be long!"

There was evidently an entrance from the one house to the
other, for Young Tewsy now proceeded to escort the lady up the
unpromising flight of stairs which loomed dismally in front of
ihem.

Red Robinson set himself to wait.

He waited excitedly for ten minutes, hopefully for ten min-
utes, patiently for a quarter of an hour. Then he began to expe-
rience extreme dismay. He cautiously ascended the dismal stairs
to the first landing.

Here he found an uncurtained window, looking out, across the
slums of Glastonbury, towards the eastern horizon. It was an
extremely gloomy evening; but the background of the view now
angrily stared at by Mr. Robinson was filled by the massive and
noble up-rising of St. John's Tower. And Red Robinson set him-
self to curse this tower. He cursed the men who made it, who
prayed under it, who rang the bells. He cursed the imaginary God
it rose up there, so massive and so square, to greet in those
gloomy menacing heavens. He cursed its rich architecture and the
richer Abbots who designed it. He cursed its buttresses, its
crochets, its arches, its pinnacles, its finicals!

Could the ghost of a mediaeval builder, with a wicked eye for
wild grotesques, have stripped Mr. Robinson then and there of
his cockney clothes he would have found him in a state of furi-
ous phallic excitement. His frustrated enjoyment of Blackie ran
and seethed and fermented through every vein. The image of
his grand enemy, Philip Crow, mocked him from St. John's
Tower. The feelings that found their human expression in the
monosyllable " 'ate" frothed and foamed like an acid poured out
upon the stonework of St. John's Tower. "St. John the Baptist!*'
he thought. " 'Ow I 'ate them! I 'ate them all like 'ell!*'

The peculiar mingling of his hate for Philip and his insatiable
lust for Philip's girl stiffened and tightened as he stood at that
dingy window till they became a demonic entity. No gargoyle on
any gothic tower, certainly not on the tower he was gazing at,
equalled in contorted malice, intertwisted with the fury of lust,
this psychic demon concealed under the neat holiday clothes of
Mr. Robinson. He felt as if the passion that filled him might at
any moment rend his clothes, crack open his brittle body, and
shoot forth over the roofs of Paradise towards that hateful tower!
He swept all Glastonbury, all its past, all its future, into the four-
square erection that was thickening and darkening there before
him against the sombre east.

He imagined himself as the leader of a wild mob of men occu-
pied in destroying with hammers and mallets every old building
in the " 'ateful" place.

Then he would blot it out! He would plough up the ground
where it had been, and sprinkle it with ashes. He remembered
from early lessons in his London board-school that something of
this kind used to be done to offensive cities. And this is what he
would do ! Raze it flat. Plough up its earth. Sprinkle it with ashes.
Those old peoples knew a thing or two; they did!

When he had reduced the place to a heap of ploughed-up
earth, when he had sprinkled that earth with ashes--with ashes
from all the filthy buckets in his mother's alley--then he would
enjoy Blackie in the best room of the Pilgrims' Inn. Then he
would cry "Yes, Blackie!" and Blackie would cry, "I loves yer
better than 'im, yer 'andsome hangry man!"

Mr. Robinson must have remained for at least twenty minutes
at this window, on the first landing of Mother Legge's "next
door."

His imaginative orgy was interrupted by the voice of Young
Tewsy from the hall below.

"Mister! Be 'ee here, Mister? Where be 'ee, Mister?"

In his surprise at finding no man where he had left a very
impatient man, in that house of "rooms" for the delights of men.
Young Tewsy forgot his manners--that is to say he forgot his
North London accent--and relapsed into his acquired Somerset-
shire, the language of his long residence in Glastonbury.

"Dang yer! Where be 'ee hiding then? This baint a railway
station!"

Red Robinson came hastily downstairs.

"Thee's 'ooman be biding along wi' Missus for thik party,
Mister," said Young Tewsy. Thus speaking he moved to the door
leading into the street and held it ajar, glancing furtively out
to make sure there was no one at the next entrance.

It became evident to Mr. Robinson that he was being politely
but firmly ushered forth into a "roomless" world.

" 'Asn't she arst for me? Hain't high hinvited, yer blimey hold
idiot!"

"I was to tell 'ee, Sir," said Young Tewsy with dignity and
reserve, but with a glittering eye, "that they ladies will send for
'ee when they do want 'ee!"

Thus speaking he continued to hold the door open, opening it
just wide enough for the passage of a single gentleman whose
shoulders were not very broad.

"Give me back that 'alf crown then, you old blighter, and don't
you dare to snigger at people who mean no 'arm...or one of
these 'ere days somebody'll knock your grinning phiz into bloody
beeswax ! "

Mr. Robinson's anger was like water beginning to drip from
a paper bag. It began with trickling drops--"give me back that
half a crown"--it went on with a squirted thin jet of wrath--
"snigger at people who mean no 'arm"--and then the paper bag
burst outright.

Young Tewsy threw the door open wide. This was the only
reprisal that he indulged in, though it was more of a retort than
Mr. Robinson realised; for in all his experience as a Cyprian
doorkeeper, Young Tewsy had only once before done this: and
that was when he ushered out Mr. Wollop's father, that dis-
reputable old haberdasher.

"Out with you, Sir," said Young Tewsy laconically. "Out with
you!"

There was nothing else indeed that Mr. Robinson could do but
go out. But as he went out he gave the ex-inmate of Wells W ork-
house one glance of so much fury that the old man jerked him-
self backward as if he had received a villainous blow.

Red Robinson walked down the street without looking back.
"High'll make you pay for this! High'll make you pay for this,
my fine bitch!"

But the unfortunate man had now to decide where he would
get his tea and how he would spend his evening. He decided to
go and see if Sally Jones was at home. Mrs. Jones, he knew,
admired him; and there was a pallid pleasure in certain inno-
cent liberties that Sally sometimes permitted. He had received
the sort of affront that makes a person's own society for the next
few hours extremely distasteful and so he hurriedly directed his
steps towards the Jones menage, much as a badly bitten tom-cat
returns sulkily to the familiar wainscot of his habitual mouse-
hunting.

But he found no one at home except Jackie Jones, who had
already had his tea and was gravely studying his geography book
at the kitchen table.

"What be a estuary, Red?" enquired Jackie after Robinson had
waited there for an hour, hoping against hope for the return
of the widow and her daughter.

"Hestuary?" the man repeated. "Hestuary did you say?" He
went to the door, opened it and looked out. "Hestuary, he an-
nounced to the empty alley, "I hain't got no one!"

Mrs. Legges hospitality was both large and varied. Tiitie
Petherton who was in considerable pain, but not so acute as to
make it necessary that she should leave the assembly, sat in an
arm-chair by the fire with one of Mrs. Legge's best rugs over
her knees. Here she struggled to suppress her groans and enjoy
this memorable occasion.

Mad Bet was behaving with wonderful self-restraint, due en-
tirely to the presence of John Crow, who not only talked to her
a good deal; but talked to her more than to anyone else in the
room.

After the departure of Mr. Robinson from "me little place next
door," which was Mrs. Legge's polite name for her Temple of
Venus, Young Tewsy locked and bolted this dubious annex and
returned to the main dwelling to help wait on his mistresses'
guests. All the rooms on the ground floor of this house--the
biggest as well as the oldest in Paradise--were crowded with
people; and it would have been a significant discrimination
among the old residents of Glastonbury to note just who were
the persons who came.

Mother Legge was, as has been remarked, liberal in drinks
but stingy in food. Even the drinks, however, were limited to
whiskey and gin and to a concoction of the lady's own which
she called Bridgewater Punch; among the ingredients of which
the particular kind of fiery rum used by sailors was most in
evidence.

Sam Dekker, actuated by what in his single-hearted simplicity,
he regarded as the proper attitude for a neophyte in sanctity, did
his utmost to interest Nell Zoyland and Crummie' Geard in each
other's personalities. This would have been more difficult--for
Nell's mind was still stunned by the change in him and still pre-
occupied by the certainty that she was, whatever anyone said
about it, really with child--if Crummie hadn't been such an ex-
ceptionally good-hearted girl. Crummie caught the secret of her
rival's sadness with a psychic penetration almost worthy of her
father and "laid herself out" to be sweet to her. And when Crum-
mie did this there were few women--as there were certainly no
men--who could resist her coaxing ways.

Thus Sam's simple mind was eminently gratified, as if he had
achieved this consummation by something akin to a miracle, when
he saw the two girls seated at last side by side munching Osborne
biscuits and sipping with wry faces the famous Bridgewater
Punch, as if they were old friends.

Mother Legge herself, too portly to do much service with her
great silver trays, soon settled herself comfortably in an arm-
chair, opposite poor Tittie, from which position of sovereignty
she received such obeisance as her dignity, and, it must be con-
fessed, too, her Rabelaisian tongue spontaneously exacted.

She was a vast, dusky, double-chinned mountain of a woman,
with astute, little grey eyes; eyes that seemed rather to aim at not
seeing what she wanted to avoid, than at seeing what she wanted
to see. Attracted by both John Crow and Mr. Evans, it was
Mother Legge's desire to have both these men at her side. Being
the hostess, however, and both these men being occupied with a
lady, Mr. Evans with Cordelia and John with Mad Bet, it was
some time before Mother Legge obtained her wish. But she got it
at last and she got it finally so completely that John was caught
on a big footstool between her right elbow and the fire, while
Mr. Evans was pilloried on a high-backed chair on her left hand
with his profile to the fire.

A fire--and you may he sure that this old sorceress knew this
well--is a sure magnet for the magnetism of excitable men, and
a sure sedative for the nerves of cantankerous men; and now,
with the fire as a second or super-female to give her aid. Mother
Legge had her own way with her favourite guests.

All the lights, in the reception room of this huge Priestess of
Immorality, hung from the ceiling in the shape of two colossal,
cut-glass candelabra, burning gas within enormous figured globes
from beneath which hung the heaviest festoons of prismatic
pendants that John had ever seen. Squinnying cautiously round
the room at those moments when his portentous capturer--who
resembled a gigantic Gargamelle seeking information from Ponoe-
rates--was engaged with Mr. Evans, John took occasion to ob-
serve that there was nothing in this high-ceilinged chamber which
jarred upon his nature except the physical contortions of the poor
woman opposite him as her pain, intensified by her inability to
move from where she had been placed, grew upon her. These
twitchings under that rug, these spasms across that emaciated
face, he did find it hard to bear, though no one else except Crum-
mie, who now and then got up and went across to her, seemed
conscious of her sufferings.

Sam had left the apartment now, feeling it incumbent upon
him to be where he least liked to be, namely among the petit-
bourgeois of the gathering, who were consuming tea and bread
and jam at the tables with tablecloths, in the other two rooms.
The sight of Sam's self-conscious unselfishness would have fretted
John's heathen mind as much as the tablecloths would have done
and the homely tea-drinkers. Here in this great chamber, so bril-
liantly lit by the flashing candelabra every person and every object
seemed to fall into a delicious harmony.

He had drunk enough Bridgewater Punch already to be feel-
ing exceptionally serene and as he watched Nell Zoyland and
Crummie, Percy and Blackie, Mr. Wollop and Cordelia, Dave
Spear--who to Percy's astonishment had just drifted in--talking
to Mad Bet, and Tom Barter who was now lost in a deep colloquy
with a pretty waitress from the Pilgrims', the whole scene swam
and shimmered before him in an incredible luxury of signifi-
cance. People and objects as John now looked at them seemed
transferred from the confused dynamic scramble of life into
something just beneath life; something that was there all the time,
but that needed a few glasses of Bridgewater Punch to enable it
to steal silently forth and show itself as the eternal essence.

This old house of Mrs. Legge's had belonged in former times,
before Paradise was overbuilt, to a famous West-Country family
called Camel. Certain portions of it were older still and asso-
ciated with that Richard Atwelle who is buried in St. John's
Church and of whom it is said : "This Atwelle did much cost in this
chirch and gave fair Housing that he had builded in the Towne
onto it." What the grave shades of these old Camels and still
older Atwelles would have felt if they could have seen the pres-
ent company, who can tell? It did not even occur to John Crow,
as he hugged his knees on that footstool by the fire or sipped his
punch from a glass placed in the polished fender at his side, to
wonder what the future denizens of this spacious room, Com-
rades perhaps of the Glastonbury Commune, would feel if they
could look back upon the existing scene!

On John's left, behind his hostess and Mr. Evans, were two
high windows, covered now by heavy black curtains that fell
from great wooden curtain-rods painted red.

Similar curtains hung over the doorway; but these were now
partly drawn.

All round the walls were rough, crudely painted oil pictures
of the ancient Recorders of Glastonbury, an office which eventu-
ally gave place to that of Mayor. These old worthies now looked
down upon this motley assembly with that ineffable complacence
which the passing of time combined with crude and faded oil-
pigments alone can give.

But their presence gave a touch that was required; as did also
the mouldering dark-brown wallpaper, a relic from the days of
the Camels; and the black frames out of which these burgesses
stared; and the big bare mahogany table in the centre of the
room.

As John glanced dreamily into their faces they seemed to look
back upon him with a look that said--"When a Glastonbury Re-
corder dies he passes into a land where men of solid worth are
permitted to despise the vulgar, without qualm of conscience or
rebuke of priest!"

Thus did old Peter King, whose uncle was John Locke, the
philosopher, thus did Fortescue Tuberville, thus did Edward
Phellips, Davidge Gould, Henry Bosanquet, Edmund Griffiths
and William Dickinson, look down upon John Crow; and it
seemed to John as if there were some residual secret of human
experience that this particular group of human beings, these liv-
ing, and those dead, could reveal, if only with one mysteriously
wide mouth, like the mouth of some great, wise, pontifical sal-
mon from the River Severn--a veritable Recorder among fishes--
they could utter the word! It would, John felt, be a word that
allowed for human imperfection, proceeded from human imper-
fection; yes, and even exacted human imperfection. It would he a
clue that exacted meanness, weakness, pettiness, ordinariness, con-
ceit, vanity, complacency, commonplaceness, mediocrity, conven-
tionality, smugness, hypocrisy; before the full significance of
human life could emerge.

John wondered to himself for a moment to whom in all this
gathering of people he could speak about this inspiration of his
--this revelation as to the value of inconsistency, complacency,
weakness, silliness, conceit--which he now derived from the con-
templation of Mother Legge's guests, both living and dead; and
he decided that the only one who would understand him would bo
Mad Bet.

"I must go over to her in a minute," he thought. "She won't
be able to stand Cousin Dave's discourses much longer. How her
eyes do stare at me! I must go over and tell her what I've just
thought before I forget it. Damn! It's going...it's gone! What was
it? Could it have been that laziness, self-satisfaction, self-de-
ception,--stupidity even--are necessary if life is to he grasped
in its essence? That sounds quite silly. How her eyes do stare
at me!"

He turned his own eyes appealingly to those old Recorders,
each one of whom had been collected for Mrs. Legge with patient
labour by Number Two. "Recorders of Glastonbury!" he thought.
"Is it my destiny to learn the secret of the mystic value of the
commonplace from you? No--it can't have been just that. It was
damned near it, though."

His erratic mind now found itself dallying with the monstrous
thought of what it would be like to embrace a woman as old and
hideous as Mad Bet! He felt a certain surprise because this
thought--so queerly were his nerves adjusted--did not cause him
any terrible shrinking. Was that because he was congenitally more
attracted to men than women? "Is the way I make love to Mary,"
he thought, "a sign that I am all the time half-thinking of her
as a boy?"

"Evans!" he suddenly said aloud, addressing his friend and
jerking his stool forward a little so as to see that grotesque Ro-
man profile of the Welshman. "Evans! Do you think it would
be possible to make love to a woman who was--I beg your
pardon Mrs. Legge, I interrupted you, I'm afraid."

Mrs. Legge stretched out a small plump hand and with a ges-
ture as royal as Queen Victoria herself patted John's shoulder.
"Aye, what's that, young man?" she chuckled amiably in her
thick throat.

"I was asking Mr. Evans," reiterated John shamelessly, "whe-
ther he thought it was possible to make love to a person who
was perfectly hideous."

"You don't mean here?" purred the preposterous lady, tapping
her bosom, which resembled Glastonbury Tor, except that in
place of the tower, it held aloft a big golden brooch, with the
tips of her fingers. "You mustn't encourage my astrologer to make
fun of his old woman in her own house."

Mr. Evans' countenance as he now turned it towards John
showed no distaste at being called Mrs. Legge's astrologer. It
was animated by a rush of all the learned and recondite folk-
lore that John's question summed up.

"There is a profound esoteric doctrine, Crow," he said sol-
emnly, "in what you've just remarked. Our old Cymric poetry
is full of references to it. Ceridwen herself, the Welsh Demeter,
appeared frequently in an unpleasing shape; and in the History
of the Grail it is recorded again and again that the Grail-Mes-
senger was of striking ugliness. Ugliness seems indeed to have
been one of the most common disguises of that Feminine Prin-
ciple in Nature which "

"But Evans, Evans!" interrupted John, "Wasn't it a Phorkyad
that Goethe in Faust makes Mephistopheles "

"Chut! Chut! Man-alive!" cried Mother Legge. "Don't 'ee in-
vocate Mr. Orphanage in me Best Parlour. Such devils, as he be,
may be ones for liking we when us be frights; but I baint asking
for their hot hugs yet awhile! What do you think of these
naughty lads' chatter, Tittie, me poor child?" And she leaned
forward out of her big chair raising her voice.

"I can't hear...hear...you...very well, Auntie. Me pains be bad."

"These gentlemen say that there be men what 'ud cosset we,"
shouted Mother Legge, "when us hadn't a tooth left in our head!"

"You were allus one for your bit o' mischie. Aunt, replied
the sick woman with a great effort, fumbling at the rug over
her knees with her bony hand, "but 'twould be different if...
'twould be different if " Her voice died away in a moan of
pain. The pain took various shapes in Tittie Petherton's con-
sciousness according to its intensity. What it resembled now was
a round black iron ball of a rusty blood-colour, covered with
spikes. Tittie herself was hugging this ball to her bosom. When
she pressed it, the hurt from those iron spikes was intolerable,
but she couldn't see its bloodiness any more, which was the
thing that turned her stomach most.

"He says no one is going to be allowed to have anythink to
theyselves. Be that true, my precious marrow?"

Mad Bet's shrill voice from her seat by the mahogany table
rang through the room. She had stretched out her long arm and
was pointing to John. There was a general hush.

"It is true," pronounced Dave Spear in a firm resolute voice.

"Let my True-Love speak," cried Mad Bet again. "If He says
it's true I'll believe you. But if He says it's a lie, I'll never be-
lieve you!"

What made John answer this interrogation as to whether, in a
hundred years--for so he worded the question to himself--Glas-
tonbury would be communistic, exactly as he did, was due purely
and solely to his idea that it would please Mad Bet! He suspected
that Mad Bet must be naturally so hostile to the existing system
of society that it would give her immense satisfaction to think
of any drastic change.

He also--such was his ridiculously weak nature--disliked the
idea, after this formidable silence, of hurting the feelings of
Dave Spear who took this matter of Communism in such dead
earnest.

Thus he lifted up his head, unclosed his eyes, met the intense
stare of the madwoman, who was waiting for his response as
though it were the verdict of Heaven, and cried out in a queer,
husky voice as if he really had been seized with the spirit of
prophecy--"Mr. Spear is right!"

He had no sooner uttered these words, than above the clamour
of loosened tongues from all quarters of the room, there came
the unmistakable sound of rain, striking heavily against the
windows.

Mother Legge struggled to her feet in a moment.

"Tewsy! Tewsy!" she called out in her most deep-throated
tones.

The door-opener of ce my other house" came hurrying in from
where he was superintending the tea-drinkers.

"Run upstairs and shut the window of the Nursery, Tewsv!

I left it wide open."

Mr. Evans and John and Barter and Dave, along with Nell and
Percy, were the only persons present who heard the word "Nurs-
ery" with surprise. Everyone else knew that it was Mrs. Legged
humour to call her own private little sitting-room upstairs by this
familiar name.

The big lady herself now walked to the black curtains and
pulled them aside. She pulled also aside a pair of gigantic mus-
lin curtains, yellowish from age, which had been there as long as
she had, which had, indeed, been her very first purchase after
she leased the house from old Miss Kitty Camel; for, said she, "I
can't abide Over-lookers!"

Then she looked forth into the night. Many heads were turned
towards her as she stood there, with her broad black back to them
all; and there came into the mind of John, who kept his eye on
her as he went across to Mad Bet, a queer feeling as if this whole
great room, under those glittering suspended lights, were a real
nursery and he and all the rest of the company frightened chil-
dren at a disturbed party, with Something more menacing than
ordinary rain beating out there at the window!

The old lady came back into the room.

"Well, it's been coming all day," she said, "and now it's come.
It's a good thing it's waited till now, for the holiday."

John thought to himself, "How often must those words, for the
holiday, have been uttered in Glastonbury houses by comfortable
people gathered in snug interiors; people whose whole life was
one long ‘holiday'!"

She had come back to her "children" now, that old black-
backed Mother Goose, and her soothing words "for the holiday,"
went about the room, like an eiderdown coverlet endowed with
soft wings, whispering to everybody--"Your frightened soul can
tuck itself in bed again, little one. Mother has sent away that
Something, so much more terrifying than the rain, that was com-
ing after you!"

The fantastic notion now entered John's shameless head that
this rich old Procuress, who had arranged so long for the unlaw-
ful pleasures of Glastonbury, had in very truth been a kind of
mystical Mother--like one of the Mothers in Faust--in driving
away fear. There were other "queer sons of chaos" than "Mr.
Orphanage"; and no escape from cosmic isolation was more com-
plete than that to which Young Tewsy held the candle!

Mother Legge went out now, doubtless to reassure her guests
in the other rooms; and to the accompaniment of what was now
torrents of lashing rain the general conversation went on.

The men of the party--and even some of the women--began
drinking again now. Young Tewsy brought in a colossal Silver
Bowl and placed it on the mahogany table. This turned out to be
a much stronger concoction of Bridgewater Punch than the previ-
ous jugs had contained.

A very curious incident occurred at this point of the evening's
happenings. At the departure of Mrs. Legge followed by the
appearance of this great Silver Bowl a general movement had
occurred among the guests. Some of the people in the room left
it, others entered it, and many changed their seats, their com-
panions, their mood. Mr. Evans for instance vacated his chair by
the old lady's now empty seat and moved hurriedly into the
group gathered about the table. As he came forward he passed
the pretty waitress towards whom Tom Barter was carefully steer-
ing his way holding the first tumbler that anyone had dared to
dip into that Silver Bowl.

Against this tumbler Mr. Evans, pushing frantically forward,
clumsily, but as it appeared accidentally, propelled himself,
knocking it out of Barter's fingers. Other hands which, follow-
ing Barter's example, were now ladling liquor out of the Silver
Bowl, paused in their pleasant task when Barter's glass fell, while
their owners looked about to see whose drink had been spilt.

Mr. Evans, however, hurried quickly to the Silver Bowl,
snatched a mug from the table, scooped up some punch with a
sweep of his long arm, and rushing to Cordelia's side pressed it
upon her.

"Quick," he cried, panting and agitated, "drink quick!"

But Cordelia, vexed by her friend's impetuosity, instead of do-
ing what he told her handed the mug to Nell, to whom she was
talking; and Nell, still too preoccupied with her private thoughts
to be alert to what was going on, lifted it heedlessly to her lips.

Thus, among all that company, Nell Zoyland was the first to drink
from Mother Legge's Silver Bowl.

When Mr. Evans perceived that his rude if not violent haste
had been in vain, he left Cordelia as brusquely as he had ap-
proached her, and returning to where Barter's glass had been
broken, began patiently to help that gentleman in collecting the
scattered fragments and placing them on the table.

"I'll finish it--now I've begun," he cried to Barter, from his
stooping position upon the floor, "You go and get Miss--"
he paused from ignorance of the waitress' name--"another one.
I'm sorry I did it."

Barter gave the Welshman's bent back one of his most vindic-
tive scowls. But he went off to do what the man had bidden him.
Blackie, who had been observing this scene from the beginning
with her wide grey eyes, now turned to Persephone Spear who
alone among these people had been talking to her. "Be that Mrs.
Zoyland from out Sedgemoor way?" she murmured softly.

Percy smiled, lifting her dark eyebrow's. "Yes, thats Nell. She's
my husband's sister."

"She was the first to drink," rejoined the other, still in a timid
whisper.

"Well?" said Percy still smiling. "Why not?"

"It's the Camel bowl," murmured Morgan Nelly's mother.
"Mrs. Legge bought it from old Miss Kitty. It's from the Abbot s
Kitchen they do tell. 'Twas what they old Popish Monks did
drink from, afore King Harry's time."

"How did Miss Camel get it?" enquired Percy, relieved to see
that her husband was deep in conversation with John Crow, while
Mad Bet, from her seat at the table which she seemed afraid of
leaving, watched the latter's face with doglike attention.

"Her were descended from they wold Papists," whispered
Blackie. "There be wondrous witchcraft in thik Silver Bowl. I
do know, for I've done charwork in this here house since I were
a young maid."

Cordelia meanwhile had left Nell's side and had taken her
seat by Mr. Wollop whose experiences as a youth in dealing
with his disreputable parent had made him careful to avoid the
contents of the Silver Bowl.

"The rain is spitting in the fire," said the ex-Mayor.

"I thought I heard a funny noise just now," said Cordelia.

"Is your Dad here tonight?" said Mr. Wollop.

Cordelia glanced anxiously at the sick woman by the fire, at
whose knees Crummie was now standing, bending over her.

"Not yet," she answered, "but I hope he'll come in soon. Mrs.
Petherton's getting worse."

"I've a'heard about how he can cure folk by laying of his
hands on 'em, your Dad." Mr. Wollop sighed lightly. "Never
cured no one in all me life," he went on, "so I reckon I weren't
the Mayor he be. But I took a interest in the people of this town,
rich and poor alike...no distinction!...and they knowed it too."

"I'm sure they knew it, Mr. Wollop," said Cordelia kindly,
soothing the fallen official, as she might have soothed a deposed
king.

Mr. Wollop looked extremely gratified. "They knew it, me
dear. They knew it," he muttered, stretching out his arm for an
anchovy-paste sandwich, snapping a neat bite out of it with his
white false teeth, and then holding it in his finger and thumb
like the picture of the Hatter in Alice.

"Oh, me God take pity on me! Oh, me God take pity on me!"

Tittie Petherton, with Crummie by her side, was twisting and
moaning in a manner that was distressing to see and hear.

"Haven't no one got any o' they pellets handy," whispered
Mr. Wollop, "what has mercy and pity in 'un?" He looked closely
at the scene by the fire. "Sister's skirt was never bought at me
shop," he remarked gravely.

"Crummie told me she's given her already every one of the
morphia tablets Nurse left," said Cordelia. "Oh, I wish Father
would come!"

"I wish he would come too," echoed Mr. Wollop. "'Twould be
a wondrous sight, with this rain spitting down chimney, to see
your Dad stop this poor woman's groans."

Cordelia had an intelligence that was accustomed to wander
more than most minds, among the mysteries of life; but she never
included her father among these mysteries. For some reason she
took her father for granted on the lowest possible level. It seemed.
in some way, quite an ordinary thing when her father stopped
Mrs. Petherton's cancer from hurting; though if Mr. Evans had
done it it would have seemed wonderful.

Barter and the waitress were all this time growing steadily
more affectionate and confidential. He had got her to himself at
a little table now at the side of the room opposite the windows
under the portrait of the seventeenth-century Recorder who was
the nephew of John Locke. To this table he kept bringing fresh
supplies of Bridgewater Punch and the flushed cheeks and spark-
ling eyes of Clarissa Smith were an evidence of his success. He
had already ascertained the exact amount of her salary, of the
income of her father, a taxi-driver in Dorchester, of the expense
she had been betrayed into this Easter "over at Wollop's" in the
little matter of underclothes and stockings, and even of what she
had had to pay for her shoes last Christmas.

He had now reached the stage--his second stage in the process
of seduction--of telling her fortune by the lines in her warm
palm. It was becoming clear that poor Tossie Stickles, now under
ecclesiastical and domestic protection, need not have worried
about her gentleman's lack of feminine support. With Tossie
rendered hors-de-combat it had become the turn of Clarissa. A
new girl was a new world to Mr. Barter and his sluggish East
Anglian senses stirred in their fen-peat depths, like great croco-
diles heaving up out of sun-baked mud, to meet this new world.

The fact that novelty was so irresistible to him in these matters
was a proof of something essentially stupid in his nature. It is
one of the psychological mistakes that the world makes, to assume
that a man whose inclination drives him on to attempt seduction
after seduction is a man of more ardent erotic passion than the
more constant lover. The very reverse is the case.

The most absorbing and distracting, the most delicately satis-
fying, of all lovers for a girl, are neither the thick-witted novelty-
hunters, nor the sour puritans. They are the vicious monog-
amists! Such indeed are the triumphant Accomplices of Life;
and when you see the pleasures of unsated and natural lust carried
on between two elderly people--as, owing to Bloody Johnny's oc-
cult wisdom, they were carried on between Mr. and Mrs. Geard--
you see a checkmating of Thanatos by Eros such as makes Mr.
Barter's brutal approaches and Miss Clarissa's silly yieldings as
commonplace as they are uneventful.

"You should hear what the girls down at our place do say
about what you rich gentlemen do in this house," giggled Clarissa.

"I must say I think you Glastonbury young ladies haven't
much to learn," responded Mr. Barter, whose experience had
taught him the exactly correct tone to take.

"They do say that this house be called Camelot," said the girl,
drawing back her hand from across the table but grudging in
her heart that the conversation--even though she had led it
astray herself--should have wandered from her good heart line
and promising fate line.

"I didn't know that," said Mr. Barter. "There! Finish up your
glass and I'll get you some more. No, I didn't know that. I come
from London, you know."

For two reasons did he tell this lie; first because he knew that
the word London always had a glamour for provincial young
ladies, but secondly because the deepest thing in his nature being
his feeling for Norfolk he never referred to it, with any of his
light-of-loves, any more than he referred to his passion for
airplanes.

If Barter had put the imagination into his love-making that
he put into these two integral passions the gross stimulus of
novelty would have been less important to him.

"I suppose," said Clarissa Smith sententiously, dropping her
Dorset accent to impress her educated admirer, "that in the Dark
Ages you gentlemen did what you liked with us poor girls."

"I hate the name Camelot," said Mr. Barter, and for a second,
even in the salt-tide of his rising lechery, he longed to pour out
his feelings to Mary Crow. How that rain beat on the windows!
It must be a wild night outside.

Clarissa didn't like the change in his voice or the change--
momentary though it was--in the expression of his face. She
toyed with the sham pearls that adorned her plump white neck
and her melting brown eyes wandered to the moaning figure by
the fire. "They oughtn't to bring sick people to parties," she
thought.

"I suppose in them days," she remarked, the Dorchester accent
slipping back, "Camelot was a place where a quiet girl dursn't
show her face."

"Have you lived here long?" Persephone Spear was saying
just then to Blackie Morgan.

"Born here, Mrs. Spear, and me mother before me. Father
came from Wales."

"How soon do a mother's thoughts begin to influence her
child?" thought Nell Zoyland as she listened with sweet atten-
tion to what Mr. Evans was now saying to Cordelia.

Cordelia thought she had never met such a nice, unassuming
lady as Mrs. Zoyland. It flattered her profoundly to watch the
tender interest with which, considering how little she knew either
of them, she was now listening to Owen's words.

Mr. Evans himself had almost forgiven her for being the first
to drink from the Silver Bowl!

"What is going to happen to me? Oh, what is going to happen
to me and Sam's child?" Nell thought. "Oh, I wish it wouldn't
rain so hard. It gets on my nerves the way it sounds. I must ask
Percy soon what we'd better do if it goes on like this. But I
mustn't fuss and get silly! From now on, till Sam's child is born,
I must be calm and sensible about everything. I wonder why Sam
doesn't come and talk to me."

The noise of the rain seemed now to be steadily increasing in
that room of glittering lights and black curtains. Nor was it only
Nell Zoyland who felt aware of it as something coming upon
them all from outside--from far outside--coming over the wide-
drenched moors, over the hissing muddy ditches, over the sobbing
reeds, over the salt-marshes; coming from somewhere unearthly,
somewhere beyond the natural!

There was a curious instinctive movement in that big room as
if all those who were present were seeking to get reassurance
from one another and to gather closer together. There was more
drinking too. Cups and glasses were dipped again and again in
the great Silver Bowl; and the voices rose and rose, as that little
group of human consciousnesses--arguing, reproaching, chal-
lenging, jesting, sneering, accusing--sought in some subconscious
way to outbrave a Presence which they all felt pressing in upon
them from that unearthly "outside." Mr. Evans had moved away
now from Cordelia and Nell. A strange restlessness had come
upon him. He began walking up and down beneath the pictures
of the Recorders.

"To let it all go,' 5 he thought, "to go home now through the
rain and go down those stairs and read that book! Yes, yes, yes r
yes, to read that passage, that page, which I 5 ve avoided since I
first found it...to look at that picture...to tell myself that
story...to remember . . ."

He stood still, his eyes on the crossed legs of one of the com-
placent Recorders. And it was allowed to him as he stared at
those silver-buckled shoes, so crudely painted, to travel with the
speed of lightning along the road that he would have to follow
if he did begin all that again. He became the terrible craving, he
became the thing he was doing, he became the itch, the bite, the
sting, the torment, the horror, he became the loathing that re-
fused to stop doing what it loathed to do. He became the shape-
less mouth that--

Human thoughts, those mysterious projections from the creative
nuclei of living organisms, have a way of radiating from the brain
that gives them birth. Such emanations, composed of ethereal
vibrations, take invisible shapes and forms as they float forth.
Thus to any supermaterial eye, endowed with psychic perception,
the atmosphere of Mrs. Legge's front parlour that night must
have been a strange scene. The secret thoughts of her guests rose
and floated, hovered and wavered, formed and re-formed, under
those glittering candelabra, making as it were a second party, a
gathering of thought-shapes, that would remain when all these
people had left the room. All thought-eidola are not of the same
consistency or of the same endurance. It is the amount of life-
energy thrown into them that makes the difference. Some are
barely out of the body before they fade away. Others--and this is
the cause of many ghostly phenomena--survive long after the
organism that projected them is buried in the earth.

All the while Tom Barter was progressing so prosperously
with his seduction of the brown-eyed, white-throated Clarissa,
the remorseful thought of himself as the traitor to his late em-
ployer took the shape of a shadowy creature bent double under
a swollen load, from beneath which its lamentable eyes strained
upward, tugging at the strings that held them in their sockets.

Meanwhile Persephone Spear was projecting from her graceful
body, whose provocative outward form was at this moment inter-
esting but not exciting the senses of Mr, Wollop as he sat placid
and content at the mahogany table, a very queer homuncula of
desperation.

"I hate all men," she had kept thinking to herself, "all, all,
all! I have found that out now! I thought it was because Dave
was just Dave that I drew back from him. I thought that if I let
Philip take me some new feeling would be born in me. But it
hasn't been born. In Wookey Hole it was exciting. Just the shock
of it. Just the pain of it. But I hate the way men are made! I
knew it when I first saw Dave naked and now--since yesterday
at that inn in Taunton; which was worse, far worse, when
Philip--Oh, what shall I do? Where shall I go? Why was I
born in this world at all? I want to love, I want to love, but
theres no one!"

The moans of Tittie Petherton as she hugged to her tortured
entrails those iron spikes of that round globe of pain which was
all that she could think of--though a hideous reproduction of
that engine hung in the air above her for eyes that could see it
--had now become so dominant in that room that conversation be-
gan to lapse.

"Can't anything be done to ease her?" said John to Dave
Spear.

"I'll go and fetch Dekker," replied the practical Communist.
"He brought her here. He'd better take her home."

With these words the fair young man hurried away. "Dekker!"
John could hear him calling. "Dekker! Dekker!"

John turned to Cordelia. "Have you ever heard such rain?" he
said. "I'm afraid the Mayor won't come at all on such a night. I
think one or other of us ought to call a taxi and take that woman
straight to the hospital."

Cordelia looked at him contemptuously. She often felt as if
her father had never shown his inherent stupidity more clearly
than in his choice of this grotesque individual with a St. Vitus
dance in his cheek and the look of a deboshed actor. "I don't
believe he ever has a bath either," she said to herself.

There came over Cordelia at that moment a blind physical
wave of hatred for John Crow.

"I don't like the way he smells," she thought.

Nothing would have amused John himself more than this par-
ticular reaction of Cordelia's. To most human persons a physi-
cal repulsion on the part of another to so intimate a thing as the
smell of their skin would have been an insult never forgiven. But
the consciousness of John Crow was so loosely attached to his
bodily frame that he would have been capable of meekly retir-
ing from Cordelia's bed--had she been his mistress--and sprink-
ling himself with Attar of Roses, if it pleased her, without bear-
ing her the least grudge.

"I like my cousin Dave, don't you?" was all he said now. "He's
the only really unselfish person I've ever met. And yet, I sup-
pose, if it brought his Communistic State a year nearer, he'd have
us all shot tonight without the flicker of an eyelid."

A terrible moan from the woman by the fire interrupted them
and they both caught a tearful, helpless appeal in Crummie's
eyes as she turned from her patient.

"The hospital " began John; but Cordelia cut him short.

"She won't go," she said. "They tried it once. They'd have
to make her unconscious first."

"I understand exactly what she feels," said John. "I'd much
sooner plague everyone with my death-cries--God! I'd like to
plague 'em with 'em--than go to any of those places. Hospitals,
prisons, workhouses--Mon Dieu! They make me shudder."

Cordelia thought to herself, "That's just what a jail-bird like
you would think. You ought to leave Father's service and be em-
ployed by Mrs. Legge along with Young Tewsy!"

John went over to Tittie's side. "Christ! My dear, can't we do
anything to stop this?" he whispered to Crummie.

Mad Bet had been watching every movement of John's all the
evening from her seat at the table. Mr. Wollop was addressing
a few friendly words to her now; but she seemed unable to hear
him. She now cried out to John so loudly that everyone stopped
talking.

"Why don't 'ee pray to thik Tree o' Life, my king, what us two
do know of? If you'd ‘a thought 'o praying before. Mr. Geard
mid come before!"

In a moment of respite from her pain, and arrested by the
silence and by the madwoman's voice. Tittie herself spoke now.
"It's began to rain," she said in a dull flat voice.

John stared into the fire across Tittie's fidgetty knees. "Bet's
right," he thought. "It's absurd that in all this company not a
soul has thought of praying. Young Dekker, who is out for liv-
ing a saintly life, doesn't believe in anything to pray to.. God!
What we want here is someone to really pray, then perhaps old
Geard will hurry up and come."

And with his face still towards the fire John dropped down
surreptitiously upon one knee. "In Glastonbury," he thought, "it
would seem popery or paganism to be caught really kneeling if
you aren't in church."

And John secretly prayed in his heart that Mr. Geard might
appear during the next five minutes. He prayed lo his dead
parent, exactly as he had done on his terrible walk to Stone-
henge, when Mr. Evans had been sent to his rescue.

Mrs. Legge, accompanied by Sam Dekker and Dave Spear and
several other people, now came into the room; but the general
attention was distracted from their entrance by Mad Bet who
suddenly rose to her feet.

John noticed that Mr. Evans was standing against the wall
under one of the Recorders. John had just time to think to him-
self, after his fashion, "Evans looks as if he were standing
against a hedge," when Mad Bet stretched out both her arms
towards Mr. Evans and uttered a piercing cry.

Evans himself swung round, his teeth chattering.

"What has he done to that thing? Oh, what has he done to it?"
screamed Mad Bet. "Stop him! Stop him! It's too much! Stop
him, you people! He's doing it again! Stop him! Can't you stop
him?"

The woman's hands were pointing, and her eyes were fixed, at
a spot about a yard above Mr. Evans' head.

The shock of her words brought Mr. Evans back to his normal
frame of mind. He came hurriedly towards the excited woman,
mumbling as he did so something in Welsh. He did not stop till
he was close up to her, where she had been pulled down to her
seat by Cordelia and Mr. Wollop.

He came up to her like a penitential monk approaching his
superior for punishment.

The madwoman shrunk away from him at first, trying to free
her arms from those of Cordelia, who was holding her tight, as if
afraid she would do something violent.

But Mr. Evans, who kept on mumbling in Welsh, set her free
from Cordelia's hold, and as soon as she felt herself free she
stopped shrinking away from him.

"It's not...it's not," whispered Mr. Evans to Mad Bet, so
that no one heard him but Mr. Wollop and Cordelia. "It's my
devil who does it...but I'm going to drive him out...on Mid-
summer Day...you shall see...you shall be there...you shall
see him driven out...he will never...."

Once more he began mumbling something hurriedly in Welsh.

Then Mad Bet did a very queer thing. She snatched off her
black hat from her bald head and stretching out her arms seized
Mr. Evans round the neck and drew his head down towards her
own. No one but Cordelia and Mr. Wollop saw what happened;
but Mr. Wollop's eyes opened as wide as Bert Cole's would have
done when he beheld Mr. Evans' great Roman nose pressing
against that horrible white rondure and his twisted mouth kiss-
ing it.

"The Grail Messenger!" thought Mr. Evans as he straightened
his back and helped Mad Bet to straighten her hat and replace it
on her head.

"Tewsy!" It was the voice of Mother Legge who had hardly
entered the room than she was once more standing at the window.
"Tewsy! Go to the front door, there's someone coming."

There had been a general movement meanwhile towards the
group that surrounded Mad Bet. Something in the human mind
leaps up with rapturous release when some outrageous event is
occurring. Most men live but a half-life, dull, tame, monotonous.
The occurrence of something that is outrageously startling, up-
setting to all proprieties, to all conventions, stirs such people
with a primordial satisfaction. The submerged Cro-Magnon in
them, or at least the submerged Neolithic man, swims up in them
like a rising diver from the bottom of the atavistic sea and they
rush forward, or steal forward, towards the spot where the for-
bidden thing is occurring.

Once more as John watched the broad back of his hostess
standing at the window, while with her plump hands, each of
which had a wedding ring upon it, she held the black and white
curtains apart, he got the feeling that she was protecting a nurs-
ery of naughty children from some monstrous invasion...from
some unearthly "questing Beast" whose featureless face made
of decomposing stuff of darkness was even now pressing a-
gainst the window.

"It is a wet night," remarked Mr. Wollop to Cordelia; but
Cordelia was desperately trying to remember what it was when
she was alone on Chalice Hill before the rain caught her by the
giant oaks, that had made her feel so strong to deal with Mr.
Evans. But as she watched him now seated at the mahogany table
with an immobile face, like the very face upon that biblical
"Penny" that made Christ utter the words--"Render unto
Caesar"--she began to question whether it were in her power
to help him. "He has got something serious on his conscience,"
she thought, "or he has got some mania that I can't understand.
Why did he do that to Betsy just now? It was horrible to see
him."

"Yes," she responded aloud to Mr. Wollop's mild remark, "but
it's because people aren't talking so loud that we hear it now.
Everyone seems whispering as if something were going to hap-
pen. I hope that miserable woman isn't going to die."

"She's kicked off her nice rug," remarked the ex-Mayor re-
proachfully.

"Yes," Dave Spear replied to a question of Barter who had
just appeared at' the mahogany table to re-fill Clarissa's glass
from Miss Camel's Silver Bowl, "Yes, my wife and I have re-
ceived word from Bristol that we'd better stay till June at any
rate if we can't get them to strike till then."

Mr. Barter felt one of the most grievous pangs of self-reproach
that he had ever known when he heard this calm declaration.
What a Judas to Philip he had been! Oh, he should never have
let these contemptible Somersetshire workmen get so out of
hand! What would he do without him? And what was he doing?
Making toys! While a real industry like those Dye-Works was
being threatened. Aye! He would like to be flying through this
wild rain now, with his fingers on the control, heading for Glas-
tonbury from Wookey, through the liquid darkness. Bah! What
jumpy idiots these Glastonbury fools were. What the devil--

"I can't bear it! Oh, my God!" Tittie's voice was hardly the
voice of a human being. The iron ball with spikes had changed
its shape...

Young Tewsy's voice rang out so quickly after the woman's
cry as to seem a portion of the same litany of chaos.

"His Worship, the Mayor, Madame!"

Mr. Geard did not stop to take off his dripping overcoat. He
pushed Mrs. Legge aside as if she had been a feather's weight.
Everyone stared at him now as shamelessly as did his predecessor
in office. The very Recorders on the wall seemed staring at him.

And well they might be!

The heavily built man in his dripping clothes was now pushing
his way through them, bent double, and with his hands pressed
against his great belly. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" he was
groaning out, as he stumbled forward.

The man's whole body seemed undergoing some sort of con-
vulsion. Blindly he stumbled against the mahogany table. The
Silver Bowl seemed to catch his attention. He caught it up as he
passed. Mr. Barter, who had just dipped Clarissa's glass in it,
drew back hurriedly, spilling the liquour he held.

"Let this cup " howled Mr. Geard in a tone that made even
Mr. Wollop shiver, for it seemed more like the bark of a
great Sedgemoor fox than the voice of a man; and even as he
cried he flung the thing with all his force upon the ground, flung
it just at Crummie's feet, who was running, laughing and weep-
ing, in wild hysterics towards him. When he reached Tittie, whose
voice had now sunk again into moans, he snatched her up in his
arms, as a fireman in a whirl of flame might seize a burning
woman, sank down in the chair with her on his lap, and began,
in his own natural voice, that familiar refrain which had won
him his nickname. "Blood of Christ deliver us! Blood of Christ
save us! Blood of Christ have mercv upon us!"

His voice got lover and lower as he went on. Then it fell into
complete silence. Still he continued hugging the figure in his
arms and slowly rocking himself and her, backward and for-
ward, backward and forward. There was such a dead silence in
the room all this while, that the voices in the other rooms became
like the intrusion of revellers at an execution or at a childbirth.

Then there came a grotesque and even rather an unpleasant
sound. It was the stertorous breathing of the sleeping woman.



MAY DAY



It was the First of May, and through the open kitchen
window of Elizabeth Crow's little house on Benedict Street
floated delicious sun-warmed airs. The house looked to the
north, across the outskirts of Paradise. There was a small oblong
patch of ground, outside, with a rough wooden fence round it,
identical with all the other back-gardens of that street; and as
in the case of most of the others this patch of earth was devoted
rather to vegetables than to flowers. Beyond the garden was a
triangular field where one of Miss Crow's neighbours kept a
couple of cows; but beyond this, except for the roofs of a few
scattered Paradise hovels, the water-meadows stretched clear
away towards the site of the Lake Village, and Philip's .landing
field, and Number One's Backwear Hut. On the stove in this
kitchen stood a sauce-pan of boiling potatoes and a large black
pot full of some sort of savoury stew. In the centre of the kitchen
was a bare deal table, the well-scrubbed top of which had as-
sumed, so soft and friendly did it look, the whiteness of a pail of
rich cream. On this table was a huge glass bowl filled with an
immense, tightly packed mass of bluebells. The gorgeous blue-
ness, a deep Prussian blue mingled with blotches of purplish
colour, rose up like a thickly packed cloud of almost opaque es-
sence out of this bowl of heavy-drooping blooms and expanded
and expanded till its richness of tint attracted towards it and
seemed utterly to absorb all other coloured things in the room. It
dominated the gleam of the shining pots and pans of that small
kitchen as completely as its fragrance overpowered the smell of
the cooking. An empty basket with a few torn blossoms, a few
long, pallid leaf-spears, and a few sap-oozing stalks, stood on the
dresser, indicating that the flowers had been brought here that
very morning. They had indeed been picked by Jackie and his
little band in Wick Wood, and one could see that they were at
their very height of blooming and would not last much longer.
The children had found two or three early pink campions on the
way to Wick Wood, in the leafy banks of Maidencroft Lane,
and these were now protruding, like carmine flags in a purple
sea, from the midst of the rest. These bluebells must have been
the direct descendants of flowers that had been the background
of many a Druidic May Day ritual round those great oaks. They
brought with them in their oozy stalks and in their drooping
heads the feeling of a thousand springs of English history. They
brought too the sense of masses of hazel-branches darkly clus-
tering around these blue spaces in the deep wood and hiding the
fluttering chaffinches and blackcaps whose songs issued forth
from their entanglement.

Nor had this great bunch lost that imprint of children's fin-
gers that country people recognize so quickly--the stalks plucked
off so short under the flower-heads and the blossoms pressed so
lightly together! In addition to these flowers there were two girls
in Miss Crow's kitchen.

The May-Day feeling in the air, the warm sunshine, the pres-
ence of such a quantity of flowers at their full height of blossom,
gave to the high spirits of the girls, as they chatted volubly to-
gether, that delicious quality of young feminine life which is so
fleeting and so easily destroyed. The presence of a man destroys
it in a second, introducing a different element altogether. Totally
unconscious of what is happening to their young bodies and
souls, girls, when they are thus alone together, give themselves up
to all manner of little gestures, movements, abandonments, which
not only the presence of a man but the presence of an older
woman would drive away. Certain filmy and delicate essences in
young girls' beings come to the surface only when they are alone
like this with one another. When any of them is alone by herself
it is different again; for then her own thoughts are apt to play
the part of intruders and cause these fragile petals of her identity
to draw in and close up.

The two girls I am now speaking of were seated at the table
on straw-bottomed chairs. They were Sally Jones and Tossie
Stickles, the plump form of the latter enveloped in a capacious
white apron, while the former wore a gay spring hat and a bright
scarf round her warm young neck. The girls were sipping hot
cocoa from big steaming cups, and as they chatted across the
mass of bluebells the clock in St. Benignus' Church struck the
hour of noon.

"Did her ladyship open the letter her own self?" enquired
Sally.

"'Twere 'dressed to her for I read the words meself as I came
along. It said 'The Lady Rachel Zoyland, care of John Geard
Esquire, Glastonbury, Somerset.' It didn't say our street and it
didn't say our number. It said 'Esquire.' Be our Mayor really a
Esquire, Tossie., do 'ee reckon, now he be a worshipful?"

"Read it? I should say her didn't read it," cried Tossie. "Not
with Missus watching she and smiling kind-a patronizing all the
while. No, Sally Jones, no, you Simple-Sal! Her took she's letter
up to bedroom, same as you nor me might have done and she
slammed her door and locked it too--bless her pretty heart! She
be a one, she be a one, Sal, and no mistake about it."

"Have you--" whispered Sally gravely, leaning forward,
till the broad brim of her straw hat overshadowed the table.

Tossie put down her cup and nodded emphatically, her eyes
gleaming. "Told she yesterday," she replied. "She were helping
I in kitchen and she talked so natural-like that I just up and told
her. I didn't mention no names, you understand, but I told her he
weren't no marrying man nor never would be. I told her he were
a gentleman; and you should have seen the face she made
at that!"

"There have been a kind of a trouble, Toss, down our way,"
threw in Sally. "I allus knew'd 'twould never last between Red
and Miss Crummie. I telled 'ee so, didn't I, time and again?
Red be a working-man, though 'tis true he baint a common man.
But Miss Crummie be quite different. She isn't a lady. We know
that! But she's different from Red."

"They weren't engaged, were they?" said Tossie.

"Oh, no, it hadn't come to that yet," admitted Sal. "For me
own part I think Miss Crummie was so haughly and offish with
the pore man that he just up and quit."

Tossie opened her eyes wide. She felt it a little hard to visual-
ise this haughty, obstreperous Crummie!

Both girls lifted their cups to their lips and took a deep drink.
They each searched their minds for something startling to say.
Their encounter seemed an important occasion in their lives:
and they 'were very unwilling to let it slide by unenjoyed to
the full.

"Mr. Philip and Mrs. Philip be coming to tea this afternoon,"
announced Tossie.

"Mercy on us!" cried Sally, "and what if this letter to her
Ladyship be to say that Mr. Athling be coming to see she?"

Tossie had now the opportunity she had been waiting for. She
had not seemed to impress her friend sufficiently with the fact of
her intimacy with Lady Rachel. It was not very surprising that
she should have confessed her troubles to Rachel. But surely it
must startle Sal if she revealed that Lady Rachel had mentioned
Mr. Athling to her.

She finished her cocoa gravely, rose from her chair, prodded
the potatoes with a fork, stirred the stew, and then leaning across
the table smelt at the bluebells. Straightening herself up she
next glanced at the door. Then she looked out of the window.
Still upon her feet she stared significantly at Sally. Her expres-
sion said: "These are no light matters."

A thrush was singing in a laburnum bush at the end of the
little garden. A faint scent of trodden grass from where the two
cows were feeding floated in upon the warm air along with that
rich song. Both the girls felt a penetrating thrill of happiness. It
was May Day; and the spirit of Romance was abroad upon
the air.

"He do write poetry," said Tossie in a low, awed voice.
"There he too much talk in this wold town about she and him.
People be awful careless the way they talk."

"Master said to Missus this morning " remarked Sally, "that
he be a true-blood Saxon."

"Meaning he over to Middlezoy?" asked Tossie, sliding down
upon her chair. How teasing it was when a person didn t give
a person the credit for things! Why didn't Sally, instead of tell-
ing her what Mr. Geard had said to Mrs. Geard, cry out, "Oh,
Tossie Stickles, how wonderful it is that Lady Rachel talks to 'ee
so nice and natural!"

"Master said to Missus," continued Sally, "that Athling be the
oldest name round here. He said Zoyland were nothing to it.

"His folks be plain farmer folks," protested Tossie. Then
taking advantage of Sally's cup being at her lips, "He do write
poetry about she."

"Did she tell you that?" cried Sally, really astonished at last.
Tossie was abashed. The truth was that it was she herself, and
not Lady Rachel, who had referred to Mr. Athling. "A little bird
told I," she murmured evasively.

"Be Mr. Philip really coming to tea?" said Sally, beginning
to feel--as she listened to that thrush--that there were too many
little birds in Benedict Street. One wanted more solid facts. "It's
not often, so people do say, that they Elms folk go out together."

"There was extra orders gived for they little rock cakes, to
Baker, this morning," said Tossie firmly.

It was Sally's turn now to bend forward and inhale the heavy
bluebell fragrance. She tilted back the big straw brim of her
hat with her fingers as she did so.

"Be 'ee going to hospital when your time comes?" she mur-
mured between her sniffs at the flowers.

"Maybe," said Tossie.

"Do they let 'ee see Mr. Barter these days?" her friend
went on.

Tossie's cheeks got red. "What do I want with seeing a bloke
that can keep company with they baggages at Pilgrims'."

"Lily Rogers told old Mrs. Robinson," remarked Sally, "that
'Rissa Smith were angling for Mr. Barter to marry she."

Tossie's reply to this was more expressive than polite. She put
out her tongue at her friend.

"Master were all worked up this morning," said Sally, content
to change the conversation now that she had made mention of
Clarissa. "Mr. Philip wrote to he a turble stiff letter about his
Midsummer Circus. He said he'd get the Police to stop it."

"Baint our Mayor above all they Police and suchlike?" pon-
dered Tossie Stickles in a wistful tone. A little bell above the
dresser began to tinkle.

"Missus wants summat," said the girl getting up from her
chair.

Lady Rachel did not breathe a word to Miss Crow about the
contents of the letter she had received till the two ladies were
weeding side by side in the little back-garden.

"I've heard from Ned," she said quietly then, looking across
the sweet-pea sticks at her hostess.

"Yes, Rachel," replied Miss Crow.

"He's coming to tea this afternoon," said the yomig girl, "if
you'll let him."

"Why, my dear, that's as nice as it can he! You know I've
only seen him that once, when the Mayor asked us to meet him."

"He doesn't expect to find anybody else here," said Rachel.

"Only my nephew and Tilly," said Miss Crow, planting her
fork in the ground and resting her hand, in her rough gardening
gloves, upon its handle. The thrush had flown off into the next
little garden, but from there its voice was still audible. The
warm air smelt of the disturbed earth-mould, but it smelt too of
a more subtle odour than that--it smelt of an odour that came voy-
aging across the water-meadows from spinneys and copses and
withy beds and high uplands and deep lanes and sequestered
gulleys and hidden combes and narrow hazel-paths and mossy
openings in old woods--the odour of Somersetshire itself! It is
only certain days, days under unique conditions of the wind and
the weather, that call out from the soil of a particular district
that district's own native, peculiar smell. And this May Day was
precisely such an especial day. Had any traveller come back to
Glastonbury on this day he would have been aware in a second
that it was one of those days when the spirit of that portion of
the earth distils itself in a rare unique essence. And of what is
this voyaging mystery composed? Chiefly of the smell of prim-
roses! Different from all other essences in the world the smell
of primroses has a sweetness that is faint and tremulous, and yet
possesses a sort of tragic intensity. There exists in this flower,
its soft petals, its cool, crinkled leaves, its pinkish stalk that
breaks at a touch, something which seems able to pour its whole
self into the scent it flings on the air. Other flowers have petals
that are fragrant. The primrose has something more than that.
The primrose throws its very life into this essence of itself which
travels upon the air. But the odour which floated now over that
little garden of Benedict Street and hovered about Miss Crow as
she looked at the proud timidity in those grey eyes that faced her
so steadily, at that light-poised figure gripping so tightly the long
hoe she had been using, had yet another pervading element in it
--the scent of moss. Not a patch of earth in any of those spin-
neys, and copses, and withy beds, that edged those water-mea-
dows, not a plank, not a post, in the sluices and weirs and
gates of those wide moors, but had its own growth, somewhere
about it, of moss "softer than sleep." More delicately, more in-
tricately fashioned than any grasses of the field, more subtle in
texture than any seaweed of the sea, more thickly woven, and
with a sort of intimate passionate patience, by the creative spirit
within it, than any forest leaves or any lichen upon any tree
trunk, this sacred moss of Somersetshire would remain as a per-
fectly satisfying symbol of life if all other vegetation were de-
stroyed out of that country. There is a religious reticence in the
nature of moss. It vaunts itself not; it proclaims not its beauty;
its infinite variety of minute shapes is not apprehended until you
survey it with concentrated care. With its peculiar velvety green,
a greenness that seems to spring up like a dark froth from the
living skin pores of the earth-mother, this primeval growth cov-
ers with its shadowy texture every rock and stone and fragment
of masonry, every tree root and hovel roof and ancient boarding,
over which the rain can sweep or the dew can fall. The magical
softness of its presence gathers about the margins of every human
dream that draws its background from life in the West Country.
The memories of youth are full of it; the memories of old people
who have gone to and fro in West-Country villages wear it like
a dim, dark garment against the cold of the grave; and when
the thoughts of the bedridden turn with piteous craving to the
life outside their walls, it is upon deep, rain-soaked, wet moss,
sprinkled with red toadstools or with brown leaves or with drift-
ing gossamer seed, that they most covetously brood!

"You know what to expect from my nephew, Rachel, because
you've seen him already," went on Miss Crow. "If he doesn't
treat our young poet with proper respect, you and I will squash
him. He's not hard to put down, as you've seen, when a woman
stands up to him."

Rachel shifted her hoe from one hand to the other and lifting
her young head, inhaled the moss-primrose odour upon those float-
ing airs. She listened to the exultant trillings of the thrush from
the unseen bushes in the neighbouring garden.

"You are very kind to me, Miss Crow.'" she said.

"Oh, and I've asked the Vicar," added Miss Elizabeth apolo-
getically. "But there's not a boy under heaven however sensitive
who could mind him. He's as easy to manage as that queer, surly
son of his you didn't like--is difficult. But even poor old Sam
is nice when you approach him in the right way."

"Your nephew won't abuse Mr. Geard, will he?" said Lady
Rachel. "Ned will be rude to him if he does. Ned likes Mr. Geard
as much as I do."

"Oh, you and I will see to that, child," laughed Miss Crow.
"Well be three to one; for Tilly doesn't count. The Mayor will
be well championed, whatever Philip says!"

A couple of hours later and the little drawing-room facing
Benedict Street was full of a lively party drinking tea and eating
rock cakes. So strong, although so tactfully diffused, was Eliza-
beth Crow's protective aura, that not only were troublesome
topics warded off, but the demonic influences from the great
Powers of earth and air were prevented from touching her little
group. Miss Elizabeth Crow not only pulled green-fringed mus-
lin curtains across the little window, but she managed somehow
to place her own substantial frame between her old friend and
his flaming enemy, so that the Vicar--who was often obscurely
worried and fretted in full sunlight--felt unusually happy that
afternoon. There was a subtle reason for his happiness, too, in
a motion of his consciousness of which he was thoroughly
ashamed although its baseness, as he knew, had the grand excuse
of so many base human feelings! Try as he might to take a
larger, more generous, less professional view of the case, he had
not been able to resist a spasm of ignoble jealous relief when
he divined, as he soon did, for he and his son were in close ac-
cord, that some new twist in the latter's eccentric mind was
keeping him apart from Nell Zoyland.

Ned Athling was certainly not the sort of youth that any ordi-
nary girl would have fallen in love with. He was short and very
fair, so fair indeed that his eyebrows and eyelashes seemed al-
mast non-existent. He was much more ruggedly built than Dave
Spear, another fair Saxon, and his hands, tanned and hardened
by farm-work, were as large as they were powerful. A cloud of
nervous timidity seemed to hover over him like smoke over burn-
ing weeds and he had a trick of casting down his full-lidded,
eyebrowless eyes when anyone addressed him and staring intently
at some spot, that conveniently besought attention, in the fabric
of his trousers.

The May Day sunlight, modified by the green-edged muslin
curtains, filtered agreeably into the little room. There was some-
thing piquant in the way Miss Crow had arranged her old pieces
of furniture in this little working-man's parlour. The eighteenth-
century chairs and tables, the seventeenth-century prints, mostly
of sea-faring worthies and of old maps of the West Indies in-
herited from a Crow who had been a Norwich merchant in
Cromwell's time, gave the room a rich and intricate look. This
was increased by a vast amount of old china of which Miss Crow
was particularly fond and the bulk of which had come to her
from a Devereux aunt, a venerable maiden lady who had lived
for half a century in the same small house, at Cromer in
Norfolk.

There were primroses and cowslips and even bluebells about
the room, all with much more greenery among them than was
possessed by Jackie's bunch in the kitchen. The muslin curtains
waved gently in the air that blew in from the street, where the
very dust--recently allayed by a blue-painted water-cart in-
scribed "Town Council"--carried into the house a curious smell
that resembled rain and yet was different from rain.

Miss Elizabeth, Tilly Crow and Lady Rachel had all chosen,
by that human instinct which follows the weather almost as
closely as do the hedge-weeds, especially airy and light-coloured
dresses. Philip himself had put on a new fawn-tinted tie which
looked well upon his heather-mottled suit, while Edward Athling
had a newly budded meadow-orchid in his buttonhole, the first
specimen of this flower that any of the rest of them were likely
to see for several weeks yet.

There was a liberal supply of thin bread and butter, and Tos-
sie had cut it so carefully that even the lady who had Emma for
a servant looked at these two great Dresden platefuls with ar-
rested attention. But the rock cakes were the most daring innova-
tion, most Glastonbury hostesses priding themselves upon not
having to go outside their own kitchens for the replenishing of
their tea-tables. This bold departure from the norm proved, how-
ever, a great success.

"No," Tilly was saying to an enquiry from Mr. Dekker about
the rhubarb in her garden. "I cannot say that I like the look of it
this year as much as I did last year. It is redder than last year of
course. I admit that. But my cook always prefers the stalks that
have green streaks mixed with the red. She says they are more
succulent."

"They are not so sweet, Madam; they are not so sweet," affirmed
Mat Dekker.

"But my cook has her own way of handling rhubarb," reit-
erated Tilly, her black eyes shining. In her mind she resolved to
have a whole morning, presently, entirely devoted to making
rhubarb jam. The question was what sort of brandy to use for
the fastening up of the jam-pots. As she watched Mr. Dekker's
watch-chain and wondered how soon a crumb of rock cake would
dislodge itself from between one of its links and one of the good
man's waistcoat buttons--Tilly longed to brush him then and
there--she recalled how she used to stand for hours in the kitchen
watching her grandmother tie up jam-pots. The smell of brandy
always made her think of a certain blue apron she had liked
wearing in those days, not because it made her look pretty, but
because it made her look grown-up and competent "Always use
the best, Dearie," the old woman had been wont to say to her
hypnotised companion. And little Tilly had vowed to herself
that whatever might be her future destiny she would never use,
like her slipshod mother did, in the making up of jam-pots,
anything but the best brandy. And this vow Tilly had rigorously
kept ever since.

"No, it wasn't exactly yellow from where I saw it."

Philip had been talking dogmatically about yesterday's
weather and the timid poet had been aroused to assert himself
when he heard Philip who had gone to Bath in his airplane--
driven now by a pilot from London--praising the sky for its
yellowness. "It was green when I saw it," he cried eagerly. "And
that's by far the most beautiful kind of sky. I call it the fields of
the sky."

Philip stared at the lad. He was in the middle of telling them
all about his flight to Bath. The colour of the sky was of minor
importance.

"What you say, young man, interests me very much," said
Mr. Dekker. "Most of us don't give enough attention to these
things. When I kept a diary at college--"

"Talking of diaries," interrupted Tilly, "I wish all of you
men would begin ordering diaries at Wollop's! That imperti-
nent young man there--you know the one I mean, Aunt?--
won't keep diaries. He says there's no demand for them."

Aunt Elizabeth burst into a peal of delicious silvery laughter.
She did not often laugh. But when she did her laughter was like
the clearest of rippling streams.

"Why are you so amused. Aunt?" enquired Tilly; but in no
vexed or aggrieved voice. Now that Aunt Elizabeth had a house
of her own she felt very friendly to her.

"Do you keep a diary, Tilly?" asked Miss Elizabeth.

"Oh, dear no! What do you suppose? It's for my cook. You
don't know my cook, Lady Rachel. Her name is Emma."

"You don't mean to say that Emma keeps a diary?" threw in
Mr. Dekker with a chuckle.

"Tilly!" The way Philip uttered these two syllables was a
masterpiece in rich psychological nuances. In the first place his
tone protected his wife from Aunt Elizabeth and from all these
strangers. In the second place his tone warned his wife that there
were proper limits to this fashion of hers of giving herself away.
In the third place his tone expressed an indulgent appreciation,
a tender recognition, that Tilly was Tilly, and that she was the
kind of thing in a person's life that he himself was glad to pos-
sess; though it might seem strange, and even absurd, to others!

"No, no," said Tilly quietly, quite unperturbed at being
laughed at by Emma's favourite clergyman, "she doesn't want
them for that. She wants them to keep accounts in. The ordinary
tradesmen's books don't suit Emma. She has her own ways of
keeping accounts."

"My new pilot's name is Tankerville," said Philip suddenly,
seeing in his mind that bird's-eye view of his Dye-Works which
had made it impossible for him to be sure whether the sky was
green or yellow.

In the general silence that followed this irrelevant observation
Lady Rachel remarked that her father would never have a servant
whose name was more than one syllable. But Philip's mind had
wandered far away from Bob Tankerville. He was saying to
himself, "I shan't replace Barter for a while. I shall wait a bit.
Those office-lads seem able to scramble on somehow. Yes. I shall
wait a little, and get a tight hand on all the reins myself. What
I've got to do now is to give Geard more rope--give him all the
rope he wants--while I egg him on by talk of the Law. He'll
hang himself--if he has rope enough!"

"Seen any otters down your way at Middlezoy this year?" said
Mr. Dekker to Ned Athling, whose shyness was so intense in
this pause of the conversation he had commenced licking his
lips with his tongue just as dogs do when they feel embarrassed.
He now glanced quickly and nervously at Lady Rachel.

"No," he replied with a blush. "I mean," he went on, "that
I wouldn't say if I had." Everyone looked at him and his colour
deepened.

"Oh, I won't tell Will, Ned!" cried Rachel, reading his
thoughts.

"I wasn't...I wasn't only thinking of him" he blurted out:
and then, with a gallant effort to give the conversation a new
turn, "I was telling the Mayor that he ought to hire a real pan-
tomime clown for his show, and have some mummers like they
did in the old days."

"He wants to keep it all for the local talent, doesn't he?" said
Rachel.

"Those professionals are the best though," went on Athling,
while Tilly fixed a nervous eye upon her husband. "To have a
real professional, of the sort Dan Leno was, bred up in the the-
atre or the circus, and to let him play his part like one of those
old mummers or mountebanks...don't you think," he spoke
hesitatingly, diffidently, brokenly, "don't you think...there
would be something...in that kind of thing? I haven't got
it quite clear...but I seem to see in my mind a sort of Passion
Play--with--" he spoke more eagerly and rapidly now, as he
warmed to the subject, "with a real pantomime clown of the
Leno tradition--improvising wild Rabelaisian 'gags'...like
the Fool in Lear...while Our Lord is before Caiaphas or be-
fore Pilate...don't you think there's something in that? The
Mayor caught my idea, I think--though whether "

Philip restrained himself with creditable self-control under
this imaginative tirade. .He thought in his heart--"This is the
only kind of thing our young England is interested in, and it's
absolutely futile. It's not only futile, it's destructive. A Dan
Leno introduced into a Mystery Play of the Crucifixion--that is
exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to this new genera-
tion! They are never happy until they've given everything--even
Religion--an uncomfortable, ironic, disillusioned twist."

Lady Rachel had been watching her friend with a mixture of
pride and bewilderment. Her nature was too direct to be alto-
gether satisfied by something as bizarre as a modern clown at
the Crucifixion, but she liked to see Mr. Crow nonplussed and
Mr. Dekker confused. Their hostess had to come to the rescue of
her nephew.

"You've put off your spring cleaning, Tilly, I hear?" she said.

Mrs. Philip Crow fidgetted in her seat and looked reproach-
fully at her aunt. To interpolate a matter of such primary im-
portance as spring cleaning into this bagatelle about clowns and
crucifixions seemed to her mind a sort of wilful outrage to the
bed-rock of human seriousness.

"Of course not," Tilly rapped out, "but Philip may have to
take a holiday when this troublesome strike and this tiresome
pageant are settled, and Emma and I have been thinking that the
carpets in the front-rooms had better wait until "

Lady Rachel gave her a quick glance of appreciation. Why,
this little lady, with the beady black eyes, really was like a child
who had got a doll's house to play with! "I wonder," she thought,
"what she'd make of the way the Bellamys manage these things
at Mark's Court?"

Ned Athling had begun to grow very restless. He tried not to
stare reproachfully at Lady Rachel. Miss Crow's enamelled tray,
with its bowl of primroses so carefully interspersed with their
heavy green leaves, was the ritual centre of this group of people.
The Vicar's gold watch-chain, Philip's fawn-coloured tie. and the
gay dresses of the three ladies would have lacked their mirror of
platonic essences had the tray been carried off. Athling tried to
concentrate his attention upon this tray.

"I sometimes think," said Mr. Dekker. "that we don't realise
half enough the influence we all have upon the personality of
our town. Don't you feel, Elizabeth, that Glastonbury has a most
definite personality of its own?"

Ned's timid eyes under their pale eyebrows gleamed at the
clergyman's words but he felt shy of asserting himself again.

"I know a place that's got twice as much of what you call per-
sonality than this town has," remarked Philip.

"Tell us!" cried Rachel. "Tell us, Mr. Crow!"

"Wookey Hole!" he announced emphatically, crossing his legs
in their neat heather-tinted trousers and surveying with satisfac-
tion his unwrinkled brown socks. "Wookey Hole has more real
character in its prehistoric stalactites than all your Ruins."

In the silence that followed this remark Miss Crow, who was
shepherding her little party with as much care as Emma's father
in the Mendips ever guided his flock down to the washing-pool,
took the opportunity of handing to Rachel and Ned a veritable
May-Day nosegay. She noticed Philip turn to the Vicar and ask
him for sympathy about Wookey Hole. She noticed that her new
cat, a big stray tabby that Tossie had christened Tiger, had come
in, as Tossie went out, and had jumped upon Tilly's lap. Tilly
was now absorbed in this cat. She had been watching it ever since
it entered, hoping against hope that she would be the preferred
one in winning its favour, and now this had happened she was in
bliss. So Miss Crow turned to the lovers.

"I want you to take Lady Rachel to Chalice Hill, this after-
noon, Mr. Athling," she said. "There was an antiquary down
here yesterday--not the one who found the Edgar Chapel by
the help of that spirit, but quite a different one--and he un-
earthed a stone up there, somewhere to the west of the hill, so
they tell me, and near Bulwarks Lane, which has completely
puzzled him, You might tell me what your opinion of that stone
is, Mr. Athling. At any rate, I'd like you to see it before you
begin your long drive home. And I want you to have a bite of
supper with us, too, before you start."

Rachel's cheeks flamed with pleasure at this, and Mr. Athling
met his hostess' eyes without blinking and smiled with childish
gratitude.

It was a shame that Tossie had left the room too soon to hear
this. As it was, it had been with a deep sigh for the presence of
her friend that she had returned to the kitchen without the tray.
She could hardly bear to look at the bluebells on the table now,
so greatly did she long to tell their absent donor all about what
was going on in the drawing-room.

"You don't mind my speaking freely to you, Dekker, do you?"
Philip was now saying. "But it really won't do; it simply won't
do for you to mix yourself up, and your position and everything,
with this man Geard. The man's a rascal. That's the long and
short of it. He's an extremely cunning rogue and an arrant char-
latan. He'd like to play the part of a sort of Abbot in this town.
This Pageant of his, or pious circus, or whatever it may be, is
getting to be a nuisance. You were saying, weren't you, Aunt
Elizabeth, that you've been worried by these endless notices from
that little fool, John? Geard must learn that in these days fo be
Mayor of a town like ours means nothing at all. This, and that
money he got from my grandfather, seem to have turned his
head. He's begun to encroach on your domain, Dekker--hasn't
he?--with all these rehearsals that I hear are going on."

Lady Rachel glanced quickly at her young farmer, but it was
impossible to stop him.

"I like Mr. Geard," he said, with a rush of hot blood to his
face. "I think he's done a great deal for Glastonbury. I think this
Pageant will bring a lot of people here." He stopped abruptly
and glanced apologetically at his hostess. "From abroad," he
added, "Germans especially."

Philip glanced at Tilly, but she was oblivious to everything
except the cat on her lap. He then sought to exchange with Mat
Dekker the particular look with which older people condone the
impetuosity of youth.

"The most important thing for any town nowadays," he said
calmly, looking not at Athling but at his aunt, "is to give the
populace constant employment. That is not done by Pageants. Is
it. Aunt Elizabeth?"

"What about the municipal factory. Sir?" threw in young
Athling.

"May I ask if you have seen that concern?" said Philip.

"Seen it? No...Yes...I mean I've been to their new shop in
George Street and bought some...some little things."

"May we hear what things, Mr. Athling?"

"Charming things!" broke in Rachel. "I've got lots of them
in my room upstairs."

"I'm glad you've found something, Lady Rachel, among their
toys, that thrills you so much, but I‘m afraid Mr. Dekker will
agree with me that the men employed in making those toys are
being rapidly unfitted for any properly paid job. They hardly
give 'em enough to live upon. I expect you did not know that,
Mr. Athling."

"They're going to let me design some figures for them, Mr.
Crow," said Rachel irrelevantly.

"Who is?" enquired Philip.

"Mr. Barter," the girl answered.

"Barter!" Philip brought out these two syllables as if he had
been King James referring to Guy Fawkes. "I suppose you've
heard, Dekker, the inside story of that man's leaving me? It had
to do with--" He stopped abruptly remembering that the victim
in the story had just been handing him those rock cakes he
had enjoyed so much. "Well, at all events," he went on, low-
ering his voice a little, out of respect to Lady Rachel if not to
Tossie, "Barter, as we know him, isn't exactly the sort of person
that any concern would be proud of. I've never heard, either, that
he knows very much about the manufacturing of toys. You can't
do these things in that sort of slipshod, amateur, arts-and-crafts
way."

"Why do you say "arts-and-crafts' so disparagingly, Sir?"
threw in Edward Athling.

Elizabeth intervened. "I can explain that" she said. "When
Philip was at Cambridge there was a lot of aesthetic tittle-tattle
going on about that sort of thing. It's all very old-fashioned!
You two children are too young to understand the point."

"I can understand that Mr. Crow, being a manufacturer of
machine-made articles, naturally has a dislike of hand-made
things," said Edward Athling, getting very red.

"Just as a farmer," remarked Philip sternly, "naturally has
a dislike of townspeople getting high wages."

"What about this strike in the Dye-Works then? Isn't that for
better wages?" The young man had scarcely uttered these im-
petuous words than he gave a curious kind of laugh and stretched
out his hand to Philip, touching his sleeve. "Sorry, Sir," he said.
"That was an impertinent thing to say. I'm enough of a farmer
to hate the way we ignoramuses rush into arguments. No doubt
there's a lot to be said for your ideas of industry as something
that gives the people steady employment, rather than just a dra-
matic adventure for the moment."

"But the municipal factory is sure to last, isn't it?" insisted
Rachel, noticing how stiff Philip was in the way he received
Ned's gesture and feeling angry with Ned for making it.

Philip shrugged his shoulders in silence. "What I feel in all
this," said Mat Dekker, "is that Glastonbury needs both its
scientific manufacturer and its dramatic Mayor." Mat Dekker was
so happy at this moment, being at once pampered by his ancient
love and jealously pleased that his son was separated from Zoy-
land's wife, that he uttered this peaceful remark with a certain
careless unction, without thinking very much what he was saying.

Lady Rachel looked at him with flashing eyes. That smug
antithesis--"its scientific manufacturer and dramatic Mayor"--
filled her with contempt.

Simple earthy natures like Mat Dekker, especially when they
have, by luck, found themselves in a social position which
cannot easily be menaced, frequently allow themselves to be
dominated by their physical moods. When Mr. Dekker on this
occasion threw out that smug remark about "scientific manu-
facturers and dramatic Mayors" it was in reality no more than
if he had said--"It is May Day. I enjoy rock cakes. I am glad
that my unaccountable desire for Nell Zoyland has been quieted
by Sam's separation from her. I like being petted once more by
dear old Elizabeth. It's nice here, now that she has shut the
sun out." Nothing that was being talked about just then touched
--for Mat Dekker--the real essential things in life. He did not.
in his heart of hearts, think that it mattered very greatly to Glas-
tonbury, or to any immortal soul in Glastonbury, whether it were
Mr. Crow or Mr. Geard who was cock of the dung-hill! And since
this was the case, it was easy for him, treating Philip as he
would have treated a greedy minnow in his aquarium, to give the
man a soothing sop with the surface of his mind, and push the
whole thing away from him as unimportant. But how was Lady
Rachel, trembling with eager excitement in the presence of her
first love and full of the intense partisanship of youth, to be tol-
erant of a hard-working priest's mental indolence? All that
afternoon, as she had surveyed this big red-faced personage
drinking so much tea and letting himself be waited upon by a
gentle, elderly lady, she had suspected him of being a repulsive
time-server and now she knew him for just that.

But Miss Elizabeth Crow was not one to be baffled by any
clash of temperament among her guests or by anything as neg-
ligible as a flash of anger on the part of the excitable little
daughter of Lord P. By the time her elder guests had departed
she had beguiled them all into good temper. Indeed, both the
young people were found making Tilly laugh with girlish delight
by their antics with Tiger in the sunny doorway, when Elizabeth
had finished saying good-bye to her other guests.

When Rachel and Ned Athling had reached the top of Chalice
Hill they spent a happy quarter of an hour hunting about for
that stone of which they had been told. At last, not greatly wor-
ried because they had not yet found it, they sat down together
on a fallen log with the greenest of new-grown ferns and bracken
at their feet and a sweet-smelling gorse bush behind them.

"Do you believe it was really here," said Rachel, "that Merlin
disappeared with the Grail?"

Ned did not reply for a second or two. Then he burst out irrel-
evantly--"You're like an Exmoor pony, Rachel, that's what
you're like."

"He wasn't a Christian,--was he, Ned? Merlin I mean. What
was the Grail to him ? That's what I can't imagine."

"Rachel!"

"Yes, Ned."

"Did you have a fear when you were little that you'd never
meet anyone as exciting as the people in books?"

"Oh, Ned, how curious! How like we are! That's just what
I always felt." She picked a cowslip within reach of her arm and
gave it to him. He smelt at it and held it tight between his finger
and thumb, waiting to hide it away in his pocket as soon as her
attention wandered.

"May I ask you something, Ned?" was her next speech.

"If it's not about poetry, Rachel. Since I've known you I've
been changing my ideas about what poetry is and it's got all
confused."

"No, it's nothing about poetry, it's--"

"Well, what is it, Rachel?"

"It's about people, one's own people. Don't you sometimes
feel as if you were a changeling? Don't you sometimes feel that
when your own people are talking and telling you this and that
--quite ordinary things--that you're all the time living in a
different world? I don't mean exactly a different place. The same
place, only seen in quite a different way?"

"It's in that different way I've seen everything, Rachel, since
I've known you. My horses, my cattle, my sheep, aren't the same
creatures that they used to be. Of course those fields, down our
way at Middlezoy, look the same as they always did but they
look more the same, if you know what I mean. I mean I never
knew before how different they are from all other fields and how
much like themselves!"

"Could you ever endure to live anywhere else, Ned, than at
Middlezoy?"

"I used to think I couldn't; but now--" he paused and
plucked at the fern-like leaves of an incipient yarrow, "I believe
I could live almost anywhere if I were absolutely sure of one
thing."

She refrained from pressing him as to what that "one thing"
was.

"I suppose you've sunk your soul into those fields at
Middlezoy!"

"Well, even if I have, I could pull my soul out again, couldn't
I, like anyone might pull out a deep thorn?"

"I didn't want you to say you could. I wanted you to say you
couldn't."

The log they were seated upon was not large enough for any
space to exist between them. At those moments in the conversa-
tion when one or other of them would naturally have indicated
a psychic misunderstanding by a physical withdrawal, all they
could do was to move their knees or their feet a trifle further
away from those of the other. The girl shifted her legs a little
now and in this slight movement the profile of her cheek was
turned. Ned snatched the opportunity and slipped the cowslip
into his waistcoat pocket.

The magic of that moment, the scent of the primroses and the
damp moss, the tremulous ecstasy of the birds and insects, the
unusual greenness that washed up against their feet like a wave
of the primal sap of creation, covered them now as a couple of
early violets might be covered, by lush transparent overgrowths
that guard and enhance their poignant breath.

"If you and I were ever, by any chance, to marry, Ned,
should we live at Middlezoy?"

"Would you marry me, Rachel?"

"I might, Ned. But you mustn't take this as a promise! Be-
sides, what am I saying? I am acting as forwardly as Juliet did!
But we must see each other a lot more, lots and lots more, before
we can know for certain that we dare do it."

Edward Athling sighed deeply, a profound sadness took the
place of the excitement he had just felt. The way she'd spoken--
though anything but frivolous--had not been exactly the kind of
ambrosial food that a lover demands.

"Don't get glum, Ned. Let's pretend! Would we live at
Middlezoy?"

"What do you mean?" he asked. "With my parents?"

She didn't like to tell him--for fear of hurting his feelings--
that that had not been her dream. Her dream included a thatched
cottage at Middlezoy down close by one of those great rhynes
where the otters were found.

But she now plunged boldly on--"With them for a while,
Ned, perhaps, till we had money enough to have a farm of our
own."

A farm of their own! This phrase of hers was so delicious, so
filled with a floating incense of enchantment, that for a second he
dallied with it as if it were serious.

But it was not serious; none of it was serious! He had against
him before he could marry the daughter of the great Wessex
nobleman such a solid weight of conventional obstacles that it
seemed madness to think about it. Noblemen's daughters had
married commoners before now, but not often--and as far as all
accounts went--never a Zoyland! He wasn't an adventurer, he
wasn't a rascally pilgarlic like one of those lean rogues lam-
basted in Rabelais who set their scurvy wits to deface, deflower,
debauch and abduct, some, sweet-blooded noble wench of an
ancient breed.

"It would only be for a time," she began again, "that I'd have
to live with your people. We should soon be able to find a place,
somewhere near Middlezoy anyhow, with a few acres that would
suit us."

"Oh, please stop, Rachel! Please stop!" His voice was really
tormented and the girl looked at him in astonishment. "You
simply don't know what you're talking about," he went on ir-
ritably. "It's impossible to imagine--for one second--your living
with my parents; impossible, I tell you; impossible!"

"I don't understand you," she said. "Oh, well! Anyhow we
haven't to consider it just yet. We'll have many a lovely time to-
gether, Ned--before we have to consider it. So don't look so
sad!" But she herself sighed long and deep, as she looked across
at Glastonbury Tor.

Ned moved now. He had been vaguely conscious for several
minutes that every time he leaned back his shoulders encoun-
tered the prickles of the gorse bush under which lay their log. It
occurred to him that his companion, whose clothes were thinner
than his, might be suffering from these gorse prickles. He twisted
his head round, yes! they must be pricking her shoulders! He
jumped up and pulled her to her feet with him.

"Too near the gorse," he murmured. He had only grasped her
arm, but his touch sent an electric vibration through her, a quiv-
ering like that which sometimes seizes upon one single tree-twig
when everything else is still.

"I wonder how long its been lying there," she said, 'it's
very old."

Both the young people gazed down at their recent seat. The
log was certainly very old. Neither of them could tell what sort
of a tree it had once been, or even if it had once grown near
where it lay. It was covered with dark moss and grey lichen, and
at one end of it was a cluster of little yellowish toadstools.

"It may have been here hundreds of years," she whispered. A
rush of thoughts, vague and indistinct, but full of a curious
pleasure, floated through her mind. How many people, old and
young, must have passed this way and glanced at that old log--
long before she was born! A sense of the wistful and terrible
beauty of life took possession of her--especially of life lived
long and quietly in one place.

"I'd like to grow slowly old, day by day, very gradually, older
and older," she said.

Ned looked at her with his forehead gathered in great puckers.
She looked incredibly childish in her long straight dress and
black straw hat.

"I suppose you never know' what you mightn't find buried on
this hill," he said. "I am glad the Mayor's going to buy the
house where the red spring is and build an arch. He talked a lot
to me, when you were gone last time, about an arch. He's got into
his head that a Saxon arch would be the thing, but someone, the
Vicar I think, had told him there weren't such things as Saxon
arches."

"I hate that Vicar," said the girl fiercely.

"Oh, come now, Rachel! He's not a bad old codger. He told
me, as we were going out of the house, that he collected
butterflies."

"Just what he would do!" cried Lady Rachel. "Think of kill-
ing a thing like that!" And she pointed to a somnolent Meadow
Brown that was fluttering over the green bracken.

"I used to collect butterflies when I was young," said Athling
gravely.

"All the more shame to you!" She longed to scold him, to
agitate him, to make him feel troubled in his mind. Not neces-
sarily about butterflies--about anything! The sun, slanting now
from the west, was drawing out every kind of fragrance from
that hill-slope, but the wandering airs that stirred the curls
under her hat were full of the scent of primroses and moss. Bees
kept flying by them; and every now and then a great blue-bottle
fly drummed past their ears, with that peculiar come-and-gone
quiver of tiny wings that holds a whole summer in its sound.

"I sometimes feel," he said, with an evident struggle in his
mind to tell her something that was hard to express, "that it's
a weakness of mine to go on writing poetry about what I enjoy
and what is so easy to describe. New forms are coming into art,
drawn from inventions and machinery,--well! you know more
about that than I do, having been to Paris and so on--and drawn
too, anyone can see, from the life of people in masses, working
people in masses; and I sometimes feel as if there were something
babyish in going on with the old country themes, with the old
love and death themes, when the other arts are following the
new way."

He had given her her opportunity! With burning cheeks and
gesticulating hands, she freely attacked him now, all the stirrings
of her love transferred to her argument.

"It's pure snobbishness, what you're talking about," she cried.
"You say to yourself, 'I must be modern,' when you ought only
to say, 'I want to find out how to express what I feel.'"

He looked at her gravely. "But isn't it important to keep in
touch with the World-Spirit? I feel somehow, Rachel, as if all
these Grail stories, all this mediaeval mysticism, had grown tire-
some and antiquated."

"You'd better ask Philip Crow to give you a ride in his air-
plane!" Her voice was quivering. Had she come down here from
listening to all this talk in London only to find her Ned repeat-
ing it?

"You'd better go over to Wookey Hole and see the remarkable
electricity they've installed there. And if you're interested in ma-
chines there are some fine up-to-date ones in Crow's Dye-Works!
You'd better go to Philip Crow and tell him how impressed you
are by his great industrial undertaking!"

"What has made you so angry with me, Lady Rachel? What
have I done? It was since I've known you that I've erown dis-
satisfied with my poetry, so full of all the old tags: it's since I've
known you that I've wanted to make it more original, more
subtle, more in line with our times!"

Her face was a picture to see, as she struggled with her con-
tending feelings.

"I don't want you to alter at all; not in anything!" she cried.

"I wish you hadn't made me talk about my poetry," he said.
"I had a feeling it would annoy you."

"It hasn't annoyed me! Only standing on this hill where Mer-
lin was and everything--I feel as if you were taking the wrong
turn. You spoke up so splendidly for Mr. Geard just now in that
house and now you seem to be taking the other side."

"What's poetry got to do with taking sides? Poetry is an art."

"Oh, don't use that word, Ned! If you'd heard what I've
heard--the talk--the affectations--the boredom "

"But isn't it an art?"

Her reply was almost screamed at him.

"No! It isnt! It's Poetry. Poetry's something entirely different.
Oh, I know I'm right, Ned! If you go and get hold of this hor-
rible modern idea that poetry is an art, I don't know what "

She stopped and clasped her hands behind her back.

"Well, anyway, Lady Rachel," he said, "it has nothing to do
with this Glastonbury quarrel between Geard and Crow T ."

"It has . It has everything to do with it! Can't you feel, Ned,
as we stand here that this place is magical? What's Poetry if it
isn't something that has to fight for the unseen against the seen,
for the dead against the living, for the mysterious against the
obvious? Poetry always takes sides. It's the only Lost Cause we've
got left! It fights for the...for the...for the Impossible!"

Young Athling answered in a mumbling, muttering voice. He
stooped down and picking up a bent stick that lay on the grass,
flicked his boots with it. "It was meeting you that started me
thinking of these things; and now you go and ride over me. I
tell you, Lady Rachel "

"Don't be silly. Call me Rachel!"

"I tell you," he went on, "I want my poetry to be a new, living
original thing. I want it to deal with machinery and inventions!
It's all very well"--he kept flicking his ankles harder and harder
with the stick he had picked up--"to go on writing about Middle-
zoy hedges and ditches and Sedgemoor tombstones, but I want
my writing to flow forward, where life is flowing."

The girl's face grew stern and very sad. Not realising what he
was doing to her, young Athling had outraged something in her
that was almost as deep as her love for him, that was indeed
mingled with her love for him, and was one of the causes of it.

"Ned, listen to me," she said. "I've heard all about this quar-
rel between Mr. Geard and Mr. Crow. It's been mounting up and
mounting up till it's become, like the Montagus and Capulets,
something you can't escape from. If you and I are to go on
seeing each other we must agree about this. It's...it's dan-
gerous not to agree about it." She uttered these last words in a
low solemn tone.

Ned Athling looked at her in bewildered astonishment. To his
mind it was simply unbelievable that she should take seriously--
even to the point of quarreling with him--these ridiculous local
politics of Glastonbury. He did not realise how deep in her
inherited Zoyland blood the passion for causes and statecraft and
for all the transactions in what is called History went. He sud-
denly felt that it was incumbent upon him, at all costs, to change
their topic of discourse. She herself had called it "dangerous"
and it evidently was dangerous. He looked down at their log. It
was not only invaded by the gorse prickles, but it was now cov-
ered by the shadow of the gorse bush.

"Do you say I could lift that log," he said, "or do you say
I couldn't?"

"I say you mustn't, because it's been there so long, Ned, and
has all those funguses on it!" But she now gave him the first
smile he had had since they got up from their seat on that log.
He threw away the stick he had picked up and his cap after it.
He bent down and handled the log, tugging at it first in one
direction and then in the other. It only moved a few inches. It
was deeply buried in the grass and hundreds of infinitesimal
weeds grew at its sides. He knelt down, the better to get pur-
chase, and lugged at it. It moved a few inches and then fell back
into its bed of a hundred years.

"You can't, Ned! It's silly to try to do something that you
can't do. Let the old thing alone, please, Ned...please...I ask
you to!"

But he did not heed her. He now straddled across the log and,
bending low down, his feet planted deep upon the grass he
folded his hands under one end of the thing, slipping his fingers
carefully through the weeds so as not to disturb the toadstools,
scratching his knuckles on various little roots, but at last getting
a really strong hold upon it.

The girl was watching him now with rivetted attention. Her
hands hanging loose at her sides, began plucking nervously at
her belt, and with one of her feet she tapped at the ground. Ath-
ling possessed the muscles of a farm-labourer. All his life, since
he had revolted at leaving home and had only gone to a dame's
school in a neighbouring village, he had done heavy manual
labour; but he now tugged and strained at this wayward enter-
prise to no avail. All he could do was just to tilt up the end of
the log about half an inch. But he had not yet made full use of
his shoulders or of the muscles of his flanks. Drawing a deep
breath and balancing his feet firmly on each side of the log he
grappled with it again. It began to move. It moved. No! Settling
itself down again with a weight of gravitation that seemed ab-
normal, and as it were intentional, the log slipped from his
hands and subsiding into its former position lay there inert,
motionless, triumphant. He had failed.

"Don't 'ee mind, Ned." cried the girl, coming towards him
and touching his shoulder with her bare hand. That touch was,
as it were, the sweet accolade of the defeated! It was the first
time in their experience of each other that she had made such
a gesture, and at a good moment did she make it now.

"Avanti!" she said, "we must hunt for that stone! Soon we
shall be late for Miss Crow's supper."

Not a word did he speak as he walked by her side across the
hill. Humiliation gnawed at his midriff like a rat at a thick
sweet-smelling board in an old barn.

She was nice about it. She had said, "Don't 'ee mind, Ned"--
and had touched him with her hand; but it was not her pity
he wanted; he wanted her admiration; he wanted her respect;
he wanted her hero-worship.

"It'll be a shame to keep Tossie waiting," she said suddenly.
"But listen; if we didn't bother about the stone any more we
could go round by the Two Oaks. Tliere'll be plenty of time, if
we go hack by Bove Town and straight down High Street. Oh,
let's do that, Ned."

At this point, while several invisible blackbirds were answer-
ing one another from the purple dislance, Lady Rachel offered
the boy her hand.

"Let's run down," she whispered.

Athling proved to be more skilful in guiding a girl past mole-
hills and rabbit-holes, as they stumbled down that uneven
slope, than he had been at lifting logs for her sake. Their speed
gathered and gathered till they were racing with dangerous ra-
pidity through bracken and bent, past thorn bushes and gorse
thickets, over elm stumps, under red-barked Scotch firs, by little
clumps of elder, mingled with holly. He guided her so well that
they reached the bottom without mishap.

"Let's go to the Oaks before we hit the road," she whispered,
slipping her warm ungloved hand out of his and shaking the
seeds and straws from her skirt.

He would have gone further than to the Oaks "before they
hit the road" if it meant the prolonging of their day. That hold-
ing her hand had given him such oblivious satisfaction that all
he wanted now was to remain at her side and forget both grass-
grown logs and Ambrosianus Merlinus.

"Oh, there are people there!" cried Rachel, "what a pity!
Well, we'll go straight to the road now and get home. We should
probably have made ourselves late if we'd gone down there."

The "people" Lady Rachel had seen were, as a matter of fact,
none other than Sam and Nell.

Will Zoyland had been warned of a crowd of sightseers ex-
pected at Wookey on this May Day, though it was no official
holiday, so he had written to Nell putting off a visit home which
he had proposed to make. Nell had promptly communicated
with Sam and they had arranged a meeting at this spot. Nell
had only just this moment arrived. Had Athling and Rachel
scrambled down the hill five minutes sooner they would have
found only Sam there.

"Dear Sam, oh, my dear Sam," the girl was saying now. "I had
to see you again because I must have given you a wrong impres-
sion when I came over yesterday. I didn't mean to worry you,
Sam, or cling to you when you don't want me, but when you ve
given a person a wrong impression you feel you have to do
something. I couldn't sleep last night with thinking what I'd
said. It was wrong of me to get so angry and to say all those wild
things. I didn't really mean what I said, you know, Sam. A per-
son can say things like that without really meaning them."

Sam took her hand and lifting it to his mouth, kissed it long
and hungrily. He had made a rule for himself that he mustn't
kiss her on the lips. "I was thinking about you all last night,
Nell," he said, "I couldn't sleep till dawn. There's a great deal
I want to tell you about."

"Were you really thinking of me, Sam? Oh, Sam," and a look
of wild hope came into her eyes, "were you thinking that per-
haps--"

"Let's find some place to sit down," he said- "There's a cow-
shed back there, half full of hay. I noticed it as I came along.
Let's go and sit in there for a bit. I mustn't smoke there--that's
the only thing--but that doesn't matter."

The look of hope that had come into Nell's face vanished.
There was nothing in his tone to suggest any change of purpose.
But she let him lead her along the lane. He led her in the op-
posite direction from that Wick Wood where Jackie and his
band had picked the bluebells and into which she had herself
gazed this afternoon as she skirted it in her walk to this spot.

He led her to a gap in the hedge through which it was pos-
sible to reach a large field that was lying fallow. Across this
field he led her, their shadows making long monumental out-
lines that were scarcely human as the rays of the sinking sun
fell on their backs. These two vast shadows moved in front and
Nell and Sam followed behind. It was a silent procession in that
isolated field full of so much old corn stubble and so many
small green weeds; for the two inhuman shadows spoke not nor
made any sign and the two solid figures behind them were also
silent. The shadows were, however, luckier than the figures, for
they had the power of overlapping with each other and merging
and mixing with each other, so that they frequently lost them-
selves in each other. This desirable power was denied the human
figures who now followed after them, silent, solemn and tragic,--
two Solids following two Shadows across the dead stubble and
the green weeds.

Nell felt a spasm of bitter sadness as she watched these elon-
gated shadows intermingling in front of them and then separat-
ing again and growing distinct. All over this part of the country,
she thought, there are shadows accompanying people, some of
them in front, some of them behind. And their appearance is the
same whatever is going on in the hearts of the figures that throw
them. People going to be executed, people going to deathbeds,
people going to bury their dead--their shadows look the same.
Shadows, thought Nell, have no hearts. Shadows are like men
who have decided to follow Christ and to leave their loves and
their loves' children!

He led her into that cowshed which he knew of. Yes! it was,
as he had said, half full of last year's hay. He made her sit down
on a heap of loose hay with her back to more hay tied in bun-
dles, and he himself sat down by her side. They remained silent
for a minute or two, and then, with an instinct to put off their
serious talk, he began telling her of various occurrences in town.
He told her that there were rumours that Philip Crow was trying
to obtain some legal injunction to stop Mr. Geard's Midsummer
Pageant. He told her that there had been a fierce quarrel at the
new Municipal Factory between Mr. Barter and some of the
Communists, led by Red Robinson.

Nell's heart sank lower and lower as she listened to him. "How
can he? Oh, how can he?" she thought. "He isn't a cruel man--
he isn't doing it to hurt me. How can he take me into this place
and then talk like this?"

The field they had crossed, with the wide horizon behind it,
and with Brent Knoll rising in the distance out of the northwest,
was framed in the oblong doorway of the shed. The framing
turned the scene they now looked upon into a curious "work of
art," isolating it from the rest of Nature, and giving it a sym-
bolic significance. The sun was now almost gone. It had become
a red, globular excrescence on the horizon. It resembled a Glas-
tonbury Tor from which St. Michael's Tower had been cut by
some celestial sword-stroke, soaking the hill with blood redder
than human blood. Slowly this bleeding convexity sank down
over the edge of the horizon. Apparently it sank into Bridge-
water Bay, into the Bristol Channel, into that South Wales from
which came Mr. Evans, Mrs. Geard, and the "foreign" stones of
Stonehenge; but at any rate it no longer occupied the central
position in that arbitrary picture produced by the door-frame of
the cowshed. Brent Knoll, however, still remained--remained
till the twilight mists arose out of the watery flats of Weston-
super-mare and hid it, and the horizon with it, from the eyes of
Nell and Sam.

"Sam, I must talk to you about it; I must; I have to. Sam,
you can't really mean to go on with your life in Glastonbury as
if we had never met--as if we didn't belong to each other--as if
we hadn't got...now...a new life...to think about, to consider, to--"

"Dearest, listen--listen to me!" he interrupted. "I've been
thinking all the time...all last night I was thinking...till
I couldn't think any more...of some way...of something
I could do...of something we both could do. I know I can't
make you feel, as I feel it, this--this struggle of mine...but
I've come to see...in the last few days...that I've shirked
something...in us...in our feeling for each other...in the child."

It was already too obscure in that shed, as they faced a long
jagged blood-line in the west fading slowly out, the last of the
May-Day journey-prints of the sun, for him to see the faint
flickering up of a tantalised hope that these words of his sum-
moned into her face.

"I must confess to you something, Nell, though it's to my
shame. Penny Pitches, our servant, my old nurse and foster-
mother, followed me up to my bedroom last night and talked
about you."

He had the wit to feel that Nell winced at this and he hur-
riedly added--"You mustn't mind, dearest. I'm only telling you
this because I want you to know the very worst of me. It's a
penance to me to speak of it. But I can't bear--"

"Sam!" She was sitting very straight up now by his side. He
could not see her face but he felt the indignant tension of her
nerves. "Sam, it's like this. I can put up with what you do to me,
and make me bear, when you do it from your own self. But to
have to listen--no! you must hear me out!--to have to listen to
what other women think, of the way you're treating me, it's too
much!"

"Little Nell"--he spoke with a vibrancy in his voice that was
new to her in him and that awed her a little--"I've come to see
that there is something queer about me...that I didn't realise.
I've come to see that I have thought only of my own feelings and
have been stupid and blind to yours. I've come to see that in the
whole thing there's been a lack in me...I don't know how to say it
...a lack of power to see things, as they appear--as they are--to
others...to you. As I lay thinking about it all last night--after Pen-
ny had gone away--I felt as if I could see myself as I never have
done before. My cowardice...my weakness...seemed to--I don't
know how to put it!--seemed to take an actual shape in the dark-
ness! I shall never forget it. The darkness glittered all about me.
It was phosphorescent. Spurts and splashes of light, shootings and
jetlings of light and there I was in the middle of it...like a great
black slug. It wasn't a nightmare, for I was absolutely wide-awake;
I wasn't even sleepy. But I suddenly knew, when I felt myself to
be that black slug, that I was grosser than other human beings. I
knew that I had a dead nerve...an atrophied nerve...in me...where
certain feelings ought to be."

He stretched himself out by her side and shifted into a more
comfortable position. He mechanically took a packet of cigarettes
from his pocket, fumbled with them, remembered that he mustn't
smoke, and put them back again.

"I mean by a dead nerve that there are feelings in human
beings which save them from acting in a certain way and from
doing certain things...and that this nerve has never been
touched in me. I knew when I became that slug in the middle of
those phosphorescent lights that in the way I'd acted to you I'd
behaved blindly, monstrously--without using that nerve!"

He could not have realised how intently her eyes were fixed
on him. He could not have realised how her mouth was drawn
down and hanging open; how her lower lip was pulled awry,
just as if it were imitating in unconscious sympathy the way his
own face worked!

But he went on as if she had been some exterior conscience
that he was talking to, some conscience to whom he had to con-
fess everything, everything! "It gave me a sudden shock of fear,
of ghastly fear, when I realised that I lacked that human nerve
which everyone else has. I was afraid of myself, Nell. It was as
if I had put my hand to my back and suddenly found that I was
growing a tail! It was as if I had looked into the looking-glass,
and seen, not my own face, but the face of a beast. I felt alone
and set apart, as if I were a pariah, a leper, a half-man."

"Oh, Sam, my dear love, my poor, sweet Sam, come back to
me and let me love you again!"

Any onlooker at this scene catching the emotion in her voice
would have supposed that he would turn to her now and press
her to his heart. He did not do anything of the kind--he went on
talking, but he laid his hand on her wrist as it rested in the hay
and gripped it tight.

"I loathed myself when I saw how blind I'd been about it all
....about you and about our child... and everything. I tried
to think out what kind of a lack it is in me that makes me
so that I can't go straight off with you and leave Glastonbury.
For I can't do it, my sweet! I thought of doing it last night just
before dawn, hours after Penny had gone away. I thought of
making Father give me money, and taking the train with you to
London. I imagined us getting into the train. I could even see
how that little shanty would look, as the train pulled out, where
John Crow works! But when I thought of it I knew--all in a
moment--that I couldn't do it. I grew cold and paralysed, like
in dreams, when I took the first step...but I want to tell you
this, Nell,"--his voice dropped to a solemn whisper--"when I
thought of us getting into the train I thought of us as three. So
you see, though I haven't got that ‘nerve' I've got something. Oh,
Nell, fve been so unhappy these last days! I don't know why
I tell you. What's the use of telling you--you who have to bear
it all? But I've been more unhappy than I thought I could be.
I've been torn in two between you and Christ and it's made me
very unhappy. I knew I'd have to bear a lot for Him, if I let
Him take me, but I never thought it would be anything like this."

"My poor, sweet Sam, come back to me!" the girl whispered,
cuddling close up to him in the hay and clinging to his elbow.

"I can't, Nell," he groaned, "I can't. Christ has got me by
the throat, by the hair of my head. If you made me come to you
tonight He would pull me back to Him. I can't escape from
Him! He's going to hold me tighter and tighter all my life."
Sam shuddered as he uttered these words. With the warmth of
her body against his as they lay side by side in the soft hay, his
nature was so stirred within him that a blasphemous fury seized
him with the Being who was causing him and his love so much
suffering.

"No! He's got me, my darling, my sweet, my only love. He's
got me and there's no help for it."

"Sam, stop! I can't let you talk like this! It's the Devil you're
talking about, not Christ! Christ would never want to separate
people who love each other as we do."

Sam tore himself from her embrace and scrambled up upon
his feet. She saw him outlined dark against the doorway. His fig-
ure seemed to contort and to twist, as with frightened eyes she
stared at him. "Never want to separate us! You don't know Him,
Nell. He's a lover, I tell you--a lover...a lover!" He almost
shouted these words at her as she lay there on the ground. Then
he swung round and stood in the doorway.

The evening of this perfect May Day was of a loveliness com-
parable with the hours that had preceded it. In certain subtle re-
spects it was even more beautiful, just as in certain ways sleep
is more beautiful than waking and death than life. But into the
loveliness of this evening Sam Dekker poured the bitterness of
his heart. He beat his hands on his head and then stretched out
his arms with his fists clenched.

"A lover...that's what you are,...a lover...a cruel lover!" Nell was
not a particularly nervous girl. She took Sam's excitement for a
sort of religious madness--as it very likely may have been--
but she felt vibrant concern for him. In fact, she forgot for the
moment the brutality of his desertion of her in her anxiety for
him. He could not have selected a better psychological trick in
order to make his treatment of her tolerable, and it may well be
--such is the labyrinthine subtlety of the human mind--that
mingled with the genuine anguish of his frustrated passion there
was a thin thread of awareness in him that to simulate more than
he actually felt was the best way of distracting her from her own
suffering.

Beyond the dark figure of her equivocal lover, leaning sullenly
now against one of the doorposts of their shed, she caught sight
of the evening star. This luminous planet hung low above the
place where the sun had sunk; and as when her love was first
menaced by Zoyland's outburst, on the evening when father and
son had come to Whitelake, this planet had cast its spell upon
her, so now once more this great Being, the one which, after the
Sun and the Moon, holds the highest place among the heavenly
bodies, dominated her troubled consciousness and held her at-
tention; until she was aware of a sort of comfort coming from its
beauty as it floated there in that greenish-coloured ocean of space.
But although she knew it not, and in all likelihood, the great
planet knew it not, there flowed forth from that swimmer in that
far-off greenish sea a magical influence which soothed the girl
as soon as it touched her, and brought her a faint return of hope.
After the Sun and the Moon, but a long way before the other
lords of the sky, whether planets or constellations, this great
luminary, either as Evening Star or as Morning Star, has gath-
ered to itself the worship of the generations. Feeling its power
upon her now, though not knowing what it was she was feeling,
Nell got up from her hay couch, brushed her clothes mechani-
cally and came over to where Sam was. There they stood together
staring at the dying glow in that greenish sky and at the increas-
ing size and brilliance of that solitary star.

She put her hand on his shoulder and he let it remain there.
The evening itself gathered them into its own universal and pri-
mordial sadness--the sadness of all lost chances and lost causes
since history began. Under the power of that moment, of the
slow dying of that unequalled day, these two and their child
within her did indeed become a conscious three as he had imag-
ined. But the third was more than a child. The liquid immensity
of that hushed twilight enlarged that little embryonic identity
into something over-shadowing and mysterious, something that
became the premonitory presence of that unknown future which
was before them both. On its soft muffled wings this embodiment
of their fate flew across their vision, its silent flight pressing down
still more, like the fall of a handful of feathers from the brooding
breast of the night itself, the lowered pulse of the earth's huge
swing into darkness.

There came over Nell's mind the slow, faint intimation that
it would be useless to struggle any more to bind Sam to her side.
As she leaned against his shoulder now in her tragic acquies-
cence she felt that this was the moment in her life when she must
gather her forces together and accept her destiny, struggle no
more against it but adjust herself to it as best she might. Always
would she love this strange man by her side, so much older in
his troubled thoughts than he was in inexperienced years. But
her love must accept the hint of this largely expanded, fragrant
twilight, darkening slowly, tenderly, solemnly before her eyes,
smelling vaguely of primroses and moss.

"Sam!” she whispered softly.

He turned his discomforted face towards her, and she seemed
in that obscure light to detect upon it a pitiful appeal to her
that she should have mercy upon him and not drive him to des-
peration; not compel him to struggle to do what it was beyond
his nature to do.

"Sam,” she repeated. "You shall do exactly what you want.
Oh, my darling, oh, my poor Sam! It's more than I can bear to
see you so troubled. Our love has been very sweet to me,”--her
voice trembled a little but it did not break--"but it must accept
what has come to it; and so it shall be. You have changed my
life. In my heart I shall be always yours and never anyone
else's.”

He made no answer but she heard him swallow down a queer
sort of half-animal sob.



OMENS AND ORACLES



Mat Dekker was right when he said that a town which
has had so long an historic continuity as Glastonbury acquires
a personality of its own. And just as in human organisms there
are slowly developed changes, sometimes maladies, sometimes
regenerations, which take place under the surface and then at a
crisis burst out into prominence, so does it happen with any
community as old and intricate as this one. Individual agencies
help to bring about these upheavals, but the preparation for
them is a long, silent, hidden growth, subject quite as much to
the influence of non-human forces as to the will of humanity.

Old Dr. Fell and his sister Barbara were to dine at Abbey
House one day early in June--to be exact on June the Second--
and when this day came there was the usual fuss and stir all
over the rambling, untidy dwelling where for some fifty years
the brother and sister had lived at the corner of Northload Street
and Manor House Road. Though the Fells had lived here so
long it was notorious that their successive batches of maids only
stayed with them for very limited periods, such was the can-
tankerous and testy disposition of Miss Barbara Fell. Thus when
any day arrived for a real dining out, and this came only some
half a dozen times a year, the Doctor's best dress-tie and Miss
Barbara's best piece of black lace, and sometimes even her tiger-
claw brooch set in opals, were apt to be in the wrong drawer or
in the wrong chest of drawers. Dr. Fell took the precaution on
this occasion of being dressed a complete hour before it was
necessary. He had learned by bitter experience that it was ad-
visable that the dressing difficulties of the two of them should
not occur simultaneously! Dr. Fell in this crafty manner took
upon himself to outwit the malevolence of Hobbididance, the
Demon of curst households. And so now he sat In his receiving
room awaiting the forward-glide of events and reading the
Enchiridion of Epictetus. Dr. Fell was not unaware that he lived
in a town which had a very ancient Christian Church. He had
indeed only to ascend the eastern slope of Wirral Hill to dis-
cover, set up by the Town Council, when Wollop's predecessor
was Mayor, a handsomely inscribed marble slab upon which was
recorded the fact that, thirty-one years after the Death of our
Saviour, Joseph of Arimathea brought His Blood to this spot.
Dr. Fell was also in a position to discover in the guide-books the
fact that not only was the church in his town the oldest church,
Orbis Terr arum, in the whole earth, but that this fact had been
sustained against rival churches at the Council of Pisa in 1409,
at the Council of Constance in 1417, at the Council of Siena in
1424, and at the Council of Basle in 1434, establishing beyond
refutation that Glastonbury possessed a church that had been
founded statim post passionem Christi--"immediately after the
Passion of Christ." Nevertheless although he denied not that he
lived in a town where perhaps an altar still existed that had
been used in the original wattle-edifice, built by one who had
touched the flesh of the Man-God, Dr. Fell was not a Christian.
He was, on the contrary, a Stoic, and when he was not reading
for the thousandth time the sturdy logoi of the stoical slave, he
was reading for the hundredth time the wistful meditations of the
stoical Emperor.

"Manny! Manny!" It was Barbara's voice ringing through the
house. He was Manny. His name was really Charles Montagu.
Manny had been a nursery nickname, and since it reduced his
dignity more completely than anything else his sister was never
tired of using it. He wearily got up and opened the door. "Tell
Rosie I want her, Manny!" He made three or four steps to the
stairs that went down to the basement where the kitchen was and
opened the door. "Rosie!" he called. "Yes, Doctor!" "Your mis-
tress wants you."

Back he came to his study, and again sat down. This time he
closed the Enchiridion and flung it on his desk. Once more in
that warm dusty June sunshine his head sank down over his
knees; and he thought how his sisler had managed to spoil the
whole of his life. He thought to himself--"What on earth have
I lived for all these years? I've not really enjoyed myself, I
suppose, on an average, for more than a single hour every day.
An hour a day! I wonder how much more than that most people
in Glastonbury get, when you add up their pleasant moments?
I can't believe I'd hold back from those morphia tablets for an
hour a day! No! It's the hope that keeps me going on. just going
on; for that's all it is. It's the hope." By what he always thought
of in his mind as "the hope" the Doctor meant nothing less than
the death of his sister Barbara.

"Manny! Manny!" Out of his chair he sprang again and out
of his study he flew. Once in the passage he waited for a second,
praying that she was only having a row with Rosie, and that this
calling for him was a strategic move in a feminine battle.
"Manny!"

"Yes, Barbara?"

"Oh, don't say 'yes' in that tone"--she was leaning over the
bannisters--"Come up, quick! Come here, come here! You must
hook me up. Rosie is too helpless for anything!"

Dr. Fell sighed heavily and began mounting the stairs. Weari-
ness and a great disgust for life weighed upon him. He followed
Barbara into her bedroom, even to cross the threshold of which
was a purgatorial punishment to him; and as he hooked her up
his loathing for her was so intense that the idea of murder came
into his mind.


Euphemia Drew's dining-room had all the windows open; but
so still was the atmosphere that the six steady flames above the
silver candlesticks--for though the western sun came slanting in
from between the columns of the Tower Arch she had made Lily
light up the table--preserved their small, blue-burning centres
of life undisturbed.

"How nice your candles look!" cried old Lawyer Beere, who
with his daughter Angela and Mr. Thomas Barter made up the
roll of the guests. The old man's grizzled head, flaccid cheeks,
and thin, spectacled nose bent again over his plate of clear soup,
on the surface of which floated minute wafers of white paste.

But Angela, a grave, fair girl, of about twenty-seven summers
--an old man's child--improved upon her father's observation.
"Candlelight by daylight always makes me think of Rome," she
remarked.

"So unnatural, the girl means," said Barbara Fell, "but you always
did have a taste for the artificial, Euphemia.'

Lily Rogers, removing Miss Ribby's soup plate at that moment,
was so arrested by this indictment against her mistress that
she touched the lady's brimming wine glass, and a tiny trickle of
claret ran down upon the cloth. "Salt does it! Don't fret, girl,"
cried Miss Fell, covering the red stain with the minute crystals.
Lily was not one to fret at such a misfortune while Mr. Barter
was looking at her. She plunged, on the contrary, into a pro-
longed and pensive reverie. But Charles Montagu glanced in
surprise at his sister. Why was she so considerate to Lily and
so harsh with Rosie?

Was he wrong in disliking that thin, angular, grey face with
such heart-burning detestation? She was always amiable to Tom
Barter. If Rosie were Lily and he were Barter, would peace, love
and harmony reign at Old Town Lodge?

Tom Barter spoke up now. He was impatient to throw all his
weight upon the side of the Pageant before these formidable
women began condemning it. "I've got a personal favour," he
said, "to beg of you three ladies," and he made a gallant little
bow in the direction of Angela whom he had only met once or
twice before, and of whose cold, chaste, direct glances he was
somewhat afraid. "I want you all to make sure you get good seats
at the Pageant by buying your tickets early. There are a lot of
foreigners coming--several whole parties of them from Ger-
many--and it won't look nice if the front rows are vacant. The
Mayor has been saving the front rows for the leading ladies of
the town. He has not let his agent sell one ticket for those."

At this reference to the Mayor's "agent," Mary, who was sitting
next to old Mr. Beere, hesitated not lo lift up her voice. "It isn't
whether you approve," she said eagerly and with a heightened
colour, "or disapprove, of the thing as a whole. It's simply
whether you would care to be entirely absent from something
that's likely to be...quite an historical event in the life of
...of everybody here."

Euphemia glanced quickly at her, as she accepted a gold-bor-
dered plate from the dreamy Lily. "Only too historical," she
thought, "in your life, my unhappy darling." But she said to
Miss Fell--"I think perhaps Mary is right, Barbara. We all owe
a duty to Glastonbury, and whatever we may personally think
of our new Mayor and his methods, we must admit that the man
has the place very much at heart."

"There won't be anything Romish about it. will there?" said
Miss Fell.

"I can answer for that," cried Barter hastily. "Oh. no! Our
fear at first was that, in his Evangelical simplicity. Mr. Geurd
might be laughed at by some of our cleverer church people. But
the Vicar has been talking to him and has made him see--"
He stopped abruptly, anxious not to overdo his argument and
also, it must be confessed, a little puzzled how to round off this
imaginary conversation.

The sun was sinking now and through the open windows float-
ing lightly and gently across the Ruins, came the fragrance of
many hayfields. Uncut as yet, the grass had become tall and
feathery, and mingled with its vague aroma was a foretaste of
something far more intimately sweet, the first breath of budding
honeysuckle and dog-roses. Angela Beere--beneath that calm
white bosom in the low-cut light-blue frock, under that quiet
forehead with the fair hair parted so smoothly--was thinking just
then very strange thoughts. She had recently met Persephone, for
the first time after a long interval, and the attraction of that
equivocal creature had grown upon her night by night, since she
had talked with her, into something like a feverish obsession. It
had been difficult for her to behave adequately, even politely, in
Persephone's presence, so troubling had the girl's personality
been. She had wanted to run away from her; she had wanted to
toss herself tempestuously, distractedly, into her new friend's
arms! "Did she like me," she was thinking now, "did I look
well? What did she mean by talking to me as she did, if she
didn't want me for a friend? When she said that about life being
so difficult, and the love of men being so gross and brutal, and
it being so hard to find a person you could love whole-heartedly,
did I make her understand how I sympathised?"

"There's going to be a bad strike in this town," announced
Mr. Barter, "if those Crow people aren't careful. You'd better
give your cousin a hint, Mary. He wouldn't take my advice." He
paused and looked at old Mr. Beere, anxious to make the lawyer
believe that it was over a pure point of industrial politics that
he had quarrelled with his late employer.

Mr. Beere, however, as he ate his cutlets at once greedily and
daintily with his old wrinkled face close to his plate, was think-
ing to himself--"It's astonishing how Crow could put up with
this fellow so long. He's an interloper. He's an intriguer. He's
thoroughly shifty. I hope he doesn't take a fancy to Angela. No
doubt he was feathering his nest in some scurvy way when Crow
kicked him out."

"Who's this Capporelli they're talking so much about in the
Gazette?" enquired Miss Euphemia Drew.

Since no one else seemed inclined to reply Mary began ex-
plaining to her friend how the person in question was one of
the famous old French clowns of thirty years ago. "He's retired
for a long time," she said. "But he comes back occasionally for
things of this sort. He's had an unhappy life. His wife ran away
with a Chinaman. Cousin John told Geard about him. He took
me to see him at one of the rehearsals. He's acting Dagonet in
their play."

"Acting who, my dear?" enquired Miss Bibby.

"Dagonet, Miss Fell, King Arthur's Fool."

Barbara turned to Mr. Barter. "I thought you said that this
performance was an Evangelical affair, something like Pilgrim's
Progress?"

Old Mr. Beere lifted up his head. "I expect 'tis pretty well
what the boys and girls like best," he said. "A little incense and
a lot of kissing."

"It cannot of course be true, Mr. Barter," threw in Miss Drew,
"what dear old Wollop told me yesterday, when I talked to him
at that cage he's always shut up in?"

"It's true, Madam," threw in Mr. Beere with a humorous gri-
mace. "You can count on it's being true if Wollop said it."

But Miss Drew shook her head. "What he said was that the
part of our Saviour was going to be played by that shabby
Welshman who's looking after old Jones' shop."

"Mr. Evans is a queer bird to look at," said Tom Barter gravely,
catching the eye of Lily as he spoke, and giving her one of those
lightning-quick recognisant glances of his that girls always under-
stood and responded to, "but be was at Jesus, Oxford, he tells me.
He certainly knows more about the history of this place than an-
yone else ."

"But to act the part of Our Lord--" reiterated Miss Drew. "It has
always struck me as strange that anyone could do it. even in
those old Miracle Plays; but now--and with this French clown
you talk of--"

But Mr. Barter's mind had already wandered some distance
from Paul Capporelli. He answered vaguely that he felt sure Miss
Drew would find nothing objectionable in the Pageant. He
thought to himself, "I've been a fool to tie myself up with that
designing little bitch at the Pilgrims'. I must edge out of that
I must give her the go-by. She's begun to rate her bloody virtue
a trifle too high. I wonder if Lily would--But of course there's
her sister! That's what has always stopped me. But by God
she's a beautiful girl--yes! and a sensible girl too." And the
incorrigible imagination of Mr. Barter began calling up such
enticing and seductive images that when the real Lily, in her
puritanical black dress and apron, came in again, the sight of
her gave him quite a shock. She had re-assumed her normal at-
tire with a too-bewildering rapidity!

The dinner drew to its end at last. Lily was now taking the
cheese-plates away and placing before the guests Miss Drews
best set of Dresden fruit-plates. The Meissen coffee-cups too
were brought in and a silver pot that had belonged to her grand-
mother. She had even instructed Mary to buy a box of cigarettes
for the close of the meal and Mary--knowing the taste of her
friend Tom--had bought some first-rate Virginian ones. The con-
versation began to revolve round the enigmatic figure of the new
Mayor.

"Young Robert Stilly at the Bank ," said Lawyer Beere, "tells
me the fellow's spent thousands on this affair. I should think
his family must be feeling it"

Mr. Barter hastened to bring forward an aspect of Mr. Geard
that had nothing to do with the expenditure of money. His re-
ward for leaving Philip bit at his conscience like a maggot at
a rosy-cheeked apple. "He talks of Our Lord," he remarked,
"as if He were standing close beside him."

"The man's always smelt of drink when I've been close behind
him," said Barbara Fell.

"Rogers tells me," said Miss Drew, "that he's been seen mak-
ing faces at that poor slobbering boy who always stands on the
pavement outside the Pilgrims'."

"I don't think," threw in Barter, "that Louie got that story
quite right. The version I've heard"--and he glanced at Mary,
for his informant had been none other than John--"is that he
made that boy understand him by signs, and that he always stops
when he passes him and that "

Mary interrupted. "I believe he's got some weird nervous sym-
pathy...mind you I don't like him...there's something unpleasant
about him...something frightening...but from all I hear he has
some nervous peculiarity which makes him imitate every infirm-
ity he meets. That must have been what Louie meant. He must
act idiotically whenever he talks to that idiot."

"All I can say is," said Miss Bibby, "it's an outrage for a
town like ours to have a Mayor who's not responsible for his
actions."

"He's a better doctor than I am in such cases," muttered her
brother crustily.

"Hear how you talk, Manny!" the lady cried. "Anyone would
think you were one of his converts, I've heard he drinks at the
pubs with the worst characters in the town. And they say that
last bank holiday he got so drunk at the Legge woman's party
that he took that sick niece of hers--Manny goes to see her--
she's got some frightful disease--on his knees."

"I'd be ashamed to talk like that, Barbara!"

Everyone looked at Dr. Fell. He had spoken in a low voice,
but with bitter distinctness.

Miss Drew intervened. "We're all of us talking scandal, I'm
afraid," she said. "You're right to rebuke us, Doctor. What do
you think about it, Mr. Beere?"

Mr. Beere looked up from his grapes. "Stilly thinks the fel-
low's mad," he said. "He's been spending money like water this
last couple of months."

Charles Montagu Fell thought to himself--"If it wasn't for
my Mary here, and some of those young girls who come to my
Clinic, I swear I'd take those tablets and end it." He finished his
coffee in a gulp and there came over him, as he put the empty
cup down, a sensation that he had been suffering from several
times lately, a sensation as if his life were merely running on
by the mechanism wound up within it, while its heart, its soul,
its meaning had fled somewhere else and he had only to cry out
in a loud voice: ''But it's all husks and hollowness! But it's all
worm-rot and dust!" and it would crumble to pieces....The
conversation drifted on now to an uneventful exchange of local
gossip.

While Miss Drew's dinner-party ebbed thus to its lame and
impotent conclusion, Mr. Philip Crow emerged from the drive
gate of The Elms to inspect the appearance of the weather.

Once out in that lovely June evening--it was now only a
few minutes after eight--he strolled into the town. In the open
space outside St. John's he encountered Mr. Stilly, the cashier
of the Glastonbury bank. Mr. Stilly had himself come out after
an early supper--he was a hard-working man of forty who sup-
ported a pair of aged parents--to take the air, walk the streets
a little, and see what was toward. Mr. Stilly had thin, reddish
hair, a still thinner, reddish mustache, and a drooping, melan-
cholic face. But he was not really a melancholy man. Mr. Stilly
accepted the pin-pricks of chance and the joltings of time and
tide with patient equanimity. He concealed a passion for taking
photographs beneath his unruffled demeanour and he was also
extremely fond of using a fret-saw. He adored his parents, who
were both exacting and tyrannical; and, one of the greatest
pleasures of his life was when at this time of the year he went
down to the brooks so that the old people might have water-
cress to their tea. Mr. Stilly had unbounded respect for Philip
Crow. When he found himself tonight overtaken by this gentle-
man his tendency was at once without question to nod to him
politely and sheer off. It was with surprise--and even with some
misgiving--that Mr. Stilly heard Mr. Crow express a wish that
he would accompany him to Tor Field to have a glance at what
might be going on out there, on this fine night of the second
of June. Mr. Stilly, conscious that he had left his "only father
and his only mother," as he was accustomed facetiously to call
them, playing at dominoes, acceded to the manufacturer's sug-
gestion.

The two men walked rapidly down Chilkwell Street, past the
Vicarage Gate, past Miss Drew's gate, past the Tithe Barn, from
which the symbolic creatures of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
regarded them without an eyelid's flicker, past St. Michael's Inn,
where Mad Bet made silent faces at them, past Chalice Well
where the red water gurgled at them in disregarded neglect, till
they came to Tor Field. The gate was open and they went in.
It was just like the field of any ordinary Fair, this place tonight,
with sail-cloth barriers pegged firmly into the earth and a con-
fusion of lively voices reaching them through the warm twilight.
They skirted the barrier and standing behind a crowd of casual
intruders, whom the Players had no authority to exclude, they
surveyed, with the distasting wonder of grown-up people in the
presence of childish nonsense, the bewildering chaos of the un-
usual scene.

Mr. Stilly opened his mouth twice to utter some suitable com-
ment before he had the courage to speak. Then he said: "It makes
one think of what one reads about America."

"What do you mean?" asked Philip. This natural but not very kind
question disturbed the play of Mr. Stilly's already agitated intelli-
gence.

"They perform...performances...a good deal...don't they...in the...
open air?" muttered the cashier of the bank.

"Do they?" said the other, laconically. "I was never there."

Mr. Stilly murmured something about Indians and sank into
nervous silence. To be standing at this hour with the owner of
the Glastonbury Dye-Works and in the presence of such an un-
usual scene was too much for him. He hoped that his parents
had not yet noticed the length of his absence.

It was apparent that it would not be for lack of varied and
fantastic costumes or of contradictory and vehement directions,
or of excitable crowds of emotional young people, that the
Geard Pageant would fail, if it did fail. Philip glared at it all
with a cold, pinched disdain from beneath his cloth cap. There
shot forth into the hurly-burly of that motley assembly, from
this man's concentrated detachment, radiated waves of accumu-
lated contempt. His angry thoughts pursued one another through
his brain like marching soldiers. They came and went; they
wheeled and counter-wheeled; they obeyed the commands of
Philip's will in much better order than these excitable lads and
lasses were obeying their distracted Professionals from Dublin.

"Humanity!" he thought. "As they were two, three, four thou-
sand years ago, so today! To mould them, to drill them, to domi-
nate them--it's all too sickeningly easy." And he thought: "How
much more worthy a resistance is offered to me by the deep,
dark, interior rocks of the Mendips! How much better to struggle
with machinery against the inertness of blind matter than to
try to make anything of such insects! It won't be necessary to
plot and scheme to defeat Geard. All I shall have to do will be
to hold off my hands. This crazy confusion, these bewildered
people; these bare legs and riotous dancing, why! it's a Baccha-
nalian orgy. He'll make the town a laughing-stock. The thing
he's stirring up here--any fool can see it--is pure religious
madness under the mask of theatricals. The man's a lunatic. This
sort of thing never has been, and never will be, tolerated in
England."

"I'm afraid I've got to go now, Mr. Crow. I didn't expect to
stay out so long. My...my people will be wondering where
...where I am." It had taken Mr. Stilly a long time to make
up his mind to utter this daring ultimatum. His voice w'hen he
did utter it was like the voice of an unhappy school-hoy mur-
muring something about cricket or football to a preoccupied
headmaster absorbed in a nice point of Thucydidean grammar.

"Eh? What did you say? Oh, all right," returned Philip. "Wait
one minute, Stilly, and I'll walk back with you."

They left the field, passing on their way out that fallen trunk
on the mossy sides of which Sam Dekker had searched for rare
toadstools on the day when Mr. Evans first thought of taking
the part of Christ in the pageant.

Meanwhile this same Sam, struggling pitifully with his love for
Nell, had entered his favourite shrine in Glastonbury. This was
a little chapel dedicated to St. Patrick lying behind the Women's
Almshouse near the entrance to the Ruins, a chapel which still
possessed an original stone altar left undisturbed by the Prot-
estant Reformation and carried upon its wall the heraldic arms
of St. Joseph, a green cross between two golden cruets.

Never had those Arimathean arms, never had that stone altar,
beheld a worshipper such as poor Sam showed himself that
night.

He was on his knees at the altar. He was alone in the little
chapel. Lower and lower he bowed his head, clenching his fingers
as he bent forward.

But it was not in the attitude of prayer that his hands hung
by his side. They swung there savagely in the manner of a prize-
fighter's fists and, as they swung, the backs of his knuckles kept
striking against the front of the stone altar.

There was something about his posture as he knelt--swaying
his whole body backward and forward--that was pitiably gro-
tesque. An imaginative observer might have received the impres-
sion that an animal was praying.

Was there any portion of Sam's nature that exulted in the
atrocious task that he had laid upon himself--the task of doing
not his will but what he conceived to be the will of a tragic
superhuman Being?

Yes, the soul itself, in this grotesque swaying body with
clenched fists, exulted in what it was doing! Sam's soul seemed
to be able to gather to itself a peculiar consciousness quite apart
from the rest of Sam's sensibility. His soul seemed to be holding
his body and his will in a tight leash, as a man might hold a
wild-eyed bull, by a ring through its nose.

His soul seemed to be saying to his natural senses and his
natural will: "You must go through this because Christ went
through it! I care not how you suffer; so long as you go on,
day by day, doing His will and not your own!"

And all the while Sam suffered there, swaying in his anguish
like a great bleeding animal held by a steel ring through his
nose, the Man-God that he invoked was struggling in vain to
reach the consciousness of this mad perverter of His secret. In
vain! In vain! Against the power-lust in the soul of a man, when
it has once tasted the wild delight of taking up its own body
and its own will and its own nervous sensibility and forcing them
to act against the grain, there is only one Deity that can prevail:
and that Deity is not Christ. How could Christ as He swept now
like a cloud of weed-smoke under the door of St. Patrick's
chapel, relax the tension of this soul, that pulled and jerked so
remorselessly at the nose of a praying earth-beast?

But Christ was not, on that vaporous Glastonbury afternoon,
oblivious of His poor, besotted servant Sam. Although He tried
in vain to change by invisible reasoning the incorrigible obstinacy
of Sam's perverted mind, upon external events He could exeicise
a certain degree of control.

He now put it into the head of young Elphin Cantle, with
whom Sam used sometimes to go for walks, to come surrepti-
tiously into the church. Elphin, like many other boys of the
town, had a passionate love of Sam. Mother Legge, when in
her cups, had recently said to Young Tewsy that Sam Dekker
had become a seducer of boys. Nothing could have been more
pathetically unjust! Sam did not in his secret heart, care at all
for boys. His walks with the oddest, queerest, and most unhand-
some among them--and Elphin was certainly one of these--
were part of his general scheme of life. He knew that there were
lots of boys in Glastonbury who, hating cricket and football
and not caring for girls, were profoundly lonely and unhappy.
To these boys he gave a good deal of his attention, which they
repaid tenfold, as far as emotional response was concerned; but
Sam knew nothing of the strength of the feelings he excited.

When Elphin peeped into St. Patrick's chapel he was thrilled
but not surprised to find Sam there. He had looked in before,
under similar occasions; but had never dared to approach the
object of his passionate adoration. Today, however, pushed for-
ward by the invisible pressure of a Hand upon his shoulder,
the thin-legged, pale-faced boy moved shyly up to his idol's side.
As he approached, he fancied he caught the sound of a huskily
drawn sob in the man's throat. This sound hurt him to the
quick. Well did Elphin Cantle know what it was to go into soli-
tary places and utter sounds like that!

The boy went close up to him and still pushed forward by
the invisible Hand, whispered his name, doing as he whispered
it, what Russian serfs in former times did to their masters, that
is to say, kissing him lightly on the shoulder. Anyone but a horn
naturalist like Sam would have started violently and even uttered
a cry; but long training in the woods and fields had given Sam
under any nervous shock--and indeed in all these things his
nerves were like tough wood--the poise of a Red Indian.

."Oh, it's you, Elf, is it?" was all he said. And he began rising
stiffly to his feet, unceremoniously wiping his eyes with the
back of one of his relaxed fists.

Elphin Cantle said not a word.

"Had your tea yet?" enquired Sam, stretching himself and
looking round for his cap and stick.

Elphin shook his head.

Come on then. Let's see what Penny has got for us today!"



The Pageant



Midsummer Day dawned long before most of the performers
destined to take their share in Mr. Geart's religious circus
had awakened from sleep. Mary Crow, however, who was
to take no part in it save as a spectator, was awake soon after
the first glimmer of dawn.

To watch the processes of dawn from a window that faces
west is in a sense like the contemplation of various excited ex-
pressions crossing a human countenance when the cause of such
feelings is absent. The girl propped herself up in bed, reached
for her dressing-gown which was at her bed's foot, wound it like
a shawl round her neck, and watched the slow, stealthy ex-
panding of the grey light. She remembered having heard John
once defend the Biblical account of the creation, when Tom
Barter criticised it as separating the creation of the sun from
the creation of light. John had maintained that light was an
entity quite independent of its immediate origin. Certainly it did
look to Mary now as if light were an entity free of all connection
with the sun.

She could see the great ruined Tower Arch of the Abbey
Church as she lay there, and she could see the tops of the elm
trees beyond it, very ghostly and phantom-like, their greenness
only half-born. The arch, it seemed, assimilated itself to this
dawn-light far less easily than the treetops. It isolated itself in
some way from this process of dawn and emphasised its own
curves and mouldings and masonry, in resistance, as it were, to
these atmospheric effects. But the foliage of the treetops was
part of it. The foliage of the treetops, as Mary watched it now,
seemed to contain -within itself the infinite sadness of this grey,
half-born, Cimmerian light that was now slowly invading the
world and establishing itself in the cold aisles and in the blank
corridors of darkness. Filmy wisps of grey mist hung about
these treetops, mist that was liker to dewdrops than raindrops
and yet did not really suggest water-drops at all. Nor did it
suggest clouds ! They were things by themselves, sui generis,
those dawn-mists, and they seemed to have as remote a con-
nection with Water in any localised form, as the dim light, in which
they dropped and wavered and rose and sank, had with the invisible
sun. "Yes," thought Mary, "something in the foliage of those
trees flows forth to greet this sad light, that does not seem like
sunlight, just as something in me flows out to greet it."

Will it be fine today? That was the next thought that Mary
had. She had been to the Northload Street room for a few
minutes yesterday evening and had found John and Tom to-
gether. They were drinking whiskey and the former was in a
state of complete exhaustion. John had told her that the Mayor
was resolved to carry the affair through, wet or fine, but that
he had somehow convinced himself--"You know the way he
talks to his God, as if He were standing by his side?"--that it
would not be "allowed" to rain on this day of "Glaston Re-
surgens." Mary felt full of doubt and anxiety. All manner ot
troubling thoughts assailed her. Suppose the whole thing were a
monstrous failure? Suppose the performers got panic-stricken
and that French clown lost his head in some wild antic or im-
provisation quite out of keeping with the rest? She had seen
a fragment of the Passion Play rehearsed and she felt totally
unable to conceive how Mr. Evans could even carry his part
off, far less be successful in it. Rumours had been running wildly
through the town for the last week about the police from
Taunton interfering and arresting the principal players, and the
last thing Mary had heard before she went to bed last night was
news brought into the kitchen by Weatherwax that the expected
strike in the Dye-Works had come and that the Glastonbury fac-
tory had locked out all its hands that morning. So far, the gar-
dener's story said, the trouble had not extended to the Crow plant
at Wookey, but that also, so Weatherwax declared, might have a
lockout tomorrow. Even the Wookey hands had demanded, and
apparently had been given, a holiday today, so that as Mary lay
propped up on her pillows, waiting for the first yellow beams
to strike the great broken arch in front of her, she seemed to
catch trouble on the air, coming from every side. Barter had told
her that the town was already filled to overflowing with visitors.
Parties of Germans, Dutchmen, Scandinavians--even a few
French people--had filled the streets yesterday. She herself had
been startled by the crowds as she went to Northload Street.

Mary was of a realistic and practical turn of mind, but her
nerves felt thoroughly shaky now. In this cool dawn-air, alone
with rooks, elm-tree tops, ruins and wood-pigeons, a thousand
alarms and terrors visited her. She imagined all those factory-
hands--the strikers from the Glastonbury works, the holiday-
makers from Wookey--joining in a great mob and invading the
field. She imagined a wild tumult taking place in the midst of
the performance, wherein John would be arrested by the police,
handcuffed, and carried off in a motor car to Taunton. The
pageant itself, she had learned, was not to begin till two in
the afternoon, but since a portion of the field had been handed
over to the ordinary booth-holders, toy-and-sweet vendors, trinket
sellers, fruit-and-nut dealers, and so forth--whirligigs and round-
abouts alone being excluded--and since gipsy caravans too were
to be allowed in by the Mayor's especial indulgence, there would
be festivities going on in Tor Field long before that hour and
plenty of opportunities for such a mixed public to work them-
selves up into a riotous state of mind before the official pro-
gramme began.

It was with a shock of real amazement, as something that
seemed more blood-red than sunlight hit the left-hand column
of the great broken arch, that the girl lifted her head now. She
let her twisted dressing-gown fall loose about her shoulders and
propped herself still higher in the bed, with the palms of her
bands pressed against the mattress, for she became aware that
the sight of this unnatural light--in reality it was a wine-coloured
red, touched with a quite indescribable nuance of purple--was
giving her a spasm of irrational happiness. She leaned forward,
allowing her dislodged dressing-gown to slide down upon the
pillows behind her and quite disregarding the fact that a cool
sunrise wind was blowing against her flimsily clad figure. Her
soul had come back with a violent spasm, like a rush of blood
to her head, and her whole nature seemed to pour itself out
towards the reddish light on that tall column. Her pulse of
happiness was intense. What she experienced was like a quivering
love-ecstasy that had no human object. She could actually feel
the small round breasts under her night-gown shiver and dis-
tend. Her head instinctively fell back a little, while her chin
was lifted up. Her lips parted, and a smile that was a smile of
indescribable peace flickered over her face. She would have
served at that moment as a model for some primitive Flemish
artist painting a passionately concentrated vision of the rape
of Danae.

Whatever it was that stirred her so, the effect of it soon passed;
but Mary told no one, not even John, of the experience she had
had on the dawn of the Baptist's day. The invisible Watchers
however of human life in Glastonbury noted well this event.
"She has been allowed to see It," they said to one another.
"Will she be the only one among all these people?"

When two o'clock struck in the belfries and towers of the
town there was an expectant stir amid the great company of
spectators in the wide sloping field at the foot of the Tor. A
surprising number of seats and wooden benches had been pro-
cured for the Mayor's great occasion, and upon these seats sat
a vast crowd of people, all of them roused at that moment to
a pitch of excitement such as had not been experienced in that
place since the day when the last Abbot of Glastonbury had
met his doom. Like the famous Homeric wind sweeping over
a cornfield, this cumulative wave of crowd-hypnosis shivered
through these assembled people, straightening their shoulders,
lifting their heads, turning their faces towards the grassy terrace
on the slope above them. Had Philip Crow's airplane been fly-
ing low down then, over this tightly packed crowd who had seats
to sit upon and over the equally large crowd at the back of them
and at their flanks who had no seats except the grass, it would
have been of fascinating interest to note the varieties of human
types gathered so close together. Many of those without seats lay
sideways on the sward, or sat crouched and hugging their knees,
while behind them all, drifting about or standing still, as their
vagrant mood dictated, were large stray groups of what might
be termed casual transients. Gipsies from the caravans ranged in
rows along the hedge, nut-vendors, pedlars with their trays, haw-
kers with packs strapped to their backs, beggars, tramps, groups
of astonished and cautious shepherds from the high Mendips,
stray factory-hands from Wookey and Street and the clty of Wells,
all these, mingled with a number of strikers from the Dye-Works
of the town itself, kept circulating and surging, advancing and
retreating, jostling, edging, dodging, hovering, spying, mocking,
criticising, deriding, applauding, just as the wind of accident and
the beckoning of caprice carried them here or there.

The two front rows of seats had been reserved for local mag-
nates, and in spite of all the suspicion, jealousy, distrust, that
was about, these seats had very few empty spaces. Miss Elizabeth
Crow' was there with Lady Rachel. Mrs. Philip Crow ought to
have been there, for although Philip had taken the opportunity
of flying to Wookey Hole, his wife, under the influence of Emma
who was here with Louie and Lily, had decided not to miss what
she now spoke of as "something to rest a person's mind." But
Tilly's dislike of publicity was so great that she had refused
this place of honour and had had to be ensconced in the fourth
row. On the other side of Lady Rachel, however, there was an
empty chair, for the girl had done all she could to persuade
her father to come and there was still a good chance that he
might. Ned Athling, who had written a considerable portion of
the words of the whole performance, was one of the principal
play-actors. Miss Bibby Fell was duly seated by Dr. Fell's side
and next to her were Lawyer Beere and Angela, and beyond them
Miss Drew and Mary. By Mary's side John had found a place
for a foreign priest. In the central portion of the second row of
seats, behind these personages, were the Vicar and his son, for
though Sam had steadily refused to have anything to do with the
performance and was now reduced to agitated burnings of heart
by the presence of Nell, he had been unwilling to refuse his
father when Mat had made an especial appeal to him not to
desert him on this occasion. Next to Mat and Sam sat Mr. Wollop
and in company with Mr. Wollop almost the whole staff of Wol-
lop's shop. Being a bachelor, and also having an equal and un-
failing interest in all mundane spectacles, Mr. Wollop had felt
it incumbent upon him to be found on this occasion "holding
up," as he called it, "his proper end."

It was a sign of something really grandly democratic in the
soul of Glastonbury's leading tradesman that there never entered
his head for a single second a doubt about the staff of Wollop's
--all its "young ladies" and all its "young gentlemen"--being
worthy of the second row of the select seats. It had , however,
several times already entered the head of the Nietzschean young
man--whose name was Booty--that he was in a place of embar-
rassing honour, since just in front of him was the vacant chair
reserved for the Marquis and to his right, for he was at the end
of the row of his fellows, sat Mr. Stilly of the bank.

In the third row of seats, but some distance from Sam, indeed
just behind Mr. Stilly's aged parents, were none others than Will
Zoyland and Nell. Nell had her brother Dave on her right, and
beyond Dave sat the Vicar of St. Benignus, the eloquent Dr.
Sodbury, whose ministrations were so pleasing to Megan Geard.
Persephone Spear had been enrolled rather late in the proceedings
among the players, but though so late a comer, she had been
given a role second to none, having been called upon to play the
part of the Virgin Mother.

It was only in the fourth row, just behind Will and Nell Zoy-
land that seats had been reserved for the family of the Mayor.
Here Mrs. Geard sat, between Cordelia and Mr. Bishop, the Town
Clerk, for Crummie was to take the important role of the Lady
of Shalott in the Arthurian part of the Pageant. Next to the
Town Clerk sat Mrs. Philip, and by Mrs. Philip's side was the
Curator of the Glastonbury Museum.

The fifth row of these reserved seats had been dedicated--Mr.
Tom Barter had been careful to see to this--to the servants of
the leading families of the town and all their especial friends
and relations. In this row, therefore, there sat a most motley
collection of persons, sweet-natured young girls, hypercritical
spinsters, nervous old men, complacent old women, and a great
many very riotous children. Here were Emma Sly, Louie and Lily
Rogers, Sally Jones and her friend Tossie Stickles--this latter,
because of her delicate state of health, armed with her mistress's
oldest and largest scent-bottle--Miss Bibby's latest two servants,
Rose Nicker and Edith Bates, both of whom had twice over
"given notice," those formidable connoisseurs of mortal life,
Mr. Weatherwax and Penny Pitches, those garrulous supporters
of the dignity of the church, Mrs. Robinson and Grandmother
Cole, together with the whole robber band from the alley. Jackie.
Nelly Morgan, Sis and Bert--the last-named being planted by a
devilish trick of chance just behind the curator of the museum
whose devotion to fossils was only rivalled by his maniacal
hatred of children.

At the extreme end of the sixth row, flanked by a voluble con-
tingent of Germans from Bremen and Lubeck. sat Mother Legge
with her faithful bodyguard, Young Tewsy, by her side, the old
lady in her best black silk and the old man in a suit of cast-off
broadcloth, hired from the laundryman, and formerly belonging
to a Baptist minister. On the other side of Mrs. Legge sat Blackie
Morgan, between whom and the old procuress a curious and
quite unprofessional friendship had sprung up.

Mr. Geard had surprised both John and Barter by insisting on
remaining completely independent of the whole thing--inde-
pendent of the actors, independent of the spectators--and the
only indication he had given to his family of his present where-
abouts was a word he had casually dropped after their early
dinner about seeing how the performance looked from the top
of the Tori

The number of foreigners who were present surpassed even
John's expectation and they constantly increased. Crowds of them
kept entering the field long after the performance had com-
menced. Every train that arrived brought more of them. They
were French, German, Spanish, Bohemian, Dutch, Danish, Scan-
dinavian and Russian. There were even two oriental, long-haired
monks from a monastery in the Caucasus. John Crow imagined
these two men setting out on this westward instead of eastward
pilgrimage at the very first hearing of its possibility, when two
and a half months ago he had sent his announcements across
Europe.

The only person among all this immense crowd who had
bothered about trying to get into personal relations with the
organisers of the event was a mysterious-looking priest from Con-
stantinople who called himself Father Paleologue. It was this
man to whom John--when he found that he could speak English
--had given a place by Mary's side, in the front seats. At the
opposite end of the sixth row from where Mrs. Legge and
Blackie were seated were Old Jones and Abel Twig. The Ward
Matron who had brought them--a handsome buxom woman al-
ways spoken of as Aunt Laura--was doing her best to amuse the
two old men. In this task she was not assisted very much by
her neighbour on the other side, who was an exceedingly caustic
French journalist famous for his biting wit. This man, who had
come to Glastonbury solely to report on the doings of Paul
Capporelli, was alternately scribbling in a notebook what pre-
sumedly were light touches of local colour, suitable as a back-
ground for the great clown, and stretching his neck to catch
more of the profile of Lady Rachel. Every now and then he would
turn a ferocious stare upon Abel Twig, who was seated between
Aunt Laura and Old Jones. There was something about Number
One's physiognomy, not to speak of his Sedgemoor dialect,
which this critical Parisian found peculiarly irritating. He was
trying to catch stray sentences--characteristic of English phlegm
and English snobbishness--from the "aristocracy" in the front
rows, among whom rumour had informed him was sitting the
daughter of Lord P., who represented one of the oldest Mar-
quisates in the Kingdom, but Number One's expressions of won-
der as to what had become of "thik big flock of good South-
Downs what old man Chinnock used to turn into this here field,"
were spoken so loudly that it was hard to hear anything else.

If the critic from Paris had desired to put down in his little
book a really significant trait of the English character, he would
have noted how respectfully and tactfully the brigade of Taunton
constables called in by Philip kept themselves in the background.
It was natural enough perhaps that the police-sergeant responsi-
ble for this large body of tactful officers had chosen to confine
their activity that afternoon to the outskirts of the crowd in the
Tor Field, but such strategy unfortunately played into the hands
of the really formidable trouble-makers. These were the revo-
lutionary leaders of the strikers at the Dye-Works. Led by Red
Robinson, who since his rebuff on Easter Monday, had deserted
the primrose-path for blood-and-iron politics, the Dye-Works
strikers with as many adherents as they could collect from the
Wookey and Wells workshops were even now at this very mo-
ment parading the streets with revolutionary banners. By means
of a real inspiration of the genius of "'ate," Red had made a
bid for the Nonconformist element among the populace of Glas-
tonbury and side by side with his political insignia he had
caused to be displayed at the head of his rapidly growing
procession inscriptions denouncing the Mayor's Pageant. ""Down
with Mediaevalism," these crafty scrolls read. "Down with Super-
stition," "No Lourdes, no Lisieux Here," "Down with Religious
Mummery."

Thus while Philip's police force was protecting the morals of
Glastonbury from the dangerous pieties of its Mayor, these
street-rioters were lumping both capitalist and pietist together
as joint-enemies of the people. Up and down the streets tossed
and swayed these varied and singular ensigns, gathering num-
bers as they went and collecting in their train all the roughest
elements of the town. At last the cry arose--inspired by the AEo-
lus-breath of Red's genius for action--"To the field!" and the
whole turbulent tide of people, the actual strikers far outnum-
bered by the less orderly elements, began pouring down Chilk-
well Street towards the scene of the performance. It soon began
to spread, as Lily would put it, "like wildfire," or as Penny
would put it, "like Satan's own stink," through the poorer por-
tions of the place that "The Town was up."

Like an animal organism that has taken an emetic, Glastonbury
now disembogued from the obscurest recesses of its complex be-
ing all manner of queer chemical substances. Such substances,
though they were living creatures, needed a shock like this cry,
"The Town is up," to fling them forth from their profound hid-
ing-places. Most of the destitute people and drunken people and
half-witted people who now poured forth from the most unex-
pected quarters were indigenous to the place. Thus for the first
time since the Battle of Sedgemoor when that strange cry went
about the streets just as it was doing now--"The Town is up"--
the real People of Glastonbury emerged and asserted itself. The
last time it had asserted itself was on behalf of that sweet, honey-
suckle bastard, Monmouth, for it was the "great gentlemen,"
like Lord P.'s ancestor and Mat Dekker's ancestor, who had
brought Dutch William in, not the people. And before that, for
it had allowed the Abbot to persecute heretics and it had al-
lowed the King to murder the Abbot without interfering, it had
responded to the cry "The Town is up" when Jack Cade revolted
against every privilege under the sun. It had rioted in honour of
Mother Shipton, Jane Shore, Lambert Simnel, John Wycliffe, John
Wesley, Lord George Gordon, and had even received and con-
cealed from royal vengeance the crafty Welshman Owen Glen-
dower. In fact the ingrown, inbred, integrated People of
Glastonbury had raised their famous cry "The Town is up!" on
behalf of every scandal that had worried the well-constituted
authorities since under the crazy Arviragus they had defied the
gods for the sake of the blood of a mad demigod, and on be-
half of the abductor Modred had waylaid the lovely queen of
Rex Arturus himself.

These were the people who poured forth now on this historic
Midsummer Day from Paradise and Bove Town and Butts Close
and Manor House Road to join with the strikers from Philip's
Dye-Works and wfith the holiday-makers from Wookey Hole. So
fantastical did some of this queer crowd look, who thus enlisted
themselves under the banner of Red Robinson's "'ate," that the
German and French and Scandinavian visitors--not to speak of
the monks from the monastery in the Caucasus and the super-
sophisticated Father Paleologue--would almost have been par-
doned for taking them as lineal descendants of the dwellers in
Abel Twig's Lake Village.

Unfortunately for Red's purpose his impatience for action got
himself and his strikers much too quickly upon the scene. His
strikers were orderly and respectable Wessex workmen, not easy
to excite to acts of violence. Thus although before they reached
the entrance they were shrewdly hustled by the strategic Red,
over several gaps in the hedge, into the field and thus were en-
abled to approach the western flank of the crowd of spectators
from an unexpected and unconventional quarter, things did not
work out as he had hoped. If this heterogeneous mob of invaders
had come en masse, in one grand rush, there is no doubt they
would have stampeded the players and ended Mr. Geard's
Pageant. But Red's "'ate"--directed equally against Mayor and
Manufacturer--had, as Number Two would have put it, "stam-
peded its wone self" and ruined ail his skilful strategy. He ought
to have waited in Chilkwell Street, opposite St. Michael's Inn--
and what a sight for Mad Bet that would have been!--until his
ragged camp-followers, descendants of the heroic populace who
fought with scythes and bill-hooks against a trained army and
a great general, had all reached the spot. It was the lack of
these irresponsible pilgarlics that spoilt Red's plan, for his
orderly strikers soon found themselves faced by the first five
rows of seats occupied by the gentry of the town, and even the
"Down with Mummery" banners paused and wavered, if they
were not actually lowered, before the indignant glances and the
cries of "Order! Order!" that now arose from these seats. To
the crowd that were following these patient factory-hands such
glances would have meant little. But many of these hands had
come to labour in Philip's Dye-Works from Bath and Yeovil and
Taunton and Shepton Mallet, and they lacked the recklessness of
the true Glastonbury tradition.

There might, however, have been trouble, even then, if Philip s
police had appeared on the scene, but fortunately these officers
had chosen to remain in that portion of the field devoted to the
gipsy caravans, for it was there that the hobbledehoys and riotous
young apprentices of the town who regarded this occasion as their
grand opportunity for causing annoyance, were shouting, sing-
ing, skylarking, making a resounding hullabaloo, and trying to
draw the attention of the vast audience to themselves. The mo-
ment was a crucial one, for the brightly attired groups of the
first part of the Pageant were already hovering about the two
mediaeval pavilions on the ledge of the hillside that served for
a platform, and Red, well-nigh desperate now and ready to risk
anything, was calling upon his banner-holders to ascend the
slope and invade this natural stage.

A spirited verbal altercation now began between Miss Drew, who
happened to be nearest to the banner which carried the word
"Mummery" and the young striker who held one of its poles.
In her excitement, for Mary could do nothing to calm her, and
Father Paleologue only laughed, the old lady rose to her feet
and bandied recriminations with the young striker, who to tell
the truth was more sulky and irritable than violent or rude.

There was an extremely large and very decorative canvas pa-
vilion at each end of the grassy stage where the Pageant was
now beginning and from these the players emerged and into
these they retreated as occasion demanded. These huge tents had
been copied from old books of chivalry; from the tops of them
floated many bright-coloured streamers and the fluttering canvas
that composed them was painted with heraldic symbols. It was
from the interior of the western one of these two pavilions that
John Crow watched in consternation the march of these hostile
banners. He despatched a messenger for Tom Barter who was in
the other tent and when Tom arrived, crossing the grassy stage
with a great deal of haste and not a little awkwardness, the only
thing he could suggest was that they should get the police away
from the caravans as speedily as possible.

"But why haven't they come already?" demanded John.

"They don't realise what's up," cried Tom. "How should they?
They think it's a deputation to the Mayor or something! They're
strangers. They don't know the town. They think it's part of the
affair...those flags and so on! They think it's part of our perform-
ance!"

The two men went to the western entrance of the great heraldic
tent and held open the sail-cloth hangings and stared helplessly
at the disturbance. They could hear contentious voices from the
invaded front rows! They could see figures on their feet among
them. John, concerned for Mary, caught sight of the unmistak-
able figure of Miss Drew brandishing her parasol. "But good
God, old man," cried Barter, "look at them coming across the
field! They're pouring through the hedge! We're being hustled
by the populace. There's no doubt about it! Philip's been rous-
ing the mob to break things up, since his police are no good."

"What are you all doing?" John cried now, turning fiercely
round on the actors with whom the tent was crowded. It was
the moment for the opening dumb show of the Pageant, which
consisted of a concourse of people in mediaeval dress gathered
to watch the Coronation of Arthur and Gwenevere. The part of
Gwenevere was taken by the tallest young lady in Wollop's, but
for the role of Arthur, Ned Athling had brought from his own
village his father's foreman, a majestic-looking middle-aged in-
dividual, bearded and broad-shouldered, but whose red-stock-
inged knees at that crisis were knocking together with panic.
The thrones of the king and queen were now standing near them,
inside the tent, a couple of Mat Dekker's choir-lads, in crimson
doublet and hose, waiting the word to drag them out From the
eastern pavilion the knights and ladies of Camelot--Sunday
School children from St. John's and St. Benignus--were already,
in the absence of anyone to stop them, gliding nervously forth
and presenting themselves before the audience. It was then that
the absence of the thrones--delayed by the consternation of the
officials in the western tent--proved bewildering to these be-
dizened youngsters.

John's fury, directing itself blindly towards the Middlezoy
King Arthur and towards the equally frightened pages who were
to drag out the thrones, was now confronted by the soft pro-
tests of the prostrate Crummie, who, lying upon a lathe-and-
plaster stretcher, roughly bulwarked to represent a barge, was
attended by two lusty youths from the Congregational Chapel
who were to carry her in, at the critical moment of the corona-
tion, and lay her at the feet of the king and queen. Across the
body of Crummie, who was wrapped in a dark blanket over which
her long fair hair fell in dishevelled allurement, a mitred bishop.
Bob Carter, from the Godney grocery, who was clinging fran-
tically to the crown of Britain, which an agitated page, Ted
Sparks from the bakery at Meare, was trying to take away from
him, burst now into angry abuse of Lancelot du Lac. This mel-
ancholy Mirror of Courtesy was Billy Pratt of the St. John's
Bell-Ringers, and Billy had infuriated Bob by insisting that it
was his right to stand at the head of Crummie when the moment
came for them all to emerge into public view, whereas Bishop
Bob declared that Lancelot's place was near the queen. It was
out of the midst of this noisy wrangle of Church and State over
the beautiful corpse that the soft voice of the Lady of Shalott
herself arose, enquiring of John what for mercy's sake was the
matter, and why the performance didn't commence. "It's so stuffy
in here," murmured the love-slain damsel.

"There's the devil to pay out here, Miss Geard," cried John,
in a state bordering on complete nervous collapse. "There's a
mob pouring across the field from the town with flags and sticks
and God knows what, and they're now collecting in front of the
audience. They're pointing at us too and I believe"--he cast a
glance through the tent-hangings--"Christ! They are! They're
coming up the hill, and all the front-row people are on their
feet and the foreigners are beginning to make a row."

John's account of things, however, was a little exaggerated.
Only one flag-carrier--the young Communist who had been
threatened by Miss Drew's parasol--had begun to ascend the hill,
but he had paused when he saw that no one was following him.
It was true that the foreign element in the audience--especially
the Swedes and Norwegians--were shouting protests in strange
tongues, but although matters were critical nothing had yet oc-
curred that was irretrievable.

"Are those Taunton police quiet still?" murmured the caress-
ing voice of the Lady of Shalott.

"Quiet?" cried John, rushing once more to the opening of the
tent. When he came back to her side--for this fair creature un-
der the dark blanket seemed just then all the human wisdom he
could cling to--he informed her that a body of policemen were
even now hastening round between the rear of the audience and
the hedge, with an evident intention of cutting off the strikers'
retreat.

"Stop them!" commanded Crummie, lifting up her lovely
bare shoulders from the black cushions on which they were rest-
ing. "Father said that under no conditions were those Taunton
police to interfere!"

"Tom!" cried poor John, in complete distraction, "Miss Geard
says the police must be stopped!"

Barter approached, fixing upon the Lady of Shalott's shoul-
ders an eye of covetous lechery.

"Are you a friend of mine, Mr. Barter?" said the girl. Into
these words Crummie threw all that world of erotic appeal of
which she was the perfect mistress. Paralysed by her passion for
Sam this appeal had been storing up for the last two or three
months like a precious wine "cooled a long age in the deep-
delved earth," but at this delicate crisis, when the whole success
of her father's Pageant was at stake, it poured forth from her
voice, her hair, her shoulders, her bosom, like undalant music.

"Yours to command, Miss Geard,'' said Ton: Barter, gloating
over her with a drugged, fatuous smile. "She's the most beau-
tiful thing I've ever seen in my whole life." he thought,

"Run down the field, then, Mr. Barter, for mercy's sake, and
stop those policemen! Talk to their sergeant, if he's there. Talk
to any of them. Tell them these people are friends of tire Mayor*
and that it's all right."

Barter didn't hesitate for a second. His face changed, however.
Action always steadied him. "I'm off!" he cried and disappeared
from the tent.

John and the Bishop and Lancelot du Lac and a group of pretty
pages with bare legs and tumbled curls watched the process of
events from the tent entrance. Edward Athling from the other
tent had already saved the situation as far as the Pageant was
concerned, for he had himself carried out upon the grassy stage
the Arthurian flag, "the Dragon of the great Pendragonship,"
towards which, as he planted it in the earth, a group of his com-
panions lifted their glittering sword-points in a reverential salute.
Then leaving the flag there, midway between the two tents, he
had withdrawn his followers from view. Thus from the embla-
zoned folds of the royal standard of Romanized Britain, the
golden Dragon looked forth towards the black heraldic Lions
upon one tent and the Sacred Symbols of Saint Joseph upon the
other. The spectators had now something to hold their attention.

John suddenly resolved that they should have something else,
and he gave a signal to the pages, who were scraping at the
golden thrones with their nails to see how deep the gilding
went, to carry them out and place them on the left of the
Dragon Ensign. Meanwhile he watched with trembling interest
Barter's encounter with the Taunton police. He could see his
friend talking eagerly and earnestly to the sergeant in com-
mand, but he could also see the straggling procession of nonde-
scripts from the town pouring constantly over the hedge and
towards their leader's banners that now seemed to be remaining
stationary side by side with the no longer protesting occupants
of the front seats.

"Begin! Begin!" vociferated some Frenchman from Avignon.
"The Play!" shouted some Spanish students from Salamanca.
"Hush! Hush!" retorted a German contingent from Weimar, to
whose more patient minds, schooled in Faustian mysteries, those
two golden thrones with the sunny hillside as a background,
held a symbolic if not metaphysical signification.

The situation was still very tense, as John well knew, much
more tense than any of these excitable masqueraders in the tent
realised. One of the younger mistresses in the Church School--
the one "who had gone to Yeovil to see her lover on Maundy
Thursday--now appeared in much perturbation to say that there
was a quarrel going on in the other pavilion between Mr.
Athling and the professional directors from Dublin. These peo-
ple, it transpired, a man and a woman, were great admirers of
Monsieur Capporelli and they were indignant now because the
famous clown, who had been sitting patiently in a corner of
the tent smoking cigarettes for the last hour, was being kept wait-
ing so long for his pantomimic performance. Made up as Dago-
net, in a disguisement learnedly and exquisitely copied from
museum specimens of mediaeval costume, Paul Capporelli was
now engaged in a lively conversation with Persephone Spear,
by whose personality, in her blue robe and red bodice, as the
Virgin Mother, he had clearly been fascinated. But the Dubliners
were full of annoyance over this protracted conversation be-
tween their precious Fool and this very local Madonna.

The conversation between Barter and the Taunton police force
had ended in the latter taking their stand all along the hedge to
prevent any more of the mob from entering from that unau-
thorised direction. But there were enough now of the irrespon-
sible element, crowding up behind the assembled strikers, to
make things look very threatening. These newcomers were by no
means of the sort to be stopped by the waving of Miss Drew's
green parasol, and between them and Mother Legge, who was
sitting at the end of the sixth row, there had already begun a
volley of scurrilous badinage that showed every sign of starting
a really unpleasant contretemps. Things indeed had reached that
stage--it was already nearly three o'clock and there was noth-
ing to see on the stage but two gilded thrones and the great Pen-
dragon flag--when the smallest spark, like the accident of Mother
Legge and her Rabelaisian tongue being on the extreme west
of the audience, might have led to a general pandemonium, out of
which, with all these foreigners already getting nervous and
irritable, it would have been impossible to get back to any sort
of order. Such a spark seemed now to have been really struck,
not by Mother Legge, but by the arrival upon the scene of the
Marquis of P.

It was the manner of this nobleman's approach that started
the trouble. Completely unaware of the arrival of the real Peo-
ple of Glastonbury upon the field, my Lord had taken it into
his head to have himself driven by Sergeant Blimp in a light
dog-cart, over from Mark Court. Taking for granted that his
daughter was keeping a seat for him--as indeed she had written
to say she would do--Lord P. told Blimp to drive him straight
round the field--they entered it from a gate at the town-end--
till he reached the front row of seats and there drop him. "'You
can go," he had said, i£ to the Pilgrims' then, Blimp, and put up.
I'll walk round there later."

Now Sergeant Blimp, although he would have submitted to
torture rather than have slept in Merlin's room, had no fear of
a mob. So when it became obvious that there was a mob--and a
rather dangerous-looking one, between them and their objective--
the Sergeant cracked his whip and trotted his tall black horse
all the more resolutely. Then the disturbance which had been
on the edge of breaking out for so long really did seem inevi-
table. Hundreds of angry voices were raised; people who were
further off pushed others who were nearer, right into the path
of the dog-cart; sticks were brandished, and if stones were not
thrown it was rather due to the fact that there were none in
that grassy field than to any want of a will to throw them! Lord
P., though courted by the Wessex bourgeoisie, was--for certain
particular reasons--detested by its proletariat; and his appear-
ance at this juncture gave this latter a chance that was not
likely to be repeated. In all human communities--indeed in all
human groups--there are strange atavistic forces that are held
in chains deep down under the surface. Like the imprisoned
Titans, these Enceladuses and Sisyphuses and Briareuses, dwell
in the nether depths of human nature ready to break forth in
blind scoriac fury under a given touch. In these violent up-
heavals of class against class there is something far deeper than
principle or opinion at stake. Skin against skin...blood against
blood...nerves against nerves...rise up from incalculable depths.

Lord P. himself was not less than astounded at the intensity
of the feeling that his figure in that dog-cart by the side of
his placid servant excited in this mob. It was as if everything
in these people's lives that they had suffered from...indiffer-
ence...neglect...contempt...cold malignant distaste...fastidious
disgust...everything that had weighed on them, day by day, in
a tacit conspiracy to press them down and keep them down,
suddenly incarnated itself in that grizzled man with the small
pointed grey beard and big wrinkled nose. Lord P. was abso-
lutely startled, and, though by no means a coward, he was
even a little frightened, by the looks he caught on some
of the womens faces in that surging mass of people.

While his black horse plunged and reared in its harness, while
men tugged at its bridle and tried to pull the reins out of
Blimp's hands, while there was danger not only of the shafts
of the cart being broken but of the whole equipage being upset,
he caught on the face of one woman from Paradise--she was a
remote cousin, by the way, of Abel Twig--a look of such insane
ferocity, free from every other feeling, that a spasm of sheer
panic seized upon him. It was one of those moments that are
apt to occur in the most carefully regulated communities. My
Lord was no longer under the protection of an invisible net-
work of magnetic wires. He was a man, and a man acquainted
with fear. But what had frightened him was not the violence of
other men. What had frightened him was a glance into a black
crater. For that black crater possessed eyes, and the Marquis
of P., clinging to his swaying and heaving dog-cart, had looked
into those eyes.

People rarely receive these revelations of the underside of life
unaccompanied by some funny little triviality which, like a
mime or a mommet, goes ever afterward hand in hand with that
chimera. The trivial thing on this occasion was some black
horse-hairs which lay smeared in a little patch against one
of the green shafts now in such eminent danger beng broken.
Black horse-hairs, wet with sweat and sticking to painted wood,
were henceforth always associated in his mind with this deadlv
popular fury surging up out of the cracks and crevices of Tor
Field.

It was impossible for the Taunton police to remain long in
ignorance of the nature of this howling and struggling group of
persons who were apparently hustling two men in a painted cart
and trying to pull them out; but for the next three or four min-
utes their official attention was so completely occupied in hold-
ing back the crowd which kept pouring down the lane from enter-
ing the field that they could not cope with this new trouble.
"Even a Zomerset orficer," as one of them said to Lord P. on a
subsequent occasion, "couldn't be in two carners of the same
girt field at the same time."

It was, however, much easier for Mr. Geard, who was, quite
simply, as he had told his family he would be, surveying matters
from the top of the Tor, to get the full significance of the danger
to Lord P. than it was for Taunton policemen. They were forced
to look up, being fully occupied. He was in a position to look
down, having nothing to do. There would certainly have been a
rush from the bourgeois portion of the native audience to rescue
the hustled nobleman; in fact, his own son, Will Zoyland,
would have been at his side in a couple of minutes; if it had
not been for two things: first, that there was a rise in the ground
to the west of that audience, which prevented them from seeing
what was transpiring over there, and secondly that the long-
expected Pageant nowcommenced in real earnest, absorbing
everyone's attention.

A couple of hundred lads and lasses gorgeously attired in
mediaeval costume marched forth now from the two heraldic pa-
vilions and grouped themselves round the Dragon Flag and
round the twp golden thrones. The body of the dead Elaine was
carried in--never in her life had Crummie looked so lovely--
and the Archbishop of Canterbury accompanied by a Knight
carrying the crown of Britain on a green cushion, stood at the
feet of the dead. Lancelot du Lac leaned against the side of
Queen Gwenevere's throne, while, for those initiated in such mat-
ters, the forms of Sir Percival, Sir Galahad, and Sir Gawain,
clearly distinguishable from one another by the devices on their
shields, could be made out conversing together at the back of
Arthur's throne. To the west of the Queen's throne and at a lit-
tle distance from the rest--as if retaining their own mythical
independence--stood Tristram and Iseult, while, in a position
of ferocious skulking, spying, and murderously tracking down
was King Mark of Cornwall.

In regard to the choice of characters for this first part of the
Pageant there had been no difficulty save for one curious excep-
tion. This exception was Merlin. John had been very anxious
to have a Merlin and so had Edward Athling. Mr. Geard, how-
ever, had steadily and--to the mind of the whole company,
obstinately--refused to allow Merlin to be represented at all.
"But we're going to represent Christ, Daddy," Crummie had
pleaded. "You don't mean to say that Merlin's more sacred than
Christ." Mr. Geard had smiled and shook his head. "Christ was
buried in Jerusalem," was his curious answer; by which John
understood him to mean that while for the world at large Christ
was by far the more sacred, here, in Glastonbury, where he dis-
appeared from view, Merlin must always be the "numen" or
the "Tremendum Mysterium" that can be second to none.

Mr. Geard had reached the top of the hill by a circuitous route
long before the Pageant was due to begin. The performance was
divided--and the Dubliners had displayed their nicest virtuosity
in the way this had been done--into three parts. All three parts
had a lot of dumb show, a limited amount of dialogue and a
great many choral songs. But the point in which the high tech-
nical skill of the Dubliners was most revealed was in the manner
in which the Pageant was fused and blended with the Passion
Play, the two together forming a trilogy to which a strange and
original unity had been given by the role played by Arthur's
Fool. The Dubliners, with Irish audacity, had given Capporelli
the leading role in all three parts, and by an artful reversal of
chronology in the interests of symbolism, the thing began with
the latest epoch of time and worked back to the earliest. Thus
the opening dealt with the Arthurian Cycle, the interlude with
the Passion of Christ, and the conclusion with the ancient Cym-
ric Mythology, Capporelli being Dagonet in the first, Momus, a
comic Roman soldier in the second, and none other than the
bard Taliessin in the third.

In the intervals of their violent quarrels with Athling the Dub-
liners had worked very enthusiastically with him over these
mystical effects. Athling had indulged himself with a passionate
wistfulness in the kind of poetry he had made up his mind to
forsake, but the new note, the modern note that was so obnox-
ious to Lady Rachel, had forced its way in. and had given a biz-
arre and even an uncomfortable twist to many scenes of this
strange Pageant. This was especially the case with the scenes
in which Capporelli entered, and the great clown consenting to
use several poignant and mocking apothegms composed by the
Middiezoy poet had added to them certain curious touches of his
own. There was such a distance between the grassy ledge where
the performance took place and the front row of seats that the
voices of individual players were liable to be blown away upon
the wind. This .was. however, compensated for by a printed libretto
which the audience could read while they enjoyed the dancing,
the studied gestures, the symbolic ritual, of the trilogy.

Mr. Geard had many deep and strange feelings as he watched
the gathering crowd from the top of the Tor. He had found
quite a large group of noisy lads up there when he reached the
top, but, knowing the Mayor by sight, they had hurriedly
shogged off, running down the hill at top speed to join in the
sport of baiting the policemen where the booths and caravans
stood in a line under the hedge and where ginger-pop was to be
sold. All except one. This was the small offspring of Solly Lew,
the taxi-driver, a grave little boy called Steve, who had mani-
fested for Mr. Geard the moment he appeared the peculiar fas-
cination that a child will sometimes display for a formidable
middle-aged man. Mr. Geard, finding himself alone with this
child on the summit of the great haunted hill, the hill of Gwvn-
ap-Nud, the Welsh Fairy-Demon, the hill where Abbot Whiting
had been so bloodily murdered, called Steve to his side and made
him sit down with him under the tower.

It was indeed upon a remarkable scene that Mr. Geard and
his small companion looked down now as they surveyed the
verdurous undulations of those island-Valleys--Ynys Witrin.
Ynys Avallach, Insula Avallonia the land of Modred, Melwas,
Meleagnant, Mellygraunce, Aestiva Regio, Insula Pomorum.
Gwlad yr Hav, Insula Vitrea, Isle de Voirre, yr Echwyd, Glast,
Glastenic, Glastonia, Glaston--over which the intense sky, that
Midsummer Day, seemed actually to he bowing down, bowing
and bending and battening upon those lovely green undulations,
as if the greatest and most powerful of all created Beings was
taking His pleasure with the sweet grass-scented earth.

The crowds of people seated on the chairs and benches in the
centre of the bottom of the field resembled a magician's carpet
that Mr. Geard by his incantations from up there under St.
Michael's Tower had caused to be laid down. He himself now,
like a modern Gwyn-ap-Nud, surveyed his astonishing evoca-
tion with a silent gratitude, with an up-welling feeling of fulfil-
ment, deep as that fount of red water whose flowing he could
detect at the foot of the opposite hill. The hats and garments and
parasols of the feminine element in his audience--for they were
all dressed for summer weather that day--caused the great ex-
pectant crowd to resemble, spread out upon the grass, that many-
coloured coat which the original nomadic Joseph had received
of his father Jacob. Westward of the crowd Mr. Geard could see
the roofs of Glastonbury, looking, with all their bright red tiles,
as if a great wave of spray from the chalybeate fountain had
washed over them. Rising from among these red-tiled roofs he
could see the massive tower of St. John's and the lesser tower
of St. Benignus'. These two towers from any distance were, with
the one under which he sat, the characteristic land-marks of the
place, for the Abbey Ruins, although to a careful scrutiny they
were just distinguishable among the trees, were unable to stand
out in clear relief.

Mr. Geard now cast his eyes upon a long, low tent, one of
the biggest tents that he himself had ever seen, which he had
caused to be set up under the hedge, to the northwest of where
the audience was seated, and on the opposite side of the en-
trance from where stood the line of caravans. Inside this big
tent, which was really five or six tents thrown into one, Mr
Geard had prepared a substantial tea--and not only a tea. He
had used as his caterer the landlord of a Glastonbury Inn that
overlooked the cattle-market and had many historic associations,
and this man had brought over from his cellar an enormous
amount of liquour of every kind. This man. whose name was
Dickery Cantle, had the peculiarity of being the weakest and
most helpless human creature that Mr. Geard had ever seen. The
Cantles had handed down this inn from father to son for no less
than four generations. Rumour says that the recruiters for Mon-
mouth's rebellion used to meet here, and that John Locke, uncle
of the first Recorder of Glastonbury, used to sit, of a summer
evening, on the wooden bench outside, drinking gin and cider,
while he meditated upon the pragmatic limitations of the human
spirit.

Dickery Cantle would never have suceeded in avoiding ruin
if it had not been that his stomach was so weak that the least
touch of alcohol made him vomit. His wife was not a woman
of much more energy than her husband and it was notorious
in the town that while their cellar was celebrated for the rare
and high quality of its wines their personal table often lacked
meat and they could not afford to buy new shoes for their only
child, Elphin. Mr. Geard would never have undertaken to pro-
vide such extensive preparations for his audience if he had
not been struck one day by the wasted consumptive look of
Elphin Cantle. This chance encounter, when he was drinking in
their bar, had remained in his mind. "I'll give those Canties
some business," he had told Megan; and this big tent was the
result.

But the eyes of Mr. Geard now turned westward, and in turn-
ing in that direction they caught sight of the mob surrounding
the green-wheeled dog-cart; & scene that was visible to him from
the Tor's summit, although quite invisible to the spectators of
the Pageant.

"They be pulling they chaps out of thik cart. Mister," Steve
Lew remarked; and Mr. Geard very quickly realised to whom
the green dog-cart and the big black horse must belong. Seldom
has an elderly man raced down a hill more quickly than Bloody
Johnny ran now. "He was only just in time," Steve said to
Elphin Cantle afterwards as he was helping him open bottles
and hand round beer-mugs. "Yon Mayor be a good 'un for a fast
sprint, looksee, spite o' his girt belly! 'Twas all I could do to
keep pace wi' he!"

It is always difficult to disentangle the element of pure chance
from the other forces that bring about any startling event, from
the pressure, for instance, of that mysterious undertide that we
call Destiny, or from the creative energy spontaneously gener-
ated, from the central point of its absolute freedom, in the will
of a living organism. What happened now seemed to submerge
Mr. Geard's personal prestige among that crowd, his official
position as Mayor of the Town, as well as the extraordinary mag-
netic power that always burned at any dangerous crisis in his
unholy eyes. Certainly his advance towards the swaying dog-cart
and the plunging horse, when once he approached the scene,
was not an easy one. One ruffian from the slums of Street, down
by the banks of the Brue, struck him in the face with a stick
leaving a bleeding mark across his white, moist, flabby cheek.
A woman from Butts Close--she was a sister of Tom Barter's
landlady, but a more reckless sort of character--dragged at his
clothes and tore his waistcoat open, so that the grey flannel shirt
(that he never would let Megan send to the wash more than
once a fortnight and that he insisted on wearing summer and
winter alike) hung out almost indecently over the front part
of his trousers. It must be remembered that between this surg-
ing mob around Lord P. and the original crowd of invaders of
the field, who had now subsided into quiescence about their
banners, there was a protuberant rib of the hillside which pre-
vented both the Dye-Works strikers and the seated audience from
seeing what was going on. Red Robinson, whose seething and
fermenting " 'ate" had, it almost seemed, been paralysed by the
mere waving of Miss Drew's green parasol, was now drifting
with baffled fury from one to another of the banner-bearers,
cajoling, commanding, imploring, entreating them, like a dis-
tracted leader in a lost battle, to rush forward and invade the
grassy eminence where the coronation of King Arthur was now
triumphantly proceeding, teasing him, mocking him, a veritable
charade of Tantalus, with its glittering and fantastical fooling.
Lord P/s fate depended, therefore, as in most physical struggles
between bewildered human antagonists, upon the configuration
of the ground. If Mr. Geard had not been playing, quite uncon-
sciously, the primeval role of Gwyn-ap-Nud, the old Welsh
Prince of Darkness, and enjoying the spectacle he had wrought
from the summit of Tor, Lord P. would certainly have come to
grief and there would have doubtless appeared some modern
Judge Jeffreys holding grim inquisition into a popular uprising.
As it was, Mr. Geard's desperate struggle to reach the besieged
dog-cart created such a hurly-burly of shouts and counter-shouts,
of imprecations and protestations, that the Taunton police guard-
ing the hedge caught the clamour on the wind and came rushing
across the grassy hillocks to intervene.

It was the sight of these officers' helmets above the heads of
the rioters that, when he recalled his sensations later, remained
with Mr. Geard as the most sinister of his impressions. His other
impressions, the dazzling sunshine, the blue sky, the trodden
grass, the stink of human sweat and foul garments, the taste of
his own blood from his bleeding cheek, the sight of the green
wheels tipped up on one side and spinning round, the hoofs of
the black horse pawing the air, the unmoved countenance of
Sergeant Blimp, the panic in the eyes of the Marquis, the con-
fusion of human arms and legs and contorted faces through
which he struggled and sweated and fought and tore his way,
left upon his mind rather a sense of exhilaration than anything
else. Mr. Geard was one of those men whose physical phlegm
is so thick and deep that it requires a series of material shocks
to rouse the full awareness in them of the taste and tang of life.
Something in him--some savage atavistic reversion to his heathen
ancestors--had tasted blood in this tossing melee of sweating,
dragging, resisting human bodies. The moments when infuriated
women--their bodies forced into contact with his body by pres-
sure from behind--clung to his plump figure, tearing, scratch-
ing, clinging, striking, shrieking, were moments of a wild physi-
cal exultation. Mr. Geard panted like a dog. The spittle from
his thick sensual lips mingling with the blood from his hurt cheek
trickled down his chin. With heaving chest, straining limbs, and
bare head--for he had now lost his hat--he struggled blindly
forward, those spinning green wheels, those almost vertical green
shafts, the scared eyes of the Marquis, drawing him forward, like
the jutting out of a wharf with a swinging lamp in a turbulent
sea. His big mouth was wide open now as he fought his way on,
the black fire in his eyes burned with a terrible glee, his pant-
ings became like the pantings of that beast called the Questing
Beast in the legends. Guttural noises, different from mere human
breathings, rose from his tormented lungs.

The curious thing was, however, that Mr. Geard's mind had
never been calmer or clearer in its working than at that mo-
ment. "This is Life!" he thought to himself; and something like
a sobbed-out chuckle rose up from the pit of his labouring belly.
His old refrain--"Blood of Christ--Blood of Christ--Blood of
Christ"--drummed in his throat and blent itself with his bestial
groanings and with his Hengist-and-Horsa chucklings. As he beat
his way on, reeling, staggering, stumbling, his queer battle-
frenzy increased rather than diminished. "This is Life!" he said
to himself, with exactly the same clear awareness of the enjoy-
ment he was getting, as if he had been a sturdy swimmer in
huge wave-bursts of tossing surf. And there gradually arose in
his consciousness a very queer notion, the feeling, namely, that
what he was doing now was not rescuing a frightened aristocrat
from a mob, but rescuing the Blood of Christ from loss, from
destruction, from annihilation. The fancy lodged itself in his
brain--quite cool and clear above his pantings--that if he could
only touch one of those upheaved green shafts with his hand, if
he could only get his fingers on the bridle of that rearing black
horse, he would prevent the Blood of Christ from sinking into
the deep earth and being lost forever! "Yes, yes, yes," he
thought, "I'll build a Saxon arch about the Chalice Well--a
round Saxon arch!" And then it was that he caught sight of
the helmets of Philip Crow's policemen.

The sight of these officials completely broke up his mood. It
was a policeman's hand--not his hand--that dragged down
those green shafts. It was a policeman's arm--not his arm--that
brought to earth the rearing front hoofs of the black horse. It
was between a couple of Philip's policemen, too, that Lady
Rachel's father was now standing, angrily stroking his beard
and gazing round vindictively in order to point out to the officials
the worst offenders and ring-leaders of the crowd. Not as yet had
the officers of the law laid hands upon anyone, but it was clear
to the exhausted and disconcerted Mayor that this was what
they were now thinking of doing. Many of the crowd were evi-
dently of the same opinion, for they were beginning to sneak
off with extraordinary celerity, each of the retreating ones as-
suming an absent-minded air with regard to immediate phe-
nomena and an intensely interested air with regard to pressing
events which demanded their presence upon the far horizon.

Mr. Geard, disappointed though he was, and with no fire left
in his eyes, now pulled himself together. He tucked his shirt
back into its proper place. He took out his handkerchief and
wiped the blood from his cheek. He buttoned his coat tightly
under his chin. Then he advanced, although with tottering steps
and heaving lungs, and presented himself before Lord P. His
Lordship welcomed him warmly. Luckily he took it at once for
granted that it was by his anxiety for the safety of the patron
of his Pageant that he had caused these officials--like the war-
riors of Cadmus--to spring out of the earth. "Well, Mr. Mayor,"
he began, "this is indeed--" Philip's policemen, hearing the
word "Mayor" and seeing Lord P. shake hands so warmly with
this perspiring, panting, hatless member of the crowd, became
convinced that they were in the presence of another distinguished
victim of this breaking of His Majesty's peace.

Mr. Geard's brain now moved very actively as he shook hands
with Sergeant Blimp, a thing which he did quite as warmly as
the Sergeant's master had done with himself. He spoke in an
authoritative voice, conveying the impression to both the noble-
man and the policemen that he was accustomed to order officials
about. "One or two of you take his Lordship to his seat. It's the
front row. Lady Rachel is keeping it for him. The performance
has begun."

"Won't you yourself--" began Lord P.

"No," said Mr. Geard abruptly; and he surprised the owner
of the dog-cart by clambering up into the high seat along with
Blimp who was already once more in possession of horse and
reins. "I presume he's going to put up at the Pilgrims', eh?" he
said.

"You're not deserting your own show, Geard?"

"Seen enough of it for a while," replied Mr. Geard. "I may come
back before it's finished though. I want to hear how you've
enjoyed it."

Blimp's hands were on the reins to pull the vehicle round.

"You won't mind if I use your cart for a minute before he
takes it back to town?"

"Not at all, Geard, not at all," Lord P. rejoined, "as long as
you don't ask me to get up again!" He uttered these last words
with a grimace that was clearly intended to make a jest of his
recent attack of nerves. Not a soul had seen the fear in his eyes
except Mr. Geard and possibly Sergeant Blimp, but it was char-
acteristic of the man to make a point of honour of this humorous
confession.

"Yes, the front row, officer," the Mayor added, in answer to
one of the policemen. "Lady Rachel is keeping a seat for him."
He laid his bare hand on Blimp's neatly gloved one. "Wait a
little," he murmured. "I want him to get well ahead."

"Right you are, your Worship," said the sergeant.

"You two had a near shave," said Mr. Geard.

"Tut, tut! 'Twere nothing to the dust I've seen kicked up in my
time," replied the sergeant. "His Lordship ain't as young a man
as he was ten years ago."

"A mob's a nasty thing," said Mr. Geard, giving the man such
an understanding glance that Blimp answered with a wink.

"His nerves ain't what they were," he said. The Mayor looked
round. It was extraordinary how quickly the crowd had scattered.

"I don't want any arrests made, nor does Lord P.," he re-
marked emphatically to a policeman who was holding their
horse's head. The animal was still trembling a little.

The man touched his helmet. "As your Worship wishes."

"Drive after your master. Sergeant," Mr. Geard directed, "but
not fast. I want to see him safely in his seat."

The policeman let go of the bridle and the green-wheeled dog-
cart set off at a walking pace towards the scene of the Pageant.
They soon reached a spot from which it was possible to get a
clear view of both audience and performers. ''Pull her up a
second, Sergeant." The man obeyed, and they waited till they
could observe the figure of Lord P., with the two policemen
close behind him, threading their way through the crowd of
strikers. When they had disappeared, "Drive over to that tent
if you don't mind," commanded the Mayor.

Arrived at the entrance to his huge refreshment pavilion, Mr.
Geard told Steve Lew, who had now resumed his fascinated at-
tendance, to run in and ask Mr. Cantle to come out. It was now
the destiny of Sergeant Blimp to set eyes on the feeblest, weak-
est, most worried and most bewildered caterer he had ever seen,
or ever desired to see. "I'm going to send you some guests of
my own straight away, Dickery," said the Mayor. "Treat 'em
well. Don't let 'em get drunk. And turn 'em out without fail
before five o'clock. All out before five o'clock!"

Dickery Cantle, whose eyes were a pale, light, moist blue,
and whose beard was straggly and thin and like bleached tow,
was so surprised at the sight of the green cart and black horse
that he could only open his mouth and blink.

"Is Elphin inside?" enquired Mr. Geard. Steve Lew heard
this, if Elphin's parent didn't, and the young Cantle with his
thin legs in black Sunday stockings soon made his appearance.
"Tell your mother and her people that I'm going to send her
some guests for refreshments in a minute. Tell her 'beer and
wine and sandwiches' and tell her all out before five, will you,
Elphin? All out by five! I don't want 'em to clash with the
other people."

Elphin Cantle's blue eyes--not pale blue like his father's,
who was now muttering something quite incoherent about
"brands" and "vintages"--but deep blue like the broad sky
above them, gleamed with intelligent understanding. "Am I to
tell Mother any...any sum...that your Worship wants...would
wish...her...to " he began.

"Tell her--'all that's reasonable,' " pronounced Mr. Geard
emphatically.

Elphin's blue eyes deepened in colour till they grew nearly
black. Then brushing some dust from his legs, thin as matches,
--those poor emaciated legs that were the fons et origo of this
big tent--he lifted up his face. "Mother will understand. Mother
thanks you from her heart, your Worship! Come, Father!" he
added.

Dickery Cantle followed Elphin into the tent, as did also Steve
Lew, bestowing on the Mayor before he departed a final glance
of fanatical devotion.

The green-wheeled dog-cart drove off now. It encircled the
seated audience from whose throats excited and vociferous ap-
plause was now arising as the King and Queen with their great
golden crowns upon their heads rose from their thrones and
moved to the side of the Lady of Shalott.

The movement of the Dye-Works factory-hands, with their
protestant allies and their secular banners, had not been missed
by Mr. Geard. All the way down that hillside--as he was racing
to the rescue of the Marquis--he was thinking desperately how
to cope with this menacing invasion. He could catch, as Blimp
trotted his horse along the edge of the vast concourse of people,
the constant murmurs of "Order! Order! Hush! Hush!" ad-
dressed to these men, who continued to talk loudly among them-
selves, even though the poles of their banners were now planted
in the earth. When they came level with the row of seats at the
end of which sat Mother Legge, Mr. Geard called upon Blimp
to pull up. Here they waited, watching for the close of the scene
on the grassy stage above. It was near the end. After a second or
two of waiting, it ended, and the play-actors, well contented
with the ovations they had just received, marched off to their
respective pavilions.

A general buzz of excited talk ran through the whole mass
of people. The dog-cart had drawn up close to where Mrs. Legge
and Blackie Morgan were sitting. Between their horse's head
and the ends of the first five rows of seats was the back of a
banner, the poles of which Tested on the grass, carrying the
words, "Down with Mummery!" These words Mr. Geard now
contemplated, as he acknowledged the salutations of the people
near enough to recognise him. Mother Legge herself made an
airy gesture with her black-gloved hand, that was almost as if
she kissed the tips of her fingers to the Mayor of Glastonbury,
and many of the seated crowd looked towards him and nodded
towards him as they continued their boisterous clapping, direct-
ing their applause to the organiser of the performance as much
as to the players.

The crowd of Dye-Works strikers was obviously ill at ease at
this juncture. The big audience behind them had time now to
concentrate their attention on these men, whose banners, "Down
with Religion!" "Down with Capital!" "Down with Mummery!"
flapped beside them in the warm summer wind. Several of
Philip's policemen were now standing about, surveying these
revolutionary scrolls with humorous detachment, but Mr. Geard
observed one of these officers edge himself in front of the knees
of the people in the second row, till he came behind Lord P.,
into whose ear he whispered something, something that made the
Marquis turn round and glance at the strikers.

The applause had been prolonged by the foreigners long after
it had ceased among the native-born, but it died down now and
a general murmur of conversation all over the big audience took
its place in the midst of which some very curious and surprising
preparations were going on on the stage in front of them all. A big
wooden cross was brought out, from which were hanging thick
ropes, like those used on shipboard, twisted loosely round its
cross-beams, and this object was laid on the ground, where the
thrones of Arthur and Gwenevere had formerly been, beside a
capacious hole that had been dug to receive it. Across the faces
of the audience was blown at intervals the warm sun-sweet smell
of trodden grass and mingled with this the pungent smell of
nicotine from the short clay pipes which many of the strikers--
quiet, patient family-men--had lit to cheer their suspense.

It was at this moment that the voice of Red Robinson was
heard in shrill penetrating tones. Red got hold of a chair and
had jumped up upon it. From this elevation he began to scream
forth a hurried torrent of abuse, raising his hands high into the
air and making them tremble there, using in fact that particular
gesture which has become almost a convention with street-orators,
but which still retains a power that has its own peculiar quality.

Mr. Geard saw two or three policemen pushing their way to-
wards this shouting man. "Give him five minutes, officers, if you
please!" This command from the green dog-cart was flung out
in those stentorian tones which used to be the delight of the
slums in Bloody Johnny's revivalistic meetings.

The officers stopped, turned, and remained motionless, glanc-
ing alternatively at Lord P., seated by his daughter's side, and
at the bare-headed Mayor in Lord P.'s cart.

"You Wessex people who 'ave come 'ere to 'ear this folly,
listen to me! And you, foreign people, who have come from hover
the seas to see this folly, listen to me! And you, Glastonbury
comrades, who know what this folly is, listen to me! High 'ave
only one thing to say this harfternoon! The capitalistic system
of society is doomed. In a 'undred years from now, private
property in Glastonbury will be hun-known! This 'ere new Mayor
of hours is no better than the light one and has for Crow hup
there with 'is blasted airpline--" He jumped down hurriedly
from his chair and took refuge within the close-packed ranks of
his friends, for the enraged figure of Lord P. standing erect now
and calling furiously upon the policemen to stop him had coun-
teracted the command from the green cart and the officers had
moved towards him. It was then that Dave Spear jumped up
from his seat and lifted up his voice.

"This man," shouted Spear, "may have been too angry to
choose his words as he ought. But what he says is true! Human-
ity will soon--" At the scholarly intonation of the young philos-
opher all the Germans in the audience--who were the ones who
knew English best--leaned forward, listening gravely and in-
tently. Indeed they cried out in guttural protest against some
nasal French voices lifted up in derision of Spear's words, and
for a moment it looked as if the old hostility between Gothic
blood and Mediterranean blood would burst out that day in
Urbs Vitrea under Gwyn-ap-Nud's mischievous rogueries! The
particular tone Spear plunged into at once, so earnest and so
academic, and his introduction of the word "humanity," be-
guiled the Russians who were present--all except the monks from
the Caucasus who took him for a devilish heretic--and brought
them over to his side. The Spanish contingent, which was un-
usually large, agreed on the contrary very strongly with the
French and joined the French in calling angrily upon the young
man to sit down.

But Dave Spear, in spite of cries of "Order!", "Silence!",
"Turn him out!" refused to sit down. "Humanity will soon,"
he shouted, "be no longer Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Rus-
sians! We shall all be men and women--working for ourselves
--not for the rich--in one great community of Comrades!" The
clamour round him got now so confused that it became impos-
sible to out-shout it, and after calmly surveying the whole crowd
with his eyes and watching them as if he were a shepherd
counting his sheep, Dave Spear sat down.

The group of strikers from the Crow Works were now thrown
into a most awkward and uncomfortable position. The bulk
of them had no sympathy with the communistic opinions of their
leaders. They were unable to enjoy "thik open air theayter" as
they regarded it, because of their near neighbourhood to the
gentry. At the same time, being honest Somerset workingmen,
they were reluctant to desert their flags. One of the most digni-
fied among them, a certain Josh Witcombe from Queen's Camel,
articulated the thoughts of the majority among them when he
said to himself--"What in the name of crikey be I doing here?
A danged fool I be, when I might be digging taties, in me bit o'
garden, this fine holiday! This ere Crow be a bloody blighter.
There ain't two opinions about that, but what be all this high-
falutin' palaver got to do wi' I? Crikey! I wish I were sittin'
peaceful-like in me back-garden, watching me sweet peas how
girt they be grown! This here Glaston will never be a place
for quiet folk to enjoy theyselves in, till both this blighter Crow
and this blighter Geard be drove out o' town."

Mr. Geard was not oblivious of the growing discomfort of
this body of worthy men. Left to themselves now by both agita-
tors and police they were being subjected to the animosity of an
increasing number of the audience, who had come to regard
their presence at the field at all as a lugubrious spoil-sport.
Mr. Geard now made Blimp drive my Lord's cart forward, about
twice its own length, till it was in the very centre of this sulky
and disconcerted crowd. Then he stood up in the cart with his
hand on the sergeant's shoulder. "Gentlemen," he began.

All eyes were turned towards him. He managed to temper his
voice so that it was only audible to the mem he was addressing..
It was an immense relief to him to observe that Elphin Cantle
had joined his young adherent Steve Lew, and that both the boys
were standing now close up to one of the green wheels of his
cart. "Gentlemen," he repeated. "I'm sorry that you should have
come out today only to find things unsatisfactory. I am the
Mayor of this town and I wish all Glastonbury people to enjoy
themselves today. I have told Mr. Cantle down there in that
tent,"--he waved one of his plump hands in the direction of the
hedge--"that I wish him to give all you men of the Crow Dye-
Works something to eat and drink at my expense. Elphin Cantle
I see is here. He'll show you where to go. Take them with you,
Elphin!" Then, as an after thought, he added, "'Twill be a shame
on ye all, and a disgrace to your Mayor, if the good liquour that's
in yon tent be taken back to cellar!"

There was a moment's hesitation, and then Mr. Burt of Stoke-
sub-Ham spoke up. "Three cheers for the Mayor of Glaston-
bury!" he cried. At once another voice in the crowd was raised,
but it was impossible for Mr. Geard to identify him--"Three
cheers for Bloody Johnny!" The cheers were somewhat nerv-
ously and somewhat shamefacedly given, and the big audience
of seated people extending now as far down almost as the hedge
craned their necks to see what new thing now was toward.

Suddenly Mat Dekker rose from where he sat by his son's
side. "Three cheers for the Mayor of Glastonbury who has given
us this " His voice was drowned in a terrific volley of applause.

In every great audience there is a certain accumulation of
magnetic emotion which seems to store itself up, as if in great
invisible tanks, above the people's heads. Mat Dekker's words
had turned the tap of these psychic reservoirs. The crowd lost
its head altogether in its excitement. It had been stirred already
by the romance of the Arthurian scene and by the rich, poignant
fooling, in amazing dumb-show, of the inspired French clown.
Dave Spear's revolutionary speech had increased this tension,
and it now broke loose in a whirlwind of excitement. Women
waved their handkerchiefs and kissed their hands; men jumped
upon their chairs and shouted; children yelled and screamed.
The vague rumours that had hovered about the figure of Mr.
Geard helped to intensify this demonstration. Those in the front
seats who had heard his speech to the striking dye workers and
had been hopelessly shocked were swept along on the current.
Lady Rachel clapped long and desperately, her cheeks white
with excitement, her eyes flashing with girlish ecstasy. The Mar-
quis wore the expression of a far-sighted statesman who has had
recourse to some irresponsible prophet. Old Mother Legge's
spacious and maternal bosom--the bosom of an immoral earth-
mother--was heaving with unsuppressed sobs. Mrs. Geard too
was crying uncontrollably. But Cordelia sat straight up in her
chair. Her eyes were fixed in miserable fascination upon that
great wooden cross lying upon the grass. When the noise died
down a little, Mr. Geard got up upon his feet for the second
time that day in Lord P.'s high dog-cart.

"What will he say?" thought Lady Rachel. "What the deuce
will old Johnny do now?" thought the Marquis. "I would not be
in Geard's shoes for something," whispered Mat Dekker to Sam.

Mr. Geard cleared his throat. Then he bent down over his
impassive driver upon whose shoulder he was pressing heavily.
"The moment I sit down, you drive off, Sergeant," he whis-
pered, "and make her go too!" Then rising to his full height and
throwing back his head he lifted his free arm high into the air.
And there fell upon that enormous mass of people one of those
tremendous and awe-inspiring silences that seem as if they were
supported, like dim catafalques of expectation, by unseen spir-
itual hands. Not unto us," he shouted in slow reverberating
tones, "not unto us be the Glory for this great Day but unto...
unto--" he was enough of a Cagliostro, enough of the charlatan
they accused him of being, deliberately to pretend to hesitate at
this point. It was a subtle oratorical trick and was not defrauded
of its effect--"unto...unto the Christ of Glastonbury!" He
sank back in his seat by the side of Sergeant Blimp, who, since
there was no question of encountering Merlin's ghost was as cool
as he would have been at a Royal garden-party. In a second the
green-painted wheels were revolving at a dizzy pace and the
dog-cart was whirling off westwards, over the grassy slopes of
the great field, as if it had entered a desperate race with some
fairy chariot of Gwyn-ap-Nud.

"I hope Blimp will breathe her a bit before the end of the
field," whispered the Marquis to his daughter.

"Hush, Father!" rejoined the girl. "Do be quiet. The Passion
Play is beginning."

The girl was right. Not oblivious of the dramatic effect of
allowing their sacred interlude to follow quickly on the heels
of Geard's last words John Crow had taken upon himself ob-
livious as to whether the Dubliners or Ned Athling or Paul
Capporelli were ready--to give the sign to begin. And the begin-
ning of their elaborately rehearsed "Mystery" was really a very
impressive spectacle.

The Dye-Works strikers, however, saw nothing of it. Turning
their backs to it altogether and this lime followed instead of led,
by the banner denouncing "Mummery," they made their way
hurriedly down the hill towards the big refreshment tent. Elphin
and Steve--this latter delighted to play so prominent a part in
the affairs of Mr. Geard--ran on in front of them to warn the
Canties of their arrival.

It was at this point that all eyes were concentrated upon the
stage. And there entered upon it first a legion of Roman sol-
diers marching behind their centurion, then--issuing forth from
the other pavilion--the chief priests and rulers of the Jewish
people, and finally, approaching by himself, attended only by
Momus, the comic Roman soldier who served as his bodyguard,
the Procurator of Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate. The part of Pontius
Pilate was played by the assistant schoolmaster in St. Benignus'
church-school, a man who had been chosen for this part by the
eloquent Dr. Sodbury largely on account of his imposing coun-
tenance, a countenance which in its juristic dignity might cer-
tainly have belonged to the supercilious Procurator of Judea.
The Roman legionaries grouped themselves around Pilate who
now, accompanied by his bodyguard Momus, ascended the
wooden rostrum or judgment-seat.

"It's like a magnified Punch-and-Judy show," whispered Will
Zoyland to Nell; nor were the Bastard's words without point,
for in their mutual elevation above the soldiers, and above the
group of Jewish Elders who stood apart from the soldiers, the
figures of Pilate and Momus appeared to be isolated in a a gro-
tesque Punchinello-like proscenium.

Nell made no reply. She was wondering what Sam was feeling
at this moment while Momus-Capporelli was out-jesting Pontius
Pilate in that ridiculous puppet-box, and players and audience
alike were awaiting breathlessly the appearance of the con-
demned God-Man. If she had known what Sam was feeling her
heart would have been less heavy than it was. For such was
the contradictoriness of human emotion that the soldiers' Roman
swords and the elders' turbans made the whole thing so fan-
tastic and unreal to him that in his bitter coldness and deep
melancholy his heart turned wistfully to Nell and her child.
His father sitting by his side felt the same sort of distaste; only
with him it was more positive. Both these big, bare-headed men
--for though the sun was smiting them with that mid-afternoon
heat which seems hotter than noon, they held their hats in their
hands--had something in them that felt deep aversion for this
Passion Play. Mat hated it as a silly, frivolous blasphemy. Sam
hated it as a lifeless and ghastly parody upon the death of his
God.

The two Dekkers had less aesthetic feeling in them for per-
formances of this sort than Mr. Whitcombe of Queen's Camel
or Mrs. Legge of Camelot! Such passionate naturalists were they
that a profound realism, earthy, simple, almost barbarous, re-
duced any theatrical show to something flimsy and childish. They
neither of them could go one psychic inch in sympathy for such
things. What to the father seemed gross profanity, to the son
seemed pure unqualified trifling. They neither of them could
catch any stage-illusion in the whole thing. What they now be-
held was simply "old Sodbury's schoolmaster dressed up as a
Roman Governor, and that wretched skipping Frenchman, bow-
ing and scraping at his side, and making sacrilegious jokes."

And when escorted by more Roman soldiers and with his
hands tied behind him and an enormous crown of thorns upon
his head, Mr. Evans was led slowly across the grass between the
long-robed Jews and the heathen legionaries, Sam turned round
lo his father with the words--"This is awful, isn't it, Dad? It's
worse than I expected. How can they all sit quiet and put up
with such disgusting tomfoolery?"

But his father was watching a butterfly. "I believe that's a
Clifton Blue," he whispered. "Do look at that little fellow, son;
there! over by that thistle!"

But the effect of the appearance of this Evans-Christ upon
Sam's mind was to assail with one swift, terrible doubt the ascetic
ideal of his whole present life and give him a craving for Nell
that made his bones melt within him. That she should be sitting
near him, now, within a few yards of him, so that by moving
his head he could catch a glimpse of her, gave him a feeling
of her identity that was as sharp as he had ever known. A new
sensation began to lift up its rattlesnake head within him, a tor-
ture that he had hitherto been spared, by reason of his dull
imagination and that "dead nerve" within him. But they were
upon him now, those devil's pincers! They had got him now, by
the umbilical cord in the pit of his stomach! Oh, to think that
Will Zoyland could hear that voice day by day, and could see
her as he had never seen her! For what was one blind, rapturous
night of passion compared with what he had? "I have never,"
Sam thought as he watched the Christ-Evans standing before
Pilate, "seen her bare shoulders ."

It often happens that when real love touches with its quivering
dart the covetousness of desire, some aspect of a girl's body, not
usually associated with amorous dalliance at all, hits her lover's
consciousness with a pathos that is well-nigh intolerable. Thus
although he had given her a child, there came over him, as the
Trial of Christ began before his eyes, a craving that made him
heartsick just once to touch her bare shoulders, just to trace
with his fingertips the line of her bare spine. Though he had
lain with her he had never thought of doing just that. Why hadn't
he? Oh, why hadn't he?

The scene that meant so little to the two Dekkers and so little
to the two Zoylands appeared to be of absorbing interest to
Father Paleologue. Mary was thrilled at his quick, intense, pierc-
ing comments. Every movement that Mr. Evans made roused his
keenest attention. Every word he caught--though he could catch
but few--from Christ or Pilate or Momus or the Chief Priest,
became a text for a rapid volley of hurried criticisms. Even Miss
Drew grew calm under the compelling intellectual charm of the
Byzantine priest and began to feel that there could not be any-
thing very blasphemous going on.

"Has he yet said, 'What is Truth?' enquired Mary with shin-
ing eyes. She felt infinitely relieved at the triumphant success
that John's labours seemed to be winning. She put everything
down to John. Athling, the Dublin people, Capporelli, were com-
pletely discounted in her mind. They might have invented a few
details, a few fancies; it was John's imagination that gave the
whole thing that strange and curious unity which Father Paleo-
logue was now talking about to Miss Drew.

"No, lady, not yet," answered Father Paleologue, "but they
soon will be. There! Didn't you catch that?"

And there came to her ears upon the warm June air, scented
with honeysuckle, as the girl intently listened, those words that
seem to come from some mysterious level of life where the laws
of cause-and-effect have no place--"To this end was I bom , and
for this cause came I into the world , that I should bear witness
unto the truth . Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice."

"It's extraordinary," whispered Father Paleologue, passion-
ately, while a light gust of wind lifted Pilate's famous retort and
carried it over the hill, "how that man acts! He can't be a local
shop-man. I've seen every Passion Play in Europe worth seeing
for the last twenty years. Oberammergau of course isn't the only
one. And I tell you I've never seen anything so convincing as this
man. And he's modern too. He's got that queer modern touch
that's so hard to define. He's a strong, ugly Christ too; and that's
a vast improvement. Do you remember Rembrandt's Christ in
'The Healing of the Sick?' I forget where it is. Rembrandt's idea
of Him was just like this. And it's Biblical too!" And the By-
zantine father quoted in an intense whisper in Mary's ears, "He
hath no comeliness...that men should desire Him."

Athling and the two Dubliners, working together, had man-
aged this world-historical scene in such a way as to mingle Our
Lord's trial before Pilate with His trial before the High Priest,
and by dispensing with the Scourging and with the Stations of
the Cross had made the Crucifixion to follow immediately upon
this synthesised condemnation.

"What is that funny man doing. Robert, in the Judge's pul-
pit?" enquired Mr. Stilly's father of Mr. Stilly. Mr. Stilly hur-
riedly consulted the printed booklet which John had caused to
be placed upon all the seats.

"It says he's Momus, Dad--'a Roman Soldier attending on the
Procurator, who plays a part like that of the Fool in Shakes-
pear's 'Lear.' "

Mr. Stilly's mother now lifted up her high-pitched, querulous
voice, the voice of a woman who "didn't like servants messing
about in her kitchen." "But isn't this the simple Gospel story,
Robert? We don't read of Momus, do we? Or is he in the
Apocrypha?"

"Maria! how can you be so stupid!" whispered Mr. Stilly's
father. "There's no New Testament Apocrypha." Mr. Stilly
vaguely recalled having once, in Old Jones' shop, been shown
something extremely like a New Testament Apocrypha, but out
of piety he kept this recollection sealed up in his heart.

"He's talking now, Robert. He's saying such funny things...
only I can't hear them quite," said old Mrs. Stilly.

Momus-Capporelli had scampered off now from the Procura-
tor's side and was passing from group to group of the Roman
soldiers, among whom he was venting monstrous Aristophanic
jests. Some of these jests were improvised in a fantastical mix-
ture of French argot and what might be called dog-English and
they were accompanied by gestures of a kind more appropriate
to the sawdust floor of a Montparnasse dancing-hall than to the
greensward of Glastonbury Tor.

Lily Rogers began to give expression to her discomfort under
the tension of this tragical-comical fooling. "I wish those sol-
diers would arrest that fellow," she murmured in the ear of her
sister. "Our Glastonbury policeman would have arrested him be-
fore this, only the poor man be so deaf."

"These Taunton officers have no more gumption than a lot of
cassowaries," replied Louie.

But the wise Emma Sly put forward a different point of view,
worthy of the daughter of a Mendip shepherd. "That's the devil
in disguise," she explained. "He's telling all those Romans that
if they don't crucify the Good Lord quick they won't be able to
crucify Him at all."

"This isn't like what Master tells we to say in Creed," re-
marked Penny Pitches to Mr. Weatherwax, "when it says 'suf-
fered under Pontius Pilate.' If there'd been a Zany like this on
Green-Hill-Far-Away Master'd have spoken of it, wouldn't 'un, in
the thirty years I've looked after he?"

"'Twere long agone," remarked the wise gardener. "Maybe
Bible itself have forgotten how 'twere. Them hefty lads be Ro-
mans, 'sknow, and Romans be heathens, and they heathens baint
as reverend as your master, my good gurl. But 'tis queer, honey,
and it do make a man's stomach queasy to see such things. 'Tis
like Saturday afternoon in private bar and yet 'tis like Good
Friday in Church. It makes a person feel sort o' wobbly in his
innards."

The opinion of the Marquis of P. upon the spectacle he was
regarding was little different from that of the old gardener and
the old servant. "I can't stand much more of this chap Momus,"
whispered his Lordship to Lady Rachel. "I want to give the little
brute a good caning and kick him out! What on earth possessed
Geard to allow such a hodge-podge as this?"

"It's my young scaramouch nephew John, Lord P.," said Miss
Elizabeth Crow with an indulgent smile, "who is responsible for
all this. Rachel knows more about it than I do, but it's the new
idea, I believe--isn't it, Rachel?--to bring in, what do you call
it? a sort of classical chorus...only satirical of course instead of
serious."

"I don't...know...quite...what I feel, Miss Crow," whispered Rachel
nervously. "I hope...it was your nephew . . but I'm afraid...there
are...others--" In her heart, for she was torn between her ro-
mantic idealising of Ned Athling and her dislike of his new meth-
ods, she heartily wished that Paul Capporelli had been left in Paris!

"Isn't that young man who's jumping about and playing the
giddy goat, Tewsy," Mrs. Legge was now remarking to her
aged henchman, "the same one that made fun of poor King Mark
just now when he was following his lawful wife?"

"And at Lancelot too, Missus! 'A cocked some fine snooks at
Lancelot when 'a seen 'un try to cuddle up gainst Queen Gwen-
derver's sweet shanks!"

"Hush Tewsy! Even though it be the same, as I think it be,
haven't they what pulls the strings the right to choose the pop-
pets? Old folk like you and me, Tewsy, don't have no idea what
young folks have in their heads these days. Why I heard Mr.
Tom Barter tell as how there weren't a wench in Wollop's--
and that's who Queen Gwendy was--who wouldn't slip off her
skirt if a fellow went the right way about it. 'Twill be bad for
our trade, Tewsy, if this gets worse. Who'll give half a sov-
ereign for a private room when every room can tell the same
tale? That's what I say about such performances as this. 'Tis
spoiling the trade, Tewsy; 'tis spoiling the trade."

"You're one for keeping up the family. Mother, ain't you?"
whispered Blackie wearily.

"Why sure I be, kid, sure I be!" cried the old lady with a
wicked leer. "When all be for all without paying a penny what's
to keep the market going?"

Blackie Morgan held her peace. Her enormous grey eyes fixed
themselves upon the ubiquitous Momus and upon the thorn-
crowned figure, to whose side the clown had now skipped, and
the abysmal disillusionment of her gaze seemed to reduce the
solid bulk of Glastonbury Tor to insubstantial vapour.

"Why is Pontius Pilate lolling like that now against the side
of his ricketty platform?" enquired Tilly Crow of the curator
of the museum.

"I hadn't noticed... there's so much going on at the same
time...I was watching that funny soldier wagging his head at
Christ...but yes, Pilate is lolling as you say. Oh, I see what
he's doing, Mrs. Crow. He's reading! That's a roll of parchment
he's got in his hands. Eh? What's that? He's soliloquising now, I
think."

"Could you hear what he said?" asked Tilly anxiously, just
as she would have asked Emma if she could hear what the
groceryman was saying at the kitchen dooT.

"Something about Epiqurus," replied the curator in a com-
placent voice, keeping a shrewd eye upon the libretto in his hand.
'That roll he's reading is the Logoi of Epicurus, Mrs. Crow."

Tilly was silent. She made a mental note that she would en-
quire of Emma, later on, what sort of a mariner Epicurus was,
that his log-book must needs be dragged in at the Trial of
Jesus.

A beautiful Greek slave now appeared upon the scene carry-
ing a silver ewer full of water. "There it is!" cried Mother Legge.
"There's Miss Kilty's punch bowl! Now I know what Mr. Crow
borrowed it for. Don't 'ee drop it now, you long-haired baggage!
Don't 'ee get thinking so much about your bare legs that you go
and drop me silver bowl!"

Sis Cole, who had been till now wrapped in a cloud of beati-
fied wonder at all she saw, spoke up when she observed this glit-
tering silver object being carried so carefully towards the pensive
Procurator. "Be he feeling sick, Jackie, that King with a coronet
on, and all they gold jingle-jangles? Be she bringing he a basin
to be sick in?"

Jackie was as proud of his knowledge of the history of the
world as the curator had been, as he now replied in his shrill
voice just behind that gentleman's back--" 'Tis Pontius Pilate
a- washing of his hands! There's a picture in school that they
must have took it from. Only 'tis a man in picture, not a gal,
what holds the soap and water for'n."

"Be it Pear's soap, Jackie? I don't see thik soap, Jackie."

"I wants to pee!" interposed Bert at this grave juncture.

The curator's head twisted round, and a look of fury was
launched at the shameless infant. Tilly turned too. "Take him
into the field, girl. Take him into the field at once," she said
sternly.

Sis looked helplessly round. There was a deep hush over that
whole vast audience while the Procurator of Judea dipped his
fingers in Mother Legge's silver bowl. "You've gone and done
it," murmured Sis after an awkward pause, but she was too
honest a little girl to scold the child when from her heart she
thanked all the Powers that it was no longer incumbent upon her
to obey this great lady who sat so close to them.

The Curator ostentatiously lit an Egyptian cigarette. "They
oughtn't bring children to a thing that lasts so long," remarked
Tilly. "They can't contain themselves like older people," and
the good lady gave Sis, behind the curator's indignant back, a
reassuring feminine nod. This nod--the symbol of that secret
freemasonry of unfastidious realism that binds all women to-
gether--comforted Sis amazingly.

Bert continued his rapturous envisaging of the visible world.
The stiff back and protuberant skull of the learned man in front
of him was as much a portion of the great general Pageant as
was the dragging of our Saviour--for Athling and the Dub-
liners had altered the details of chronology without the least
scruple--before Caiaphas the High Priest. The laws of per-
spective as well as the facts of chronology had been interfered
with by these daring stage-directors until the Passion Play on
the terrace of Gwyn-ap-Nud's Hill looked as if it had been de-
signed from various primitive pictures and from pieces of very
old tapestry.

It need hardly be said that there was reached through Mr.
Wollop's round little pig's eyes no dissimilar vision of ecstasy.
All that there was in sight was wonderfully comforting and
thrilling to him. The persons in front of him, the deep blue of
the sky, the green grass, a tiny little red spider that was now
crawling across his own plump hand, were of equal interest to
him with Peter denying his Master. For, as in certain primitive
pictures, where a great number of memorable scenes are enacted
close together, these scenes in the Pageant followed each other
in such quick succession and in such close proximity that they
produced, or almost produced, a pictorial unity.

Thus, in immediate juxtaposition with Pilate's prolonged
soliloquy and also with the pantomimic fooling of Capporelli,
as the clown moved from group to group, Christ was led before
Caiaphas, and Peter denied Christ. The part of the cock was
introduced. This was a too dangerous experiment even for the
two Dubliners. They maintained that there was such a deep and
primordial poetry about the crowing of cocks, drenched in the
dews of ten thousand tragic dawns of human suffering, full of
such equivocal, treacherous, and yet Homeric braggadoccio,
carrying memories of women in travail, of dying soldiers, of
millions of tortured, imprisoned and executed victims of Society,
memories of insomnia, memories of madness, memories of love--
that it would be vulgar, sacrilegious, a blasphemy against the
dignity of the human spirit, impious, gross, offensive, ridiculous
to introduce a pantomimic cock upon the stage. Besides--the
two Dubliners had argued--no human eye ever actually sees the
cock that makes its eyelids open. The crowing of the cock
brings with it the passionate revolt of all the desperate lovers
who like Romeo and Juliet would fain, if they could, hold back
the coming of the dawn! It has become--so the Dubliners pro-
tested--one of the eternal symbols of the human race, recognized
from Ultima Thule to Thibet, from Greenland to the Cape of
Good Hope; and to introduce a visual mockery of such a thing
in any performance would not be merely Aristophanic. It would
be diabolic.

But the young poet from Middlezoy countered these arguments
by saying that it was the Betrayal of the Christ by Peter that was
the outrage upon the primordial mystery of the Cock's Crow, and
that by representing the Cock in visual form, this Betrayal was
pilloried as it deserved; and that so, and only so, was its full
tragical sordidness, baseness, weakness, cowardice, emphasised
and felt, as it was meet it should be.

Grandmother Cole it was, who, sitting next to Mrs. Robinson,
had a sagacious word to say upon this matter. When she saw
appearing suddenly, as if out of the side of the hill, perched
upon the steps of Pilate's wooden rostrum, an admirably de-
signed and powerfully conventionalized Cock, the old vestment-
cleaner remarked to the ex-servant of the Bishop's Palace--
"Thik red-combed bird be come to put all chicken-hearted men
to shame. Me old man used allus to say to I when 'a did hear thik
noisy bird--'Ye wiming-folk be all broody hens. It takes a man-
bird to call up the bleeding sun!' But I did tell he 'twere all a
vaunt and a vanity, for though cock might crow ever so, the sun
only rose when it chose to rise of its wone self."

But the only remark that Red's mother made when she heard
this and beheld the feathered apparition, was as follows: "'Tisn't
only to-die that little Ben 'Awker 'as crowed. High've 'a 'eared
'im in our street long afore they pliced all them feathers on 'is
pore little 'ead!"

Grandmother Cole expressed astonishment. As a Somerset-born
woman, a native of Gwlad yr Hav, she had much more power of
accepting illusion than this daughter of the East End. That feath-
ered object, four feet high, with a huge red comb, was to her as
real as the tower on the top of the Tor. It disturbed her mind to
think of it as concealing little Ben Hawker of her friend's alley.
"Be thik bird little Ben then?" she murmured. "What things be
coming on the world when little Ben whose birth I do mind,
and 'a cost his mother a sore time, should be a-crowing like a
cock and making thik bearded man holler and run!"

Saint Peter's remorse of mind did indeed seem so extreme
that it almost looked as if he were going to seek refuge from his
shame in the arms of Lady Rachel, so far down the hill was he
now flying! The Dubliners had told him to run towards the audi-
ence and utter his tragic soliloquy so that every word could be
heard. Ned Athling had composed one of his best poetical rhap-
sodies for this Rock of the Apostolic Church, but he had not
expected the ringing tones with which--only a few paces from
the astonished Lord P.--St. Peter howled out his lines. But
Father Paleologue, Mary was relieved to note, seemed well
pleased by this episode.

"It's as it used to be in the old Miracle Plays," he whispered,
leaning forward with flashing eyes. "I wouldn't have missed this
for the Patriarchate! And look at Christ watching him over His
shoulder! There's been genius in the invention of this! I wish
my Greeks could see it."

The retreat of the errant Saint when he realised how far he
had run was even a greater masterpiece of shame. His back, as
he slunk off to one of the Arthurian pavilions, was the back of
all the deniers of their love since the world began.

"And it's only Billy Bates, the Pilgrims' boot-black!" thought
Mary; and she began to tell herself that this triumph of her
John was worth all her sacrifices.

And now, according to this strange and primitive Gothic pic-
ture that Mr. Geard had caused to be painted upon the slopes
of Turris Vitrea like a veritable enchantment of his favourite Mer
lin, the moment came for the binding of Mr. Evans upon that
great cross of wood. It had been the fidgetty persistence of the
man himself that had got them at last--or rather got Mr. John-
son of the Great Western station timber-yard--to make that cross
out of oak. Nothing but oak, and oak too from one of the spin-
neys of Wick Wood, would satisfy this lover of the Druids.

"Don't 'ee look, girlie! Don't 'ee look!" whispered Sally Jpnes
to Tossie Stickles. "'Twill upset 'ee to see they cruel soldiers
torment thik poor man."

"But 'tis only Mr. Evans," protested the imperturbable Tossie.
"And they be only tying of he. They baint nailing of he, nor
nothing!"

"Don't 'ee look, girlie!" repeated her friend. "Just shut your
eyes tight and I'll report to 'ee how things be with the man, and
how he do bear up under being crucified."

"They're lifting of him now! Oh, looksee! looksee. They're
hauling of him up!"

"Shut your eyes. Toss! Mercy on us, shut your eyes!"

But it was the sympathetic Sally, and not the prospective girl-
mother, who was now the one to shut her eyes. "You tell I, then,
how he be bearing it," she murmured now.

" 'Tis nothing to see, Sal, 'tis nothing to take on about so!
'Twere much worse when I did see a sheep killed, in old man
Chinnock's shed, in this same very field."

"It says 'un...were...like a sheep...it says 'un were...and dumb like
a sheep in slaughter!" The tender-hearted Sally was crying now,
but Tossie, keeping the palms of her hands pressed against her
bowels of compassion, continued to stare at the motionless Figure
suspended on the cross.

It was left to the acute Mr. Weatherwax to remark to Penny
Pitches that there were no Thieves by the Lord's side. "This be
a poor Crucifixion," he grumbled. "This be a stingy Crucifixion
when they've only got one cross to set up!"

"Thee be worse nor Pontius Pilate, Isaac," replied Penny. "It
be the same to the good Lord whether he be hung in company
or hung single; and since it be for we sinners anyway--"

"Old 'ooman, old 'ooman," whispered Mr. Weatherwax, "thee
don't really think, do 'ee, that the murdering of one honest man
could save such beggars and bitches as we be? I baint what you
might call a infidel, but there don't seem no justice nor right
to my mind in me and you being let off because of people per-
secuting one good man--like thik poor man over there! Anyway,
'tis not by tormenting folk that good parsnips be growed and
good 'taties be dug. What us wants in this here town be more
men with Authority, not more o' these here play-actors."

Father Paleologue kept drawing deep breaths of satisfaction
all this time. He was interested to observe that the two bearded
monks from the Caucasus seemed profoundly impressed. The
younger of the two--so he whispered in Mary's ears, but she
was too much afraid of staring to corroborate his words--was
weeping openly and passionately. How deeply this Byzantine
scholar thanked his stars that good luck had thrown one of
John's proclamations into his path! He would never forget this
stupendous spectacle. Mr. Evans' figure, as it hung there be-
tween the two heraldic pavilions--they had carried away Arthur's
Dragon Flag--had a dim grandeur that was really startling.
The man looked majestic, a real murdered Man-God, hanging
there between earth and heaven; and the intense greenness
of the hill behind him with that erect, immobile tower, and the
gleam of the Roman swords, and the richness of the Hebraic gar-
ments, and all this huge gathering of the people, hushed, awe-
struck, solemnised, gave to that single Figure, suspended against
the grassy steep, a magnitude of importance that was over-
powering.

"What are those old men counting up their money for?"

"Mother, Mother!" whispered Mr. Stilly reproachfully, for it was
one of his parents who uttered these words, "that's the thirty
pieces of silver."

"It's easy for you, Robert, of course," retorted the old lady
testily. "Your father and I haven't had your privileges at the
bank, but to me it looks more like round bits of wood covered
with gilt tinsel."

It was not given to Mr. Stilly's parents--much as they loved a
quiet game of dominoes--to catch the horrible pathos of the way
Judas was now behaving.

Perhaps in that whole vast assembly only Father Paleologue
and one other realised the full poignancy of the acting of Judas.
That "other" was Morgan Nelly. The little girl uttered no word.
She allowed Jackie to explain to Sis that it was Judas who was
being repulsed by those old men with the money-bags and that
he was now going out to hang himself. Jackie explained that
these old men were now saying--"What is that to us? See thou
to that!" and that Judas was now going to hunt for a good place
to "see to it" from. But Morgan Nelly's heart leapt up in sym-
pathy as she followed the figure of Judas wandering among
some small thorn bushes and a patch of stunted hollies, looking
in vain for what he wanted. In the end he disappeared behind
the western pavilion, and long before he had disappeared the
main interest of the Pageant had shifted from him altogether;
but the little girl's heart was still with him. She knew who it was.
While the public knew him as a crazy and good-for-nothing elder
brother of the Nietzschean young man at Wollop's, Nelly Mor-
gan knew him as "old Mr. Booty" who used to read Grimm's
fairy tales on the cricket-field when his side was in.

The Madonna now, all dressed in dusky blood-colour save for
her sky-blue robe, was clinging to the foot of the Cross, while
near her the Roman soldiers were throwing dice and playing
cards in stiff circles upon the green grass. Momus, perched upon
the steps of the empty judgment-seat, was idly tossing up a toy-
balloon into the air and catching it as it came down; and to give
the scene its true character, as some old Flemish painter would
have visualised it, as a tragedy, namely, that drew its poignance
from the pell-mell of that human life which was so indifferent
to its superhuman anguish, either the Dubliners or Athling had
brought it about that Pilate and Caiaphas should .be playing
chess together at a little round table in front of that western
pavilion behind which Judas had withdrawn to hang himself.

Persephone's grief at the foot of the cross that bore Mr. Evans
was the finest piece of acting in the whole Pageant. Its emotion
was so sincere that it swept the whole picture together as nothing
else could have done. The girl's monumental gestures were like
those of some classic representation of her own namesake, the
great Goddess of the Dead. Her sublime suffering gave a strange
unity to all the minor groups and personages, their businesses,
their occupations, their pastimes. She seemed to gather the diurnal
preoccupations of the whole race together and with passionate
solicitude to offer it up, like a cup of hyssop, to the lips of the
dying. The other Marys, Mary the sister of Lazarus and Mary
Magdalene, came now to Our Lady's side, however, and with
their approach an unhappy crisis in the directing of the per-
formance came to the surface.

Ned Athling, anxious to try every sort of new experiment,
wanted to introduce a tragic dance at this point by the two
Marys round the prostrate figure of Christ's Mother. This, in
view of their Catholic up-bringing in Ireland, was too much for
the Dubliners. They refused to countenance it. Athling, however
--and this had happened in other cases as well--insisted on go-
ing on with it, with the result that the two girls who were playing
the two Marys, Bessie and Lizzie Marsh from Bove Town, were
completely confused, and as they bent together over the pros-
trate form of the Virgin, they made several sinuous movements
with their flexible hips and several swaying movements with
their bare arms, while at the same time they lifted up their
voices and chanted the ballad-like refrain that Athling had writ-
ten for them.

The nervous blundering of these young and pretty girls was
not at all distasteful to the bulk of the foreigners, to some of
whom it appeared as the final touch of modern art, to others as
a naive example of English barbarism; but to the feelings of
Mary Crow, who recognised at once that someone had made a
mistake, it was a harrowing spectacle. She turned hurriedly to
catch the eye of Father Paleologue, but he smiled back at her
reassuringly, however, and when she murmured her fears, "Oh,
of course one can see that!" he whispered. "But chance has
favoured these people at every turn, and though to many these
dancing gestures--there! they are doing it again!--must seem
ridiculous enough and even outrageous, still you must remember
that the Magdalene must in her time have danced for her patrons.
Why should she not now, poor girl--like the Jongleur of Paris
before the altar--dance for the Crucified?"

"But, Father," she protested, "the other Mary...the type of con-
templation...surely "

"Yes, yes, Lady," he conceded. "It's a mistake. It's the only bad
mistake they've made. But those little girls are sweet creatures
and--"

"Father, I believe you're laughing at us all the time!"

Father Paleologue became in a moment intensely grave. "If I
did that, dear daughter," he said earnestly, "I'd deserve to be
unfrocked. I'd deserve to be cut in pieces like your last Abbot.
I'd deserve anyhow--" and he gave her an irresistibly winning
smile that broke through the mask of his stiff archaic face as
though a lamp had been lit within his soul--"not to have had
the exquisite pleasure I've had today."

"Thank God they're going--those girls!" cried Miss Drew in
a shrill voice. "And they're dancing away, hand in hand, now,
as if it were a may-pole they were leaving, not their dying
Saviour." Her words reached the ears of the Marquis of P. who
turned and gave her a gracious little bow. It was the first time
he had recognised Miss Drew today, but these caustic sentiments
of hers met with his entire approval.

"Are those baggages," remarked Miss Barbara Fell, "who have
just gone dancing off into that tent, supposed to be camp-
followers to those soldiers gambling there?"

Fell returned no answer.

"I asked you, Manny, if those girls--" and she repeated her
whole remark.

"One of them is a Saint still invoked in Glastonbury, sister"
--the doctor's voice was strained to the breaking-point and in
his heart he was saying to himself, "I can't bear it...I can't
bear it...I can't bear it"--"and the other is that Mary, the
sister of Lazarus, who was such an especial friend of Jesus. I
don't know why they swayed about like that. Perhaps they were
so unhappy that they took to drink!"

"What's the matter, Angela," asked Mr. Beere crossly. "You
can't sit still a moment. We can't go before the end. I suppose
it's getting on for the end now." These extraordinary words that
could scarcely have been uttered on the continent of Europe were
luckily heard by no one except Angela and to her they were no
more than the portentous yawn from the old gentleman that
followed them. They were no more than the buzzing of a blue-
battle fly that at that moment flew past her ears. Her face was
white and her whole body was trembling with excitement. The
soul within her yearned to that beautiful form that now with
uplifted arms was embracing the feet of the suspended Figure.

There was another person in that big audience who was as
agitated as Angela Beere and that was the Vicar of Glastonbury.
Indignation had coloured Mat Dekker's face a dusky red and
his heavy brows were knotted over his bushy eyebrows. The
whole business filled him with sick aversion. Why, oh why had
he ever allowed such a thing as this to take place in his loved
town? For all his High Church practices Mat Dekker at heart
was as simple an Evangelical as John Bunyan or John Wesley.
He regarded this whole performance as a monstrous and ghastly
parody of an historic Event that had changed the life of the
cosmos. "I can't stick it out, son, I can't stick it out!" he
groaned.

Sam laid his large hand on his father's knee. "It's the end
now, Dad, I think. Those fellows, lugging that step-ladder, are
going to take Him down. Ned Athling is with them himself.
He's supposed to be Joseph of Arimathea."

"Damn Ned Athling!"

It was at that moment that the Christ-Evans uttered the only
words he had spoken since he had been lifted up. He cried sud-
denly in a great voice that rang out across Tor Field and across
the gipsy caravans, and across Chilkwell Street, till it reached
the blood-red fountain in Chalice Hill: "Eloi, Eloi, Lama,
Sabachthani!"

The two Dekkers rose simultaneously to their feet. "That man
...that Evans...wasn't playing then...Look, me boy, his head's
really hanging down now. I must see to this!"

"Go slow. Dad! He may be all right. It may only be his damn-
ed acting. Don't make a fool of yourself, Dad! No! It's no
joke. They are running out of the tents! They're breaking up.
Something is wrong. He is ill. He's hurt. He's fainted!" They
pushed their way together between the rows of seats and began
running towards the stage. They were not the first to do this, how-
ever. A good distance in front of them Cordelia Geard was rush-
ing wildly towards that great cross of oak-wood. Their move-
ment was a signal for a general uprising. Many others--among
them Dr. Fell--were running now up the slope, towards the ter-
race, where Mr. Evans hung by his armpits. Meanwhile it was
the ironical duty of the pretended Saint Joseph to act in real
genuine earnest in this unrehearsed Descent from the Cross.

Inside the western pavilion there was now a scene of the ut-
most confusion. The two Marys, little Bessie and Lizzie, had
been both sobbing hysterically in shame over their fiasco. John
Crow had been vainly trying to comfort them. "Us have spoilt
the Pageant!" Bessie was moaning. "Oh, why did 'ee let we
do it?"

"Us'll never be able to look anyone in the face again!"
Lizzie was wailing. "I wish I were dead! I wish I were dead!"

But the little maids' distress was now broken into by a wild
uproar. "Evans have fainted! Evans have burst a blood-vessel!
There be blood pouring out of Evans' mouth!" Both John and
Barter--careless now about appearing before the audience in
their ordinary clothes--rushed out of the tent and ran to the
scene of the trouble. The Roman soldiers had already left their
dice and their cards and were engaged in helping the Jewish
elders lift the cross bodily out of the ground and lower it down
upon the grass. There were so many powerful young farm-
hands among them that this was not a difficult undertaking.

Capporelli had come up meanwhile and was gesticulating vio-
lently, talking so rapidly in French that everyone near him only
stared. Some of the Roman soldiers--rough lads from the Sedge-
moor farms--nudged each other and made fun of him. "Play
over. Play quite done ," they cried to him in pidgin English as
if he were a Chinaman.

Cordelia had become cold and calm. She was giving rapid,
incisive directions to the lads who were lowering the cross. Ned
Athling, in a bewildered trance, perched upon the upper steps
of his step-ladder, was contemplating the surging movements
which looked for a time like a dangerous panic, that were
now rocking the excited audience. He tried to make out the figure
of Lady Rachel, but the crowd was too dense.

Barter was one of the few who kept his head at this juncture.
"Did you say that those Dublin people had got a megaphone
somewhere ?" he asked.

Jolm looked at him quickly. "To quiet the audience, you
mean?"

"Of course. We can't let 'em break up without a word."

"Let's go and see."

They crossed over to the eastern tent and there, sure enough,
after a word with the Dubliners, whom they found on their
knees hurriedly flinging all their private belongings into two
black handbags, like passengers in a sinking ship, the mega-
phone was produced.

"What shall we say? Will you do it?" Barter found himself
yelling these words into John's ears as they carried their mega-
phone past the outskirts of the crowd that was now surging and
shouting about the prostrate cross and above the unconscious
form of Mr. Evans. It must have been that vision of the Dub-
liners packing their black bags that compelled him to yell like
that when John could have perfectly well have heard a whisper!

And what unconscious force was it that made the two friends
--like two field-marshals whose army is defeated and in full
flight--carry the megaphone back to their own eastern tent in-
stead of using it at once where they had found it? The power
of habit with these two men had been more quickly established
than one would have believed possible! John and Barter must
have hurried with their megaphone to the spot where they were
used to giving their orders, as instinctively as a dog carries a
bone to his kennel. Probably in a boat of starving derelicts who
have just killed and torn to pieces one of their companions each
man would be driven to convey his portion of the cannibal feast
to his own bench, by the side of his own row-lock. At the door
of their own tent they encountered Crummie freshly emerged
from the ladies' tiring-room and as trim and lovely as ever in
an ordinary summer frock.

"Oh, I'm so glad you've got that thing!" she cried. "I was
just going to ask you if there wasn't something of that sort to
quiet them. I suppose if he's only fainted you'll go on with the
Pageant?"

John looked at Barter and Barter looked at John. What a girl
this was! "I...we...they " began Barter. "We thought we'd let
it end here," said John.

Crummie surveyed the two disconcerted representatives of her
father with a puzzled frown. She then turned her eyes upon the
audience. Yes! they were all on their feet and most of them
pushing and struggling to extricate themselves from the chairs
and benches. Soon they would be scattered in all directions.
Many were already rushing wildly up the hill towards the
pavilions. The girl smiled sweetly. "Better do it now if you're
going to do it," she said. "Tell them that the Mayor bids them
good-bye and thanks them for coming."

John lifted the megaphone to his mouth. "Do I just shout it
out?" he asked her nervously.

Mr. Geard's daughter looked round. The Middlezoy foreman,
still dressed up as King Arthur, was standing nearby, quietly
lighting his pipe. She called the man by name and he slouched
up to them. "Take this," said Crummie. "Run over to Pilate's
what-do-you-call-it, will you? Shout out to them that the Mayor
bids them good-bye, and tell them to go home quietly, and that
Mr. Evans has only fainted!"

King Arthur lost no time in obeying to the letter this clear
command of the resuscitated Lady of Shalott. He ascended the
wooden rostrum and standing erect there--a majestic and im-
posing figure--he bellowed forth in a terrific voice--"Ladies
and Gentlemen; attention all, please!" His words were audible
all over the field. Even the gipsies in their caravans heard them.
The Dye-Works strikers came pouring out of Dickery Cantle's
tent, well refreshed with meat and wine. Everybody stood still
and listened. It was as if the real Rex Arturus himself had
suddenly reappeared to restore peace upon earth and fulfill his
magician's prophecy.

"What a girl!" whispered Barter to John as they followed
Crummie with their eyes as she stood behind the rostrum,
prompting the Middlezoy foreman.

"But Evans may be dead," murmured John.

"Not he," returned the other. "But even if he is--"

"The Mayor wishes to assure ye all that the gentleman be
only fainted. The Mayor thinks best for Pageant to end here
and now. The Mayor thanks ye all for coming, especially those
of ye what come from far. The Mayor hopes ye'll all come to
Glastonbury again. The Mayor--" There was a pause at this
point while King Arthur bent his head to catch his prompter's
words. Then raising the megaphone again--"The Mayor gives ye
all the Blessing of the Living Christ!" The foreman came care-
fully down the creaking wooden steps with the megaphone under
his arm.

Crummie was watching with delight the surprising effect of
these words from the slope of the hill. It was as if, in the very
midst of some wild panic under the urge of an earthquake or a
volcano, every person had been struck mute and immobile, ex-
actly where they were.

Even John and Barter were silent for a moment staring down
at that petrified mass of people. John had time to observe that
when the crowd began to move again it was in quite a different
manner. There was no longer a tendency to rush up the hill
in a dense mob. Everyone seemed to become a separate individual
again. The crowd-hypnosis had been entirely dispelled by this
invocation of the Redeemer of the Individual.

"What a pity," thought Ned Athling, as he came out of his
trance and scrambled down his step-ladder, tripping awkwardly
over his Arimathean robes, "What a pity that they never heard
my verses about the Heathen Grail!"

Meanwhile a burly Taunton policeman, under Cordelia's di-
rection, was pouring brandy down Mr. Evans' throat. Other
policemen were pushing the crowd back, so that the prostrate
man might have more air and space round him. Megan Geard,
supported by Mr. Bishop, the town clerk, and by Bob Sheperd,
the old Glastonbury policeman, was now standing near-by, out
of breath and very much concerned.

"He'll come round now, Marm. Don't 'ee take on. He'll come
round now. Miss Cordy'll bring 'un to's senses, quick enough,
you'll see, Marm!" Thus did old Bob comfort his Worship's
lady while the equally infirm town clerk made feeble efforts to
get down on his knees by the side of the ghastly figure on the
ground. But the aged public servant was so "fat and scant of
breath" that this gesture remained unfulfilled.

"Oh, Mother, Mother, what shall we do, what shall we do?"
moaned Cordelia, losing her nerve at the familiar sound of her
mother's panting breath. "I've poured a lot of this slug down
his throat but he doesn't "

"Doctor be here! Doctor be come!" This welcome cry arose
among a group of Roman soldiers, the smell of whose bare legs,
hot and grass-stained, had become a part of that day that lodged
itself in Cordelia's memory. The Taunton policemen now cleared
a path for Dr. Fell.

"His heart's beating, Doctor!" cried Cordelia. "I've got my
hand on it. It's beating funnily, but it's beating still."

The doctor placed his hat on the grass and knelt down over the
prostrate man who lay with his mouth grimly open. There was
a great streak of blood on his chest and another on his shirt and
his lips were caked with blood. "He's burst a blood-vessel...
of some kind," murmured Dr. Fell. "The question is what kind.
Did he faint away as soon as he had shouted those words?"

It was to Persephone, who had been sitting all this while upon
the fallen cross as it lay on the ground, that the doctor addressed
this remark. She leaned forward to answer him, re-arranging as
she did so the folds of her sky-blue robe. "Yes, Doctor," she
said in a low, rather guttural voice. "It was the strain of that
shout. But I think he was uncomfortable before. I think he was
in distress before. I believe he was in considerable pain, for quite
a long time before!" There was a queer hysterical ring in the
girl's voice as her words mounted up. When she came to the
word "pain" she shouted it with a vibration of anger.

The doctor mechanically wiped off some blood from Mr.
Evans' bare chest with the tips of his fingers. "We'll have to get
him to the hospital," he said, "and, what's more, get him there
as quickly as we can!" He rose on one knee still keeping the tips
of his fingers on the unconscious man's chest. "Who's got a car
on the field?" he said.

Persephone rose to her feet and came forward, catching up
her trailing blue garment round one bare arm, and hitching an-
other fold of it into her belt as she moved. "My car is just over
that ridge, Doctor," she said. "It's by itself there, and there are
no others nearer than the road. If you don't mind my being like
this" and she spread out her long bare arms and gave a toss to
her head from which her curls hung in a loose mass, "I'll drive
him there in a jiffy! Only he must he carried to my car. I can't
get it over that hank!"

Dr. Fell stood up. "Will you carry him, officers?" he said,
addressing the nearest policemen.

Three of the men in uniform stepped forward and under the
doctor's directions lifted up the unconscious Mr. Evans.

Cordelia turned to Persephone. The last time she had spoken
to this girl was in the reception room of Mother Legge and as
their eyes met now they both recalled this encounter. It was Cor-
delia then who had been dressed in blue! "Thank you, thank you,
Mrs. Spear," she murmured with intense emphasis. "You may
be saving his life by this."

The three policemen with Cordelia walking behind them car-
ried their burden where Persephone led. She and Dr. Fell moved
on fast in front, talking earnestly. The doctor was explaining to
Persephone, in as unprofessional language as he could, just
what he feared, just what he hoped, as to the injured man's
chances.

"You'd better go home, Mother!" cried Cordelia stopping for
a moment to turn her troubled face to Mrs. Geard.

"But you're coming back, aren't you, darling?" cried the de-
scendant of the House of Rhys, extricating her arm from that of
old Bob Sheperd. "They'll never have room for you in her
little car!"

Cordelia waved her hand impatiently at her mother, as much
as to say--"You look after yourself, dear!"--but she turned
then, and running after the slowly moving bearers joined the
melancholy cortege without another word.

Megan Geard sighed deeply. "I wish the Mayor were here," she
remarked to the old Glastonbury policeman.

Bob Sheperd cordially endorsed her wish. "If his Worship
had been here that poor man would never have died," he said.

Megan Geard gave a start and a sudden shiver ran through
her. "You don't think he is dead, Mr. Sheperd, do you?" she
groaned.

The old policeman wagged his head. "I've 'a seen many a
corpse in me time, Marm, and not a one o' them but had blood
o' just that colour, dry-like and sticky-like, on they's poor lips."

When they reached the little car it became only too plain that
if one of the policemen sat by Persephone's side to help carry
him in when they got to the hospital there was only just room
for Dr. Fell and his unconscious patient.

"Take care! Go gently! Oh, go gently!" Cordelia cried, clutch-
ing the sun-warmed door-frame of the machine as it swung open,
while they were lifting Mr. Evans in.

But an intruder now appeared upon the scene whose strange
appearance startled and shocked the girl even in her desperate
concern. It was none other than Mad Bet, who had persuaded her
good friend Solly Lew to conduct her to this particular spot,
from which she could observe and not be observed. The kind-
hearted taxi-driver had remained here with the woman for quite a
long while. Then, watching with the eye of a hungry man the
rush of the Dye-Works people into Dickery Cantle's tent, he had
gone off, "to get a bite of summat for five minutes." The mad-
woman had left her hat, trimmed with forget-me-nots, under the
hornbeam bush where she had been sitting, and her egg-white
cranium was a disturbing object even to Dr. Fell who had known
her from his youth up.

To the Taunton policemen, as panting and perspiring, they
withdrew from the car's door, this new apparition was still more
startling. They thought for a moment that she was one of the
players and that this shocking baldness was a mask.

"Only to touch the hem of his garment! Only to touch his coat-
ies or trowsies!" gabbled Mad Bet, pushing Cordelia out of her
way and struggling to stretch her arm into the car. "He told I, at
Mother Legge's," the woman went on, "to come Midsummer Day,
and see he cast out his Devil and I've seed he do it! I've seed
that girt Devil flyin' over Tor-top with wings of dragon! He be
Jesus, his wone self now, the poor man be. Don't 'ee drop 'un in
grave, Doctor! Don't 'ee let them put stones on his poor bleed-
ing heart. Where be going to lay him then, gents, where be?
Where be? Mad Bet'll come and watch over he. Night and day
she will, till he rolls they stones away!"

"Don't do that!" cried Dr. Fell sharply, when one of the
Taunton policemen began unceremoniously pulling the woman
back. "Let her just touch him once. There! There! That's enough
now. Look...here's a friend of yours coming!"

The doctor's words were justified, for hatless as herself and
very much the worse for drink, Solly Lew could be observed stag-
gering up the hill and frantically waving his arms. "He thinks the
police are taking her," remarked the doctor laconically, clamber-
ing in beside the unconscious man, who was lying limp and heavy
across the seat.

Mad Bet caught the word "police" and the word "take"; but her
whole soul was so stirred by what she had seen that no fear for
her own skin could touch her. She had been allowed to do what
she had set her heart on doing, and she drew back now quite
quietly and stood immobile, looking like a ghastly waxwork at
Madame Tussaud's.

Dr. Fell's attention, the moment he had settled himself on the
edge of the seat, against the patient's bare rope-bruised ankles,
was attracted by the sight of a little bird deliberately alighting
upon the topmost twig of the stunted hornbeam. "It's a Lesser
Whitethroat," he thought to himself.

Cordelia's distracted face was thrust into the window of the
car. "He won't die. Doctor, will he?" He could do nothing but
shake his head and murmur, "Careful now, careful now!" as the
unhappy girl snatched at one of the injured man's hands and,
careless of who saw her, pressed upon it a feverish kiss. "He
won't die, Doctor, will he? He won't die, Doctor? I couldn't--" But
Persephone had already got her machine in motion.

"He's in good hands, Miss, in very good hands," murmured one
of the Taunton policemen who had been left behind, as they
watched the car descend the rough cattle-track that led round the
eastern side of the Tor.

"That clever actress be a first-class driver, Miss," remarked the
other man, "and everybody knows Dr. Fell. I've 'a seed 'un
meself many a time, in Tarnton 'Firmary, when he were younger
than he be now. There aint such a man as old Fell, :io! not this
side o' Bristol."

The policemen were so terrifying to Solly Lew that he had not
dared to advance. Mad Bet, however, walked slowly towards him,
keeping her eyes on the disappearing car.

As Persephone drove into town with her heavy load that event-
ful afternoon her nature was undergoing the strangest upheaval.
Since her quarrel with Philip she had spoken to him only once.
There had been indeed nothing to be said between them. She had
"turned," as people say, "against him." His particular kind of
passion had come to be revolting to her. Her deep riddle now was
how she had ever been attracted to him, or let him touch her at
all! In her husband's case she had only arrived at a point of de-
parture towards which she had been steadily moving for months.
With him she had no overt rupture, but for the last week or two
she had ceased to share his bed. But the sight of this man Evans
hanging on that cross had hit something in her that went very
deep. A nerve, perhaps it was, rather than anything else, in her
weary heart; but it was a dark, strange pull, a rending tug at this
queer nerve, an inexplicable feeling, and one to which she yielded
now in an abandoned mood of delicious languor. This sudden,
melting tender sensation--utterly unexpected and mysterious to
herself--did not seem to affect her recognition of Mr. Evans as a
queer, impossible person. He might be the most ridiculous person
in the world; he might be a madman. It remained that something
wild, dark, desperate, in the man, as he hung there, something in
his sombre contorted face, with his great Roman nose and massive
forehead, something in his lean, extended arms, something in his
exposed shoulder-blades, something even in the black hairs on his
chest, now caked with crimson blood, had touched a nerve in her
being, an organic nerve, that went down to the dark deep knot of
erotic mystery in the centre of her woman's nature. She had di-
vined in a way no other soul had done--certainly not Cordelia--
the vein of thrilling exultation in Mr. Evans' mood, that had sup-
ported him in that atrocious endurance.

There always was in Cordelia's attitude to Mr. Evans--there
had been from the start--something at once "old-maidish" and
maternal, something of the passion which frustrated, love-starved
women feel for cats and dogs and parrots--especially the can-
tankerous and eccentric among such creatures. To Cordelia this
whole business of the Pageant had been a vexation and an annoy-
ance. She regarded it as a mere characteristic whimsy of her
father, while Mr. Evans' mania for playing the Crucified she
looked upon as an arbitrary madness, a sort of wilful mental in-
dulgence, that she had feared all the time might lead to disaster.

Persephone, on the other hand, had so many neurotic manias
in herself that she responded like touchwood to the quiver of Mr.
Evans' perverted heroism. As she had embraced that wooden beam
beneath his feet she had felt, vibrating through its dense oaken
veins the wild triumph of his tense tormented nerves, the savage
rapture of his self-immolation. And she had fancied too, in a
passionate delusion that had sent an electric wave of reckless
confederacy through her woman's flesh, that Mr. Evans was not
indifferent to her presence there, was not unaware of the reciproc-
ity of her mood. A strange Virgin-Mother had she been to a sin-
gular Saviour of a wounded world! Pressing her flat boy's breasts
against that oaken post and straining upward towards her imag-
inary God-Man and Divine Son, she had allowed herself to yield
to the uttermost to this new unexpected tenderness for a man she
knew nothing of!

Such and not otherwise had been the feelings of Persephone
Spear as she had lifted up her voice and wailed aloud--"My Son
and my God! My God and my Son!"--as the Middlezoy young
man had instructed her. Little had Ned Athling known, little had
those Dubliners known, the wild maenad-like feelings that their
gothic dumb-show had evoked in this morbid girl. Had she been
aware, as she crouched and moaned at the feet of her madman, of
the psychic waves of swooning adoration, flung towards her fig-
ure, from the white-cheeked girl seated there by the yawning Mr.
Beere? Not consciously aware, of a surety; but such waves of
electric passion seldom, like lightning-bolts, lose themselves in
the unrestoring earth. Some tremour, some vibrant residue, how-
ever faint, reaches, as a rule, the object towards which such feel-
ings are directed, and it may well have been that this shivering,
yearning idolatry for her--reckless as some young nun's worship
of the real blue-robed Maid of Heaven--had quickened the pulse-
beats of her own passion, as she poured forth her spirit in this
strange new tenderness, never felt before.

Such were the feelings of Persephone. But the girl was wrong,
wrong as so many other worshippers of gods and men and beasts
and demons are wrong. Mr. Evans was totally and entirely un-
conscious of her presence at the foot of his cross. That oaken
beam that had carried the trembling of his emotion to her, and
had made it shiver through every channel of her frame till it
reached the centre of her organic life, had, for some occult
reason, absorbed and not transferred the emotion which she felt.
All that wild, dark, lovely sense of being isolated with this hook-
nosed, contorted-mouthed victim of his own strange mania, iso-
lated with him on an austere promontory of confederate fate, was
in reality a groundless illusion. In this particular case--quite
otherwise than in Angela's--there had been a break of contact.
Perhaps a girl's nerves respond to the nerves of another girl and
send out magnetic currents that can be caught from far off;
whereas something in the masculine constitution, something
dense, thick, opaque, obtuse, stupid, has the power of rejecting
such contacts. Or it may be that the erotic emotions, when they
brim over from the masculine spirit, extricate themselves, as
women's feelings never do, from the bitter-sweet honeycomb of
Nature, and shoot off, up, out, and away, into dimensions of
non-natural existence, where the nerve-rays of women cannot
follow.

Those queer analytic elementals, those inquisitive naturalists
that very old places, full of contorted human history, attract by
a species of spontaneous selection, must have derived a malignant
pleasure from the words they heard spoken by Monsieur Cap-
porelli when both the protagonists of the Passion had disap-
peared with Dr. Fell. In true French style, reducing every mortal
human feeling to a rigid pattern of logical amorousness, the
famous clown had uttered to Ned Athling words full of an ironic
and blasphemous amusement when the unconscious King of the
Jews and his blue-robed Mother had vanished together to the
hospital. A touch of jealousy may have mingled, too, with his
sly tone, for Capporelli had been really and truly caught by
Percy's slender hips and her graceless tomboy humour. "An en-
gaging situation," the clown had remarked, as he was changing
his clothes in the gentlemen's portion of the eastward-facing
pavilion, "and a very piquant one, for those two, it's been, we
may be sure, ever since they hoisted him up."

The Middlezoy poet turned upon the laughing brown eyes of
the speaker a pair of blue-grey eyes more chilly-cold than the
wettest sea-fog that comes up out of Bridgewater Bay. "Do you
think so?" he remarked. "It was lucky she had her car so near."

Capporelli fixed a sentimental and whimsical eye upon the
spot where he had been so happy with Percy. "Who knows?" he
sighed. "You people are all so peculiar and so--inhuman that it
is difficult to say!"

The elementals of Glastonbury--those naturalists that had
hovered over the vaporous humours of three thousand years of
criss-cross human tangles--must have howled with laughter when
they heard this clever Frenchman "explain," in accents dry and
logical, the relations between Mr. Owen Evans and Mrs. Perse-
phone Spear.

Mr. Evans had, as a matter of fact, been caught up into a
region of feeling utterly beyond the comprehension of any Latin
or any Teutonic mind. This had gone on since he stood before
Pilate until the moment when he shouted "Eloi , Eloi!" It was not,
as St. Paul has put it so well--he the one among them all who
would really have understood Mr. Evans--it was not with flesh
and blood that he was contending, but with mysterious powers of
evil upon levels revealed to few. No equivocal perversity grati-
fied by divining the feelings of Persephone entered for a second
into the terrible visions with which, as he hung between heaven
and earth, his mind was bruised and broken. The perverse girl
had detected, as Cordelia never could have done, the quality of
Mr. Evans' feelings, but what she had no idea of was the tragic
lengths to which he had carried them. The physical pain he suf-
fered before he shouted that "Eloi! Eloi!" was more acute than
he had ever dreamed of undergoing. Both Athling and the Dub-
liners were to blame, and indeed still more so was John, for not
insisting on Dr. Fell--they could have had confidence in him--
being present at one of their rehearsals. Evans had suffered, but
not acutely suffered, at these rehearsals, and what he had en-
dured he had kept to himself, for it was what he wanted. It was
the prolongation of the scene--drawn out so foolishly by that
luckless Dance of Death of the two Marys--that had brought
about his collapse, and it was the strain on his arms, bound too
tightly by those ropes, and the tension of the muscles of his
shoulders, stretched between the cross-bars, that had caused him
such anguish. But not since the bloody King put the last Abbot
of Glastonbury to death had such physical pain been experienced
by anyone upon the slopes of Gwyn-ap-Aud's hill. But it would
be a mistake to say that the spirit of Mr. Evans yielded, or weak-
ened, or regretted his undertaking. Right up to the end, till by
straining his torso to the breaking-point he lost consciousness,
he not only endured this anguish but he exulted in enduring it.
His exultation kept mounting and mounting--extreme pain and
ecstatic triumph embracing each other in dark mystic copulation.

Mr. Evans became indeed Three Persons as he hung on his self-
imposed cross. One person was his body, another was his soul.
He felt his soul--or rather his soul felt itself--to be entirely out-
side of his body. This phenomenon was to him, as he hung
alone there, looking down on that vast crowd, as much of a
definite, concrete experience as the pain itself. The pain became
a Third Person, and the soul of Mr. Evans kept urging on the
pain. He felt as if that crowd beneath him was the whole human
race and that by the transaction that was now proceeding between
these Three Persons, thus suspended in the air above them, this
crowd, an immense animal passivity, was in some way re-created,
purged, cleansed, transformed. His body, as the pain increased--
as his soul deliberately caused the pain to increase--began to
overbrim the confines of its human shape. His body projected
itself under the pain in great waves of filmy chemical substance.
It flung forth this filmy substance in streams, in torrents, in a
mighty, rushing rain! And then there arrived a moment when
Mr. Evans knew that his body was the whole hill, the whole field,
nay! the whole wide-stretching landscape. Into this landscape,
into this earth-hulk that was his body, his soul kept driving the
pain, compelling it to bury itself deeper and deeper into this
living mass. This continued till his body became more than the
mere immediate landscape. It became the whole round earth,
swinging on its orbit through space. And above this earth-body
hung the master-spirit of Mr. Evans still driving the pain on. He
was the Zeus and Prometheus and the Vulture--all three linked
indestructibly together! And all the while a triumphant ecstasy
poured down from him like a bloody sweat

Nor must it be supposed that Mr. Evans' rational mind--that
portion of his consciousness that indulged its activity apart from
pain or pleasure--was paralysed all this while. Those two man-
ners, which John Crow had noted as long ago as their encounter
at Stonehenge as peculiar to the man, were not superficial. They
represented the workings of his deepest nature. His pedantry as
people called it, was as much heightened by his present suffering
as was his imagination. As other men visualise their past lives at
the moment of drowning, so Mr. Evans, in the midst of his an-
guish,--even while he identified the substance of his flesh with
the whole round earth from which it was projected--was in-
tensely aware of the peculiar history of the spot beneath him.
The pain he endured turned his pedantic acquisitiveness into a
living medium, acutely sensitive, quiveringly receptive, through
which the whole history of Glastonbury began to pour.

Glastonbury seemed to have waited for the sacrifice of Mr.
Evans to exhale upon the air its darkest and most terrible secrets.
That no one heard these secrets, except the man himself who was
the medium for them, mattered nothing to these singular rev-
enants. They found Mr. Evans' anguished entity suspended above
the soil of that historic spot and they seized upon it, just as a
horde of wild and gusty winds, blown here, blown there, might
seize upon an AEolian harp hung aloft in a lonely place. Thus it
came about that another Pageant,--much more grim and much
less romantic than the one that had been played that day--passed
through Mr. Evans' brain. Kings and Prelates, Saints and Sodom-
ites, Madmen and Monks, Whores and Nuns, People Executed
and People Imprisoned, together with a woeful procession of
common, nameless People upon whose toil and hunger others
lived, streamed in a wild torrent of heads and faces and arms
and limbs through the tormented consciousness of Mr. Evans.
And the crowd was not only human! There lay one of the worst
horrors of it. Mingled with the human torrent were other living
things, animals, birds, and even fish. All the eyes that in the long
history of this place had looked in vain into those of the killer--
all these tormented eyes gathered now about Mr. Evans! And it
was all connected with his deadly, his irremediable vice. The
figures that flooded his brain were all torturers or victims, every
one of them; and as the thing grew and grew upon him. as he
hung there, all the victims flowed into one and became one, and
the torturers flowed into one and became one. Then it came
about that between Mr. Evans as the torturer and this one victim,
who yet was all victims, a dialogue arose; so that from their di-
vided localities in space they addressed each other, and from
their horrible association in time they answered each other.

"Forgiveness for you," cried this voice, rising from all the
victims of Glastonbury since the tribes of men had first come
there, "can never, never be. For you did this thing, and went on
doing it, knowing what it meant! Others tortured me from bru-
tality, from insensitiveness, from stupidity. You and those who
were like you did it, knowing what it meant. It was that knowl-
edge, knowing what I felt, and yet not stopping, that has made
forgiveness impossible."

The terror of the voice made Mr. Evans feel like a thing that
twisted on the floor of the Pit and yet out of the smoke of his tor-
ment he uttered a reply. "In Eternity we are as one!" he cried
hoarsely. There was a silence for a moment or--so it seemed to
him, as he hung there--for a thousand years.

Then the voice was lifted up again. "Never can we be as one! I
have looked into your eyes and you did not stop. Each moment
you went on made the difference greater. It can never be crossed
now. It is a gulf in eternity now. You could not hear me if I did
forgive you."

And once more as he heaved himself to and fro he replied
to the voice. "Christ can forgive me. Christ holds eternity in
His hand." And again there was a silence of a thousand years.
"I am Christ!" cried the voice, in a tone that made the flesh
wrinkle like blown sand upon Mr. Evans' bones. "Every victim,
whether you've done it for your science or your ambition or
your religion or your lust; whether it be a beaten prisoner,
a trapped beast, a dog strapped down for vivisection, a racked
heretic, a burnt Negro, a tortured child, is I; yes, is I myself!
And you are right when you say that I hold Eternity in my hand!
These voices come, these voices that are my voice! Can you
gather them up, these victims of yours, these tortured, hunted,
trapped victims, by their thousands upon thousands? Can you
gather them up where you have crucified them? Can you cause
the earth to yield again to you their black blood? Can you cause
the air to return to you their pitiful cries? I have heard the
voices of men--yes! and of wise men too--how they have said,
‘All is equal, all is permitted.' It is I and none other--I, the
Christ--who speak thus to you from Eternity, and I say unto you
‘All is not equal! All is not permitted!'"

Even yet, even after hearing these things--such power hath
the spirit of a mortal creature to fight for its life--Mr. Evans
was still able to reply to the voice. "I could not answer you,"
he murmured hoarsely, "if I were not answering you from the
Cross."

"You forget what you have done," went on the voice, and
it was like the voice of the wind over the sea. "You forget! You
forget!"

Mr. Evans' tone had a terrible veracity now. "Is it you who
say that to me?" he cried out. "No! No! Christ or Devil,
you are wrong there! Never have you let me forget, never for
one moment!" And it was then that the voice became a vast
anonymous voice, gathered up, it seemed, from so much suffering
in the world as to be rendered almost inarticulate! It came to
Mr. Evans' ears out of the gills of fishes, out of the gullets of
beasts, out of the shards of insects, out of the throats of birds,
out of the wounded coils of slowworms, out of prisons, out of
hospitals, out of madhouses and domestic torture-rooms, and as
it rose and sank, as it sank and rose, it accused Man--man the
cruel, man the blood-fiend, man the voluptuous tormentor, man
the rejoicer in pain, man the inventor of pain, man the pain-
begetter, the pain-eater, the pain-drinker, the pain-devil! And
from the abysses of Mr. Evans' consciousness leaped up into the
day, like an eel, out of fathomless mud, a question for the cru-
cified Man-God. "So evil, so cruel, so base, 0 Lord, are the gen-
erations of men, why dost Thou seek to redeem them with Thy
suffering? Why dost Thou not cause a flood to arise--as at the
beginning--and drown forever their itching, biting, stinging,
scorpion-lusts in smooth, deep fathoms of oblivious water?"

And the voice replied to him again and it was now so low and
yet so searching that it was like a wind stirring the horns of snails
and touching the hairs in the throats of night-jars, and moving
the antennae of butterflies, and lifting the gold-dust from the
cracks of puff-balls, and blowing the grey dust from the drop-
pings of weasels, and rippling the brown rain-fall in the cups
of fungi, and fretting the light scurf on the brittle skulls of the
newborn, and the rheum-drops on the eyelids of extreme age.
and the sweat-drops on the forehead of death. And the voice
whispered--"For those that are forgiven there shall be a new
heaven and a new earth!" And Mr. Evans groaned forth his re-
tort to this: "But what of those that cannot be forgiven? Is that
new heaven and that new earth built upon the Golgotha of the
Second Death?" The voice at this became so low that the ears of
the man, clairaudient as he was through his suffering, could not
distinguish words.

"It is God and He is lying to me," thought Mr. Evans. "He is
lying to me. People lie to the condemned for whom there is no
hope."

And Mr. Evans hanging there in his great anguish hardened
his heart against the voice. "We are alone," his soul whispered
to his body and to the pain that he was inflicting on his body.
"They have left us quite alone."

And it was then that he lost consciousness. This was what only
one person afterwards would believe when he told them about it,
namely, that he had no recollection of shouting with a great
shout that "Eloi! Eloi!" which brought the blood from his
mouth.

Cordelia would not believe it, nor would Persephone, nor
would John, nor would Mr. Barter, nor would Aunt Laura, the
matron of the ward where he "came presently"--as the ironic
human phrase runs--"to himself." The only person who believed
it was Mr. Geard; and the extraordinary thing was, when, a
couple of weeks after, the Mayor of Glastonbury was visiting
him in the hospital, and he was telling him about this, such must
have been the heat of the day, or the distressing sights in that
particular ward, that Mr. Geard, after accepting his account
without question, fainted dead away!



IDOLATRY


It was now already two whole months since the Pageant:
and the ebbings and flowings of Glastonbury lives were proceed-
ing under a scorching mid-August sun.

It was a Saturday afternoon; and resting against the warm
bank of a high hawthorn hedge, John and Mary Crow were
watching the tall pale-gold stalks of a ripe cornfield over against
Bulwark's Lane leading to Bushey Combe.

The girl wore a cream-coloured frock covered with little light-
green spots, like the spots upon the inside wings of the butterfly
called a Green-veined White. She had on black stockings and
very thin shoes, and as she lay between the golden wheat-stalks
and the tall hedge-grasses, she allowed one of her outstretched
hands to caress the cloudy pink blossoms of a tuft of fumitory.
Her white straw hat lay on the ground beside her feet, upside
down, and into the place where her head would naturally have
been, John was now with meticulous care constructing an imag-
inary thrushes' nest out of twisted blades of grass and bits of
rubble.

Her face was averted from his as she lay on her side but, as
they both rested on their elbows, John would vary his preoccu-
pation with her up-turned hat by allowing his long nervous
fingers alternately to rumple up and restraighten that green-
spotted frock, so warm, as was the form beneath it, in the glow-
ing afternoon sun.

The girl's whole being responded to these satyrish caresses
with a luxurious and delicious contentment of mind and body,
such as she had not known for many a long month.

She had been married now to John for exactly two days and
she had at last persuaded--or believed she had persuaded--Miss
Drew to allow her to live with him in that Northload room, while
she continued to spend the bulk of each day in her old employ-
ment as that lady's companion. They had not yet had their first
night together; but ever since they had been married, secretly
but not surreptitiously, by Mat Dekker in St. John's Church, the
unbedded bride had been transferring her clothes and other
private belongings to this happy retreat, the first menage that
she could call her own! Whether it would be tonight that the
grand move would be made or tomorrow, Sunday night, she was
not quite sure. She had extracted a sort of reluctant half-promise
from Miss Drew that it should be tonight; but on that issue she
was prepared to be flexible, if, when it came to the point, it had
to be tomorrow instead!

John also was happier than he had been for months: probably
as happy as he had ever been since that day on the Northwold
"big river." This girl by his side seemed on that warm August
afternoon to satisfy his whole nature in a way that he had more
than once doubted it ever could be satisfied.

What a delicious mystery--frond-leaf beneath frond-leaf, shell-
whorl beneath shell-whorl, calyx beneath calyx--the identity of
a girl was! It seemed to John, as he followed with his electric
fingers the delicate curves of this body lying by his side and as
he threw out one trifling remark after another, just to hear her
voice, just to note what such a being would say, or wouldn't say,
that the renunciation of all this made by Sam Dekker was a mon-
strous outrage upon life.

"I'll set Mary at him!" he thought to himself, and then he
thought, "No! he won't listen to any girl. I must fight it out with
him myself. It's mad what he's doing. The fellow's worse than
a murderer. He's got the uttermost mystery of mysteries under
his fingertips, and instead of worshipping it he's starving it
to death!"

He had a delicious opportunity for enjoying Mary at this
moment with his most intense idolatry and concentrated fetish-
worship; for her back being turned to him, she could not distract
him by any look.

Both her words and her silences, as he caressed them now,
along with the rest, seemed to have about them the very lines and
curves of this form that he found so intensely appealing. "What
is it," he thought to himself, as he contemplated her long slim
legs in their black stockings, "what is it about a girl's shape that
excites a person so?"

The girl seemed in such a dreamy and passive state just then
that she appeared ready to yield to the least pressure of the hands
that caressed her. John took advantage of this to make her lie
prone on her face, where she seemed perfectly content to stay
quite motionless inhaling the sun-warm aromatic smells of those
infinitesimal plants such as tiny yellow pansies, that seem to love
wheatfields better than any other place, and idly pushing at the
brim of her grass-filled hat with the tips of her shoes.

He began strewing her prone limbs now with little bits of
grass taken from the bird's nest he had made. Holding these
grasses in the air above her, he let them fall down in showers;
and it pleased him to watch which of them would find rest upon
her, and which would drift aside into the hedge-weeds, caught
by some scarce-perceptible breath of the soft southerly wind.
"What is it about the way they are made?" he asked himself
again; and it seemed to him that the most exquisite thrill came to
him--the thrill that was at once most satyrish and most infinitely
tender--from the feeling of the piquancy of such desirable limbs
being inseparably united to a conscious mind--a mind that bore
about with it, wherever it went, this sweet provocative burden.
"But it's only," he thought to himself as he stopped strewing her
with grass and began smoothing down that cream-coloured frock,
"because it's Mary! If this were another girl, instead of what I
feel I should feel either savage lust or furious disgust. God! I
would not stay here a second with another girl--except of course
Lisette; but that's different. I'd hate for another girl to think to
herself, I've got him! He likes me!' I'd hate for another girl
to have that kind of triumph."

The maliciousness he now began to feel towards this imaginary
other one drew to itself all that natural loathing of the opposite
sex felt in certain moods by both men and women; but such was
John's nature that he could take this repulsion, this sex-loathing,
which is a far more powerful and deep-rooted feeling than any
mere sex-hatred, and bury it in the ground; bury it as a dog
might bury a piece of offal, knowing that if his maliciousness or
his roguery required it, he could dig it up.

The chances are that for pure unmitigated lechery John Crow
ranked highest among the whole population of Glastonbury.
Others might have far more powerful erotic sensations; but for
pure delight derived from lust, John would, with one exception,
have carried away the palm. This exception was Angela Beere,
the chaste-looking, unapproachable daughter of old Lawyer
Beere. Angela lived for nothing else but for erotic dreaming--
her mind by night and day was a temple full of ''chain-swung
censers" to the Cyprian; and in this temple was a sacred niche
that was occupied by many different figures, but by only one
figure at a time. At present the niche was occupied by the figure
of Persephone; and it was before the figure of Persephone that
Angela prostrated herself exactly in the same way that John
prostrated himself before Mary. Between the pleasure that An-
gela was enjoying, at this very minute of time, as she sat at her
easel--for she dabbled in water colours--sketching among the
Abbey Ruins, by calling up Persephone's form, and the pleasure
that John derived from the actual presence of Mary's there was
no difference at all.

Above every community, above every town, there are invisible
Powers hovering, as interested in the minnow's, male and female,
swimming about in that particular human aquarium, as Mat
Dekker was in his fish.

It is only a very few human beings, however, in each com-
munity, who are able to slip out of their skins and share this
super-mundane observation of themselves. For the most part the
inhabitants of a given locality--or aquarium--just go blindly
on, unconsciously swimming about, following their affairs, obey-
ing their necessities, pursuing the smaller fry, making their
weed-nests or their mud-nurseries. Nor have we any right to
assume--rather the contrary--that the few persons, who have
this power of slipping out of their skins and joining those super-
mundane naturalists, are nobler, or even wiser, than the rest.
Very often they are the extreme weaklings--dwelling on the
verge of nervous idiocy.

In Glastonbury at this particular epoch, John Crow, Perse-
phone Spear, and that emaciated son of Dickery Cantle, whose
wasted legs so troubled Mr. Geard, were probably the only ones
who could attain this detached view. And certainly it would be
absurd to maintain that any of these was nobler, or wiser, or
nearer the secret of life than Mr. Geard for instance, or than
Miss Elizabeth Crow, neither of whom ever looked down, so to
speak, from above the surface of the aquarium. At this particular
moment of the fifteenth of August, that is to say at nine minutes
and forty seconds past three o'clock, had any of these super-
mundane naturalists been studying the physical and psychic
movements of the Glastonbury aquarium, they would certainly
have come to the conclusion that John Crow, contemplating the
real figure of Mary toying with the little wild pansies, and An-
gela Beere contemplating the imaginary figure of Persephone,
first in one aspect and then in another, as she sketched the
famous ruin usually known as St. Joseph's Chapel, were the
two water-creatures whose amorous excitement was most intense.
And quite apart from super-mundane observers it is likely enough
that the most desirable of all electric vibrations is just this very
sort of erotic desire, neither altogether gratified nor altogether
denied.

A small red poppy, such as linger on after their season, with
so many other cornfield plants, was dying in front of him and
a great black slug was drawing its slime over the pink pea-like
petals of a little rest-harrow. But the curious shrivelled blackness
of the dying poppy, with a strange wet look upon it, as if it wept
in its death, or as if it poured forth the most hidden store of all
its hoarded nepenthe, for nothing but the voyaging south wind,
that needed no anodyne nor any healing, to take and carry away,
did not lessen John's emotion.

Into the poppied juices of black death's own veins that perfect
sweetness by his side had crept, cozening him, cajoling him,
anointing him, with an ointment that was like a Lethe within
Lethe, an oblivion within oblivion.

The girl's yieldingness and sweetness as she lay there, bathed
in that golden sunshine and in those flickering shadows, seemed
to extend itself, like an element of eternal kindness and reassur-
ance, to everything in life.

The little rest-harrow seemed indeed to be holding its breath
till the black slug passed on its way; but its leaves were sturdy.
The slug had eaten only one pea-shaped petal. And lo! in a
moment the small strong plant could breathe again! A scarf of
rainbow-glittering slime it would wear till night-fall, but even if
no dews washed it down there would probably be rain in a day
or two and naught left of that trail. What a thing that he had
found a creature so sweet, so divinely chiselled by the great
Pygmalion of the universe! There had been a long epoch in his
life, all those years in France--though Lisette had been generous
and tender--when he would have mocked at the idea of finding
such absolute content, such fathomless peace of mind, in idolis-
ing a girl's body.

It had nothing to do with Glastonbury; that was certain! No.
it was in Norfolk they had met, and to Norfolk they would re-
turn one day.

Propping himself up upon his left arm and looking across the
girl's body, he could see the mouth of a big rabbit-hole; and
beyond that, lying close under the hedge, an old disused plough.
Upon one of the handles of this plough, which stretched up to-
wards the sky, some child or some tramp had tied a fragment of
red flannel, such as might once have been an old woman's petti-
coat. The sight of this object sent quivering through John's mind
a sudden piercing sense of the tragic pell-mell of human life
upon the earth. That bit of red petticoat tied to the plough
seemed to become a symbol--like a gallant flag held up by the
old battered sun-warmed earth--that there yet remained, in spite
of everything, a hope, a chance, faint, so faint! but still a chance,
that all the hideous miseries beneath the sun might have, down
deep underneath them, some issue, some flickering outlet, some
remedial hope.

"If there is," thought John, "it's through women that it comes
to us now." It seemed to him at that moment as if upon the kind-
ness of women, upon the yieldingness and patience of women,
and upon a certain reassurance--the mere absence from their
nature of the horns of the male beast--that their presence gives,
as of the anonymous weeds and hedge-rubble under his fingers,
all hope for better things depended. "They are all profoundly
immoral," he thought. "This accursed Glastonbury saint-myth
that baa gone, like bad wine--like wine made of the poison-
berries of that Levantine thorn tree in the churchyard--into so
many heads in this degenerate town, has never really appealed
to women--they have always seen through it--they have always
known it for what it is."

John, now finding the hand that clutched at the weeds growing
paralysed and numb from supporting him so long as he thus
leaned upon it, moved his position and sat up straight, hugging
his knees with his wrists.

"As long as I don't move or speak," thought the prostrate girl
to herself, "he will go on loving me! " And it indeed seemed as if
Mary was not mistaken in this, for it was as if all that earth-born,
sun-warmed bread of life, rising from the tops of its millions of
golden stalks, had entered into John's being, giving to the thrill-
ing happiness with which he enjoyed her--all untouched as she
was--an infinity of protraction. The hum of insects, the shiver-
ing music of the larks, as if their very heart-strings were voluble
within those little up-borne handfuls of feathers, the distant bark-
ing of sheep-dogs, the, monotonous refrain of some invisible
chiff-chaff in a hedge elm a hundred yards away, the sight of a
mountainous ridge, slope upon slope, peak upon peak, of huge
white clouds on the southern horizon, and, above all, that de-
licious appearance known as heat waves which he could see
hovering beyond the plough handles, like floating nets, he
thought, with which the elementals of the air fish for the amorous
dreams of plants and mosses and lichen and stones, as the sun
draws them forth--all these things partook of the sweetness of
the girl he loved and became part of that sweetness.

"How lucky I am," thought John, "to have had the wit to es-
cape all the traps that the Evil Spirit sets for nervous, excitable,
hypnotised men and women. If I were Sam Dekker, I should be
saying to myself ‘what ought I to be doing now? What's my next
labour and burden, 0 Lord of Miseries and Sorrows?' If I were
poor old Tom I should be rushing madly from wench to wench,
trying to forget that I hadn't money enough to live in Norfolk
or buy an airplane! If I were Philip I'd be working ten solid
hours a day, building up my business. If I were Evans--but it's
beyond me to know what goes on behind those Silurian eye-
brows. But--0 you wheat-stalks and little bindweeds!--I'd like
to leave some dint, some signal, some impress upon this very
exact spot; so that in future times, when some miserable Philip
or Sam or Tom comes groaning along this hedge looking for a
branch on that chiff-chaff tree to hang himself on, he may sud-
denly step into what these air beggars call a pocket of incredible
happiness; and think to himself 'God! I'll trick the Devil yet!'"

The moment finally came when John decided that he would
arouse his prostrate companion. This was a new delight: for. as
he knew by experience, a girl is never so provocative as when
she wakes up from a long trance of passivity during which her
whole being has been charged to overflowing by the electricity
of desire.

He jumped quickly to his feet. "Up with you, my treasure,"
he cried. "I'm getting restless." Nothing, not a shade, not a
flicker, not a glow, not a breath, did he miss of the girl's identity,
as he helped her to get upon her feet. Her benumbed, half-uncon-
scious shyness--for she swayed like a drugged creature when
first she found herself erect--the way her cheeks smelt of sun-
shine and moss, the way her lips tasted of the stalks of grass,
the way she glanced, with an indrawn "chut-chut" of tongue and
teeth, at the untidy state of her dress, the way she half-yawned
and half-smiled, all these things doubled the enchantment with
which he now embraced her, turning her this way and that, as he
pretended to brush the hedge-rubble from her clothes.

The very fact that she was such a grave, self-contained and
dignified girl made all her little feminine peculiarities much
sweeter to him. Mary indeed had got in John what women so
rarely get, a lover who was as conscious as another girl would
have been, only actively instead of passively so, of the thousand
and one little infinitesimal flickerings of physical feeling which
create the aura in which the mind functions.

"Yes, Mary?"

"I believe it would have been easier, after all, if we'd done
the natural and obvious thing and gone straight to the room after
we were married."

"Now don't fuss over that, any more," he retorted, picking up her
hat for her. "It was to please her we did as we did. It was her idea.
She begged you to wait till Sunday and we promised we would.
Nobody knows we're married but her and Tom and Dekker."

"Perhaps...I'll have...to wait...till Sunday," said Mary.

John looked so aghast at this that she kissed him of her own
accord.

"Well...I'll do my best. But how shall I let you know whether
to come and meet me at the gate or not?" she continued
rather wistfully. "She may make such a scene, when it comes
to the point, that I'll have to put it off till tomorrow."

"Oh, I'll come at nine, my treasure, and hang about there for
half an hour, for an hour if you like! And then, if you're not out
before St. John's strikes ten. I'll know you can't do it. But you
will do it--if the woman hasn't fallen into a fit or anything--you
will, won't you?"

"I will," said Mary solemnly; and she felt if she were mak-
ing a vow before that whole, sacred, golden cornfield.

"We ought to have done it as I wanted," he grumbled now,
picking up his stick and his own hat. "We ought to have done it
directly after the Pageant."

"Now stop!" the girl cried with a flushed cheek. "I absolutely
refuse to go over all that again. You know perfectly well why
I wouldn't do it then. You know how mixed up everything was
and how--but, oh, my dear, don't let's quarrel over that old
story now! I'm too happy today. It's all been too lovely today.
Don't let's go and spoil it now, just at the end. My dearest, my
dearest, don't 'ee bring up those old grievances now, please, don't
'ee!" And she slipped her hand into his with a gesture of intense
pleading.

John shrugged his lean shoulders with a gesture learnt in
France; but he obeyed her and let the dangerous topic drop.

Hand in hand they soon recovered their equanimity as they
moved along the hedge towards the gate leading into Bulwark's
Lane.

John never took Mary's hand without a dim, delicious feeling
that he was holding her--as he never yet had held her--un-
dressed and lying by his side.

"Well," he thought, "tonight...tonight!" and then as he
lifted up the heavy gate to close it, when they were safe in the
lane, and took a final glance at that shimmering corn, "I must
never forget this afternoon; never, never!" Slowly, lingeringly,
they drifted down the uneven decline, following the windings of
that narrow lane, and he held her fingers tighter and tighter in
his clasp. Why, oh, why, had he not kept her there in the corn-
field till it was too late for her to go back to the Abbey House;
till there was nothing to be done but just let Miss Drew go, and
lock themselves into their Northload room for the night!

But it was wiser, always wiser, to accept the appointed end of
happy hours! His incorrigible mind set itself wondering now
whether this might not be the real solution of the problem of
evil, of pain, of deprivation and frustration in the world. Sup-
pose things were so made that there was nothing in life that need
interrupt an eternity of August afternoons like this one? Would
that not take away from this afternoon its perfect thrill, its won-
derful essence, its strange and abiding entelechy?

Though he hadn't thought of such matters up there, wasn't it
the awareness, at the back of his mind, of his noisy shanty in the
Great Western yard, of old Tom's cynical troubles, of Miss
Drew's tragic passion, of Geard's mania about Chalice Well, of
Philip's scornful hostility, of the difficulty of propitiating their
landlady, of the way Mad Bet was forever waylaying him, yes!
and of the sights and sounds, so many of them disagreeable, that
crowded in on his days, as he went back and forth between
Northload Street and the railway station, which, like the solid
masonry of the bulk of St. John's Tower, making its rich turrets
and pinnacles so much the lovelier, had given the final magic
touch to those golden wheat-stalks and those black stockings?

John dug his root-handled hazel-stick viciously into the dry
cart-ruts as this thought came to him.

"My sweet!" he cried aloud.

"What is it, John?"

"Do you suppose all our happiness depends on contrast?"

"You mean our having to come down here; and my having to
go back for dinner?"

"That kind of thing...yes!"

"Better walk alone now," she said, drawing her hand away and
moving it quickly to her hat and then to her waistband. "I know
what you mean, John, and I've thought of that too--but some-
times I get a feeling that there's a world, just inside or just out-
side this world, where these opposites that are so hard to under-
stand, lose their difference altogether."

"But that means death, doesn't it?"

She turned her heads towards him and he was astonished at
the softness, the bloom, the glow that suffused her face at that
moment.

"Not...necessarily...not always," she said slowly; and then, before
turning her head away, she smiled one of those deep, mysterious,
feminine smiles, that only the greatest poets and artists, such as
Dante, Leonardo, Blake, have dared to note, depict and comment
on, in their troubled search for the absolute.

St. John's clock struck six as they reached the centre of the
town. "Too late for tea, John," she said. And then she added,
"We'll have our tea at midnight and all to ourselves. But, oh,
goodness! I do feel so frightened all of a sudden."

"What's the matter, sweetheart?"

"Oh, I don't know! John, I'm afraid, she'll be terribly upset.
You won't be angry if I don't come, and you've waited and
waited?"

"Of course not," he replied hurriedly. "By God, it'll only be
what I deserve if I have to come back alone. Besides, it's only
putting it off till tomorrow!"

The girl stared in front of her, fixing her eyes on that well-
preserved Gothic building that is usually called the Abbot's
Tribunal. Something had profoundly disturbed her.

"Tomorrow...tomorrow," she murmured vaguely.

"What is it, my sweet? What is it, Mary?"

She gave a quick sigh and a shake of her head.

"Oh, nothing...I expect I'm just nervous. But when you've
looked forward to a thing for a very long time and it's just--"
She bit her lower lip; she pushed back the hair beneath her hat
with the unconscious gesture of a woman facing the worst tidily.
"Well, my dear," she said resolutely, fighting down a craving
to burst into tears and to cry frantically: "Let's go to the room
now, straight away, quick--to the room--now!" "Well, my dear,
I suppose we'd better part here. I'll just have a comfortable time
to see her for a moment or two before we dress for diitner."

"Will you come over...to the room...in your--dress?" John asked,
feeling as if he were a tramp making a rendezvous with a princess.

"Of course; I've got my warm cloak, haven't I? I'll bring my
little black bag ."

John looked at her with astonishment. That she should be
able--this delicate exquisite provoker of feelings such as could
ascend the steps of the ultimate Heaven--to manage such a dras-
tic undertaking as to have a scene with Miss Drew and leave the
house with a black bag, seemed to him wonderful. That she was
ready to do it, that she was fond of him enough to do it, amazed
him. He had never been a man who attracted women, and he
exaggerated their coldness towards him. Indeed in regard to the
love of women he had a physical humility that was almost a
mania. One of the strongest holds that Mary had over him was
the simple fact that she, a sweet-looking, intellectual girl, could
be in love with him at all! Secretly John regarded himself as the
most unlovable human creature then living in Glastonbury.

As he continued to hold the hand which she had given him
and to stare at her like a person in a trance, Mary had herself
to make the move she dreaded.

"Good-bye...till tonight!" she said and tore her hand away.
But she was back again before John had left the spot. It was
a crowded piece of pavement where they had stopped in
front of the mullioned windows of the old Tribunal, and John,
following the cream-coloured frock with his eyes, had stepped
into the gutter so as not to be jostled.

Here they met as she pushed her way back against the current
of the crowd.

"If I don't come tonight, I'll come tomorrow morning. You
won't go out till I come, will you?"

"I should say not!"

And she had flown for the second time.

She still had that queer disturbed feeling, as coming down
Silver Street, she passed the high Vicarage wall. "It looks like a
monastery!" she thought. She was anything but reassured when
she caught sight of Sam Dekker at the Vicarage gate, talking to
Crummie Geard. Crummie had recently taken to helping old

Mrs. Robinson arrange the flowers for the church altar, and she
had come--quite naturally that Saturday night--to fetch a bunch
of white geraniums from the Vicarage garden.

Sam raised his hat as Mary passed and Crummie nodded; but
the impression left by this encounter was an unpleasant one.

"She holds those white flowers like a nun," Mary thought.
"And she used to be such a lovely, merry creature. I believe that
man is putting horrible ideas into her head! He's got a sort of
furtive inquisitor's look. He'll be making that pretty little thing
enter some terrible Order. How she is listening to him, drinking
in every word! He's worse than a priest--that young man. And
what a shifty sensual look he's got. He gave me a look as much
as to say: ‘Go on and take your pleasure! Go on and break Miss
Drew's heart! A time will soon come when you too will come
here for white geraniums!' "


As Mary hurriedly slipt off her cream-coloured frock--and she
felt a desire to crumple that dress between her hands and press
it to her face instead of folding it up so carefully--and began
taking down her hair, she became conscious that her panic just
now went deeper than the struggle with poor Miss Drew and
deeper even than the difference between the Tribunal and that
golden field. She paused in her task, with her bare arms lifted
to her head at the mirror, and stared into her own grey eyes.
Mary was as little conceited of her looks (nor, to confess the
truth, were they of any startling quality) as her lover-cousin, for
he could hardly be called a husband yet, with those bridal sheets
still cold, was conceited of his.

Into her grey eyes she looked therefore, as a spirit might look
that would fain give pleasure to the man she loved by giving him
her body. "The next time," she thought, "I look in the glass will
be in our room!" She took the comb now and began combing out
her hair, holding her head so far back that she made her long
tresses hang straight as seaweed, clinging to a smooth-oval-
shaped stone. And she really did forget her anxiety now and Miss
Drew and everything; for the electricity in her hair, as she pulled
the comb through it, gave her such a delicate, amorous shiver
that it made her feel as if butterfly wings were caressing her
nipples under her soft shift.

And she thought: "What will it be like tonight? Shall I feel
awkward and ashamed? Will I be able to sleep ?"

There came a puckered wrinkle to her forehead now, as she
put the comb down and began plaiting her smoothed-out locks.
John was funny. John's manias and fastidiousnesses, where girls
were concerned, seemed to be endless. "I'll be a fool, an idiotic
fool, if I let him see me undressed too soon. Td better put out
the lights while I'm slipping on my nightgown."

Her mind pondered on gravely and intently, thinking to her-
self, "Well--there you are again, you curious creature!" It was
indeed a fierce mania of Mary's to stare into her own eyes at the
looking-glass. She did it as a rule more angrily than with any
other feeling; and, when she did it, she always thought of the
self that looked back at her there as something quite different
from the self she was conscious of really being. Her real self
didn't seem to have eyes at all; didn't, in some mysterious way,
seem to need eyes or nose, or mouth! Her real self seemed com-
pounded out of pure ether and totally independent of bodily form.

"I've felt this unsafe feeling somewhere else," she now told
her staring grey eyes; "and I know where it was too! It was the
night when I undressed after being in the boat with John, on the
Wissey; the night when I was in the room next to Dave and
Persephone, and when John was at that inn."

What Mary could not know was that the original cause of this
feeling was that the desperate prayer which they had sent up
from the boat that day had only reached the malice in the First
Cause instead of its beneficence. She tried angrily now to shake
off the feeling.

"If I do make Miss Drew let me go tonight," she thought, "I'll
have it out with you, looking so wild and troubled!" And then,
not thinking of herself as beautiful, she set herself to think of
the best method of procedure when the great moment came. No
young lady from Wollop's, led by Young Tewsy into "my other
house," could have meditated more carefully on the diplomacy
of provocation. But this grave, true-hearted girl, before she had
finished arranging her hair as she wished it to be, had smiled
once at her own image. It was a flurried, faint, flickering smile,
like a watery sun on vaporous ice; but, when she came to kneel
before her chest of drawers to take out her best white evening
dress--that she had not put on since the night when Tom Barter
came--she suddenly fell to laughing aloud. The memory had
come into her head of those everlasting Elizabethan bawdy jests
about the taking of maidenheads. "I don't fancy I'll be much
changed in that respect," she thought to herself, as she unfolded
her big crimson sash.

But she had no sooner placed dress and sash side by side upon
the bed and had begun to wonder what stockings to select, when
there came a faint, hesitating knock at the door.

It turned out to be Lily; and Lily with tears running down her
cheeks.

"What is it? What's the matter?" she cried. "Come in, Lily! Come
in and tell me what it is."

She pulled the girl in and closed the door. "There! There!" she
murmured soothingly. "Don't you cry! You'll spoil your nice, clean
apron. Look! Here's a new handkerchief; and I'll give it to you, Lily,
to keep. It's real Norwich linen."

"Louie was...I thought...Mr. Weatherwax said..."

"Now stop, Lily! There's a good girl. Stop and tell me about it quietly."

"'Twas to do with...'twas because of...'twere about Mr. Barter,
Miss Mary."

Mary was a kind-hearted, generous girl and not devoid of her own
queer slant of Norfolk humour; but her attitude to Lily did uncon-
sciously change a little at the introduction of Mr. Barter's name.

"Well, Lily, what was it?"

"Thank you...ever...so much...Miss...for this love...lovely handkerchief!
I shall keep it as...as a keepsake, Miss."

"But what is it, Lily? What's upset you so?"

"Mr. Weatherwax said he'd tell Mistress that he'd seen Mr.
Barter talking to me in Ruins a week agone come Sunday. He've
a bad tongue, that old man has; and Louie thought if I told you,
Miss, what tales he's going about telling of me, maybe Mistress
would...I mean maybe Mistress wouldn't--"

"But did Mr. Barter talk to you last Sunday, Lily?"

"Not talk--of course--Miss Mary"--and Lily, folding up the
handkerchief into little squares, uplifted a face as innocent of
all guile as a wrongfully accused heroine in a story by the author
of The Channings--"not talk, of course, Miss--Mr. Barter hap-
pened to pass by when I was reading under the wall at Ruins'
End and naturally, being the gentleman he is--"

Mary found her good-temper coming back to her with a rush.
The image of the sedate Lily with her book, the expression,
"Ruins' End," the casual Barter taking a blameless stroll in the
Abbey grounds--in the presence of these things it was impossible
to nourish grievances. Besides, Lily could take care of herself.
Lily was no little goose like Tossie Stickles.

"Tom, Tom," she thought, "you'd better take care. If I know
anything of our Lily you'll meet your match if you don't look
out!"

"I understand, Lily....It's all right. Miss Drew knows how
careful you always are of the credit of her house. If I were you
I would only laugh when old Weatherwax teases you. Answer
him back! Pay him off in his own coin. Above all, don't make
him angry."

Mary paused for a moment, and then, while she moved to her
chest of drawers to finish her dressing, the thought of Crummie
and the white geraniums made her burst out scandalously to Lily
who was fumbling with the red sash on the bed: "We girls can
only be young once, Lily," she surprised herself by saying. "But
we must keep our wits about us, for men are ticklish creatures."

It may be believed how wide Lily's eyes opened when she
heard these words. "Mr. Barter has always behaved very proper.
Miss," she stammered, "and I'm sure, Miss, you know that I--"

"That's enough, now, Lily," said Mary firmly, pushing the as-
tonished maid gently towards the door. "Go and see if Miss Drew
wants any help; and if she's gone down, tell her I won't be a
minute. By the way, Lily, it may interest you to know that I was
married the day before yesterday!"

Lily's face expressed unalloyed dramatic interest; but, a sec-
ond later, bewildered consternation.

"She thinks it's to Tom," passed through Mary's mind. "Yes,"
she went on, "to my cousin, Mr. John Crow, who did so much in
the Pageant."

Lily sighed a deep sigh of relief. "Are you going to...to leave us...
Miss...I mean Mam?"

"We'll see what your mistress says about that," replied Mrs.
John Crow with a brazen chuckle. "I've got two homes now,
Lily--one here and one--not here. Now run off, please, there's
a good girl! Oh, and you can tell Louie to send in some of those
tartlets she made yesterday. I know there's rice pudding; but if
she wants to give me a treat "

"May I tell--" murmured Lily from the doorway.

"Of course, of course! Only say it's a great secret--especially
from Mr. Weatherwax!"

It was only eight by the French clock on the mantelpiece when
dinner was over and Miss Drew and her rebellious companion
were seated opposite each other, with the Dresden coffee-cups
between them. Not a sip of her coffee, however, had Miss Drew
taken. Her face was tense and white, her nostrils twitching, her
fingers fretting with her white shawl, her shoes tapping the
ground, her back straight.

"--like an elopement; that's what it is...stealing off at night to a
man's room...no! it's worse than that...it's like an assignation!"

"It's my husband's room," maintained the girl firmly; and she
said to herself: "I believe she's going to let me go."

Miss Drew visibly shuddered.

"Mary!" she said.

"Yes, dear?"

"Go to the dining-room sideboard, please, and get me half a
wine glass of Mr. Dekker's brandy!"

The girl made haste to obey her and was glad to find that the
room was already nearly dark and that Lily had taken away both
rice pudding and tartlets.

Miss Drew drank the brandy in two quick gulps.

"Is he coming for you tonight?"

The girl nodded.

''I won't have him cross my threshold! I've told you that
already."

"He's not coming in. I'm to meet him at the gate."

The woman rose from her seat and, moving to the chimney-
piece, drew her shawl tight round her shoulders.

There were no flower-pots in the grate tonight. Its cold pol-
ished black cavity looked back at her like the ribs of death.

"This moment had to come," she said in a low voice, speaking
more to herself than to the girl. "It had to come; and now
it's come."

"But I'll be over every day, dear," whispered Mary, wishing
bitterly that she had never let John come for her tonight. "It's
worse than I expected," she thought.

"You don't know," said Miss Drew, "you simply don't know
what you're to me."

"Dear...my dear!" murmured Mary, rising, she also, from
her seat, and making a little wavering, fluctuating movement
towards her friend.

But Miss Drew continued: "No, you don't know, you never
have known! This man...this 'husband' as you call him, this
cunning scamp...has less feeling in his whole body than I've
got in my little finger!"

She must have caught, just then, an involuntary glance of
Mary's towards the door. The younger woman was indeed afraid
that Lily might suddenly appear to carry off the coffee.

But to Mary's amazement Miss Drew now rushed to the door
and locked it! Such a thing as locking the drawing-room door of
the Abbey House to prevent interruption from the servants was
as much of a tragic and historic event--if the real proportion of
things be considered--as the eviction of the royal spy, before
Sedgemoor, from the bar-room of Dickery Cantle's great-great-
great-grandfather.

When Miss Drew came back from crossing the room the two
women confronted each other between the fragile coffee-table and
the fireless grate. The elder wore her usual black silk garment
with the heavy brooch seeming the old lace frill on her withered
neck. Opposed to her gaunt figure; Mary's form, in her low-cut
white dress and big crimson sash, looked very young and soft and
girlish.

"I'd like you...I'd like you not to..."

Miss Drew was evidently struggling to say something that tore
at her vitals.

"I'd like--" she gasped again.

"What is it, oh, what is it?" stammered Mary, awed, a little scared
and completely bewildered.

"I'd like you not to go to him tonight. I'd like you to stay with
me tonight...our last night...as you are!"

"Of course, my dear, if you feel it like that--"

"I mean...not leave me at all...just this once...I mean...let me hold
you...all night...close to me--"

Mary's face must have expressed such trouble, such pity, such
confused agitation, that the old woman changed her tone to a
quieter one. "It would be nothing to you...to watch...to be there
...to be near me...just this once...and then"--she swallowed a
rasping, dry sob--"tomorrow...you shall go."

"Dear! I must think. He'll be at the gate in a few minutes; I
must--I don't know what to say. For him to go back alone--
through the streets--to that room--oh, I don't know what to do!"

She flung herself down on a chair, her red sash trailing to the
carpet, lying on the carpet, like a great stream of blood from a
stab in her side.

Miss Drew leaned one of her long, tight-sleeved arms upon the
mantelpiece and watched her.

The void of her longing for her, of her losing her, throbbed
within her like a hollow cave, round the walls of which a bitter
stifling smoke was whirling, seeking an exit.

The French clock on the mantelpiece ticked on remorselessly:
tick-tock, lock-tick, tick-tock, as if there were behind its hidden
wheels, some demon of the inanimate, that was taking vengeance
for all the hammerings and tinkerings it had had at the hands of
its man-creators.

Mary glanced hopelessly, helplessly, at the clock. She remem-
bered how it had ticked, just like this, the night she had felt so
sad with Tom before the Pageant. Her thoughts kept taking first
one road of trouble and then another. "It isn't fair!" her heart
cried. "I belong to John. It isn't fair!" And then a vast pity for
this unloved, childless old woman surged up within her. "After
all," she said to herself, "it's only for one short night: and how
could I be happy, over there, thinking that I'd denied her such
a little thing?"

"Let me think," she whispered, giving Miss Drew a faint smile
and a reassuring nod. "Sit down, dear--don't stand like that!
You make me nervous. I only want to think...just to think
...a little more."

But Miss Drew did not show any inclination to sit down. She
kept her eyes fixed upon the girl in the chair, as if that red sash
were a death warrant. And something from her Isle-of-Ely an-
cestors now rose up in Mary's nature; something sturdy, earth-
rooted and with a smack of indulgent humour in it, like the taste
of peat-smoke.

"The poor heart!" she said to herself. "John and I can surely
wait for twenty-four hours. If I can--God knows!--he can."

To her consternation Miss Drew now rushed forward and with
a heart-rending groan flung herself on her knees at the girl's feet.
"I'm not a bad woman! I'm not a bad woman!" she sobbed out;
and then to Mary's dismay she began pressing the red sash
against her lips. "I'm not...I'm not a bad woman!" she groaned
again, uplifting to the girl a face contorted with shame and
passion.

"Miss Drew! dear Miss Drew! Get up, for Christ's sake. It's
not right for you--it's not right for either of us! Oh, what shall
I do? What shall I "

But the other had buried her face in the girl's lap and with
her arms outstretched was clutching at the sash where it was
wound about the young woman's waist. She was murmuring all
sorts of wild things now to which the girl could only helplessly
listen, looking distractedly at the clock, which went on with its
infernal ticking in exactly the same tone as if its mistress had
been pouring out tea for Matthew Dekker.

"Oh, I love you so! Oh, I would give up my life for you! I
can't bear it any more--it's lasted too long. But you will? My
child, my little one, my only one, you will? You will be with me,
watch with me, let me hold you, just this one single night? I'm
not a bad woman! Say I'm not, child! It's...its...it's this Love
that's burning my life up!"

The clock selected this particular moment to begin striking
nine, the hour when John was to be at the gate! She had done
nothing towards putting her day-dress and her night-dress into
that black bag she had told him about. The intrusion of Lily at
that juncture had left her barely time to get dressed at all.

She had to struggle now with a definite anger against this
frantic creature; but her sturdy East-Anglian nature stood her
in good stead and she fought that feeling down. She saw in her
mind's eye the drooping forehead, the lowered eyelids of the
nun-like Crummie. She saw Sam Dekker's white geraniums; and
she murmured to herself again: "The poor heart! The poor
heart!"

"Get up, dear! Get up!" she now cried aloud in a voice not
untender but resolute and emphatic. As she spoke, she herself
struggled out of the chair. Standing erect now she felt in more
control of the situation; and she took hold of Miss Drew's hands
and managed to drag her up from her knees. She was startled as
she did this by the burning feverishness in the woman's fingers.
But when she got her safe on her feet the agitated lady fell into
a fit of, violent shivering as if, in the fever of her emotion, she
had been plunged into ice-cold water.

But she resumed her old place by the empty grate; though
Mary could see the thin black arm that she extended along the
mantelpiece was trembling so much that it made a couple of
ornaments that stood there jingle and tinkle against each other.

Miss Drew glanced sideways now at the ticking dock, as if she
could have struck out its life with one blow and left it pointing
at ten minutes past nine in an eternal paralysis!

"Well," she whispered huskily, "why don't you go up and
pack your things, if...that man...is waiting for you?"

Mary walked slowly to the window. She was once more in an
anguish of indecision. The tragedy of passion often consists in
the depths of harsh unlovableness into which it throws its vic-
tims. Miss Drew, by the tone in which she said, "Go up...that
man is waiting," had done her utmost to destroy the very pity
upon which her fate depended. The "poor heart," as her red-
sashed companion had called her in her thoughts, was indeed in
a tragic impasse.

"Well...have you decided against me...against the one thing I've
ever begged...on my knees...of a living soul?"

Her words seemed to come, not from her own mouth, but from
some other Miss Drew,--a towering image of devastated frustra-
tion--that hung and wavered in the air between them.

But Mary continued obstinately staring out of the window into
the round half-circle of trimly weeded gravel, surrounded by
thick laurel bushes from which a winding driveway led to the
gate. The window was open at the top; but not content with this,
she presently pulled aside the muslin curtains and opened it at
the bottom. She now stood there motionless, listening intently,
while the warm August air stirred her gown and, entering the
room, made the candles flicker.

Several little brown moths took the opportunity of flying in
past her white figure. Some rushed to perish at the candles on
the table, while others beat themselves against the lamp till they
fell upon the floor. Neither Miss Drew nor her companion had
any margin of consciousness left for these little suicides of blind
desire. Miss Drew's thoughts flickered much more wildly than
the softly fluttering curtains or the lightly stirred folds of her
companion's frock.

They were a strange jumble, these thoughts; a jumble of old,
conservative prejudices and passionately covetous longings; long-
ings rendered intensely concrete and circumscribed by reason of
their long suppression.

"Mamma...Mamma...never sit on sofas...weakness to sit on sofas
...hold your back straight now...straight Euphemia...Betty Newton
in hay-loft...kissing...Mamma...angry like God...God sees all...he
will hold her all night...a sneak...a tramp...a trickster...a thief...
friend of Geard...Geard meddling with Chalice Well...Geard letting
loose all the devils...burning...burning...Betty Newton...Mamma...bed
all day...bread and water...too long, too long, too long...sweet...so
very sweet...and for him, all for a dirty trickster...no one knows
how sweet but me...too old now...old...old...never sit on sofas...
weakness...hold your back straight, Euphemia...a dirty adventurer
must have her...hard she is...hard to me...soft as clay to him...it
burns...it would be only once...peace, rest...lovely, heavenly peace!
...her red sash...it burns...Lily and Rogers in bed...never knock-
ed...never rang...everything changed since that man became Mayor
...Chalice Well...blood...her sash...red blood...it burns...never for
me...after this...never for me...she'll be gone soon...listening for him
out there...gone...gone...a maid no more...it burns...Lily and Rogers
in bed...two pillows...slept watching...watching slept...mamma...
grand-mamma...crying all night...never came...never heard...it burns
and burns and burns."

"I couldn't be happy in our room tonight," thought Mary. "And after
all--no! I'll do it. The poor woman! It's better than giving her white
geraniums to hold in her hand."

She shut the window with a violent jerk of her strong bare
arms. She turned and came slowly, gravely, gently, towards the
figure by the mantelpiece. She came close up to Miss Drew and
threw her arms round her as she would have thrown them around
a wounded animal.

"I'll stay," she whispered softly to her, "I'll stay, dear!"

The rush of wild excitement, relief, passion, shame, the motion
of racing blood from heart to nerves, brain, throat, were too
much for the wrought-up feelings of the woman.

Her head sank down, like the head of a reed in the water when
a sluice is opened, and upon Mary's shoulders her tears fell now
without stint, while a queer whimpering, like the crying of a
child whose mother has suddenly appeared among a crowd of
strangers, showed signs of changing into hysterical laughter.

"Come and lie down, dear...There! I'm not going to leave
you...not for one moment...my poor, poor darling! Come and lie
down...only just a minute."

Thus murmuring, Mary half-dragged, half-supported her till
she got her safe upon the sofa...upon that very sofa where
""Mamma" had so often told the little Euphemia that it was
"weakness" to recline. Then the girl s practical mind began to
work fast. "I must," she thought, "run out and tell John. I'd
better go and get hold of Lily. Oh, mercy! Her eyes are shutting!

I hope she's not going to faint."

Thrusting a pillow under Miss Drew's head, Mary ran to the
door, unlocked it and hurried down the passage. She had shut
the door carefully behind her; but even so, she did not want the
lady to hear her shouting for help.

"Lily!" she called gently.

There was no answer; but she thought she detected the sound
of hurried movements and disturbed voices in the far distance.

"Lily! Louie! Where are you?"

Then she heard the unmistakable sound of a man's voice--the
voice of Mr. Weatherwax. She opened the kitchen door. "Come
here, Lily, come quick, please; I want you! Miss Drew's ill!"

There was bread and cheese upon the kitchen table and also--
Mary noted it with a house-wife's indignation, even at that crisis!
--the brandy decanter from the dining-room sideboard.

The scullery door opened--just wide enough to allow the
entrance of a very slim virgin--and Lily, hurriedly pinning on
her white cap, slipped into the kitchen, with eyes very wide and
even her pretty mouth a little open.

"Oh, Lily, Miss Drew's unwell--I've made her lie down on the
sofa; and I think--"

"La, Miss!--I mean Mam--does Mistress want the brandy?
Mr. Weatherwax just dropped in to ask how we was off for vege-
tables, and Louie thought "

"Listen, Lily. We must try and help Miss Drew upstairs, and
get her into bed. I shall sleep with her tonight; so you can take
my pillow and things into her room. One minute, Lily! Just go
and tell Mr. Weatherwax not to go for a moment. If she's too
heavy for us, he could carry her up."

"Yes, Mam; yes, Mrs. Crow."

Mary hurried back into the drawing-room.

To her astonishment Miss Drew was standing by the mantel-
piece again, but her whole manner was changed from what it
had been. She was self-possessed now and very quiet.

"Come here, child," she said.

Mary went up to her and she took the girl's head gravely be-
tween her hands and kissed her forehead.

"I've changed my mind," she whispered, very dignified and
commanding. "I wish you to go after all. Run out now quickly
and tell that man to wait for you; and then come back and pack
your things. And I shan't expect you back till Monday morning.
I wish it, Mary! You must do what I tell you. I shall be abso-
lutely all right. I shall get up early and go to St. John's."

The curious thing about this long, hurried speech was that Miss
Drew never raised her voice above a whisper. Mary stared at her.
The sight of their two untasted coffee-cups brought back so
vividly the painful scene she had gone through that night, that
this change in her employer's tone seemed dreamlike and
unnatural.

But, before she had time to reply, Lily came quickly in with-
out even a pretence at a knock.

"Lily," said Miss Drew calmly, raising her voice now, so that
it sounded quite as usual, "you know, of course, that Miss Mary
is married?"

"Yes'm, Miss Mary told me, Mum."

"But she's going to be with us, as before, I'm glad to hear,"
Miss Drew went on, making several little movements with her
hands among the objects on the coffee-tray--"that is, during the
day-time. But I've told her we'll be able to manage without her
tomorrow; for we mustn't be selfish, must we, Lily?"

"Yes'm...no Mum."

But the lady of the Abbey House now turned to the extremely
embarrassed Mrs. John Crow.

"Run out, dear, and tell your--good man, that we're all help-
ing you to pack and that you won't keep him long."

Dominated by the authority in her tone and spared any protest
by the presence of Lily, Mary had nothing for it but to obey her
to the letter. She went to the door, which Lily gravely opened
for her, and slipped out into the hall.

She did not soon forget her queer sensation--as if she had
been turned into a bit of seaweed on the top of a great cresting
wave of compulsion--as she looked hurriedly round for some-
thing to throw round her. There was a big, eighteenth-century
mirror hanging in the hall; and in a flash of queer detachment
as one of her hands mechanically went up to her hair, she thought
to herself, "Women must have wrapped things around their
white shoulders like this, while arrows were flying, guns firing,
torches waving, men shouting, for hundreds and hundreds of
years!" She opened the front door and descended the stone steps.
Then, with the cloak she'd picked up clutched tight round her--
more as a protection from the night, from obscure invasions of
her nakedness, than for warmth in that summer air--she ran
rapidly down the drive. Yes! There he was.

"No...no! Not now, John!"' 1 ,she panted breathlessly, as he
hugged her against him, almost lifting her off the ground in his
thankfulness to have got her again. "There...there! Let me
go, John!"--and when she was free--"I must go- back now for
my things...I only came...to tell you I was--" she could
hardly get the words out in her agitation--"to tell you I was
coming. You wait here, John "

She was off up the drive again, and out of his sight, almost
before his unspeakable relief had found time to flow to his con-
fused brain from the arms which had held her.

He could not remain still. Every pulse in his body was beating
and his heart was as voluble as the French clock, still ticking
behind Miss Drew, as she talked quietly to Lily. He set himself
to pace up and down the road like a sentinel guarding some royal
palace.

There were all sorts of vague delicious scents upon the soft
air that rustled through the laurel bushes, stirred the wall-flowers
in the crannies of the grey wall, went sighing off like the breath
of an invisible spirit over the tops of the trees. But from some
remote cowshed somewhere out towards Havyatt Gap, on the road
to West Pennard, he could hear the pitiful cry of a beast in pain.

As this cry went on, tossed forth upon the summer night with
woeful persistence, John stood and listened nervously, leaning
upon his hazel-root stick.

"Damn!" he thought, "and it must be a pain like that, that
this woman's enduring now, only in the heart...in the heart
...at my carrying off Mary! What a thing--that not one per-
fect day can he enjoyed by anyone without hearing something
groan or moan! What would young Dekker be doing in my case?
Well--it's clear what he'd be doing, by what he's done over Mrs.
Zoyland! Cleared out of it...hands off...and spends his time be-
tween Paradise and Bove Town, comforting the sick."

He resumed his sentry's march, but his mind was beating now
against the blood-stained wedge of the world's pain, and he could
not give up himself with absolute assent to his good hour.

He prodded the crumbling stonework of the wall with the end
of his stick in angry pity: pity for Miss Drew, pity for that suf-
fering beast on the West Pennard Road, pity for the whole array
of anguished nerves upon which the great, blunt thumb of evil
was strumming its nightly gamut amid these sweet summer scents.

Once more he listened intently. How hard not to listen! What
was the trouble with that beast over there? What were they doing
to it? What were he and Mary doing to Miss Drew? If only he
knew that there were a God, who for one second had an ear open,
what things he would pour into that gaping, hairy, stupid orifice.
In the old days their gods made them sacrifice their enemies to
propitiate the great pain-engine.

"I'll put into old Geard's head," he thought, "to burn an image of
God, like a great Guy Fawkes, when he has his Festival of Christ's
Blood."

He resumed his sentry's march. The suffering beast was silent
now. He prayed that Miss Drew also was either rocking herself
to sleep in a fit of hysterics or hardening her heart in pain-kill-
ing hate.

"But if everyone waited," he said to himself, "to snatch their
hour, till not a cry, a groan, a moan, could be heard in the whole
world, who would ever be happy?" There! Wasn't that the open-
ing of the front door? No! 'Twas one of those inexplicable noises
that are liable to occur in all silent places, as though some am-
bushed eavesdropper struck something with his foot.

"What an awful mood Tom was in when I saw him yesterday!
He doesn't seem to like it very much our being married. Perhaps
I oughtn't to have asked him to the church. She said not to! Girls
are wise in these things...wise...There! That surely was the door?
Yes, there are her steps! Oh. the darling! Oh. the heavenly darling!"
He snatched the bag from her hands and laid it on the ground,
flinging his hazel-stick after it. His whispers of rapture as he
welcomed her, touching her, here, there, with his hands, as if to
make sure that it was she and none else, drifted off among the
other faint sounds of the night and went on their airy voyage
eastward. The wind came from the west: so that, long after no
human ear could have heard them, those sounds--or those vib-
rations that would have been sounds to more sensitive ears than
man's--went journeying due east. Over the roofs of West Pen-
nard and East Pennard they went; over Ditcheat and Milton Cleve-
don; over Cogley Wood and King's Wood Warren; over Monkton
Deverill and Danes' Bottom; till they left the West-Country al-
together; and were resolved into thin air somewhere beyond
Stonehenge.

But Mary soon made him pick up her bag and his stick and
set off down Silver Street.

"I was within an ace--an ace I tell you--of not coming to-
night! In fact I'd told her I wouldnt come; and it was quite de-
cided; when, all suddenly, she changed her mind and became
absolutely generous. She just made me come, John, just made
me!"

"Poor old thing!" he interjected at this point. And then he
caught himself up. "Damn it, my sweet, how self-complacent a
person gets, in a second, when luck turns--but I can't help it;
I've got you! I've got you! I've got you!"

Mary smiled to herself in the warm velvety darkness that hung,
like a great priestly alb, around the masonry of St. John's Tower;
for she said in her heart: "How different women are from men!
I suppose we all accept from our earliest childhood, this tragic
division between the happy and the unhappy. Men seem to
discover it, like a new light on things; and at once want to do
something, or at least to make some grand sign of doing some-
thing!" But she forgot Miss Drew herself when they reached that
door in the lamp-lit silence of Northload Street. John produced
his latch-key.

"Think if I'd forgotten it!" he whispered. "Think it we'd had
to ring and bring that woman down!" And she remembered, as
they ascended the two flights of stairs to their top floor, glancing
with an almost guilty nervousness at the various doors they
passed, how miserable she had been so many times, on these
stairs. She recalled the day when she had bought the tablecloth
at Wollop's and had found Tom there and came away without
even knocking. As she followed John now with her hand on the
gas-lit bannisters and watched the ends of his grey flannel trous-
ers clinging about his down-trodden heels, she wondered to
herself why it was that he loved her now so much more than
during those wretched months before the Pageant. Was it Tom's
fault in those days? or Geard's? or just the agitation of the
Pageant?

"I don't understand him," she said to herself, as they reached
their own landing, "but I belong to him, I belong to him! He
loves me more today than he's loved me since the boat on the
Wissey."

Her feelings were a thrilling mixture of contradictions when
they stood in the room at last--alone together--and with the
night before them. But they were all happy sensations; though
so opposite! It was a delicious sense of a furtive, guilty assigna-
tion she had, as she heard him lock the door behind her. But it
was also a heavenly sense, as she looked around her, of being in
a room she had made according to her own taste; for in Thorpe,
at Norwich, it had just been "Mary's bedroom," something she
had accepted exactly as she had grown up in it; and of course,
at Miss Drew's, everything belonged to the house.

She felt also--and this was totally unexpected--a hot wave of
shyness mounting up through her as she hesitated for a second
to throw off her cloak. She pressed her knuckles quickly to her
face, before she looked round, and prayed he wouldn't notice
how burning her cheeks were! But he was snatching off her cloak
now; and now he was standing back, for a minute, to gaze at her
with adoration in her low white dress and bare arms and shoulders.

"What a...lovely...sash!" he whispered solemnly; and he seemed
to be drinking her up with his eyes, just as if he were kneeling
at her feet and she were the very cup at the altar. And then his
hands, his lips, his very soul, were pressed rapturously against
her shoulders, her throat, her shy cold breasts.

The touch of her body began very soon to change this worship
of her beauty into a more intense but less sacramental desire.
His fingers began feverishly plucking at the fastenings of her
bodice. But Mary remembered her carefully thought-out erotic
diplomacy and she slipped away from him.

"No...no...no, John, I'm going to undress behind our screen.
That's what I bought it for, at Wollop's! It's my dressing-room
behind there--as well as my kitchen! You go and get quite
ready for bed...give me my bag, though, my night-gown's in
there...yes! get into bed as quick as you like, and I'll turn
out the gas!"

When John recalled every conscious moment of all this night,
after she had left him on Monday, the thing that remained in his
mind as most entrancing was the marbly smoothness of her body
when he held her at last. Being as queer as he had always been in
his amorous peculiarities, and being as frantically fastidious as
he was vicious, this smoothness of Mary's flesh was a new ex-
perience to him. He hadn't exactly expected her to be as scaly as
a gryphon, or even as bony as old Tom was, but this heavenly
smoothness was something quite unlooked for!

And she was so docile, too; that was another surprise to him;
for he had expected, from what he had read in books, that she
would be capricious, nervous, agitated, difficult.

Yes, Mary was indeed "docile." John was right in that! She
too had her surprises that night; and the greatest of all these
was the sense of absolute naturalness and freedom from
embarrassment.

When she had felt that first rush of blood to her cheeks she
had thought to herself: "Mercy! I'm not going to be silly in that
way, am I?" But when once she had turned out that gas-flame
...why! it was all as easy and nice as it had been in the
wheatfield. It was nicer, in fact; for in place of the great Mother's
confederacy with her daughter's psychic ravishing, as she lay on
that sun-warmed bank, here, in this Northload bed, with the
water-meadow scents coming in through the window almost as if
they came from her own Norfolk fens, there was about her an
older, deeper, darker protection than even of the earth; here
there was about her the protection of the ancient night itself,
oldest of all the gods, older than all the Thrones, Dominations,
Principalities, and Powers that brood over Glastonbury, older
than any Holy GraiL And Mary thought to herself: "Because I
have found my love and because I have come to belong to my
love, I will bear now, without making a fuss, whatever chance
may give me to bear! I will think of what I feel now--pure
gratitude; and I'll be sweeter to Miss Drew than anyone in all
her days has been!"

And John thought to himself: "I wish I could get old Tom's
troubles out of my mind! I wish I'd stirred up the Mayor a bit
more to make things easier for Tom at the factory. I wish I
hadn't asked him to come to the church. I wish I'd seen more of
him lately! I've just dropped old Tom, I've just forgot him,
neglected him, let him slide out of my mind!"

And as John lay there, discovering in the smoothness of Mary's
limbs something that was as surprising to him as if he'd found
a white seaweed or a blue wood-anemone, his shame about
neglecting Tom became like a bruise, a definite bruise in some
back-ledge of his consciousness. "I must accept it," he said to
himself; and he began to think, as he slowly sank to sleep--
the girl was asleep at least an hour before he was--that the
only morality he possessed was a feeling of shame whenever
he allowed himself to cry out, "I am miserable...I am un-
happy...I am wretched." Not to pity himself whatever hap-
pened and not to be miserable whatever happened: such was
John's morality. To allow himself to go to sleep feeling dis-
tressed about Tom would have been a lapse from his interior
code of honour.

As he heard St. John's clock strike two he gathered himself
together within himself in a curious habit-gesture of the will.
This gesture he always thought of in a particular way, using a
special image for it. The image he used for it was a certain kind
of black travelling trunk studded with brass nails.

Such a trunk he had once seen on a barge on the Seine. A
man--a young working-man--was sitting upon it; and it was
from this lad's expression that John had derived this particular
symbol of refusing, whatever happened, to be unhappy, which
constituted in his own mind the only morality. At the first
temptation to such weakness, as at this very moment, when he
was tempted to stay awake worrying about old Tom, he would
make this habitual gesture of the will and visualise the black
trunk with brass knobs!

It was a further proof of how women receive the tragedies
of others with a more vegetable-like acceptance than men, that
while Mary went to sleep at half-past one full of a delicious
sense of fulfilment, John found it very difficult, in spite of his
black trunk with brass nails, to get the troubles of Tom Barter
out of his mind.

No doubt a large part of this difference between them lay
in the fact that Mary was much less nervous about sleeping with
John than John was about sleeping with Mary!

Being one layer or one skin, so to say, nearer Nature than
he, her love for him saturated her deeper identity more com-
pletely than his for her; so that the contact of strange flesh--
strange at least under these new conditions--was much less
of a nervous shock to her, for all her greater receptivity, than
it was to him. His deeper soul had not really yet accepted this
new experience, so that while her love made it possible for her
to fall into a childlike sleep of absolute peace and security,
John stayed awake for some while longer, worrying about Tom,
and when he did sleep it was a sleep less deep than hers.

But before the church clock had struck another hour, both
of the cousins were fast wrapt in unconsciousness in that little
Northload room; and the wandering mists from the water-mead-
ows of the Isle of Glass, floating in and out of their open win-
dow, renewed their strength as they slept; for these airs carried
with them a far-off dim remembrance of the vaporous summer
mists that at this very moment were rising from Dye's Hole
and from Oxborough Ferry and from that great pool at Harrod's
Mill where the personality of Tom Barter had first risen up
between them.



TIN



It was now mid-September. The harvest--a particularly
good one that year--had been gathered in, and the apples in
those immemorial orchards of Insula Pomorum, those deep-
grassed, grey-green orchards with their twisted trunks under
which the cuckoo flowers are so dewy-fresh in the spring and
the wasps so drunken-sleepy in the autumn, were beginning to
grow yellow and red.

The elderly curator of the little Glastonbury museum was
walking up and down between the famous Ancient British boat,
over which he had kept guard for forty years, and the almost
equally famous Lake Village pottery, much of which, during his
long indefatigable regime, he had dug up with his own hands.
That old canoe-boat had still a serviceable air. It looked as if
it would almost have served the owner of Wookey Hole himself,
to push his daring explorations beyond that Stone Witch, up
his subterranean river; and the pottery too looked as if it could
still hold the milk and honey of Avalon.

But Mr. Merry felt worried at that moment. It was Wednes-
day--early-closing day in the town--and he had been promised
by Mr. Crow that if he could get down to the starting-field by
two o'clock he should be taken for his first air-ride.

Bob Tankerville, the pilot, was going to fly to a certain fac-
tory town in France that day, one of a series of such expeditions
that Philip had been making of late, but today, the master him-
self being unable to go, he had offered Mr. Merry this unique
chance.

"Tankerville can do my business," he had said. "All he wants
is someone to grumble to."

But it was now a quarter to one and there was no sign of
an expected visitor for whom he had been waiting since twelve
o'clock.

"It'll be a rush to get my dinner," thought Mr. Merry, as
he stroked with his old fingers the edge of the ancient canoe.
Being a bachelor, and very rigid in his habits, Mr. Merry made
much of his dinner hour at the Pilgrims'. Since the Pageant,
he had enjoyed these meals with especial zest, because his bete
noire, Barter, whose flirtations with the waitresses were a source
of perpetual irritation to him, had, since he left the dye works
for the municipal factory, ceased to appear.

A rush! If there was one thing in life that Mr. Merry could
not abide it was what he called "one of those damned rushes
when you don't know what you're eating." And here he was,
heading steadily, moment by moment, towards a rush. Partly
by disposition, for he was one of those slowly moving persons
who savour intensely their own physical functioning as they go
to and fro over the earth, and partly from the habit of his pro-
fession, which dealt in huge tracts of time, the curator had
come to resemble the biblical Creator; for to his erudite and
historic mind, "a thousand years were as one day."

He had been pestered now for nearly a fortnight by letters
from the foreman of the municipal factory--an individual who
signed himself "Radley Robinson"--for permission to talk to
him on what the applicant called "affairs of importance."

Did the passionate Red, whose baptismal name was Radley,
feel any sense of a psychic-philological shock when he mur-
mured to himself, pen in hand, "haffairs of himportance" and
then wrote down the un-aspirated words?

Since the Pageant and since the unsatisfactory compromise--
from his point of view--that had ended the dye-works strike,
Mr. Robinson had been hardening his heart and concentrating
his energies. Deep in his soul shone still the illuminating lamp
of "'ate"; but to his Jacobin destructiveness he had had the wit
to add a great deal of indomitable cockney patience; and on
the strength of this he had been promoted to the position of
second-in-command under Barter. He had set himself to pro-
pitiate Barter with a ferocity of sly, satiric unction, that made
that shrewd East-Anglian positively sick with aversion. But there
was nothing else to be done! The manufacturing of souvenirs
flourished well under Red's astuteness. He alone seemed able to
keep the hot-heads and cranks, of which the works were full,
in any sort of order.

Above all, the Mayor, doubtless at his daughter's instigation,
was evidently anxious to soothe the man's wounded feelings by
giving him material advancement.

Anyone watching old Mr. Merry at this minute, rubbing with
a privileged forefinger this precious aquatic relic, under the
very nose of his own proclamation against such doings, would
have supposed that he was wondering what actual prehistoric
human rump once squatted in this frail skiff; but not at all.
He was thinking to himself "If he doesn't come soon, I'll have
to let the pudding go."

But suddenly the door opened and there, quite unmistakably,
was the pestering man.

Red looked like what is called a ticklish customer. He looked
like a person capable of employment by Scotland Yard. But he
also--with his neat foreman's suit and new cloth cap--looked a
little like a master-plumber. He didn't look the kind of person,
anyway, that Mr. Merry, from forty years' experience, felt he
could dismiss with a well-worn jest about its being "early-
closing."

The curator sighed deeply as he requested his visitor to take
a chair and learned that his name was Robinson.

"He's a pesterer," he thought, "but he isn't an arch-pesterer.
I may have time for pudding."

He was right. Mr. Robinson plunged into business without any
beating about the bush.

"What would you call this, Sir?" he enquired promptly, tak-
ing a stone from his pocket and handing it to the curator.

Mr. Merry took the object in his hand. It resembled a thunder-
bolt. It also resembled a lump of clay. The old gentleman's face
became very animated.

"So you've found a bit, have you? Mr.--Robinson--ah! I
thought--someone would--would find another--before long."

He jerked out these detached syllables as if he were accepting
the object in question for his museum. He did lick his finger
now and rub violently one corner of it.

"Yes; you've found another, Mr. Robinson. That's the seventh!"

Mr. Robinson, who had a friend among the apothecaries, now
uttered a mysterious chemical formula. And then, immediately
afterwards, looking Mr. Merry cheerfully in the face, pronounced
the single syllable--"tin."

"It's the helement, hain't hit, Sir, what the Romans used to
trade in; them that wore the himperial purple? "

"I've know'n this was coming for twenty years," thought the
distracted curator, his face changing from animation to pro-
found dismay.

He looked sharply at his interrogator. How much did this
fellow know? He wasn't a chemist. He wasn't an antiquary.
Could he be palmed off with a learned lie, or couldn't he? But
Mr. Merry as a result of his scrutiny decided that lies were use-
less. "It's begun!" he said to himself. "It's begun! This fellow
will take it to Crow; sure as I'm a dizzard. The beauty of Wookey
Hole is departed! Crow will start quarrying the moment he
sees this. The wonder is that he has missed it himself; he's
always going down there--with his electricity. This is the end;
the end of all those lovely stalactite caves that Clement of
Alexandria talks about!"

"I can see, Sir," said Mr. Robinson rising to his feet, "that
my hinformant was right; and that it his the helement after
which the Corinthians "

"Not Corinthians, my good man; Carthaginians cried the
curator, "and what you've got there isn't an element you must
understand. It's a chemical deposit, precipitated from the sub-
terranean river down there and brought up from some deep min-
eral pocket in the Mendips."

"0 lordy! lordy! lordy!" he thought to himself, "why can't
I hold my silly old tongue?"

"It's the hold Roman metal, henny-'ow," said Mr. Robinson
with emphatic assurance. "I thought it was myself ; but I thought
I'd just run in to-die and arst so as to mike sure. I'm not cryzy
about telling people what hisn't their business any more nor
you be, as I plinely see! But in dies like these dies, it's best to
be sife!"

Mr. Robinson buttoned his coat complacently over the inner
pocket containing the specimen he had brought.

"A mineral the harticle is then, Sir; a nice little mineral! And
this sime mineral is what the himperial Romans used? I thought
so. I thought there weren't no mistike; but I said to myself, 'tis
best to get the word of sich has knows!"

He put on his cap, adjusted it carefully, though with a touch
of rakishness, gave a contemptuous glance at the Lake Village
pottery--as much as to say: "No himperial metal in your die!"
and then, as he said afterwards to his mother, "took me bleedin'
'ook, leaving the old gent, and small blime to 'im, not knowing
'is 'ead from 'is tile."

The next person Red Robinson went to see was a small chem-
ist in High Street of the name of Harry Stickles, a remote rela-
tive of Tossie's. He got into the shop just before it closed; and
when the last shutter was put up, Mr. Stickles took him out
into his little back garden; where they sat down, in that drowsy
autumn noonday on a bench beneath the wall. Opposite them was
a pear tree and under the pear tree a big yellow cat. Several
brooms and mops were propped up against the wall and a
broken earthenware bowl lay at their feet.

" 'Ad yer dinner, 'Arry?" said Red.

"What do you suppose, you bloody Londoner? I dines at
twelve sharp, I'd have you to know, and what's more I've got
as tidy a little missus as any tradesman in town, and don't you
forget it,--when it comes to the cookery department "

Red looked at the yellow cat.

"Where is your lidy now, then, 'Arry? Washin' the so-up-
lidies?"

Mr. Stickles made a gesture with his thumb and a slight mo-
tion with one of his eyebrows. This signified that the mistress
of the house was upstairs just above their heads, and that if
they were to talk blood and iron business it would be wise to
lower their voices.

"You've 'it the mark, 'Arry; you've 'it it strite this time!
'Tis that nice, little metal what mide them hemperors so rich.
You've got it. You've got it! The honely question now his, 'ow
much will you be 'ighbel to soak 'im for."

Red took off his cap and laid it down at his feet, upside down.
The joy of his " 'ate," and the thought of "soaking" his enemy
had caused drops of sweat to moisten the front of this object;
and upon this 'ate-sweat a blue-bottle fly began to feed with
such intense avidity that one might have thought there was a
nourishing potency in Mr. Robinson's wrath.

Harry Stickles did not reply for a while. Both men now took
out their pipes and contented themselves with contemplating
the yellow cat, as their smoke ascended in filmy-blue curves
into the misty air. The cat stretched out its front paws and.
yawned voluptuously, displaying a throat as pink as a wild rose.
Then Mr. Stickles said, in a carefully modulated voice, so that
his wife, even if she was listening at the window above, could
hardly have caught his words:

"The number of sixpences I've a-spent overlooking for this
here thing in Wookey would keep me in tobacco for a year.
But there's a big lot of it down there--a big lot! It only wants
digging for. There be tons and tons, I shouldn't wonder."

Mr. Stickles was a short man, even a dwarfish one, with long
muscular arms and a face like a mad baby. His face was a soft,
round, roguish face, with pleasant dimples; but into it, as if
in some fantastic experimentation, had been thrust a pair of
eyes that glittered with insane avarice. The truth was that long
before Philip had begun charging sixpences for the privilege
of visiting Wookey Hole, Mr. Stickles had been wont to spend
Sunday after Sunday among those stalactites.

"Don't yer let 'im horf under a 'undred thousand!" said Red
Robinson cheerfully.

"Lucky if I get a hundred quid out of him," whispered the
other; "but he can't have found it or 'twould have been in the
paper."

"Piper be 'anged!" whispered Red ferociously. "What price
'im putting 'is gines and 'is tikings in the piper! What eel do
to-die, we pore dawgs will know tomorrow, and that's hall there's
to it!"

Mr. Stickles contemplated his yellow cat with intense and
concentrated attention. Suddenly he slapped his hands on his
knees.

"I'd catch him just about right--after he's had his lunch and
all--if I were to go round and see him now--straight off the
blooming reel!"

Red Robinson squirmed and fidgetted on hearing his friend's
bold utterance. In the secret malice of his heart he had seen
himself as the one, dedicated by a just providence, to dangle the
metal of Carthage and Rome before the eyes of the greedy manu-
facturer.

"He's been flying all hover Europe; so 'is pilot's landlidy in
Butts' Alley told Sally Jones...stealin' secrets from they
foreign dye-works; so 'tisn't likely he'll be in The Helms to-
die."

Mr. Stickles was however already upon his feet, while his
yellow cat, as if to give oracular encouragement to his daring
master, left the pear tree and rubbed himself against his legs.

"Maybe 'twould be better if someone helse, someone that
'adn't no hinterest in the money, someone who were a good
friend o' both parties, some quiet honlooker, you might say,
willin' to serve hall and sundry, were to go and talk to 'im,
rather than he who's the principal hagent!"

"Meaning?" whispered the gnome-like discoverer of tin, with
a leer. "Meaning?"

But Robinson had drawn back in some disquietude; for the
dwarfish chemist had suddenly thrust his face very close to his
face, and was displaying, between his thin lips, the flickering
point of a red tongue.

"Well--why not?" said the cautious foreman of the municipal
factory. "Why shouldn't you ring 'is bell henny-'ow, and tell
the servant you kime? No 'arm in that! Henny gent may ring
henny other gent's front door-bell and arst to see 'is collection
of bricky-backs. No 'arm in that!"

But Mr. Stickles did not feel the same inspiration, or the
same sympathy, in his friend's voice that he had felt in the
yellow cat's uplifted tail.

"I'm off," he said abruptly. "I don't suppose you want to wait
here all the afternoon, till I come back, eh?" he added.

"Oh, you'll come back, quicker nor that!" cried the other.
"Eel not be for arstin' yer to stay and drink fizz with 'im, all
the afternoon, hunder 'is shady helms."

No sooner were both men gone than the head of a pretty, fair-
haired young woman appeared at the window.

"Goin' to see Mr, Crow, are ye?" she murmured to herself.
"Going to surprise your little Nancy with a hundred pounds--
I don't think!"

And then, kneeling on the floor with her elbows on the
window-sill, Nancy Stickles caught sight of young Mrs. Glover
and her baby reclining in a wicker chair by the edge of her
tiny lawn, while Mr. Glover--the ironmonger---with a large
pair of garden scissors was trimming the straggling border of a
bed of London Pride.

At once the girl's thoughts ceased to be malicious, or vin-
dictive, or even self-pitiful! She thrust her fingers into her apron
pocket and extracted a little, sticky paper bag. Out of this she
took a lemon-drop and put it into her mouth.

"He'll be twelve months old, next Thursday, Billy Glover
will! It's nice for Betsy Jane the way Mr. Glover do stay at
home on closing-days and tidy up garden."

It was as if some great consolatory spirit in things, perfectly
indifferent to the blood-and-iron activities of her mate and her
mate's ally, now began to pour out upon this head at the window,
lemon-drop and all, everything that it had to bestow.

A wood pigeon's voice became audible in the small lime trees
at the bottom of Mr. Glover's garden; and in spite of the noise
of the traffic in the street in front, it was possible to catch the
pleasant sound of a lawn-mower in the garden beyond Mr. Glo-
ver's. That mysterious relaxing of everything hard, everything
tense and strung-up, that comes with autumn was all around
Nancy as she looked out, breathing a vague cider-sweet smell
of apples. If moss and primroses were the dominant spring scent
in Glastonbury, apples were the autumn one.

This particular day was indeed as characteristic of autumn
in Somerset as any day could be. A blue haze was over every-
thing, so thick and intense, that it was as if the blueness in the
sky had fallen upon the earth, leaving only a vague grey hol-
lowness in the upper air. This blue haze invaded everything. It
crept through gaps in hedges; it floated over old crumbling
walls; it slipped into open stickhouses and haysheds. And though
it was blue in colour, it smelled strongly of brown mud and of
yellow apples. This blue mist, reeking of cider-juice and ditches,
seems to possess a peculiar somnolent power. Travellers from
the north, or from the east, coming into Glastonbury by train
through Wareham, may be sitting erect and alert as they pass
Stalbridge and Templecombe but they will find it difficult to
keep their eyes on the landscape when the train has carried them
beyond Evercreech and they come into the purlieus of Avalon.

Sleep seems to emanate from this district like a thin, pene-
trating anaesthetic, possessed of a definite healing power, and it
is a sleep full of dreams; not of the gross, violent, repulsive
dreams of the night, but of lovely, floating, evasive day-dreams,
lighter, more voluptuous, nearer the heart's desire, than the raw,
crude, violent visions of the bed.

Nancy Stickles felt a wave of delicious languor steal over her
as she contemplated the Glover family enjoying themselves on
their little lawn and as she watched the blue mists floating over
the old walls and lying in hollows between the narrow alleys,
and hovering in pigsty doors, and privy doors and fowl-run
doors, and flowing like the vaporous essence of some great blue
apple of the orchards of space over everything she could see.
She felt quite friendly to her husband. He never struck her. He
never abused her. He always gave her exactly the same sum
of money every Saturday, whatever receipts the shop brought
in. He didn't drink. He praised her cooking. But on the other
hand--oh, how happy she always was when he was well out
of the way and she was left alone!

There must have been something in Nancy of the unconquer-
able zest for life that the gods had given to old Mother Legge
who was her great-aunt. She was an extraordinarily pretty girl;
and she had so fair and clear a complexion and such a rounded
figure that people turned to look at her as she went by. But
Nancy had no self-pity. It never occurred to her that she had
been wronged by God or by humanity because her father died
in the workhouse and her mother in the county asylum; or
because she had been cajoled by the accident of propinquity into
marrying the poorest and most miserly of all Glastonbury's
tradesmen.

She did not like it very much when Red Robinson, her hus-
band's friend, showed a tendency to take liberties with her; but
she managed to rebuff him without "making trouble," and as
soon as he was out of sight she had the power of casting him
from her thoughts. Nancy Stickles was perhaps more perfectly
adjusted to the ways of Nature, and to the terms upon which
we all live upon this earth, than any other conscious person in
Glastonbury except Mr. Wollop and Bert Cole. But Nancy had
a double advantage over both these adherents of the visible
world in the fact that she included many undertones and over-
tones of a psychological character completely out of reach of
Bert and the ex-Mayor.

She shared with her great-aunt a certain Rabelaisian habit of
mind, or at least a habit of mind that liked life none the worse
because of its animal basis.

At this moment, for example, when it became clear that Billy
Glover had "forgot where he was" and was being carried kicking
and screaming into the house, Nancy Stickles felt no repugnance.
If she'd been called upon at this moment to give Billy Glover
a bath she would have gone into Billy's room without the flicker
of a sigh, and been soon looking out of Billy's window, just as she
was now looking out of Harry's!

When not in acute physical pain, or in the presence of acute
physical pain, Nancy Stickles enjoyed every moment of life.
She liked to touch life, hear life, smell life, taste life, see life;
but she went far beyond Mr. Wollop and Bert, as she did in-
deed beyond everybody in Glastonbury, except its present Mayor,
in the enjoyment of religion. To Nancy Stickles, God was a dig-
nified, well-meaning, but rather helpless Person, like Parson
Dekker; Christ was a lovable, but rather disturbing Person, like
Sam Dekker; the Holy Spirit was, quite simply and quite rev-
erently, a very large and very voluble Wood Pigeon; but all
these Entities moved to and fro in an inner, behind-stage Glas-
tonbury; a Glastonbury with greener fields, a redder Chalice
Well, yellower apples and even bluer mists, than the one Nancy
knew best, but one--all the same--that she felt frequently con-
scious of, and towards which her deepest feminine soul expanded
in delicious waves of admiration, hope and love.

It was not every woman in Glastonbury for instance, who,
running down now to answer a light ring at the closed chemist's
door, and finding her husband's relative Tossie, obviously pretty
far advanced in her pregnancy, standing in the doorway, would
have greeted her with the lively hug and kiss of Nancy's welcome.

Tossie, however, showed no sign of being surprised at these
manifestations. Everyone knew that Nancy "were one for kissing
and cuddling," and the younger damsel behaved now with a
grave, indulgent toleration, and an air that seemed to say, "We
women have a right to be made a fuss of by you girls, but if
you'd had our experience of life you would be less excited."

The two of them moved together into the back garden and
sat down on the bench under the wall, lately occupied by Harry
and Red. The yellow cat was no longer in sight and the young
mistress of the house very soon carried off the unsightly scrub-
bing mops. She even picked up the fragments of the earthen-
ware bowl and carried them in. Tossie, sitting with folded hands,
took no notice of these movements.

"I shan't be going to hospital till after Christmas," she re-
marked. "Maybe not till the New Year."

"Will ye be staying where ye be till your time be come?"

"That's what Missus do say; but her'll have to get a girl to
help soon in house, me being liable to be taken wi' dizzies."

"Do it feel pretty lonesome-like when you do have they
dizzies?"

"Not particular," replied the other carelessly.

As a matter of fact, up to this day, and indeed up to the day
of her delivery, Tossie never had a flicker of either dizziness or
faintness.

"Who be Miss Crow going to have into house to help 'ee?"

Tossie proceeded to add to her air of a mother of the gen-
erations the air of a bestower of sinecures.

"She have asked I if I know'd of a friend of me own maybe;
and I told she, I'll go round, I said, and see Harry's wife, Nancy;
but of course, I said, being well-to-do people, as you might say,
and high-class tradesmen, it's doubtful if Nancy would come."

"I might come--afternoons and evenings," said Nancy pen-
sively.

She was thinking to herself--and yet not thinking--for it was
a less definite process than that--feeling rather, with every
ounce of her flesh, every nerve of her body, every pulse-beat of
her blood, that it would be extraordinarily pleasant to walk over
to Benedict Street every afternoon and have tea with Tossie
instead of at home. "Harry rather likes getting his own tea." she
said to herself.

"Could 'ee cook dinner and help I washing up?" cried Tossie
eagerly. "They'd be having nothing to speak of for lunch. Good-
ness, Nance! but I'd dearly love for 'ee to come. 'Twouid drive
all they faintings away to have thee there wi' I"

Nancy pondered. "I expect," she said, "Harry would be pleased
for me to go. He's been making terrible little in shop this last
year, owing to competition."

"Does Harry let 'ee see what he do make," asked the sagacious
Tossie, "or does he take it out of till and tell 'ee any tale 'a
likes?"

"Men prefers to manage their own business, as a general rule,"
replied Nancy cautiously; and then to change the subject, she
asked Tossie about Lady Rachel.

Tossie became, in a second, extremely secretive and extremely
consequential.

"She's unhappy. Anyone can see that. But she doesn't tell
things to everyone. She only tells things to folks as she do know
very well...folks in house."

"Does Mr. Athling come over regular to see her?"

The importance printed on Tossie's countenance as she pre-
pared to reply to this question delighted Nancy. All this was
part of those undertones of life that she enjoyed quite as much
as the littered surface.

"People can meet people, when they wants to--especially if
them be Ladies of Title--without coming to house, can't they?"

Nancy's eyes sparkled with glee. The idea of being initiated
into fashionable intrigue thrilled her.

"Maybe you'd like to walk up wi' I now, and see Miss Crow?"
said Tossie casually.

She spoke with the airy negligence of one royal ambassador
throwing out a bait to another royal ambassador. Nancy got up
from the bench, went to the window of the back room, the chemi
cal dispensing-room, and looked into the house. It was only five
minutes to three by the clock in that small back room. The litter
in that room, its hand-to-mouth look--not like a real chemist's
shop at all; like an extremely humble apothecary's place, where
there might be a barber's chair!--made her feel more than ever
sure that Harry would agree to her going.

"Yes, if you have rested long enough, Toss, and are sure the
walk won't tire you, I'd love to go with you now. I'm not a bit
afraid of Miss Crow. She talked to me once on the cricket-field
for a long time. I like her. She's nice."

On their way the two young women caught sight of John
Crow, hurrying along on the other side of the street.

"Is that there Mr. Crow still working for the Mayor, Toss?"
enquired Nancy.

"Sure he is; and what is more he's married his cousin who
do live with old Miss Drew out to Abbey House. Missus went to
call on 'em one day last week in Mrs. Boul's house in North-
load. They ain't only got one room; they ain't; and 'tis all
crowded with curtings and cushings and such like oddments.
'Tain't like a real room, Missus did say; 'tis like a Stoodio in
Chelsea-town."

"Did she tell you that, Toss?"

"Me and Lady Rachel," replied Tossie.

"Be Mr. Crow working for the Mayor still, Toss?"

"Some say he be, and some say he baint. Some say he be a
Roosian Spy. But anyway he be Philip Crow's cousin, though
they aren't on speaking terms."

"What's this I hear, Toss, about the Mayor digging great pits
in Chalice Hill for to find Jesus Christ's Supper Cup?"

"That's just ignorant talk," explained Tossie from her su-
perior level. "Mr. Geard baint digging pits; he be setting up
foundations. He be going to build a girt arch, so they do tell at
our place, and make thik red spring run under 'un."

"There be a wonderful lot of they foreigners come to Glaston
since Pageant-day."

"Stop a minute, Nance, while I gets me breath. When you be
as I be you won't skip as you walks."

Nancy obeyed and they paused by the wall of St. Benignus'.

"Sally Jones told I," whispered Tossie, in a tone as preg-
nant as her own form, "that she heard the Mayor tell his lady
there'd be a girt miracle when thik red water do run under his
new arch. Sal said he looked like a prophet when he spoke of it.
She said he told his wife about some Welshmen of ancient days,
with a name what begun with a 'T' like me own name, what
writ about this here miracle afore King Arthur's time."

Nancy contemplated the tower of St. Benignus' Church round
which several black swifts were cutting the misty air, as they
swayed and circled. Her eyes had an entranced faraway look in
them.

"These be wondrous exciting times we do live in, Toss. I've
always had a mind that I'd live to see a miracle since I were
confirmed in cathedral."

As Nancy uttered these words she laid her hand upon the
wall of St. Benignus' graveyard, and gently stroked its green
cushion of thick moss.

"Think, Toss, what it would be like," she went on in a low,
awed voice, "if there were a real miracle in Glastonbury!"

Tossie Stickles felt she was deriving more comfort from the
gentle pressure of that old wall against her fecund frame than
from any conceivable departure from the normal system of
things.

"I don't lay no stock on miracles," she said. "I reckon 'tis be-
cause I've got so much on me mind."

Tossie Stickles was not the only person in the town that fine
afternoon whose mind was preoccupied. Philip Crow, after an
interview with Harry the chemist, looked at the clock in his
study. Only half-past three! He'd got rid of that greedy dwarf
in double-quick time. What a funny-looking man--his face so
round and smooth and his eyes so hungry for bank-notes! He
hurried out of the study, where he had been showing Mr. Stickles
his own specimens of Wookey Hole tin, and went down the pas-
sage. The drawing-room door was open. He looked in. How nice
those phloxes smelt! How well Tilly arranged flowers in a room
--so different from those untidy wildflower bunches, that Aunt
Elizabeth always left about! Dear old Tilly! He closed the door,
thinking to himself: "It must be very unpleasant in those coun-
tries where the rooms have no doors to shut!"

He stood for a second in the hall, listening. The rich, misty
autumn sunlight poured through the lozenge-shaped panes of
mid-Victorian coloured glass, inset above the front door, fell upon
the hall table, throwing a rosy light upon the tray of calling
cards that stood there, upon the top of which Emma, true daugh-
ter of Sly the shepherd, had placed the virgin card of Lady
Rachel Zoyland, fell upon the stuffed pike, brought, like the
famous picture of the poet Cowper's mother, "out of Norfolk,"
and fell finally upon a leather-bound Bradshaw with a brass
paperweight laid upon it.

No! There wasn't a sound in the house. It must be the serv-
ants' day out; and Emma must be "lying down," upstairs. His
eyes fell by chance--perhaps because it was so rosy from that
coloured glass above the door--upon the Bradshaw, and upon
that little brassy Lion of Saint Mark which kept it in its place.
He sighed--a quick, little, deep-drawn sigh. Persephone had
brought him that absurd little brass object from Venice. What a
strange girl! What on earth had he done to offend her, to make
her so cold to him? He had been tender, considerate, tactful.
He had been everything they liked! He couldn't help making love
to her when they slept in those places--Taunton, Bath, Exeter,
Bristol. What else did she expect? Did she think men and women
could lie quietly side by side, like two girls? That was precisely
--as far as he could make out--what she did think. Why on
earth, else, had she turned against him? Well! Let her go.
Alone! That was his manifest destiny; to wrestle with this
chaotic world alone; without the warm comfort of a girl's faith-
ful sweetness. For the flicker of a second as he stared at that rosy
gleam, and the slanting, dust-mote sunglide that led down to it,
he thought that it would be nice, as he got older; if Tilly would
consent to adopt his little Morgan daughter. But her mother
would never give her up ; and Tilly would never consent. Besides
---what a handle to his enemies!

He took down his grey felt hat and chose a stick from half
a dozen that stood there, huddling, as if for protection, in their
painted stand round Tilly's big umbrella. He never bothered
much about sticks. Who was it he'd come across in the last week
who made such a fuss of his stick? Oh, that scallywag John!
He'd met the scamp only the other day, at Aunt Elizabeth's and,
do what he could, he couldn't keep his temper with the fellow.

Well! He must hurry up now and get to the office. But he
wished that rosy light on that brass thing hadn't made him
think of that sweet waist and those boy's hips! He opened the
door and walked with his quick short steps down the drive and
into the Wells Road. It didn't take him long--he had often
timed it exactly, not more than a quarter of an hour--to get to
his office.

"No! It would never have done to fly to the Continent today!"
he thought, as he was greeted by a chorus of anxious appeals
from his young men and saw the applicants for his attention
waiting in his ante-room and the pile of letters, come by the
second post, on his desk.

He settled himself in his swivel-chair in front of the big, fa-
miliar blotting-pad, covered with neat calculations. He gave one
quick glance out of the window at the well-known factory chim-
ney. "Ha!" he said to himself, "There'll be some more of you,
my fine boys, spouting your smoke, before Philip Crow is done
for!"

It took him three-quarters of an hour to dictate his most im-
portant answers, and then another twenty minutes to deal with
his two most important visitors. Then there came a call for him
to go to the telephone.

"That'll be the chap I want," he thought. "That'll be my
good Will!"

Will Zoyland indeed it was; and so pressing and crucial was
the Bastard's communication, that there was a violent running
to and fro in the office of the Crow Dye Works.

"No tea at home today," thought Philip, as he hurriedly set
about despatching the rest of that day's business. He dismissed
all his local suppliants now, telling them to come again tomor-
row; and he gave just ten minutes apiece to a man from London
and a man from Birmingham.

"A busy cove, our gentleman seems to be," said the London
man to the Birmingham man as they went off together. "When
does your train go? The five o'clock to Bristol? I'm going to
take the Somerset and Dorset to Wareham and catch the old
six-thirty to town."

"This little hole's going to look up, I shouldn't wonder," said
the Birmingham man presently when they were halfway down
Benedict Street. "It's a nice little place."

"So long as this freak Mayor they've elected," assented the
other, "doesn't ruin things with his damned Socialism! They tell
me that the bloke's starting a regular commune down here.
They'll be hoisting the red flag next. But they've got a tough cus-
tomer to deal with, that's evident, in our friend Crow."


Philip himself, later that afternoon, was walking rapidly, from
where he had left Zoyland, to the exit out of Wookey Hole
Wood. "I'll start contracting at once over that tin," he thought.
"I'll not draw in one bit with the new Dye Works business. Fll
play 'em off against each other! If the tin does come out in good
quantities, I'll begin that piece of road too, straight away. If
the Romans had a road there, I can have a road there. The good
Will got pretty excited? How his beard wagged."

Philip's mind now ceased to adumbrate forth even the most
blurred sentences. It ceased to evoke even those mysterious short-
hand hieroglyphs, half-word, half-picture, that we so often use.
In the orbic emanation from his body, projected like a moving
nimbus round his figure as he moved, enormous images built
themselves up, and then annihilating themselves as if by the
mandate of some interior stage-manager, built themselves up
anew, in other, stranger shapes.

His energy as he walked along with those quick, short, com-
mander-of-men steps that were so characteristic of him seemed
to be simply limitless! He felt it pouring through him, like some
as yet unnamed magnetic fluid. He felt as if he were tapping
some immense reservoir of power, stored up in those caverns
he was leaving--power that had accumulated there for centuries
and centuries, like the metallic deposit he would soon quarry
out--and in the strength of which nothing could balk him, noth-
ing could frustrate him. The curious thing was that as he gave
himself up to this intoxicating feeling he felt an excitement that
was actually phallic. Nor was there anything unnatural in this.
Both two great forces pouring forth from the double-natured
First Cause possess the energy of sex. One is creative, the other
destructive; one is good, the other evil; one loves, the other
hates. But through both of them pours forth the magnetic en-
ergy that moves and disturbs the lethargy of Matter. Both of
them have abysmal levels in their being that transcend all that
we at present know of the duality of life and death.

There is no ultimate mystery! Such a phrase is meaningless,
because the reality of Being is forever changing under the primal
and arbitrary will of the First Cause. The mystery of mysteries
is Personality, a living Person; and there is that in Personality
which is indetermined, unaccountable, changing at every second!
The Hindu philosophies that dream of the One, the Eternal, as
an Ultimate behind the arbitrariness of Personal Will are de-
luded. They are in reality--although they talk of "Spirit"--under
the bondage of the idea of the body and under the bondage
of the idea of physical matter as an "ultimate."

Apart from Personality, apart from Personal Will, there is no
such "ultimate" as Matter, there is no such "ultimate" as Spirit.
Beyond Life and beyond Death there is Personality, dominating
both Life and Death to its own arbitrary and wilful purposes.

What mortals call Sex is only a manifestation in human life,
and in animal and vegetable life, of a certain spasm, a certain
delicious shudder, a certain orgasm of a purely psychic nature,
which belongs to the Personality of the First Cause.

There are human minds--and they find it easy to hypnotise the
shallowly clever--who apply to the primordial mysteries of life
and sex certain erudite names, and by this naming, and by the
noting of certain sequences, they think things are explained.
Nothing is explained. The only causal energy in Nature is the
energy of the double-natured First Cause and of the innumer-
able lesser personalities whose existence is revealed in the un-
rolling of Time. And the ecstatic quiver of that great cosmic
ripple we call Sex runs through the whole universe and func-
tions in every organism independent of external objects of desire!

Parthenogenesis, as Christian clairvoyance has long a go de-
fined it, is a symbol of what the soul constantly achieves. So are
the Dragon's Teeth sown by Cadmus; and the pebbles cast behind
them by Deucalion and Pyrrha.

The composers of fiction aim at an aesthetic verisimilitude
which seldom corresponds to the much more eccentric and chaotic
dispositions of Nature. Only rarely are such writers so torn and
rent by the Demon within them that they can add their own touch
to the wave-crests of real actuality as these foam up, bringing
wreckage and sea-tangle and living and dead ocean monsters and
bloody spume and bottom silt into the rainbow spray!

They intersperse their "comic" and their "tragic" in a manner
quite different--so hard is it to throw off the clinging conven-
tions of human tradition!--from the ghastly monotonies and sub-
lime surprises that Nature delights in.

All thoughts, all conscious feelings belonging to living organ-
isms, in a particular spot upon the earth's rondure, mount up
and radiate outward from such a spot, overtaking in their ascent
the sound-eidola and the sight-eidola which accompany them!

Philip was now pausing for a minute on the path that led to
the little gate out of the wood. His hands were deep in his trouser
pockets. He wore no hat. He carried no stick. His suit was the
same suit of rough heather-coloured tweed that he had worn in
the Spring at his aunt's tea-party. What he could see of the sky
above the trees was cloudy. The white mist rising from the
Wookey Hole river that issued from the side of the wet green
precipice below him soon lost itself in that peculiar Somer-
setshire blueness which is neither air nor vapour, water nor
cloud, but a phenomenon, an entity, unique to itself.

With this atmospheric blueness there came to his nostrils a
sweet, pungent, rather morbid odour, an odour which Philip
would have simply called "the smell of Autumn"; but which was
really composed of the dying of many large sycamore leaves, the
emanations from certain rain-sodden, yellow toadstools, the faint
fragrance of bowed-down ferns, the wholesome but very musky
scent of herb Robert growing amid faded, tangled masses of
dog's mercury and enchanter's nightshade.

Philip stared at the ground in front of him in a species of
trance. There were a few dark-green shiny leaves of heart's
tongue ferns hanging over a muddy ledge just there, and near
them the smooth round roots of a beech tree covered with a
black, oozy moisture. Cupped within the folds of the beech roots
that were nearest the trunk were infinitesimal pools of ink-black
rain water, the presence of which reduced the duskiness of the
vegetable ooze that trickled near-by, to an indescribable green-
black. Across the roots of this tree lay several small, rotten
twigs, some of which were covered with a soft, brilliantly green
moss out of which protruded those minute fungoid growths which
children call fairy-cups.

What Philip would have simply called a "feeling of Autumn"
manifested itself also in the clamorous cawing of the rooks above
the taller trees and in an obscure smell of damp leaf mould that
came drifting by, like a tremulous and voluptuous breath out of
the very mouth of Death itself.

When he jumped into his car to drive back to Glastonbury he
found that by making this effort to explain things to Will Zoy-
land, who had a mind which was about as capable of grasping
such matters as Coeur de Lion's would have been, he had not
only cleared up a great deal in his own head but had made
several drastic decisions with regard to immediate action.

Zoyland's careless "desperateness" had not been without its
effect upon him, childish though the fellow's notions of business
were, and as he swept through the narrow lanes to hit the main
road without the necessity of going through Wells, he kept think-
ing, under the damp, overclouded sky where not a star was
visible, that a really important crisis had at last arrived in his
carefully-laid schemes.

"I'll begin mining at once," he thought, "and I'll fly to Taun-
ton tomorrow and see those road-contractors. Better get well
ahead before the frosts begin in earnest. But the weather will
stay open till Christmas! It always does in these muggy regions
--so different from Norfolk!"

He drove faster and faster through the damp, chilly night,
and the earth-scents that rose round him from the deep ditches
and the wide fields became so much nourishment to his dominant
thoughts. He did not articulate his feelings abput life. He was
no philosopher. But there came over him just then, like a de-
licious plunge into ice-cold water, a sense of his absolute lone-
liness in the world.

As he turned those leafy corners and allowed the low-hanging
foliage to brush against his machine, he felt an exultant pride
in being thus alone and fighting for his own hand against the
whole system of things! Like many another competent states-
man, both before and after Signor Machiavelli, the obtuse nar-
rowness of Philip's atheism, dogmatic with the dogmatism of
instinct rather than of reason, discounted all possibility of super-
natural aid in this crisis of his affairs. He did feel a certain
outward-rushing urge, surging up from deep within him; but
how was he--with his innate incredulity--to know that this was
the umbilical nerve within him vibrating in response to the nerves
of the Great Mother?

He did feel a faint, strange, far-off intimation of some fount
of energy, kindred to his energy, outside the dense, damp, au-
tumnal darkness that flowed around him; but how was he to
know that this was the eternal movement and counter-movement,
in its abysmal pools of being, of the First Cause of all life? He
was not even quite oblivious of an obscure something, hostile to
him, unappeasably inimical to all his schemes, struggling un-
weariedly against him in the world. But how was he, with his
small, narrow Bayeux Tapestry skull, to know that this some-
thing was the undying Personality of Christ?

When he reached the main road he began to drive faster still.

"This Glastonbury mediaevalism," he thought, "won't stand up
long against the crowds of modern workmen I'll bring into the
place. My trouble will always be the same--strikes engineered
by these damned Communists."

Tilly had gone to bed when he got home and so had Emma.
He had not slept in the same room with his wife for years; and
things were always arranged for him so that he found whiskey
and biscuits and butter and cheese left out for him on a black
tray on the green tablecloth on the dining-room table; and his
bed nicely turned down and a hot-water bottle, usually quite
cold when he arrived, but giving a friendly look to the bed
where the clothes were uplifted into a little hill near the foot.

All these small things, the particular look of that black tray
against the green tablecloth, the particular appearance of the
napkin that Emma always placed over the butter and cheese, the
welcoming friendliness of that stone hot-water bottle--Philip
was old-fashioned in certain matters--gave him a delicious sense
of being humoured and considered, not only by one, but by two
competent housewives. He found tonight, so careful had Emma
been to tuck his towel tightly around the metal hot-water jug in
his china basin, that the water was still hot; and as he washed
his hands he thought to himself:

"My life is exactly as I like it to be. This year is going to be
the crisis of my life."

No knee did Philip Crow, Esquire, of The Elms, Glastonbury,
Somerset, bend to any supernatural power, as he clicked off his
electric globe, climbed into bed, and stretched his feet downward,
delighted to find there was still warmth in the stone bottle.

"There's an autumn feeling in the air tonight," he thought.
"It was chilly in those lanes."

But he did a thing then which proved how excited he was
after his resolute conversation with Zoyland. He pressed his
knuckles against his closed eyeballs. When he had been quite
a little boy--after his Devereux grandmother had repeated over
his pillow in her stern and yet doting voice:

"Angels one and two and three guard thy counterpane for thee;
While above thy sleeping head be the wings of Michael
　　spread!"

he had been accustomed to do this; finding that the kaleidoscope
of astonishing colours which this pressure made to pass before his
vision was curiously soothing to his young mind in the black
darkness.

And now as he removed his knuckles he beheld the Glastonbury
which his present plans would create. He beheld his heavy lor-
ries tearing along a broad road from Wookey to the outskirts of
Lake Village Field. He beheld his good concrete road cutting
diagonally over the meadows from this point to the centre of
Street. He beheld his great new bridge (making the old Pom-
parles one--the Bridge Perilous of the Legends--look insig-
nificant and negligible) by which his motor-trucks would cross
the Brue. He beheld three tall new factory-chimneys rising up
from his dye works in the town. He saw the rows and rows and
rows of workpeople's cottages--not silly, fancy ones, but solid
serviceable ones--to which labouring men from Bristol and Car-
diff, and even further afield, would be attracted. He saw the sign
"To Let!" set up over their precious, socialistic toy-factory,
which he would not even bother to purchase from them!

"And I alone shall have done all this," he said to himself.

One quaint and surprising peculiarity Philip had. He always
slept--except in the very warmest summer nights--with his win-
dow shut. This was a peculiarity that, without his being aware
of it, he shared with most of his factory-hands. But it was no
doubt one of his old-fashioned early-Victorian habits. Grand-
mother Devereux used, for instance, always to say, "Beware,
children, of the night air!" Thus, as he now turned over upon
his left side to compose himself to sleep, the smell in his nostrils
had very little of that autumn feeling that had made his stone
bottle so welcome. It was a composite smell, a smell composed
partly of his quilled eiderdown, partly of the paint of his hot-
water jug, partly of his cake of recently used brown Windsor
soap, and partly of a large cedar press in which Tilly and Emma
kept his winter clothes.

Small physical movements, nay! the scarcely conscious physi-
cal positions of human bodies in sleep have at many great crises
of history tilted ponderous scales. Had Constantine, for instance,
slept on his right, in place of his left side, before his decisive
battle, had Caesar slept on his right side instead of his left be-
fore they called him to the senate-house, had Boadicea slept on
her back before fighting the Romans, or Cleopatra on her face
before sending Antony to fight them, great issues might have
fallen out in a changed manner and the upshot of vast events
been different.

Philip Crow on this occasion turned over on his left side to
sleep. Now when he had slept with his cousin Percy he had
always had the girl on his left side and therefore it was natural
enough that when the ferment of his schemes had died down
and he tried to sleep, instead of sleep coming upon him, love
There is doubtless in certain old, indurated families a deep
ineradicable strain of what might be called centripetal eroticism.
A tendency to inbreeding is not always a sign of degeneracy in
a race. It is often an instinct of ethos-preservation, suspicious
of the menace of mixed bloods. Doubtless something of the in-
ordinate individuality of the Crows was due to a constant inter-
marriage between cousins among them, doubling and redoubling
the peculiarities of their "Gens."

It was Persephone's long slender waist and narrow boyish hips
that tormented Philip now. He had often in his life fancied to
himself that he was chaster than most men, because of the cold,
critical eye with which he was able to regard women. His only
passionate love-affair before he met his cousin again, after a
long separation, had been with a boy at school, whose figure,
girlish for that of a youth, was almost identical with Percy's.

The natural softness, sweetness, submissiveness of normal girls
had always been repulsive to him. To quicken his pulse at all
there had to be something wilful, evasive, difficult, withdrawn;
and since all these qualities were of the very essence of his
cousin's nature she had attracted him fatally, the first second
she reappeared. She was still in Glastonbury. He knew that,
though he had not seen her for weeks and weeks, and had not
spoken to her for a couple of months. She had apparently left
Dave. At any rate, he had returned to Bristol without her after
the strike ended. The gossip of the town--reported to Tilly by
Emma and retailed by Tilly to him over some subsequent tea-
table--declared that she had become the inseparable companion
of Angela Beere.

Philip knew Angela well, of course, as her father, by no
means an incompetent lawyer although a besotted glutton, had
often done work for him; but her Madonna-like coldness--she
certainly was "withdrawn" enough--had somehow repelled him.
That a passionate friendship should have come to exist between
such a silent, cold-blooded creature and the lively Percy struck
him as weird, incongruous, incredible. But then--as he knew well
enough--it was the incredible that was always happening in
these things.

After the Pageant, when the fellow was well enough to leave
the hospital, Tilly had reported the most fantastical tales of
"something going on" between that crazy Welshman and Perse-
phone. This he had never believed; but he had thought he un-
derstood the cause of the report, knowing only too well his
cousin's passion for the bizarre and the exotic.

Philip stretched out his right arm now as he lay on his left
side and seized in the dark the cold rosewood bedpost at his
pillow's head. Out of the dream-dimension which surrounds our
visible world the wraith of his Devereux grandmother struggled
frantically to give him a warning. To be able to see his small,
neat, well-moulded head--for these insubstantial tenants of the
etheric envelope of our material plane find physical darkness
no hindrance--lying on the pillow and not to be able to attract
his attention was an atrocious tantalisation to this proud spirit
from beyond our palpable dream-world.

The occasion was indeed only too characteristic of what the
First Cause, in its malicious moods, delights to evoke; for while
Philip, in a spasm of savage yearning for the slender waist of
his cousin, gripped angrily that smooth bar of wood, the wraith
of the only woman who had ever passionately loved him wrestled
frantically with the laws of the universe to give him a sign, a
token, a warning, that he was putting, not a blind hand upon a
bedpost, but a blind foot upon a road that led to desperation and
madness.

"Perse! Perse! Oh, Perse, where are you? Come back to me,
Perse!"

But Persephone, in a little cheap bedroom she had taken at
Dickery Cantle's dilapidated place, was even then, with her
flushed cheek resting on her thin arm and her dusky boyish
curls making a nimbus of darkness within the darkness, dream-
ing peacefully of Angela's devotion as they wandered together
beneath the ruined carvings, so delicately foliated, so tenderly
moulded by long-buried fingers, in Saint Mary's Chapel!

Into that narrow Bayeux Tapestry skull, while:--"Stop think-
ing that! Stop thinking that!" cries the old ghost-wraith more
and more desperately, come scattered memories now of little
inn-rooms in Taunton, in Exeter, in Bath, in Bristol, in Dor-
hester, in Tewkesbury; a curtain from that room, a flapping
blind from this, a bedpost from that, a coloured print from his,
a cock-crow full of a thousand misty Wessex dawns, a dog's
marking, the rattle of early milk-cans--and mingled with all
hese things those slender hips and the waist like that torso--
what the devil was it called?--that she had brought back to
how him when she went to Italy!

To lie awake wanting, wanting, and with so little hope; to turn
over on the right now ("But it's too late now, Philip my grand-
son; you should have done that at once!"), to turn on your
back now, kicking the stone bottle viciously aside; and stretch-
ing out so stiff and so straight, till the soles of your feet press
against the woodwork; to snuff up nothing but the smell of
brown Windsor soap, and eider-down coverlet, and a faint odour
of dog's dung from your muddy boots, in place of that mad-
dening fragrance that always made you think of the sun-baked
apricots in Canon Crow's walled-garden, the sweetness of those
bare sun-burnt shoulders, was all this the result of that "autumn
feeling" which you had encountered as you went to your interview
with Zoyland at Wookey Hole?

"I could bear it," he thought; "I could bear it if only her
hips weren't just like they are...yes! yes!...and if only
her curls didn't curl so tight against the back of her neck! It's
those curls and those hips together that torment me so!"

He went to sleep at last, just about three o'clock; and while
Emma was dreaming that she was helping old Sly on the Men-
dips to shear a great black -faced ewe, with a face like the face
of her mistress, and while Tilly was dreaming that the new silk
lining of her ottoman had dyed itself--without the help of her
husband's dye works--into an incredible shell-pink, the master
of The Elms dreamed that the Mayor of Glastonbury brought
him a vast basin made of glittering tin and held it before him
and cried "Vomit!" and he dreamed that although he retched
and retched he could not bring up anything except a little white
saliva! But behold! Mr. Geard himself spat into that huge caul-
dron; and it came to pass that out of the mingling of their
spittle there was created in the centre of that glittering vessel
of shining tin, a little homuncula...a little dazzling girl-child
...and Philip found himself hoping frantically that the face
of this homuncula would be Percy's face. But when the dazzling-
ness of the little creature lessened or when his eyes could bear
its brightness better, the features disclosed to him were such as
he had never before seen. But Mr. Geard lifted up the cauldron
to the Jull stretch of his arms and cried out with a thundering
cry: "Who is the Tin-Merchant now?" and then as Philip
looked up at the vessel in the man's hands, behold! the bottom
of it became ruddy as blood, and even as he gazed, drops of
blood fell from it upon the ground and the ground was dyed
purple; and he murmured in his dream:--"The lost dye! The
lost purple dye!" and he fell on his knees beneath the vessel
and he made his hands into a cup and he thought in his heart:

When he has gone I shall take this to my dye works...and
it will go over all the world; and it will be called the Glaston-
bury Purple!"

It was with his head full of the image of this dye that he
finally sank into a dreamless sleep; and when he awoke, long
after the birds of his garden had greeted the dawn, of all his
dreaming it was only the dye he remembered. Geard, the shin-
ing vessel, the girl-child with the unknown features--all these
he had completely forgotten.

And the slim waist of Persephone Spear had also receded into
the far background of his mind.



WIND AND RAIN



We will have a grand opening, Crow," said Mr. Gears to his
faithful John as they sat talking after supper in the old
faded parlour of the Geard house. Not a thing had been done to
improve this grotesque room since those times when, as Philip
had assured the assembled family after his grandfather's will
had been read, Geard had been "a nuisance to everyone, with
his two sprawling daughters, his preaching and his poverty."

It was the first of October and a spell of wild stormy weather
had set in. As John sat on the sofa by Mrs. Geard's side--for
both the girls were out that evening--and watched his employer
rubbing his big white hands and nodding his big white face over
a warm fire of mixed coal and wood, the rain was streaming
down the panes, and every now and then the two gas-flames hang-
ing from the ceiling were caught in a draught of wind (for Mrs.
Geard cared more for air than for the protection of curtains),
and were blown sideways, in spite of their glass globes, in
sinister tongues of blue flame, producing a startling flickering
effect all over the room.

"We'll have more than that. Sir,” responded John, "if you and
I are still alive.”

Round that faded old room, in that faded old petit bourgeois
house, the October wind seemed to howl as if it had been sent
from Stonehenge to hunt for Mr. Geard and was rejoicing at
having found him.

"Hunt out this False Druid,” the gods of that Altar Stone must
have said, "and put our Terror into him!”

There came into Mrs. Geard's thin, long face, with its mobile
eyebrows and queer, troubled, flickering smile, a very curious
expression as she looked up from her knitting. A Rhys of Pem-
brokeshire, as she was, there was something in a night like
this that appealed to a deep-buried instinct in her, and in some
odd way she relished the spectacle of all her old domestic ob-
jects cowering under the storm.

Funny old things they were--Mrs. Geard's possessions--the
woollen antimacassars, the sickly yellow pears and blue grapes
under a big glass covering, with red plush round its base, the
staring picture of her father, the Plymouth Brother, with whis-
kers like a sailor and a mouth like a letter-box closed for Sun-
day; the old, worn, ash-coloured carpet, the black bear rug with
broad red-flannel edgings and more mouse-grey skin than black
hairs left to view, and all the ancient, stained, blotched, greasy
cushions that always were to be, and never had been, re-covered;
and the ricketty little tables with glaring tablecloths, and so
many brackets with green and red tassels hanging from photo-
graph frames, containing groups of Geards and Rhyses, the
former a good deal less pompous-looking but hardly less stiff
and uncomfortable in their photographer's parlours--all these
things made up a sort of dusty, cushiony ensemble, like the huge
nest of some kind of stuffed bird, now extinct.

And Mrs. Geard derived such a queer, sensual pleasure, as she
listened to the wind howling round this room, just as if its ceil-
ing were the roof of the whole house, and its walls the walls
of the whole house! She had the feeling that this whole warm,
cushiony, greasy, human-smelling place were being carried along
through vast spaces of rainy night-air. She put down her knit-
ting, left John's side, bade him "please remain seated, Mr. Crow!”
and going to the window opened it yet a little more at the top,
so that the gas-flames grew still more agitated and the red cur-
tains bulged into still fuller convexities.

"Always the one for fresh air is my good wife,” said Bloody
Johnny contentedly, as he watched this move of his lady's, and
then returned with a zest to his conversation wuth John.

But Mrs. Geard, as she took up her knitting again,--thick,
grey socks for her man's winter-wear--felt a further increase of
voluptuous satisfaction as the draught from the window fumbled
about with its blind gusty fingers through that comfortable room.
Perhaps her princely South-Wales ancestors had felt something
of the same feeling when the arras bulged out from their chilly
walls and the smoke blew into the hall from their blackened fire-
places.

In good spirits that night was the Mayoress of Glastonbury,
for her eldest daughter had told her, when she and Crummie
were putting on their waterproofs and galoshes to go out to
Lawyer Beere's party, that Mr. Evans had asked to have their
banns read out next Sunday at St. Benignus' Church.

So the flickering smile on the woman's face kept returning,
as she knitted, and her eyebrows kept wrinkling up and wrinkling
down, as they did when she was listening to Dr. Sodbury's ser-
mons. If at this moment, in her high spirits, she had done exactly
what she would have liked to do, she would have put on her old.
weather-worn cloak, covered her head in her black shawl, snuffed
up the whole cosy essence of this adored parlour of hers with
one rapturous sniff, and set out to "call for" her two children,
doing it just as if she had been a nurse, come to take her little
charges home from a children's dance.

Then as they took off their wet things in the hall she would
have whispered to Cordelia, "I'll give you my wedding umbrella
when you're married, Cordy!" Nor was Mrs. Geard's wedding
umbrella a gift to be despised, for it possessed a handle of
solid gold carved in the most majestic proportions.

"You're sure, Sir, that that London architect understood your
design?" the crafty John was now remarking. "Some of these
local people laugh at the idea of a Saxon arch associated with
a Byzantine dome."

"Ain't Saint Sophia's got a dome?" said Mr. Geard. "Ain't
there domes in Russia? And ain't I seen a Saxon arch with me
own eyes in a wall at Greylands ? 'Tis true it were walled-up,
that good Saxon arch, but an architect from a place like London
can un-wall 'un, can't he? I mean, see what 'twould be, if the
stones were took out and make one similar to 'un?"

One quaint and very characteristic peculiarity now manifested
by the Mayor of Glastonbury was a strong tendency, since
his accession to wealth and power, deliberately to revert to his
old South-Somerset dialect, which was a mingling of the purer
Somerset speech with a tincture of Dorset.

"Somewhere around Christmas would you have it, Mr. Geard,
your grand opening celebration?"

Bloody Johnny smiled.

"Maybe then, and maybe not then," he answered laconically.

"It all depends, Crow, and you know it do, on how things work
out."

"As I've said before," remarked John, "you won't get a real
rush of people from the Continent till you've had a Miracle
performed by this chalybeate spring of yours."

Mr. Geard threw upon the fire another piece of wood. Most
people in Glastonbury kept a wood-box by the side of their
coal-scuttle. And then he amused his secretary, but did not at
all surprise him, for John was getting used to the man's little
ways, by a sly wink. "They shall have their Miracle all right.
Crow; they shall have their Miracle!" he chuckled.

"The man's a prize charlatan," thought John, "and yet he
isn't! God knows what he is!" But aloud he said, "Well, Sir,
supposing it gets into all the English papers, and supposing the
Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Brussels, Rome, Madrid, Copen-
hagen papers report it, and supposing a regular Lourdes and
Lisieux kind of a rush begins, how do you propose to stop the
Anglicans, or the Roman Catholics, from exploiting such an
event?"

"Ah, my boy," grumbled Bloody Johnny, "you've hit our
trouble in those words of yours, pretty closely, but I have me
Blessed Lord at hand, and He's already begun taking up that
matter with me." The man rubbed his shins meditatively and
leaning forward in his low arm-chair, pulled with both hands
the shiny black material of one of his trousers close round his
leg. This action seemed to give him some kind of spiritual com-
fort and he continued to enjoy the warmth, gazing into the fire
with a curious film over his black eyes, the sort of film that
might have covered the ophidian stare of the world-snake, at
the bottom of the Northern Sea.

John Crow crossed one of his own scarecrow legs over the
other and watched him, listening to the clicking of his com-
panion's knitting needles and to the moaning of the wind in the
chimney.

"The moment has come," murmured Mr. Geard, thinking
aloud, "for a fresh shoot to appear from the Glastonbury
Thorn."

"Why don't you keep a cat?" burst out John irrelevantly, turn-
ing to the lady at his side.

But it was from her husband that the answer came.

"All flesh is a conductor of force, didn't 'ee know that, lad?
And when thoughts are being born they must be fed. He here,"
--and the extraordinary man actually made a jerk with his great
thumb towards the space in the centre of this snug, cushiony,
be-tasseled, be-rugged, be-fringed, be-carpeted interior--"He
here wants all the force there is about, if I'm to keep Him
close!"

John bit his under lip and looked down at those mouse-grey
hairless islands in the black bear rug. He thought to himself:
"Damn the fellow! He's nothing but a gross, overfed Cagliostro!
What the devil am I doing in this muggy hole, selling my soul
and swallowing all this tosh?"

"So our Mayoress isn't allowed to keep even a cat?" he
brought out in a tone that did not conceal his feelings.

There was rather an uncomfortable silence for a while after
that, broken only by the queer plop...plop...plop which
the curtains made, as they bulged out and then went limp again,
answering the gusts. But John thought of his nights with Mary in
their Northload room. "It's worth it!" he said to himself. "I
never knew a girl could be so sweet."

"You'll be more indulgent, laddie, when you've seen a little
more of me," said Mr. Geard suddenly, sinking back in his arm-
chair and clasping his plump fingers together over his heavy
gold watch-chain. "If you'd been a young Arab in the tent of
Mahomet you'd have heard the Prophet break wind once and
again!"

"John!" cried Megan Geard, letting her knitting sink upon
her lap.

"It's all right, apple of me eye! The old man were only talk-
ing." And he cast upon her a glance of such radiant affection,
the heavy films vanishing from his black eyes, that John's emo-
tions were once more swung in the opposite direction.

"I believe you've got in your head, Sir," he couldn't help
blurting out, "a whole new religion--but what I can't see is, how
you're going to graft it upon the old one. These curst Anglicans
are bound to give your Miracle their own twist. They'll say it's
a proof that Rome hasn't a monopoly, and so on. They'll say it's
the Grail of Arthur come back. They'll say--"

"Let 'em," cried Bloody Johnny, in a hoarse, thick voice.
"Let 'em say all they like and the Papists too. I've got a little
something in store for 'em, lad--a little surprise--that even you,
sly as you be, you rogue, haven't guessed yet!"

The ball of grey wool now rolled off Mrs. Geard's lap and
John Crow got up to fetch it for her. He was still standing up
holding the ball in his hands and trying to wind the loose thread
when above the noise of wind and rain came the sound of the
front door opening, and the excited voices of the girls come
back. Both their parents rose to their feet and John, handing the
woollen ball to Mrs. Geard, hurried out to help them take off
their cloaks. He caught sight of Cordelia's rain-drenched profile
as she struggled to shut the front door against the storm.

"She isn't a bad-looking girl after all," he thought. "It must
be the party!"

Crummie meanwhile had taken a seat on the only hall-chair,
a miserably battered upright wicker chair, bought at a sale by
her mother before she was bom. John bent upon one knee to
help her get off her galoshes. Aye! how the rain ran down in
little pools from her drenched clothes. Both the parents had
appeared now and her father was tugging awkwardly at Crum-
mie's mackintosh, while Mrs. Geard helped Cordelia to push
the bolts to of the closed door. Then she also turned to Crummie.
"How nice you do look, child, if I say it myself."

"She always was the prettiest little wench in town, wasn't she,
my chuck?" and Mr. Geard kissed the girl's wet cheeks.

John hurried to Cordelia and held her dripping cloak while
she slipped out of it. "You come out, like a Naked Nannie from
its calyx!" he whispered. And then, as he held the drenched cloak
in his hands, not knowing where to put it, "What's that you were
saying to Cordy, Mr. Crow?" threw in her mother.

"Only telling her how well her evening dress suits her, Missus!
And so it does; don't you think so, Sir?" and he hung the cloak
up on the only peg that was not overcrowded.

"No! Not there!" cried Cordelia sharply. "You're putting it
over Mother's."

It was the first remark either of the girls had yet made, but
it let loose a flood of chatter from Crmnmie as they all went
into the parlour. "Angela looked sweet, Dad. You'd have loved
her. She had on that white dress I told you about. Mr. Wollop
himself ordered it from London. She had one, little, single moss-
rose pinned on the front. She looked bewitching, and she was
more animated too than I've ever seen her. Oh, and you should
have seen Mrs. Spear! She had an old-gold dress on. How she's
been keeping it I don't know, in that awful room she's got at
Cantle's. It looks out on the yard! She took me up once, when
we met down there. It's the worst place for a girl like--" She
caught her breath, remembering John's relationship to this pres-
ent cynosure of delicate scandal. Mrs. Geard broke in at this
point as they all stood round the fire; Crummie with her frock
folded up above her petticoat crouching on the bear-rug, with
her white arms spread out to the blaze.

"May I tell Mr. Crow--for he's such a friend of the family
now, and knows us all so well--what you told me when you
started out tonight, Cordy dear?"

Cordelia's whole body stiffened. Her dislike of John had by
no means modified with closer knowledge. The more she knew
the more she disliked! She turned towards him now a pair of
the coldest, haughtiest eyes that had ever challenged him.

"It's nothing. Mother makes much too much of it. Besides,
you probably know it already, being such a friend of Owen's.
It's only that our banns are to be given out next Sunday."

John made a funny little bow. "I'm sure," he said, "I con-
gratulate you--I mean I'm sure I congratulate Mr. Evans."

"You ought to give my daughter a kiss, lad," chuckled Mr.
Geard, and he drew Cordy's proud head down with both his hands
and kissed her himself on the forehead.

"He'd better kiss Crummie," the tall girl murmured spitefully.
"Perhaps it'll bring her the same good luck--if it is good
luck."

Her voice had died away to so faint a tone as she breathed
these last words that only her father caught them.

"Hush, child!" he whispered, patting her bare shoulders with
his plump hand. "You'll feel quite differently bye and bye."

Mrs. Geard, with a delicacy worthy of the House of Rhys,
avoided her daughter's eye as her husband spoke, while Crum-
mie, with the laudable desire of drawing the general attention
away from her angry, confused sister, glanced roguishly at John.

"Aren't I going to have that kiss?" she laughed.

John had expected this, and he had made up his mind exactly
what he would do. He sprung forward, caught Crummie's fair
head in both his bony hands exactly as her father had held
Cordy's and gave it a gentle shaking, ending up with the lightest
possible brushing of his lips amid her wavy hair.

"You tease! You tease! You tease!" he cried, as he shook her.

Between Crummie and John quite a piquant understanding
had arisen. The pretty girl, in her silent, tantalised passion for
Sam Dekker, had dropped all association with her other men
friends. Red she never spoke to now, and in avoiding Red--for
they worked in the same place--she found it easy to avoid
Barter. To John, in a sense, she found herself positively cling-
ing, and as Mary seemed, just at present, far too happy to be
jealous, and as it was a situation that lent itself perfectly to
John's artful nature, Crummie's spirits had revived a little dur-
ing the last month or two; a little, not very much. Not very
much! How often to her hot, tear-soaked pillow had the wretched
girl moaned out the madness of her relentless love! What was
the use of having a father who could exorcise devils, who could
give sleep to the tormented, if he could not heal his own child's
wounded heart?


At the very moment when John was tickling his lips with
Crummie's shining tresses, the queer object of the girl's unfor-
tunate craving was having a prolonged and distressing argument
with his father on the subject of Nell.

"I tell you it only torments the woman the way you treat her!
Better never see her at all than sneak off over there every day
he's away!" The museum actually echoed to the indignant tone
of the Vicar, and the lid of his tobacco-jar that stood adjacent
to the aquarium tinkled ominously against the glass.

"But she's gone seven months with our child, Father. And
since the end of August he's been at Wookey nearly all the time."

"But Mrs. Pippard's with her, boy! You found Mrs. Pippard
for her yourself. She's fond of her, isn't she?"

"But, Father, when a woman's going to have a child she's
nervous and sensitive anyway, and when it's your own child
she's going to have--"

The Vicar's rugged face had become very red and his formid-
able little eyes--like Sam's, only much greyer--had ceased to be
grey and had become a curious blue colour under his bushy
eyebrows.

He rose from his chair and stood with his broad shoulders to
the mantelpiece, angrily jerking up the tails of his long black
coat and holding his hands beneath them while he warmed his
back at the fire.

"It's all wrong," he shouted. "The whole thing's outrageous!
If you'd had the spunk of half a man in you you'd have made
him divorce her; you'd have--"

He suddenly remembered that divorce was one of the things
against which the party in the Church to which he belonged was
especially opposed.

"Well, anyway," he added. "You'd have done one thing or
the other; not gone about dickering and havering and dodging
in the way you have."

Sam was silent for a second or two. His face did not show 1,
the faintest trace of any resentment against his father. Then
he suddenly said, "Would you like her to leave Zoyland, Father?
Would you like her to come and live with us here?"

His father's mouth opened with astonishment and he stared
blankly.

"And be divorced, you mean? And you marry her, you mean?"

"No, no! Just live here with us. I'm not going to marry her
nor any other woman--just live with us here, I mean."

"As your mistress, after the child is born?"

"Father!"

"Well, isn't that what you mean? But perhaps you don't want
to wait till the child is born. Perhaps you'd like to sleep with
her, as she is, under my roof!"

If Sam had been endowed with a little more penetration he
would have understood better what surge of suppressed feeling
underlay his father's outburst.

As it was he could only sigh helplessly and cast his eyes upon
the aquarium. Often and often had the sight of those fish, dis-
turbed by the lamplight and behaving in a manner contrary to
their ordinary routine, distracted his mind from weightier
troubles. He got up now and placed over them the kitchen dish-
cloth, which, in the agitation of that night, both he and his
father had forgotten.

"I suppose she'll be going into the hospital," he said, as he
sat down again, "in another month."

His father let his coat-tails drop and began striding up and
down the room. "I can't understand that fellow Zoyland," he
flung out, "any better than I can understand you. That sweet little
woman between you two rogues! Yes! That's the word for it,--
between you two rogues!"

He glared at Sam out of eye-sockets that seemed like two deep,
livid-blue holes in a rock of red clay.

Sam surveyed him helplessly, not shrinking from his gaze, but
looking at him as he would have looked at Wirral Hill if it had
suddenly become a volcano. His father's wrath was beginning to
affect him like a wild dream out of which he felt he ought to be
able to force himself to awake.

"What would you wish me to do, Father; if I did exactly what
would please you?"

"Please me, does he say?" roared the exasperated man. "I
tell you I hate the whole affair; and I've a mind to--a mind to--
wash my hands of it!" It was on his tongue to say--"my hands
of you!" but he corrected himself in time.

"But what would you tell me to do, Father, if I did exactly
what you told me?"

This point-blank question did quiet the angry man a little.
He put his hands into his trouser-pockets, and walked with a
somewhat less assured stride. Sam had nonplussed him a bit by
this question. It was much easier to storm and rage at his son
than to give him intelligent advice. But he satisfied both his
anger and his conscience when he finally came out with his
reply.

"I think, if you haven't the guts to act like a man in the mat-
ter, you ought to leave this girl alone." This was probably the
wickedest thing Mat Dekker had ever done in his life--the utter-
ance of this opinion.

Sam's strange fixed idea of sharing in Christ's sacrifice might
quite conceivably have put it into his head that it was his duty
to do exactly as his father bade him, in which case Nell would
have had the experience of losing her headstrong lover at the
precise moment when the sort of companionship he felt allowed
to give her was exactly the comfort which she craved most to
receive, which was indeed all she could receive. But Sam was
not yet a complete maniac; nor had his father's constant harp-
ing upon this string of "being a man" and "having guts," failed
altogether to arouse a natural reaction. He rose firmly to his
feet. "Well, Father," he said, "if tha's all the help you can give
me, I think we'd better bring the conversation to a close." He
paused for a moment, and then, ashamed of the abruptness of
his tone, he added more gently, "You've always been good to me,
Father. This is the first time in my life that I've--troubled you
like this. I daresay we'll both of us see things more...calmly
...more...more quietly...later...on." He took a few steps towards
the door and then stopped and turned. It had always been their
custom, a custom rather unusual among sons and fathers in
Glastonbury, and perhaps one that was an emotional legacy left
to the atmosphere of that house by Sam's Swiss mother, to kiss
each other good-night. On this occasion it needed one of the
greatest spiritual efforts he had ever undertaken when Sam
forced himself to go up to his father and make the motion
of offering to kiss him.

A red-faced, righteously indignant, dignified and outraged
man is not an easy objective for such an advance as Sam now
made. But the power of habit is great, and Mat Dekker, after
all, loved nobody in the world--certainly not this girl whose
troubling beauty had so upset him--as much as he loved his
son. So now, though in deep and gloomy gravity, he did bend
his head and allow his rough, bristly cheek--for he was a man
who needed shaving twice a day--to touch, for the tenth part of
a second, Sam's up-raised and twitching chin.

"Good-night, Father."

"Good-night, my boy."

Sam's betaking himself to his bedroom that night coincided,
after about five minutes leeway, with the departure to bed of
another Glastonbury bachelor, namely, Mr. Thomas Barter. The
steps up which this gentleman slowly and wearily climbed were
much less pleasant to ascend than those dusted and polished by
Penny Pitches. Mr. Barter was no longer in his High Street
room. Since his salary at the Municipal, as it was called, was
based on the success of the venture under his management and
as his task in organising it was a Herculean one, he found himself
for the moment with a very meagre income. He had been forced
to economise if he were to be able to continue his daily table
d'hotes at the Pilgrims', and not to continue these meant the last
straw of misery. His adventure with Lily had turned out any-
thing but a success. This dreamy, romantic maiden had unex-
pectedly proven herself a past mistress in the art of giving nothing
for nothing! As much kissing as he liked, where the auspicious
Ruins--an entrance-fee every time, for Lily refused to steal into
the grounds over the Abbey-House wall!--hid such chaste delin-
quencies; but beyond kissing, absolutely not one single stolen
sweet. Thus, for the last month, for he had long ago quarrelled
with the mercenary Clarissa, Mr. Barter had been compelled to
be chaste. His sole pleasure during this epoch had been the tender
but rather anxious one of snatching difficult assignations with
Tossie Stickles.

In default of all other feminine society, for Mary seemed,
since her marriage, deliberately to avoid seeing him alone, Mr.
Barter clung quite pathetically to his interviews with his "ruined"
Toss. Her sweetness to him knew no bounds. With her, if they
could only manage to escape observation, everything was per-
mitted; nothing was forbidden; and all was for pure love. He
got fonder and fonder of Tossie. Her ways, in her state of preg-
nancy, astonished him by their sweetness and quaintness. He even
became interested--and this for the first time in his masterful
career--in his future progeny. Many were the whimsical col-
loquies, interspersed with bursts of impious merriment, that they
had together over this serious event. The girl had recently got
into her head, so big had her belly grown and so violent were
the movements within her, that they were destined to be the
parents of twins; and even this prospect, conceivably one of
humorous horror to an unscrupulous Don Juan, appeared to
be by no means distasteful to Mr. Barter. But dear to him as
were these happy encounters, they had become so infrequent
of late as the girl's time drew nearer, that they no longer served
to remove the gloom which kept gathering deeper and deeper
upon him.

Tonight, as he mounted those disgusting stairs in George Street,
after a long wretched evening spent in his miserable little res-
taurant, he really felt as if he were approaching the end of his
tether. When he had turned on the gas-jet--the burner had not
even got a globe--he sat down on his chilly bed and surveyed
his washing-basin and heavy white jug with a nauseated resent-
ment that could see nothing in front of him but a leaden urinal-
wall of blank despair.

"God!" he thought, "this won't do. I'll go cracked if this goes
on. I must get hold of a new girl." But the worst of it was when-
ever he tried to think of a new girl, and he knew quite a lot of
them--Wollop's alone had at least half a dozen and only one
of these was impossible--he always thought of Toss. What was
it about Toss that caught him so? It must be the way she laughed.
She laughed with such rich merriment. She went off at anything
he'd say or do and nothing could stop her. He'd never known a
girl before who laughed with such a bubbling chuckle and then
such ringing peals. And she used to laugh like that when he
was making love to her. God! she would laugh sometimes when
really--a girl ought to be grave. But he didn't care. He liked her
to laugh. Her laugh was like all the curves of her plump body.
Well! Well! She won't laugh, poor little thing, when her time
comes. But perhaps she will. Perhaps her child will be born
in one prolonged, rich peal of laughter. Her child? Her twins!
A boy and a girl. A Toss and a Tom. Yes, her laugh was like
her arms between her shoulders and elbows--the inside of them,
when she bent them. Her laugh was like those rings above her
knees, made by those ridiculous garters.

A new girl? Damn them all! Thin, sour, puritanical, avaricious,
cold-blooded hussies!

He turned his miserable gaze upon his one wretched pillow,
dirty from his head, for he had grown remiss in having his bath
since the weather got so chilly and "the woman down there"
made such a fuss about hot water. He unlaced his boots. His
socks were a sight! "I must do something about all this," he
thought. "I can't go on like this." He took down his pyjamas
from a hook behind the door and surveyed the cold thin cotton
sheets and the frayed edge of the cheap blanket. "I'm damned
if I'll take off my vest and drawers," he thought, "just for to-
night!" This "just for tonight" had been repeated ever since
the middle of September. Mr. Barter, the sturdy fen-man, was
certainly becoming degenerate.

He turned off the light and got into bed. "I can't go on like
this," he repeated. And he set himself to do what he disliked
extremely to do--to consider his financial position. He had saved
up, since his parents died, leaving him nothing, exactly a thou-
sand pounds. He remembered the day when, in his balance-book
received from Mr. Robert Stilly, he had first beheld the figures of
that sum. It was just before John came. It was when he was
going about with Mary. To have saved a thousand pounds, all
earned by yourself, when you were only thirty-five--that was
something as things went in England nowadays! No! He could
not, he must not, break into that thousand. But what could he
do if he didn't break into it? Until the factory was really on a
production basis he had to get on as best he could. His din-
ners at the Pilgrims' always cost him five shillings--that is, if
he had two bottles of ale. And he must have ale. Ale to his
meat. Ale to his pudding. It might not be a gentleman's taste,
but it was his taste. He had been a fool to leave Philip. But
there it was! How was he to know then, what he knew now, that
he'd have this brute Robinson to work with?

He tried to imagine himself back again with Philip, but some-
how, miserable though he was, those galling, rankling insults--
no! they were worse than his present nervousness with Robinson.
At any rate he could heartily despise Robinson--even while he
recognised the man's infernal industry. And he couldn't despise
Philip! He hated them both, but it was better to live with what
you loathed and despised, than with what you loathed and ad-
mired! God! how it was raining tonight and how the wind
howled! He remembered the look of the old chimney-stack on
this wretched house, as he came just now along those few yards
of streaming pavement. It looked damnably shaky as the rain
beat against it. He wouldn't wonder if one of these nights it
didn't come down. And what room would it hit? His of course;
his room. What a nice death that would be. Crushed under that
filthy ceiling, covered with bricks, cement and wet mortar. Who
would have my thousand then? One of those fourth-removed
Warwickshire cousins? "I must certainly make my will," thought
Mr. Barter. "And I'll leave every penny of that thousand to Toss.
God! these ricketty old houses, how they do shake in a storm."

He began to hope that Tossie wasn't frightened by this high
wind in her room at the back of that Benedict house. "I sup-
pose if she got scared," he said to himself, "she'd call out and
Miss Crow would go to her." And Barter's mind went through
the process--it took less than half a second--of summoning up
the image of Miss Elizabeth and giving this image his hearty
commendation. He did not articulate this in the sort of words
he would have spoken--such as, "Miss Crow's a decent sort," or
"Miss Crow's the only lady in the whole blooming family except
Mary," but it was as if towards the portly figure of Miss Crow
he gave a sort of mental nod as a man entering the Salon Carre
in the Louvre might give a nod towards the Mona Lisa, as much
as to say, "So you are there still-"

His reflections were interrupted by an unusual noise and his
heart gave a most unpleasant jump. Some door on the landing
below--the house was let in single and double rooms--had been
flung open and a voice was shrieking--"Call the doctor, some-
one! Who's there? Someone must go for a doctor at once!"

Mr. Barter was for a moment tempted to pull that cotton sheet
and the two thin blankets tightly over his head. "If a person's
fast asleep," he thought, "they can't disturb a person."

"Mrs. Smith! Betsy Burt!" screamed the voice on the landing
below.

"It is extraordinary how fast I sleep--I was deep asleep then
and never heard a sound." These were the words that passed
through Barter's head as his excuse on the following morning.
But the curious thing was that even while he was completing
this rigmarole he was already out of bed, striking matches,
lighting the gas, and pulling on his trousers. Mr. Barter's arms
and legs, it appeared, were more benevolent than his thoughts.
Not only did he pull on his trousers but he hurriedly began put-
ting on his boots. That done, he went to his door and threw it
open. "One minute, down there!" he cried. "One minute, and I'll
go." He flung on his waistcoat, coat and overcoat, snatched up
his cap, shut his door and ran downstairs.

It appeared that the child of a solitary and rather unpleasant
woman who lived in the room parallel to his own on the floor
below had been taken with some kind of fit. It was a little boy
of six and the child was now, as Barter pushed Mrs. Carey and
Betsy Burt aside, lying on the bed with a ghastly white face and
his eyes tight shut.

"'Tis convulsions, Mr. Barter," said Betsy Burt, when he
pushed his way in.

"'Tis 'pocalypse, Mister," cried old Mrs. Carey, "for I do know
how it takes 'em. 'Twere 'pocalypse that thee own blood-brother
died of, Miss Burt; so you oughtn't to be the one to talk of
convulsions. But I do know! I've a seed un and handled un in
many a corpsy, and they was all took just as this child be. He's
gone already--looks so to I. First they gets red and then they
gets turble white. 'Pocalypse takes them i' the heart, 's know,
and that's what do make their colour fly!"

The woman whose screams in the middle of that night had
brought nobody out of bed but Mr. Barter and these two crones,
was kneeling on the floor frantically chafing the hands of her
child.

"I'll bring the doctor here in five minutes," Barter said, touch-
ing her on the shoulder, but the woman did not turn round;
did not, as a matter of fact, take any notice at all.

"She were whoam late last night, Mister," said old Mrs.
Carey, tugging at his coat as he hurried out. "Don't tell doctor
I said it! Don't bring no inquest tales on I!" she called after
him, as he went downstairs.

It didn't take him long, for he ran fast all the way, butting
against the deluging rain like a Norfolk gamekeeper, to reach
Dr. Fell's house at the corner of Northload Street. Luckily--
though it was long past twelve--the doctor was still "reading"
the "Enchiridion" in his study. In other words, his favourite book
was open on his knees and his broad low forehead, with the
grizzled hair sticking out of it like the bristles of an aged hog,
was nodding above the book. He opened the street-door himself
and let Mr. Barter in.

He agreed to go at once, but when they opened the door again
to make a start the rain was so terrific that he begged his sum-
moner to wait till he got back. "Then I can send anything by
you, Barter, that they may want. Besides, no use your getting
wetter than you are. It can't go on like this. I know the house.
There's whiskey on my table, man, and a glass somewhere. Take
a good pull. It'll do 'ee good."

It was an incredible comfort to Mr. Barter to pour himself out
a half-and-half tumbler of whiskey and water, and to draw in
his chair close to the red coals. He made towards his friend,
the doctor, the same sort of mental nod of inarticulate approval
that he had made towards Miss Crow. A warm glow of the first
unadulterated pleasure he had had since he last saw Miss Stickles,
ran through his veins as he gulped down the good drink and
dried his wet boots at the fire. "I believe I'll give up my dinners
at the Pilgrims'," he thought, "and buy whiskey with that money!
Drink's better than the best cooking, when a man's got the
doldrums."

Half an hour passed. Barter went to the doctor's table and
poured himself out half a glass more, which he now proceeded
to sip, without putting in any water. He moved to the doctor's
big leather chair and placed his glass upon the floor. A de-
licious drowsiness began to flow through him like a ripple of
warm etherealised honey.

In an hour the doctor entered. "He'll he all right--the little
lad," he said cheerfully. "It was that kind of mock-epilepsy that
children sometimes get. He's asleep now, and so I hope is the
mother. There's no hurry for you to go, my boy. Wait till the
rain's subsided. Let's make a night of it. I've got plenty more of
this stuff. It's good, isn't it?...That woman will kill that child
with her drunken ways, unless I get the Society to take him
away from her," he went on when they had settled down. "Do
you know that I know at this moment one, two--five mothers
that are killing their children in this town?"

"Well, they'll be out of it when they're dead," said Thomas
Barter.

"And do you realise, my good friend, that Tittie Petherton's
cancer is following a track that won't kill her for months and
months--maybe not for six months! I made sure it would finish
her off in a week or two, when I examined her in August, but
not at all!"

"Well! in a year, anyway, she will be dead and all that pain
wiped out."

"Wiped out, Barter? What are you talking about? Are you
such a happy man as really to believe that in the whole sweep
and surge and swing of things pain like that is wiped out? I
read a Russian book once, Barter, by that man whose name begins
with D, and a character there says he believes in God but rejects
God's World. Now I feel just the opposite! I think the whole
of God's World is infinitely to be pitied--tortured and torturers
alike--but I think that God Himself, the great Living God,
responsible for it all, the powerful Creator who deliberately gave
such reptiles, such sharks, such hyaenas, such jackals as we are,
this accursed gift of Free Will, ought to have such a Cancer--"
The quiet doctor actually jerked himself forward to the edge
of his arm-chair, till, with only the tip of his buttocks--where
his erect and angry tail would have been switching if he had
possessed one--resting upon its very verge, he drew with his
forefinger a crucial outline upon the air--"such a Cancer," he
cried, "as would keep him Alive and Howling for a Million
Years!"

"I went through Paradise yesterday," remarked Barter. "The
poverty's pretty bad down there still, in spite of all this new
work that Crow's been giving people."

The doctor, who had now relapsed panting into the depths of
his chair, took up the subject with a groan. "I should think it
was pretty bad! It's few of the natives who get this work. He's
brought in a lot of new men from Bristol and Bath, a stronger,
better-fed type, and more docile too! Therell be another riot
before our folk expect it, and a much more serious one than that
little affair at the Pageant, when they mobbed Lord P."

"What do you think, Doctor, will really come of all these
diggings and buildings out at that well? Do you think Geaid
will get a steady crowd down here every year--or only just on
the day he opens the tiling? John was telling me it would be
opened between Christmas and the first of January,"

"My good friend," said Charles Montagu Fell, pointing at Bar-
ter with the stem of his cherry-wood pipe, "what people forget is
this! In all these improvements, whether Geard brings them in or
Crow, the real pain of mind and body goes on where people
haven't the heart or the health to get the benefit of such things.
That's the point that's always forgotten. I'm a doctor, and a
doctor's profession's naturally with the unfit rather than the fit.
And I tell you the tragedy of life is in the rubbish heap. People
talk of the sufferings of the strong, and how you ought to help
"the strong rather than the weak, as if the weak were a type of
animal that didn't feel. I tell you suffering is like a fungus that
the strong can carry about with them, and still bustle and strut,
whereas with the weak the fungus is too heavy. They can't hold
it up. It pulls 'em down. But it don't numb their feeling! They're
nothing else but feeling--feeling and fungus!"

"But aren't the poor used to it?" protested the man from
Norfolk.

Dr. Fell sank back in his chair and pushed his fingers through
the stubbly grey hairs that stuck out from his low forehead.

"He's one of the ugliest chaps I've ever seen," thought Barter,
"but he has good ideas and good drink."

"No, Barter, no, no! that's another pretty, comforting, easy
lie! The human consciousness is not confined to what you can
see of the body, or of the habits of the body. We all carry about
with us something distinct from the body, the thing that says,
‘I am I.' This something, this soul, never gets used to any human
situation! It finds itself ‘landed' or it finds itself riding the
waves. It's never used to anything."

At this point in the conversation both the men started up
straight in their chairs and glanced at each other.

"Someone's moving about, up there," said Mr. Barter grimly.

Dr. Fell's countenance expressed savage loathing. He listened
intently. Then he gave a sigh of relief. "It's the rats, Barter. It
must be the rats. They become lively in the Autumn."

"I hope so," remarked the other.

They both listened again. No! that was the sound--to the
doctor's ears quite unmistakable--of heavy woollen slippers, a
little too large for the feet that wore them, stumping, plockety-
plock...plockety-plock, along the landing above.

"It's her!" whispered the doctor. "My God! It's Bibby!"

They listened again and once more there was silence. Every-
thing in the house was as still as the centre of a wood covered
with new-fallen snow. And then the sound began again--plockety-
plock...plockety-plock...above their heads.

Mr. Barter was not easily disturbed, but he was shocked to
see a man he liked as he liked the doctor, give way to his nerves
as he did now.

Charles Montagu Fell leapt to his feet and began hitting that
low forehead of his with his two fists, hitting it quite hard and
repeating as he did so, over and over again, an expressive if not
ancient English word of one syllable, which the propriety of
learned taste has excluded from the Oxford Dictionary. .

"Sorry, Barter," he murmured, with a shame-faced grimace,
when this manifestation was over, "but you've never known what
it is to live with someone who...with someone who...gets
on your nerves to such a pitch." He came up close to his friend
now and laying a finger on the man's sleeve, whispered in his
ear: "You don't know what the word loathing means, do you,
Barter? Loathing...loathing...loathing! It's much worse than
hatred. I can tell you that, anyway!"

Once more they drew apart and stood listening. And once
more those flopping steps inside those loose, soft slippers be-
came audible.

Mr. Barter was of an unimaginative disposition, but even he
became aware of something rather horrible in the sound of those
steps, combined with its effect upon the nerves of his friend.

"I don't like going off," he said, looking round uneasily, "and
leaving you like this."

"Oh, she'll quiet down as soon as we open the door," returned
the doctor. "You note how she does. It‘s really rather funny;
but the joke, as Heine said of something else, is somewhat stale."

He moved to the door as he spoke and opened it, making a
sign to the other man to listen. It was exactly as he had said.
The steps in the loose slippers retreated, with that peculiarly
unpleasant sound, a little accelerated, as they caught the vibra-
tion of the closing of a door.

"Gone to earth," said the doctor grossly, and he proceeded
to open the street door. They stood together on the doorstep.
The rain had ceased, and there was upon the night a faint taste,
like a thin, diffused chemical salt, of that early hour of the
morning.

Suddenly there was uplifted into the silence of the sleeping
town a premature cock-crow. At once, though it was really just
as dark, both of the men seemed to feel the approaching dawn,
feel it like the smell of some kind of sea-breath brought up on
the winding tidal ditches, from Bridgewater Bay. The absolute
stillness of the wet pavements and clammy cobblestones and
slippery roofs and drenched eaves had a curious effect upon the
two men. They both had the same feeling although neither told
the other. They both felt as if Glastonbury, at least, in her sleep,
were an actual, living Creature!

Barter turned round before he descended the dripping steps
to the silent pavement and shook hands with his friend. Very
tightly did he grasp the man's fingers.

"Finish the bottle before you go up!" he said, and the words
seemed to fall upon the wet nakedness of Glastonbury like a
rattle of shot from a boy's catapult.

"One of these days I'll murder her," returned Charles Mon-
tagu. "Would you come to the Taunton Jail to see me, Barter?"

"Shut up, you fool, and finish that bottle!" But when he
glanced back, before he went down Northload Street towards
High Street, he saw that the doctor was standing there still,
watching him go. "Maybe I ought to have stayed all night with
him," he thought. He waited for a minute watching his figure
at that door and wishing it would go into the house. Something
seemed to be holding Thomas Barter back on that spot, and
not allowing him to depart and forget Dr. Fell. No situation
between human beings is more curious than when, after a sepa-
ration, two people look back at each other. It is especially
curious when, as now, they both seem unable to stop looking
at each other, clinging to each other with their eyes! Barter had
the feeling that it was not he who was going off--but his friend.
He felt as if the doctor were standing on the deck of a liner,
and as if he had just one more chance of running down the
gangway. But no! The bridge was up now, and a widening gap
of wickedly dark water was separating its hull from the wharf!

He waved his hand. He could not resist the impulse to do this.
It was indeed the merest chance that he resisted the urge to
run back. But the figure on the steps turned now without making
any sign and went into the house and the door was shut.

Mr. Barter proceeded slowly down Northload Street. He walked
a little faster when he reached the centre of the town, directing
his steps towards his George Street room, but, for all the good
whiskey he had drunk, his thoughts were heavy, cold and stiff,
like a load of staring-eyed dead fish on a blood-stained wheel-
barrow. He met no one--not even the old Glastonbury police-
man, not even a prowling cat. All the shops had their shutters
fast closed. All the houses had their blinds down. He cast an
indifferent lack-lustre eye upon these houses as he went along.
Here was one a little bigger than the others and even more ob-
stinately closed up. There were iron railings with spikes upon
them in front of it and along these railings rows and rows of
minute raindrops hung. The whole place was so silent, under the
chilly darkness before dawn, so motionless and sepulchral, that
these little quivering rain-drops catching specks of faint light
from a pallid street-lamp seemed more alive than such water-
drops usually are. Barter, however, cast an unseeing, unapprecia-
tive eye upon them. It would be hard to say what natural object
at that moment--short of a falling meteorite--would have ar-
rested his attention. Probably even his foreman at the Municipal,
an artist in his showing off before Sally Jones, had more of
what is called aesthetic appreciation than Mr. Barter. But he did
observe one object with a faint interest in connection with this
particular house, as he moved along by these pallid raindrops,
and that was a massive gilded plate, which was also illuminated
by the neighbouring lamp, and upon which he read the words
"John Beere, Solicitor." He had often been nudged by a loqua-
cious waitress in the Pilgrims' dining-room--this was in Clarissa's
day--and told to observe the passionate gluttony of this short-
sighted old gentleman. I'll buy whiskey in future," he thought,
"and keep the bottle at the restaurant. That girl would look
after it for me. The woman at home would drink it"

His mind called up the alternatives, and he tried to weigh
them against each other. The cosiness, the good cooking, the
ale, on the one hand, but with hostile wenches, set on to bait him
by Clarissa; and on the other, a filthy, dreary little chop house,
with wretched cooking, but with a buxom, nice girl, to bring him
his bottle, carefully guarded by herself, and with hot water
and lemon gratis if he wanted them!

The importance of this dilemma had brought his steps to a
momentary stand in front of Lawyer Beere's house, and before
going on he glanced up at its mellow Queen Anne fagade. There
was a night-light, at any rate, some extremely faint lamp-light,
burning behind the closed blinds of one of the upper rooms.

"That awful Angela!" he said to himself with a little shudder,
as he went on down the street. To a nympholept, of Barter's
pragmatic complex, the mere fact of a feminine creature being
unresponsive to his advances relegated her to a worse than unde-
sirable category.

Angela Beere, as a matter of fact,--for Barter was right about
it being her room---always put out her light when she went to
bed, but today, because of the terrific storm of rain that had
descended upon the close of her party, she had pressed her
friend Persephone to stay the night with her and not to attempt
to return to Dickery Cantle's unappealing place, and to this
proposal Percy had consented, making the stipulation, however--
for she never slept in total darkness--that there should be at
least a night-light in the room. At the very moment Mr. Barter
was going by, the younger of the two girls, excited and restless,
was whispering to the other.

"I can't read enough of those books about it," Angela was
saying. "He's got the most thrilling ones--every one that's been
written, I should think!" She was referring to the heathen Grail
of the old Celtic mythology and to her new friend, Mr. Evans.

There was something weird about this whispered conversation
in those last hours of that night, before the faint, cold dawn-
breath--more like a sigh of something dying than a cry of some-
thing newly born--crept over the wet hills, stole along the tow-
paths, touched the gateposts and the dams and the stone bridges
and the floating weeds in the ditches with its silent approach.
Both the girls were sensitised and spiritualised to an unusual
pitch of feeling, but nothing could have been more different than
the way they felt.

"I love to hear you, Angela! Go on, go on! Tell me more!"
Thus did Percy reply; thus did Percy encourage her, but in her
heart she drew away. Why was it that nothing seemed to satisfy
her, to hold her, to cast a spell upon her that could last? A curi-
ous and subtle weariness weighed upon her now. There seemed
something mysteriously sad about everything in life, as she saw
things now, in the deep silence, only broken by this feverish
voice at her ear.

Had Mr. Evans been permitted--like Iachimo in Shakespear's
play--to pass a vigil in that chamber, his Druidic imagination
would certainly have been stirred to the depths by the sight
of those two lovely heads under the faint illumination of
that flickering night-light in its small crimson glass. How white
was the complexion of the younger! How gipsy-brown that of
the other! Persephone's dusky curls lay against her pillow like
autumn leaves upon snow, and her face had a far-away, weary
look, as if the enchantment she sought were not here...not
anywhere in this rain-drenched, silent town...not anywhere
in all this Gwlad-yr-Hav of Somerset...perhaps not anywhere
in all the round earth! The soft hair of the other head, on the
contrary, under that dim light, looked like a heap of scattered
autumn crocuses, but her cold eyes and her smooth white cheeks
were alive with feverish excitement as she narrated, in her pas-
sionate, furtive whispers, the story of the Cauldron of Ceridwen.

"That Cauldron was the real Grail, you know, and it was that
that made Taliessin young!" Then, without a second's pause,
catching her breath in a particular way she had, she plunged
into the tale of Math, Son of Mathonwy, which Mr. Evans had
shown her in the Mabinogion. "Arianrod---which means Silver
Circle--laid a destiny upon her son Llew," she whispered, "that
he shall never have a wife of the race that now inhabits this
earth. 'Well," said Math, "we will seek, thou and I, by charms
and illusion, to form a wife for him out of flowers.' So they
took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom,
and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them
a maid, and they baptised her and gave her the name of
Blodenwedd."

As she told this story to Percy, Percy could not help feeling,
as she looked at the transparency of this white face by her side,
that the girl herself might well have been named Blodenwedd!

Lovely were they both, as they lay there in that glimmering
light, but whereas Angela seemed to draw to herself from out
of the storm-cleansed darkness everything that was pallid and
phantasmal in the rain-soaked meadows, in the dripping hazel-
spinneys, in the cold, moss-covered hill slopes, Persephone
seemed, as she lay listening to her friend, as if she were an
incarnation of all the magic of the brown rain-pools and the
smooth-washed beech boughs and the drenched, carved eaves of
fragrant woodwork, and the wet reed roofs of the dyke-hovels
down there in the marshes of the Brue.

"I believe I know who you are in these Grail stories!" Angela
was now whispering. "You are Lorie de la Roche Florie, the
mistress of Gawain!"

"I've not found him yet, anyway," smiled the other.

"He says," whispered Angela, "Mr. Evans says, that Mayor
Geard is really in league with the old magical Powders, and that
the new inscription theyVe found on Chalice Hill has to do
with Merlin, and not with Saint Joseph at all!"

The girl's Madonna-like face had a flaming spot on both her
cheeks and her breath came in quick gasps as these hurried syl-
lables left her lips.

But Percy listened languidly. Her lonely, unsettled, restless
soul bad not yet found what she craved. "Perhaps," she was
thinking now, "what I want is not in this world at all!" Some-
thing in her anyway--probably her sceptical Norfolk blood--
felt profoundly suspicious of all this chatter about the old gods.
She liked flirting--if her ambiguous relations with the Welshman
could be called by that name--with Mr. Evans, but his Cymric
mythology left her absolutely cold. She fancied she had made
the discovery of late that there was a certain type of nature that
could not enjoy life in a frankly amorous, or honestly vicious
way, but must be always complicating the issue by bringing into
it all sorts of half-mystical, half-religious notions.

While the fair girl continued her esoteric whisperings with
burning cheeks and eyes growing brighter and brighter, Percy
was thinking to herself, "If Dave would do nothing but talk
about Communism in his curious way I could live with him for-
ever. If Philip would go on driving me in his car sans cesse,
I could live with him! And it's going to be just the same with
you, my angel, only the other way round! I like your being
fond of me but your ideas wear me out. What a wild, excited
way she's whispering now! God bless me! Owen Evans hasn't
discovered any new sins that aren't practised every day among
people who've never heard of his Guardians of the Grail or his
Daughters of King Avallach!"

She knew that the dim light from their little night-light fell
upon her face, and she knew that the other's spasmodic outburst
of hot, quick, excited words would cease in a second and the
girl's feelings be cruelly wounded if she realised the effect she
was having. So, born actress as she was, Percy assumed an ex-
pression of exhausted but responsive intentness. But her soul
wandered far away.

Ned Athling, who had come to know her quite well during
their rehearsals together, had introduced her recently to Lady
Rachel, and Rachel's passionate love of old ballad-poetry and
her hatred of everything modern, had amused her not a little.
The image of Rachel hovered now very clearly before her mind.
Mr. Evans' pupil in mysticism would have been staggered and
her heart stabbed had she been able to read her friend's thoughts.

Taliessin and Aneurin, Bendigeitvran, or Bran the Blessed,
Terre Gastee and Balyn's Dolorous Stroke, Arawn, King of
Hades, Caer Pedryvan, where PwylFs Cauldron was found by the
heathen Arthur, the Mwys of Gwydno-Garanhir, without which
Kulhwch might never have Olwen to his bed--all these would
have sunk down into the sluices of nothingness, into the weirs
of oblivion, if the fair girl had known the bitter truth!

So the exhausted and intently smiling brown-skinned mask
listened to her friend's voice, but beneath it the girl's unsatisfied
soul wandered off far into the darkness. Over the head of Mr.
Barter it wandered, as he weighed his whiskey against his ale,
over the house of Dr. Fell, it wandered, where the word murder
had been so lately breathed, over the Mayor's bedroom it wan-
dered, where Mr. Geard could still derive amorous pleasure
from embracing Megan, over the sleeping head of Sam in his
Vicarage room, over the tossing, sleepless head of Sam's be-
getter, in his room, out, far out, away from all these people,
away from all these roofs, covering desire and torment and rap-
ture and lechery and despair and paradisiac peace, It wandered
free,--free of them all, free even of the body of its own pos-
sessor, but still unsatisfied, still wanting something that no flesh
and blood could fulfil,--something "that might not be in the
world at all," or at least so hidden that none could find it.



THE MIRACLE



Just one word, Mr, Mayor," said Dr. Fell as he stood
with his hand on the window of Solly Lew's taxi. "I must have
it completely understood that, as this woman's medical adviser,
I refuse to give my consent to your taking her."

"Quite right, Doctor," replied Mr. Geard from inside the ve-
hicle, where he was supporting the groaning Tittie, "I receive
your protest. Mr. Crow here and my daughter are your witnesses.
I take full responsibility." He raised his voice. "You want to
come, don't you, Mrs. Petherton?"

"Yes, yes! Oh, Lord! Anything. Oh, Lord! For to make thee
stop; for to make thee stop even for a little while, Lord! Yes, yes.
Oh, there thee be again!"

The tortured woman had come recently to talk to her cancer
as if it were a living person. She called it "Lord"; for it repre-
sented the nearest and most wilful power she knew. It was this
peculiarity that had begun to get on the nerves of the worthy
Nurse Robinson and was one of the chief reasons why she had
asked to be relieved from her task. " 'Twill be better for hevery
one concerned, for 'er to 'ave a change." she had said when Mat
Dekker who had made himself responsible for the nurse's salary
protested at this decision. "She'd be far better horf in the 'ors-
pital," she said. And it was this word, overheard by the patient
a week ago, that had now made it essential that there should be
a change, for, after this, the woman's feeling towards the nurse
was like what a heretic would feel towards an Inquisition official.
The frightened Tittie would not let her come near her without
screaming.

"I'll bring house down if yer moves a step!" she threatened;
and once she had begun shrieking and struggling so terribly that
the neighbours had run in and made a scene.

"Drive on, Solly!" commanded Mr. Geard.

Crummie and John, sitting opposite the two principals in this
strange event, kept up together--under cover of the unhappy
creature's groans--a rapid exchange of comments.

"She's too far gone," said John. 'That's what I'm afraid of.
If she weren't so far gone she might help him by her faith in
him. But she's beyond that!"

"He doesn't care what she thinks, if only he can get her there!"
gasped Crummie, wincing with sympathy at every movement the
woman made.

"I can't make him out," said John. "He doesn't seem worked
up over it. You saw what a good dinner he ate...all that
Yorkshire pudding! I'd feel happier about it if he were more
stirred up. Could you imagine a worse hour of the day for such
an experiment? There's St. John's church striking half-past two
now'."

"What's he going to do with her?" asked the girl. "Has he
told you?" she went on. "He can't be going to dip her in that
water! I won't let him, we mustn't let him, if he tries anything
like that."

"Oh, he'll be sensible," said John, "as far as that's concerned.
He's got a head on his shoulders. Better leave him alone."

It would have been easy to talk like this before Mr. Geard's
face, even if the woman had not been groaning and twitching as
she was, for he had a peculiar power of being at once there and
not there, at the same time, under certain conditions.

"Careful!" he shouted out loudly now to the driver. "Don't go
through the Square! Go by Bove Town, and down Silver, into
Chilkwell."

"Right ho. Sir! As your Worship wishes," replied Mr. Lew\
Mr. Geard was certainly at that moment deliberately engaged in
breaking a good many natural laws, or at least refuting a good
many conventional notions of such laws. With his great belly
stuffed with Yorkshire pudding, with the weather around him.
hot, moist, muggy and windless, with the sceptical John watch-
ing him with the scrutiny of a detached lynx, with the clocks
striking that time of day, of all others the most material and
when human souls are most drowsy and uninspired, with Crum-
mie full of that particular kind of tender, practical, feminine
solicitude, which is of all things most antipathetic to the drastic
urge of creative energy, with the subject of his proposed cure
so distraught with pain as to be almost out of her mind, it might
indeed have seemed that he could not have been more handi-
capped in his amazing projects unless perhaps if Dr. Fell, still
vehemently and professionally in opposition, had accompanied
them.

Conditions were worse for their purpose when they finally ar-
rived at the spot, than even John or Crummie had anticipated;
for they found the place occupied by a gang of callous working-
men frpm the slums of Paradise, still lingering, though their
dinner-hour had been over a long time, at their jests and bois-
terous fooling.

Solly Lew stopped his taxi just opposite these men and John,
opening the door, gave Crummie his hand. His consciousness of
the moment--of the accumulation of impressions that made up
what the moment brought--had never been more alive. He was
surprised--and ashamed too, so that the blood rushed to his face
--when he found that the grasp of Crummie's warm, electric
fingers had given him a disturbing pleasure. "She's a plump
young baggage," he said to himself, in order to destroy this feel-
ing. "Her legs aren't like a boy's, as Mary's are!" But the truth
was--although he hated to acknowledge it--that his sensual hap-
piness with Mary had made him much less impervious to fem-
inine charm than he had ever been in his life. "There's no de-
pending on my wicked feelings," he said to himself. "I seem to
be just exactly what that Austrian says all babies are--poly-
morphous perverts!"

John had had nothing for lunch himself except a cup of tea
and two mouthfuls of a bath-bun; so that although it was only
thirty-five minutes past two, his nerves were as alert as if it had
been four or even five o'clock. He had had his breakfast early
too, so that he felt like a priest who had fasted in preparation for
some especial function.

While Solly Lew was helping Mr. Geard get Tittie out of the
car John glanced through the great torn gap in the hedge to
where the workmen were engaged. They were beginning to work
again now, with many suppressed glances and whispers and
nudges directed towards the Mayor.

Behind where they were working at this moment, digging a
ditch for further foundations, there already might be seen several
quite substantial rows of walls--the beginning of Mr. Geard's
Byzantine rotunda and Saxon arch. These walls, now risen to
nearly seven feet high, totally concealed from where the men
were working all sight of Chalice Well; for the Mayor's London
architect, an expert, it turned out, in the mystical intention of
compass-points, had got the entrance arch facing due east, so
that vistors to the Well, following in the footsteps of the great
Joseph--Agathos-Dikaios, as St. John calls him,--might approach
its waters, moving, if they were religious, on their knees, and tap-
ping the ground with their foreheads, in a 'westerly direction.

"Come!" said Mr. Geard now, in a husky, authoritative voice,
addressing his daughter and John.

Helped by Solly Lew he half-carried the suffering woman, still
keeping up, heedless of where she was, her hysterical dialogue
with her tormentor, over the littered hedge-gap and straight
among the workmen.

Most of the men touched their caps, some went on working,
all glanced at the Mayor of Glastonbury with that mingled fa-
miliarity and respect which he always aroused in the populace.
He had come so often to watch them work, and had brought
with him so many curious companions, that none of them seemed
particularly astonished at the sight of Tittie's contorted figure.

He directed Solly to prop Mrs. Petherton up for a minute
against an overturned wheelbarrow; and then drew the man aside,
beckoning John and Crummie to join them.

"What I want you three,” he said emphatically, but speaking
in a quite unexcited, natural voice, "to do for me now, if you
will, is to stand in line between here and the Well, and not let
a soul go up there! No one will probably want to. But if anyone
does try they must be stopped. That's all! If I want you, Crum-
mie, I'll shout. But I probably shan't want anyone. I won't be
long. Bless us and keep us!”

Without any further words he moved over to the prostrate
woman and lifted her up in his arms, holding her pressed against
his chest.

"He be going to christen she, looks so!” said Solly Lew. "Well,
Missy, I reckon us had best do what 'a said; hut it's sore in me
heart to wish poor Bet were wi' I! Thik poor 'ooman would
give the eyes out of she's head to see these grand doings I”

John was the only one of Mr. Geard's three singular disciples
who had the gall to cast a furtive glance over his shoulder to
watch the Mayor's sturdy, cautious steps, as he carried his dis-
tracted burden out of sight behind the newly erected masonry.
When the twain had vanished from view, however, he also turned
round and took up his sentinel's post. Thus John was standing,,
on the extreme west, Solly on the extreme east, and Crummie in
a position that might be called east by south. Here they all three
settled themselves to wait, as calmly as they could under the
circumstances.

It was remarkable how little notice the labouring men, pre-
occupied with their digging, and anxious to show the Mayor's
daughter that they were earning their pay, took of their em-
ployer's proceedings. John himself, as he watched the motions
of their mattocks and spades, felt a queer trance-like feeling
steal over his restless mind. His gaze, travelling over the stoop-
ing backs of the men on the level ground and over the heads
and swinging picks of those working in the ditches, noted, in
this curious dreamlike numbness of his senses--so alert a few
minutes ago--that a flock of sheep was being driven up the road.
These woolly creatures packed close together, but raising in the
damp windless air no cloud of dust, and much less than usual of
their accustomed bleating, were moving en masse, like a river
of grey, curly wool, eastward, away from the town.

Three figures, a man, a boy, and a sheep-dog, as grey and
woolly as the flock itself, walked patiently and somnolently be-
hind them. As he watched these figures and that moving river of
grey backs in front of them his mind was carried away upon a
long vista of memories. Various roads where he had encountered
such sights, some of them in Norfolk, some of them in France,
came drifting through his mind and with these memories came
a queer feeling that the whole of his life was but a series of
such dream-pictures and that the whole series of these pictures
was something from which, if he made a strong enough effort,
he could awake, and feel them all dispersing, like wisps of
vapour. Pain was real--that woman crying out upon her cancer
and calling it "Lord! Lord!"--but even pain, and all the other
indescribable horrors of life seemed, as he stared at the backs
of those moving sheep, to be made of a "stuff," as Shakespeare
calls it, that could be compelled to yield, to loosen, to melt, to
fade, under the right pressure.

Gone were the sheep now; and a second later, following them
in that same dreamlike movement, gone was the man, and the
boy, and the dog. John's mood changed then with an abrupt jerk.
Something in his mind seemed to fall with a machine-like click
into its normal groove.

Slyly he turned round and glanced at Crummie. The girl had
slipped off her cloak, spread it on the ground, and was sitting
with part of it wrapped round her knees. She waved to him as
he caught her attention and he waved back. None of these work-
men had the least desire to spy upon the master. Bloody Johnny
was at liberty to perform any crazy ritual he liked behind those
walls. "I might just as well be sitting by Crummie's side,” he
thought. He peered round the other way to see what the taxi-
man was doing. Solly Lew also was sitting down--on a stone or
a log or something--calmly smoking his pipe and contemplat-
ing the workmen. But John's imagination was at work now. What
on earth was Geard doing to that woman? Most repulsively--
for John's mind had a Goya-like twist for the monstrous--he
saw his employer dipping that poor creature in his precious
chalybeate water! He saw the scene with hideous and telescopic
minuteness. He saw the filthy underwear of the poor wretch, un-
changed for a week no doubt while she beat the nurse away,
and all stained with ordure. He saw vermin, frightened by the
water, leaving her clothes and scurrying away across the slabs
of the fountain where they would undoubtedly perish miserably.
He saw the loathsome image of the cancer itself. Geard was
bathing it in that reddish water and muttering his grotesque invo-
cations, while the woman--John could see her face--was terri-
fied into forgetting her pain by the cold shock of the water. No
doubt it had come into her simple mind that the Mayor had de-
cided to rid Glastonbury of her. John's imagination after being
so dazed by the sheep was now seized with a terrifying clair-
voyance. He followed one of Tittie's vermin in its flight from
Bloody Johnny's vigorous ablutions. And he saw it encountering
a lusty wood louse which had had to turn itself into a leaden-
coloured ball to avoid Mr. Geard's feet but which, appearing now
in the other's path like an immense Brontosaurus, had un-
curled itself to the view of the human louse.

"All is strange to me,” said the human louse to the wood
louse. He spoke the lice language with its beautiful vowel sounds
to perfection.

"On the contrary,” said the wood louse, speaking the same
ancient tongue but with a rude rural intonation," you are the
only strange thing here to me.”

"Could you direct me ” the human louse enquired, giving
its words a classical resonance, indicative of the fact that its
ancestors had lived with the Romans, "to any human skin in this
vicinity?”

The wood louse rudely disabused this dainty traveller of his
high hope; and reported that the only skin except the bark of
trees available in that quarter was the skin of a rabbit that had
been caught in a trap a year ago.

"Nothing can save you from dying of starvation that I can see,”
said the wood louse, "except to be discovered by some bird
small enough to snap you up. If you like I will pass the word
round that you are in such mental anguish that--”

Here the story John had told himself broke off; but he con-
tinued thinking about the monstrous arrogance of the human race
in lumping together in one clumsy and ridiculous word--"in-
stinct, instinct, instinct”--all the turbulent drama, full of criss-
cross psychic currents and convoluted struggles and desperations
of the subhuman world.

The thought of the luckless fate of this miserable vermin in
the unchanged clothes of this rebel against Nurse Robinson
brought into John's mind just then, under that heavy sky, the
real ghastliness of the word relative. "It's relatively important
that those vermin should escape starvation,” he thought. "It's
relatively important that Geard should have his miracle. It's
relatively important that this wretched woman should be eased
of her pain. It's relatively important that my life with Mary
should be exquisitely happy. It's relatively important that this
grave ass Philip should get the town council's leave to make
his road over the marshes. God! What a mix-up it all is. I don't
care! I didn't make the world. I'm not responsible. There could
not be a sweeter creature than Mary--no! not from Glastonbury
to Jerusalem!”

While these thoughts were passing through John's mind, Mr.
Geard, stark naked in the Grail Fountain, the water of which
came up beyond his waist, and watched by the petrified aston-
ishment of Tittie, who reclined with her back against the base
of the Saxon arch, was extending his arms in some sort of com-
mand, John was utterly wrong in his imagination. Not once did
Mr. Geard call upon the Blood of Christ. Not once did he
sprinkle with the blood-red water the woman with cancer. Mr.
Geard's clothes lay in a neat heap at Tittle's side; and the woman,
in stupefied amazement, was watching his uplifted fingers as
they kept mechanically opening and closing in the tempest of
his mental struggle.

Mr. Geard was not praying. That was the difference between
this occasion and the other occasions when his therapeutic
powers had been used. He was not praying. He was commanding.

If the question were asked, what precisely was Mr. Geard think-
ing and feeling as he lifted his arms from the Red Fountain,
the answer would have to be that he was assuming to himself
the role of a supernatural being! As a matter of literal fact--
such were the childish limitations of this singular man's nature
--Mr. Geard had, for one second, visualised to himself a pic-
ture in the Sunday School at Montacute, representing Our Lord
in the process of being baptised in the Jordan! There was no
conscious blasphemy in this flickering thought, and it had not
lasted. Now he was neither thinking nor feeling. Now his whole
body and soul were absorbed in an act. This act was the act of
commanding the cancer to come out of the woman; commanding
it on his own authority; so that the growth in Tittie's side should
wither up!

The truth is that this chalybeate fountain on this particular
hillside had been the scene of such a continuous series of mystic
rites, going back to the neolithic men of the Lake Village, if not
to the still more mysterious race that preceded them, that there
had come to hang about it a thick aura of magical vibrations.
That rabbit's skin in the trap, referred to by John's wood louse,
might lose its virtue owing to rain and frost and bleaching sun;
but this psychic aura, charged with the desperate human strug-
gles of five thousand years to break into the arcana of Life, no
rains could wash away, no suns could dry up, no frosts could
kill.

Immersed to the waist in this ruddy spring which had been
the scene for five thousand years of so much passionate credu-
lity, it is not strange that Mr. Geard, whose animal magnetism
was double or treble that of an ordinary person, should find
himself able to tap a reservoir of miraculous power.

No sacred pool, in Rome, or Jerusalem, or Mecca, or Thibet,
has gathered such an historic continuum of psycho-chemical
force about it as this spot contained then, and contains still. But
Mr. Geard did not confine his reservoir of healing power to what
this locality had stored up. He wrestled at that moment with the
First Cause Itself. Now it can be understood why he chose a day
so damp and dark and windless, so brown, so neutral, so apa-
thetic, so heavy with drowsy mists, for his grand experiment. It
was because--led by an instinct which he himself could never
have explained--he wanted to get into touch with the First Cause
Itself uninterrupted by the dynamic energy of the Sun or Earth
or any subordinate Power. The man was now like an athlete
of some kind as he stretched out his arms and concentrated his
massive and mountainous energy.

The curious thing was that his mind remained perfectly calm,
clear and quiet. It was always rare for Mr. Geard to lose his
sangfroid , even at the most culminating crisis; and he was now
quite coolly saying to himself--"If I do it, I do it. If I don't do
it, I don't do it--and the woman must die. But I shall do it. I
feel it in me. I feel it in me.”

What Mr. Geard kept his mind steadily upon, all this while,
was that crack, that cranny, that slit in Time through which
the Timeless--known in those parts for five thousand years as a
cauldron, a horn, a krater, a mwys, a well, a kernos, a platter,
a cup, and even a nameless stone--had broken the laws of Na-
ture! What Mr. Geard really did--being more practical and less
scrupulous than Sam Dekker--was to associate this immemorial
Fetish with the Absolute, with Its creative as distinct from Its
destructive energy. Sam, in his passion for the crucified, opposed
himself to the First Cause, as Something so evil in Its cruelty
that a man ought to resist It, curse It, defy It, and have no deal-
ings with It. Thus in his loathing of the evil in God, Sam. the
Saint, refused to make any use of the beneficence in God: and
this refusal was constantly handicapping him in his present "all-
or-nothing” existence. Mr. Geard on the other hand was prepared
to make use of this ambiguous Emperor of the Cosmos without
the slightest scruple.

Mr. Geard now happened to catch the sound of a peewit's cry,
a sound that was one of his favourite bird calls, for he associated
it with certain particular fields on the road from Montacute to
Yeovil, and he regarded it, reaching his ears at this crisis, as a
most blessed omen. Simultaneously with this cry, which was not
repeated, he noticed, to his intense satisfaction, that Tittie Peth-
erton was yawning! "I've done it'' he said to himself, and strain-
ing every nerve of his nature, body and soul together, he forced
himself to envisage that cancer as something towards which he
was directing arrow after arrow of blighting, withering, deadly
force. "The great thing is to see it,” he said to himself, while his
black eyes now alight with their most burning fury, stripped the
poor woman of every stitch of clothing.

His arrows of thought now became a spear--the Bleeding
Lance of the oldest legends of Carbonek--and with an actual
tremor of his upraised, naked arms, he felt himself to be plung-
ing this formidable weapon into that worst enemy of all women!
"I've done it,” he repeated, for the second time, as he saw Tittle's
eyes begin slowly to close.

And then Mr. Geard shivered and his teeth began to chatter.

Perhaps he wouldn't have succeeded after all if there hadn't
come into his head at that moment an actual vision of one tiny
living tendril of that murderous octopus under the sleeping
woman's flesh. With one terrific upheaval of the whole of his
massive frame, its gastric, its pulmonary, its spinal, its phallic
force, and even lifting himself up on tiptoe from the gravel at
the bottom of the fount, he plunged that Bleeding Lance of his
mind into the half-dead cancer.

Then he bowed himself forward, like the trunk of a tree in
a great storm, till his forehead touched the surface of the water.
From that surface he proceeded to gulp down, in long, panting,
gurgling gasps, enough water to satisfy the thirst of the Quest-
ing Beast. "Blood of Christ!" he spluttered; and it was the first
time during this great struggle that his favourite expression had
crossed his lips.

And then his former utterance escaped once more from the
depths of his throat, like a veritable grunt of that Questing
Beast; and almost inarticulately the words rose from the chaly-
beate water, "I've done it!” sighed Mr. Geard for the third
time.

He now scrambled out upon the new stone slabs, took one quick
complacent glance at the foundations of the Saxon arch, and
began hurriedly drying himself. For this purpose he used, not
his grey flannel shirt, as anyone would have expected, but a
new black woollen waistcoat which Megan had just finished knit-
ting for him.

When he had got all his clothes on, including his thin black
overcoat and a sort of Low Church parson's hat, which was his
favourite headgear and which he now squeezed low down over his
forehead, he lifted up the sleeping woman very carefully in his
arms and carried her out between the pedestals of his arch. It
was Crummie who had dressed Mrs. Petherton for this great ex-
cursion--certainly the most important she would ever make, till
"the young men,” as the Scriptures would put it, "carried her
out for her burial”--and Crummie had found an old purple bon-
net in a cardboard box which she had placed on her head, tying
the strings round her neck.

From Mr. Geard's fingers, spread out now under the woman's
back, this hat now dangled by one of its purple strings, flapping
against his knees as he carried her down the hillside.

Bloody Johnny's three attendants hurried anxiously to meet
him and great was their relief--shared to the full by Mr. Lew--
at the cheerful tone in which he greeted them.

While this momentous event was occurring upon Chalice Hill,
a certain young man, who was a newcomer in the town and had
only recently opened a lawyer's office in High Street, was talking
to Merry the curator and to Mr. Sheperd the policeman on a
bench in the little gravelly court-yard outside the Museum.

This young man's name was Paul Trent, and the impression he
produced upon sensitive people was that he ought to have been
endowed with a less brief and less masterful name than this. He
was indeed as silky and soft as a moth; and like a moth were
his gentle movements. Brown were his eyes, with long lashes;
very dark brown was his hair; while his skin was of a delicate
ivory-yellow tint with a faint brownish tinge in the cheeks and
chin. His lips were red and full, the under lip a good deal larger
than the upper; and his mouth, usually a little open, showed
beautiful teeth.

Taking him all in all, there was something warm, feline, and
caressing about this man, and a certain air, too, for all his gen-
tleness and quietness, of being a tartar, as they say, to meddle
with or provoke.

He gave the impression--which was not entirely erroneous--
of coming from some region bathed in constant sunshine. He
had been called once by an antiquarian friend "Phoenician-
looking”; but there seemed to be more of the sun in his composi-
tion than of the sea; and an ordinary person would have thought
rather of Persia in connection with him than of anything Punic.

Trent was a nephew of old Mr. Merry and it was in consequence
of what the curator had been telling him for the last six months
in regard to all the new movements in the place that he had de-
cided to come and practise in Glastonbury, He had already made
friends with John Crow and Tom Barter and by their means had
won for himself an entrance into the Geard household where
his original personality had pleased Bloody Johnny so well that
be had introduced him to Mr. Bishop, the town clerk. "The Coun-
cil ought to have its own lawyer,” the Mayor had remarked to
Mr. Bishop. "Besides Beere is much too conservative.”

The Mayor of Glastonbury in the depths of his South-Somer-
set heart, nourished a profound suspicion of all lawyers; but he
had too many definite reasons for distrusting Mr. Beere to allow
a few indefinite ones to prejudice him against Paul Trent.

"What I haven't yet been able to find in your town, Mr. Sheperd,”
the sallow-faced young man was now saying, "is a good vegetarian
restaurant.”

The Glastonbury policeman opened his left eye wide and half-
closed his right eye. This was not a wink, for Mr. Sheperd would
have regarded that historic gesture as a confession of confed-
eracy in roguery. Besides he had the peculiarity of being able to
retain this particular mask for as long as the precise tone of the
conversation required it; namely the narration of something
wonderful to the speaker but not wonderful to the hearer. "They
eat raw turnips and such-like in them places, don't 'un?” Mr.
Sheperd said. "I reckon us country folk see so much o' they
things in daily life that us don't want to see 'un when us be
enjoying ourselves at public house. Us likes to see a bit o'
good meat then; such as a labouring man when my father were
young, never saw all the year round 'cept Squire gave a parish
dinner at Christmas.”

It had for so long been a recurrent refrain in Mr. Merry's con-
versation--"When my nephew Paul comes to practise here”--
that when he did come, and even persuaded Grandmother Cole
to give up to him her famous front bedroom, looking out on the
High Street, everyone was frantic with curiosity. Old Mrs. Cole
had retained for twenty years a neat little notice at the door
of her High Street house, which contained the words "Front
Bedroom To Let for a Single Gentleman” but the old seamstress
was so fastidious in her Single Gentlemen that this pleasant sunny
retreat had become for years a sort of unused state-parlour. Mr.
Barter had visited it on his first arrival; but the presence of
Sis and Bert in the back room, for Barter had no love of chil-
dren, would have prejudiced him against the place even if the
austere morality of the old lady had not been so apparent. But
"my nephew from the Scilly Isles” as Mr. Merry always called
Paul Trent, seemed to have no fear of either children or moral-
ity! and something about the long-nosed young man, perhaps
his mania for elaborate ablutions in absolutely cold water, per-
haps his passion for seedlings in window-boxes, perhaps the un-
bounded respect in which the whole town held his uncle, had
induced Mrs. Cole, not only to give him her front room on trial.
"till I sees where we stands and how we feels," but to let him
retain it indefinitely.

But if the old Glastonbury policeman had opened his left eye
when he was questioned about the vegetarian restaurant, he posi-
tively gasped at the next remark of "my nephew from the Scillv
Isles.”

"Are there any philosophical anarchists, Uncle, in this town
of yours?”

"Bless me! Tut! Tut! You don't mean to say you have those
notions in your head still, Paul? No, I should say not! I should
think notl Wouldn't you, Mr. Sheperd?”

But the old policeman was too dumbfounded to do more than
open his right eye as wide as his left.

"Of course I'm the same as I always was, Uncle. You ought
to know that! I wouldn't have come here if you hadn't told me
so much about the new Mayor and his municipal factory.”

"But Mr. Geard isn't an anarchist, Paul; is he, Mr. Sheperd?”

The policeman spat on the gravel at his feet. His expression
seemed to say--"I can't answer for these harum-scarum officials
of recent date; but I know that when I first joined the force
young men would not dare to talk so wildly.”

"Haven't you ever seen an anarchist before?” Paul Trent en-
quired point-blank of the horrified officer.

"I heard Dickery Cantle say,” replied Mr. Sheperd, "that his
grandfather served drink to a Chartist once, and were men-
tioned by name for such doings, in a sermon at St. John's.”

"I met John Beere in the square this morning, Paul,” inter-
rupted Mr. Merry, in order to change the topic, "and he asked
me about you. I thought he would be crusty about your being
made the Council's legal advisor; but he spoke quite nicely about
you. He told me that Mr. Spear from Bristol was in town again
and staying at Cantle's, though not in the same room as his wife.
Angela, he told me, has made great friends with Mrs. Spear.”

The old policeman looked up sharply. "Thik Spear be a Roo-
shian spy,” he murmured, "leastways that's what they tell I down
at Michael's Bar; but I can't vouch for't, ye understands.”

"Talk of the devil ” cried Curator Merry, for at that mo-
ment Dave Spear, accompanied by Red Robinson, entered the
courtyard of the museum. "Ah, Mr. Spear!” cried the old
Curator, "We were just talking about you. How do you do, Mr.
Robinson! Mr. Robinson here was one of the first to discover
this vein of tin in Wookey, Paul, about which the Western
Gazette is talking so much. This is my nephew from the Scilly
Isles, gentlemen, Mr. Paul Trent.”

"Well, Mr. Merry, I think I'll be taking a step round they
Ruins,” threw in the old policeman at this point, feeling unequal
to cope with such an invasion of revolutionary persons.

"Don't get up, Mr. Sheperd,” said Dave kindly. "I don't want
to disturb you--or you either, Mr. Merry! We were looking for
your nephew at Mr. Bishop's office; and he told us we'd prob-
ably find him here.”

"I'll come. I'll come,” murmured the moth-like young man,
smoothing down his silky hair with a sun-burnt hand and pick-
ing up his felt hat from the gravel. As he went off with them his
uncle could not help noticing how well his loose-fitting brown
clothes suited his general personality.

"We wanted to see you, Mr. Trent, please,” began Red Robin-
son, "on a very important High Deer of Mr. Spear's, an High
Deer which kime to 'im in Bristol.”

Dave Spear gave a nervous little laugh. It was part of his
training as a good Communist to restrain his personal feelings
in the furtherance of the cause; but he had never in his life met
with an ally, or a tool, or a confederate, more alien to his spirit
than Red Robinson. The man's vitriolic Jacobinism--reducing
everything to a personal hatred of Philip--got on Dave's nerves.
He had small reason himself on any account, to be indulgent to
Philip, but there was that in Red's tone whenever he referred to
him--a feverish murderous ferocity--which shocked and repelled
his whole nature.

"If you two people don't mind,” said Dave, "I'd like to get a
little exercise. It's lighter than it was. The sun may come out
presently. But even if it doesn't, I'm sure it's not going to rain.
Let's go to Chalice Hill and see how Geard's buildings and dig-
gings are getting on? I've not seen that new inscription up there,
either, that everyone's talking about.”

Spear's two companions agreed at once to this suggestion and
they set out along Silver Street, past the Vicarage gate, past Miss
Drew's gate, past the ancient Tithe Barn, till they arrived at
Chilkwell Street. They did not delay very long contemplating
Mr. Geard's improvements. As they peered between the rudi-
mentary columns of the Saxon arch at the disturbed waters of the
well, Red Robinson announced that in his opinion the labourers
down there had been "bithing” in the fountain. Dave protested
strongly against any such idea. "It's not the weather for bathing,”
he said. "Besides,” he added, "they're all Glastonbury men; and
everyone here respects this place.”

"High'd bithe 'ere if I 'ad the mind,” muttered Red.

When they reached the top of Chalice Hill they hunted about
for the newly discovered inscription but without success.

"It's either a fike or a bloody superstition,” said Red. "If I 'ad
my way I'd clear out the whole bilin' 'eap of these, bloomin'
relics.”

"Let's sit down,” said Dave, "and then we can tell Mr. Trent
what we've thought of.”

They all three sat down on the already brown and fast-wither-
ing bracken and leaned their backs against a hillock of green
moss. Red Robinson became silent now, leaving it to Mr. Spear
to explain to Paul Trent what their idea was. Although he would
never have confessed it and indeed would have been handicapped
by his manner of speech in the expression of it, Red felt at that
moment, as the sun began to show signs of breaking through the
clouds, a vague feeling of sensuous well-being very unusual to
him. The personality of Sally Jones presented itself vividly to his
mind. He had been seeing a lot of Sally lately ^and had come to
the conclusion that he would ask her to marry him. He knew
it was his mother's notion that he was Sally's social superior,
she being the Geard's maid-of-all-work and he being foreman of
a factory, but he had grown to be so fond of the girl that he was
inclined to risk his mother's social disappointment.

It had been a good deal of a strain upon him, his former as-
piration for the hand of Miss Crummie; and it had been worse
than a strain the rebuff he had suffered from Blackie Morgan.
With Sally he felt, for the first time in his relations with any
Woman, completely at ease.

Thus as he sat between these two gentlemen, conscious enough
that they neither of them liked him, conscious enough that he
had offended them by his word about "bithing” in Chalice Well,
the effect of that faint flicker of sunshine upon the hillside was
to throw around the sturdy figure of Sally a consolatory and
comfortable warmth, like and yet unlike, what he used to feel
for his mother when he was laughed at at his East-London
Board-school.

"It's nice on this hill,” said Paul Trent.

"Yes,” agreed Dave, "and look at the way that shaft of sun--
like a Rubens landscape, isn't it?--falls on Tor Field! It's pe-
culiar to this place, a day like this, with the sun breaking through
in spots, and those golden patches on the side of the Tor, and
those workmen's figures in the haze. How do you feel about
Glastonbury, Mr. Robinson? Have you come to get fond of it?”

"High hain't one for these hart and nighture feelin's,” said
Red bluntly; but so paradoxical is human psychology, that the
moment after he had made that remark he felt an overpowering
longing to have Sally Jones by his side up here, giggling when
he tickled her; and crying out, "Oh, Mister Robinson, how cyni-
cal you be!” when he denounced "all this fike and 'umbug!” He
didn't think of Rubens and he didn't know purple from gold in
the diffusion of all these drifting vapours; but by giving himself
up to this melting tenderness towards Sally Jones as associated
with what he was now looking at, there took place within him
a certain blending of the man's flesh and blood with the chem-
istry of the elements, such as made that misty October scene
really more memorable to him than to either of his companions.

"It's strange to think," said Dave, "that when the Mayor has
his grand opening ceremony for this new shrine, this whole hill-
side may be covered with a surging crowd of people from all
over Europe."

"Yes," said Paul Trent. "But you won't get a crowd like that
unless there's a miracle; and the time of miracles is past. What
I'd like to see in Glastonbury is something very different from
any of this miracle-mongering. I'd like to see--but you had
something to ask me, hadn't you? We'd better come to business
now--and talk later."

Paul Trent sat upright upon his rather womanish haunches,
with his arms curved tightly round his knees in their soft brown
covering, and his delicate hands clasped together. His figure blent
harmoniously with the bracken on which he sat. and the misty
sunshine seemed to caress his silky brown head as if it were
thankful to find some object more amenable to its wooing than
the stubbly cranium of Dave or the carrotty poll of the cocknev.

He looked, sitting there, like a figure brought to that spot by
the far-journeying sun itself, so that it should be sure of at least
one whole-hearted devotee in that land of green shadows.

"Well, gentlemen? What did you want to see me for?" re-
peated this visitor from the Scilly Isles.

Dave looked at Red; and Red looked at Dave. They both were
conscious of that curious nervousness which so often descends
on people who have an important communication to make. It is
at such times as if the piece of news itself stands with its bearers
at the closed door of the unwitting recipient's mind and appears
suddenly, to these very attendants, like a bride they have chosen
by lamplight and that they feel a little abashed by in the light of
full day.

But Dave plunged in boldly and explained how his Bristol or-
ganisation, which was the largest in Wessex, had come to the
conclusion that with a little skilful local handling a real com-
mune might be established in Glastonbury. Dave confessed that
the original idea of this commune had not come from the organi-
sation but from his wife Persephone.

"She's probably forgotten now what she said," he explained.
"But she has these inspirations sometimes; and when I enlarged
on her idea to the leaders of the Party in Bristol they were at
once struck by it. You see, Mr. Trent, we all feel that Glastonbury
may never again have the luck to have a Mayor like Mr. Geard
and that we ought to exploit such a great chance."

The eyes of this moth-like figure grew suddenly lambent with
excitement. "Did I...hear...you...correctly?" he cried. "Did I hear
you say that your friends thought of starting a commune here?"

"They didn't think of it--nor did I think of it--it was my--"

But Paul Trent had leapt up from the ground and with his
arms behind him was surveying the autumnal contest that was
going on between the fitful sun-bursts and the swallowing clouds.
He seemed to be staring at this scene in order to associate it for-
ever with the idea of a Glastonbury commune.

"Goodness gracious!" he cried, "what a place this is for mists!
A commune...Yes! I would damned well like to see a commune!"

It was quaint to hear the mild feminine expletive of "goodness
gracious!" followed by so revolutionary an aspiration.

"Mr. Trent," cried Dave, his cheeks red with nervousness and
his blue eyes blinking, "you're not by any chance a Communist,
are you?"

The voluptuous mouth, with its heavy underlip, broke into an
amused smile. He shook his head vigorously and, as he did so,
resumed his seat on the bracken.

"No, Mr. Spear," he cried, laughing lightly, "I'm an anarchist!
My commune is just the opposite of yours! It's a voluntary asso-
ciation altogether. But part of its natural habit would be to pool
its resources for the common benefit; voluntarily of course; not
by compulsion; but it would pool them, Mr. Spear!"

The flush upon Dave's cheeks died away; and the gleam faded
from his blue eyes. He gave vent to the familiar little sigh which
everyone who knew him was so used to, the sigh of an honest
man forced by the logic of action in a world of expediency to act
against his nature.

"Well," he said, repeating this sigh, "we can work together
over this, anyway. In the Paris Commune there were Communists
and Anarchists; so why not in the Glastonbury one?"

"I won't be 'arf glad to see a guillotine set up in this 'ere
bloody 'ole," threw in Red Robinson pensively.

"You're confusing your dates, my good man," chuckled the
Phoenician-looking stranger.

"What price dites if I 'ave the bloody 'ead of P. Crow hesquire?"

"You're vindictive, Mr. Robinson," said Paul Trent, turning
his warm brown eyes upon this savage Jacobin.

"Hif you'd 'ad the hinsults high've 'ad, you'd be the sime,
Mister," rejoined the Cockney touchily.

"I take the liberty to doubt it, Sir," laughed the other. "Good-
ness gracious! What's the point of getting spiteful? Besides per-
sonally I don't like the knife and I don't like to see blood." He
gave a little shudder and made a grimace.

"You prefers bombs, I suppose," said Red sulkily. "If I hain't
smart with me dites, and if I be 'spiteful' as you call it,
high'd never lower myself by throwing them dirty things!"

"Have you never heard of a philosophical anarchist, Mr. Rob-
inson, or of Kropotkin or Tolstoy or Thoreau or Wait Whitman?"

"High'm a workin' man, high ham," said Red bitterly. "They
don't teach hus them 'igh-class continental writers in the Old
Kent Road!"

"Come, come, you two," cried Dave Spear. "This is far too
important a meeting to be wasted in discussion. We've got to es-
tablish our Glastonbury commune, before we begin quarrelling
how to govern it! Shall I tell Mr. Paul Trent all we've thought
of, Red?"

"Has you please. Mister; but I won't 'ave none of that dirty
foreign bomb-throwing where high be. 'It the bewger 'ard is
what high says; but don't go blowin' up a lot of gals and
kiddies!"

And once more, under what he felt to be the contemptuous
hostility of both these men, Red recoiled with a delicious slide of
his imagination into the soft admiring arms of Sally Jones. He
too looked at the sun-smitten vapours on Gwyn-ap-Nud's hill, and
allowed his body--the body of an unwearied, neatly dressed
foreman--to mix with the elements; registering a vow that the
very next afternoon he had a chance he would coax Sally to
come up here with him.

"Well, Mr. Trent," said Dave, "it's like this. It appears that
the whole of the land on which Glastonbury's built belongs to
Lord P. And it appears that on the first of January all the leases
of it come to an end. For the last twenty years, as far as I can
make out, old Mr. Beere has collected these rents and renewed
these leases; but this year, Persephone tells me, the old man is
getting very shaky and peculiar. Angela tells Persephone that he
thinks of nothing nowadays but his meals. Lord P. of course has
no idea of what's happening. But the truth is his agent is in his
dotage."

While Dave was speaking, Paul Trent's whole nature was
leaping for joy. He was one of those people whose souls do not
extend, as some souls do, outside the limits of the body. The soul
of this man from the Scilly Islands penetrated his resilient,
sensitive flesh and blood as the eddying water in a rock-pool
might penetrate a sea-sponge.

He thought to himself, "Can it be true that I'm not in a dream?
Can it be true that there's a real chance here--if it's only one in
a thousand--of trying the great experiment?" His mind whirled
back to this and that good omen which had come to him on his
journey to Glastonbury, To feel free of all compulsion...to feel
the physical caress of air and water and earth upon his life,
as he earned his living, a free man among free men, the stu-
pidity of society broken up...if he could only know it for one
year! Through every vein in his warm body rushed wave after
wave of excited thought. He remembered a hideous phallic
scrawl which he had seen on his way to Glastonbury in a public
lavatory at Exeter, the sight of which had given him a sudden
loathing for the human race. "It's restraint," he thought, "that
makes people like that. Free them, free them! Free life from
every compulsion and people will be naturally kind and gentle
and decent."

Red Robinson, while Dave was speaking, had got quite deep
into a dialogue with Sally Jones, as they lay side by side on
this patch of bracken. Sally was now beginning to express not
only admiration for his mental qualities but in her own sweet
roundabout way a wish that their position on the hillside were
not so exposed. "Let's go to Bulwarks Lane," Sally was just say-
ing with a delicious gleam in her eyes.

"The Party's idea was," said Dave Spear, "I mean my idea was,
or to be absolutely correct Persephone's idea was, that we should
get the town council to offer a bigger rent for the ground where
Crow's new factory is than Crow has ever paid. But it won't be
only that land that we'll offer to take! We'll get the town
council "

At this point Paul Trent's excitement at the chance of realising
a dream about which he had thought night and day since he lost
the fifth form essay on Freedom at Penzance by advocating free
love, became so intense that he remembered the name of his first
nurse; a name he'd forgotten for twenty years and had tried
again and again to recall. The woman was called "Brocklehurst";
and he now repeated to himself this harmless name, several times
over, the name of a thirty-year-old corpse buried near Ashbury
Camp in Cornwall and now serving as a Eureka of anarchistic joy
upon the top of Chalice Hill.

"We'll get the town council," went on Dave Spear, "and that
really means we'll get Geard, for he does just what he likes with
them, to rent from Lord P. the whole of his Glastonbury prop-
erty; and we'll bribe Lord P. into this by giving him a much
larger rent than he's been getting from the tradesmen. Why, all
High Street belongs to him, except the Abbot's Tribunal, which
goes with the Ruins! Once in the position of lease-landlord for
the whole of the town, the council could get rid of all opposition
and start a co-operative commune. It would have its factories. It
would have its own retail shops. Though the Ruins belong to the
Nation, or to the Church--I forget which--Chalice Hill, Glaston-
bury Tor, Wirral Hill, all belong to Lord P.'s estate; and though
of course Geard couldn't buy the land, if the council got a long
lease it would come to the same thing. He'd have the right, that
is the council would have the right, to admit visitors, or not to
admit them, as it pleased. The Ruins would remain, of course--
but they'd remain as church property or national property,
whichever they are, in the midst of our commune. They'd be a
little island of medievalism in the most modern city-state in
the world!"

Paul Trent sat straight once more upon the extreme tips of
his buttocks. He rubbed back his brown hair with both his hands.
"Uncle hinted to me that I'd find things pretty interesting down
here," he said, "and goodness gracious! I certainly have. Mercy
me! What good luck that he told me to come!"

"Of course," said Dave, "I have not had time to get any
definite word from Geard yet. It all depends on Geard. He may
have to help the council with money on January first, if they
can't offer Lord P. enough out of their local taxes. Yes! It all
depends oi Geard; but when I talked to him about it a few days
ago he seemed interested. At least I thought he was. But I always
feel awkward and uneasy with Geard. I don't know why. I feel as
if I were looking down a precipice where ferns and roots and
grasses protrude but where you can't see the bottom. Do you
have any feeling of that sort, Red?"

The man from the Scilly Isles took this question addressed to
their companion as a deliberate piece of irony; but he was
totally wrong.

Red Robinson's opinion of Crummie's father, uttered in the
attentive ears of his two fellow-conspirators, showed that to
him at all events there was no guile in the question.

"Geard's a 'oly old 'umbug. That's what Geard is. But he's
a harss hover money. No more high-deer of money 'as Bloody
Johnny got than my boot-sole 'as. 'Ees strugglin' to ruin 'isself
as 'ard as you or high are tryin' to better ourselves; and that's
sayin' a lot!" And the foreman leered at Dave, as much as to
say: "We know what a good thing you mike of being a
Communist!"

Did any one of these three conspirators to establish a Glaston-
bury commune realize their deep psychic luck in having let their
idea escape upon the air, for the first time, on the summit of
Chalice Hill?

Not one of them! And yet to the invisible naturalists of Glas-
tonbury, commenting curiously upon the strange history of the
place, it must have been apparent that they were led to select this
spot for the inauguration of their wild scheme by some kind of
instinct.

It was at any rate in a voice full of solemn intensity that Paul
Trent now enquired point-blank of his two companions whether
they wanted him to be their intermediary with the great Glaston-
bury landowner, and Dave and Mr. Robinson delayed not to
make it clear to him that this was precisely what they did want
him to do.

"As a lawyer," Dave said to him, "you'll realise better than
we do what arguments to use. But everyone knows how badly
Lord P. is in need of money these days; and of course the coun-
cil has the power to raise the local taxes; and of course the
Mayor--in so important a matter--would be prepared to advance
a good big sum on the Council's security. We ought to be able to
offer him at least half as much again as Philip Crow can afford.
The man must agree. He can't help agreeing when it's a question
of so much money! It may just tide him over these difficult days."

"It mikes a pretty enough tile, Misters," said Red sarcastically,
"but high think, if you harsts me, that when Christmas comes we
shall be sitting 'ere on our bloody harses just the sime has now,
and that blasted Crow--you must excuse a workingman's feel-
in's, Mr. Spear--siling "is airplines just the sime! 'Tain't as
heasy, as you misters seem to think, to 'umble these 'ere capital-
ists. They wants lead put in 'em--that's what they want--a few
hounces of lead in their tin-digging bellies. That's what would
settle 'em! Set 'em up against a wall and pump some good lead
into 'em!"

"Still feeling spiteful, Mr. Robinson?" said the man from the
Scilly Isles. "Well! I'll do my best, Mr. Spear, with this land-
owner of yours. When do you want me to see him? Does he live
about here? When will you have a definite offer, ready in writ-
ing, for me to show him? And when had I better talk to Geard?
Shall I go round to his house after dinner tonight?"

Dave nodded eagerly, his blue eyes radiant. "Yes, yes!" he
whispered, as if they were already in the ante-room of Lord P.,
"by all means go round to Geard's tonight. I don't think I'll go
myself. He doesn't like a lot of people fussing about him. Better
be quite frank with him about your being an anarchist and so on,
and about the Comrades in Bristol being so keen. Better tell him,
though, that it wasn't their idea. Tell him it was my wife's. He's
a great feminist, Geard is!" And Dave grinned like a schoolboy.

While this conspiracy against him was going on on the summit
of Chalice Hill Philip Crow, with the Taunton road-contractor
and a land-surveyor from Evercreech at his side, was standing
between Lake Village Field and the rain-swollen river.

The childish robber band from Red's alley and from Paul
Trent's back room had left their friend Number One's garden-
fence and had advanced in loose formation, across the big air-
plane meadow, to see what was going on. While the Evercreech
surveyor made his measurements and while the Taunton con-
tractor with notebook and pencil, lost himself in his calculations
Philip was left alone with his own thoughts. He was leaning upon
one of those many walking-sticks of The Elms' umbrella-stand
that lived under the matriarchal rule of Tilly's umbrella. He was
following with his eyes the building of the bridge--at present
more imaginary than the Eel Bridge or the Sword Bridge of the
legend, which was to take his tin across the Brue.

From where he stood he could see dimly through the sun-
smitten mists the vague outlines of Pomparles Bridge on the road
to Street, where John had had his vision of the falling sword of
the British king. The mist-enveloped sun was luminous enough to
cover all the meadows around him with a rich glow. This glow
became pure yellow light when Philip, hearing the voices of the
children approaching him, turned away from the two men and
looked westward. A small lombardy poplar stood up, darkly out-
lined in the midst of yellow luminousness, and Philip could see
a dark bird of some kind--it was really a six months' old rook--
perched on a swaying twig on the top of this little tree. The rook
was heavy and the twig kept bending under its weight; so that
in order to retain its balance it was compelled to flutter with its
great wings every now and then. It was Philip's long motion-
lessness that alone had allowed it to settle so near a human
being.

It was at the moment when Philip saw the rook fly off with a
terrific flapping of its wings and with an angry caw, that he ob-
served three children, a little boy, and a little girl holding a
small child by the hand, standing about three hundred yards
away and watching intently the curious movements of another
little girl who was apparently approaching him by the furtive
method of running from tree to tree.

The child had now reached the poplar from which the rook
had just flown and Philip was able to detect her tumbled brown
hair and rough grey skirt peeping out from the poplar's trunk.
He took a cautious step or two in the direction of the tree. "It's
all right, child," he called out. "What is it? Is it a game you're
playing? Come here and tell me. I won't hurt you!" Thus spoke
the instinctive father in Philip; for he had been quick to recog-
nise the little daughter of Blackie Morgan.

The effect of his call was twofold. It sent the three other chil-
dren scampering off at top-speed towards the safety of Number
One's fence, while it caused Morgan Nelly, in order to prevent
herself from yielding to a similar panic, to cling tightly to the
poplar trunk with both her thin arms.

It was thus that Philip found his only child when he reached
the tree. Her forehead was pressed against it and her fingers were
frantically clutching its bark. He began to speak caressingly the
moment he approached her, for he was touched by the look of
those thin arms; and when he reached the tree he did what was
perhaps the wisest thing he could have done, he sat down with
his shoulders against it, so that the back of his cap almost
touched her clasped hands.

Morgan Nelly could have escaped now if she'd wanted to and
run straight off to Number One's fence, from behind which
Jackie and Sis and Bert, under the protection of Number One
himself, were watching with intense interest the development of
this exciting drama; but when her father calmly lighted a ciga-
rette and began to talk to her without trying to pull her arms
away from the tree she felt at once reassured.

"I know who you are, child," said Philip. "I knew when I saw
your friends. For I know the children you go about with."

There was no reply; but he caught a faint sound over his head
which indicated that she'd unclasped her fingers.

"If you'll come and sit down here for a minute and talk to
me, I'll give you a penny."

There was no reply to this either; but the surface of the poplar
tree served so well as a whispering gallery that he could hear her
talking in a low murmur to herself. This was an old psychologi-
cal device of Morgan Nelly's; and it was a way to exchange
thoughts without the overt shock to one's shyness of officially
addressing a stranger or being addressed. The stranger listened--
indeed if he was wise he listened in silence--and Nelly acted as
chorus for both.

"Jackie is just the same as Sis and Bert," she rambled on. "He
dared me to do it and said he'd follow me and come close when
I were talking to Mr. Crow; but he ain't following me. He's
talking to Number One. But they're all looking to see if Mr.
Crow takes me up and sends me to jail for running after he. If
he did do that, I'd be glad! I'd be glad to go anywhere that isn't
here--even if 'twere jail."

Philip puffed on at his cigarette, keeping a sharp eye upon the
contractor and upon the surveyor who were now engaged in an
earnest colloquy and an alert eye upon the three children and
the old man. The only observer of his dialogue with his daughter
upon whom Philip cast a relaxed, carefree and devil-may-care
eye, the eye of a true begetter of bastards, was Betsy, Number
One's brown and white cow, whose neck was stretched beyond all
decency and restraint between the rails of her master's fence so
as to crop the less familiar grass of Philip's field.

"Perhaps--I say perhaps--I might pay for a little girl I know,
going to the seaside or to some very nice place."

This was a bribe beyond the power of resistance in Philip's
daughter. She slipped round the tree and stood in front of him,
her hands behind her back.

"Mummy wouldn't let me take no money, for nothing," she
said emphatically, looking down upon her progenitor with
knitted brows. "That is, Mummy wouldn't, unless she were a little
squiffy but not too squiffy. When, she's too squiffy, Mummy do
cry for Dad."

"Was your Dad's name...Morgan?" enquired Philip with intent
to discover how much the child knew.

Morgan Nelly nodded vigorously. "But you," she added, "be
me godfather...and a wicked, miser one; what'll never do
me no good if I wait till Judgment Day."

This revelation of the manner in which his name was passed
about between mother and daughter was very significant to
Philip.

"I mustn't set fire to the grass, must I?" he remarked amiably,
extinguishing his cigarette by pressing it into the side of a mole-
hill. He hitched himself up, after this, and fearing dampness in
the grass thrust his cap beneath him.

"Your hair baint very grey!" exclaimed Morgan Nelly.

Philip smiled and instinctively smoothed his hair down with
both his hands under this feminine scrutiny.

"Who said it was?" he enquired casually.

"Red said you was a grey-haired bewger," said the child.
"Wliat be a bewger, Mister?"'

"Red? Oh, you mean that chap Robinson, that I dismissed for
cheek, is he a friend of your mother's?"

"He baint now," responded Nelly confidentially. "Mummy do
loathe the sight of his ugly mug."

‘Tm glad to hear that," said Philip grimly. "Your mother and
I are in agreement there, anyway."

‘'Number One says that they wold funny men do walk about
when 'tis dark in this here girt field."

"You mean old Abel over there?" said Philip. "What funny
men is he talking about?"

"Them as lived where they moundies be...them as had King
Arthur for their king."

‘"Your friend's shaky in his history, Nelly," said Philip, and
he was conscious of an agreeable warmth under his ribs as he
called his daughter by her name.

"Weren't King Arthur king in them days?" she asked.

"Not till much later, Nelly, according to most accounts."

"Who were king in they times when folks lived on hurdles in
water?"

"Heavens, child! I don't know," groaned her father. A sharp
pang at that moment shook some nerve within him. It would be
nice to come home of an evening from the office and listen to this
child's chatter. "I wonder if Tilly would--" he thought.

But the little girl had become very pensive. She too found it
extremely nice to have someone in addition to Number One with
whom she could talk on the subjects that filled her mind. Jackie
always wanted to be the hero of every conversation! What she
liked was to enjoy prolonged speculation with someone clever
enough to know when King Arthur lived but too grown-up to
want to be King Arthur.

"'Tis queer," she remarked, "to think of they old funny men
rowing in their boats where you be sitting now!"

But though Philip had no desire to be King Arthur, or to be
any unknown neolithic hero, he resembled Jackie in his inability
to brood for more than a minute over the mystery of the passing
of time.

"Have you seen that boat in the museum, Nelly?'" he enquired
now, bringing the subject down to something concrete.

"No, Mister, I ain't seen 'un; and don't want to see 'un if Mr.
Merry be there. He scolded me turble once when us played in
museum-yard. He took Jackie's ball away and never gived it
back. He kept Jackie's ball, he did, for his own self. 'Tweren't
right of 'ee. Jackie said he'd tell policeman. But policeman be his
friend. Policeman be allus in thik yard talking to he."

Philip was silent. His daughter's attitude to these local mag-
nates was so different from his own that he felt at a loss for a
suitable comment.

"If you was one of they Lake Village men, Mister, and I were
talking to 'ee, would you have a girt stick with a sharp flint on 'un
and thee-self all naked like, or maybe a few big dock-leaves
round thee's waist?"

Annoyed with himself for not being able to deal better with
her rambling talk, which had now become so easy and natural,
and was thus very agreeable to him, Philip actually felt his
cheeks beginning to burn.

"You'd be glad enough I had a spear with a flint top," he re-
marked, "if that cow over there were a sabre-toothed tiger or a
mammoth."

The little girl's eyes shone. "Would 'ee go after it now with
thik spear and rip its belly open for it?" she enquired with pant-
ing eagerness.

Philip began to experience a definite fear that the child would
soon want him to play a game with her, and rush off across the
field with his stick, pretending that the harmless Betsy were a
mammoth.

"Do you learn history at school, Nelly?" he enquired.

"Would you spear 'un under his ugly tail or would you spear
'un in his girt mouth?" said Nelly, disregarding his reference to
school and to the study of history.

Philip liked it when she called him "you" instead of "Mister."
He stared at the ground beyond his daughter's grey skirt. Yes,
it was certainly a queer thing that this grass should have been
covered with a brackish expanse of water in those old days; but
it was not a thing he cared to think about. In some subtle way it
seemed to make his present activities less important. She cer-
tainly had a mind, this child; but it was more like her mother's
than his! He remembered that it was just this sort of vague and
to him rather desolate brooding that the big-eyed char-girl used
to indulge in when he talked to her in Mrs. Legge's "other
house."

"I'm going to make a new road into Street and a bridge over
the Brue," he suddenly announced to her. He had not intended to
say these words. He had not intended to refer to his present
undertakings at all. It must have been a subconscious desire to
boast of some great deed before his offspring, so as to make up
to her for not going on with that story about mammoth-spearing.

"I don't like roads," said Morgan Nelly. "I likes tow-paths
and cattle-droves best. Jackie and me's going to play Indians in
Wick Wood when the leaves are all down!"

"What will the gamekeeper say?" said Philip, whose idea of
woods was associated with the sporting activities of his friend
Zoyland.

"Oh, Jackie do know a gap into they woods! Sis can't get Bert
through thik gap, but I can. I lifts he and pushes he till he be
over. Us get bluebells there--bunches on 'em! And Jackie found
a Muggie's nest wi' five eggs when us were there. Do 'ee hold wi'
taking more'n two eggs, Mister? Sis says 'tisn't right to take 'em
all. She did cry, Sis did, when Jackie took 'em; and I made him
put 'em back; all but two. Sis said the mother bird was wailing
something pitiful, but Sis be soft over such things."

"I'm going to make a bridge over there," repeated Philip. He
seemed driven by an impulse he could not resist to try at all
costs to impress the child's mind. "If you don't like roads, Nelly,
you surely like bridges?"

"That's Pomparles over there," she said in an awed whisper,
"where King Arthur threw away his sword."

"I'm going to build a new bridge, another bridge, much bigger
than Pomparles."

The child looked at him with a look of horror. She was evi-
dently deeply shocked.

"Not anywhere near Pomparles, are you?" she asked; while
an expression of aversion and distaste came into her eyes.

"But, Nelly--" he pleaded with her, as if she were a grown-
up person, "my bridge will be ever so much bigger and
broader; and a great many lorries will pass over it. Pomparles
is a shaky old erection. Probably it'll have to be taken down.
Progress can't stop because people are sentimental about a heap
of old stones. That's narrowness, Nelly; that's prejudice, that's
being soft and silly--like you said your friend Sis was!"

But he had shocked the little girl through and through by
what he had said; and no special pleading, no references to Sis,
could undo the harm he had done.

"Pomparles taken down? King Arthur's Bridge taken down?
I don't like you, Mister! I hate you!"

Philip was astonished at the contortion of fury into which
her face was convulsed.

"Come, come, come," he said, "don‘t let's quarrel the moment
we've begun to make friends." He jumped up lightly to his feet
and made as if he would lay his hands on her shoulders.

"They won't let you pull Pomparles Bridge down!" she cried,
.skipping back out of his reach. "Mr. Geard won't let you! "

"Mr. Geard couldn't stop me if I decided to do it," cried Philip
rapidly growing as angry as the child was. It was not a sign of
Philip's littleness but of his greatness that he could get so vehe-
ment in a dispute with a little girl. Napoleon would have done
so; so would Alexander the Great; so would Nelson, so would
Achilles. Most modern rulers would have laughed at her and re-
torted with some quip too ironical for her to understand.

"He could! He could! He could!" cried the little girl and put-
ting out her tongue she shook her small fist violently at him and
scampered off at a wild rush towards Number One's cottage.

Philip put on his cap very carefully and gravely, picked up
his stick, and walked with leisurely steps towards the two men.
"I shall say I scolded her for her bad behavior," he thought.
"She got impatient, like a spoilt child, in a minute, and answered
rudely and ran away." Thus would he explain to anyone who had
seen their quarrel what it was that had happened.

"You've taken all the steps, I presume, Sir," said the con-
tractor to him a little later, "about getting leave from the county,
and so on, to have this new road and this new bridge made?"

"Certainly. Of course!" replied Philip. "I've been to the gov-
ernment offices in London about it, as well as to the countv
offices in Taunton. The only thing that could possibly delav it
would be some of these small proprietors--like that old man
over there--making difficulties and asking too much. From what
you two gentlemen tell me it would really be most advisable to
purchase his permission." He raised his voice at this point so as
to include the Evercreech surveyor in his audience. "I was saying
that I think it will be necessary to pay whatever compensation
that old Mr. Twig demands. If we brought it through Lake Vil-
lage Field there might be some red-tape difficulties with the Na-
tional Office and those things always delay matters so."

"They do, Sir," said the surveyor.

"That's what I always says myself, Sir," said the contractor.

It was at this point that Philip's eye caught sight of two fig-
ures advancing along the tow-path on the high bank of the Brue.
They were coming from the direction of Street and following the
river in its northwesterly windings. Philip had no difficulty in
recognising these figures--for he was as long-sighted as an Isle-
of-Ely heron watching for fish--as those of Lady Rachel and Ned
Athling.

Ned Athling was making his plans to leave his parents at
Middlezoy and take a job which Geard had offered him in the
town, the alluring job of editing an official Glastonbury news-
paper--to come out every week. Ned was to have a completely
free hand as editor of this paper, which was to deal with every
aspect, political, economical, social, poetical, mystical, of the
life of the town.

Lady Rachel's feminine relatives, especially the old Lady in
Bath, had been pressing her father with every kind of impor-
tunity to bring to an end her stay in Glastonbury. Day by day
however she had assiduously been drinking those chalybeate
waters, several springs of which could be reached in various
places in the town much nearer than the hillside where they
originated, and her health was obviously making such improve-
ment that Dr. Fell had had little difficulty in persuading Lord P.
to disregard his family's clamourings.

It was a question, however, how far this attitude of his would
change--Lady Rachel had now passed her nineteenth birthday--
when it reached his ears that Ned Alhling was in town and that
the girl was assisting him, as she fully intended to do, in his
editorial labours. It was about this peril to their exciting project
that they were now talking, with their heads close together, as
they came drifting along that tow-path, far too engrossed in each
other to notice the man and the little girl under the poplar tree
or the child's wild escape across the field.

The first number of the Glastonbury paper was to come out
in a month from now. The printing presses, the type-setting ma-
terials, the machinery and the office furniture were already in
working order in a very old building in the outskirts of Para-
dise, one of the oldest buildings in that neighborhood and one
much easier to adapt to their purpose than anything they could
have found in the centre of Glastonbury. The only point where the
Mayor had not given his editor a free hand was in the matter
of the name of the paper. Mr. Geard wished it to be called The
Wayfarer.

Philip had no desire just then to encounter "Lady Rachel and
her young man," as everyone in Glastonbury called them; but
his searching fen-man's eyes, unconsciously combing the land-
scape on every side for signs of living creatures, was arrested
now by the figures of two men advancing along the same tow-path
from the opposite direction. Philip recognised one of these men
at once as Sam Dekker; but the other puzzled him for a time. At
last he decided, and decided correctly, that it was young Jimmy
Rake, a subordinate of Mr. Stilly's in the Glastonbury bank.

Sam had begun to make it a custom of his to befriend the
friendless in Glastonbury, of which there were, he very quickly
discovered, more and queerer specimens than he had ever sur-
mised existed in the days before he was caught in his Vita
Nuova. Jimmy Rake was one of the loneliest of all these friend-
less ones. The other lads persecuted him at the bank. Mr. Stilly
found him incompetent. His landlady in George Street regarded
him as "not all there."

The truth was that James Rake, an orphan from the little town
of Ilchester, was a youth paralysed by shyness. His miserable
shyness was indeed his only claim to his landlady's view of him
and the principal cause of Mr. Stilly's contempt for him. In other
respects his character was simple, colourless and commonplace. If
what is called "distinction" by virtuosos in human qualities was
the chief hope of the lad's salvation, Jimmy Rake was undoubt-
edly damned. "Rake is a Fool" was what one of the little boys at
the Oreylands Preparatory had scrawled in chalk one morning
on the headmaster's blackboard; and even that indulgent gentle-
man, as he wiped these marks away with the duster kept on his
desk, made no denial of this popular verdict.

Rake was a fool. He was a fool at cricket, a fool at football,
a fool at examinations, and the worst fool of all with women and
girls. There was an old canal in the marshes some six miles from
Glastonbury on the borders of Huntspill Moor and because of
a rare kind of water-mint that grew there this was a place where
Sam and his father had for two or three seasons, and as late as
October too, found specimens of the Large Copper butterfly.
James Rake was interested in butterflies. He was not stirred over
them to the passionate intensity of the two Dekkers; but he was
interested; and he had made a gallant effort to overcome his shy-
ness when Sam invited him to this walk on early-closing day.

They had gone by way of Meare, and Westhay Level, and
Catcott Burtle, and the northern fringe of Edington Heath; and
they were now returning by way of Meare Heath and Stileway.

Sam had quickly discovered that there was a solid, compact
mass of what might be described as "honest wood" in Jimmy
Rake's nature. The lad had the power of walking steadily on, for
miles and miles, without uttering a syllable; nor were his re-
marks, when he did speak, of any very vivid or original char-
acter. The most striking observation he had made today in the
whole of their ten-mile walk was what he remarked as they were
crossing some fallen branches in a spinney near Edington Junc-
tion, on the Burnham and Evercreech Railway, "The white ones"
-- he was speaking of toadstools--"seem to grow on the dead
wood; and the black ones on the living wood." Sam had taken
advantage of this remark to expatiate at some length on the
toadstools of the neighbourhood, in which he and his father had
specialised together for one whole autumn a couple of years ago;
but his discourse seemed only to prove that the abundant "woodi-
ness" in the nature of Rake the Fool was not the kind upon which
either black or white fungi spontaneously flourished.

At the moment when Philip's long-sighted vision was concen-
trated upon the man and the woman approaching from the south
and the two men approaching from the west, Sam himself real-
ised to what an encounter he was leading his shy friend and he
looked about him, wondering how to avoid this couple who were
directly in their path. Ned Athling too became just then aware of
a group of three men standing in the field to the north of them
and a couple of men advancing from the northwest. There was
a small unimportant bridge over the Brue just at that place,
called Cold Harbour Bridge, and it was quite close to this spot
that Philip was now standing. A little tributary of the river left
the main stream at this point and flowed southeast to Northload
Bridge, and thence lost itself among the orchards of the town.
This Cold Harbour Bridge formed, in fact, the centre of an imag-
inary circle on the circumference of which these three groups of
human beings were now arrested in a threefold consciousness of
one another's presence.

To the surveyor from Evercreech there was nothing in the least
remarkable about the fact that two men should be approaching
Cold Harbour Bridge from the west, and a man and woman from
the south, following the same tow-path. The contractor was won-
dering whether he would be permitted to bring his own workmen
from Taunton for the construction of the new road or whether
the town council of Glastonbury would insist on his employing
local labourers upon the job. The surveyor from Evercreech was
wondering if his wife's father, now suffering from an attack of
pleurisy, would leave them his small dairy farm of four Jersey
cows, when he came to die.

But there was, as a matter of fact, no geographic section of
the environs of Glastonbury that had not been so often the stage
of portentous human encounters that chance itself seemed, in the
weariness of her long experience, to have found it easier to slide
events through the smooth grooves of fate than to shake them
into her favourite surprises; for from under Cold Harbour Bridge
which was the precise centre of the equilateral triangle formed
by these now quite stationary groups of people, all wondering
how they should avoid contact with one another, arose the tall
lean shape of Mother Loggers aged doorkeeper. Young Tewsv.
holding in one hand a large blood-stained fish which he had
just killed and in the other a long fishing-rod.

"I've a caught he! I've a caught he!" he kept repeating and
gazed round him with the frantic gestures of one demanding an
audience.

Philip looked from the surveyor to the contractor with the air
of a monarch who asks his courtiers to rid him of an intrusive
churl.

"He's a tramp," said the Taunton man.

"He's one of the town's idiots," said the gentleman from Ever-
creech who was hoping for the death of his father-in-law in order
to inherit four Jersey cows.

But Young Tewsy was so anxious to tell the whole world of
his successful kill that he climbed up upon Cold Harbour Bridge
and held his catch in the air; waving it first in the direction of
Sam and Jimmy and then in the direction of Lady Rachel. It
was enough for Lady Rachel that an old dilapidated beggar was
appealing to her in some way. She ran forward at top-speed to
the bridge, followed at a slow and indeed at a sulky pace by Mr.
Athling who began to feel extremely uneasy at the presence of
so many people. People seemed to be appearing from every
quarter of the horizon. Mr. Athling could see Sam and Jimmy in
one direction, Philip and his two companions in another, while
in addition to these he could perceive in the distance, on the
other side of the big field, a group of children, an old man, and
a cow with its head outstretched between wooden railings.

The sun was breaking through the clouds in so irregular a
manner that one stream of light fell upon the tall heggar wav-
ing the fishing-rod and another upon the children and the cow.

If Rachel Zoyland followed her hereditary instinct by rushing
to the spot where a flag of appeal or of disturbance had been
raised, Sam Dekker followed his hereditary instinct by running
at top-speed to where s n excited a fisherman was brandishing a
great fish. Poor Jim Rake, however, though not from pique or
sulkiness like Athling, but from a paralysing spasm of nervous-
ness followed Sam at a snail's pace. He looked neither to the
right or to the left, for fear of being summoned to shake hands
with someone, but kept his eyes fixed on the blood-stained fish,
whose own eyes, which five minutes before had been searching
the vistas of flowing water through the weed stalks of the Brue,
had already taken upon them that glazed lidless stare of a dead
creature upon a marble slab.

"You have caught a wonderful fish!" panted Rachel, when she
reached Young Tewsy's side upon the narrow bridge.

"Ain't I, your ladyship,"--for he knew her well by sight--
"ain't I?" gasped the old man. " Tis the girt chub of Lydford
Mill come upstream for they autumn flies. I've a-dipped for he
every mornin' since September and every noon when Missus
could spare I to come out--and now I've a-hooked 'un. There
'un be, your ladyship--there 'un be, Mr. Dekker"--for Sam,
bowing awkwardly to Rachel, was now on the bridge too--"and
'twere I what hooked 'un! Ain't he summat to see? Looksee
what a girt mouth!"

"You've killed it too roughly, Tewsy," said Sam. "You
shouldn't have bloodied it so." He took the fish in his hands.
"Yes, he's right," he remarked to Rachel. "I've seen you myself,
haven't I?" he added, this time addressing the fish, as he lifted
up its dorsal fin with his forefinger. "I've seen you, down at
Lydford in your own Mill Pool; but I never thought to hold you
in my hands on Cold Harbour Bridge."

Philip, Jimmy Rake, and Ned Athling were all standing on the
tow-path now, while Young Tewsy, supported by Lady Rachel
and Sam, remained above them on the bridge. Philip took off his
hat to Lord P.'s daughter and made some laconic remark about
the nourishing quality of Brue mud.

"Look, Jimmy!" cried Sam, holding up the fish for his friend's
inspection.

"It won't be nourishing much longer, Mr. Crow, if your chem-
icals begin to get into it," said Ned unkindly, venting his vexation
upon the manufacturer.

"My chemicals!" murmured Philip, "I assure you, Athling,
that nothing from my--"

"This is Mr. James Rake, Lady Rachel," said Sam, handing
back the fish to Young Tewsy.

Mr. Rake tried to remember that it was best to take his cap
off by the front rather than to clutch it by the top. The lad's
cheeks got very red when Rachel remarked that she had seen him
in the bank.

The man from Evercreech, forgetting about the four Jersey
cows, now approached the group, while the contractor in order
to retain his self-respect began writing in his notebook. His West-
Country awareness of the presence of Lord P.'s daughter, how-
ever, made him feel so self-conscious that all he could write down
were the words "Saunders Brothers, Builders and Contractors,
Taunton."

So deep however were the centuries-old grooves, into which
fate had moulded the historic atmosphere round Lake Village
Field, that chance now, playing at being fate, brought to the
lips of Young Tewsy a significant retort, as if to compel some-
one among these people to take note of what was going on. The
contractor from Taunton had just added to the words "Saunders
Brothers" the words "Due from Mr. Philip Crow," when Philip,
putting his hand into one of his trouser pockets and bringing out
a lot of loose silver, said to Young Tewsy, who was endeavouring
to take his rod to pieces--"I'll give you ten shillings for that
chub, my good fellow!" Philip had been hesitating between men-
tioning five shillings or ten; but he had decided on this enormous
sum, because of the presence of Lady Rachel, to whom, as soon
as he had obtained it, he intended to offer the fish as a chival-
rous gift.

It was then that Young Tewsy had uttered the following
remark.

"'Tis for Missus, Sir. Tain't for sale, Sir. Missus 'ave been
hinterested, Sir,"--Tewsy in his excitement was reverting to his
North London accent--"hever since I began fishing for the fish.
The fish 'ave been on Missus', mind, Sir. She 'ave dreamed of
the fish, Sir. She wants to heat the fish, Sir. She says--yes, my
Lidy, 'tis Mrs. Legge I be speaking of--she says, Sir, when she
was little, Sir, they 'ad a sighing in town about the fish. She said
they used to sigh:

‘When Chub of Lydford do speak like human
On grass where Joseph has broken bread,
Be it a man or be it a woman.
In the Isle of Glaston theyll raise the Bead.'

And this 'ere fish"--he had laid the chub down upon the grass
while he pulled his rod apart and wound up the line--"this 'ere
fish cried ‘Whew! Whew! Whew!' just like a dying Christian,
when I 'it its 'ead to stop its floppin' on grass. Missus 'as been
all wrought-up, Sir, in a manner of speaking, by thinking on
this 'ere fish. If I were to sell 'ee the fish, thanking 'ee kindly,
Sir, all the sime; or sell it to your Lidyship, thanking you kindly
all the sime. Missus 'ud be terrible fretted. She do yearn to put
5 er 'ands on this 'ere fish's tile and to scratch 'erself with this
'ere fish's fins, and to thrust 'er thumb down this 'ere fish's
throat. 'Tis meat and marrow to Missus to 'old this 'ere fish to 'er
bosom. So thankin' you, Sir, all the sime and thankin' you, my
Lidy, it 'ud never do for me to let a living soul 'ave this 'ere
ancient fish, save only Missus."

Having uttered this diplomatic ultimatum, the old man, leaving
behind him in Lady Rachel's nostrils a mingled odour of sweat
and fish-slime, shuffled down the bridge steps muttering: "God-
den, gentles, god-den, Lidy!"

Philip could not help following him with a wistful glance as
he went off towards Mr. Twig's hut; for he thought to himself--
"She will like to see that fish!"

The group of persons at Cold Harbour Bridge now began hur-
riedly to escape from one another; Sam and Jimmy Rake follow-
ing in the track of Young Tewsy towards the Godney Road,
Lady Rachel and Ned turning to their right and pursuing the
tributary of the Brue that led to Northload Bridge and the cen-
tre of the town.

The great goddess chance, still finding her line of least resist-
ance in the smooth fate-grooves of Glastonbury, now decreed
that, as the two lovers passed Number Two's shop they should
catch sight of Mr. Evans and old Bartholomew Jones talking in
its interior with the door wide open.

Mr. Jones had left the hospital; but finding that his business
had increased considerably, owing to the town's curiosity--espe-
cially the town's feminine curiosity--with regard to the eccentric
Welshman, he had begun to negotiate with Mr. Evans, a slow and
infinitely cautious proceeding on the old man's part, on the sub-
ject of some sort of partnership. Rachel caught Mr. Evans' eye
as they passed and the lovers drifted into the shop.

Ned Athling, his temper now quite recovered, had been dis-
cussing with Rachel as they came along the possibility of making
this capture of the famous chub of Lydford the subject of his
first article for The Wayfarer.

Old Jones bowed himself off on the appearance of the two
young people; for he said in his sly old heart, "Me pardner will
be sprightlier in coaxin' they to buy summat if I baint there."

Athling therefore lost no time in narrating to Mr. Evans the
whole adventure of the fish; while Rachel, tired after their long
stroll by the river, sank down to rest in one of the big Louis
Quatorze chairs. The girl had noticed before that some of her
happiest moments came to her when she was feeling exhausted
like this. She had noticed it especially since she had come to
Glastonbury. She had even spoken of it to Ned. "It's a delicious
feeling," she had told him. "It's just as if I sank down through
some yielding element, into a world like this one; yes! in every
particular like this one, only with all the annoying things
left out."

She took off her hat now and let it lie in her lap while she
pushed back her brown curls from her forehead, glancing as she
did so at one of Old Jones' gilt mirrors. "How white I am," she
thought, "and how hot and untidy and funny-looking! I wish I
could get the smell of that old man's clothes out of my nose. How
some smells do cling to anyone. And there's fish-blood on my
hands too." She lay back in the big gilt chair and crossed her
legs, clutching the rim of her hat. Yes! It was coming, it was
coming, that lovely sensation. It was like sinking through deep
water, water of a pale glaucous colour, and seeing everything
through water.

"Is that because Glastonbury was an island once?" she thought.

But how perfect it was to sit here, with the sounds of the
street and the air-waves of misty sunshine coming in together
through the open door! How handsome Ned looked talking to
this man; and what passionate interest the man was taking in
what he was telling him! But everything was so lovely and
tender and wavering to her as she let her head sink back. "There's
something heavenly," she thought, "about this feeling. It's just
like being dead and yet intensely happy. I've had it before, I
think, in this shop. Certainly I had it the other day in the souve-
nir shop. It's something about this place. I don't know what it is.
I'll tell Father I won't go to London, whatever Aunt Betsy says!"

The girl was right about Mr. Evans looking passionately inter-
ested. He looked as if he were plunged into some interior vision
that rendered him totally unaware of what he was doing with his
hands, or with his feet, or with his body. For instance, the mo-
ment Ned Athling had finished his narration Mr. Evans sank
down on a small chair opposite Lady Rachel and stretched out
his long legs with their great square-toed boots and grey socks
and allowed his long arms to hang down on each side of the
chair. His shirt, as well as his coat, was so much too short for
him that not only were his bony wrists but perceptible portions
of his lean arms nakedly visible to view, as his hands swung
there with the long fingers dangling.

Lady Rachel was unable to resist a slight flicker of retreat
from the presence of these great boots and rumpled grey socks
thus protruded towards her; but being the well-bred girl she
was, she restrained this movement at once and did not even draw
in her own slender legs. Thus between the boot-soles of Rachel
and the boot-soles of Mr. Evans there was not space to drop a
feather.

Athling approached the back of his lady's chair and leaned^
both his elbows upon it so that his knuckles almost touched her
head. Thus as Mr. Evans began his commentary upon what he
had just heard there was no more distance between the lovers
than there was between Mr. Evans and Lady Rachel and the mag-
netism that accompanied the Welshman's words linked them all
three for a space together.

The extraordinary thing about Mr. Evans' face this afternoon,
as the lovers watched it, was the rapidity of its changes from a
mask of hollow, expressionless desolation into lineaments of
prophetic and inspired passion.

"I never thought I would be here...in this Death-Island of
my people...for Glastonbury is the Gwlad-vr-Hav, the Ely-
sian Death-Fields of the Cymric tribes...on the day when
that fish was killed. Of course I knew about it. Friends of mine,
when I was at Jesus, went down to Lydford to see it. They never
did see it themselves; but they talked to old men and old women
who had. It must be fabulously old, that fish! Tewsy ought never
to have done it; but if anyone was to do it he was the one. Of
course he won't live the year out. But he'll have the happiest
year he's ever had in his life; and he'll probably die in his
sleep. What I am now telling you two...and you can believe I
would not tell everyone these things...is mostly from the
Book of Taliessin and from the Triads and from David ap
Gwilym and from Lady Charlotte's Mabinogion and from Sir
John Rhys, and from the Red Book of Hergest, and from the
Vita Gildae and from the Black Book of Carmarthen, but in my
own Vita Merlini I've gone further than any of them into these
things. Few Glastonbury people realise that they are actually
living in yr Echwyd, the land of Annwn, the land of twilight and
death, where the shores are of Mortuorum Mare, the Sea of
the Departed. This place has always been set apart...from the
earliest times...Urien the Mysterious, Avallach the Unknown,
were Fisher Kings here...and for what did they fish? The
Triads only dare to hint at these things...the Englynion only
to glance at them...Taliessin himself...did you know that?...
was netted with the fish in the weir, by Elphin the son of
Gwydno Garanhir...And for what...and for what did this Fisher
King...

Mr. Evans' voice now rose to a tremulous pitch of excitement.
Ned Athling's hands crossing the back of Lady Rachel's gilded
throne were now actually in contact with the girl's neck, nor did
she move her head away. A mutual impulse made it seem desir-
able that they should touch each other at some point while Mr.
Evans was talking about "yr Echwyd."

"For what did these mystical Figures...rulers in Ynis-Witrin in
the time of my people...seek...when they fished?" The curious
thing was that Mr. Evans' body seemed at that moment, while his
two young hearers watched him, to grow more and more corpse-
like. Those hare hanging wrists, those outstretched feet in their
great boots remained absolutely motionless. It was as if his
physical form had already sunk into the waters of that Cimmerian
sunset-realm which he called "yr Echwyd," while some power
from outside of him was making his lips move in his corpse-like
face!

"They sought for more than a fish, for more than any great
chub of Lydford...they sought for the knot of the opposites,
for the clasping of the Two Twilights, for the mingling-place of
the waters, for the fusion of the metals, for the bride-bed of the
contradictions, for the copulation-cry of the Yes and No, for the
amalgam of the Is and Is Not! What they sought...what the
Fisher Kings of my people sought, and no other priests of no
other race on earth have ever sought it...was not only the
Cauldron and the Spear...not only the sheath and the knife,
not only the Mwys of Gwyddno and the Sword of Arthur, but
that which exists in the moment of timeless time when these two
are one! What they sought was creation with-out-generation.
What they sought was Parthenogenesis and the Self-Birth of
Psyche. What they sought was the Stone without Lichen which
the people before my people worshipped, when they set up

The voice proceeding from the lips of the corpse-face of Mr.
Evans became so hoarse and broken at this point that it hardly
seemed like a human voice. Lady Rachel could clearly hear the
footsteps on the pavement outside, through the street door which
they had left ajar; and these steps sounded to her like the steps
of all the generations of men treading down the stammerings of
the Inanimate Bottom of the World.



"NATURE SEEMS DEAD"



During the first week in December three new subjects of
the King of England entered this world in the little maternity
annex of the Glastonbury Hospital. Nell Zoyland was deli\ered
of a boy, while Tossie Stickles--to her immense pride and satis-
faction--was delivered of a pair of lusty girl twins. It was con-
ducive of certain curious encounters that these two young women
and their children should be lying simultaneously in private
rooms opening from the same passage. Tom Barter coming to
visit Tossie found himself confronted in that passage one day by
Will Zoyland and another day by Sam Dekker, while Miss Eliza-
beth Crow, who was devoted in her watchfulness over Toss and
her twins, met on one and the same evening, Persephone Spear
and Dave Spear coming to see Nell, but coming separately on
this errand.

Something certainly seemed--at least up to this present date
which was now the tenth of December---to be favouring the com-
mune conspirators. Dave and Red and their new ally Paul Trent
had evidently been well advised in their choice of a locale that
day, wherein to broach their daring plot. Philip Crow, like many
another Napoleonic tactician, was weakest in the cautious con-
sideration of all probable and improbable contingencies. Like the
impetuous Corsican and like Oliver Cromwell he swept ahead
upon his main idea, allowing sleeping dogs to sleep and open
stable doors to remain open. Never for one second did it cross
his active brain, any more than it crossed the brain of Tilly, ab-
sorbed in making her domestic arrangements for the winter, or
the brain of Mr. Tankerville, growing more and more energetic
in his commercial flights about Europe, that there was the least
chance of any difficulty over his factory leases, the rents of which
remained still only paid up to the beginning of the New Year.
The construction of his new road and his new bridge was for the
moment held up by the flat refusal of Mr. Twig to sell any por-
tion of his small patrimony, but the Evercreech man, more anx-
ious than ever to serve this rich employer, since his father-in-law
--as obstinate about dying as Number One was about selling--
still persisted in milking his four Jersey cows with his own hand,
was already in correspondence with the county officials over the
possibility of exploiting a section of Lake Village Field. BuL
though handicapped over his road and his bridge, Philip had
begun his tin mining under the most promising conditions and
already the sound of picks and mattocks and of cranes and en-
gines could be heard proceeding from a big clearing in the hill-
side under which many unvisited subterranean passages led into
the heart of the hill. Half a dozen truckloads of the precious
metal had already been despatched from the railway station at
Glastonbury; for although this station was further off than the
one at Wells it was easier to make use of and Philip had a much
stronger "pull" with the railroad officials there. It had been just
a month ago, in the middle of November, when the first tin had
begun to emerge, nor would Philip ever forget his feelings when
he beheld the lorry containing it roll off towards the Great
Western station, ready to be taken to Cardiff through the Severn
Tunnel. For the last month the tin had been pouring forth with
such a steady flow that Philip's spirits had mounted up to a pitch
of excitement that was like a kind of diurnal drunkenness. He
dreamed of tin every night. The metal in all its stages began to
obsess him. He collected specimens of it, of every degree of
weight, integrity, purity. He carried bits of it about with him in
his pocket. All manner of quaint fancies--not so much imagina-
tive ones as purely childish ones--connected with tin, kept en-
tering and leaving his mind, and he began to feel as if a portion
of his innermost being were the actual magnet that drew this
long-neglected element out of abysses of prehistoric darkness into
the light of day.

Philip got into the habit of walking every day up the steep
overgrown hillside above Wookey and posting himself in the
heart of a small grove of Scotch firs from which he could ob-
serve, without anyone detecting his presence, the lively transac-
tions at the mouth of the big orifice in the earth, where the trees
had been cut away and where the cranes and pulleys stood out
in such startling relief against the ancient sepia-coloured clumps
of hazel and sycamore, still growing around them upon the leafy
slopes. Here he would devour the spectacle of all this activity he
had set in motion, until he longed to share the physical exertions
of every one of his labourers, diggers, machinists, truckmen,
carters, stokers, miners, and haulers. He yearned to be himself
boring, dynamiting, shovelling, lifting, carrying, driving; and so
intensely had he fixed his eyes on every bodily movement these
men had made, that by this time--by the tenth of December--he
really could have hired himself out, and won commendation
from his foreman in the job, at almost everyone of these several
labours. It must not be supposed that he neglected his office-work
or his dye works extensions and increasing European sales dur-
ing these exciting weeks. He worked steadily at the office from
nine to one every day, and always looked in there again about
five before he went home to tea. After his tea he had recently
acquired the custom of retiring to a room which Emma called
the study, Tilly the north room and he himself the play-room.
Shut up in this room he used to ponder long and deeply over his
affairs, plunging into various mathematical and commercial cal-
culations and making rapid notes in a big, foolscap-size notebook
with a white vellum binding. This notebook had been given to
him by Persephone when she was quite a little girl. Illuminated
upon its front page was his name and hers united by a gilt
border within which were lilac-coloured hearts, strung upon a
green string.

On this tenth of December Philip returned to the north room
after Tilly had gone to bed, and gave himself up to an orgy of
concentrated thought. He had already brought so many new
labourers and working people into Glastonbury that it had begun
to be difficult to house them, and Philip--little dreaming what
a deadly blow was preparing for him from that quarter--had
entered into negotiations with the town council relative to his
housing these newcomers in some of the newly built "council
houses." The fact that there were so many unemployed among the
old-established Glastonbury people, who now saw these lively
upstarts from Bristol and Cardiff occupying houses provided by
their own socialistic government and built out of local taxes,
was a fact that did not redound to Philip's popularity with the
populace. Glastonbury's populace was--as they proved in their
mobbing of Lord P.--not at all inclined to remain passive and
patient when they once got a particular grievance lodged in their
brain; and Philip had been surprised by the sullen looks with
which he was greeted whenever he had occasion to pass through
the poorer portions of the town. He had even heard derisive jeer-
ing when he recently crossed, in his little open car, one of the
outskirts of Paradise. This extreme unpopularity into which he
had fallen was another of these possible causes of catastrophe
which Philip neglected. It was part of that element of sheer
recklessness in him, to which reference has already been made, to
hold public opinion in infinite contempt. Humane enough towards
those immediately dependent upon him, Philip was absolutely
devoid of imagination when it came to be a question of people
he had never seen.

His small, hard, oblong head, very protruding at the back, and
rather flat at the sides where the ears clung so closely, had that
particular look about it that old-fashioned military men's skulls
have. As he pulled his chair round now in front of the fire, leav-
ing the vellum-bound notebook open on the table and sprinkled
with cigarette ashes which he had not bothered to blow away,
he thought to himself quite calmly: "It would be a good thing if
the Glastonbury people would simply die off; die off and leave
their houses empty to make room for me to fill the town with
a different type altogether! But they seem able to live on for-
ever, feeding on mud and mist! Die! Die! Die! Die quickly and
have done with it!" It was at this moment that he saw in the red
coals of the fire, a heap of dead people, dead heads and arms and
legs and feet. It was a totally unreal illustration of the French
Revolution, that set him upon conjuring up this romantic spec-
tacle. It was a picture that he had seen in some silly illustration
of some cheap story; and the queer thing about it was that these
dead people were not disfigured in any way. They were just dead.
"How these Christs and Buddhas," he thought to himself, "ever
reached the point of feeling that it was worth their while to save
the human race is more than I can understand. I don't want to
torture anyone"--here Philip's judgment of himself was abso-
lutely correct, for there was less sadism in him than there was
in Mr. Stilly or in Jimmy Rake or in Elphin Cantle--"but it's
impossible for me to understand this 'value of human life' that
some people make so much of." Once more he stared at the
coals; and once more he saw in those red recesses that curious,
sentimental assembly of neatly dressed corpses with sad, peace-
ful, composed features, laid out in that artistic morgue. And then
there flickered over his hollow eye-sockets and over his hollow
cheeks, as he stared at that fire and stretched out his hands to it.
a grim smile, for he thought of what Tilly would say if she could
read his thoughts at this moment.

Tilly--good housekeeper as she was in her orderings of well-
killed meat--could not bring herself to trap the smallest mouse.
If kittens had been born in her house by the dozens, it would
only have been by the craftiest deception that Emma could have
got her to get rid of one of them. "What actually would Tilly
say," he wondered, "if she knew that if I could cut off the heads
of all the poor of Glastonbury and fill their houses with a picked
set of men and women who could really work I'd do it tomor-
row? As a matter of fact, if by lifting up my hand now I could
destroy those people and get this new population here tonight,
I'd do it! Yes, and sleep quite soundly afterwards!"

One of the most interesting things about Philip, when he in-
dulged in mental contemplations as he was doing now was the
guileless un-maliciousness of his inhumanity. Though it never
occurred to him to ask himself by what right could he condemn
to death, in his thoughts, a whole section of his fellow-townsmen,
he derived no wicked pleasure from the idea of their death. His
grey-black, closely cropped skull was as devoid of such notions
as one of the mattocks of his workmen at Wookey. He experi-
enced now, in his silent house, with his open figuring-book on
the table behind him and these glowing coals in front of him, a
delicious sense of soundness, compactness, integrity in solitude.
"I am I," his whole being seemed to say, "and the world is my
clay and my mortar." Leaving these ill-nourished Glastonbury
incompetents safe in their neat and artistic death-pile, his
thoughts now turned to what he regarded as the superstitions of
the place. Yes, he would willingly, if he could, obliterate all
these Gothic Ruins, lay a good solid expanse of lead-piping to
drain Chalice Well, pull down that old Tower from the Tor
and build a water-tank up there, dig out every twig, sprig, root
and branch of this corrupting thorn bush and really set to work
to have the best tin centre in this spot that existed anywhere in
the world! Here again, in the matter of superstition, Philip's de-
structive desires were astonishingly un-malicious.

John Crow would have derived a most convoluted vandal-
thrill, the wanton excitement of a run-down atheistical adven-
turer, in obliterating all traces of the Great Legend. Red would
have gratified incredible levels of "'ate" by so doing. Barter would
have done it with the grim unction of a sullen executioner, es-
pecially if he could have shogged off afterwards with Tossie and
the twins to Norfolk! Even Dave would have done it with a cer
tain self-righteous doctrinaire-austerity. But Philip would have
done it absolutely without a single arriere pensee. He would have
done it by the pure necessity of his nature, as a dog twines him-
self round on a mat before lying down, or a cat scratches the
dust over its excrement. He would have wiped the place clean,
both of its under-nourished rebellious populace and of its morbid
relics, and then set to work, as inevitably as a beaver returns to
its job after a flood, to build up' an industrial centre out of the
richest tin mine and out of the most scientific dye works any-
where on earth!

It was with his head full of these thoughts--thoughts that
sprouted from his hard skull like scaly lichen from a gatepost
on Brandon Heath--that Philip finally switched off the electric
light in the play-room and went up--carrying his patent-leather
shoes in hand--to his stuffy bedroom, his cold hot-water bottle,
and the invisible wraith of his well-satisfied grandmother.

All the enemies of the Great Legend happened, that night of
December the tenth, to be going to sleep about the same time.
Glastonbury indeed, under its windy, moonless winter sky, was
like many another town that night in the turbulent history of our
earth: it was subject to the psychic tearing down and building up
of the most violently diverse energies. But all these Legend-
Destroyers were of the same sex! That was the interesting and
significant thing to note. Not one single feminine wish, from
Tossie in the hospital to Mother Legge in what she called her
nursery, was lifted up from the bed of sleep in hostility to the
immemorial Tradition. But from the bed of Red, and the bed of
Dave, and the bed of Paul Trent, and the bed of Mr. Barter, and
the bed of Lawyer Beere, and the beds of bank-cashier Stilly,
gardener Weatherwax and Will Zoyland and finally from the
bed in Northload Street of John Crow, there rose up, along with
the destructive will-power of Philip, a cumulative malediction
against the Legend. There had been a time when Mary would
have joined this gang of iconoclasts--she alone among all the
feminine shapes in the town--but, since her marriage, Mary had
relapsed into a veritable undersea of infinite peace so delicate in
its muted dreaming that she would have no more wished to break
up any of its dream-scenery, any of its deep-sea arches, its deep-
sea columns, its leagues of translucent emerald-coloured floors,
than she would have wished to break the heart of Euphemia
Drew.

The history of any ancient town is as much the history of its
inhabitants' nightly pillows as of any practical activity that they
perform by day. Floating on its softly upheaving sea-surface of
feminine breasts the island-city of mystery gathered itself to-
gether to resist this wedge of rational invasion. Backward and
forward, for five thousand years, the great psychic pendulum has
swung between belief in the Glastonbury Legend and disbelief.
It is curious to think of the pertinacity of the attacks upon this
thing and how, like a vapour dispersed by a wind that re-fashions
itself again the moment the wind departs, the moss-grown towers
and moonlit ramparts of its imperishable enchantment survive
and again survive. When the king murdered the last Abbot of this
place he was only doing what Philip and Barter and Red and
Dave and Paul Trent and John would have liked to do to the
indestructible mystery today. In the most ancient times the same
fury of the forces of "reason," must have swept across Glaston-
bury, only to be followed by the same eternal reaction when the
forces of mystery returned. The psychic history of a place like
Glastonbury is not an easy thing to write down in set terms, for
not only does chance play an enormous part in it, but there are
many forces at work for which human language has at present
no fit terms.

This particular night of the tenth of December was in reality
one of the great turning points in the life of Glastonbury, but the
issue of the struggle that went on tonight between the Enemies of
the Legend and its Lovers would evade all but supernatural nar-
ration, however one might struggle to body it forth. Out of John
Crow's head, after he had relaxed to sleep that night from his
lascivious claspings of Mary's marbly limbs, there leapt up into
the darkness the spiritual form of all the suppressed malicious-
ness from which he had been suffering in his service of Bloody
Johnny. This spiritual form was a shape, a presence, an entity.
It was, in fact, the essential soul of John Crow, for the vital con-
sciousness of his sleeping body was but a vague, weak diffusion
of electric force. What else could the soul of John Crow do when
released in sleep from his life of psychic slavery, but join, with
an exultant rebound, all those other wandering spirits who were
engaged in killing the Grail. It was not necessary for any pal-
pable shape to fly out of that window in Northload Street in
order to join, in a sort of Warlock's Sabbath, the ill-assorted
spirits of Philip Crow and Red Robinson. When I write down
the word join, I mean a motion of John's soul that it would be
impossible for any scientist to refute, a motion of his whole
essential being, now his body was asleep and his diplomacy re-
laxed, to kill the Grail. By joining with Philip, on this night of
the tenth of December, to strike this blow at a fragment of the
Absolute, the essential soul of John Crow took a considerable
risk. For one thing, it was a risk to leave his sly, cautious, saurian
neutrality and join his grand enemy. That he did so at all is
only one more proof of how deep John's maliciousness went. In
his service of Geard, in connexion with the Grail and in connex-
ion with Chalice Well, John was steadily outraging the evasive,
trampish, irresponsible essence of his nature. He was taking
sides. He was siding with the Grail against its enemies, when all
the while, in his heart, he longed to kill it! The "something" in
Philip and John and Barter that loathed the Grail so deeply was
not just simply their Norfolk blood. This fragment of the Abso-
lute was too ticklish a thing not to divide human souls in a dis-
turbing and disconcerting manner, setting brother against brother
and friend against friend. All the way down the centuries it had
done this, breaking up ordinarv normal human relations and
exerting whenever it appeared, a startling, shocking, troubling
effect.

It was really a monstrous thing now that John and Philip
should dislike one another so heartily during the daylight hours
but at night rush off together to join in killing the Grail. The
Grail could not actually be "killed," for the Thing is a morsel
of the Absolute and a broken-off fragment of the First Cause. It
could not of course be killed literally; not in the sense of being
annihilated. But it could be struck at and outraged in a way
that was a real injury; real enough, anyhow, to stir up a very
ambiguous feeling in the tramp-nerves of John Crow! After all,
though there was an unknown "element" in the composition of
this broken-off piece of its own substance, that the First Cause
had flung down upon this spot, there was also something of the
"thought-stuff" of the same ultimate Being in the personality of
all its living creatures. Thus, in the psychic war that was going
on above the three hills of Glastonbury, the Absolute was, in a
manner of speaking, pitted against the Absolute.

On this tenth of December the wind blew directly from the
west. Over Mark Moor it blew from the marshes of Highbridge
and, beyond that, from the brackish mud-flats of Burnham. The
tide had been so high indeed in the Burnham estuaries that many
of the more pessimistic fishermen there, whose flat-bottomed
boats--as they had done since the Vikings came--explored those
muddy reaches, prophesied that the dams were going to burst
again, as they had burst in November, five years before, flooding
the whole country. Over Bridgewater Bay it blew, and over the
Bristol Channel, from the mountains of South Wales. A scattered
army of little ragged clouds followed each other eastward all
that night, blotting out from the vision of nocturnal wanderers,
or from such as kept vigil at lonely windows, first one constella-
tion and then another. Thus the nature of the night of that tenth
of December was peculiar and unusual, for no fixed star and no
planet was free from sudden, quick, hurried and erratic obscur-
ings by these rags and tatters of flying vapour. Endlessly they
blew across the welkin, those tattered wisps of clouds, changing
their shapes as they blew into the fitful forms of men and beasts
and birds and tossing vessels and whirling hulks and flying
promontories, and obscuring first one great zodiacal sign in the
heavens and then another. The wind that shepherded these wild
flocks was full of the scent of channel seaweed and of channel
mud, and as it voyaged eastward its speed kept increasing, so
that these cloud-shapes, thus broken into smaller and smaller
wefts, now began to fly like gigantic leaves across the Glaston-
bury hills.

Two human beings, one a woman and one a boy, found them-
selves too restless to sleep that night in this city of sorceries.
These were Nancy Stickles in her attic room on the High Street
and Elphin Gantle in his father's hostelry, the Old Tavern, which
stood on the edge of the Cattle Market. Both these persons, this
young married woman and this boy, left their beds between one
and two that December night and pulling chairs to their windows,
looked out upon those flying clouds. Elphin's room, which was
far away from both Persephone's and Dave's, in the rambling,
faded, old public house, looked out from a sort of stucco tower,
added to the main building in the reign of William the Fourth.
His window was a large one composed of many small panes and
when Elphin in the dead of night threw this open and sat leaning
his elbows upon the window-sill he could not only see a high
garden wall covered with mossy coping-stones, but he could see
a bare larch tree swaying mournfully in the wind, and, beyond
this a little tributary of the Brue, irrigating a piece of municipal
ground that had been parcelled out into allotment-gardens, and
crossed, although its waters were not deep, by several plank
bridges. There was a clump of dead stone-crop upon this mossy
wall, and near the stone-crop a single faded wall-flower which
bowed and swayed in the wind and seemed to emit, as it swayed,
at least so Elphin Cantle fancied, a faint dirge-like sighing. The
boy spread out his arms upon his window-sill and stared at the
pallid waters of the Brue tributary and at the tossing larch-tree
top and at the sighing flower- stalks on the wall. His window was
unusually large, as often happens with that particular sort of
stucco tower, so that there was a dizzy sensation as, well as a very
chilly one as he looked out upon the night. But Elphin was much
more in the night , much more mingled with its vague scents and
its morbidly distinct sounds than he would have been in any
other room in Glastonbury. His mother had decided to let him
sleep in the tower room "till a guest asked for it." Now, as it was
unlikely that a guest would even know of the existence of the
tower room, Elphin was pretty safe.

He thrust his right arm out of the great window and stroked
the stucco wall with his fingers. Something about a stucco wall
always fascinated Elphin, and now with this wind wailing in his
ears, whistling through the larch tree, moaning across the plank
bridges of this Brue ditch, the touch of this material helped him
to think. But he was in a blasphemous and a wicked mood that
night, for his idol Sam had broken his promise to take him out
there, beyond Charlton Mackrell, to the weir at Cary Fitzpaine,
on the River Cary, where several tench had been caught this
autumn, that queer fish gifted' with the gift of healing! Sam had
given him no better excuse for the breaking of this promise than
that Mrs. Zoyland was all alone, that afternoon, up at the hos-
pital, a state of affairs that by no means seemed to justify such
treatment of a friend. Elphin's restless excitement, therefore, in
that wet-blowing wind and his queer pleasure in rubbing his
hand against that old weather-stained tower wall were mingled
with a bitter anger against both women and religion. He associ-
ated them together, which was unfair with that particular kind
of philosophical unfairness, touched with perverted eroticism,
that many famous writers have indulged in. Women were, it is
true, now at this very moment, all over this silent city, nourish-
ing the Grail in their sleep, but the great religions of the world
were not founded by women. The soul of Elphin Cantle, never-
theless, as, on this tenth of December he leaned out upon the
night air, rushed forth to join the souls of Philip and John in
their murderous night hunt of the Grail, just as if on this night
of the west wind's wild rush through the sky, there really had
been a sort of Wizard's Sabbath.

This joining of Philip and John in their orgy of Grail-killing
meant no more than that if anyone could have looked down that
night upon the mental arena of Glastonbury he would have
seen a powerful group of masculine consciousnesses bent upon
completing the work of the bestial King Henry, and destroying,
once and for all, all traces of this Cymric superstition.

Elphin's heart yearned for Sam, and his nerves throbbed for
Sam. His feverish pillow, left over there alone in the darkness
now, as he sat at this huge window, could have told a pretty tale
of nightly desperations, as the lad tossed and turned and quiv-
ered in his perverted passion, while week followed week, and
there seemed no satisfaction for him in sight. And so his fury
turned upon Sam's religion, and this the boy mixed up, wildly
and blindly, in his crazy unfairness, with the existence of all the
feminine persons that Sam was in the habit of meeting these
days, but especially with Mrs. Zoyland. "May the curse be on
her!" cried Elphin now to the flying clouds. "May the curse be
on her!" he cried to the tossing wall-flower, to the bending larch,
to the rippled streamlet, and to all the wet, hollow, dark spaces,
like the wind-swept corridors of a madhouse, that extended be-
tween Chalice Hill and Tor Hill, and between Tor Hill and Wir-
ral Hill. "May the curse be on her, and may she be sorry to death
that she ever met him!"

This malediction was a much more singular and significant
one than poor Nell would have understood. It was in reality--
if the full secret purport of Elphin's thoughts had been revealed
--directed quite as much against the Grail as against Nell. For
the curious thing was that when presently he began again--whis-
pering the words aloud with intense solemnity--to curse the
woman whom his hero was so constantly visiting in the hospital,
he extended his curse, as his outstretched fingers fumbled at the
chilly stucco wall beneath his tower window, to that consecrated
Cup in the hands of his friend's father from which Sam was
always receiving the Sacrament. His boy's thoughts were all con-
fused, and not having been yet confirmed by the Bishop of Wells
he had only the vaguest notion of the meaning of the Mass. The
Cup containing the Wine at those "early services," which, like a
faithful dog watching his master, he was wont to gaze upon from
the back of St. Patrick's Chapel, was the same to him as this mys-
tic Grail, lost or buried in Chalice Hill, of which he heard his
parents talk. Elphin's love for Sam was too passionate to be
vicious, but it was also far too intense to be innocent, and with
a lover's clairvoyant instinct he was fully-aware that Sam's
worship of Christ absorbed many feelings in the man which if
released would turn to human love. What Elphin did not realise
was that it was this very love of Christ coming between Sam and
his mistress that had given him his place, such as it was, in Sains
life. Had this accursed Grail, or this sacramental Cup that the
boy confused with the Grail, become nothing to Sam it would
certainly not have been to the love of Elphin Cantle that he
would have turned! Thus, as so often happens in the coil of
human drama, the very power against which, in his blind pas-
sion, the unhappy lad was now pouring out his imprecations, was
the one thing that kept him in his idol's life! Sam's pity for this
lonely child was part of the grand tour de force of his life of a
saint. To be interested in boys at all was totally against the
grain with him.

While Elphin was at the tower window of the Old Tavern,
Nancy, having slipped from the unconscious arms of the heavily
breathing Harry Stickles, was at her attic window looking on the
back gardens of High Street. This west wind, blowing from the
Bristol Channel, blowing from the hills of Pembrokeshire, blow-
ing from that Isle of Gresholm off the western shores, where
round the Head of Bran the Blessed fluttered that song of the
Birds of Rhiannon which brought death to the living and life to
the dead, this west wind was more than an ordinary wind that
night to Nancy Stickles. It was her sense of this west wind that
had drawn her out of her bed. The feeling of it had reached her
in her dreams before she awoke. Sitting on her hard bedroom
chair at the window which she had managed to open wide with-
out disturbing Harry, she now gave herself up to the power and
the rush of it as it swept past her house. In the other houses
everyone was asleep. Not a sound reached her from the street in
front. There she was, exposed to the far-stretching sky with its
whistling cloud-leaves, to the wide, wet hollows of darkness that
covered the earth, and above all to that rushing wind! About a
quarter of a mile separated her from Elphin at his open window.
The boy had put on his overcoat which had been covering him in
his bed. The girl wore her rough, thick dressing-gown and also
a black woollen shawl. Neither of them had the remotest notion
of the presence of the other, although the identity of each, the
son of Mr. Cantle of the Old Tavern, and the wife of Mr. Stickles,
the chemist, was well-known to each. It was a palpable example
of the way in which the desperate wishes of living creatures flung
out at random upon the air counter and cancel each other's mag-
netic force! The boy cursed the religion of Glastonbury and the
girl blessed it. Yes, she blessed it, as she gave herself to this
wild wind that had been calling to her through her dreams for
the last five hours.

Oh, how delicious it was to give herself up to it...to feel it
take her completely, as she crouched there, with her strong,
firm working-girl's fingers clasped together on the window-sill!
"I wish," thought Nancy, "that it was the wind and not men who
took girls!" And she fell into a fantastic reverie in which she
told herself a story about a bride who gave herself rapturously
to an enamoured wind-spirit. "Oh, I am so glad I am alive!"
thought Nancy, and the brave, optimistic girl, as she let the wind
seek out her responsive breasts under her black shawl, began
adding up in her mind all the good aspects of her life. She was
always doing this. She found it an excellent antidote to all that
she suffered from in her husband--that plump, placid baby with
eyes of insane avarice--and it always came back to the same
thing, to the one grand privilege she had, that of having been
born in Glastonbury! Her employment at Miss Crow's, where she
was now aided by another distant relative of Tossie's, a certain
Daisy Stickles, was a constant delight to her. The walk alone,
through the heart of the town and past St. Benignus' church-
yard, was a solid pleasure; and there were times, especially after
her work was done and she was returning in the evening, that
she could have started skipping down the narrow Benedict Street
pavement. She could even have snatched up a certain ragged
little boy she was always meeting down there and hugged him
to her heart and danced him up and down and made him cry with
surprise and offended dignity, and all from a delight in life
that, as it poured through her sometimes, seemed to know no
bounds. Certain ways of her husband's--certain mean little phys-
ical peculiarities, and Nancy was not by nature at all fastidious
made her feel sometimes as if she could not go on living with
him. But she had devised all manner of devices to deal with
these nasty ways and she never felt hopelessly caught, because
she was always telling herself stories of running away from him.

Harry Stickles certainly did possess quite a number of pecu-
liarities which would have been nerve-racking to any less well-
constituted girl. These nasty little ways were made worse by
the man's preposterous and incredible conceit. But Nancy had
been given by Nature one supreme gift---wherein only one other
person in Glastonbury rivalled her, and that was John Crow--
the gift of forgetting. Harry could do something at one minute
that offended her to the quick, something that so scraped, jarred,
and raked her nerves that she could have rushed to the window
and flung into the road one of those big coloured receptacles,
red and green, that mark a chemist's shop ; and yet, three minutes
later, as she sat sewing in her parlour window, what she called
her "fancies" would begin as deliciously as ever! Nancy's fan-
cies were simply her sudden recollection of certain moments
of intense realisation of life as they had occurred several years
ago. They were nothing more than the look of a particular wall,
of a particular tract of hedge, of a particular piece of road, of
a certain hay-wagon on a certain hillside, of a particular pond
with ducks swimming on it and a red cow stepping very slowly
through the mud, of a load of seaweed being pulled up from
the beach by struggling horses, of the stone bridge crossing the
Yeo at Ilchester, of a little toll-pike at Lodmore that seemed
to be made up, as she had seen it from the top of a bus beyond
Weymouth once, of nothing but whitewashed stones and tarred
planks and tall brackish grasses and clouds of white dust. Nancy
could never tell which of her fancies would rise up next like a
fish, making a circle of delicious ripples round it, from the
depths of her mind, nor did she know whether these mental
pictures stored up in her brain were limited in number, and
whether, at a certain point, they would begin recurring all over
again, or whether they were inexhaustible and need never repeat
themselves.

But while Nancy and Elphin kept their vigil, what dreams
there were in Glastonbury! Dreams without any beginning, as
they were without any end. For who ever began a dream? People
always find themselves immersed in the middle of some dream or
other. The essence of sleep does not lie in dreaming; it lies in
a certain dying to the surface life and sinking down into the
life under the surface, where the other life--healing and re-
freshing--exists like an immortal tide of fresh water flowing
beneath the salt water of a turbid sea. It is sufficient to remember
the lovely and mysterious feeling of falling asleep compared
with the crude, raw, iron spikes of the unpleasant things that
happen in dreams to realise the difference. Between the process
of going to sleep and the process of dreaming exists a great
gulf. They seem to belong to different categories of being. But,
however this may be, the fact remains that upon certain nights
in the year--when the tide at Burnham begins to rise with a
weird persistence--the sleep of Glastonbury is a troubled one.
The sturdy northeastern invaders--the ancestors of Philip and
John--beat back more than Mr. Evans' people when they swept
the Celts into South Wales. They beat back with them their
thaumaturgic demigods, the Living Corpse, for instance, of Uther
Pendragon, the mysterious Urien, King of yr Echwyd, the Land
of Glamour and Illusion, the Land whose vapours are always livid
blue, that mystic colour named by the bards gorlassar, and Arawn,
King of Annwn, they beat back, together with those weird pro-
tectors of the heathen Grail, the Fisher King Petchere and the
Maimed King Pelles. All these Beings, so many of whom seem
to recede and vanish away even as they are named among us,
like creatures of a blundered incantation, had the ancestors of
Philip and John and the ancestors of Dave driven back westward.
And along with Mr. Evans' people, and their dark chthonian gods,
these healthy-minded invaders had driven back the very dreams
of these Cymric and Brythonic tribes.

For today it was Mr. Evans and Mrs. Geard and Blackie Mor-
gan, together with that impoverished and mutinous population in
the slums, whose holocaust Philip had seen that night in the
"artistic" pictures of his red coals, who were the true aboriginals,
and the larger part of their blood, like that of the old Lake
Village dwellers, was both pre-Celtic and prehistoric. So that on
this night of all nights, this night of the tenth of December, a
date that always, every year--only none but the witch-wives of
Bove Town and Paradise knew about this---was a significant
date for Glastonbury, what really came back upon this terrific
wind, blowing up out of the western sea and the western isles,
were the dreams of the conquered, those disordered, extravagant
law-breaking dreams, out of which the Shrines of Glastonbury
had originally been built. Nancy Stickles was perfectly right
when she whispered to the darkness, as her white breasts ex-
panded under her black shawl in response to that wind, "What
a thing sleep is--to be in the world!"

It was only upon those happy heads that did not dream, how-
ever, that the true mystery of sleep, carrying those carefree
foreheads deep down under the sacred waters of yr Echwvd,
really descended. Such was the privilege, that night, of both
Lady Rachel and Miss Elizabeth Crow. Such was the privilege
of Mr. Wollop and of Bert Cole. Such was the privilege of
Young Tewsy, of Tittie Petherton and Tilly Crow, of Penny
Pitches and of old Abel Twig. Among the others the eternal con-
test went on, as it had gone on for at least five thousand years,
between the friends of the Grail--that fragment of Beyond-Time
fallen through a crack in the world-ceiling upon the Time-Floor
--and its deadly enemies.

The Grail had come to be the magnet-gatherer of all the
religions that had ever come near Glastonbury. A piece of the
Absolute, it attracted these various cults to itself with an indif-
ference as to their divergency from one another that was almost
cruel. Thus the instinct in Philip and John that drove their souls
forth tonight to go Grail-killing was as blind and overpowering
as that which drove Pellenore to pursue his Questing Beast.

Neither Nancy nor Elphin, these watchers at windows, at the
back of High Street and Cattle Market, were aware of this great
melee of warring dreams, tossing and heaving, with the gon-
falon of the Grail on one side, and on the other the oriflamme
of Reason. Whirled about in that rushing wind, which kept
eddying and ricocheting among the three Glastonbury hills,
drifted those opposed dream-hosts. Every dreamer under those
diverse roofs--from the slate-tiled Elms where Philip lay in
his stuffy room to the draughty stable loft at St. Michae's where
Solly Lew slept his tipsy sleep--was forced, that tenth of De-
cember, to mingle his own private dream with this great noc-
turnal tourney.

John Crow dreamed that they found the Grail on Chalice Hill,
found it in the earth about six feet north of the Well; but when
it was found all the people present turned into a flock of star-
lings and flew away, leaving only himself and that philosophic
wood louse he had imagined encountering the human louse of
the woman with cancer. And he himself was now seized with a
frantic necessity to make water and yet he knew that if he made
water on the earth that wood louse would be drowned. So John
Crow made water into the Holy Grail. When he had finished this
blasphemous sacrilege he observed that the wood louse had
crawled to the rim of the Vessel. "What are you going to do?"
John cried in terror. "Drown myself," replied the louse.

But if that wild wind out of the west disturbed the dreams
of men it did not prove less disturbing to the dreams of women.
Persephone dreamed that green leaves were growing out of her
feet and out of her shoulders and that she was standing stark
naked in the centre of a group of silver-barked birch trees who
were all, like herself, slim, naked girls with green leaves grow-
ing out of their heads and green leaves growing out of their
feet. Near this group, where Persephone was standing, there
grew that nameless tree from the top of Wirral Hill which Mary
had called by one name, Mr. Evans by another, and Mad Bet
by another. And Persephone suddenly saw all the girls turn to-
wards this tree and lifting up their hands begin chanting some-
thing to it. What they chanted was pure gibberish, but Per-
sephone, when she awoke, remembered this gibberish which was
as follows:

"Dominus-Glominus, sow your seed!
Sow your seed, sow your seed!
Glominus-Dominus, rain and dew!
Rain and dew, rain and dew!
We your servants will make your bed!
Make your bed, make your bed!
Some at the foot, and some at the head,
But which of us lies beside you?"

This gibberish was doubtless recalled from some ancient child-
ish jingle, repeated in one of those immemorial games that little
girls love to play together, during which they take one another's
hands and advance and retreat in dancing movements that are
as mysterious to any casual onlooker as the fantastic words that
accompany them. But though recalled to the mind of Persephone
from some half-forgotten game of her childhood, there doubt-
less were words added to it in her dream that could hardly
have been present in the original version, and which were cer-
tainly more suitable to the nature of this wild night of brackish-
smelling Wessex wind than to any harmless ring-of-roses dance
upon a Norfolk lawn. The curious thing was that in Persephone's
own mind, as she dreamed this dream, there occurred one of
those confused metamorphoses which so often make dreams so
bewildering and misleading--the confusion, namely, of this am-
biguous tree with a Cross.

The Mayor of Glastonbury's dreams on that tenth of December
were full for instance of a nightmarish mingling of his daughter
Crummie with Merlin's fatal Nineue, and both Nineue and Crum-
mie with Lady Rachel Zoyland.

Nor were the dreams of the Vicar of Glastonbury less dis-
turbing. Mat Dekker dreamed that he was visiting Nell Zoyland
at the hospital, where he had, as a matter of fact, visited her
already three times, and that he was giving her the Blessed
Sacrament, a thing he had often longed to do, but had never
dared to suggest doing. He was on the point of raising the Cup
to her lips when it grew so heavy in his hands that he could
scarcely lift it. The Cup, in fact, transformed itself into Mother
Legge's silver bowl--or rather Kitty Camel's silver bowl--with
which of course Mat Dekker had been familiar before it passed
into its present owner's possession. Whiter and whiter grew this
sacramental Cup as the priest struggled with it in his dream.
"I must hold it tight," he thought, "I must press it against me."
And then there happened a metamorphosis similar to the one
that had occurred in Percy's dream, only in the reverse order;
for while, with Percy, the tree turned into the Cross, with Mat
Dekker the Grail turned into Nell Zoyland. So deep had been
the wrestling of this man's majestic character with his passion
for this girl, that until tonight, even in his dreams, he had re-
sisted temptation. But tonight there happened to him one of those
occasions when great creative Nature manages to outwit the
strongest self-control. Nature achieved her end by lodging in
Mat Dekker's mind the feeling that at all costs he must hold this
white bowl firm and tight against him, so that it should not spill
a drop of Christ's blood. But as he held it in his dream, and
as it became the body of the girl he so terribly desired, Nature
managed to so numb, drug, dull, confuse, cloud, hypnotise, para-
lyse and otherwise "metagrabolise" Mat Dekker's implacable
conscience, that it allowed him to give way with good heart to
a spasm of such exquisite love-making that it was, to the poor
ascetic priest, like the opening of the gates of heaven!

Little did Elphin Cantle know, as he clutched his father's old
stable coat--now his own bed-cover--tighter and tighter round
him at his turret window, that the psychic current of his wrath
against the Glastonbury superstition was aided by the austere
dream-gestures of Dave Spear from another quarter of the Old
Tavern. Dave's thoughts before he had gone to sleep that night
had been calm and peaceful. He had dined with his wife at
Dickery Cantle's old-fashioned ordinary in the tavern parlour,
and Percy had listened so sweetly to his stories about their
Bristol comrades that he had been tempted to reveal to her the
great scheme he had now on foot. Where communism was con-
cerned, however, Dave was a man of iron; and in spite of the
fact that their whole plan was originally her own inspiration,
he had thought it wiser--as it certainly was!--to hold his tongue
over all that. But to all that he did allow to pass, in that ex-
pressive Homeric phrase, "the barrier of his teeth," Percy had
listened with much more than her usual attention. Something
in the rising wind had roused her feelings to a pitch of imper-
sonal tenderness, and her husband happened, by good luck, to
be the beneficiary of this soft mood. But once asleep Dave's
mind reverted at once to his great conspiracy, and the crying
of the wind in his chimney and the flapping of the blind in his
window worked into his dreams and made them as disturbed
as Percy's own, but to a different issue. For the walls of a real
commune rose up in Dave's dream as that wild wind, blowing
out of Wales, made the historic house about him creak and groan
through all its ancient beams and rafters. Thus had it groaned
when the emissaries of Henry hunted out of its seclusion the
last faithful servants of the Abbey. Thus had it groaned when
the spies of James dragged forth the unhappy preachers who
had supported Monmouth. The whole conflicting tenor of Dave
Spear's life-struggle with himself would have been revealed had
his dream been written down, "For the sake of the future,'' he
kept muttering, when, as dictator of his commune, he gave orders
for the Abbey Ruins to be destroyed and the Mayor's new build-
ings to be levelled with the ground. Clean and fresh rose, in his
dream, the new Ynis-Witrin, founded, this time, not on the
tricks of kings and priests, but on the equal labours and rewards
of workingmen. "For the sake of the future!" he cried in his
sleep as he watched the destruction of shrine after shrine.

But if Dave's dreams that night were drastic, the conduct or
his fellow-conspirator, Red Robinson, who was awake and drink-
ing and making love, in complete imperviousness to this mys-
tical procession of bodiless shapes, was neither very drastic nor
very brave. Red had persuaded Sally Jones to sit up with him
after closing hours in the back parlour of St. Michael's Inn This
was a proceeding that would have got the good-natured land-
lord into trouble had it been discovered, but Red had grown
so tired of his miserably hurried interviews with the girl, in
her mother's home and his mother's home, after her day's work
at the Geards', that he had broken away from his usual caution.
Sally, who had a latch-key of her own, would just have to tell
her mother that Miss Cordelia had kept her late that day to
help with the preparations for her wedding. They had decided
that it was best that Sally when she left St. Michael's near mid-
night should walk home alone and should even make a short
detour so; as to approach her home from the direction of the
Geards "Neighbours be such ones for noticing things, she had
said, "and 'tis no good to start a lot of talk when there be no
cause for talk." To this sentiment Mr. Robinson had given a
cordial assent. He found himself, as a matter of fact, extremely
comfortable in the little, seldom-used inn-parlour with halt a
bottle of gin unfinished on the table and a good fire in the grate.

The old lady of the house--Mad Bet's aunt--had been friendly
to the Robinsons ever since, owing to Mrs. Robinson's employ-
ment in the Palace at Wells, they had first settled in Glaston-
bury. This friendliness--such is the importance of small matters
in small towns--was due to the fact that Mad Bet's aunt had a
sister who had married a man "down Richmond way." The man
was long dead and so was the sister, but the accent of the Rob-
insons pleased the landlady. "The way you folks talks," she
said, "do mind me of sister's husband."

It would never have done for Red to bring Blackie to this
inn, because they knew his mother. Crummie, of course, too
could never have come. But he now began to enjoy the full
benefit of having found a girl at once so respectable and so
simple-minded as Sally Jones. When Sally was going and they
stood talking in the hallway, the landlady pointed upstairs and
spoke in a whispering voice. "'Er been a sore trial today, 'er
been! John had to lock she up in back room. 'Er were so noisy,
you understand, in front. 'Er be asleep now, John thinks, and
'a holds tis best to let she bide where 'a be. She don't, as general
rule, settle down to sleep in back room. Back room ain't what
you might call the room anyone would choose to sleep in, but
Bet ain't as pertikkler as some folks be, owing to her being as
she is" Destiny or chance, whichever it was, now decreed that
Red Robinson, having supped full of the sweets of love, was
to be deprived of the pleasant half hour of luxurious rumination
which he had planned for himself. The old landlord went himself
"a step of the way" down Chilkwell Street with Sally. "The
wind can't hurt a pretty girl," he said, "but it can ruffle and
rumple her worse nor we would ever be allowed for to do."

There was a stir and a confusion now in the little passage
that led from the back of the bar-room to the old cobbled yard.
Solly Lew suddenly appeared in sight from these back premises
dragging after him into the lamplight an extraordinary figure.
"Missus! Missus!" the stableman was crying. "You...must
...pardon...me...if--" Mr. Lew was quite out of breath. He was
panting "like a hound in summer" as he struggled to hold
back the person who emerged with him now. "I've a told
Finn Toller that 'a be too boozed to speak to any Christian
man, least of all to any friend of the family, but 'a says 'a
must speak in private to Mr. Robinson."

"In...private...so I said,' repeated the drunken derelict, stag-
gering to an erect position but keeping his hand on Solly
Lew's shoulder. "In...private it must be. lookee! And old
Finn do know what's in's mind to say to 'un, though ‘a
have had a tidy drop in out-house...but old Finn do know...
old Finn do know!"

The lamplight by which the landlady of St. Michael's now
watched with an indignant eye this invasion of her premises
hung over the back door of the inn. It swayed to and fro in
the wind, and through the open door, behind the two lurching
men. Red Robinson could catch a glimpse of faintly gleaming
cobblestones and dimly illuminated woodpiles and empty beer-
bottles. A large rain-filled water-butt showed too in that gusty
door frame, while along with the howling wind there came a
strong odour of rank straw and sour human urine.

"Yer ain't fit to talk to the Missus nor to her friends!" re-
iterated Solly, "Yer ain't fit for naught but workus, and to
workus ye'll come, yer old rum-drinker, yer old deck-swabbler ! "

"Stand straight and answer me at once, Finn Toller," ex-
claimed the angry landlady. "What were you doing in our yard?
Come, come, now. No nonsense! I say, what were you doing
there, Finn Toller? Speak up! Can't you understand plain
English?" *

"I dunno what to say to 'ee, Missus," muttered the helpless
ruffian, "but I do know well in me mind that 'tis Mr. Robinson
here what I've 'a come for to see...for...to see...for...to..." At
this point, so potent was the Bristol rum to which Solly Lew
had been rashly treating this fish from the bottom of the Glas-
tonbury Pond, that, disregarding the landlady's indignation the
wretch actually began murmuring a lewd catch that had been
formerly popular in Bove Town and Beckery.

"I've a whisper for you, in your mare's-tail-ear';
Pillicock crowed to Kate,
‘I've a whisper for you, me Coney dear,
Your man be away over Homblotton Mere
And I be at your gate.'"

Mr. Finn Toller in his natural condition was no engaging sight
In his present state he was a revolting object. He was a sandy-
haired individual with a loose, straggly, pale-coloured beard. He
gave the impression of being completely devoid of both eyebrows
and eyelashes, so bleached and whitish in his case were these
normal appendages to the human countenance. His mouth was
always open and always slobbering, but although his whole
expression was furtive and dodging, his teeth were large and
strong and wolfish. Mr. Toller looked, in fact, like a man weak
to the verge of imbecility who had been ironically endowed with
the teeth of a strong beast of prey.

Red Robinson did not at all relish the look of things as this
repulsive hang-dog creature shuffled now towards him and fixed
upon him a look of revolting confederacy, a look that seemed
to say: "Here I am, Mr. Robinson! You've called me up and
here I am!" The truth was that at the end of one of his most
eloquent revolutionary speeches to the Glastonbury Comrades,
Mr. Toller had sneaked up to Red and compelled him to write
his name down, in the book they kept, as available for any
activities required--"and the dirtier the better!" Mr. Toller had
added, as he slobbered over the table. Red had got into trouble
with the other Comrades for allowing the man to write his name
down in their book. They told him that it was enough for him
if the filthiest beggar swore he would spit in the road when Mr.
Crow passed by! "That's enough to haul him into the party, eh?"
they said. Nor was their sarcasm unjustified. Red took no in-
terest at all in keeping up the quality or integrity of the Com-
rades. What he was after, as Finn Toller with his wolfish instinct
had very quickly detected, were recruits, not to Marxianism, but
to 'ate.

"My husband will be back in a minute," said the landlady
sternly, "and you remember how he got rid of you the other
night when you were hanging about so late!"

"What I've got...to say, Missus, be for Mr. Robinson's ear
alone. Please allow me, Missus, for all that us poor folks have
got left"--he stopped and threw a very sinister leer at Red--
"be what be put in our minds by they as be book-larned and
glib of tongue, like this clever Mister here, who is foreman of
his Worship's. Us poor dogs hasn't got anything left in the
world, us hasn't, except they nice, little thoughties, they pretty
thoughties, what clever ones, like Mister here, do put into we."
It was clear that the threat of the landlord's return had sobered
"Codfin," as his neighbors called him, quite a good deal. He
seemed able to walk by himself now, for he shook away Solly
Lew's supporting arm. His pale, lidless, blue eyes began peering
about, like the eyes of a maggot dislodged from its native habita-
tion and seeking a refuge. "If Mr. Robinson will come in here
with me," he said now, moving towards the pleasant parlour
where Red and Sally had been enjoying themselves, "I won't
make no trouble for no one; but if Mister here, what be so
clever and so book-larned, won't let I speak to he, I'll raise
such a trouble that you'll have to call for the police."

"What impudence is this?" cried the landlady. "You wait
till my husband comes back. He'll show you whether he has to
call for the police to give you the--" But to the good woman's
complete amazement Red himself intervened at this point.

"High'd better 'ear what 'ee 'as to sigh," he said. " Tis no
good disturbing the plice when 'ee says 'ee'll go quiet as a lamb
of 'is own self, if I tike 'im in there for a jiffy. That's so, ain't
it, Codfin?"

Mr. Toller, apparently completely sobered now, bowed to the
landlady, made a grimace at Solly Lew, and followed his "clever
one" into the parlour where Red shut the door. It would be
difficult to explain the subtle cause of Mr. Robinson's submission
to this demand of Mr. Toller to speak with him, but undoubt-
edly, mingled with other things, there had sprung up, the very
second these two men met, that curious psychic fear, of which
mention has already been made in regard to Lord P.'s attitude
to his bastard. Glastonbury was, if the real truth were revealed,
just as every small town is, crowded with queer, morbid and
even humorous instances of this irrational terror of one person-
ality for another. These fear-links can be grotesquely joined up in
a spiritual mathematical and nervous pattern of psychic sub-
ordination.

Philip Crow himself had been afraid--in this particular way
--of Tom Barter. Indeed these mysterious fear-links brought
together--in an ascending and descending scale of fear--the
great Lord P. and the gentleman called Codfin. For Lord P.
was afraid of Zoyland. Zoyland was afraid of Philip. Philip--
though this latter did not know it--was afraid of Barter. Barter
was afraid of Red. While Red--and here we reach the convoluted
secret as to why he was at this very moment so carefully closing
the parlour door--was afraid of Mr. Toller.

They were an interesting and curious pair as they stood facing
each other now by that parlour fireplace. Red was determined not
to offer Codfin a drink or to ask him to sit down. Mr. Toller's
watery blue eyes, blotched, freckly face and tow-coloured beard
kept turning, with a sort of feeble insistence, like that of a great,
dazed, malignant cockchafer, towards the half-empty bottle.

"What is it?" said Red. "What do you want? Tell me quickly,
for he'll be back in a minute. He's only taking Miss Jones a
bit of the way home." There was no earthly reason why Red
should have informed Codfin that the landlord of St. Michael's
was taking Miss Jones anywhere! This excessive, hurried, eager
confidence, expressed in a cross and peevish tone, was a beautiful
example of psychic link-fear, working in accordance with its
nature.

After shutting the door Red walked to the fireplace, leaving
Finn Toller standing in the middle of the room. Red glanced at
the man hurriedly and then, quite as hurriedly, turned his face
away. From the straggly beard, the watery eyes, the ragged
clothes, there emanated something that Red found extremely per-
turbing. It was one of those moments when the pre-birth stirrings
of a gbaslly idea are huddled and swaddled in an ominous
silence. Certain thoughts, that have been long nurtured in deep
half-conscious brooding, manifest themselves, when they finally
emerge into the light, with a horrid tangibility that is like the
impact of something physically shocking. And into this warm,
firelit room, full of the aura of a young feminine body that
has been so assiduously courted and caressed that its sweet es-
sence pervades the air, there now projected itself a presence
that was monstrous, revolting, intolerable.

From each particular hair of Mr. Toller's beard this presence
emanated. From the adam's apple in his bare, dirty neck, from
the blood-stained rims of his watery eyes, from the yellowish
fluff, growing like fungus on cheese from the back of his hands,
from a certain beyond-the-pale look of his naked, shirtless wrist-
bones, this presence grew and grew and grew in that closed
room. It sprang from Toller; but it was distinct from Toller.
It seemed to find in the fragrance of the courted body of Sally
Jones an air favourable to its monstrous expansion.

Red could not reasonably, normally, have divined the nature
of this horrid thought, of this newly born abortion from the
broodings of Mr. Toller's brain. There must have been within
him some protoplasmic response to it, created by the germinat-
ing poisons of his 'ate, of which he himself was unconscious.
Violence must have called to violence, like deep calling to deep,
between what was unconscious in the one and conscious in the
other. Once more he glanced furtively, quickly, at the man stand-
ing by the table, and this time their eyes met.

"'Twas your cleverness what put it first into me head." Had
Mr. Toller uttered those words or had he thought those words
himself? Red felt a peculiar and ghastly unreality stealing over
him. The gin-bottle looked unreal. The carpet looked unreal. The
low wicker-chair with its flowered cushions where he had so
recently held Sally on his lap looked most unreal of all. "What's
that you're sighing?" His own words seemed unreal now as soon
as they left his mouth.

"A bloated capitalist, like 'im, what do hexploit us poor dawgs,
ought to lickidated." It was Mr. Toller undoubtedly who was
saying that; and Red recognized his own oratorical expres-
sion, "liquidated," the meaning of which, for the word had
reached him from Bristol, had always puzzled him--though this
had not prevented him from using it in his orations.

"A hairy-stow-crat like he be oughter be lickidated!" re-
peated Mr. Toller; and Red's discomfort was augmented by the
manner in which the man's mouth dribbled as the words left
his throat.

"You're drunk...that's what you are...too drunk to know your
own nime...and if I weren't hunwillin' to disturb this quiet 'ouse "

"Lickidated be to tap on's bloody head, I tell 'ee...tap on's
head, till's bloody brains be out!"

It was not the words alone, it was a certain galvanic twitch
that accompanied them in Mr. Toller's hands, that made Red be-
gin now to feel sick in the pit of his stomach. He suddenly found
himself becoming fascinated by Mr. Toller's hands. As he looked
at these hands he noticed that they were not only short and stubby
hands, but--and this was quite unlike most stubby hands--they
were hands that tapered at the fingertips and could bend back-
wards. How patient, harmless, reassuring, most human hands
are! But Red realised now that Mr. Toller's hands were much
more disturbing than any expression in the features of his face.

In all minds there are abominable thoughts. We are all potential
murderers. But something--some feeling, some motion of the
will, some scruple, some principle--intervenes, and we can-
not act what we think! But there was a look about Mr. Toller's
hands that seemed like the cry of murder in the night, like the
underside of bridges, like shrubberies in public parks, like tin-
roofed sheds near madhouses, like gasworks beside foul canals,
something that unravelled the skein, that broke up the funda-
mental necessity and substituted a monstrous terrifying chaos
...deep, black holes...dangling ropes...the desperate dilemma of
the indestructible corpse...the horror of the secret held by one
alone...

Red now began to see those hands of Codfin at the throat of
life, at the throat of that life which meant the sweet body of
Sally Jones, the carved bishop's chair in his mother's kitchen,
the liver-and-bacon in his mother's frying-pan not to speak of
his nice, new foreman's clothes! It was part of life that there
should be persons like Codfin going harmlessly about...per-
sons that a workingman foreman could pass by, but that the
gentry--like that John Crow who had the office in the station
yard--were bound in honour to treat to drinks. And those hands
were now to be raised against life...the life of a living man!
Those hands were tools of "liquidation." No more liver-and-
bacon, no more bottles of gin, no more girls on laps, when those
hands were lifted up. Unreal! That's what this moment was, and
unreal in the way that makes a person feel sick. That straggly
beard and slobbering mouth were talking of "lickidation"; but
they were thinking of murder. The blood began to leave Red's
cheeks. Poor people might be hungry, sick people might be sick,
weak peqple might have to carry burdens--but they were all
alive! And even death, when it came in the natural course of
things, had a secret inevitable comfortableness about it! You
could talk of such death with a girl on your lap. But murder--
that was a different thing...

"I couldn't do it with a knife, Mister." The words sank down
into the fireplace at which Red was now staring. Red allowed
them to sink, like eight black marbles thrown by a wicked child
into a particularly red hole.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Toller," he whis-
pered in a low voice.

But the other went on: "Nor with a bullet, Mister, for I be
feared o' they little pop-guns." Sharply, after the other eight
marbles, went these thirteen simple words, all of them into the
same red hole. "One of they iron bars 'ud do to do't with, what
his workmen do leave about, up alongside o' Wookey." As he
spoke, the man made a feeble and fluctuating movement of his
whole person towards the table, on which stood the half-empty
bottle of gin, a decanter of water, and a plate of gingerbreads.

Red, as his eyes followed him, remembered with miserable
vividness how Sally and he had played a merry London board-
school game with those gingerbreads, having a racing match to-
gether to see how many they could swallow while the little min-
ute hand of his watch went round the circle.

"Toller!" he rapped out. "What, in 'oly 'ell, are you talking
about?"

The individual known as Codfin patted the stopper of the
bottle with the palm of one of his hands. Then he threw a long,
silent, sidelong glance at Red out of his lidless and lachrymose
blue eyes. He said slowly: "Don't 'ee go and get crusty wi' I,
Mister. I baint a clever one like you be, but I can look up won-
drous long words in dick-shone-ary, I can. They do know I well
in public library. A person don't have to write no slip o' paper
for to take dick-shone-ary down from shelf!"

"Toller!" snapped Red again. "What in 'old 'arry's name are
yer mumbling about?"

"Tirry-aniseed be the word you spoke up, so free and strong,
when you made thik girt speech about lickidation, Mister. And
'twere wondrous to I, when I did see thik same girt word writ
down in dick-shone-ary! Tirry-aniseed were thik long word, and
it do mean a sweet and savoury killing of he that lives on poor
men's sweat."

"Toller!" gasped Red in horrified alarm. "You stove that,
strite and now! You stove it, I say! Shut yer bleedin' mouth and
go to 'ell with your hidiocies! People in speeches may curse
these bleedin' capitalists, but people what Like to iron bars are
murderers, that's what they are, pline, downright murderers; and
people who even 'ear such things be complexes of murderers;
and I tell yer. Toller, I won't so much as 'ear one word more o'
this from yer bleedin' mouth. I'll call the Missus strite now,
and see what she says to your blitherin' hidiocies! Yes, I will.
I'll call her strite now!" He moved, as he spoke, towards the
door, but instead of displaying the least alarm at his threat, Mr.
Toller, with ghastly sangfroid, began deliberately to pull the cork
from the bottle and pour himself out a glass of raw gin.

Red's hand was actually on the handle of the door when he
turned round and contemplated this outrageous spectacle. His
face worked convulsively, as he stood there; the mixture of fear
and fury in his heart almost choking him.

"Put--that stuff--down!" he spluttered; but instead of open-
ing the door he found himself holding it tight shut with a sort
of guilty violence. In a flash he beheld himself in the dock at
Taunton, accused of plotting Philip Crow's murder at the hands
of this slobbering devil. But Finn Toller coolly and quietly re-
placed the cork in the bottle.

"Thik iron bar be the best thing, then," he repeated. "I thought
a man like you be, Mister, would say nothing less! I couldn't
do it wi' a knife, nor yet wi' a bullet. One o' they girt iron bars
be the very thing for anyone what feels on his mind, as thee
and me does, the sweet savour of tirry-aniseed!"

Red glanced past that pock-marked, freckled face, wherein the
weak blue eyes were suffused with a watery rheum, and stared
miserably at the gingerbread on the table. How foolish people
were, he thought, not to enjoy, with a gratitude to fate beyond
expression, every minute of respectable, innocent happiness that
was not in danger of the jail or the rope!

His moment of supreme misery was brought to an end by the
heavenly sound of the front door opening and the voice of the
landlord of St. Michael's Inn, raised in genial badinage. Never
was a tiresome old gentleman's voice more welcome.

As Red opened the door, so vivid had been his plunge into
crime, condemnation, convict's clothes, picking oakum, warders,
jailers, chaplains, executioners, black-caps, drops, and burning
lime, that he vowed that never again in his whole life would he
introduce into a speech the word "tyrannicide." As Finn Toller
sneaked off now, under cover of the lively eulogies of "Miss
Jones" that poured from the lips of the blustering old man, Red
felt that never again, either, would he boast of heroic bloodshed
to his admiring Sally. He had got such a glimpse into the mon-
strous, as he watched the adam's apple in Mr. Toller's throat jerk
up and down while he drank that gin, that he thought as he sub-
mitted to the old gentleman's jokes, "Better listen to such old-
time stuff to the end of me dyes, rather than 'ave the 'orrible
tighst in me mouth what I 'ad just then!"

"Well, if ye baint ashamed of yourself, ye ought to be!" pro-
nounced Solly Lew emphatically as he dismissed his late protege
through the back of the old stables and new garage.

"Us haven't done no harm to they, nor they done no harm to
we," protested Toller in a wheedling voice. "That were wondrous
fine rum you gived I, Mr. Lew, and if the Lord wills I'll pay the
good deed back to 'ee, come Christmas. Good night, Mr. Lew,--
don't 'ee trouble to come no further. 'Tis a wild night for wind,
looks so, but no token o' rain! I never likes these windy nights,
Mr. Lew. They disturbs a person's' mind. Yes, I knows me way,
thank 'ee kindly, god-den to 'ee."

But when Solly Lew had gone back into the house, Mr. Toller
made no hurried departure from the scene. He had long been
practising in Glastonbury certain patient, quiet, humble little
methods of burglary; of burglary so unassuming, so unpre-
tentious, so easily satisfied, that he had only once been caught
at it, and since it was Bloody Johnny who caught him, eating un-
cooked sausages in his larder one November night, Codfin es-
caped even on that occasion with an eccentric reprimand.

He now set himself to survey the back premises of St. Michael's
Inn. He had long been anxious to find out exactly how the land
lay in this establishment, and tonight he felt in very good spirits,
having found out all he wanted, and at the same time, by a stroke
of what in his own mind he regarded as pure personal superiority,
reduced the Mayor's foreman--and how he had done it he him-
self hardly knew!--to a position of nervous subordination.

He now planted himself under the protection of a big plum-
tree that grew against the old stable roof and proceeded with up-
lifted beard to contemplate pensively the rear of the house. It
must not be supposed that all the excited outpourings of human
feeling that were whirling off on that west wind from so many
dreaming heads--not to mention the two watchers at the open
windows--were without their effect upon the nervous organisa-
tion of the watery-eyed Mr. Toller. Had Solly Lew, or any other
boon-companion, enquired of him how he felt just then, Codfin
would have doubtless replied--"I never have liked these here
windy nights. These here nights be turble hummy and drummy
to me pore head."

As his weak eyes slowly swept over the ramshackle roofs and
walls and chimneys before him, Toller's figure suddenly stiffened,
like a nocturnal animal conscious of danger. He became aware
that one of the back windows of the main structure of the house
was wide open and that a human face was intently scrutinising
him; and not only scrutinising him, but making signals to attract
his attention.

Now Mr. Toller, who had no scruple about using iron bars
and who had not the slightest fear of Mr. Sheperd, the old Glas-
tonbury policeman, had from his childhood been awed into hum-
ble respect by the personality of Mad Bet. He recognised now
that there was nothing for it but that he must do this creature's
bidding. He recognised, in fact, with the same instinctive knowl-
edge which Red had shown in his own case, that when in the
presence of Mad Bet he was in the presence of a nature born
to dominate him.

The woman was beckoning to him to climb up upon the stable-.
roof and come to her window"; an exploit which, for a person
with any agility at all, was not a very difficult task. Mr. Toller
accordingly made an obeisance with his head and a sort of
salaam with his hands, such as Sinbad the Sailor might have
made in the presence of some Grandmother of the Djinn, and
set himself to climb. The wind was his chief trouble in this
ascent; for the plum tree afforded him a ladder at the begin-
ning; and once on the roof, as far as the actual climbing went,
all was easy. But the wind made it difficult for the man to keep
his balance; made it very difficult for him to advance. He
crawled forward upon his knees as best he could; but many
times he was forced to lie prone on his stomach and remain
absolutely still while the wind-gust whirled over him.

What did Codfin think about during these moments when he
lay on the cold slate tiles, in considerable peril of being toppled
over and rolled down? To translate his thoughts into ordinary
speech would cause their tang, their salt, their fine edge, to be
lost; but the drift of them was doubtless something like this:
"I'll be glad when Mad Bet lets me go. Mad Bet's got a message
for me. Mad Bet's message is to some man she's taken with. I
wouldn't mind, same as some would, if Mad Bet were taken wi'
I! A 'ooman be a 'ooman; and when a 'ooman do smile at I, it
do wrinkle up her face, all soft and sweet, even if she be as ugly
as sin."

Such, in rough clumsy short-hand, were some of Codfin's
thoughts as he advanced slowly over the stable roof, lying flat
when the gusts were worst, and crawling forward when they
subsided.

According to the wise, if somewhat tragic philosophy of Dr.
Fell, the thoughts of this scum-beetle from the Beckery stews
were just as important, in the total sum of things, that night
of the tenth of December, as the dreams of Parson Dekker or of
the Mayor himself. But it must be remembered too that accord-
ing to Dr. Fell's philosophy there was a deep importance, per-
haps only a little less deep, in the feelings of a bewildered flea
that Mr. Toller had carried away in his vest with him from his
Beckery lodging.

"'Twere sweet as rum and sugar to make that cockney sod
take notice!" Such might be a rough translation of yet another of
Mr. Toller's thoughts as he cowered in the wind under the racing
clouds and tore his finger-nails in the interstices of the slate tiles.
Those old slate tiles, on St. Michael's stable roof, came from the
same part of South Wales as did this great west wind and neither
they nor it seemed prepared to lend themselves easily to the
proceedings of Codfin thus struggling to obey the commands of
Mad Bet.

But he reached her window at last and to his dismay found
that she intended to descend to the ground in his company!
Finn Toller was not the man to shirk; but it must be confessed
that if there had been any trace of tipsiness left in him, this
command of the madwoman's--and it was given with the calmest
certainty of its being obeyed--would have made him deadly
sober.

The woman was warmly dressed and warmly shawled for the
adventure when he finally reached her. That was one good thing.
Another good thing was that her bonnet was tied with very
strong tight strings under her chin. He could never have got her
down in this wind, though he probably would have tried, if she
hadn't herself, with the supernatural cunning of the insane, told
him exactly what to do. She Lold him exactly where he could
find a ladder and she told him how he could fix the end of this
ladder in the projecting leaden rain-pipe and lay it flat along
the roof, thus affording a support for her knees in the wind,
and, when they finally -reached the gutter, an easy way of get-
ting down.

It took so long to make all these moves, especially when he
had the woman out upon the roof with him, that by the time
he had got the ladder safe down from the leaden gutter and had
it firmly fixed in the earth for her final descent, it was about
three o'clock.

"Her be a master-sprite, her be!" he thought to himself, as he
looked up at the wind-blown shawl and flapping bonnet huddled
at the edge of the water-spout; though where he had picked up
the phrase "master-sprite" he could not for the life of him have
remembered.

She made him take the ladder back when she was once on
the ground, to the place where he had found it. Then, for the
first time, she told him what she wanted him to do.

An hour later--but still a long way from the approach of the
winter's dawn--Finn Toller found himself seated inside St.
Michael's Tower on the top of Glastonbury Tor, facing Mad Bet.
Mr. Geard's London architect had lately been making a few
necessary repairs in the interior of the structure and it was only
for this reason that these two had been able to enter. It would
have been totally dark within this stone fortress of Mat Dekker's
God had not Betsy--who had made, during the long half hour
when her liberator was fighting the wind on that stable roof,
the cunning preparations of a crazy one with a fixed idea--
brought with her two or three candle-ends, extracted from candle-
sticks left by chance in her place of temporary captivity.

Finn Toller produced matches from his pocket and proceeded
to light one of these candle-ends, setting it up, by the help of its
own grease, upon a piece of boarding. The flickering little flame
soon illuminated--but there were no living eyes except their own
to envisage the scene--not only Bet's old-fashioned bonnet and
quilted shawl, but the straggly beard, freckled face and watery
eyes of the derelict who sat opposite her, and who now filled
the blackened stub of a clay pipe and set himself to smoke, as
he leaned his back against the eastern wall of their square stone
refuge.

The howling and shrieking of the wind, as these two sat there,
made about their ears a deafening tumult, so that it was neces-
sary for them to raise their voices to an unnatural pitch if they
were to make their meaning audible. So innocently heathen was
Finn Toller that when Bet shouted at him: "Archangel's walls
be strong 'gainst they Devils!" he had the notion under his tow-
coloured poll that Bet was referring to her familiar spirit by
some particular pet name.

But Bet was quite right. Gwyn-ap-Nud's Powers of the Air
were surely abroad in full force that night; and Michael's great
wings needed to be strong indeed to ward off from Glastonbury
these rushing hosts.

"Why don't Mayor Geard build up Archangel's Church?" shouted
the woman, "instead of dipping folk's bodies in thik wold Well?"

Mad Bet had put an unanswerable conundrum this time be-
fore her rescuer. Mat Dekker would have altogether entered into
the spirit of this question. Over and over again had he remarked
to Sam--"There can't be more than a dozen real Christians in
this place, me boy; or instead of these fantastical Pageants I'd
be celebrating Mass up there in a great new church!"

But Finn Toller puffed away at his clay pipe in silence. His
awe in the presence of his companion was so great that he had
actually done what he had never in his life done before; asked
a woman's permission to light this pipe of his! And Mad Bet's
permission had been given in true hieratic fashion. But it was a
different thing when she talked to him of rebuilding churches
to St. Michael. A patient, though not a sulky silence fell on
him then.

Finn Toller took off his cap and leaned back his head against
the stone wall. He couldn't see the stars at the top of the great
funnel in which they sat, because of certain cross-beams which
the Mayor's architect had put across that dark hollow space. He
experienced at that moment, however, one of the nearest ap-
proaches to religious exultation that he had known since as a
child he had been taken to see General Booth pass through town.
To be alone with Mad Bet on the top of Glastonbury Tor was
something to remember. Burglaries and iron bars were trifles in
comparison. But to be alone with a holy 'ooman, as he mentally
named his companion, was not destined to be without its penal-
ties. It was with some perturbation that he saw her now bend-
ing down over their solitary candle-flame.

"What be doing, Mad Bet?" he enquired nervously, using the
epithet mad much as Tossie would have used the word Lady-
ship in addressing Rachel.

The woman was melting one of her other candle-ends at the
lighted candle. Having reduced the wax thereof to the desired
softness she rapidly proceeded to mould it into the rough like-
ness of a human figure.

"Thik be her!" she now remarked, holding up this distorted
inch of wax.

Then, hurriedly rising, she muttered some devilish incantation,
quite inaudible to the dumbfounded Codfin, and proceeded to
stamp upon the image she had made, grinding the wax into a
shapeless mass of candle-grease and mud and saw-dust, under
her heavy heel. As she trod, she began muttering again; but this
time her words were audible to the astonished waif from the
Beckery slum:

"Dirt ye was and dirt ye shall be!" screamed the madwoman
ferociously. "I've a done for 'ee now, ye bitch! Dirt ye be now,
I tell 'ee! Dirt ye be; as ye were afore he picked 'ee up! Dirt!
Dirt! Dirt!" and the grinding heel finished its savage job so
completely that there was soon nothing left of that fragment of
obliterated wax. Then with several long-drawn panting breaths
Mad Bet resumed her seat.

"Can 'ee keep a secret, man?" she shouted at the agitated Mr.
Toller whose watery eyes were now staring anxiously at the tower
door.

It was in Codfin's mind that her familiar spirit, whom he had
heard invoked as "Archangel," might at any second take a pal-
pable shape. This was the only moment in that long eventful
night when Mr. Toller experienced a real shock of agitation, save
for his first sight of the woman at the window.

"I be a grave for they secrets, Mad Bet," he now remarked,
in a resigned voice, puffing furiously at his pipe as if with the
intent to evoke a screen of wholesome smoke between himself
and the supernatural.

"'Twere her what you seed I stamp into nothing," went on
the madwoman. "In Archangel's Tower I stamped on she.
Looksee!--how candle do splutter and spit! Now 'tis done. 'Twere
her I stampit out. Hist! How thik wind do blow! 'Twere me wone
heel what stampit she into dirt. Her be dirt now; and her'll stay
dirt till Judgment!"

Mr. Toller's eyes became more watery than ever owing to the
acrid smoke which he sucked out and blew forth. To his com-
panion's tirade he thought best to make no reply. He had almost
as strong a desire to disassociate himself from these proceed-
ings as poor Red had recently had to disassociate himself from
"tirry-aniseed" and iron bars.

"If I speak her name, Finn Toller, will ye hold 'un mute and
mum in thee's deep soul?"

Mr. Toller's lower lip hung down; and two thin streams of
saliva, stained with tobacco-juice, dripped upon his filthy shirt
and upon his still filthier vest. The flea which he had brought
with him from his Beckery shanty snuggled up to his breastbone,
deriving much comfort from the pale-coloured hairs, smelling
like those of a dead stoat, which grew on the man's chest.

But he answered, as Homer would say, "from his steadfast
heart": "What you do tell to I, Mad Bet, be more hid than they
hanging-stones in Wookey. Folk can see they stones for sixpence;
but not for twenty pound would I betray thee, 'ooman...no, not
for twenty times twenty!"

Thus reassured, Mad Bet spoke her mind freely.

"Her be thik baggage, thik hell's broth piece o' harlotry, what
lives wi' wold Miss Drew. Some do say she be married to 'un;
others do say she be his light-o'-love. But whether or no for
that, she do go to's bed in Northload, every night, weekday and
Sunday. She do bless herself for living soft and cosy wi' thik
old 'ooman by day, and she do mightily cherish being colled and
clipped in's bed, when night do come! Heigh! but she do like
being naked to thik man's dear hand, night by night, and all
so daffadown-dilly in pretty bed-clothes! I do know she's feelin's
by me wone feelin's, Mr. Toller, and I do thinky and thinky,
when night do come, how she do lie so snug and warm wi' he."

Mr. Toller's masculine brain began to be totally confused.
Mad Bet was talking of her enemy as sympathetically and under-
standing as if it were her daughter. Codfin could understand
bringing down an iron bar on the head of a rich mine-owner;
but this sympathising with the feelings of someone you were re-
ducing to dirt under your heel was a subtlety of vengeance be-
yond his grasp.

"I do know thik lass," he contented himself with saying. "I've
a-been inside Missy Drew's fine house wi' Bob Rendle from
Ditchett Underleaze. Us never took nothin', for Bob were fright-
ened when Lily Rogers talked in she's sleep; but I've a-been up-
stairs and downstairs in thik fine house."

Mad Bet pushed back her Sunday bonnet, with its forget-me-
not border, till Toller could see the gleaming whiteness of her
bare skull by the guttering candle-dip. He fidgetted uneasily un-
der the glance she now fixed upon him.

"I've a-never killed a gal yet, Mad Bet, and I be--" It is prob-
able that no effort of any human will, made in all Glastonbury
that night, was more heroic than the effort required from Mr.
Toller as he completed this speech--"and I be too old to
begin now!"

Having made his stand, Mr. Toller must have felt an overpow-
ering desire to soothe what he supposed would be the mad-
woman's fury. He had known from the beginning that her pres-
ent obsession was about Mary; for since Mother Legge's Easter
party Bet's mania for John was one of the chief tavern topics.
If Finn Toller had in his nervous organisation anything resem-
bling what in popular parlance is called a "complex," such a
"complex" consisted in the idea--almost, although not quite,
a complete illusion--that people were continually wanting to
bribe him to commit some murder.

Was Mr. Toller a homicidal maniac? Any glib answer to this
question would, be a misleading one. Human character is far
more complicated than is suggested by these popular scientific
catchwords. Exact and very circumstantial detail would be re-
quired just here. Mr. Toller would, as a matter of fact, have
found it much harder than Penny Pitches or than Emma Sly to
kill a chicken. Cruelty to a child would have been more difficult
to Mr. Toller than to anyone in Glastonbury, except perhaps
Harry Stickles' wife, or Abel Twig of Backwear Hut. On the
other hand, to hide in the bushes with that iron bar; to steal up
softly behind Mr. Crow; to crack, with one sweeping horizontal
swing of his under-nourished arms, Philip's Norman skull; to
beat that unconscious skull into a pulp by hammering it after-
wards with the iron bar; these proceedings would undoubtedly
have been accompanied by a voluptuous glow of intense sen-
suality.

Perhaps the strictly correct view of Mr. Toller's nature was
that he was a "homicidal maniac" only with regard to the kill-
ing of the most powerful personage in his immediate environ-
ment. But it is doubtful whether the definitions of tyrannicide,
given in the public library dictionary, included the element of
voluptuous sensuality in the killing of tyrants. To catch the vibra-
tion of this element Mr. Toller would have to have looked up
other, more modern words; words which, it is quite certain,
would have been to him totally unintelligible.

"Six o'clock Solly Lew do open up," remarked Betsy now,
pulling down her bonnet into a respectable position. "I reckon
it be near five, Mr. Toller. Us better be moving!"

She rose to her feet as she spoke and extinguished the gutter-
ing candle, leaving them with no light at all but that which
descended from the wind-shaken, cloud-bespattered firmament.
This extinguishing of that little yellow pyramid of fire took on
a grandiose significance from the austere and deliberate manner
in which she did it. It was just as if she were washing her sor-
ceress-hands in that small flame; washing them clean of all fur-
ther association with such a chicken-hearted "tyrannicide" as
Finn Toller.

Thus, when they emerged from St. Michael's Tower, and be-
gan to descend the Tor, without having spoken one single def-
inite word, Mad Bet allowed Finn Toller to feel himself to be a
cowardly, effeminate, unreliable, untrustworthy traitor!

It was a melancholy proof of how remorseless a tyrant Eros
is, that Mad Bet should have descended Tor Hill without one
grateful word to her devoted servant! The invisible Watchers
of that Glastonbury Divine Comedy must have recognised some-
thing curiously unfair in the fact that while the madwoman had
this devouring passion for John, Finn Toller had no blinding,
drugging, heart-hardening obsession wherewith to armour him-
self against misfortune. His pale freckled face and straggly beard
drooped together under those windy stars, and his arms and legs
moved like those of an automaton, as he wearily followed that
forget-me-not bonnet and fluttering shawl.

He resembled a scarecrow that this crazy love-bewitched crea-
ture had compelled by her incantations to follow her, up that
hill. He did not pity himself; he did not say to himself: "Women's
ingratitude is like the ingratitude of the Arch-Fiend!" He only
thought to himself again and again: "Her wants me to kill that
gal what lives wi' old Miss Drew; but I never yet have killed no
gal; and I baint going to begin killing gals--no! not even for
Mad Bet!"

The most materialistic of human beings must allow that at cer-
tain epochs in the life of any history-charged spot there whirls
up an abnormal stir and fume and frenzy among the invisible
elements or forces that emanate from the soil.

Such a stir, such an invisible air-dance was at its height as
this man and this woman descended the hill, between five o'clock
and six o'clock, on that dawn of the eleventh of December.

From the poor bones in the town cemetery on the Wells Road
--out beyond The Elms--rose up certain faintly stirred and
barely perceptible responses to this thaumaturgic wind; but if
from these bones a dim tremour came, much more did a turmoil
of subconscious reciprocity--to use the Wessex poet's great word
--gather about Gwyn-ap-Nud's Hill from the royal and sac-
rosanct bone-dust buried beneath the Abbey Ruins. The wind
arrived at Glastonbury carrying feathers and straws and husks
and ditch-vapours with it that it had picked up from Meare
Heath and Westhay Level, from Chilt on-up on-PoIden and Baw-
drip, from the banks of the River Parrett, from Combwich and
Stogursey Brook, from Chantry Kilve and Quantock's Head. But
from Glastonbury it could only carry away, along with other
wisps and husks and straws and ditch-vapours, such dreams as
were the lighter emanations of the place. It could carry away
the dreams of Jimmy Rake and Mr. Stilly, of Bartholomew Jones
and Jackie Cole, of Mr. Merry and of Emma Sly, of Solly Lew
and of his son Steve; but not of the Town's Mayor or of the
Town's Vicar.

But even with these the west wind's burden, as it left Glas-
tonbury, was too heavy. For it must needs enter the open win-
dows of the hospital and burden itself with the dreams of Nell
Zoyland's son--a child with the very lineaments of Sam Dekker,
even to his curious chin--and also with the dreams of Tossie's
girl twins which were of such incredible lustihood as to resem-
ble the sturdy dreams of the winter grass, growing in those low
meads where the Evercreech man's father-in-law kept his Jersey
cattle.

Crude and coarse and wholesale are our psychic judgments
about newborn children, compared with the careful discrimina-
tions we use in physical chemistry. To any scrupulous eye among
the supernatural watchers of Glastonbury it would have been
clear that the soul of Nell's little boy was already avid with by
far the most intense, clutching, insatiable life-greed that existed
in the whole town--a greed that made Philip's egoism seem like
courteous absent-mindedness and Red's inbred hate like the itch-
ing of a nettle-sting. It would also have been clear that Tossie's
twins were so easy-going, so sweet-natured, so unselfish, that it
was as if all the humour of Tossie herself had been mingled with
the wisdom of Tossie's mistress and with the piety of cousin
Nance.

By burdening itself with the greedy dreams of Nell's little boy,
who actually cried in his sleep because the nurse refused to wake
his mother so that he might be suckled, and with the vegetative
feelings of Tossie's little girls, who seemed perfectly prepared
to let off their mother and enjoy any alien nourishment at any
moment, the wind seemed to need a greater momentum to carry
it away northeast, towards its resting-place on Salisbury Plain,
than it possessed. It flagged a little by the time it reached West
Pennard. It dropped some of its tiny moss-spores, its infinitesi-
mal lichen-scales, its fungus-odours, its oak-apple dust, its sterile
bracken-pollen, its wisps of fluff from the bellies of Sedgemoor
wild-fowl, its feathery husks from the rushes of Mark Moor, its
salt-weed pungencies from the Bay of Bridgewater.

It dropped fragments and morsels of its burden now, all along
the path, of its eastern flight. It dropped some at Pylle, some at
Evercreech, some at Wanstrow and Witham Friary, some at
Great Bradley Wood, some at Long Leat Park. Wisps of what it
carried floated down at all those little villages called by the
name of Deverill. At Kingston Deverill, at Monkton Deverill, at
Hill Deverill and at Longbridge Deverill little fragments were
wafted to the ground.

The wind gathered more strength as it reached Old Willoughby
Hedge and Chapel Field Bam. But it dropped some more of its
burden at Two Mile Down and yet more of it among the ancient
British villages and the high hill-tumuli that surround Great
Ridge and Stonehill Copse.

At last it arrived at Salisbury Plain; and it was natural enough
that then, in those darkest hours of that long December night,
it should sink down and fail.

But for Mr. Evans, at any rate, there would have been some-
thing significant that it should thus sink down and fail and find
the end of its journey on the very spot where those "foreign
stones" were deposited that must have followed, on their mysteri-
ous conveyance out of Wales, the self-same path across the heart
of Somerset.

It would certainly have been Mr. Evans' opinion that what-
ever happened to the seaweed smells, and the dyke-mists, and the
wild-fowl feathers, and the oak-apple dust, and the brackish
marsh-vapours, the more psychic portion of this wind's aerial
cargo would have been deposited at one place only--at the actual
spot where the two great "Sarsen" monoliths have bowed down,
during the centuries, and fallen prostrate, across the stone of
"foreign origin" that is still the Altar Stone of Stonehenge.



CONSPIRACY



The Marriage of Mr. Owen Evans and Miss Cordelia Geard
had already taken place; and it was in one of the little new town
council houses in Old Wells Road that they had settled down,
immediately after this event--Cordelia not being one to press
Mr. Evans to spend his savings on a holiday just at the mo-
ment when Old Jones was coming to terms over the partnership
in the shop.

So it was against a background of roadside hedges and garden
bushes, stripping themselves, or being stripped, by wind and
rain of their perilous-smelling, morbid umbrageousness that these
two singular persons went through the experience of being in-
itiated into each other's withheld identity.

Nowhere in all the fertile and leafy regions of Somerset, so
heavy in vegetation, does Winter set in with more definite em-
phasis than in the regions around Glastonbury. The thicker the
foliage, the richer the earth odours, the bluer the apple-scented
vapours, the more stark and desolate is the contrast. Then be-
gins a wet, chilly, lamentable nakedness; and the three Glas-
tonbury hills weep together like three titanic mourners over
Arthur and Merlin and Lancelot and Gwenevere.

Mr. Evans felt that to the end of his days he would be com-
pelled to associate the approach of Winter with the intense nerv-
ous reactions through which he was passing in this first intimacy
he had ever had with a woman. All through November, as the
man went to and fro from his small house in Wells Old Road,
a street that lay northwest of Bove Town, to his shop in the High
Street, the gradual unleafing of so many twigs and stalks and
branches and trunks coincided with his closer and closer in-
timacy with Cordelia.

To his surprise he found himself completely spared those
shocks of physical disgust and sick aversion which he had been
expecting and which indeed--in his fantastic self-punishment--
he had assumed as the essence of this new adventure. The situa-
tion was indeed a very curious one; for until the time of his
living with Cordelia every vestige of sensuality in his nature
had been absorbed in his weird and monstrous vice.

Now there occurred a reversion of this; and his sadistic tend-
ency fell into the background for a period. It did not leave him.
His own belief that it could, by some contact with the miraculous
element in Glastonbury, be compelled to leave him still re-
mained; but the moment for that had not yet come. His ghastly
and nearly tragic experience at the Midsummer Pageant had not,
and he never pretended to himself that it had, worked that heal-
ing spell. But it slowly began to present itself to his mind as a
strange and unexpected phenomenon, that in his new relations
with Cordelia there arose in the essential nature of the case, a
situation that lent itself to what might be called a harmless and
legitimate sadism, a sadism that was so mitigated and diffused
that it was difficult to disassociate it from a delicate and tender
attraction.

It was a growing astonishment to Mr. Evans to discover what
a world of exquisite and thrilling possibilities the mere difference
between the sexes creates. It was a surprise to him to find out
what subtleties of receptivity exist in the nerves of a girl who
is in love for the first time in her life!

And just here the presence of his suppressed perversion stood
him in good stead; for it annihilated totally any possibility of
that crude and unimaginative craving for novelty which had led
Tom Barter such a dance.

Accustomed, just as was his friend John Crow, to derive his
wickedest thrills from his imagination, Mr. Evans found that
this strange, dim undersea of feminine self-consciousness, whose
ebbings and flowings now receded and advanced around him, was
a world so full of dark unexpected storms and of mysterious
halcyon calms, caused apparently by a word, a look, a gesture,
that in association with it, it was impossible to suffer from that
withering ennui and horrible life-weariness which hitherto had
been--to take a leaf out of Tom Chinnock's book the particular
Terre Gastee of his destiny. The trend of his mind too--as imagi-
native in his "unpardonable sin" as it was in his antiquarian
fantasies--did both him and Cordelia the unspeakably good turn.
of rendering what is usually known as beauty in a woman totally
unimportant.

Nature was in a position to supply the place of beauty by
her basic insistence upon the fact that this awkward and unbe-
guiling creature was, after all, endowed with both the form and
the susceptibilities of a normal feminine being.

The wise irony of those tutelary spirits which do not desert
in our need even the worst of us, destined Mr. Evans to find his
Glastonbury miracle where he least looked for it; for the pres-
ence of the Grail in that spot has the effect of digging deep chan-
nels for the amorous life of those who touch its soil.

All lovers who have ever visited the place will know at once
what is meant by this. None approach these three Glastonbury
hills without an intensification of whatever erotic excitement
they are capable of and whatever deepening of the grooves of
their sublimated desire falls within the scope of their fate.

Cordelia was a true daughter of Glastonbury; and the magic
of the place, as Mr. Evans in his first manner was always ex-
plaining, had the power of acting as an aphrodisiac of far more
potent force than the famous "sea-holly" of Chesil Beach.

The Grail of Glastonbury--and this is why Mr. Geard was
entirely justified in making it the centre of his new religious
cult--just because of its timeless association with the First
Cause had the peculiarity of exciting human souls to concen-
trate their eroticism upon one single ideal object, as Sam for
instance had done in becoming a mediaeval lover of his tortured
God-Man; while it excited others, among whom was John Crow,
to concentrate upon one real human being.

As for Cordelia, she had been living, all that windy November,
in a state of such wild and wanton excitement that it is doubtful
if there was any woman in Somersetshire through the whole
Autumn, as drunken as she was with the lavish ichor of Eros.

Mr. Evans was so ignorant of the ways of women and so con-
fused by his new experience that he did not realise the emotional
extremity which his caresses were stirring up in Cordelia, nor
the frantic tumultuousness of the feelings which his love-making
aroused. The girl was passion-drunk. She never missed taking Mr.
Evans to the shop. She never missed calling for him at the shop.

On all possible occasions when he had a day off. or when the
shops were officially closed, she would make him take her for
long walks in every direction: but principally to the east which
meant beginning with Chalice Hill.

On these walks she would cling to his arm and pour into his
ear abrupt, excited, and very often hardly coherent rhapsodies.
Love in general was the subject of these spasmodic outbursts,
rather than any elaborations of her own feeling; nor was Mr.
Evans one to miss their poetic quality. Her words flowed and
tossed; and then wavered and sank. They drifted and wilted,
only to rise up again, mounting, gathering, rushing forward,
to a new climax, to be followed in its turn by a new sinking
down to exhausted silence.

One particular walk Mr. Evans never forgot. It was when they
were following a little field-track between Havyatt Gap and
West Pennard that the girl's eloquence mounted to the climax
which so especially impressed him. It was a wild, gusty, rainy
day; though the rain was discontinuous and the gusts intermit-
tent; but when it neither rained nor blew there fell upon that
stripped landscape a cold paralysed interim of shivering still-
ness, in the midst of which Mr. Evans felt that he could hear the
beat of the wings of the Birds of Rhiannon.

On this particular walk to Pennard, Mr. Evans realised that
there were moments when his strange companion gathered up
into her uncomely face a spiritual grandeur that was astonish-
ing. Cordelia's face lent itself to windy and rainy weather. She
had been herself a little shocked, as well as startled by the man-
ner in which, in that twilight escape by herself, seven months be-
fore, to the Two Oaks, she had been obsessed by a feeling of
dominating power.

It was about four o'clock on this early-darkening December
day when their field-path--a very small unfrequented cattle-
drove on the way to West Pennard--led them past a solitary
Scotch fir. The rough, reddish-brown trunk of this great tree
was soaked with rain on its western side; and showers of rain-
drops fell on their heads from a big branch above them which
stretched towards the west like a gigantic extended arm.

Cordelia wore an old cloth cap of Mr. Evans'; and he himself
had come out bare-headed, fearful of not being able to keep
on his head, that gusty afternoon, his familiar bowler hat.

Thus as they paused beneath the tree whose upper branches
groaned and creaked to greet them, the man found he could kiss
the wet cheeks and cold mouth of his woman without the teas-
ing interruption of either of their hats being knocked off, a
thing that was always happening with these two clumsy ones.

"I never knew what it was like to kiss," said Mr. Evans, "be-
fore I had you! I like kissing you at the end of a dark day and
under this Scotch fir."

Their wet cold faces, her shapeless nose and his grotesque
hooked nose like the caricature-mask of a Roman soldier, their
large, contorted, abnormal mouths, made, it might seem, more
for anguished curses against God than for the sweet usage of
lovers, were now pressed savagely against each other and, as they
kissed, queer sounds came from both their throats, that were
answered by the groanings of the tree and by the raindrops as
the wind shook it.

A series of long-drawn cawings reached them now, as four
black rooks with a faint grinding and grating of their huge
wings passed over the tree, aiming for the rookery above Mark
Moor Court.

Down somewhere in the southern hedge of the field where this
Scotch fir grew, an old holly tree was creaking lamentably in
the wind. Uninitiated travellers in that lonely spot would have
casually remarked: "What's that creaking over there in that
hedge?"--but each of these two ugly skulls with the anguished
distinction of the ancient house of Rhys upon their lineaments
thought within themselves: "How lucky I am to be happy when
God delights to make even trees suffer!"

As a matter of fact, although neither of these human lovers
were aware of this, between that Scotch fir and that ancient holly
there had existed for a hundred years a strange attraction. Night
by night, since the days when the author of Faust lay dying in
Weimar and those two embryo trees were in danger of being
eaten by grubs, they had loved each other. The magnetic dis-
turbance of the atmosphere at that spot, while the distorted
mouth of Mr. Evans was pressed against the distorted mouth of
Cordelia, was an agitation to the old tree in the hedge, so that
in its creaking there arose that plaintive yearning of the vege-
table world which comes to us more starkly in the winter than
in the summer.

In the summer when the wind stirs the trees, there is that
rushing, swelling sound of masses of heavy foliage, a sound that
drowns, in its full-bosomed, undulating, ocean-like murmur, the
individual sorrows of trees. But across this leafless unfrequented
field these two evergreens could lift to each other their sub-
human voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and
strong; that cry which always seems to come from some under-
world of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying
acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of
men and women.

It is on such gusty, early December afternoons, when darkness
falls before people prepare for tea, that the symbolic essence of
rain is most deeply felt. And that they should be realised in
their essential quiddity, these whirling gusts of grey rain tossed
obliquely across the darkening hills, they must not come in a
steady, tropic downpour. Floods of rain destroy the quality and
the significance of rain. Drops they must be, many, many drops;
an infinity of drops if you will; but still numberless separate
drops, grey or brown or whitish-grey, in order that they may re-
tain that rain-smell, rain-taste, rain-secret, which separates rain
from ordinary water.

They were both silent for a space after this embrace, standing
under the Scotch fir, and Mr. Evans thought to himself that the
look he now caught upon her profile was one of the strangest
and most arresting he had ever seen on a human face. And it
was no wonder he felt like this; for her face had caught that
mysterious secret of the rain which very few faces and very
few imaginations are able to catch. But Cordelia's face had
caught it today, and held it there now in all its wild far-hori-
zoned meanings.

There are faces made for moonlight. There are faces created
to respond to the wind. There are faces for sandy deserts, for
lonely seashores, for solitary headlands, for misty dawns, for
frosty midnights. Cordelia's face was made for rain. It had
nothing in it that was normally beautiful; and yet it became at
this moment the living incarnation of all those long hours when
rain had mingled with her secretest hopes. Her face was charged
with the rain that had streamed down the window-panes at
Cardiff Villa, twilight after twilight, while her thoughts had
been flying far away; far over dripping forests, far over swollen
rivers to green-black castle walls of which she fancied herself
the mistress or the captive.

The path they were following now approached a steep incline
which led between bare muddy banks and along deeply indented
cart-ruts to a small clump of spruce firs at the top of a con-
siderably high hill. They were both familiar with this hill and
with this clump of spruce firs. There was indeed for Mr. Evans
a special interest in this place, which was some distance out of
Glastonbury. He had himself found a deserted sheepfold up
there, in a clearing in the centre of this little fir wood, a rough
building made entirely of ancient blocks of mossy stone, but
quite roofless and windowless.

Pottering about evening after evening, in the environs of
Glastonbury, Mr. Evans and Cordelia had made more than one
interesting find; but with regard to these old stones, that had
been thrown so crudely together here to form a shelter for sheep,
our Welshman had a theory that made them the most interesting
of all his discoveries. He held very strongly to the opinion--
and he had even persuaded Mr. Merry to come round to his
view--that these stones originally belonged to the little chantry
or hermitage to which Launcelot du Lac retired to die, after the
vanishing of Arthur and after Gwenevere's retreat to tire nun-
nery at Amesbury.

It was a long tedious ascent up to this little fir clump; nor
had the place any striking aspect or any particular beauty
save this ruined sheepfold in the centre of it. And yet as they
struggled up the bare slope in the rain, Mr. Evans remarked
to his bride:

"Haven't you noticed, Cordy, that it's often some small insig-
nificant place like this that comes back to your mind with a
sudden significance, rather than the more famous spots?"

She was not yet so used to being called "Cordy" by Mr. Evans
that it did not strike her as queer to hear it now as they made
their way up this nameless and rainswept little eminence. Names
are like clothes to girls. The name Cordelia, especially when
uttered by her father, always made her feel as if she were
wearing her old, weather-worn tailor-made costume, and beneath
it, her winter underwear against her skin; whereas when she
heard Mr. Evans call her "Cordy" she felt as if she were wear-
ing her thinnest cotton drawers. Since she had been married she
had been "Cordy" almost constantly in spite of the fact that she
was now wearing her winter clothes.

Like a tree that had begun to gather moss and lichen before
it was old, there was so much untouched soil in the rich levels
of this girls nature that the green sprouts of passion grew more
lavish and luxuriant every day.

Between the Glastonbury trees stripping themselves bare and
this Glastonbury native, stripping herself day by day of new
maidenly reserves for the enchantment of her lover there was
a similar parallel. It was to the west wind that the Glaston-
bury foliage yielded and fell; and it was to the gusty inter-
mittent motions of Mr. Evans' erratic desires that Cordys innate
chastity sank away. Not one aspect of her life under those new
brick tiles of her little house, fresh from the local brickyard to
the north of Bove Town, where the council had bought them,
but became associated with her gradual seduction.

The fact that the Welshman cared little for womanly beauty, the
fact that behind the concentration of his desire was nothing but
the diffused sublimation of his suppressed vice, rendered this
girl's initiation into the nervous excitements of Eros an arena of
hidden rapture such as, at that epoch, contained no equal within
the purlieus of the whole town.

The two descendants of the House of Rhys were now halfway
up the ascent of their hill, their boots and stockings already
thoroughly soaked by the wet stalks of the dead bracken. The
slope they were ascending was to the northward of West Pen-
nard, whose outskirts in following their winding cattle-path they
had already passed. Between the summit of this hill topped by
the clump of dwarf spruce firs and by the ruined sheepfold, and
the banks of Whitelake River there was nothing bul the rough
tract of untilled country known as Hearty Moor.

It was thus as unfrequented a spot as could well be found
within a few miles of Glastonbury; and had a circle been
drawn about that town no point upon its circumference save
perhaps Crannel Moor to the west of Godney, would have been
securer against human invasion. Save for an occasional shep-
herd-boy, guarding a flock of black-faced ewes from Norwood
Farm, no one, even in summer, ever came to this place.

Thus when Mr. Evans suddenly cried out:

"There's a light in the sheepfold, Cordy!" his voice was as
startled as if he had informed her of the presence of a gibbet
up there with a figure swinging from it! A steadily burning
light, when you are convinced of being several miles from any
human habitation, is a thing that naturally makes a person's
pulses beat.

"Is it the Norwood shepherd?" panted Cordelia, trying to keep
pace with her companion's long strides.

"Hush!" was Mr. Evans' reply as he quickened his pace still
more.

She followed him in silence; and together they pressed for-
ward, ascending the hill. The wind struck them with such force
as they climbed and the darkness had gathered about them
there so suddenly that Cordelia began to experience that natural
human nervousness which the approach to a flickering light in a
lonely spot can induce even in one not usually subject to com-
mon timidities.

She whispered something in her companion's ear that the
wind rendered inaudible.

"Hush!" replied Mr. Evans again.

It now became apparent that the light they had seen was
brighter than any conceivable shepherd's lantern from Norwood
Farm. Cordelia could not resist disobeying him; and for the
third time during their approach she spoke.

"Someone's lighted a fire," she whispered. "The ghost of
Lancelot!" she added with a wild laugh. Her words and her un-
restrained laugh seized upon one portion of Mr. Evans' conscious-
ness and carried it, like a wild goose with ruffled, helpless
feathers, to a certain imaginary tract in an ancient dream-land-
scape of his, where he always placed this ruined chantry from
the old legend, surrounding it with the melancholy horses--their
long uncut manes full of dead leaves and their burdock-tangled
tails sweeping the wet grass--growing older and feebler year
after year, as their masters prayed, hoping against hope, the
armourless penitents within those stone walls and the armourless
steeds without, for the return of the lost King.

It was fortunate for the silence of their approach, as they
now, having reached the summit of the little hill, stealthily
pushed their way through the spruce clump, that the wind, blow-
ing obliquely across their profiles, carried that hysteric laugh of
Cordelia's over the darkened valley towards Laverly and Pilton
and Folly Wood.

Mr. Evans possessed himself now of the girl's cold hand and
as he drew her after him between the firs, led by that flickering
firelight and by a smell of burning fir-cones that now accom-
panied it, he began to feel, rising up within him, a childish de-
light in adventure such as he thought his terrible obsession had
destroyed forever.

They now heard voices within the walls of the stone sheepfold ;
and as step by step they cautiously advanced, anxious to get a
glimpse of the speakers while they themselves remained unseen,
they both recognised the harsh uplifted voice of Mad Bet. The
other voice Mr. Evans did not know, though he could tell it was
a man's; but Cordelia, being a native of the town, recognised
quickly enough who was the madwoman's companion. It was the
disreputable Finn Toller; and later, when in bed that same night
she told Mr. Evans who it was, she received an obscure shock,
like a premonitory warning, when her husband showed an un-
expected interest in this sinister figure.

It was through a gap in the stone wall that they saw these two
persons now, sitting beside that fire of sticks and dry ferns. They
dared not move close enough to catch any definite words of what
these two were saying; but the psychic aura of their discussion
reached them; and it must have been this, though Cordelia did
not suspect it then, that accounted for Mr. Evans subsequent de-
sire to make Codfin's acquaintance. Just as the gods are said to
know one another under any mask so are those whose peculiar
vice or perversion separates them from the rest of the world
endowed with a sixth sense of recognition.

Retaining his bride's hand in his own, and growing conscious
of some appeal to his perilous nerve in what was going on, Mr.
Evans compelled her to remain concealed. Concealment was as
unsuitable to Mr. Geard's elder daughter as any role he could
have chosen for her; but she was too happy to be anything but
docile; and with their faces brushed by a tall undergrowth of
elders they contemplated through its broken wall that ruined
sheepfold, whose masonry, at any rate, although not in its pres-
ent form, had witnessed the death of the noblest of Glastonbury
penitents.

The dialogue of which they caught only the psychic vibra-
tions, for the two were speaking in low tones, was as follows:
"If so be as thee can't do it to she , may-be thee could do it to
he?

These words of Mad Bet were a startling surprise to Mr. Toller,
for he sat up straight on his log, close to the fire they were
feeding, and stretched out his arms to the blaze, clasping and
unclasping his fingers in its glowing heat so nervously as to make
it obvious he was thinking of something very different from the
physical pleasure of warmth. The man's straggly yellow beard
wagged in the smoke of the crackling sticks as he turned his
watery blue eyes towards his companion. He blinked miserably
with his white eyelids beneath his hairless eyebrows and there
came a look of panic and even horror into his face.

"But he be your true-love, baint he?" he said, with shocked
emphasis and speaking very gravely. "Ye doesn't want me to
likidate, as thik Mr. Robinson do call it, your wone true-love,
Mad Bet?"

The woman was silent; and what the feelings were that seeth-
ed and fermented in her heart it would be hard to put down in
words; but after a minute or two she spoke again.

"If he were dead, never would she sleep with he again in a
pretty night-dress bought for a fairing from Tim Wollop."

But the philosophy of the Glastonbury underworld could not
let this idealism pass unchecked.

"But neither would you ever sleep long-side of he, Mad Bet.
He would be lying in churchyard mould and ye would be yaller-
ing in top-room of old John Chinnock's."

There was a long pause at this point during which Finn
Toller pensively stirred the fiery embers with one hand while
he flung upon their exposed red heart a handful of dry wood
with the other.

"Listen, Finn Toller!"

The smooth and freckled face of the workhouse waif com-
posed itself to receive a painful shock of some kind. Never did
Mad Bet open her lips, but she caused her devotee some kind
of nervous agitation. But so far from decreasing her servitude
this constant state of psychic fear in which she kept him accentu-
ated his devotion. Fear of her kept him in a perpetual ferment
of nervous idolatry.

"Listen, Finn Toller; and answer me careful, for I want to
have the truth of this from thee. Will thik iron bar, what you
knows of, make my young man feel afore he dies? I don't
want 'un to feel. I'd be feeling it me wone self, if he had any
anguish. I don't want 'un to be able to say as much as his patter-
nost, as they papists call it. I want he to be alive, and thinking
about his bitchy; and the next tick of the clock I want he to be
all blackness; blackness and holy bubbles and dear soul gone!"

Mad Bet was wearing a dark shawl over her poor bald pate;
and, as she spoke, she pulled it down over her eyes, as if sym-
bolising this final extinction of her "young man's" consciousness.

"And when 'tis all over," she added from beneath this veil,
"and he be safe buried in earth, hour by hour I'll go and sit on's
sweet grave! She won't be there; for 'twill be in thik graveyard
out in Wells New Road that they'll lay 'un; and that will be
too far for she to wend--'cept on Sundays and Holy Days! But
old Bet will take her meals there; and day and night keep guard;
and that's because it's necessary for someone to drive the devils
away; and that's because the devils always love a sweet corpse;
and that's because sweet corpses same as his'n, always do smell
as sweet as new-mown hay!"

Had Mr. Evans been near enough to see Finn Toller's face
in that firelight he would have been reminded of a famous folk-
lore professor, whose lectures at one time he used to attend.
When some pupil would propound to him a question that was
more audacious than behooved the subject, this good man would
frown in blank, bewildered confusion and would open his mouth
to its utmost stretch.

Thus did Finn Toller look when Mad Bet asked him whether
her "young man" would "feel" anything when that iron bar
crushed his skull.

"If he did feel it I should feel it, Finn Toller," repeated that
crouching figure, pulling her shawl so far down over her face
that the syllables she emitted issued forth in a muffled tone.

Mr. Toller continued to survey this enveloped head. It was
hard for him to tell whether the woman's eyes were scrutinising
him closely from beneath it or whether they were blinded by the
folds of the shawl. But he watched her intently; as a tame wolf
might watch its robber master ere they rose to attack a caravan-
serai of travellers.

From Cordelia's post of observation the madwoman's head,
illuminated by those red flames, resembled an old Bible pic-
ture of the Witch of Endor. Squatting there on the floor of that
ruined chantry she might have been an image of Despair con-
fronted by an image of Murder; the former being conscious of
every implication of the deed they discussed, the latter wrapped
in a dull, stupid, besotted daze of animal uneasiness.

Resting with their heads pressed against their protecting elder
bush, both Mr. Evans and Cordelia experienced many queer sen-
sations as the acrid-smelling smoke from this fire hit their nos-
trils. Beating down his darker feelings, Mr. Evans set himself
to recall a certain melancholy passage in Malory, the words of
which, from constant perusal, he could reproduce in their pre-
cise lilt. These, as the damp twigs flapped against his head, and
the wind through the ruined walls made a dull moaning in his
ears, he repeated under his breath:

"'Then Sir Launcelot never after ate but little meat, ne drank,
till he was dead. For then he sickened more and more, and dried
and dwined away. For the Bishop nor none of his fellows might
not make him to eat, and little he drank, that he was waxen by
a cubit shorter than he was, that the people could not know him.
For evermore, day and night he prayed: but sometime he slum-
bered a broken sleep; ever he was grovelling on the tomb of
King Arthur and Queen Guenever. So he fell sick and lay in his
bed; and then he sent for the Bishop that there was hermit and
all his true fellows...."My fair lords," said Sir Launcelot, "wit
you well my careful body will into the earth, I have warning
more than now I will say; therefore give me my rites"...Then
there was weeping and wringing of hands; and the greatest dole
they made that ever made men."

But all the while he was repeating these rhythmical words
with one portion of his mind and in this task using all the
power of his memory, there flitted through the unrecording por-
tion of his consciousness a vague awareness of something going
on over that fire that stirred up his suppressed vice. Mr. Evans
was clairvoyant in these things and though he did not hear those
murderous words spoken, the impression produced on the sur-
rounding air by the mention of Finn Toller's iron bar was so
strong that it roused emotions in him that he had not felt since
the Pageant. And while Mr. Evans was struggling to drive back
his devil by recalling the death of Lancelot, his bride's atten-
tion was hypnotised by the extraordinary figure of Mad Bet; and
she kept saying to herself:

"If it wasn't for Owen having come, I'd have soon gone mad
just like her!"

There was something so portentous about that head muffled
in the black shawl--as if the woman had arrayed herself for
some tragic event and were uttering words that could only be
spoken from a shrouded face--that the girl found the shocking
rags of Finn Toller a relief to look at in comparison.

But what were they talking about? These two queer ones had
not met in that ruined place for the mere pleasure of meeting!
Not from their murmuring voices, not from their dramatic ges-
tures, but from a vibration in the whole atmosphere around them
did Cordelia, as well as Mr. Evans, catch, without witting what
it was, the revolting smell of a crime against human life.

But now came an interruption. A great fluffy barn-door owl,
a galvanised bundle of soft feathers and precipitate alarm,
roused by the heat of the fire, suddenly flung itself out of its day-
long retreat in one of these old walls, and whirled off with a
scream over the elder bush where the two onlookers were hid-
den. Catching sight of them there, it flew sideways with a sound
so unusual that it caused Mad Bet to snatch the shawl from her
head. Hurriedly, Mr. Evans pulled Cordelia back, and following
an instinct, the childishness of which was natural to both of
them, they retreated at a wild rush through the spruces and at
a still faster pace down the slope of the hill!

It was not indeed until they reached their Scotch fir that he
let her pause to take breath; and then, when between his laboured
gasps he tried to kiss her as he had kissed her before, the same
wild, horse-like, hysterical laugh broke from her lips. The sound
was disquieting but it had the effect of soothing the nerves of
her who uttered it. This queer couple resembled each other in
the irrelevant and motiveless way they both were accustomed to
burst out laughing. "Those two were up to some mischief, Owen,"
murmured the girl. But Mr. Evans hurriedly veered from this
grim topic.

"Where the guide books make their great mistake," he said, as
they now turned homeward, "is in treating Glastonbury as a frag-
ment of history, instead of something that's making history.
Your father's absolutely right. It's the future that's important"

Cordelia made no reply. It was always in relation to her father's
ideas that she came nearest to losing her respect for Mr. Evans.
As she felt this cool night wind blow against her face, and heard
her leather boots creak with their familiar little creakings, and
thought of the cake she had made yesterday for their tea today,
and fumbled with the handle of Mr. Evans' stick as the next best
thing to holding his hand, it seemed to her that this masculine
desire to create some "important" future was one of the dreariest
mockeries of human values that existed in the world.

"Keep us alive. Give us food. Give us love. Give us children.
But take your ‘important' Communisms and Capitalisms from
around our waists and from about our necks!"

Thus would Cordelia have liked to have expressed herself if
she could have found the right words. It would have been a satis-
faction to scream out once in her life at the top of her lungs to
her father, to her husband, to Dave Spear: "You are all a lot
of babies with your curst politics!" She would have liked John
Crow to have been there too; and, if the moment had permitted
it, she would have liked that odious wretch to have fallen in love
with her, beyond measure, beyond restraint, and tried to kiss
her, so that she could have slapped his face!

"Our good John said something yesterday that was very true,"
Mr. Evans continued, stirred by an unconscious telepathy. "He
said that a great many material things had certain little tricks
of arranging themselves at certain times, as if they all shared in
the process of some secret ritual to which we have lost the clue."

"Do you know what I'd like to do, Owen, when I hear that
man talk in that sort of way?"

There was a tone in her voice that Mr. Evans had come to
know too well and he had the wit to remain silent.

"I've annoyed her," he said to himself, "by dragging her so
fast away from Mad Bet. She doesn't know that I've lost interest
in Mad Bet, now that she's stopped torturing herself and is just
indulging herself. I'm not sure, after all, that she is the Grail
Messenger. Cordy is more like the Grail Messenger than she is,
but there's a tone in their voices that is very similar."

He was totally oblivious of the fact that seriously to compare
his wife with this lamentable creature had something monstrous
about it. But in Mr. Evans' attitude to women there was an ob-
tuseness that was almost ghastly. Certain human souls suffer
from the psychic atrophy of a particular sympathy in regard to
the opposite sex. Persephone Spear had a similar peculiarity,
only in the inverse way. To Persephone no man was worthy of
the least subtle consideration. Men to Percy were like fish, whose
gills, though they could open and shut, had no feeling in them.

The spirits of both Cordelia and Mr. Evans sank to a low ebb
when they reached their row of red-tiled roofs, above Bove Town.
This depression had something to do with a straggling line of
little labouringmen's houses, newer even than their own--indeed
not quite finished--which the town council was just new erecting
for the workers in its souvenir factory.

Few things are more desolating to certain human moods than
new uninhabited houses. In addition to this cause of gloom Mr.
and Mrs. Evans were exhausted with their walk and longing for
their tea; a refreshment that could not--in the nature of things
--be ready for at least half an hour. But deep down below the
surface it was not the new houses nor their craving for tea that
made them depressed. It was the emanation reaching out towards
them from that ruined sheepfold.

Parlour and kitchen were the only rooms on the ground floor
of Five, Old Wells Road; and when he had unlocked the front
door and entered the house, Mr. Evans went straight into the
parlour and sank down in a big, ugly, purple arm-chair which
stood there. Cordelia meanwhile hurried into the kitchen and
began her preparations for tea before even taking off her hat.
It was not indeed till she had laid the table, cut the bread for
toast, and got out the butter--they ate all their meals in the
kitchen--that she ran upstairs to wash her hands.

The troubled mood which had descended upon them both did
not immediately lift, even after they had been within their
walls for a quarter of an hour; and this was the first time in their
brief experience of Old Wells Road that such a thing had oc-
curred. Never before had Mr. Evans gone into the parlour in
this way and plunged into the arm-chair Mr. Geard had given
them without offering to help his wife get the meal! The arm-
chair was the biggest that Mr. Wollop had had on sale, and it
contrasted oddly with the rest of the furniture of their small
house, which was certainly more picturesque than it was com-
fortable, being in fact almost all the unsalable things in Num-
ber Two's shop which had been lent to Mr. Evans by his partner.

The arm-chair was a purple one and a proud-looking one;
and it had a lavender-coloured fringe round the bottom of it. It
was with the tassels of this fringe that the long nervous fingers
of Mr. Evans were now uneasily fumbling. He had lit the gas-
jet on entering this room which was only separated from the
kitchen by the narrowest of little passages, and he could now see
through the open door Cordelia's shadow, thrown by the kitchen-
lamp behind her, flickering about upon the floor of this passage.

Mr. Evans' legs were stretched straight out on the new carpet;
his muddy boots were resting on their extended heels; while the
skin of his ankles exposed above his ruffled black socks looked
curiously white and helpless in the glaring gas-light. His great
aquiline nose drooped motionless above his chest and his arms
hung down at his sides. His face was pale and he kept sucking at
his cheeks in some queer manner which emphasised the promi-
nence of his cheek-bones. His thoughts hovered around the for-
lorn happenings in the olden times that had left Launcelot du
Lac to perish so miserably in that little chantry, but these
thoughts were affected and the man was not unaware of it, by
what he felt, beyond any definite explanation, about that dia-
logue in the sheepfold.

"Launcelot's death," he said to himself, "was one of the sad-
dest things that have ever happened in this unhappy world." As
he went on pondering upon this tall heroic lover's decline and
how he lost a cubit of his stature among those flesh-scourging
monks, his eyes began to close, and that particular kind of drow-
siness that comes to human beings when the pitiableness of all
human affairs presses wearily upon them, weighed down his
eyelids.

All human minds, as they move about over the face of the
earth, are in touch with a dark reservoir of our race's psychic
garbage. Just as all the thrilling and vibrating thoughts that
have animated human organisms survive the deaths of these or-
ganisms, so all the heavy, cloddish, murderous, desolate thoughts,
in which free will and faith and happiness perish like asphyxi-
ated gnats, roll themselves in a foul torrent into a great invisible
planetary Malebolge. This Malebolge is always present and
near, a little way below the surface, for all our human minds;
and it only needs certain occurrences, or certain arrangements of
matter, to cause an odious and devastating effluvia from its
surface-scum to invade the arteries of our consciousness.

Although their ignorance of what that sheepfold talk had
been about forbade any discussion of it between them, yet some
residue of it floated there above the purple arm-chair and hov-
ered in that little kitchen above the stove, acting as an invoker
of those blighting waters of Malebolge, and saturating Num-
ber Five, Old Wells Road with that sick and sour undersea of
abhorrence which human thoughts in their malice and their
weakness have created for their own torment.

By the middle of their tea, however, they both felt more cheer-
ful. The self-protective will to forget licked up with its sorceress
tongue all these poisonous emanations squirted forth from this
underworld Malebolge. Up and down, like a beautiful coral-
tinted tongue, that will to forget moved--as the magic fumes
of the tea mounted to their heads--and very soon it had licked
up every trace of those waters of hell!

Their conversation became excited, emotional, imaginative, as
it usually was at tea-time; and it was with regret that they sud-
denly heard the sharp tinkle above their heads of the door-bell.

They both got up and moved simultaneously into the little
passage. It fell to Cordelia to open the door and she let in, one
by one, Dave Spear, Paul Trent, and Red Robinson. All the visi-
tors professed roundly that they had had tea in the town.
They even named the tea-shop, which was neither the worst nor
the best available, being the little place kept by Mrs. Jones, the
mother of Sally and Jackie and the sister of Mr. Evans' partner.

Cordelia did her best to find seats in the parlour for them all.
She got Red safely disposed of in the purple chair, with Paul
Trent balanced on its arm; and while she and her husband
propped themselves up, as well as they could, on Number Two's
ricketty antiques, Dave sat squarely down on a kitchen chair
which he himself had carried in. This little touch of officious-
ness on Dave's part--she didn't want any of them in the kitchen
with the tea-things all about--had an instantaneous effect upon
Cordelia's nerves which affected her whole attitude to the busi-
ness on which the three men came. To the end of his days Dave
would never learn the delicacy and charity of not meddling.

"Women ought not," he would have said, "to be fussy about
how their rooms look! Rooms are for human beings to sit in,
when--protected from wind and darkness--they discuss how to
improve the world."

The three conspirators, whose plot, devised originally by
Persephone, had become now a quite momentous and possibly
even an historic affair, had been visiting so many Glastonbury
houses in the last couple of weeks that they had come to use a
sort of stage-method in dealing with people. This method had
been invented by Paul Trent with a full understanding of the
characters of Dave and Red; and what it really amounted to was
that while he himself explained the statistics of the plan, he left
Red to interject the revolutionary dynamite, and Dave the
prophetic austerity. He was the lean Cassius of the plot: Dave
the incorruptible Brutus; Red the vindictive Casca.

But of course this method was hardly required on this occa-
sion, because rumours and murmurs and maledictions of the great
plan had been rumbling and humming at every meal Cordy and
Mr. Evans had recently shared at Cardiff Villa.

But such was the notorious absent-mindedness of Mr. Evans
that Paul Trent felt justified in being as explicit with him as if
he had never heard the subject discussed.

"We came in really," he said, "only to tell you two that
everything is moving according to our scheme."

"Has Father decided to lend the council some money?" en-
quired Cordelia.

Paul Trent was too much of a diplomatist not to sense far-
off the electric flicker of opposition. He made a feline movement
on the arm of Red's big chair, as if he were a cat preparing to
do battle.

"Nothing is decided yet," he said. "We have only been dis-
cussing things." '

"What does Mother say?"

For a second this question nonplussed the man from the Scilly
Isles; for it pushed him out of his legal world into his philo-
sophical world.

"I quite agree with you that a wife's wishes ought to be care-
fully considered when it comes to any big investment but...
I'm afraid...in this case "

"You mean she doesn't agree?" said Cordelia, "and I don't
wonder either," the girl went on, "she hasn't got the least bene-
fit out of Canon Crow's money so far--and now it's all going to
be thrown away!"

Paul Trent leant forward with a flush upon his swarthy cheek
and a contraction of his arched eyebrows.

"Not thrown away, lady!" he murmured softly, "not thrown
away! He'll still be by far the richest man in Glastonbury."

Cordelia uttered a spasmodic little laugh, a laugh which caused
Mr. Evans to give her a grave and anxious glance.

"Your father ," interjected Dave,"--and your mother knows
that perfectly well--would never touch a penny of his fortune
for anything but the good of"

"'Ee'll be the biggest stock-'older in our commune, Miss
Cordy ," remarked Red Robinson, "and 'is will be the only nime
what'll be in all the pipers."

"He never got back half what he spent on the Pageant," said
Cordelia.

At the word Pageant, Mr. Evans gave an involuntary shiver.
He thought to himself: "With Cordy as my Grail Messenger,
I'm on a better path now!"

"Miss Crummie told me 'erself," protested Red, "that 'twere
only the two and a 'arf hinterest 'ee got from the bank, 'ee spent
on that silliness!"

"That is really true, Miss Cor--I mean Mrs. Evans," mur-
mured Dave, staring at her with puzzled wonder. (Why have
women, he thought, so much stronger possessive instincts than
men?) "And everybody knows," he went on, fixing his blue eyes
steadily upon her, "that he's always regarded Canon Crow's
money as a trust for the common good."

"Damn the common good!" cried Cordelia impatiently, "I
don't see what you people have got to do with our money! The
Rector of Northwold left it to Father without the least restric-
tion. He left it to him because he was his best friend. All his
own family had deserted him. Father made those last ten years
of his life the happiest he ever had."

"Are you really going to Mark Court today?" enquired Mr.
Evans. "I've never seen Lord P. Does he appreciate that amazing
old house of his?"

"What we came for officially, Evans," said Paul Trent, think-
ing to himself, I'll make this commune the first real anarchist
experiment that's ever been made; and if this moralizing ass
Spear is as stupid with men as he seems to be with women, I'll
not have much difficulty with him!--"was to tell you that if
Lord P, does sign over to us the leases of his property, your
shtop, together with nearly all the shops in High Street, will
have to deal with us and do your business co-operatively in
future. This will mean," he went on hurriedly, noticing an im-
patient movement from Cordelia, "that Glastonbury tradesmen
will pool their profits. Not all their profits, of course," here lie
gave a sidelong, cat-like glance at Dave, "for the whole idea
will be to have as much complete personal liberty as possible;
but enough to enable the commune to deal as a unit with the out-
side world."

Mr. Evans' attention had been wandering for some while and
his face had grown animated with a child-like excitement.

"Glastonbury," he now cried, rising to his feet and beginning
to walk up and down the little parlour with long strides, "Glas-
tonbury will be like she was before that Tudor Devil, and all
Welshmen know what the Tudors were, ruined her independ-
ence! Glastonbury will be a living Entity again. She will draw
a magnetic life from her Three Hills strong enough to attract
all the world to her side. She will take her place " he paused
and stared gloweringly at Red who was smoking his pipe in the
purple chair with a wry, malicious smile. "This pooling of
profits is nothing," he went on with a wave of his hand. "We
must all earn our living, of course; but that's not it. We must
free ourselves from Teutonic vandals like this Lord P., of course;
but that's not it. We must employ our workers, of course, better
than Philip Crow does; but that's not it. The great thing is to
revive the old life of Glastonbury Herself--the great thing is
to revive the old faith in Glastonbury Herself as an Urbs Beata
to which all the...all those who are...all those who have
been...all those, I mean, who've put themselves outside the
pale may be...may be...purged in their minds!"

His voice had risen so vehemently that when he suddenly
stopped and plumped down on one of Number Two's shakiest
chairs so that its gilded back cracked, everyone stared at him in
embarrassment.

There was a nervous silence in the room. Dave thought to
Himself: "It's the capitalistic system that breeds these eccentrics.
When all able-bodied men in Glastonbury work in our municipal
dye works no one will have time to think whether they've purged
their minds or not! These nervous maniacs are the result of para-
sitism. We shall see to it that this fellow works with his hands
till he's too tired to think about his manias!"

Red Robinson looked round for something to spit into, but
seeing nothing except the fireplace, which was too far away,
he swallowed his saliva with a gulp and crossed his legs in the
purple chair.

"The pint, Mr. Heavens," he remarked grimly, "hain't whether
Glastonbury waters can cure the pox, but whether hus working
chaps can get 'old of the bewger's factories."

"Father tells me you're an anarchist, Mr. Trent," said Cor-
delia, attacking with feminine penetration the weak spot in this
ambiguous conspiracy.

The old, weary film of cultivated patience descended upon
Dave's blue eyes.

Red Robinson struggled to his feet, approached the small coal
fire--the parlour of Number Five, Old Wells Road, was decidedly
chilly--spat angrily into it and came back to his chair.

"'Ee doesn't know nothin' of hanarchy 'cept the nime," he
jerked out, "nor nobody helse neither! 'Tis a bleedin' fancy of
such as 'as never done a stroke of bleedin' work in their bleedin'
lives!"

"Mr. Trent's our lawyer, Red," said Dave quietly. "If he's cle-
ver enough to make Lord P. sell those leases, we at least must
compromise a little when it comes to our commune."

But Paul Trent had turned to Cordelia and was waiting for
an opportunity to speak.

"Real anarchy," he began, in the most caressing and beguil-
ing voice, as if he had been a young Bagdad silk merchant dis-
playing his wares in a luxurious harem, "has never yet been put
into practice. Mr. Robinson thinks it a mere fairy-tale, but if
your town council leases the shops in High Street and takes
over the dye works and gives me a chance to make the few laws
which--"

"Laws?" cried Red derisively, "'Ee's been sighing that we'll
all henjoy ourselves and do just what we like; and now 'ee's talk-
ing about laws!"

Cordelia, who had begun to gloat over the effect of her apple
of discord, surveyed with astonishment the movement of self-
control with which the man from the Scilly Isles patted Red's
shoulder and joined in the laugh against himself.

"If he can do that," she thought, "he'll be a match for Lord
P. and reduce old Beere to nothing."

"I cannot...think," said Mr. Evans gravely, speaking slowly
and emphatically and evidently weighing his words, "that an
anarchist commune in Glastonbury is a...practical possi-
bility."

"Pardon me, Mr. Evans," said Paul Trent, "but perhaps you
spoke just then...without...altogether...realising...how dangerous
it is to...to clash with a man from the Scillies,"

Mr. Evans' corrugated countenance broke into a deeply in-
dented smile and he rose up from his creaking chair and crossed
the room and shook hands vigorously with the anarchist.

"So you read the authors too?" he cried. "I never knew it!
I never knew it! Think of that! And I never knew it!"

When Mr. Evans spoke of "the authors" he always meant one
set of authors, those, namely, that dealt with Cymric mythology
and Cymric superstition. He dropped the young lawyer's hand
now and turned to his wife.

"Cordelia," he said, "you may mark my words that Lord P.
will sell them his land! Mr. Trent reads the authors. Mr. Trent
knows that it was in the Scillies that the oldest of the gods--
Cronos himself--was kept in prison! Mr. Trent knows that since
that day it's dangerous to interfere with a man from the Scillies
who's set his heart on anything."

"'Ee don't believe one word, Mister, 'ee don't," put in Red,
"of they tiles and fibles what yer pins yer bleedin' fithe on!
'Ee thinks they be all my eye!"

Red looked maliciously at Mr. Evans. His reference was obvi-
ously to Paul Trent, who once more astonished Cordelia by his
self-control.

"Well!" he said, "if our host can't believe my philosophy, and
I can't follow his poetry, we can agree at any rate in enjoy-
ing your humour, Mr. Robinson!"

"I don't know whether you realise, Mrs. Evans," said Dave
Spear, "that your father has decided to put off the opening of
his Chalice Hill arch until the end of January; when we hope
to have a ceremonious proclamation of the Glastonbury
commune."

But in his heart, as he spoke, Dave thought to himself: "Since
the only aspect of this affair of the least historic importance
will be its move towards England becoming communist, I must
see to it that the Gazette says nothing of Trent's absurd anarch-
ism." He sighed heavily. It would have been far easier for him
to drill and march and keep step and practise rifle-shooting than
to do all this plotting! But the cause demanded it. His dislike of
it was part of that bourgeois mentality in him which must be
overcome.

"You see, Mrs. Evans," broke in Paul Trent in a soft, caress-
ing voice, "this commune of ours will be a very harmless adven-
ture. We have no intention of bringing the government down on
us; and the fact that your father will naturally be the leading
spirit in it all will keep politics in the background. His interest
in it is entirely...religious...if I can use the word! Our friend
Spear, here, thinks of it as an advertisement for communism.
I am even more modest. I regard it as a quiet little experiment
in philosophical anarchy. Mr. Robinson, whose influence with
the labouring element in our town is so great, is less doctri-
naire in his notions. He will be content if--"

"If it makes that bewger Crow sit up and take notice! I 'ate
the bloke's bleedin' phyz!"

Red added this last remark almost pensively, puffing out such
a quantity of smoke that what Cordelia beheld in her purple
chair was an artisan's torso, with a head covered in a cloud.

"It is true as he says," remarked Spear--and it was notice-
able that all three conspirators, Dave-Brutus, Trent-Cassius and
Robinson-Casca, addressed their remarks to Mr. Geard's daughter
rather than to her husband--"our commune will be a very ten-
tative movement and with many facets. I wish," here he gave
another of his weary sighs, and his blue eyes took on that hope-
less film of disillusionment which had such a curious pathos
of its own--"I wish your father wasn't quite so absorbed in his
religious ideas. He would be such a power, if only "

Cordelia pulled down her muddy skirt hem over her ungainly
ankles and let her eyes embrace all the lour men in one sweep-
ing and rather contemptuous glance.

"Why don't you make him dismiss that man John Crow?" she
threw out harshly. "It's that idiot who urges him on. Father's just
putty in his hands. And he doesn't believe in anything himself
He plays with us all. I know him, through and through!"

The founders of the Glastonbury commune surveyed their
hostess much as a hoard of directors might have surveyed their
office-stenographer if she had suddenly told them that their
window-cleaner was the real danger to the firm.

But Mr. Evans, who had returned quietly to his antique chair
after his discovery that the lawyer from the Scillies read "the
authors," broke in at this point.

"My wife has got fond of John," he said gravely. "And so
she always punishes him and holds him up to scorn."

"Owen!" Cordelia's astonishment at this unexpected attack
was so great that her big mouth became as round as the letter 0
in the "Ora pro nobis" of a missal.

"'Tis Miss Crummie--not Miss Cordy--what's got fond of
Crow's cousin!" interjected Red. "She 'as divided 'er 'eart be-
tween Crow's cousin and young Mr. Dekker. Hain't I right, Mrs.
Heavens? 'Tis 'er and not you what 'ave got soft on Crow's

The insanity of Red's obsession against Philip was so extreme
that it extended itself to every member of Philip's family. To
Red's mind, Miss Crow of Benedict Street as well as Mr. and
Mrs. Crow of Northload Street and even Persephone Spear, at
present domiciled at Dickery Cantle's, had no individuality of
their own. They were the bewger's cousins; and that fact damned
them.

"What's your opinion, Evans," said Dave Spear, anxious to
turn the conversation away from these dangerous personalities,
"as to what form our commune should take, if we really do get
it started in January?"

"'Twas yer hone Missus, weren't it," interrupted the incor-
rigible cockney, addressing Dave, "what first thought of upsetting
the bewger by this 'ere commoon?"

Mr. Evans rubbed the side of his great hooked nose with his
left thumb. Everybody in the room except Red, who now, as he
reverted to his pipe, found his thoughts leaving the Crow family
and summoning up the more soothing image of Sally Jones,
fixed their eyes upon the Welshman.

The little parlour had become as stuffy as it was chilly. The
gusty wind, beginning to shake the not very solid architecture
of Five, Old Wells Road, seemed to join with the bizarre fur-
niture of that small room in calling upon Merlin's biographer
to utter some oracular word. At any rate there occurred just then
that kind of pregnant silence to which groups of human beings
are liable when their private thoughts differ so completely as to
evoke a sort of negative equilibrium.

"I think it won't matter very much," Mr. Evans said gravely,
"what form your commune takes. You yourself," and he stared
at Dave with a mouth from which a small dribble of saliva was
descending, "you yourself will oppose our good friend here,"
and he nodded at Paul Trent, "and that opposition will bring
the whole thing to nothing."

His words were the first words, all this long while, that
brought Paul Trent, who had been half-concealed in the smoke
of Red's pipe, down from his seat on the arm of the chair. The
feminine-complexioned, soft-fleshed anarchist, in his beautifully
fitting clothes, now moved to the fireplace where he stood upon
the rug and contemplated Mr. Evans with a tender indulgence.

The woman and the other men--for even Red seemed conscious
of something unusual in the air--watched these two Celts with
a faint uneasiness. For it seemed as if these strangely different
aboriginals of the Western Isles stared at one another, as though
something was passing between them totally obscure to the
other persons in the room.

"I've only read," murmured Paul Trent, in a much softer voice
than that in which he discoursed on the commune, "books
upon the authors."

Then, without a moment's pause, as if it were a fragment of
some immemorial ritual of which they both held the mystic clue,
Paul Trent began to recite, in a sort of grave sing-song, words
that seemed to Cordelia to be madness, to Dave to be devilry,
and to Red to be pure gibberish.

"'Complete was the captivity of Gwair in Caer Sidi.
Lured thither through the emissary of Pvvii and Frvderi.
Before him no one entered into it.
Into the heavy dark chain that held--"

Here Paul Trent stopped; but only to give place to Mr. Evans
who caught up the refrain; answering him with a sort of antiph-
ony that seemed to their hearers still worse insanity.

"'The Head of Annwn's Cauldron, what is it like?
A rim of pearls, it has around the edge;
It boils not the food of a coward or perjurer.
The bright sword of Llwch was lifted to it.
And in the hand of Lleminawe it was left.
And before the door of Hell's gate lamps were burning;
Seven alone did we return from the fortress of the Perfect
Ones."

"Did you compose all that, Owen?" enquired Cordelia.

"Certainly not!" answered Paul Trent, speaking for Mr.
Evans. "It's all in the books about the authors. Neither of us
invented it. Rhys, Loomis,--they all quote it. It's from a very
ancient Welsh poem called ‘The Harryings of Annwn' and it
appears to refer--"

But Mr. Evans interrupted him.

"It obviously does refer," he shouted, "to that ancient heathen
Grail, far older than Christianity, which redeemed...and always
will redeem...everyone who understands it...from...from...from...
from the captivity of Gwair in Caer Sidi!"

He suddenly burst into a spasm of suppressed laughter which
had an extremely disconcerting effect upon the ears of his hear-
ers. Mr. Evans was evidently on the edge of a shameless and
vociferous laughing-fit caused by some interior vision which
struck his mind as a monstrous Rabelaisian jest.

It always has an unpleasant effect when a person of a very
dominant physical personality falls into uncontrollable laugh-
ter. There is something indecent in the spectacle of it. This inde-
cency seems to be mysteriously increased when there is an ig-
norance in the hearers--as in this case there certainly was pro-
found ignorance--as to the cause of the explosion.

Swinging his head and his shoulders backward and forward,
making the most extraordinary chucklings, growing at the same
time very red in the face, he allowed these laughter-tears to run
down his cheeks and to fall upon his waistcoat without attempt-
ing the least concealment of his emotion. It was as if he had
suddenly been permitted by a special dispensation of Providence
to catch a glimpse of the monstrous cosmic joke, abominable,
heroic, megalomaniacal, into which the whole creation resolved
itself!

Cordelia rose from her seat and moving to his side laid her
hand on his shoulder. She felt as if her strange mate had sud-
denly turned into a medium for some huge, earth-cracking super-
natural ribaldry, that to her was inscrutable. She looked anx-
iously at the others to see how this exhibition struck them. But
under her touch Mr. Evans quickly recovered himself and what
had so agitated her womanly nerves seemed quite a natural oc-
currence to the other men.

Their host's laughing-fit evidently partook of that extra-mun-
dane humour to which all men are subject and which remains a
mystery of childishness to their wives and daughters.

Cordelia, surveying the diminishing convulsions of her part-
ner's gaunt frame with an irritable concern, became a symbol
of immemorial feminine annoyance in the presence of such a
masculine outburst when to a man--quite suddenly--the whole
cosmos appears in the light of a monstrous joke. Women never
laugh in this sort of way. Their laughter is pure naughtiness and
unadulterated mischief, or it springs from physical well-being
and is the airy happiness of the innocent earth-bubbles of matter
or, finally, it is hysterical, as when Cordelia laughed like the
neighing of a horse.

But she went quietly back to her seat now and Mr. Evans re-
marked gravely: "In this affair of yours, gentlemen, I confess
I'm no politician, what I was going to say was...when a per-
son touches"--he rolled his eyes towards Mr. Merry's nephew--
this basic Secret of Life, that our Bards expressed in poems like
The Harrying of Annwn, these external arrangements of Society
--capitalism or communism--seem unimportant."

Dave Spear rose to his feet, stretched himself, sighed heavily,
squared his shoulders and with his hands clasped behind his
back broke into a low, intense appeal, addressed to Mr. Evans
alone.

"If you could see human beings digging, as I have lately...
up there at Wookey...straining their muscles and going on
and on...and if you could realise that this same manual labour
is required, all the while, to keep the machinery of our indus-
trial system working...and that the people who do it...upon
whose labour we all live...the people who make the machines
and who feed the machines...are robbed by us non-workers
of all but their bare living, you would not, my dear Mr. Evans,
you could not, talk of communism as unimportant. You and
I, with our bourgeois mentality, shrink from it as we shrink
from slavery! But surely it's more righteous that we should all,
quite openly, be slaves of the State, than that by an evil and
crafty trick, and by our hypocritical talk of mental labour being
‘harder' than manual labour, we should prolong this crime...
this unpardonable sin?"

At the words "unpardonable sin," Mr. Evans, who had been
hearing him gravely, gave a guilty start, and automatically looked
sideways to the floor, to the place where, if he'd been in the
shop, the staircase to the cellar would have been.

"You can't have either communism or anarchism in one little
town," he said. "It's the whole country that must go in for it,
or it must be let alone. And even if you were dictator of all Eng-
land, Spear, I tell you it isn't money or position in life that
makes the difference between happiness and unhappiness. It's
something else...and when I think of how unimportant all
these questions are in comparison with...I could...I could...

His face which at this moment was a mixture of Don Quixote,
the Devil, and Dean Swift, broke into certain deep wrinkles, evi-
dences of another laughing-fit, which contorted it considerably,
while he controlled and prevented the outburst

Paul Trent now looked at his watch.

"Well! gentlemen," he said, "I've decided that I want you two,
after all, to come out with me to Mark Moor Court tonight. I
only pray we shan't find Will Zoyland closeted with his father!
I'm afraid if Will got on our track at this juncture he'd ruin the
whole thing. What a blessing he's out at Wookey!"

As soon as the visitors were gone, Cordelia said hurriedly to
her husband: "Better take your stroll now, hadn't you, while I do
the things?"

"What did you say?" murmured Mr. Evans, giving the hack
of the purple chair a push to move it towards the fire.

"Better go out and get your evening stroll over, while I wash
up," repeated Cordelia.

Mr. Evans stared blankly at her. The natural movement of any
couple, in their own house, when a group of visitors have de-
parted, is to draw up to the hearth with an ebullition of relief,
and begin a critical analysis of the evening. This was clearly
what Mr. Evans expected; and he was a little nonplussed. He had
not much to say to Cordelia about communes and commune-
makers; but he had a great deal to say to her about The Harry-
ing of Annwn.

The girl had already left him, however, and crossed the little
passage into the kitchen; so he snatched up his long black over-
coat from its peg and let himself out without a word.

"She's cross," he said to himself, "because I laughed like
that. She thinks I made a fool of myself."

He followed the Old Wells Road till he reached a turn to his
left, called Edmund Hill Lane, which led to the clay pits and
the tile works of Edmund Hill Pottery. This pottery had played
an important part in the modern life of Glastonbury, supplying
the town council with those fine large brick tiles of a beautiful
orange-red colour with which it had roofed all its new workmen's
houses not only in Old Wells Road and Bove Town but also in
Benedict Street. It was from under these bright red tiles, made of
rich Somersetshire clay, that the hopes and despairs of many
generations of Glastonbury people were destined to mount up and
follow in its gusts, night by night, this dream-burdened westerly
wind.

Mr. Evans got glimpses of a tormented half-moon in the sky,
as he walked along, tossed, tumbled, rolled, buffeted by piled-up
cloud racks, driven, themselves, across the rain-swept spaces by
this same wind. Edmund Hill Lane was at that hour a lonely
place to walk in, as it stretched upward towards those isolated
clay pits. Its ruts were clay; its banks were clay: it had been cut
out of clay; and it led to the richest clay pit in the West Country.
And all this clay, which in time would be moulded and hardened
into roofs for the dreams of Glastonbury people: dreams that
would be--so Mr. Evans told himself now as he strode along--
much the same, whether under Dave Spear's commune or Philip
Crow's capitalism!--called out to Mr. Evans and tugged softly
at him, with wet, mute, rainy, dumbly murmuring mouths, and
straining, coldly heavy, corpse-like fingers.

The glimpses he got of that wildly tossed half-moon stirred
the imagination of this man in the tight-waisted black coat and
bowler hat. The wet clay stuck more and more clingingly to his
boots as he advanced up the windy hill, leaving Glastonbury and
its conspirators far behind him, and his mind followed those
weird, old, chthonian deities of his race, whose dim personalities,
veiled under these Cymric syllables, "Pwyll, Pryderi, Liwch,
Lleminawc," called to him out of the wet earth. The very dreams
of the people behind him, mounting up alongside of him from
under the tiled roofs of the town, fell away from him now and
sank down like a flutter of autumn leaves. That iron bar in the
brain of Finn Toller, of which he had heard without hearing,
sank down. The great lorries, full of hermetic tin--diabolus
metallorum--of which Philip, in his house in the New Wells
Road, was thinking, fell away and sank down. The Harrying of
Annwn! How much more there was of the essential sorrow of
things and of the essential exultation of things in that queer
phrase than in all this absurd business of buying legal parch-
ments from the Marquis of P.!

As he walked along under the sickly moon and the feverish
clouds, Mr. Evans thought to himself how much more real the
world of consciousness was than the world of matter.

"In any given spot on the earth's surface," he thought, "the
consciousnesses of men are flowing and floating just below the
blind material surface! They have the same sun, the same moon.
the same stars; but it is with the souls of these things, with their
under-essences that the consciousnesses of men have dealings!"

He came to a heap of clumsily thatched turnips, by a wayside
barn, that the owner had covered up for winter feed for his
cattle, and upon this heap he sat down, pressing the tails of his
black coat under his thin flanks against the damp of this dark
mound. And sitting there alone under that turbulent sky it came
over him that the lives of men upon earth were all subject to
the captivity of Gwair in Caer Sidi, lured by the emissary of
Pwyll and Pryderi; in other words that they were all held in
bond by something alien, by something external to their true,
free essence. But he got the feeling that his own deeper nature
could take hold of his body, yes! and take hold of all this bodily-
world around him, and drive them both, as this wind was driving
these clouds, upon strange, occult purposes of its own.

Mr. Evans rested upon this thought for a second, holding him-
self aloof with an austere effort and grasping fate itself, as a
man grasps the handle of a plough. But even while he was ex-
periencing this masterful sensation there slid into his erotic nerve
the quivering forked tongue of his unpardonable sin.

Something about what he had seen that afternoon in the sheep-
fold had broken a barrier in the fortress of his sensual concen-
tration; and through this hole there now slid, or threatened to
slide, the electric-tingling body of the undying worm.

"I must make use," he said to himself, "of what Geard is doing
with that Grail Spring. The Pageant didn't kill it...but perhaps this
water...these crowds...this white magic of old Geard...may kill it!"

So he spoke; but as if in mockery of "old Geard," and all he
could do, there moved, there stirred, there awoke, in the remote
circles of Being beyond this wild sky, the appalling perilous
stuff in the double-natured First Cause. In its primordial Evil,
as with its wavering searchlight it fathomed the numberless
worlds of its living victims, the First Cause struck straight down
now at the responsive nerve of Mr. Evans' vice, and as it stirred
that poison it gave itself up to an orgasm of egocentric contem-
plation. As for Mr. Evans, he saw himself returning to his house
with this madness and with this horror upon him; he saw him-
self mounting the narrow staits; he saw himself embracing Cor-
delia...and he felt he could not do it...he felt he could not
...go home...just then...with this reptile lifting up its head.

"Complete was the captivity," he muttered to ‘himself, "of
Gwair in Caer Sidi!"

Without realising what he was doing he pressed his left hand
under the wet thatch of the turnip heap and pulled out a turnip.
This, all muddy as it was, he pressed to his face, smelling at it
with his hooked nose, and finally biting it with his strong wolfish
front teeth.

While the Welshman sat on that damp heap of turnips and bit,
with ferocious and yet hardly conscious impulse, into the flesh
of one of the rankest and most astringent turnips in the heap,
spitting out each mouthful after he had chewed it and once more
plunging his teeth into the sharp-smelling substance, it happened
that a microscopic creature--all mouth and yet all belly--was
enjoying, or suffering from precisely the same twinge of ego-
centric mania, as were Mr. Evans and the First Cause, as it lay
coiled up upon the surface of this same vegetable.

Thus it was fated for this particular turnip heap in Edmund
Hill Lane, halfway between Old Wells Road and the Brick-tile
Works to be the occasion of the bringing together, at exactly three
minutes to nine o'clock on the night of the twelfth of December,
of three identical psychic aberrations, that of the infinitesimal,
microscopic parasite, that of Mr. Owen Evans, and that of the
ultimate First Cause.

Human beings are however more sensitive to interruptions
from chance than are gods or insects; and it was Mr. Evans who
was the first to be distracted from this obsession of vicious con-
templation. He became aware of the approach of voices coming
down Edmund Hill Lane from the direction of the brick works.

They were the voices of a man and a boy; and they were amus-
ing themselves by hooting like screech-owls. Apparently some
real nocturnal bird of the species they were imitating was fol-
lowing them in the darkness; for Mr. Evans could hear at inter-
vals a cry that was like an echo of the noises that these pedes-
trians were making, following them at no considerable distance.

He got up hurriedly from his damp seat and threw the turnip
away. In its fall the insect feeding upon its surface was brushed
off; which meant the death that very night of that microscopic
parasite. The First Cause alone continued its unspeakable con-
templation; that motion of evil in the ultimate abyss, against
which all the good that is in mankind is forever struggling.

Mr. Evans advanced up the lane to meet the newcomers. This
he did because he had the peculiarity of always having a nerv-
ous dread of people overtaking him in the dark; and yet he felt
reluctant to hurry off home! He found himself even now pos-
sessed of a morbid fear of their stumbling upon him unwarned;
so,--although with something of an effort--he forced himself to
cry out "Hullo there!" in an almost menacing voice.

"Good evening, Mr. Evans!" came the reply out of the dark-
ness; and he found himself shaking hands with Sam Dekker.

"Do you know Elphin Cantle?" said Sam.

And the boy, coming sulkily forward, shook hands too.

"I had an idea we'd meet someone we knew if we came back
this way," Sam went on. "Elphin and I have been putting up
wild ducks at Decoy Pool and Meare Pool; and we came back
by Crannel Moor instead of by the Godney Road. We had our
supper at Upper Godney. They gave us half a small pike that
Mr. Merry had caught yesterday, when he was over there; in
that pond at Lower Crannel. It tasted good, didn't it, Elphin,
served with fried parsnips and parsley?"

Mr. Evans peered through the darkness into the boy's face. The
name Elphin made him think of Gwydion-Garanhir and of Tali-
essin.

"I'd have liked to ask you in," he remarked, "but Mrs. Evans
may be in bed. What do you make the time, Mr. Dekker?"

Sam looked at his watch and announced that it was after nine.

"You brought back that Saint Augustine I lent you in the
spring so faithfully, that you're always welcome to any books
you want to take from the shop."

Sam thanked him and then became silent. The two men stood
awkwardly side by side; while Elphin, moving to the edge of the
fence, set up his owl cry again.

"I'll walk back with you, if I may. as far as my house," said
Mr. Evans.

But for some reason--perhaps because the boy Elphin was so
occupied with the owls--they neither of them made any move to
start forward.

"Your voice sounded just now as if it were bothered bv some-
thing, Mr. Evans ," said Sam at last after an embarrassing pause.

It was in his instinctive recognition of all animals' moods that
this patient naturalist, transformed now into the latest Glaston-
bury saint, exploited his shrewdest wisdom.

"Have you a cigarette, Dekker ?" asked Mr. Evans.

Sam gave him one and struck a match. This ancient Prome-
thean act brought the two men together as nothing else could
have done just then. On a dark, rainy night even the flicker of a
match-flame has a magical power; and the little circle of light
extending outward from Sam's concave fingers illuminated not
only Mr. Evans' hooked nose, as he bent towards it, not only
Sam's own retreating chin, but the frayed edges of a small duo-
decimo that the latter carried in his rough tweed-smelling jacket
pocket.

"What's your book?" enquired the antiquary with professional
curiosity.

"Only a St. John's Gospel," answered Sam nervously, shov-
ing the volume down further into its place, and pulling his
pocket-flap over it, to hide it.

"The Mayor's favourite book," remarked Mr. Evans. "He says
it's the whole Bible of his new religion."

"Too-whit! Too-who! Too-whit! Too-who!" cried Elphin
Gantle from the fence.

"Listen, Evans!"

Sam blurted out the words hurriedly; and it was with a trem-
bling hand that he lit a cigarette for himself now from the one
which the other was smoking.

"I've been thinking lately, Evans, that our Glastonbury Christ
is like Osiris. They've cut him into fragments; and out of each
fragment they've made a different Person. I don't care much for
this Fourth Gospel. That's why I read it."

Mr. Evans nodded his complete and entire understanding of
such a motive.

"My Christ's utterly different from Geard's," Sam said, "and
different from my father's. My Christ's like Lucifer--only he's
not evil...at least not what I call evil. But He's the enemy of
God. That is, He's the enemy of Creation! He's always struggling
against Life, as we know it...this curst, cruel self-assertion
...this pricking up of fins, this prodding with horns...this opening
of mouths...this clutching, this ravishing, this snatching, this
possessing."

"Too-whit! Too-who! Too-whit! Too-who!" came Elphin's
voice. The lad was on the other side of the fence now.

Mr. Evans cast his eyes round him. The half-moon was dip-
ping, diving, rearing, tumbling, toppling, under that strong, wet,
westerly wind. Some of the clouds closest to it took on every now
and then, a momentary yellowness, sickly and unearthly, but
most of them were of the colour of cold steel. Mr. Evans snuffed
the air like one of the seals of Proteus. He thought he could de-
tect the smell of seaweed on the wind.

"The tide must be high tonight at the Burnham mud-flats," he
thought to himself. "They must be afraid of the sluices breaking
over there."

"Too-whit! Too-who! Too-whit! Too-who!" Elphin and his at-
tendant owl were already across the sloping pasture in the di-
rection of Maidencroft Lane.

Mr. Evans took off his bowler hat, and bending forward tapped
Sam on the shoulder with it.

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" he said. "You're
the son of a priest, aren't you? Can't you say to the Demon:
'Come out of him?' "

There was a moment's pause; only broken by the little mo-
notonous taps--like a man knocking off water-drops against a
doorpost--of Mr. Evans' hat upon Sam's shoulder.

"There! I was only joking!" cried the Welshman at last. "I
expect you don't believe in miracles, any more than you believe
in the Fourth Gospel. You're listening to that boy...that's all
you're doing! You're thinking of owls, as those rascals that came
to my house just now were thinking of leases and communes! It
makes me laugh, the way you all go on...while all the time...the
Harrying of Annwn..."

Here the man's face distorted itself, not with the coming on of
that queer, planetary laughing-fit, which had seized him in the
room, but with a similar feeling of isolation.

"You don't even know what Annwn is!" he murmured.

Then with a deep sigh, he replaced his hat on his head.

"Complete is the captivity of Gwair in Caer Sidi! he groaned
inarticulately, buttoning a loosened button of his tight-fitting
overcoat.

"Elphin! Hullo, Elphin! I'm going on!" Sam's voice rang out
across the fields in the direction of Maideneroft Lane.

"No, I don't believe in miracles ," he said gravely, "any more
than Christ did. What He did was simply to use His will to kill
His will."

"Too-whit! Too-who!" Elphin was at the fence again now and
his attendant bird of the darkness had apparently left him.

Mr. Evans muttered something in Welsh. The thought that
came into his heart was a thought of sick terror.

"This man's Christ is a madman like I am. His will holds the
rod over His will. He's all strain and torment. It's with torment
He drives out torment! I ought never to have spoken to this
man."

Elphin joined them now and they all three moved down Ed-
mund's Hill Lane. Not a word did any of them speak till they
turned into Wells Old Road; but all the while, just eluding his
conscious mind, there hovered about Mr. Evans' soul the sinis-
ter impact of that dialogue he had not heard.

"Will thik iron bar what you knows of make my young man
feel before he dies?"

Even before they reached Number Five of Wells Old Road, or
Old Wells Road--for both designations are in local use--Mr.
Evans could see a light in Cordelia's bedroom. At his gate he
hesitated whether to bid his companions good-bye or to accom-
pany them a step further. An instinct in him difficult to analyse--
perhaps a desire to test to the dregs the spiritual magic of this
disciple of a non-miraculous Christ--made him decide to go on
with them for a little way.

"I'll turn back in Bove Town," he said to himself. Sam seemed
surprised, and Elphin seemed definitely cross, that they had not
been able to get rid of this disturbing intruder even when they
passed his own gate.

Once again a dead silence fell upon all three as they turned
into Bove Town and walked along the well-worn flagstones of the
raised path under the stone wall leading to High Street.

Sam, it turned out, had to go into St. John's Church to make
the necessary preparations, which his father usually made for
himself, for the morning's Mass.

Elphin Cantle hoped against hope--indeed he actually prayed
in his heart--that Mr. Evans would see fit to say good-bye to
them at the entrance to the churchyard. The boy repeated under
his breath, as they approached the great church tower, a sort of
ritualistic incantation:

"This bloke ought to go home! Ought to go home; ought to
go home! This bloke ought to go home; when St. John's clock
strikes the hour!"

What was Elphin's consternation when this prayer of his was
not only not answered, but the extreme opposite of it was brought
to pass!

"Good-night, Elphin!" said Sam when they reached the lamp,
swinging from the arch above the entrance. "We mustn't take
you any further out of your way."

The boy stared aghast, his feelings smitten through and
through as if by a catapult.

"But Sir!" he gasped, "but Sir...but Mr. Dekker! I allus helps
'ee with they rinsings and rubbings. I be especial good at it;
ye said yer wone self, I were!"

"Shake hands with Mr. Evans, Elphin, and run off, there's a
good lad. We've had a nice day together; and we'll have some
more; but I'm busy now. Run off home to bed, there's a good
kid!"

Not a motion did Elphin Cantle make to shake hands with
Mr. Evans or indeed to shake hands with Sam. He turned round
without a word, without a sign, and taking to his heels ran off
at top speed. He dodged between the people on the pavement.
He dodged between the vehicles in the street, and making for his
room in his stucco tower, as a wounded animal makes for his
lair, he never shed a single tear till he threw himself down--
coat, cap, muddy boots, just as he was--prone upon his bed and
cried like an unhappy girl.

But Mr. Evans, egocentric though he had grown to be, was not
one to view a child's tragic discomfiture with equanimity. He
felt angry with Sam. Did the fellow think that he couldn't have
talked to him before that boy? Well, he certainly wasn't going
to talk to him now! The fellow was a prig, a fool, an ass, to send
that lad away...a lad called Elphin too; and he had a curious ex-
pression under that lamplight...a funny face...an interesting face!

Such were Mr. Evans' thoughts as he followed Sam into the
church.

"I know you'll be pleased to see," said Sam, "what Father has
done to St. Joseph's tomb!"

He led him to the famous, empty sarcophagus--one of the
most moving, if not one of the most authentic ossuaries of our
planet's history--where the bones of the man who gave up his
own tomb to Jesus are reported to have been laid.

Mr. Evans could not see very clearly in the dim lamplight that
radiated down the isle what Sam's father had done; but it evi-
dently was no great matter, for the tomb looked exactly as it had
looked to him when he had visited it in the early Spring with
the man who was now his father-in-law. But if Mr. Evans thought
of his father-in-law as he stood tonight by that great scooped-out
concavity, his companion had a much more poignant thought;
for the image of Nell, as he had talked to her and quarrelled with
her here, before the begetting of their child, came with cruel
vividness upon him.

"I may never," Sam forced himself now to say, "have such
a good chance to...to tell you, Evans, what I really feel about
...all these things."

He leant forward wearily as he spoke, for he was tired and
drowsy after his long walk, and he had never felt less clear-
headed and less inspired.

"What I feel is this," he went on, pressing both his hands
against the rim of the tomb and bowing his head forward above
its dusky emptiness. "I feel that the whole Creation is on the
wrong track...all scrambling for happiness and the satisfaction
of the senses. I feel that the only thing to do is to follow
Christ in making the will kill the will."

He lifted his ill-moulded beast-like lineaments and darted a
quick nervous glance at the tall, black-coated figure standing
aloof with his hands behind his back.

"How like the shirt of Nessus is this curst vice of mine!"
thought Mr. Evans, when, to his loathing, he found that the mere
distress of this will-killing Christ-lover had begun to cause him
a lively mental shiver of a dark sort of pleasure. "The poor
devil, the poor devil!" he said to himself. "I must not let my-
self feel like this!"

Tightly he clasped his long fingers behind his back, squeezing
them angrily together so as to suppress his wicked feeling by
their discomfort.

"If I let myself feel like this now," he thought, "I'll be creat-
ing an atrocious thought-imp that'll drive him from worse to
worse. Down with you! Down with you, you living leprosy! I
will wash you off--if it's in my own blood!"

"Don't 'ee see, Evans," Sam was now murmuring hoarsely,
"it's the whole stream of life that's got this possessive instinct,
this snatching, scrabbling, scraping, ravishing instinct. What
Christ has to do is to deny the whole thing, root and branch!
And it's no use saying it's for 'fuller life,' or 'more life,' that He
has to do it. It's all poison. It's all one glittering, shining, seeth-
ing tide of poisonous selfishness! We are all scales, scurf, scab,
on the same twisting, cresting dragon of the slime. The tide of
life itself is evil. That's the great secret of Christ. And what He's
aiming at now--the tortured Anti-God that he is!--is the freezing
up of the life stream! Christ doesn't give a damn for morality,
Evans! That's not the point with Him. He's out for something far
greater and deeper. He's out for the Beyond-Life! Do you remem-
ber what I said to you on Tor Hill, Evans, about His redeeming
Matter? I didn't realise then how He redeems Matter. He does
it by freezing the life force in it. He knows what the life force
is; and he can track it down. He can find it bubbling and seeth-
ing and horning and pricking and taking and tormenting and
triumphing in every direction. And then he touches it with his
cross and freezes it up!"

Mr. Evans became aware that old Mrs. Robinson, who had
been waiting for Sains late appearance before going home, had
now crept up with her broom and duster till she was within hear-
ing. The ex-servant of the Bishop must have caught some word
of their discourse--one of those tragic clue-words of our human
Tournament such as old women rejoice to lap up, as cats lap
milk--and she probably thought of this scene at the Arimathe-
an's tomb as a sort of moving-picture close-up, which, if she
could get a good seat, "'ud be the sime as the theayter."

"I can't help thinking. Mr. Dekker," said the Welshman now.
"that your ideas have changed a good deal since you talked to us
that spring day on the Tor. It seems to me that then your ideas
were more orthodox. I seem to remember your quoting the words
of the Mass, Verbum caro factum est, but from what you say
now "

"Yes, yes, yes,--I have changed, Mr. Evans, and everything
about me's changed; and the whole world has changed! The
world can't go on devouring itself, as it's doing now, snatching,
biting, stinging, poisoning, ravishing its flesh, and pressing it-
self with its beautiful breasts"--he threw a very queer expression
into these last words, the reason of which was obscure to his
chief hearer, but from the way her little rat's eyes glittered in
the dusky aisle, not so obscure to Mrs. Robinson!--"against
reality!"

Mr. Evans found it very difficult to look at this agitated figure
on the other side of the tomb of the great tomb-lender without
a stir in the coils of the nerve-snake within him that fed upon
such food.

"You are lucky in one thing, Mr. Dekker," he said. "I mean in
your quiet life at the Vicarage with your father."

"I'm afraid Elphin's feelings were hurt," said Sam, looking up
and turning his head towards the door.

His eyes fell upon Mrs. Robinson who was dusting the seat of
a perfectly spotless oaken pew and edging nearer and nearer.

"Hullo, Mrs. Robinson!" he called out; and his mouth worked
convulsively before he could say another word in the irritation
of her presence and his desire to get rid of her.

"Will yer be wantin' me henny more, Mister?" the old woman
responded. "Because, if not, I'll be miking me way 'ome."

"Nothing, nothing, thank you!" he replied, impatiently and
added in the same tone, "You can go now, Mrs. Robinson."

("'Twas a shime to 'ear the way they two were talking," the
old lady said to her son when she got home that night. "Ondecent
'eathen talk 'twere such as never ought to be 'eard hinside of a
'orspital, least still of a church. Mr. Sammy, 'ee 'urried me hout
of door as if I'd catch a palsy by stighin' a minute in their
company!")

"Boys are very sensitive creatures, Dekker," announced Mr.
Evans sententiously. "When I was young there was an old man
in the Pembrokeshire hills, where we lived, that I used to watch
milking his goats. I used to catch them for him sometimes. He
used to get angry with them and I used to be glad when he got
angry with them. But one day he sent me away for throwing
stones at them. And--do you know, Dekker, I wouldn't go home!
I stayed out on the hills for a whole summer's night. I slept in
a gully on a heap of heather, and all that night when I thought
of the goats--" He stopped abruptly; for he saw that Sam
was no longer listening. Sam indeed had only heard a small por-
tion of this speech and that portion not very distinctly. He was
keeping his eyes fixed on the retreating form of old Mrs. Robin-
son; but the eyes of his heart were fixed upon Nell Zoyland.

The girl was back again now from the hospital, and estab-
lished--with Mrs. Pippard as a nurse for the child--once more
at Whitelake Cottage.

Mr. Evans had done more than blush as he told about the
goats. A deep swarthiness had actually mounted to his cheeks,
his forehead, his neck. For this story was a sacred story. Led on
by the hour and by the place he had told one of the important
stories of his youth.

But Sam Dekker wasn't interested enough even to know
whether he had been speaking of goats or of rabbits or sheep.
Mr. Evans' black-coated figure had begun to grow misty and
faint for Sam; and Mrs. Robinson, issuing forth from the church
door, had become for Sam like some fantastical curlicue on the
lettering of a tragic volume. Even a saint cannot bear up always;
and at that moment, so great was his physical exhaustion that
something in him nearly broke down.

Mr. Evans little knew how near this student of the Fourth
Gospel, standing over the tomb of the man who had buried
Jesus, had come to crying out a wild curse upon the divine
Lover.

"She's my girl! She's my girl!" Sam moaned in his heart.
"What hast Thou given me; what canst Thou ever give me, in
exchange for my girl?"

When they were all at last out of the church and got home--
Sam asleep ; Mr. Evans asleep; Mrs. Robinson asleep; but Elphin
Cantle still sitting at the window of his stucco tower--there ensued
a singular dialogue without words between the red light of the Re-
served Sacrament and the empty sarcophagus of St. Joseph. This
was one of those dialogues which it is never fantastical to inter-
pret in human language, because no one can deny that in some
language they must be perpetually occurring.

"Aren't you tired, red light, of shining so long without a pause
in front of this Miracle of the faith?"

Thus, in a cold, flat, toneless voice, enquired the empty
Sarcophagus.

"Yes," answered the red light, "I am very tired."

"If you could get anyone to move you," said the Sarcophagus,
"you could rest here, within me; for I am tired of being empty!"

And the echo of the clock in St. John's Tower, coming down
through the belfry into the church, repeated in a voice faint as
an old man's last whisper :

"Tired...tired...tired...tired...tired...tired......tired...tired...tired...
tired..." as it echoed the striking of the hour of ten over the
roofs of Glastonbury.



THE CHRISTENING



Tossie Stickles' lusty twin girls were christened by the
Vicar of Glastonbury--bastards though they were!--with all due
ceremony and at the regular hour for that ritual, after the chil-
dren's service, on the day following the Evans' visit to the ruined
sheepfold. Immediately after this ceremony the young mother and
her small daughters were established once again under Miss Eliza-
beth's roof in Benedict Street. Nancy Stickles still continued to
come each day "to help out"; so that Toss was enabled to divide
her time between looking after her infants and cooking for the
family, which still included--after several battles royal with my
Lord's sister in Bath--the independent Lady Rachel, who now
went regularly to work with Ned Athling in the little office of the
weekly Wayfarer.

Deep in Miss Elizabeth's heart was lodged the fixed idea that
eventually Mr. Barter would marry Tossie; and with a view to
this natural and ethical contingency, she now had begun encour-
aging the manager of the municipal factory to pay constant vis-
its to his illegitimate family under her roof, going so far as even
to give up her drawing-room, whenever that gentleman came, to
his conversations with Tossie.

It was one of those fantastic and incredible arrangements that
in real life are always occurring; situations which, in premoni-
tion, seem absurdly impossible, but which are the very ones that
Nature, moulding the prejudices of men to her own views, takes
a humorous pleasure in bringing about.

The christening of Nell Zoyland's child was something much
less easily dealt with; just as the fate of its mother was in the
hands of more eccentric and wayward persons than either Tom
Barter or Miss Crow. Will Zoyland had made up his mind that
his father, the Marquis, should stand godfather to the little boy,
who was to be called Henry after the great man. But the Marquis
had a nervous dislike of appearing in public in Glastonbury--
a place which he had come heartily to distrust and dislike since
he had been mobbed by the rabble on that eventful Pageant-day
--and so after long discussions and procrastinations it had been
worked out that Nell's child was to be baptised at Whitelake
Cottage by Mat Dekker on the fifteenth of December.

Hearing that Lord P. was coming for this occasion, as well
as Dave and Persephone who were the little Harry's other god-
parents, what must the good Mrs. Pippard do--who was related
to half Glastonbury--but beg from her mistress the privilege of
giving a little christening party of her own to celebrate this aus-
picious day. Thus the fifteenth of December that year was to be
a lively occasion out at Whitelake; and it was a fortunate occur-
rence, and a good omen too, for babe Harry, that this day, after
so much rain, was one of cloudy and intermittent but still of
quite perceptible sunshine. Harry was a tragic little boy in cer-
tain ways. He clung desperately to his mother; and it was always
touching to see the struggle in his small heart between his intense
greediness and his hatred of being fed by any other "Mwys," as
Mr. Evans would have called it, than his mother's lovely breasts.

The proletarian contingent of Master Henry's party was to
include Mother Legge and her now quite convalescent niece,
Tittie Petherton, Nancy Stickles, who was also a relative, Sally
Jones who had once been in service along with Doxy Pippard,
the old woman's daughter, and last, but not least, our old acquaint-
ance Mr. Abel Twig, who was Mrs. Pippard's cousin.

All these persons were to have their tea in Nell's kitchen, while
Lord P., together with Mr. and Mrs. Spear and the Vicar, re-
freshed themselves in her small parlour.

The present dwellers of Whitelake Cottage included not only
Mrs. Pippard herself, but her daughter, Eudoxia, a girl who was
now acting as the Zoyland's housemaid. Both mother and daugh-
ter slept in the ante-room of Will's private retreat at the back of
the cottage, while Nell and her child slept in the front bedroom.

Since the show season at Wookey had come to an end Will
Zoyland had been employed by Philip in the much more impor-
tant role of assistant-overseer of the new tin-mining works. The
head overseer--an industrious and clever technician--was not
good at keeping his subordinates up to the scratch; nor had he
much initiative with regard to tracking out new veins of metal-
deposit. Thus Zoyland's job at the tin mine was partly a dis-
ciplinary one and partly a geological one, neither of which oc-
cupations exactly suited his peculiar gifts. But he did not demand
much salary; ten times less, in fact, than Philip would have had
to give to anyone else; and all the labourers on the works held him
in respect because of his name.

Lord P. had announced that he would drive over in his dog-
cart from Mark Moor Court, picking up Lady Rachel on his way
through Glastonbury. The christening was roughly timed for
between four and five; and Mat Dekker had told Nell that he
would try to come over himself soon after three, so as to enjoy
a little talk with her alone before her other guests arrived.

Will Zoyland had come to the secret conclusion, after first
setting eyes on his wife's infant, that this was none of his; but he
had concealed this certainty so successfully that Nell had not the
least suspicion that he had divined the truth; and this secret
knowledge of his gave him a great and unfair advantage in the
daily struggle for the mastery between them; for he found that
to have such a weapon, and not to use it, was the strongest
weapon he could possibly have; and he took full advantage of
this. His position, just then, was in many respects a singular and
crucial one. The fact that Nell was suckling the child herself,
though old Mrs. Pippard helped her washing and dressing him,
made it psychologically difficult for Will to start making love
to her again. He had a curious penchant for babies, amounting
almost to a mania for these odd little poppets, whose angers are
so nerve-racking and whose philosophical calm is so soothing; so
that he won Nell's maternal gratitude willy-nilly by his tender-
ness to her offspring, especially as he consented to sleep on the
couch in the parlour and to leave her and child the uninterrupted
use of their bedroom. It had given Nell a queer kind of shock
when she saw Mrs. Pippard making up that particular couch for
the master of the house; that couch which had not been used as
a bed by anyone since that day in March!

But Will's passionate devotion to the child disarmed her com-
pletely because it was more than she had dreamed would hap-
pen, and she took it to imply that he had not the least suspicion
that the little Harry was not his.

The baby, on its side, seemed to take to Will with a degree of
awareness and attraction unusual at that age. He was a child of
colossal egoism and of an immense power of love. He loved Nell
with a piquant zest that was delicious to behold; but his love for
her was a hot, feverish, violent thing; while his response to
Zoyland was a sort of rapturous calm. In his furious fits of tem-
per, which were of a tragic intensity and prophetic of a future
that made the girl tremble to think of, Zoyland alone could
handle him, quell him, console him. Time and again, old Mrs.
Pippard, who could do nothing with him, would say to Nell--"If
it weren't for the measter, thik mommet 'ud fling 'isself into
convoolsions."

"He can't not think it his own child!" Nell would say to herself ;
but how he could have been so deceived, when its pathetic little
chin was so exactly like Sam's, she never considered. She was
very grateful, too, at being let off all love-making; and this she
attributed to Will's passion for the child; and it made her un-
easy, with a sort of shamefaced discomfort, to think that she owed
her escape from his amorous advances to this deception. But in
this matter, too, as much as over the child, the girl, for all her
feminine insight, had been completely outwitted by the crafty
huntsman. It was really the sly old Zookey Pippard who engi-
neered this treachery. Perhaps, being a relative of Mother Legge,
she had it in her blood to play procuress. But it was she who
had persuaded her daughter to come up to Whitelake Cottage
from a very good place at a farm near Witham Friary, and her
arguments must have been very subtle ones; for the wench re-
ceived, in return for her work, probably the lowest wage that has
ever been paid to a maid, at any rate in a gentlefolk's house,
from Westbury Beacon on the north to Huish Episcopi on the
south. But Zookey was--as Mr. Weatherwax, who knew her "up
hill and down dale" said to Penny, when those old gossips first
"larn'd who 'twere were looking 'arter Missy Zoyland"--"the
cunningest bitch-badger this side o' Tarnton."

Eudoxia Pippard, when she finally appeared in response to
her crafty parent's beguiling hints, completely turned Will Zoy-
land's head.

Having lived a chaste life for nearly half a year and having
recognised the fact that he had been made the bread-winner for
another man's child, Zoyland found nothing in his passion for
Nells baby to prevent him from committing delicious adultery
with Doxy Pippard. Eudoxia was indeed dedicated, it seemed, to
give immoral delight to Lord P.'s bastard.

She was not at all what you would call a pretty girl. Her lips
were much too thin, her nose was a little twisted to one side and
her neck was decidedly too long; but she had one peculiarity
which, as soon as he discovered it, set Zoyland's Varangian senses
on fire, and that was the most satiny skin that ever a Glastonbury
amorist had clipped, as Malory would say, since the days of the
damosel Linet, of the Castle Perilous! It may be easily that, in
the category of feminine desirability, such polished flanks, such
slippery knees, such satiny hips, and all such other sinuous slen-
dernesses, do not by any means constitute what is called "classi-
cal beauty" or even romantic charm; but whatever they constitute,
as they slide in or out of a seducer's arms they evoke a ravishing
and transporting satisfaction.

Now there was an outside wooden staircase at the back of the
house, leading into the ante-room of the "smoking-room"; so
that when Nell and Sam's child were fast asleep, in the front of
the house, Eudoxia could easily come in through the kitchen
door. This door, if Zookey remembered to leave it ajar, had well-
oiled hinges; so that when Doxy found herself--at first with agi-
tated surprise, but later with entrancing coquetry--clothed only
in her night-gown and in the presence of the master of the house,
lying upon his couch bed, there was no danger of surprisal if
they spoke in low whispers.

Now Nell, although Zoyland had loved her dearly and had got
great enjoyment from her, had never been really responsive to
his embraces. Her body had responded faintly, her heart a little,
but her inmost imaginative nerve, the crucial chord to the essen-
tial quiver of a girl's stirred senses, not at all. The full-blooded
bastard, as may well be believed, had had many loves before he
became infatuated with Nell Spear, but none of these had been
adepts at the art of provocation, none of these had been viciously
exciting.

Now Doxy Pippard possessed, among other original character-
istics, a curious mania for retaining her virginity. Vicious and
inflammable as she was with the feverish, reckless, almost swoon-
ing intensity of the pseudo-consumptive type, she had lavished
her nervous provocations on all her men and yet had managed
matters so skilfully as to be a maiden still. The mere idea of
lying in the arms of the son of the Marquis of P. was intoxicating
to the romantic yearning in her snake-smooth, leaf-cool body;
while the herculean proportions of Zoyland as a human being
fulfilled all her secretest girlhood's dreams as to what a real
masculine bedfellow should be.

On the eve of the day of the christening Eudoxia had come
down to him soon after midnight, entering the kitchen by the
door left unlatched by Zookey; and it was after a couple of
hours of paradisiac dalliance, wherein her protection of herself
from "mortal sin" prolonged her companion's tantalised delight
beyond what he would have dreamed possible, that the couple sat
up suddenly on that single-pillowed couch-bed under the heavily
curtained window and started to listen with all their ears. What
had disturbed them was an outburst of crying from the child,
followed by Nell's voice calling Will's name. It is probable that
no possible re-arrangements of society--not even that most ideal
commune pictured by Paul Trent--will ever bring it about that
the fear of discovery in erotic infidelities will be abolished. Such
"alarums and excursions," such panic-stricken beatings of the
heart, seem as deeply implicit in the fatality of human relations
as is the indestructibleness of jealousy itself.

Zoyland had already thrown one of his herculean limbs out of
bed; and with his heel on the floor was clutching the bed-clothes,
'preparatory to obeying his wife's summons, when Eudoxia, who
had curled up her supple slenderness like a frightened grass-
snake, close under the window-sill, heard Zookey's voice reassur-
ring both mother and child.

"There's Mother!" she whispered. She was right. For once, it
seemed, the old woman's influence had succeeded with the head-
strong baby; for they heard its shrill cries die down now; and
soon after they could catch the creaking of the heavy shoes she
wore and the drag of her lame foot--for Zookey suffered from
eczema and the chief ornament on her extemporised toilet-table,
which was a big black trunk with Nell's maiden initials on it.
was a great china pot of zinc ointment--as she returned into the
ante-room.

Even his herculean capacity for amorous play being exhausted,
and this alarm having roused them both to extreme wakefulness,
Zoyland and Miss Pippard fell to talking in low whispers.

A luminous half-moon, disencumbered tonight of those eter-
nally eastward-travelling clouds, threw a silvery stream between
the brown curtains of their window; a stream which fell on the
man's bushy beard and on the girl's old-fashioned night-gown
and on her slippers tossed down upon the floor. In his rough
eagerness, Zoyland had torn away the top button from the front
of this gown, and the girl's long thin neck protruded wantonly
and weirdly; sometimes entering that ray of moonlight and some-
times receding from it, like a slender birch-trunk surrounded by
swaying bracken. Close beside Miss Pippard's faded blue slip-
pers Zoyland had thrown down his own muddy boots, one of
which lay on its side, contented and at ease, in that little pool
of moonlight, while the other, left in the outer darkness, stared
sadly at the ceiling.

They were both sitting up in the bed, their backs against the
western wall of the cottage, while the stream of moonlight enter-
ing on their right hand and illuminating the girl's neck and the
fringe of his beard, left their upraised knees, over which the rum-
pled bed-clothes extended in confusion, partly in light and partly
in shadow. One of his arms was hanging loosely over the edge
of the couch while the other, flung round her waist and against
her bare side was teasing his tired senses with an aftermath of
delicate tantalisation. As he rested there, Will Zoyland felt ex-
tremely grateful to Miss Pippard for the pleasure she had given
him and for the pleasure she was still suffusing through every
nerve of his deliciously lethargic frame. Sexual gratitude is an
emotion much less frequent in modern days than in mediaeval
times, owing to the fact that industrialism has cheapened the
value of the sex-thrill by lowering the ritual-walls surrounding
it. In modern times it needs a profoundly magnanimous and even
quixotic nature to feel this emotion to any extreme degree. It is
doubtless this absence of sexual gratitude that accounts for the
cold-blooded and savage hatred that so many separated couples
feel for each other today; and the furious vindictiveness of their
disputes over money. But it is a sign of meanness in a man or
a woman, and of a certain thinness of character, when such grati-
tude is so quickly forgotten. A large nature may find it necessary
to hit fiercely back; may find it necessary to escape altogether;
but even in its retorts, even in its avoidance, it retains a certain
fundamental tenderness and indulgence, based upon physical
gratitude for the thrilling sensations of the past.

It was largely his over-brimming gratitude to Nell for the
thrills which he had got from the touch of her body that had
made Zoyland so indulgent in the matter of Sam. Men that sail
the sea are as a rule, by reason of their isolation from women,
more grateful to them for their favours than landsmen are. A
jealous peasant, a jealous tradesman is much more common than
a jealous sailor; and though Lord P.'s bastard had never sailed
the sea, his Norse ancestors had, and that manner of life lay deep
in his blood.

Miss Pippard was a complete stranger to Will Zoyland; and,
for this very reason, the fact that the shuffling of life's cards--or
as some would say, the machinations of Zookey--had given him
the thrilling privilege of enjoying the satiny texture, cool and
slippery as the leaves of waterlilies, of the girl's limbs, endowed
their moonlit whispers with a piquancy as delicate and exalted
as a bird's song or a butterfly's flight in a monastic cloister.

"I'm glad your mother's asked Mother Legge tomorrow," whis-
pered Will, "for I've always had a fancy for that old lady. She's
a classic figure, if you know what I mean, my dear. My father
used to say she made him think of a whore-mistress in Rome."

"Is it true, Mr. Zoyland," came a faint response from the white
figure at his side, "that the Mayor of Glaston cured poor Tittie
of a killing cancer?"

"God! my dear, I don't know! I've been out at Wookey all
the autumn. Perhaps it wasn't cancer at all. You'd better ask her
tomorrow and see what she says. I wouldn't go to that pious old
humbug, if I had the worst cancer ever known. I'd shoot my-
self first."

"They say there'll be rare doings," went on Miss Pippard,
offering as she spoke just the kind of resistance to his caresses
that enhanced their value while it did not waylay their direction,
"when Mr. Geard opens his new arch on Chalice Hill. They say
they foreigners be due to come in trainloads to see 'um. I were
out at Moorleaze, by Witham Friary, on Pageant Day. Missus
went to it, and so did the childer; but Master kept I by 'un,
to" She interrupted herself with a little click of her tongue
against her teeth. This sound usually denotes some gentle disaster
when uttered by a young girl. In the case of Miss Pippard it
denoted an indulgent awareness of amorous advances.

"To play in the hayloft with him?" whispered Zoyland,

"There were a lot o' new goslings," Eudoxia continued
gravely, "out there by Croft Pond; and I were the only maid in
Dairy what he trusted wi' they. Old Madge Dill was too rheu-
matic to cross barton. She be the one I told 'ee about, Mr. Zoy-
land, what got the rheumatiz, from picking watercress."

"I remember, sweetheart," whispered Zoyland. "She was the
one who stinted you in butter till you scared her by that tale of
the corpse candles."

"So she was," sighed Eudoxia, "and arter that tale I were the
richest-nourished woman in Mid-Somerset. I wish often--and
sweet Jesus do know I wish it now!--that Mother had never
made me leave that good place. Master often would say I were
the deftest maid for smelling out mushrooms that he'd ever seen.
He often said that when I married he'd give me a solid gold
bracelet wi' filgree lacework on 'en." Thus whispered Eudoxia
and sighed heavily.

She gave her bed-fellow plenty of time to meditate on the
lavish liberality of Moorleaze and upon ways and means of
rivalling it. Then she sighed again.

"I'd like Mother to try if the Mayor's Miracle Spring on
Chalice Hill could cure her eczema." This pious wish was
breathed into the moonlight with intense gravity. And then, even
at the very moment when her resistance to her seducer's one-
handed caresses perceptibly slackened, she added in a still graver
whisper:

"It makes her toes itch terrible--poor Mother! I'd give half
a year's wages to ease her of thiccy devil's smart!"

Zoyland's lechery was of a very subdued kind just now, so he
could afford to moralise at this moment to any extent. "Some-
times," he said to himself, "these girls seem to have no nervous
system at all. They can respond without responding, and think
of God knows what! If anyone asked me what I valued most in
a woman I'd say attention! It's like dealing with a creature that's
half an animal and half an angel. The larger part of your talk,
of your love-making, of your ideas, of your thoughts, pass over
them like water off a duck's back!" He had arrived at this finale
in his meditations when the girl suddenly stiffened herself like
a galvanic wire and shrank against the brown curtain, pulling
the bed-clothes over her head. Zoyland had time to catch one
faint rustle on the staircase leading to the bedroom above, and
one slight creaking of the bannister; but he had no sooner leapt
out of bed and stumbled over the girl's slippers, than the door at
the foot of the staircase was flung cpen, and Nell--in her blue
dressing-gown and with a flat silver candlestick in her hand--
stepped into the room.

To the end of his days Zoyland remembered the expression of
Nell's face. Her eyes were gleaming with a fierce, hard, bright
lustre when she first came in; but as she raised her candle one
side of her features was blotted out in shadow.

"Aren't you ashamed of yourselves?" she cried in a clear ring-
ing voice, and with a hand that he could see was neither trem-
bling nor shaking she carried the candle into the middle of the
room and laid it on the little green card-table, pushing a vase
of small-flowering chrysanthemums that stood there out of the
way with the candlestick rim.

The bearded man, looking very tall and formidable in the
candlelight, held his ground and remained with his massive legs
firmly planted on the rug, his bare feet widely apart, his flannel
shirt hanging loose over his bare thighs. But Nell came right up
to him and with an imperious gesture with her hand made as if
she would push him out of the way as she went to the couch to
confront Miss Pippard. Not being able to do this and apparently
surprised at the man's imperturbable sangfroid, Nell made a step
sideways toward the wall on her left and called out to the hud-
dled figure on the couch.

"Aren't you ashamed of yourself, Eudoxia? Aren't you ashamed
to treat me like this and your mother upstairs too; and me with
little Harry? I can't understand you, Eudoxia. I can't understand
how you could do such a thing!"

While Nell was thus expressing her indignation to the form on
the couch, Zoyland's mind was rapidly considering two alterna-
tive lines of action. Should he pick up his clothes, which lay
there, piled up on a wicker chair, near the bookcase--that book-
case that contained the massive volumes of Arabia Deserta--and
retire with them to his "smoking-room," leaving Eudoxia to the
mercy of Nell? Or should he, by hook or by crook, compel
his wife to go back to her bedroom and her child? Huntsman
as he was, Will had only to decide on the line to take, and he
would follow it up recklessly and defiantly. Up to this point,
Nell, in her righteous anger, had had the whiphand over both of
them. But Zoyland's one clear instinct now was to save Miss Pip-
pard from further humiliation. Lovely though Nell looked in
her blue dressing-gown, the banked-up righteousness of her in-
dignation seemed to have changed her personality in a very
subtle way. Zoyland could not help experiencing a queer shock
when he saw how this gross incursion had dragged the beautiful
girl into the role of jealous, sport-spoiling domesticity, wherein
it is hard for any woman to play an attractive part.

The man's sensations followed one another, like straws on
a splashing water-fall, during the few seconds of Nell's words to
that tumbled couch from which his own burly form now warded
off the candleflame.

"Come on upstairs, Nell," he said, moving toward her. "We'll
talk this out better upstairs. It's not Eudoxia's fault."

"Don't come near me--don't touch me!" cried his wife, with
scarlet cheeks and flashing eyes.

"Come on upstairs, Nell!" he repeated in a quiet voice that was
full nevertheless of a formidable resolution. Those invisible
naturalists--belonging to regions of Being more powerful, I will
not say "higher" than ours--who take a peculiar and doubtless
sometimes a decisive interest, as Mat Dekker did with his
aquarium, in human dramas as tense as this--must have been
impressed by Zoyland's calm and masterful handling of this
situation. They would have seen that all his real tenderness was
for his wife--they would have seen that he regarded his affair
with Miss Pippard as of no more consequence than if he'd been
caught stealing cherries. But they would also have noted that he
had the rare gift of using violence in cold blood. For instead of
being in the remotest degree intimidated by Nell's electric fury--
and in her fit of blind sex-reaction the gentle girl struggled like
a pantheress in his arms--he lifted her up, as Zookey might have
lifted little Master Henry, and carried her bodily up the stairs
into the room above, when he laid her--Zookey Pippard having
discreetly closed the door of the ante-room--upon the bed, by
the side of her sleeping first-born.

The aforementioned celestial naturalists would not have been
deceived, as certainly the terrified Eudoxia was, into regarding
Nell's furious anger as a deep and tragic feeling. They would
have commented to one another--over this Whitelake aquarium
of anthropoid minnows--to the effect that had Nell been really
tragically hurt she would have hugged her baby to her heart
where she was, and never come down those stairs so deliberately,
so softly, and so bent on righteous retribution!

What Eudoxia beheld when she removed the bedclothes from
her head was the wide-open door of the staircase, the flickering
candle on the table, the twisted blue girdle of Nell's dressing
gown lying in the same pool of moonlight as her own slippers
and her paramour's boot, and the untouched heap of the master's
clothes piled up in the wicker chair over by the bookcase.

Sitting up in bed with beating heart, the girl surveyed these
objects for a second or two. Then, under her breath, deeply,
passionately, concisely--and it must be confessed with no little
justification--she cursed "the womb that bore her and the paps
that had given her suck." .

"It's all your fault, Mother!" she wailed in her heart. This is
the last time I'll listen to 'ee! I'll go back to Moorleaze tomor-
row, so help me God!"...


The first of the guests to arrive on the following afternoon,
which turned out to be a neutral day, as days go, neither wet nor
fine, neither windless nor gusty, neither warm nor particular y
chill, was the Marquis of P. and the Lady Rachel.

Lord P. arrived in a thoroughly nervous and crusty humour.
Zoyland and Nell had barely finished their late lunch, cooked by
Zookey in sulky silence--her daughter having gone off to catch
the nine o'clock bus to Frome, intending to quit the bus at
Wanstrow, and make the best of her way, without even risking
a telegram, safe back to her deserted goslings of Croft Pond.

The Marquis went at once for a stroll by the river with his
son, leaving Sergeant Blimp to dispose of the green-wheeled
dog-cart and the black horse, as best he might.

"I've got a piece of news for you, Will," he declared with an
assumed eagerness, as soon as they were out of hearing. The
bastard shrugged his great shoulders. He knew his father too
well. The long-winded dissimulation of the House of Lords
pulled no wool over his eyes.

"The Governor's been making an ass of himself," he thought
grimly. "This is his regular beginning!"

The old man's profile, as he watched it moving by his side
with the scrubby Vandyke beard and prominent nose, seemed to
have grown perceptibly sharper since he saw it last. The aged
nobleman had a pinched, frustrated, tired look on his old war-
rior's face, as if he'd been wearing his suit of chain-armour too
many years, and would be glad enough to make his will and lie
down with his forefathers in Wells Cathedral.

"I shan't have to sell Mark Court," said Lord P., "that's one
good thing. I did a good stroke of business last night, me boy.
I wish you could have seen how I led 'em on and hustled 'em and
rustled 'em and tussled 'em."

"Christ, Dad!" cried the other, in great alarm, snatching at
his father's sleeve and bringing him to a halt, while he swung
round to face him. "What have you gone and done now?"

"They came last night," said the old gentleman. "Three of the
devils came! One was your wife's brother, the Bolshevist--an
honest chap, by the way, that fellow is,--and an agitator of some
sort--an impossible individual; and the third bloke was a clever
lawyer from the Scilly Isles--called Trent. He very soon realised
with whom he had to deal. The other two had seemed inclined to
sermonise me. They took the tone that if I didn't let 'em have
their way this time now, I'd be far worse caught later on. But I
soon let 'em see I wasn't the sort of person they could rush like
that! But this fellow Trent seems to have made a pretty close
study of all the Glastonbury leases and properties; and he helped
me to make your Bolshevist relative see my points when I ex-
plained the situation."

"For God's sake what have you done, Sir?" cried the bastard,
mightily alarmed.

The old man straightened his shoulders and leaned forward
a little, bowing stiffly from his waist, like a soldier and a courtier,
but digging his cane deeply into the tow-path mud.

"Well, I'll tell you, lad," he said, leaning on the handle of
his stick. "I've fixed things now so that I shan't have to worry
any more about my income, for years to come. I've been looking
up the entail and those brothers of yours--damn their souls!
A lot they care for my troubles!--have no word to speak in this.
The Zoyland entail doesn't touch Glastonbury."

"You've gone and sold " cried the bastard.

"No, I haven't, lad. Don't get excited too soon. All I've sold
to 'em, and for a good round sum too, I can assure you, is that
section of the dye works properties that are on my land. That's
the newest section, you know. That Crow fellow will look yellow
in the gizzard when I clear him out; and a good thing too. He's
been taking things too much for granted, the snappy close-
mouthed rogue! But for the rest; for the High Street shops and
for the Bove Town and Paradise property; I've let 'em have
those on a fifty years' lease, and at a thousand pounds higher
rent, too, than I got from the tradesmen and the slum-tenants.
It's a first-rate piece of business, lad! Old Beere is furious, of
course. But that's because I did it over his head. But a lot he's
done for me these last years--except eat my pheasants and tell
me indecent yarns about his daughter and your wife's sister-in-
law, who everybody told me was soft on Crow! He's in his
dotage, old Beere is. He thinks it's a great glory and a mark of
gentility in him that he's got a daughter who don't run after
the boys! I told the old fool that his sort of gal would murder
him for his cash if he wasn't careful."

William Zoyland jerked himself uncivilly away from his father
and took a hurried step along the tow-path.

So this was what that slippery lawyer from Cornwall had
been up to all these weeks in that new office of his! Had he
got round old Beere? No!--impossible. But brother Dave was
certainly behind it! Who would have supposed that that funny
little man would have had the gumption. But of course
the fellow at the back of the whole thing was that wily old
humbug, Geard. He was the one! "I must run off and tell
Philip," he thought, "this afternoon; as soon as the christening
is over. The newest section of the dye works sold!--Why it's
a serious blow! Of course he has the others...but it's serious,
it's terribly serious. How on earth will Philip take it?"

He came striding back to his father.

"Well...you have gone and done it!" he rapped out bru-
tally. "But let's see if I've got it clear what you've done. You've
sold that newest piece of factory-land to them? The one north
of Manor House Road and southeast of the Burnham and Ever-
creech Railway? That other one, east of the cemetery, doesn't
belong to you? Philip Crow is still safe there? But listen--are
you sure that the buildings on that newest section are yours to
sell? I mean the whole plant? Didn't that man--what's-his-name,
that Crow bought out--sell him all those buildings with the good-
will?"

The Marquis stroked the point of his grey beard.

"Couldn't sell what wasn't his, lad! No, no! That newest sec-
tion of buildings near the Burnham Railway, was built by the
business man of our family, your great-uncle, Lord Edward.
That was before the days when you were a baby in petticoats,
out there at Limoges. I took your mother to see 'em...had a
pretty narrow shave too, that day, of being nabbed...she had
the devil's own spirit, that woman,...when it came to skating
on thin ice...just like you, me boy!"

While this conversation was going on, Lady Rachel was being
introduced to little Master Henry.

Zookey Pippard recovered her temper a little in the excitement
of dressing the babe in its christening-robe; and for some reason
only known to its own passionate and highly strung spirit the
infant took a violent fancy to Rachel, clinging to the finger
she gave it smiling and slobbering in rapture when she re-
ceived it in her lap.

The next to arrive among the expected guests was none other
than Mat Dekker. The tall massive form of the priest was ar-
rayed in his long black Sunday coat, and he had taken a lot
of trouble to wipe his thick boots with swathes of grass before
presenting himself at the door of Whitelake Cottage. He had
forgotten, however, to change his week-day trousers, and these
looked more faded and shabby than usual. The man was ob-
viously strung-up and full of seething emotions; but he kept
himself well in control, and begged quite naturally for a little
tete-a-tete with the mother of this newly enrolled soldier of Christ.

It was a strange moment for both of them when the mother
and the grandfather of Henry Sangamore Rollo Zoyland sat
opposite each other in that low-ceilinged bedroom, at the top
of those stairs down which the girl had carried her candle to
such drastic purpose the night before.

She lay now at full length on the bed, propped up on two
pillows, while her child, though fast asleep in its cradle between
them, did not separate her very far from the priest.

Fortunately or unfortunately, as it may chance to be, the
amorous clairvoyance of a woman is lulled, drugged, drowsed,
deliciously stupefied, by the magical sensation of giving suck.
Although her child was fast asleep now, the feeling of its exact-
ing lips, of its masterful thirst for the fount of her life, was still
clinging to her responsive body, and rendering it dull, tranced,
entoiled, preoccupied, to all other sensitised awareness! Thus
as she allowed Mat Dekker to retain her cold schoolgirl fingers
across the counterpane of the sleeping child, resting her hand
with his, in fact, upon the wicker edge of the cradle, it never
entered her head that this man--her dear love's father--had
anything in his heart toward her except a deep priestly sympathy.
She knew she felt no shyness of him; she knew she felt a lovely
and relaxed security in his presence; she knew she was deriving
from the touch of his rough fingers an inrush of spiritual
strength; but beyond this she experienced, or, was conscious of
experiencing, no intimate link between them.

There was one restraint, however, that did come over her, and
that puzzled her a little as she struggled in her mind to overcome
it--a singular difficulty in mentioning his son's name to him. She
longed to call out to this silent, rugged, friendly supporter: "And
now tell me everything about my Sam!" But some inexplicable
force always held back the words, just as they slid, like drops of
recurrent rain from the smooth stalk of her happy peace, to the
tip of her tongue.

"Why can't I ask him how Sam is?" she thought to herself.
"It must be because of his religion. He's come to baptise Sam's
child--but he doesn't want to think of us together."

With this explanation in her mind, she let herself relax again
on her pillows and close her eyes, pressing the hand that held her
own in a confiding and trusting clasp. It was Mat himself who
broke this silence, at last.

"I've been thinking a great deal lately, Nell," he said, "about
this grand consecration day of the Mayor's. It's to be in January
they tell me now; and I hear the wildest tales, as I go about
among my people, as to what the man is planning." He sighed
heavily, as he spoke, and Nell took the opportunity of repossess-
ing herself of her right hand which she promptly made use of
to pull her blue robe more tightly about her.

Deeply had Mat Dekker sighed when he spoke of the Mayor
of Glastonbury; and the girl, in her maternal atrophy of the sex
nerve, had put the sigh down entirely to the delicate professional
problem of how to deal with Mr. Geard's wild and fantastic
schemes. But, of course, in reality, not more than a thousandth
part of this heavy sigh had anything to do with Mr. Geard's
activities.

They were interrupted by the appearance of Zookey Pippard
who came to tell them that all the other guests had duly arrived
and that his Lordship was growing impatient for the ceremony
to begin.

Zookey approached the cradle and Mat Dekker stood up.

"I hope this isn't the first time, Zookey," said the priest with
a kindly chuckle--he was always a transformed man when he
dealt with the native-born, a touch of the old Quantocks' accent
entering, so to speak, his very manner as well as his intonation--
"that you'll have heard me say a prayer, since--but us won't let
the Missus know how well we know each other, shall us?"

Under normal conditions this indulgent indiscretion, referring
to an occasion when the worthy man had rescued this tricky old
baggage from the clutches of Mr. Sheperd, would have met with
a roguish retort. But the naughty old woman was still smarting
from Nell's anger over Eudoxia.

"His Lordship said to her Ladyship just now," Mrs. Pippard
retorted, humming and murmuring over the baby and giving its
tiny red cheek a fillip with her finger-nail. "What be Dr. Dekker
doing upstairs? Be he a-baptising of she?"

"Nonsense, Zookey!" cried Nell, "aren't you ashamed to tell
such fibs? But you had better go and get ready, Mr. Dekker.
Tell them Zookey and I will bring Henry down in less than five
minutes...."

"And so she said her must go; and Doxy said Mister would be
best pleased for she to go, her wone self." These exciting words
echoed through the kitchen of Whitelake Cottage half an hour
later, when the christening was well over and the upper-class
portion of its audience was having their tea in the parlour.

"She shouldn't a-spoke up like that," said Nancy Stickles re-
proachfully, putting down a great piece of new bread and black-
currant jam, for they were all squarely seated round the kitchen
table, and looking with a straight open gaze into the equivocal
face of Zookey--"After all it weren't nice for Mr. Zoyland to be
talking to she on sofa in parlour, like you says he were, and she
in bed with Master Henry, and house all hushed and still."

"Will you have another piece of sponge cake, Auntie Legge?"
threw in the hospitable Zookey. "Us all do know how 'spectable
and proper you be, Nance Stickles, when all the town know of
how Red Robinson was turned out of house by your Harry be-
cause of the fuss you made of 'ee and the clipping and colling
that went on when your Harry was to bed. I do know for sure
how 'twere, because Mr. Robinson told me of it, his wone self."

It was at this point that Abel Twig broke in, interrupting this
altercation among the women with such a quavering faint voice
that it seemed like the voice of Philosophy itself come forth from
those old Lake Village mounds.

"Thik Red Robinson were zour, no doubt, when Mistress Nance
didn't let 'un do what 'a wanted to do...and so 'a went and cast
up this tale agin' her, same as thik dirty Potiphar-scrub did
agin' King Joseph in History."

There was an uncomfortable silence round the kitchen table,
during which the more peacefully inclined among the guests
turned to Mother Legge for protection. That great provider of
Cyprian pleasures had so far hardly uttered a word. She had kept
her eyes fixed upon the door which led into the parlour; a door
which had been carried bodily to the cottage from Mark Court
and was of excessively thick oak.

"Don't let them get quarrellin', Auntie," pleaded Tittie Peth-
erton with her mouth full of buttered scone.

Sally Jones added her voice to that of Tittie, from whose ap-
pearance no one certainly would ever have supposed that a few
months ago she was screaming so pitiably for morphia.

"Mrs. Legge!" cried Sally, as if the old procuress were very
deaf. "Didn't 'ee hear, Mrs. Legge, what Zookey Pippard said to
Nance Stickles?"

The mother of Eudoxia was not slow in defending herself.

"Auntie be hard of hearing," she threw in spitefully, "when her
eats her tea with poor volk in kitchen, 'stead of with gentry in
parlour."

These words hit Mother Legge straight to the heart. For the
truth was that the old lady had half-thought when she received
the invitation to attend the Zoyland christening, that her place
would have been with the gentry rather than with her humble
relatives. It was indeed in pensive consideration of this unhappy
nuance that the portly lady, though they had given her the only
chair that had arms and the only tea-cup that wasn't a kitchen-
cup and had taken care to help her first to every dainty on the
table, now stared gravely at this great oaken door through which
the one voice of the people within that was at all articulate--
and that only now and again--was the voice of William Zoyland.
The other voices were lost in a vague indistinguishable murmur.

Zookey Pippard was among the few women in Glastonbury
who ever stood up to the present tenant of Camelot and of "my
other house." But there was a majestic dignity in the rebuke
that the old lady administered now and an incredible daring too.
She actually got up from her chair, walked to the oaken door,
opened it wide enough for her person to fill the whole space and
said with perfect sangfroid to Nell: "Your servant here, Ma'am,
is unwilling to leave us to look after ourselves; but you must
please, tell us the moment you need her; for we can get on per-
fectly well without her."

"Oh, thank you, Mrs. Legge; thank you very much!" cried
Nell, half-rising from her chair in that particular flurry of per-
turbation that young hostesses feel when there are signs of a
mutiny below deck. It was the Marquis who saved the situation.

"Why, if that isn't my old friend from Paradise! They never
told me they'd got you here! Where have they been hiding you?
Come over here--is that all right, Nell?--and sit by me." He
gave the arm-chair in which Persephone was seated a little jerk
with his finger and thumb--he behaved exactly as if he had been
Theodoric the Ostrogoth, patronising some harem at Algiers and
indicating by the slightest tap upon his Gothic sword-hilt that he
would be more amused by the aged story-teller of the tents than
by the cleverest young houri.

Persephone as she languidly rose, smiling very sweetly upon
Mrs. Legge and extending one of her long arms toward her, gave
Lord P. one single quick, flashing, steel-piercing glance that not
only succeeded in making the old despot feel uncomfortable,
but in making him heartily wish her back; so lovely did she look
in her anger.

"She could have stabbed me, the little minx," he thought.
"And I must see her again," he thought.

Once settled in this capacious chair, with all her black satin
flounces and her voluminous black laces deposited about her,
Mother Legge gazed round her with impenetrable aplomb. Under
the protection of my Lord she felt ready to be indulgent to her
enemies and more than bountiful to her friends. She even felt
she owed something to Zookey Pippard for having been the one
to give her the final prod that had led to this public recognition
of her true status in Glastonbury society.

"He be fast asleep, the pretty babe," she remarked now, glanc-
ing upwards at the ceiling. "You splashed 'un well with the
holy water, Passon! It put me in mind of me wone Baptism to
see how they drops did trickle over 'un."

There arose at this moment a pressing necessity for more hot
water in Nell's best silver tea-pot, which had been a present
from her communist brother. To that brother the young mother
looked now, for she noticed that Persephone, in her reaction
from the rebuff she had received from my Lord, was flirting out-
rageously with Will.

Dave got up with alacrity, opened the thick oak door and
entered the kitchen, allowing a clatter of excited women's voices,
mingled with the husky bass tones of Number One, to pour into
the parlour.

He returned with the kettle and filled up the tea-pot, which
his sister carefully held out to him across the sun-burnt wrists
and clean Sunday shirt-cuffs of the Vicar. The door between the
two rooms remained open while this transaction went on; and
that curious tension that comes over two confronted groups of
people, between whom yawns the social gulf, reduced Whitelake
Cottage to one complete self-conscious silence. It was through
the middle of this silence that Dave, like a young doctor walking
down a ward of expectant patients, took the kettle back to the
kitchen and returned to his place, closing the oak door be-
hind him.

"I can't think how we people," he said, "can be content to go
on with this sort of thing. I suppose there isn't one of us here
who casts a thought on all those picks and shovels that are work-
ing now, over at Wookey, getting out that tin which Nature put
into the Mendips for the benefit of everybody."

Will Zoyland rolled his amorous blue eyes lazily round from
his contemplation of Percy's supple figure and stared at the
speaker, who now look his seat by Lady Rachel.

A splutter of bullying raillery burst from him before his brain
had the wit to think of a good retort.

"What is your name?
Elacampaine!
If you ask me again
I'll tell you the same,"

he chanted in an aggravating manner; and then he added:

"You and I and the Vicar, Dave, my friend, are the only ones
here who could use those shovels for five minutes; and we
couldn't use them--at least I couldn't--for half an hour with-
out getting exhausted. What are you going to do about that, eh?
There must be division of labour in this world."

"But we're not labouring at all!" cried Lady Rachel, making
room for Dave to take his seat by her side.

"Not labouring, Rachel? That's a nice thing to say," cried Zoy-
land in a great voice, "when I've given up my one single holiday
for months to entertain all you people and have Henry chris-
tened! You should see how I work out there, my good child.
Why, I'm often in that draughty little office, hours after Spear's
precious shovellers have gone home to their suppers."

He shouted all this so loudly that Dave's answer was made the
more effective by its extreme quietness.

"We all can't dig, Will. That's true enough; but we'd all dodge
it if we could. I'd be content if those who did the dirty work got
more pay than the rest of us--instead of much less; and being
looked down upon by us as well."

Zoyland must have been conscious of the advantage that
Spear's quietness gave him. He must have been nourishing a bit-
ter grievance too about Eudoxia and a still deeper one over what
his father had just told him with regard to the sale; for he now
cried out quite uncivilly:

"Bosh! Rats! All these theories are the merest clap-trap! It's
the same all over the world! Wherever you go you see men or-
dering and men obeying. Would you yourself be found with a
pick and shovel, I'd like to know, if you could drill us all into
your precious commune tomorrow?"

A humorous smile flickered across Dave's face at the mention
of the word commune. "They little guess," he thought to himself,
"how near they are to a commune in Glastonbury!"

But before he could reply, Lady Rachel had leaped into the
breach.

"The point you entirely slur over, Will," cried the young girl,
quoting with a touching faithfulness to her lover, a paragraph
in next Saturday's Wayfarer "is whether these labourers would
prefer working for a single individual like Philip Crow, or
working for themselves--that's to say for the community."

"Well said, Lady Rachel!" murmured Mr. Spear.

There were actually tears in his eyes as he looked at her, so
delighted was he to find how far she had travelled along the
path, since he had last talked with her.

"Well said, little traitor!" mimicked Zoyland.

"If you'd think a little more and shout a little less, Will, it
would be a good thing," retorted his half-sister with a red flush
on her cheeks.

"What she said is unanswerable," remarked Dave Spear sternly.

The Marquis of P. rose to his feet

"Will," he said in a slow drawling voice, "I wish you'd be so
good as to tell the Sergeant to put my horse in and bring him
round." He then turned politely to Nell, fumbling for a minute
in the pockets of his coat, and finally producing an object tied
up in tissue paper.

"I picked up Rachel at the curiosity shop in Glastonbury," he
said, "and she helped me to choose this little trifle for the child.
That man?...that extraordinary individual...who's always there
now...took a long time hunting it up...but it's genuine...he said
it was rather valuable...it's got our arms on it anyway...which I
thought was a rather happy coincidence."

However long Mr. Evans may have taken in finding the object
referred to, he certainly hadn't taken very long in tying it up;
for, as Lord P. brought it out of his pocket, the tissue paper was
already in tatters. It was a tiny little cup, but it was apparently
made of gold; and there was a general rush of the company to
look at it.

Nell made a very pretty, hesitating, upward tilt of her face;
and the bastard's father didn't hesitate to take advantage of this.
He held her upraised chin gently between his finger and thumb
for a second as he brushed her full lips with his grey mustache.

"Bless you, my dear," whispered the old man softly. "After all
it's you mothers who are the real workers."

The fuss over the golden cup, which Nell presently, to prevent
the portly lady having to struggle to her feet, placed in Mother
Legge's lap, occupied the company sufficiently and laid--like the
council's water-cart--the cloud of controversial dust, until Ser-
geant Blimp appeared at the back door with the green-wheeled
dog-cart.

The Marquis and his daughter had to pass through the kitchen
to reach the vehicle, and Zookey Pippard wisely placed a block
of wood against the oak door to keep it open.

The Sergeant and his big horse were soon surrounded by a
mingled company from both the two rooms; for a horse is
still the one thing in England that obliterates all social
embarrassment.

"How be, Sergeant?" said Abel Twig familiarly to the sol-
emn-faced coachman.

"Pretty tidy, Mr. Twig, thank'ee--I'd like it well enough down
here and be glad enough--I would--to stay down here, if
'tweren't for they Bellamys. Those two old warlocks, Mr. Twig,
were made by Satan, to bother a man's life out of him."

"I can believe it. Sergeant, I can believe it. I only once set
eyes on thik wold couple; and that were at Somerton girt Fair;
but I seed 'un haggling wi' they gippoos in a manner onbefitting
decent Christian volk. I were sorry for they gippoos...and
that's the truth, Sergeant...when I heerd how thik pair were
carryin' on."

Sally Jones now hurried forward to stroke the mane of the
black horse.

"How does yer uncle Bart enjoy 'is-sell, Sal, now he be back
in shop?"

"He ain't doing only half what he were, Mr. Twig," replied
Sal, "and 'ee have gived up his place over shop too. He have
taken a room at Dickery Cantle's where he can see the cattle
market from his windy. He says, Them as has had a zysty as
bad as my zysty do like to see a bit of the girt world, afore they
caves in.' "

When the Marquis and his daughter appeared upon the scene,
and were helped into the dog-cart there was quite a little crowd
around them.

Though most of these friendly adherents were only women,
Lord P. received an old-fashioned feudal ovation as he drove off
by Blimp's side with Lady Rachel perched upon the back seat.

"'Tis fine to smell a whiff of good horse's dung again," said
Abel Twig to Zookey, as they turned back into the house, "in
place of this here gasoline."

"That's what my darter Doxy said, only this very marnin', as
her went off to get the Frome bus. ‘Mother,' my darter said, I
reckon I'll go back where people aren't so finicky and so per-
tickler, and where they girt cart-horses have silver bells on
their necks.' "

Indeed with the departure of the head of the Zoyland family
a strange and uncanny irritation seized that whole group of
people, an irritation that seemed to flow like an evil electricity
from kitchen to parlour, and from parlour back again to kitchen.
The little golden christening cup, with the Zoyland falcon on it,
which the Marquis had brought, became now the innocent cause
of a violent quarrel between Zookey and Sally Jones.

Nell had brought the cup in to show them, as soon as the dog-
cart had driven off, and Sally had said that Uncle Bart had told
her long ago about that gold cup and that Miss Crummie had
wanted to see it, but Miss Cordy, what's now Mrs. Evans--had
said 'tweren't right "to show things to people unless people were
thinking of buying things."

It was then that Zookey had rudely remarked:

"Thik wold Number Two do blurt out lies as fast as his lungs
do pant. I reckon he thought thik cup were common silver-plate
till Mr. Evans told 'un 'twere gold."

To this insult Sally had replied in an incoherent rush of
words, the drift of which was that she had heard Mr. Geard tell
Mrs. Geard that if he were blessed by Providence to find his dear
Lord's cup, there'd be something in Glaston that would divide
lies from truth forevermore. "And that," Sally had added
fiercely, "that would be the last of thee, and of thee's devil's
tongue!"

"Ye'll be saying next that his Lordship's gold cup," retorted
Zookey, "with his Lordship's wone trade-mark on it, be the
Mayor's cup. That comes of letting Red Robinson take 'ee, where
no decent woman should be took! I've a seed ye two, sneaking
whoam at night down Chilkwell Street and if thee don't mind
thee's manners, I'll let the Mayor know thee do go round town,
telling tales of what he says to his Missus, when none be by!"

Nell had gone upsairs by this time to suckle little Henry;
Zookey was clearing away the tea-things in the parlour; Zoyland
and Percy were standing together by the nearest pollard willow
in the direction of that deep weir, into the waters of which, on
the occasion of Mat Dekker's first appearance here last March,
Sam had been so strongly tempted to fling his bearded rival.

Dave Spear, using Percy's little motor car for this purpose,
was occupying, himself by patiently driving, in two successive
trips, first one party and then another of the proletarian guests
to their various homes in the town. He took Mother Legge and
Tittie first. Then, on his return, he took Abel Twig, Nancy
Stickles and Sally Jones, Sally sitting on Nancy's lap. This oc-
cupied him altogether, with the inevitable lingering conversations
in doorways, nearly a whole hour; and thus it was getting on for
seven o'clock when he finally found himself turning out the
lights of his machine on that gravel patch at the back door, upon
which lay the wholesome-smelling droppings of the black horse
from Mark's Court.

Entering the kitchen by that well-oiled outer door that Doxy
Pippard had found so serviceable, he discovered Doxy's mother
laboriously coping with an enormous pile of dirty dishes. Will
had purchased at the last moment, in the china department at
Wollop's, a number of cheap tea-cups and plates that Nell had
cordially disliked, but that Zookey, hearing the altercation about
them, cast an envious eye upon, regarding them as a possible
perquisite. These new cups and plates, although not to be com-
pared for intrinsic beauty with Nell's own collection, possessed
for Zookey a far greater value than these, just because there hung
over them this vague premonitory glamour of future ownership.
Without doing it deliberately Zookey broke two of Nell's nicest
cups, treasured relics of the quiet Spear family, objects that
bore no predatory falcon upon their gilt-bordered whiteness; but
not one of these new "Wollop things" did she so much as crack,
partly because of their sturdier substance, but also because in her
acquisitive mind, they were destined for her own dresser in Bove
Town. After standing to chat for a few minutes with Mrs. Pip-
pard, a friendly gesture that was rewarded by several wickedly
barbed pieces of information ("Parson can't hang over Missus
long enough, when she have child at breast," being one of these,
and "Thee's preety lady and the Master do seem to like thik dark
river-bank" being another and "'Twere wondrous to see how
Auntie Legge's eyes did shine when gold cup were on lap" being
a third) Dave Spear pushed open the door and went into the
parlour. Here he found an aura of such forlorn emptiness and
hushed sterility that even his vigorous and phlegmatic nerves
were affected by it.

Nell--or Mat Dekker when he went up to Nell--had blown out
all the candles save one and the first thing Dave did was to light
two more. All three at his elbow on the table, he sat down to.
read and to smoke, taking both book and pipe from his own
capacious pocket. A treatise upon the Lost Atlantis it was that
Dave produced and it interested him as an imaginative picture
of an ancient communistic state.

A certain interior feeling, however, of quite another order
than any emotional reaction to wife or sister, refused to be stilled
by his reading. This feeling was that of extreme hunger. Dave
had had no lunch; and the thin bread and butter and scotch
scones of their tea had been devoured so quickly by Zoyland and
Mr. Dekker that before their economic dispute began he had had
only a nibble at them; and once launched into his argument he
had naturally forgotten such a personal thing as a craving
for food.

Most of the pathetic scenes in almost everybody's life are
scenes unnoted by anyone and totally disregarded by the person
in question. Such was this moment in Dave's life; when, with
his head full of the signing of those documents at Mark Court,
he was pondering on these legends and rumours of Atlantis in
connexion with his historic experiment in Glastonbury, and all
the time wondering against his will whether Zookey intended to
cook them any supper.

He was successful in rigidly keeping out of his mind every
image of Dekker bending over Nell in the room above, and of
Zoyland bending over Percy in the darkness outside; but as his
three candles flickered upon these legends of the drowned con-
tinent, he could not prevent his thoughts from running upon
baked potatoes and gravy.

Twice, while Dave had been reading his book on Atlantis, and
thinking against his will about potatoes and gravy, Percy came
straight up to the window outside where those brown curtains
were, and peeped in upon him. Being the man's wife, and yet
with no essential kindness for him, the girl when she saw him
there did not feel the least sense of the pathos of that short
flaxen-haired figure, with its schoolboy earnestness, turning the
pages of "Atlantis" and every now and then making a pencil-
note in the margin of the book. Thinking himself completely
alone in that candlelit room Dave gave way to a childish trick,
that his dead mother had long ago tried to cure him of--a trick
of sucking his upper lip, and pulling it as far as it would go,
into his mouth, while he licked it with the tip of his tongue. But
Percy, while she had grown so familiar with his ways as to take
them all for granted and while she had come to value his opin-
ions so as to accept them for her own, felt toward him not one
single kindly human feeling.

"There he is--reading that book!" she had said to herself the
first time she peeped in. "How his ears do stick out!" And the
second time she peeped in, it was much the same.

"There he is--still reading!" she thought. "How insensitive
his hands are!"

Will Zoyland had not yet forgiven Nell for his humiliation of
last night. He had agreed to the precipitate departure of Eu-
doxia; but there had been no reconciliation between himself and
Nell...in fact very few words of any kind had passed between
them since he had carried her bodily up the attic stairs to spare
the feelings of Miss Pippard.

Aggravated rather than appeased by his protracted dalliance
with Doxy, Zoyland's senses were irritably on edge after his long
summer of celibate virtue.

The electric response of Persephone to his careless courtship--
for, as we have discovered, to excite a man's desire to the point
of desperation was a recurrent aspect of this singular girl's per-
versity--very quickly heightened this rebellious wantonness into
leaping flame of desire. Nell's unforgivingness over the trifling
incident of Eudoxia rankled in the bastard's mind as something
extraordinarily unfair. Here was he playing the wittol for Nell's
sake and what was she doing in return? He couldn't blame her
for being absorbed in her maternity; but she might at least have
been indulgent to his natural and pardonable lapse.

As he pulled Percy away from the parlour window after her
second spying upon her husband, he glanced up at the window of
the attic and noted by the faint light there that she had only lit
one of her bedroom candles. He could hear no sound of the
Vicar's deep voice either; and he thought to himself, "The Padre
is holding her hand and rocking the cradle--a pretty family
picture! But where do I come in?"

Will's complaisance over the child was, if he had troubled to
analyse it, more for the baby's sake than its mother's. His rich
animal nature--the lavish temperament of a born outlaw--re-
sponded exuberantly to the helplessness of babyhood. He found
Henry sweet to his taste; but if a wandering gipsy-woman had
left a foundling on his doorstep he would have made the same
kind of pet of it.

The little golden christening-cup, having been handed here and
there between parlour and kitchen, and now reposing in peace at
the foot of Henry's cradle, had been an added cause of annoy-
ance between Zoyland and Nell. The girl had expressed a desire
to have the baby's name engraved on the cup, but this had
seemed to William a paltry, middle-class addition. Did not the
cup already carry the proud falcon of his race? Thus there had
been yet more bitter words between them on this head, which
added still further to the rankling score of grievance.

"Come on, sweet one," he now whispered, dragging Perse-
phone away, from the house towards the tow-path and this time
in an easterly direction. "They don't want us in there. He's plot-
ting revolution, and they're plotting sentiment! We're out of it
tonight, you and I; and we'd better make the best of being out
of it!"

Percy had always enjoyed flirting with Zoyland, but they were
both in a completely different mood tonight....They were
both in the same mood too, by some fatality; which always
means a vibration between men and women full of delicious
danger.

"Is it possible," her incorrigible spirit pondered, "that this
man is going to do what Phil and Dave couldn't do? This is a
glorious moment anyway. I wish it could last forever!"

The half-moon, looking water-logged and labouring, like a rud-
derless ship, in the mottled sky, poured down a stream of am-
biguous influence upon the swollen river. Too many feminine
nerves, of every level of organic life, were draining just then
that strange Being's vitality, so that the magic touch that fell
upon Percy's relaxed limbs as Zoyland dragged her along by the
hand, was a mere accidental overflow; casual, uncalculated. It
gave enough light however to guide their steps as they followed
the tow-path; and the whole nature of that night was such that
nothing emphatic or arresting in the elements distracted their
attention from each other.

"He willing and she willing," as Homer says, they speedily
receded out of all sight of the cottage.

The truth is that women like Nell, absorbed in their mother-
hood, and men like Dave, absorbed in their politics, will to the
end of time throw into each other's arms reckless, restless, irre-
sponsible, wandering stars, like Percy and Zoyland. It is upon
these strangely neutral nights, such as was this fifteenth of De-
cember, that the real power of darkness as opposed to daylight
gathers itself together to assert its essential identity. Complete
darkness is usually so empty of all discrimination as to be prac-
tically a negation; but darkness faintly touched by a sickly moon
has a certain positive character. The absence of high wind or
pouring rain, too, enables the mind to receive, in uninterrupted
concentration, those simpler emanations of earth-life, such as
the leap of a fish, the rustling of a rabbit, the cry of a nocturnal
bird, the bark of a farm-dog, the lowing of a cow in an isolated
barton, the faint soughing of reeds, the creaking of a bough, the
fall of a twig into a silent pond, the shy stirrings of aimless little
night-winds amid the dead bracken, which are destroyed and ob-
literated by the more startling play of the elements.

Zoyland paused only once in his predatory stride and that was
to make the girl lean on his arm in place of holding his hand.
She was indeed following him so gallantly and with such an easy
swing over the muddy ground that he felt proud of her as a com-
panion. The truth was that in a rough-and-tumble country walk,
Percy, for all her sophistication, would have beaten any woman
in Glastonbury except her cousin Mary. It was perhaps the vig-
orous Norfolk strain in their blood. But whatever it was, no
Glastonbury-born girl could have rivalled these two in this.
Further and further eastward he led her; for he knew well by
this time what he had in his mind.

What he was aiming at, and he found it without any trouble,
was a spot that had always made him think of just this very
contingency though not necessarily with his present lady! About
half a mile from Whitelake Cottage there was a reed-thatched
shed where the farmer of those fields kept his dry hay. The fields
on both sides of the stream belonged to this man just there; and
in order to convey his hay across to his cattle on the opposite
bank he kept a flat-bottomed boat tied by a rope to an iron stake,
beneath this hayshed. Zoyland had made use of this boat many
a time before, and without leave asked either, for the purpose of
shooting wild fowl; and it now entered his mind that nothing
could be more congruous with the hour and the girl than to em-
brace his present delicious companion where the waters of the
river would be flowing within an inch of their bodies.

Percy laughed aloud--a low, merry, young-girl's laugh of pure
mischief--when she found herself laid upon a mattress of
hay in this floating bed. Her mind flew to that grey strip of sub-
terranean shingle under the Witch of Wookey. Her only desire
now--and even that was a languid one--was to put off her final
yielding to the bearded man until she had enjoyed to the extreme
limit the excited tension of his craving.

"How queer it is, in my life," she thought to herself, "the way
the same situation keeps repeating itself! Is it possible that that
Bristol Wharf"--she was thinking of her early encounters with
Dave--"and Wookey Hole, and Saint Mary's Ruin,"--she was
thinking of one particular meeting with Angela Beere--"and
that room in the hospital"--she was thinking of the last of her
morbid visits to Mr. Evans--"were all rehearsals of this break-
ing of the ice with Will? When a person's life repeats itself--
from that shore of Phil's to this boat of Will's!--there's a doom
of some sort in it. He may be able to do it. He may! Will! Can't
you do it? Can't you show poor Percy where her heart is? Oh,
find it, oh, find it, darling Will! Touch it, hurt it, bruise it, break
it! So long as you show her where it is--poor Percy's lost
treacherous heart--that she can never, never, never find!"

It may well be believed, with a piratical amorist like Zoyland,
that it was not long before Persephone's body, whatever hap-
pened to her heart, belonged, as far as it could belong to anyone,
to this herculean ravisher.

In the matter of pure lust, Will did not get half the satisfact-
ion from his taking of Percy that he got from his dallying with
Eudoxia. But in every other respect--aye! how he did enjoy the
unequalled circumstances of these violent embraces!

The gurgling of the water beneath this keel-less vessel, the
rubbing of the rope against the bark of a little bush, the droop-
ing down as if in sympathy with his heathen satisfaction, of the
whole cloudy heaven, the smell of the river-mud, the glittering
slide from the high zenith of a falling star in the direction of
North Wooton and Croscombe, and most wonderful of all and
actually simultaneous with the apogee of his delight, the sudden
rising of a great, broad-winged heron and its heavy retreat over
the moonlit marshes towards Westholme and Hearne House--
all these things gave to the bastard's sensuality that sort of ro-
mantic elemental margin, which was the thing of all things that
he relished most in the world. Thus, it may be imagined in what
a mood of tender gratitude he took Percy back, holding her hand
tight, very tight, and repeatedly kissing it.

As they moved along, he thought to himself--"Girls really
ought to be allowed everything they want in this world, when
they can give a person such entrancing pleasure!"

He felt in a delicious mood now; at peace with Man and at
peace with God; and he would have got home in this mood, if it
had not been, as. he approached the house, that he caught sight
of a particular branch of a particular tree which he had noted--
it was blasted by lightning--while the Marquis was telling him of
the sale of the factories and of the leasing of the shops.

Quite irrelevantly, and not very discreetly, he burst out, upon
catching sight of this branch--"The old man brought bad news,
tonight, kid...devilish news. He's selling I don't know what
of his Glastonbury property to I don't know who; and leasing,
for an ordinary person's life-term, what he can't sell! It's old
Geard, of course, who's at the bottom of it; but it'll be terribly,
terribly serious for Philip. I ought really to let Philip know
tonight, so that he can take measures, if there are any measures
to take! He says distinctly that he's sold at least a third of the
Crow dye works. They are only the newest ones--but still! I was
perfectly flabbergasted. I knew he owned the land, of course;
but I somehow thought Philip had built all the dye works. But
of course he didn't! He only improved the old ones out by the
cemetery. And it now appears he's only had these new ones on a
lease; and this lease is now up. If these people--Geard and the
rest--don't choose to lease 'em to him again, they can kick him
out. And they will kick him out! There's no doubt about it. They
all hate him like the devil; and nothing would give 'em more
pleasure than to bring him down a few pegs."

Persephone herself was a little surprised and shocked by what
she felt in response to this. For many dark and complicated
reasons she actually felt a spasm of pleasure at hearing of this
disaster to Philip. She had been deeply piqued, for one thing, by
his obvious ability to get on perfectly well without her. For an-
other thing, she had accepted, for good and all, her husband's
views as to the injustice of the capitalist system. But there was
a much subtler reason than either of these for Percy's throb of
uncousinly pleasure at hearing this startling news. Philip's chief
hold upon her imagination had been her idea of him as a swift
raptorial man of action, competent, unscrupulous, deadly. But
this news showed him as outwitted and something of a fool; and
this development left the fortress of her heart free for Zoyland.
She was in her queer fashion watching with an intense inner in-
terest her feelings about Zoyland. She felt that she was still,
though they were far from the boat, under the spell of his por-
tentous magnetism, of his overpowering physique. After Wookey
Hole, when Philip had loosened his hold upon her, she had
very quickly become mistress of herself. She had shaken off
her contact with him as if it had been no more than a kiss. But
something surely...deeper than that...had been touched by
Zoyland's possession of her in the hay-boat. Furtively in the
darkness she allowed herself to fondle the man's muscular wrist;
and then from his wrist her long slim hand slipped down to his
great swaying hips. Here, as her fingers strayed, she found one of
the leather straps of his braces hanging loose; for when he had
been buying that set of heavy tea-cups at Wollop's, he had been
persuaded to purchase a new pair of braces for himself by the
youth who read Nietzsche and these articles his powerful fingers
found it very difficult to button. When he felt her knuckles
against his side the spontaneous intimacy of the gesture tickled
his fancy as much as her actual touch tickled his ribs; and with
a deep-drawn chuckle he stopped dead.

"Do it up, if you can, kid!" he laughed. "It's beaten me, that
bit of leather!"

She put both her hands to it and finally--though not without
an effort--she got it fastened. This was the first time in Perse-
phone's whole life that she had buttoned a man's button.

It was a quaint little incident, but in its particular kind of
intimacy it affected some nerve in her wild, perverse nature that
sent a delicious shiver through her whole frame. She felt like
some elemental creature of the night, some wandering elfish
thing, that was taking care of a primeval earth-giant. No woman
in all Glastonbury had less of the maternal in her composition
than this erratic boy-girl; but by thinking of herself as an elf-
waif and of her paramour as a fairy-tale giant, she made of this
trifling incident, as they stood there in the river-scented dark-
ness, something that was significant and even symbolical.

To their surprise--for human beings are very like animals in
their expectation of finding what they have left exactly as it was
when they left it--they found, on their re-entrance into the
parlour, Nell and Dave and Mat Dekker seated round a small cold
supper. Dave rose quickly to get them chairs, for their places
at the. table had been prepared for them; and while they sat
down, they could hear Zookey Pippard crooning and murmuring
to the baby in the room above. In the centre of the table, side by
side with the vase of small bronze-coloured chrysanthemums, Nell
had placed the little golden cup; and this small object at once
became again the topic of general conversation.

Although Mat Dekker had made a stubborn struggle with his
religious conscience not to allow his overwhelming feeling for
his son's mistress to betray itself in any overt manner, his whole
being had been so stirred by these long, sweet, lonely hours, in
semi-darkness, with heir and her child, that he flooded her, satu-
rated her, drowned her in the heady worship of his suppressed
passion. It was therefore from an atmosphere of limitless and
enfolding idolatry that Nell found herself faced, at first by the
bodily absence, and then by the absence of mind, of her husband
and her sister-in-law. She had kept Mat Dekker and Dave wait-
ing half an hour for their supper; but then, when the absent ones
had not returned, she had told Zookey to bring in "all there was
in the house."

Mat Dekker was too excited to eat very much; but half his
normal appetite was enough, with the aid of Dave, who was
ravenous for food, to dispose of the more substantial viands that
Zookey had been able to find, and there was little left for Zoyland
and Percy except sponge cake and black-currant jam.

Now, although suppressed desire is destructive of appetite,
satisfied desire is creative of extreme hunger, and happy as Zoy-
land and Percy were in their secret union they both felt a
very sharp craving for some kind of solid and substantial
nourishment.

Below the surface of the most civilised human beings, the
hunger-lust darts and snaps like a fish, snatches and rends like
a bird, growls like a wolf, snarls like a panther, buzzes like a
hornet, bleats like a sheep and stamps like a bull; and there is
nothing so aggravating to hungry stomachs as the sight of dirty
plates pushed away from satisfied rival stomachs. Mrs. Pippard
was so tired and cross after her party that Nell had not liked to
demur at anything she did; and indeed when cold ham, tinned
sardines, and scrambled eggs appeared, she knew well enough
that the resources of her larder were exhausted.

Unfortunately, nothing looks more tantalizing to hungry eyes
than bits of cold toast upon which scrambled eggs have been
served, or more offensive to the aesthetic sense of hunger--for
hunger has its aesthetic sense--than the scales and tails of sar-
dines upon oily plates.

Thus, however happy the two adulterers were in each other's
society, and whatever secrets of this curious neutral night they
brought into Whitelake Cottage with them, when they found
themselves confronted by the sponge cake, it was very difficult
to retain their high spirits.

"Percy would like a couple of boiled eggs and a cup of tea,"
cried Zoyland in a casual, airy, jaunty manner.

"I'm sorry," said Nell, "but the kettle is cold and there are no
more eggs."

"Well...anyway...let's have some cheese," Zoyland's voice had
become a good deal less airy. But Mat Dekker broke in:

"I'm so sorry--I told you how it might be--" he muttered,
looking anxiously at Nell, for he had finished every bit of her
excellent cheddar cheese before he proceeded to light his pipe.

"I'm--afraid--I ate--more than my fair share of the sar-
dines," said Dave anxiously, "but I expect there is--" and he
looked at Nell with a pathetic masculine faith in the unlimited
resources of feminine providing--"I expect there is something."

"Well, I know what I can get for Percy, anyway," cried Zoy-
land angrily, leaping up and rushing into the kitchen.

"Take off your boots, if you go up to your room," warned
Nell. "He'll be sure to hear; and Zookey has only just this min-
ute got him off to sleep."

But Zoyland took not the slightest notice of this request; and
sure enough in a short time they could all hear the creaking
sound of his heavy steps as he walked through the attic ante-
room into his smoking-room. Nell rose indignantly to her feet,
listening intently.

Persephone helped herself to a piece of thin bread and butter,
a piece that had already acquired a certain dry consistency,
which indicated that it had been left over from tea. From some-
where outside, away to the back of the house, where there was
a clump of naked larches, came the barking of a fox; but for
once Mat Dekker was oblivious to this exciting sound.

His eyes were fixed with a furious sympathy upon Nell's white
face; his long fingers were clenching themselves under the table,
their nails pressing into the palms of his hands. As for Dave he
was occupied in a vain attempt to open a ginger-beer bottle.

"You'd like some of this, wouldn't you?" he whispered across
the table to his wife. Then he added in a still lower voice, "It
won't open though."

In the silence that ensued everybody could catch the audible
lifting up of an angry infant's moan, a moan full of a self-pity
that amounted to anguish.

"He's woke up," cried Nell, biting her lip, and casting a wild
look of blind appeal upon Mat Dekker.

"Hush...listen!" whispered Persephone.

And while in the further distance the heavy tramp of Zoyland's
boots was audible, they all caught the lilt of an esoteric jumble
of West-country rhymes, chanted over the cradle.

"Oon, two, dree, vour...
Bells of Girt Sedgemoor!
Who can meake panceake
'Thout fat or vlour?

Zee-Zaw, Harry's mother,
Sold her bed and laid in clover,
Wadden she a dirty slut
Da zell her bed and lay in dirt?

'Pon my life an' honner!
Gwine to Mark's Tower,
Who should I see,
But Zookey's Babee?
'Pon my life an' honner!"

In the interior of Whitelake Cottage this singular lullaby was
very audible and not devoid of significance. But its effect upon
the infant was the reverse of soothing. Something in the sound
of the child's crying, when it burst out again now, made Mat
Dekker think of a small vivisected dog he had heard howling
once and that he could never get out of his head. Nell's face
became distorted with anger. She felt as if each step Zoyland
took, upon those creaking boards up there, was taken upon the
outstretched nerves of Sam's child! She could see the way its
funny chin, the very replica of Sam's, was wrinkling itself up
in its blind suffering!

But she clutched the back of her chair and tried to force her-
self to remain where she was. "If I go up," she thought, "I'll
say something to Will which he'll never forgive--and which I
never shall want him to forgive!"

But Will had got what he wanted now; and the creaking up
there ceased, as he came down the outside steps and entered the
kitchen.

"I'll have something really decent for you to drink in a minute,
Percy!" he shouted through the oak door, pushing it open for
a second with his hand.

Nell sank down mechanically into her chair; but some new
thought had entered her head--some desperate thought--and she
sat staring into vacancy, disregarding them all.

The child's crying grew louder and louder in the room above
--Zookey was scolding it now; but that was even less effective
than her "oon, two, dree, vour." Dave had recommenced his
attempts to loosen the ginger-beer stopper; and Persephone was
swallowing her second piece of dry bread and butter.

"I can't think how--" began Mat Dekker, half-rising from
his chair. There were beads of sweat on his forehead and his
whole face had darkened to a dusky red. Zoyland came rushing
in now from the kitchen, opening the oak door with a heavy kick
and letting it close behind him. In one hand he held the bottle;
in the other three tumblers.

"Here's something that'll make you forget whether we've
starved you in this house or not!" he shouted, pouring out a
stiff glass of the stuff for Percy. It was of Percy and Percy alone
he thought. Everybody else was non-existent. It was as though
he and Percy were still by themselves on the bottom of the
hay-boat.

"I can't think why--" stammered Mat Dekker, staring at
Nell in helpless, pitiful expectancy.

If Zoyland saw only Persephone just then. Mat Dekker all that
evening had seen nothing but Nell!

Dave relinquished the ginger-beer stopper as hopeless. He
stared at the smoke which continued to rise from Mat Dekker's
lips, in big convulsive puffs, floating away above the candle-
flames. Persephone gulped down the whiskey and held out her
glass for more.

"It's good, Will," she murmured gratefully. "It's better than
food." They exchanged a long, entranced look. He filled her
glass again; and again she emptied it in a few quick gulps. Her
brown eyes had a dazed, ensorcerised film over them as she sank
back in her chair. "I do love him. He cares nothing about any-
thing," she thought. "He's just like me." The drink kept mount-
ing and mounting to her brain.

Zoyland drank out of her glass and then refilled it for her
for the third time. He made an automatic motion of passing the
bottle to Dave, who shook his head. He had ignored Mat Dekker
completely all that evening, since they had first entered, and he
continued to ignore him. His eyes were as luminous with excite-
ment now as Percy's were languid with enchantment. They sat
opposite each other, and as they drank they stared at each other;
and more and more it seemed to both of them that they were
each other's true love. They kept drinking out of the same glass,
which might have been drugged for them by that same Dame
Brisen, who, in the days when love was all, brought Launcelot du
Lac to the bed of young Elaine.

Dave as he looked now from one to another of this distracted
company, said to himself in his heart--"And this sort of thing
is what they call a personal life! These people are thinking of
nothing else but their own personal emotions; and they are
proud of it. And while they are wasting their time like this, the
men from Crow's Dye Works, the men in Bove Town, in Ed-
mund's Hill Road, in Benedict Street, in Paradise, are sleeping
soundly and freely, without any fuss.

"If I can keep Trent from spoiling it all with his anarchism,
I'll teach these good friends of mine how to be impersonal!
These people think that their feelings are the only serious thing
in the world. Their feelings! When, at this very moment in
China, in India, in New York, in Berlin, in Vienna--Good God!
...their feelings! When, at this moment, if all the pain in the
world caused by this accursed personal life, by this accursed
individual life were to rise up in one terrific cry...it would--"
The little Henry's crying--as if to round off Dave's thoughts
--rose to a pitch that was distressing to hear. And yet Nell
did not move to go to the child. Her forehead was knitted
into an intense frown and her eyes continued to stare straight
in front of her.

"Damn that child!" cried Zoyland, jumping suddenly to his
feet. "Here! I'll give him his cup. That will stop him!" He
snatched the little cup of gold from the centre of the table,
and flinging open the staircase door, rushed upstairs.

Nell instinctively sprang to her feet too; but sat down again
immediately, her head remaining turned towards the staircase
and a queer, distorted, rather unnatural smile on her face.

Whatever Zoyland may have done when he reached the top
of the stairs, he was evidently completely successful in soothing
the child; for the listeners at that candlelit table--and none of
them spoke a word--were aware of the baby's cries suddenly
dying down. Little gurgling whimperings followed; and then a
profound hush; a hush that was broken finally by the voice of
Zookey, uttering the words: "God be on us!"--which was the
woman's favorite commentary upon the ways of Providence,
when thoroughly surprised by any curious occurrence.

Apparently satisfied that the personal manias of his trouble-
some relatives had reached some kind of temporary surcease,
and made aware by the look of their countenances that objective
conversation was for the moment suspended, Dave Spear slipped
his hand into his side pocket and brought out his book on
Atlantis. He was too polite to read in company, but the sight
of the volume, laid on the table by the side of his plate, gave
him a sort of reassurance that speculative thought upon serious
matters was not wholly impossible, even in Whitelake Cottage!

Thud...Thud...Thud..."What on earth," thought Dave, "is this
bearded drunkard doing now? "Stop! stop. Master Zoyland!"
the agitated voice of Mrs. Pippard and her shuffling scramble
in pursuit revealed the nature of the bastard's action. He
was carrying the baby downstairs! His appearance with the
child in his arms was a signal for them all, except Dave, to
rise from their seats. Nell rushed straight up to him, and
without a word spoken, snatched the infant from his hands
and set herself smoothing its rumpled clothes.

She took it to the couch under the brown curtains by the win-
dow and began rocking it on her lap, swaying her body back-
ward and forward, as she did so, and murmuring to the child
apologetic whisperings.

"She'd forgotten him...she had! She'd forgotten her baby
in her bad, bad thoughts! There...there...there...go to sleep
my precious...go to sleep...there...there...there..." Both Zoy-
land and Persephone were already under the power of what
they had drunk; but he now filled their glasses again from
the oblong flat-sided bottle he had brought down from his
room, and once more they resumed their seats opposite
each other. With each drink she took, the tall girl's entrance-
ment increased. Her dark eyes were swimming now with a
newly awakened desire for the man's embraces.

She watched every movement he made; and her whole body
as she lay back in her chair cried out to him in wordless yearn-
ing: "We are yours!" her child-breasts cried. "We are yours!"
her long relaxed limbs answered. "We are yours!" whispered
her warm neck and her glowing curls. "We are yours!" echoed
her sinuous waist and her boy-hips. Meanwhile, Mrs. Pippard
had begun to clear away the supper things.

Each time she took anything from the table she threw a dis-
approving, disgusted glance at the state Persephone was in, and
did her best to catch the deep-set sombre eyes of the Vicar of
Glastonbury. But Mat Dekker had no eyes for anyone but Nell.
The man's inmost nature was seething, fermenting, heaving, up-
heaving, beyond restraint. Of the bastard and Percy he noticed
nothing. They made part of a hateful burden of enemies, all
of whom, including even poor Dave with his Atlantis book, the
pages of which the indignant revolutionary was now permitting
himself to turn, were to his mind persecuting, outraging, tor-
menting his divinely enduring lady and her sweet child!

When the table was clear of everything except the small
golden cup, Zookey Pippard stretched out her hand to seize upon
this, so that she might fold up and carry away the tablecloth.
But Zoyland intervened.

"Christen little Harry's christening-mug!" he cried in a thick
drunken voice; and rising to his feet he snatched the thing up
and began pouring raw whiskey into it, out of the bottle. Having
achieved this much of sacrilege with his shaky hand, what must
the bearded rogue do but forget his first intention--whatever that
may have been--and hand the shining mug to Percy, who, with-
out a second's hesitation, raised it in the air, preparatory to
pressing it to her lips.

This sight was more than Nell could stand. "Zookey!" she
called out in a voice that rang through the room. The old woman,
who had been standing like a glaring Phorkyad of secular
Judgment in the doorway, hurried to her side.

"Here, take him! Hold him!"

She transferred the child to Mrs. Pippard's arms and came
forward towards the table. "Mr. Dekker!" she murmured, from
a mouth that looked like a sword-cut in a linen sheet spread over
a scarlet counterpane, "Mr. Dekker!"

It may be believed that the passionate Quantock's nature was
uppermost at that appeal and that the priest was forgotten.

"Yes, my dear?" he murmured huskily...and then, under his
breath, "Oh, my darling!"

But whatever the impulse had been that made her call out
to him, it died away now when she saw the fatal devotion
burning beneath his bushy eyebrows, and she sank down at the
end of the table and covered her face with her hands.

Persephone, who had only just touched the liquor in the gol-
den cup with her lips, pushed the thing impatiently away from
her at the sight of Nell covering her face like that. But Mat
Dekker had reached the end of his tether. The point had come,
as he stood there, while Zoyland, pushing hurriedly past him,
began talking wild nonsense to the child in Zookey's arms, when
he must either tear the priest's mask from him and cover that
bowed head with more than a religious consolation, or get away
from her...leave her...get home to his son...to his aquarium...to
his dead wife--to his God...The heavily built man stood there
panting, like a great dog whose mistress has gone down one
path and his master down another. His greenish-black trousers
remained so still above his square-toed muddy boots that to a
whimsical eye--only there was no whimsical eye just then in
Whitelake Cottage--they became objects quite distinct from
his head and shoulders; objects that hung, like a drowned man's
trousers, on a post by the wharf.

It was the way her knuckles looked, half-buried in her wavy
hair, that he couldn't endure another second. If only she would
speak to him he could choke down this feeling! He shut his
eyes and pressed his clenched hands against the flapping coat-
tails which hung down on each side of those baggy trousers.

"If I don't get out of here at once," he thought, "I shall for-
get myself completely."

Behind his closed eyes he forced himself into a mood in which
his feeling for Nell turned into anger against her enemies:
"Damn that drunken whore! She drank out of the christening
cup!" It was finally by the aid of a self-tyrannous auto-flagel-
lation which it now becomes only too clear his son had inherited
from him that he decided to leave Whitelake Cottage at once.
"Damn that tipsy bitch!" he said to himself before he made any
move; hitting out at poor Percy just as a child, suffering from
a nettle-sting, might have beaten the grass^

"Good-night, my dear Nell!"

His words sounded curiously irrelevant in that disturbed room.
Indeed, to Nell's ears they sounded as if he had uttered them
in an earthquake or a shipwreck. She could not take their mean-
ing seriously.

"You...are...not...going?" she said, raising her head and fixing upon
his face her large, tear-wet, reproachful eyes. It seemed impos-
sible to her at that moment that she was going to be deserted by
her only real friend in that whole house.

"Yes, I am, Nell dear," he answered, looking vaguely around
for his coat and hat and stick.

Dave Spear closed his book and jumped up. "I'll drive you in
a jiffy!" he said. "I've driven twice into town already tonight
...in Percy's car you know...I like driving...I like it very much."

His words aroused Persephone from the semi-comatose state
into which she had fallen and she fixed upon him a tipsy stare.

"Good Dave!" she murmured--just as if he had been a dog
--"good, kind, thoughtful Dave! \es, you fellows, yes it ? s true
--he can drive. He's quite right in saying that. He drives very
nicely. I didn't teach him. The Comrades in Bristol taught him.
They said he must learn. He didn t like it when he first heard
that! But he obeyed them--he always obeys them. He'd obey
them if they told him to kill Philip!"

There was no reason why she should have brought in Philip;
but something very deep in her nature was drowsily comparing
the various people to whom she had given herself up to be en-
joyed.

"I'll never...know...what love is!" she thought to herself. This
thought came to her with such a strong feeling of having made
a momentous discovery, that she fancied she had spoken it out
loud; and she looked round the room, in a kind of shamefaced
challenge, to justify herself for so doing.

Mat Dekker waved his hand for Dave to sit down.

He disregarded Persephone with studied discourtesy. Nell looked
at him aghast.

"You don't have to go, Mr. Dekker?" she cried, beginning
to see that he actually was collecting his things. He spoke in a
quiet voice now, but a voice that was resolute and final. "Yes,
I've got to be getting home. But I love the walk...you know
that--don't you, Nell? But I've got to be getting home; or
Penny and Sam will be coming out to look for me, among the
rhynes of Splott's Moor."

This allusion to Sam was a wise and crafty one, worthy of
any old Quantock shepherd. It brought their two dwellings near
each other and it softened his departure by involving her in his
consideration for Sam and Sam's anxiety about him. Nell rose
to her feet.

"Well, if you must, you must," she said. "I shall never forget
your goodness to me today and...and always!"

Zoyland made a mock bow to the priest as the man passed
him, carrying his surplice bag in one hand and his stick and hat
in the other.

Nell opened the door to let him out.

"Good-night, little girl!" he murmured. "God bless you. God
protect you!" he added huskily as he strode off towards the river.
She closed the door on his retreating figure and drew a miserable
sigh.

Percy still sat on in a tipsy daze. As for Will Zoyland, he
seemed unable to stop talking nonsense to the sleepy, but thor-
oughly placated infant. Little Harry's long-robed body lay con-
tentedly now in Zookey's arms. She swung him to and fro as
she leaned against the wall.

"Harry says his christening-cup hasn't been christened yet,"
cried Zoyland suddenly. With one of those impulsive, irrational
angers that sometimes seize on drunkards, he turned fiercely
upon Nell. "It's my cup. It's my father's cup," he gabbled.
"And I say the cup hasn't been christened yet, Harry's little
cup. Harry says it must be christened!" He moved with unsteady
steps to the table. Here he picked up the cup and raising it to his
mouth, tossed off its contents.

"That's...not...christening...Will...that's only...that's only...mum-
bled Persephone in a drowsy voice.

"You're right...my girl...you're always right! It's wonderful how
she's always right, isn't it, little Hal? It's my cup; it's my father's
cup. It's got our falcon on it. By God! I'll christen it in river
water!" He ran to the door carrying the cup in his hand.

Nell clung frantically to him, calling out repeatedly: "Are you
mad. Will? What are you doing, Will? It's not yours...it's Harry's.
It's Harry's, I tell you, Will! It's Harry's cup!"

But he wrenched himself loose from her and managed to get
the door open. She followed him into the garden; and a breath
of cold night air floated into that whiskey-smelling room.

Dave stood there motionless, hesitating whether to follow them
or not. How calm and impersonal looked that little book about
Atlantis lying on the table face-down and open!

"Let 'un alone, Mr. Spear," cried Zookey. " 'Twill only vex
'un worse for thee to meddle. Her can quiet him. Him won't hurt
his Lordship's golden mug."

Percy looked dreamily at her husband while her eyelids sank
down...opened again...and sank down again.

Her lulled and drugged senses had drifted back to the hay-
boat. Never had she felt like that before! Never had she given
herself up like that before! She had not known the least little
thing about "love." No wonder people made so much of it, and
priests called it "mortal sin!" "I'm sleepy," she thought--"I'd
like to go to sleep in his arms. How strong he is! I'd like to
melt away in his arms; and sleep...and sleep...and sleep . .

Meanwhile Nell was following Zoyland down the sloping lawn
towards the river.

She was wearing a tight-fitting lavender-coloured dress with
loose, beautifully cut sleeves. This particular dress she had seen
in Wollop's window and Mr. Wollop's head-seamstress had
worked hard to alter it for her, against the day when she came
out of the hospital.

She overtook him long before he reached the river bank and
clung to him desperately and they struggled together, trampling
upon her wild-flower bed and the last of her marjoram plants
that were sinking down into the wet winter mould.

In the struggle between them, for he kept holding the little
cup high up in the air and she kept dragging at his arm to
reach it, it happened that one of her sleeves got caught in some
way as they swayed together and was badly ripped, evoking as
the fabric tore, that particular sound which is, of all others,
the most agitating to a woman, when she is struggling--whether
in love or in hate--with a man. The tearing of her dress and
the ease with which Zoyland--even in his drunkenness--held the
cup out of her reach caused Nell to lose her self-control com-
pletely.

She struck at his face again and again with her clenched hand;
a proceeding which astonished him so much that he could only
murmur, without attempting to defend himself, "Do it again,
darling! Do it again, Nell!"

It is a memorable epoch in a man's life, the first time a
woman strikes him in anger. In most cases a certain subtle link
is broken between them that can never be mended. But there
are exceptions to this.

In the relations between men and women the taking of vir-
ginity is undeniably the symbolic as well as the psychic root
of all complications. This act causes pleasure to the one and
suffering to the other--therefore, when a woman strikes a man,
a deeply hidden, basic relation is broken; and broken in a
manner that, as a rule, is dangerous for both.

The Reverend Dr. Sodbury, Rector of St. Benignus', who was
Megan Geard's favourite among "God's Ministers" as the lady
put it, "in all Glaston," in an eloquent sermon preached on the
occasion when Mrs. Legge of Camelot, then in the prime of her
life, was summoned for violently striking the father of Mr.
Wollop, spoke of there being something in a woman's striking
a man that was monstrous, perverted, unnatural, forbidden,
impious, shocking, obscene and--the worthy Doctor in his orig-
inal manuscript had added the word "bestial"; but in a later
version he had modified this into:--"More proper to the insect
world than to the world of humanity."

"Do it again, darling! Do it again, Nell!"

Zoyland was debarred from making any serious attempt to
defend himself from these blows not only by gallantry but also
by his obstinate efforts--natural to the gravity of drunkenness--
to keep the cup far out of her reach.

Into her blows Nell threw all the mounting tide of her feel-
ings; feelings that had been gathering and gathering against
Zoyland ever since Sam gave up making love to her, ever since
her child's conception began. To the end of her life she remem-
bered what she felt as she hit him. It was the sight of his beard
in the moonlight, more than anything else, that made her repeat
her blows so often. And each blow--as she felt the flesh she struck
at yield under her knuckles--seemed to avenge her, and liberate
her, and heal some deep hurt in her, and fulfil some profound
necessity of her nature.

It was as If she were striking something more than Zoyland.
It was as if she was striking at that whole procession of rank,
hirsute, brutal, abominable men that she had seen that day,
when in the first recognition of her maternity she had burnt
up her brother's pamphlet--it was as if she were striking with
her schoolgirl hand, all that unfair advantage that men pos-
sessed over women in this world; their easy escapes, their light-
hearted irresponsibility, their shifting of burdens, their abysmal
conceit How she had hated that "thud...thud...thud..." of her
husband's heavy steps coming down those stairs! Well! It was
with another "thud...thud...thud," of her woman's knuckles
against his bearded face, that she had countered that!

It was not, of course that the girl had time to feel all this in
sequence; but she did feel the overpowering impetus of all this
as she struck her blows.

The tearing of her dress was the raising of the sluice and
the flood simply followed. The truth seems to be that the at-
traction between men and women lets down a drawbridge across
a fretting current of hopeless differences that has only to be
exposed to lead at once to these wild outbursts.

As long as she had not met Sam, or known that there was
a Sam in the world, there was enough sensuality in her to make
Zoyland a tolerable partner. But when Sam and Sam's child
came between them, Zoyland was thrust at once into that cate-
gory of unilluminated maleness towards which it takes a born
courtesan to be indulgent.

It was the appearance of Dave Spear's figure now--for the
impersonalist had decided to disobey Zookey--that drove the
tipsy giant to his next move.

"I said I'd christen 'ee, little cup," he roared, "and so I will!
How do 'ee like that?"

So speaking he ran down the slope of the moonlit lawn, tread-
ing carelessly on her rain-beaten patch of rosemary, and flung
the golden cup clear into the middle of the misty stream.

There was a shriek of astounded dismay from Nell and a cry:
--"What on earth--" from the bewildered Communist; and with
a much smaller splash than anyone would have expected
--in fact with hardly any splash at all--the "Doll's House
Grail" as Mr. Evans had called it when he sold it to Lord P.,
sank down to the bottom of Whitelake River!

The spasm of her anger all spent now, only a sick disgust
at his folly remained in Nell's mind. But this was enough to
give her the final push to what she had been gathering up her
courage to do all that agitated evening. She had not missed--
no woman could have missed, not even one who loved another!
---the vibrant aura of infatuation between Zoyland and Percy.

It had been her vision of their two faces as they drank that
whiskey that had tipped the scale.

"Will," she said very quietly when the two men, the one
approaching her from the house and the other from the river,
met at her side, "Will--listen!"

"I am listening; and so's brother Dave listening!" jeered Zoy-
land.

But she went on in a steady ice-cold voice.

"I...am...going...to...leave...you," she said. "I'm going to leave
you...now...tonight. Dave is going to drive baby and me to--
where I tell him--but that's not for you--and yet it is for
you--yes--I'm going to the Vicarage. Mr. Dekker will take
me in. I've had enough of this sort of thing, Will. But...but--"
she hesitated for a second---"but...I'm sorry I hit you. I
oughtn't to have done that. I don't know what came over
me."

Lord P.'s bastard drew a deep breath. The light from the drift-
ing half-moon made his great bushy beard look twice as big as
it did by day and his figure twice as formidable.

What passed through his mind like a falling star was the
thought of Percy's naked body, alone with him in that little silent
house.

"Very well, Nell," he said, as quiet and composed as a man
could be. "Very well, Nell."

"I shall leave Mrs. Pippard here," she went on, "you can keep
her or let her go, just as you like--"

"I'm listening, Nell," he repeated. "Very well, Nell."

But she turned to her brother now. "Dave," she said humbly
and gently, "Dear Dave, I'm sorry to drag you into all this
....besides I know how you...I know what we both..."

"Oh, it's all right, Nelly," Dave cried hurriedly, anxious,
above everything, to stop her from referring to Percy before
Zoyland. "We'll get off at once. Don't 'ee fret! We'll get off
at once. Dekker's a fast walker. He'll be home before we're
there. Don't 'ee fret, Nelly. The Vicarage won't hurt you for
one night anyway...and we can see later...we can all talk
...reasonably and quietly...later...and try and see things...
later...outside our own skin!"

This expression "outside our own skin" came suddenly into
Dave's head. It was his personal reaction from all this long day
spent in stroking the electric skins of so many personalised
animals!

"Don't 'ee fret, little Nell!" How many times in her earlier
life had this absent-minded half-brother uttered these words!
They brought more comfort to her now, in her distress and her
shame, than she would have thought possible if she could have
foreseen how this day was going to end. Dave put his arm
shyly and stiffly round her waist. There were no directions in
the Marxian philosophy--nor indeed in his Atlantis book--tell-
ing a reformer of society how to comfort a woman. But between
his sister's soft waist under her torn sleeve and his own arm,
just then, there seemed to be something spontaneously generated
which was outside the sphere of reason.

Not more than an hour later Mrs. William Zoyland and Master
Henry Sangamore Rollo Zoyland were safely deposited, together
with modicum of luggage, on the steps of the Vicarage front
door.

It was the Vicar himself who opened the door to let them in.

The child, disturbed by the ceasing of the movement of the car,
began to cry loudly; and in spite of her agitation his mother
could not help recalling how, when they left Whitelake Cottage
to the tune of Zookey Pippard's "oon, two, dree, vour," her hus-
band had said: "I know one person who'll miss me, Nell, in
that monastery of yours!"--and how tenderly he had brushed
the baby's face with his great yellow beard.

As for Dave Spear, he was free that night to read his Atlantis
book till the candle in Dickery Cantle's third back bedroom burnt
to the socket. But he read only three pages. It is hard to be im-
personal in a cosmos that runs to personality.



THE SAXON ARCH



CHRISTMAS CAME AND WENT IN THE USUAL IMPERCEPTIBLE
Somersetshire manner.

Mild, open weather prevailed, so that Jackie and his robber
band, exploring the Wick Woods for trapped rabbits, used fre-
quently to drag the exhausted, but still enquiring Bert, home to
his grandmother, with two or three untimely primrose buds
clutched tight in his hot little palm.

But with the appearance of the New Year the barometer fell,
and a series of sharp black frosts followed one another, con-
stricting the damp Avalon clay and killing off these premature
buddings. The lease of the bulk of his Glastonbury property to
the reorganised town council realised for Lord P. so large a sum
of ready money that he was able to establish his heavily taxed
finances on a new and more satisfactory basis, and Will Zoy-
land, with his new companion at Whitelake Cottage, got the
benefit of this change in several substantial presents of money.
The Marquis had never liked his son's wife and his sympathies
were entirely with the bastard in the estrangement from Nell.
Persephone on the contrary proved to be an adept at cajoling
the great man. As to Bloody Johnny's fortune, the inroads upon
it by these new transactions, were, thanks to the council's power
of borrowing, much less than the Mayor had anticipated; and as
the visitors from abroad, attracted by John's advertisements,
poured into the town all that winter in increasing numbers, the
new Glastonbury commune, under the dictatorship of the Mayor's
assessors, showed signs of being more than able to keep its pro-
letariat satisfied and its tradesmen active and content.

The business done in Mr. Wallop's shop alone surpassed all
the holiday seasons the ex-Mayor could remember, so that al-
though his establishment did not officially come under the new
regime, he was willing enough to hand over to the communal
purse, sooner than break with the authorities, all the percentage
they demanded of these increasing profits. The bank, the railway,
Philip's older dye works, and his Wookey Hole tin mine, were
therefore, as the early weeks of January passed, the only strong-
holds of individualism left untouched by the new order.

The official opening of Geard's Saxon arch and of a curious
building near it which was really a sort of Platonic Academia
for his new religion, but which, for want of a better name, was
hitherto styled the Rotunda, was to take place on January the
twentieth of this new year. So widely had John's clever circulars
advertised this event, that by the morning of the great day every
available lodging in the place was crowded, and those incor-
rigible capitalistic railways were running their loaded excursion
trains into the town soon after daylight began.

"Are you really off to Wookey now?" enquired Mrs. Crow of
her husband at an unusually late breakfast at The Elms. "Emma
says there won't be a stroke of work done anywhere in the neigh-
bourhood today."

Tilly was not a little disturbed, for reasons of her own, at the
lateness of the hour; but the master of the house had slept
heavily that morning.

Philip looked across the table at her with his indulgent smile.
How dear she was to him, after all, this quaint little lady for
whom he felt no more erotic attraction than if she had been his
aunt, like that Aunt Maria who had lived for the last thirty years
at Aix-les-Bains! "You wouldn't want me to sit twiddling my
thumbs at home, would you," he said, "while Geard has his
grand glorification?"

"Emma says she thinks you ought to be there!" In all the last
decade of their relations Philip's wife had never dared to speak
so decisively; but her private nervousness made things leap out
that she had not meant to say. But her words troubled him. Had
even she, then, joined the increasing circle of their neighbors
who were drifting away from his side towards that of the Mayor?
He glanced down frowningly at his plate. He began biting his
underlip beneath its grey mustache. He felt hedged round by
enemies, cornered, run to earth, like a hunted fox.

Paul Trent's coup d'etat in the matter of Lord P.'s property,
his own eviction from his new dye works, a sudden deplorable
diminishing of the expected tin ore from his Wookey Hole vein,
all these blows, coming together, had driven this grandson of
"the Devereux woman" fairly to the wall.

"Ought to be there," he thought bitterly, "ought to be there,
to help hoist this crazy charlatan, who's ruining me with Grand-
father's money, upon the final pinnacle of his folly."

His tin. was running out before either his new road or his new
bridge was ready to transport it. The old dye works which was
all that was left him of his special industry, taken over thirty
years ago, was devoid of a manager.

Bob Tankerville, entangled with one of those servants of Miss
Drew's, was not half the adventurous air-pilot he used to be. The
airplane itself had become an impossible expense in the present
state of his finances. He had come down finally in the last few
days to endure some very humiliating discussions about his bank-
loans with the Glastonbury bank-manager. Even the bank itself,
flooded with communal money from the huge inrush of visitors,
was beginning to turn against him! He had seen too with his
own eyes a row of trucks full of his tin ore shunted on a siding
to make room for the loads of clay which the council was bring-
ing in as material for their preposterous figurines. And only a
year ago, with Barter as his manager, he was in the full flush of
his success! Yes, it was the treachery of that accursed Didlington
cad that was at the bottom of his trouble! He had thought he
was going to do better without him and he had done better with-
out him at first. But that was before old Beere fell into his
dotage and let this smart rascal Trent outwit him at every point.

"Emma thinks"--began the irrepressible Tilly again, and never
had the Perfect Servant been consigned to so deep a pit as her
master consigned her to now--"that you ought to stand up to
that crowd at the opening and tell them what you feel about
these fol-de-lols."

He lifted up his face and tried to smile at his wife with his
old tender, humorous, superior smile.

"They'd howl me down," he muttered.

"Oh, no they wouldn't, Philip--Oh, no they wouldn't! Not one
of them, as Emma says, can speak as well as you do. Not one of
them can--"

But there was a look upon Philip's face that she had never
seen before, a dangerous, reckless, desperate look; and she be-
gan suddenly to feel that it was wiser, with a man who could
look like that, not to dare him to do hard things.

Tilly subsided into silence; and stretching out her arm, with
the tea-pot in her hand, re-filled her husband's cup. which he had
mechanically held out to her. She was worried by a little con-
spiracy of her own at that moment, for the success of which she
wanted Philip out of the way that morning. Completely unknown
to him, she and Emma had been visiting Jenny Morgan, or
Blackie, as Red Robinson called her.

This had been Tilly's own immediate reaction to the disclosure
Emma had at last consented to make to her, pushed on by the
chattering tongues of the servants from the Abbey House. Even
Emma--who thought she knew her mistress well--was surprised
by the spirit which the little lady showed under this communi-
cation; and thus it was proved--to the astonished interest of the
Invisible Naturalists--that the human minnow of the species
"Housewife" is liable to act heroically at a great emotional
crisis.

Tilly had indeed, in several trying and disconcerting inter-
views with her husband's ex-mistress, tried to persuade Blackie
to give up the child and allow her formally to adopt it. But so
far these attempts had proved fruitless.

Though Nelly Morgan went about during all her playtime, with
Jackie and Sis and Bert, her mother seemed obstinately un-
willing to part with a daughter she hardly ever saw. Since this
particular morning however was, by reason of the opening of the
arch, a general Glastonbury holiday, Tilly had induced the child
to come up to The Elms after breakfast and pay her a formal
visit. She had done this on the strength of an assurance from
Philip that he would be away all day at Wookey; but she herself
was begging him not to go to Wookey!

Tilly's interior nervousness grew so great at last that she felt
she must get Philip off her hands, at least as far as that nonde-
script out-of-the-way room where he kept his geological speci-
mens. But Philip had got up now from the table. He moved over
to the fireplace and sat down in one of his grandfather's chairs
and proceeded deliberately to light his pipe. Tilly pondered
How could she say to him, "I want to get rid of you so that I
can welcome your girl's child!" It was one of those ironic private
contingencies that some especially dedicated troop of imps seems
to delight to contrive on occasions devoted to important public
events.

Tilly thought to herself: "He's bound to hear the child's voice
if he stays here. How crazy I was to let her come this morning!"

She began piling the breakfast things on a tray, a task which
she delighted in--for if Tilly hadn't been a mistress she would
have been a flawless parlour-maid--when there was a bold, loud
ring at the front-door, a ring twice repeated, the ring of a child,
who enjoys pulling the bell-iron out to its furthest reach! Well!
there was nothing to be done. The fat was in the fire and the
cat out of the bag.

She went herself to the door and opened it; and Philip, quick
to catch something unusual in her manner, followed her into the
hall. The worthy Emma, primary cause of this embarrassing con-
tretemps, issued at the same second from the kitchen and ad-
vanced firmly, quietly, discreetly down the passage.

"Mummy were dead-asleep," declared Nelly in her shrill child's
voice. "So I thought I'd come in me week-day clothes. Mummy
were turble sick last night."

"Do you mean drunk?" growled Philip grossly, while Emma
carefully shut the front door and began dusting with her apron
the brass lion upon the hall-table; this last gesture being a sym-
bol of the occasion's dramatic importance.

"Drunk-sick," responded the child with a wicked gleam in her
dark eyes. "Be you wanting to have me live here," she added,
turning to her sulky and disturbed father.

"Live here, child? I didn't know--" But he turned sharp
round upon Emma, venting his discomfort upon the onlooker.
"Don't stand there like that, woman!'' he snapped. "We don't
want any help with this child."

"You can clear away, Emma," said Tilly apologetically, mak-
ing a move to take the child into the drawing-room. But Emma,
hurt to the quick, was already retreating towards the kitchen
door, when she heard by the sounds behind her (for her ears
were like the ears of a mouse in her own domain) exactly where
her mistress was going. This knowledge brought her professional
tact into play with an automatic force that overcame her injured
feelings, for the new house-maid was cleaning the drawing-room
and it would not do for her to notice things.

"Ethel is in there'm cleaning'm," she said, indicating that the
dining-room was the place for this domestic tragi-comedy.

"You shouldn't have spoken like that to Emma, Philip," said
Tilly, as soon as the faithful servant had withdrawn again.

"Damn Emma! Come in here, both of you," and he pushed his
wife and his child before him into the dining-room. "What I
want to know first of all is this," he began, when they were all
inside; and he actually turned the lock of the door to make sure
of no further invasion; "how long have you two been seeing
each other?"

Tilly who had taken her usual place at the table was begin-
ning to reply when the child cut her short. "Her's been seeing
Mummy and me since Christmas. Her brought Mummy and me
some crystal-ginger, didn't you, Marm? and some Reading bis-
cuits, and some French sardines, and some Spanish olives, and
some Turkish delight, and some tangerine oranges and some--"

"Here! hold up, kid!" cried Philip, unable to help smiling
at this long enumeration of dainties. It crossed his mind how
extraordinarily characteristic it was of Tilly to woo his mistress
and his mistress' child with objects from the grocer's.

"I went once before Christmas," said Tilly, who through this
whole episode had preserved her equanimity perfectly except
when Philip called Emma "woman." "You've forgotten to tell
him that, Nelly!"

"I always knowed," cried the child in a shrill voice, when
she interrupted herself by staring frantically at the little blue
flame under Tilly's polished hot-water urn, and finally by
stretching out a long thin arm towards this strange object, feel-
ing with extended forefinger, to see if that queer flame was hot,
"that father weren't me proper father, by mother pushing me
away when her cried for he. Be he my proper father?" and she
sidled up close to Tilly in the most coaxing and ingratiating
way, and pointed with her finger at Philip, who now stood with
his back to the fire regarding the pair with a bemused scowl,
Tilly put one hand round Nelly's waist and with the other be-
gan smoothing down the creases of her frock. "Yes, child," she
said hurriedly, "I'm afraid he is; though he hasn't been a very
good father to you, not telling me about you long before this."
She kept her eyes on the child's dress and even began putting
both hands to a place in the waistband that was held by a safety
pin that had got loose.

"How could we know, kid, how could we know," said Philip,
addressing the child, "that she would have liked little girls who
belong to robber bands and who trespass in Wick Woods and
let rabbits out of snares?"

"She likes me!" said Nelly with decision and with one of
her sudden impetuous movements she imprinted a quick, hot,
excited kiss on Tilly's shoulder.

Tilly bent low down in her efforts to close the safety pin. She
was extremely unwilling that Philip should detect that her eyes
were swimming with tears. "She likes us both," she said sharply
and emphatically, "and she likes Emma too--don't you, Nelly?"

But Nelly had burst away from her hold and had rushed to
the window. "There's a bicycle!" she cried, "and he's thrown a
paper down! Oh, may I see if it's the Gazette? Mummy always
lets me see the Gazette. It told about him and Mummy once!
Mummy said that wicked Red put it in." Without waiting for
permission she ran out and brought the paper into the room.
While she was gone Tilly and Philip exchanged a long, word-
less look, that contained an exhaustive and conclusive commen-
tary upon the whole episode.

He thought, "How ironical that both she and I were visiting
Jenny in that house. Suppose we had met one day at the door!"

"May I open it?" asked. Morgan Nelly when she was back
again.

"It'll be all over town that she's here now," thought Philip.
"That paper-boy will tell everyone."

The Gazette contained prominent headlines about the opening
of the arch. "Mayor's Speech Eagerly Awaited," Philip could
read, from where he stood by the fire. "Jackie's Sally be going
to marry Red," announced Morgan Nelly, finding no sign of
the pictures she had hoped for in this number and offering her
own quota of Glastonbury news. "Mummy says 'tis more than
he deserves."

She remained silent for a second, her brows puckered. "What
do bewger mean?" she suddenly enquired gravely of the man
by the fire. She evidently felt that The Elms' dining-room was a
source of supply for certain gaps in her knowledge of the world.
"Do bewger mean the Devil?"

But there was heard now a discreet little tap at the locked
door, and Tilly sprang to her feet. "I've got to order lunch,"
she said. "Shall we keep her here for the day?"

Philip nodded without speaking; and then as Tilly's hand was
on the door handle, "I think perhaps I will go up there pres-
ently," he said.

"To the opening?"

"Yes. That's what you said, wasn't it?" This appealing to her
for advice on so momentous an occasion, on the question of his
confronting in public his grand enemy, took the little lady's
breath away.

He seemed different in some way as she looked at him now,
standing over there; and for their mates to look different is ex-
tremely disconcerting to women. They prefer the most familiar
tempers to anything inexplicable.

"I...wouldn't...care...to...interfere...with your...plans, Phil," she
stammered nervously. "But if you do go I must tell Emma lunch
won't be till after two. The opening is announced to begin at
eleven, you know; but it won't be over till after one, I'm sure."

While this memorable encounter was taking place in The
Elms' dining-room, for it was already long past ten, an enormous
crowd had assembled at the foot of Chalice Hill, where, as the
Western Gazette had justly remarked, the Mayor's speech was
being "eagerly waited by all Wessex."

It was not only the opening of the Saxon arch and of the Ro-
tunda, but the inauguration of the new Glastonbury commune
that this twentieth of January was to see; and the possibility of
all manner of exciting clashes between those friendly to the
Mayor and those hostile to him, gave the sort of spice to the
occasion that always attracts a crowd.

Tom Barter had come across to Northload Street, puzzled as
to what he and Tossie were to do thal day with the twins, for
Toss had left Benedict Street and had taken a furnished room
of her own. Mary had made him stay and have a second break-
fast with her; for she wanted to talk to him about Tossie and
the children.

This other Mr. and Mrs. Crow were indeed as late that morn-
ing as the pair at The Elms. John lay in bed still, propped up
on his pillows. He had had a feverish night; he felt sick now in
his stomach; he was unable to eat a morsel; he declined to
smoke a cigarette; he was insatiable only for endless cups of
strong tea.

Mary was boldly sounding Tom on the delicate topic of his
marrying Tossie; and she was telling him that if they did marry,
there was an unfurnished room to be let on the floor beneath
their own in this same house.

"It would be so nice, Tom," she said, "for us all four to be
together; and I could look after the children sometimes, while
you and Toss get away for an afternoon."

"You...don't...think," muttered the cautious Tom who was on
his knees by the fire with the toasting-fork, as he glanced
furtively round at Mary, afraid of being rushed by a conjunc-
tion of feminine influence out of some precious bachelor free-
dom whose benefits he might be forgetting at this time. "You
...don't...think...that...being married would spoil it all?"

"Spoil it for you, or for her, do you mean?" asked Mary,
wondering a little, in her own mind, exactly why she was press-
ing their old friend so hard. "But he used to live so miserably,"
she thought, "so squalidly and miserably."

"For both of us!" murmured Tom. "You don't want any more
toast, do you, if he's not going to have any? For both of us!
I might feel caught; and she might get--oh, I don't know--
heavy and domestic, and stop laughing and all that!"

"She isn't so very thin, now, Tom, is she?"

"Shut up, Mary! You know what I mean--you know how girls are
when they've got settled--I couldn't bear it for Toss to change
a single bit!^

"She won't change, Tom. She won't change. I'd be ready to
bear all your reproaches, old friend, if she did; so well do I
know that she won't. And I don't think...very much...that you
will, either," she added archly; smiling down at him with her
hand on the toast she was buttering.

John turned his face away from this scene at the fire between
his wife and their friend. He was not at all sure, at the bottom
of his mind, that he wanted Tossie and Tom established in the
same house.

"What a demon I am," he thought. "I love old Tom when I've
got him to myself; but these mixings up--good Lord!"

"How do you feel now?" enquired Mary, turning to him when
she and Tom were seated at the table. He refused to meet her
eyes. "I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil!" he muttered, with-
out a thought of Barnaby Rudge's raven.

"Don't keep bothering, Mary," he groaned peevishly. "You
know what's the matter with me and so does Tom."

"You're not getting jealous, are you, old chap, because I've
got your place?" chuckled Barter.

Mary thought to herself: "How dangerously these men fool
each other! Doesn't he know that when he says a thing like that,
he makes John hate him so much that he could strike him dead?"

"I hope you realise, John," she said, "that nothing will in-
duce me to let you go to that thing this morning? You've got
nervous prostration--that's what's the matter with you; and
you're going to stay in bed."

"So that Tom can take you to the Hill, I suppose? I thought
something like that was in your mind."

Mary said to herself, "I must be more careful. Oh, these
men, these men! Our jealousies are serious or nothing. But with
them--"She had already come to the conclusion that under
a certain "cannikin-clink" brusqueness, like that of Iago, her
husband concealed black holes of malice that went down to
the nether pit.

This judgment was not quite accurate. John's fits of "miching-
mallecho" came and went, like the weather. Often when she
thought he was most affectionate, his heart had turned as cold
as ice; and again, when she fancied she detected abysses of ma-
licious aloofness, he was merely worrying because he was afraid
he was going to have dyspepsia.

"If you can't go," she said emphatically, "I shan't go. Tom
can take Tossie and leave the babies with us here. Why don't
you do that, Tom? Toss would love to see the crowds and hear
the speeches."

Barter admitted that so far they had been unable to find any-
one to leave the twins with. All Glastonbury seemed resolved to
be at Chalice Hill this morning.

They finished their meal in silence, John's feverish querulous-
ness exercising a discouraging effect upon them.

"Do you want me to come over with you, Tom, and get the
twins?" she asked, as soon as they were done. "It's after ten,
and you and Tossie should be starting if you want to get good
places."

As soon as Barter and Mary had departed on this errand, John
Crow struggled up from his bed and somewhat stiffly and weakly
stood erect upon the floor--Yes, he felt pretty wretched; but
it tickled his vagabond fancy to trick the two people he loved
best in the world; and he set himself obstinately to put on his
clothes. When he was dressed, and had his overcoat on, he went
to the sink and sponged his face with cold water. This made
him feel a little better; and moving to the table, he filled Mary's
tea-cup with milk and poured it down his throat.

"Nervous prostration," he said to himself, "what a phrase
that is! Well, I certainly have done something for old Geard
and his Saxon arch; and I'm damned if they're going to keep
me from seeing the sport."

Half an hour later he had succeeded by the exercise of both
blandishments and violence in pushing his way through the surg-
ing crowd, which already filled the road and spread up the slope
of the hill, till he was standing right against the new arch itself.

It was a fine piece of work, this Saxon arch, now it rose un-
covered to the watery sunshine of that January day, but little
as John knew about architecture he felt sure that the great archi-
tect had fooled Mr. Geard and that this massive stone edifice
was a completely new and original work no more Saxon than
Cardiff Villa was Saxon. But it was a noble erection; and John
had an inkling that in some very subtle way the architect had
actually caught something of the spirit of Mr. Geard's new
religion!

It was not easy to define to himself what he felt; but he did
feel that if he, John Crow, had had to express in solid stone what
he had come to understand of the Mayor's strange notions, it
would have been almost exactly in this way that he would have
done it. How queer that crowd of human heads looked, as it
swayed and undulated beneath him! A line from Homer's descrip-
tion of the pallid ghosts, flocking up from Erebus, came into his
mind---"The powerless heads of the dead."

He still felt curiously dizzy and feverish; so much so that
between himself and that vast undulating crowd--and how
silent and patient they were! They only swayed and moved and
eddied and drifted. They really were like ghosts from Erebus!
Why were they all so spellbound?--Yes, between him and them
there seemed to be a cold, grey, clammy, Cimmerian mist.

On the opposite side of the arch from where he was stand-
ing, and he was himself inside some sort of rope-barrier--how
had he crossed that barrier? He could remember nothing just
now--was a broad, empty platform, covered entirely with a
heavy black cloth, "God! it looks like a place of execution," he
thought; and then it came over him that it was towards this
draped platform, though there was no one there, that this vast
concourse of people were lifting their hushed, awe-struck, hypno-
tised heads--the "powerless heads of the dead."

And John began to receive a most uncanny feeling--the feeling
namely that Mr. Geard really was standing on that platform now.
Either his own brain was too dizzy to see him there, when every-
body else saw him, or there was an actual invisible presence up
there which everybody in the crowd felt without seeing anything.

But it certainly was, for John, the most extraordinary expe-
rience he had ever had, that swaying, shifting, drifting, undulat-
ing crowd--men, women, and children, young men and young
maids, foreigners and natives--all lifting up strained, tense,
hushed, white faces, as they surged slowly about, while their vast
mass moved, like a sea-flood stirred by tides that could not be
seen, here and there about the ribs of the hill.

Feeling too dizzy to stand much longer upon his feet, and
yet unwilling to sink down upon the grass, John began examin-
ing the great unhewn rock-boulders out of which the architect
had constructed this singular monument. While he did this he
began to experience the feeling that he was really entirely alone
on this hillside, and at any moment this illusion, the mirage of
these faces, might melt away. He was aroused from this sensa-
tion by a sudden spasm of recognition. Where had he seen this
particular type of stone before? The stone was inserted between
two blocks of Portland stone--for among the architect's original
effects in the Saxon arch was the use of several varieties of ma-
terial--and as John now leaned his forehead against it, for it
was on a level with his face and he had come hatless from
Northload Street, he knew well where he had seen its like be-
fore. It resembled one of those strange "foreign stones," which
Mr. Evans assured him came from South Wales, which he had
seen at Stonehenge.

The contact of his skull with this stone--and it is likely enough
it would have happened with any stone of a similar texture--put
new strength into him and cleared the mists from his brain. He
now discovered that he was not by any means alone in this
roped-off enclosure. There was in fact quite a large group of
people assembled here, though in his dizziness, and his preoccu-
pation with the vast array of faces upraised from the slope be-
low, he had felt as if he were the only person close to the arch.

"It's like the ones at Stonehenge," he remarked to his nearest
neighbour, who turned out to be the beautiful wife of Harry
Stickles, the chemist. Nancy had indeed traded shamelessly on
her unusual good looks to get inside this privileged barrier,
and it was only because all the officials were local people that
she had attained her desire.

"Where is he now?" she responded to John's remark about
the stone.

"Where is who?"

"He; Mr. Geard."

"I don't know," said John. "To tell you the truth, Mrs.
Stickles, l feel as if he were standing on that platform now! I
seem to feel him there...but of course it's empty." He ran
his fingers over the stone that interested him so much. "It's
like the ones at Stonehenge," he repeated aloud.

‘There must be more sacred stones," said Nancy, "in Glas-
tonbury than anywhere else in England. I heard people talking
just now about a stone with funny marks on it that's been found
quite lately on this Hill."

"So they've got it, have they?" he said. "It must be the one
that this new antiquary was after, not the King Edgar Chapel man,
but this new fellow who's been about here--but Mr. Geard never
told me about this stone."

"That's just what they were saying about the other one with
the marks on it," said Nancy. "They were saying he hides these
stones where no one can find them."

"Only when he thinks they've got something to do with Mer-
lin!" said John. "He knows nothing really about the Legend.
He's never read a word of Malory. It's old Evans who's put all
this Merlin business into his head."

"He's a very great man," said Nancy gravely.

"I never said he wasn't!" responded John. "They'll be making
a legend out of him soon. Geard of Glastonbury--it sounds like
history already!"

They both were silent; -and John, with his fingers still pressed
against that South Wales stone, began to feel again the strange
sensation of being quite alone up here under Geard's arch and
by the side of Geard's black-draped platform. The touch of this
foreign stone seemed to isolate him, along with all the Glaston-
bury stones. It gave him the power to feel the life of Glastonbury
with all its long historic centuries as if it were the mere motions
of beetles and earth-worms across the surface of a platform of
primordial rock, the rock of the Island of Avalon. That vast
crowd of white upturned faces, that were like ghosts from
Erebus, seemed to become real ghosts, the ghosts of all the men
and women whose little, turbulent earth-lives had disturbed the
planetary repose of this rock island in the tide-swept marshes.
Yes! He felt them rise up multitudinously about him, kluta ethnea
nekron, "the glorious tribes of the dead," and he, the wornout
Danish adventurer, privileged by a strange fate to be the one to
feel them there, with Geard's arch above him and Geard's plat-
form beside him.

He glanced up from that sea of pallid faces to the coping-
stone of the arch which had been rudely carved into a rough
resemblance of Dunstan of Baltonsborough. Baltonsborough it-
self was over there, hidden by the Tor, an abode of living people
still, and nearer him, beyond Edgarley, was Havyatt Gap, where
his own un superstitious Danes had been stopped by these mad
monks. Mad they were then; mad they were still; and old Geard
was the maddest of them all!

This stone, all these stones, how much nobler was their long-
enduring life than the follies and fevers of men! Surrounded by
the great waters had they once been, by the tossing salt waves
of that free sea, over which the Viking ships had swept. Would
that some strong new flood might come up from its ocean-bed,
and sweep over all these morbid-legended fields! How he hated
them, these lies, these frauds, these illusions, which he had been
paid to propagate! And yet there was something about old Geard,
that seemed as much on his side as on the side of these mad
monks. Was Geard himself, secretly in his deep heart, as heathen
as he was? Was that black-draped empty platform only waiting
even now, for the lifting of some huge gonfalon of defiance to all
this? Was this opening of the man's Saxon arch into these Latin-
Celtic mysteries of Glastonbury, in reality a reversal of that
stopping of the Danes at Havyatt?

How well he remembered his own first entrance into the town,
more than ten months ago, in Mr. Evans' little motor car. Well!
Evans and he were both married men now; married and settled,
and far away from Stonehenge!

"I can't think where he is!" It was the beautiful Nancy address-
ing him again.

"How do I know," John replied peevishly. "He's probably
asleep in Wookey Hole, like he was last time, when Cousin
Philip shoved himself into his place. Why! Talk of the devil--
if there's not Philip himself, coming over here now!"

Nancy turned round and sure enough there was Philip Crow,
pushing through the crowd that gave way before him, and mak-
ing straight for the platform.

Behind him, as he came, rose a low angry murmur from the
natives present. They were evidently already expectant of a sec-
ond grand anti-climax.

Philip skirted the platform steps, evidently surprised to see
no sign of Geard, and passing--a thing no one else had dared
to do--right under the arch, came up to Nancy and John.

John held out his hand. They had not met many times since
that day at Northwold Rectory.

"Come to address us in place of the Mayor?" said John, his
cheek twitching with the family twitch and his eyelids blinking
under the grip that Philip gave his fingers.

"Perhaps...it will...fall on me," responded Philip with an air
of contemptuous nonchalance. "I'm ready for the job...
if Lord P. and our good Vicar are dodging it! Has the Mayor
got no one to introduce him? How oddly all these things are
arranged!"

"Do you know Mrs. Nancy Stickles, Philip?"

Philip took off his hat and bowed. "It's just like the scamp,"
he thought, "to saddle me with some pretty pick-up at a moment
like this."

But before Nancy could do more than return an embarrassed
smile to his exaggerated deference, none other than Mr. Geard
himself appeared quietly among them, as if materialising out
of the air. The Mayor nodded kindly at Nancy, winked at John,
and offered his plump hand to Philip. His appearance was so
sudden that it was like the appearance of Teiresias at that Cim-
merian scene which John had already called up.

John stepped back a little and regarded with concentrated at-
tention the Protagonist and Antagonist of this memorable occa-
sion. Never had the contrast between the two men been more
marked.

Philip was dressed in a fawn-coloured overcoat and light soft
grey hat. He wore spats beneath his blue-serge trousers and in
his hand he carried a cane with a round jasper knob that Perse-
phone had given him. He had a red camellia in his buttonhole
and his whole demeanour was composed, debonair, alert.

Bloody Johnny, on the contrary, was really scandalously at-
tired. He had dodged, as his custom was, on public occasions, all
attempts of his family to groom him. He was not even pictur-
esquely untidy. He looked like a deboshed verger who had
turned billiard-marker in some fifth-rate club.

"He's been drinking," thought John, "and that's why he's so
late."

John was not in error. From a very early hour that morning,
Mr. Geard, on this supreme occasion of his life, had been sip-
ping brandy with that old crony and convertite of his, the ostler
at the Pilgrims'.

John now approached a step nearer to these two Glastonbury
magnates. He forgot all about his dizziness, in his anxiety to
hear what they could possibly be saying to each other on this
day of all days. But as often happens when two formidable per-
sonalities meet, they each seemed desirous of avoiding any real
contact with the other.

Nancy also moved up close to Mr. Geard's side. She seemed
to have an obscure feminine instinct that it would be fatal for
her Prophet to have a serious encounter with this enemy at this
juncture.

The murmurs that rose from the crowd at Philip's appearance
now changed into shouts and yells when the two men were
clearly observed talking together.

"Begin! Begin! Begin! Leave your chattering and begin!"

Such was the burden of a storm of confused cries, not only
in English but in every European tongue, that now rose like a
howl of demons from the crowded slope of Chalice Hill.

"We are being chaffed by the populace," said Philip with a
bitter smile. "The chap's half-seas-over," he thought. "Tilly was
right to tell me to come. He's going to make an absolute zany
of himself. This is my chance, if I can keep cool. I wonder if
my voice can carry as far as the road. I'll let these foreigners
know that this sham commune and this mountebank Mayor are
not the only representatives of Glastonbury."

Thus did Philip Crow gather his wits together; but what were
Mr. Geard's thoughts at this crisis? He had none at all; none,
that is to say, beyond a lively interest in the camellia in Philip's
buttonhole! He was as empty of abstract considerations or even
rational considerations as ex-Mayor Wollop himself. But let no
one suppose that this physical placidity meant that Mr. Geard
was hors-de-combat. It only meant that he was in such peace with
himself that his whole being moved in harmony to the least stray
thought that came into his head. It is true he was drunk. But
Philip was a fool to regard that condition as a handicap to Geard
of Glastonbury. Not even John--who knew him so much better
than Philip--realised the power that resided in the man's com-
plete freedom from self-consciousness.

All that his tipsiness did was to make him five times more
his natural self than in normal times. And Mr. Geard's natural
self was a thing of mountainous potency. It is likely enough that
Nancy's Prophet of the Lord had quite deliberately repaired to
the ostler's bar at the Pilgrims', so as to leave no shred of fussy
vain human self-thought between his intellect and his world-
deep sensations.

"Do you know where the steps are to that platform?" said Mr.
Geard. "They'll be quiet enough presently. Do you mind if I
sit down for a moment?"

"My chance is coming," thought Philip, "my chance is coming."

Mr. Geard now deliberately sat down on the grass. This per-
formance was almost as disconcerting to John as it was to Nancy;
and it was a good deal worse than disconcerting to the officials
of the commune in the crowd below. John began to feel it im-
perative that someone should intervene; for Mr. Geard seemed
to have fallen into a trance of imperturbable quiescence.

As he sat there cross-legged, with his plump fingers extended
on the grass at either side of him, he looked like some neolithic
beast-god, paramour perhaps of the Witch of Wookey!

But quick as lightning Philip accepted this grand chance of-
fered him by the fates and stepping lightly past John and Nancy
mounted the steps of the platform and presented himself before
the audience.

"You have all come here," he began, and out of mere curiosity
they let him get as far as that, "to show your interest in our
great historic town and to learn what we are trying to do to
make it not only a beautiful place, worthy of its old traditions,
but also a place where the noblest achievements of Progress can
be carried--"

But "Progress" was the last word that was audible; for at that
point he was simply shouted down. Yes, there was nothing for
Philip to do but to descend those platform steps as proudly
and contemptuously as he had mounted them. This he accom-
plished with self-control, dignity and grace. Once on the ground,
however, he gave a swift malicious glance at the grotesque per-
son squatting on the grass, over whom Nancy and John were
bending, shrugged his shoulders, replaced his hat upon his
head, waved his cane, and made his way down the hill.

But with John pulling at one arm and Nancy pulling at the
other, Bloody Johnny was now raised to his feet. This achieve-
ment, every detail of which the crowd watched from below, was
grossly and humourously cheered, the "hoch, hochs" of the Ger-
manic element and the "vivas" of the Italians being especially
vehement.

Once on his feet, Mr. Geard smilingly dispensed with Nancy's
help; but permitted John to assist him to mount the platform;
and John himself, amid the tumult of applause that greeted the
Mayor, slipped down again and took his seat on the lowest stair
of the steps, side by side with Bob Sheperd, the old policeman,
and Mr. Merry, the old museum curator.

It was at that moment of the proceedings that Miss Barbara
Fell was overheard to say that it was a pity dear Mr. Crow should
have been shouted down; while Dr. Fell was heard explaining
to his neighbors in philosophic language that Mr. Geard was
probably not very drunk and had probably staged the whole
episode, with the view of arousing in his audience "that par-
ticular psychological mood of sympathetic nervous hilarity which
can be so quickly changed by a crafty orator into passionate
receptivity."

Certainly in its whole long and turbulent history no man in
the county of Somerset has ever received an ovation comparable
with the ovation that Bloody Johnny received at this moment
before he began to speak. And when he did begin, a silence like
the silence of fishes in the sea, or of birds at midnight, fell upon
that crowd, so that angry heads were turned round when anyone
coughed or sneezed or shuffled or struck a match or even turned
up his coat collar.

From the poinl of view of oratory, there was nothing at all
remarkable in the way the Mayor's speech began. Many of his
later discourses, as they were taken down in the next two months,
were far more eloquent He thanked his hearers for allowing him
to speak at all--"under the circumstances." He said that he was
sure people would come from all parts of the world to drink
of the Grail Spring. He emphasised the historical interest of the
new experiment in government that Glastonbury was making. He
begged "those who were strange to our system of a just and
equitable division of those benefits which human brains and hu-
man labour, working in harmony with Nature, give to humanity,
to suspend their judgment till they see the thing in working
order."

He rambled off at that point into quite a childishly grave re-
cital of early Glastonbury history. He referred to the Lake Village
neolithic race. He spoke of the Ancient Britons. He alluded to
the importance of the work of the great Saxon king, Edgar.

As John watched the faces of the audience from his position
by Bob Sheperd's side he was struck by one very curious phe-
nomenon. The fact that the Mayor was blundering along in a
quite commonplace way, uttering brief and cursory remarks
that were really platitudes, made no difference at all to the ex-
traordinary impression he produced. John found it amusing
afterward to notice the various ways in which the great London
newspapers handled this striking difference; this discrepancy be-
tween the substance of the man's speech and the spellbound awe
--there was no other word for it--with which his uninspired re-
marks were received. Once more John began (or was it his dizzi-
ness returning upon him?) to feel as if all those upturned faces
were thousands and thousands of ghosts, all the nekuon ameneena
kareena, "the powerless heads of the dead," of the long Glaston-
bury history, listening to Mr. Geard.

It was not long, however, before John's ears heard the phrase:
"I therefore declare this arch to the Grail Spring of our dear
town, open, free of charge, to all persons who, who, who care
to come!" and he became aware that, in the same droning and
uninspired manner, Mr. Geard had begun to allude to various
familiar aspects of the Grail story; aspects such as the simplest
schoolchild in the place had been acquainted with since infancy.

This preposterous narrating and countenancing, in solemn
seriousness, of what John felt to be a mass of fantastic and grue-
some fairy-tales, made something stark and dangerous rise up
within his East-Anglian soul. He turned his eyes away from these
hypnotised ghosts and fixed them upon that stone in the new
arch which had made him think of Stonehenge. And it was borne
in upon his mind with a frozen certitude that however phantas-
mal matter might be in its interior essence there was something
about it when it hardened into stone that reduced all organic
flesh into the transient, the impermanent, the perishable. He saw
the birth and the death of the generations--men and beasts and
birds and fishes--their tremulous loves, their wretched tribula-
tions, their vain hopes, their importunate passions, and all swept
away by wind and water from the enduring majesty of these
stones, that themselves changed not, save by cosmic catastrophe.

"If I could destroy," he thought, "in one overwhelming stroke
all this whole maze of delusion; if I could bring the free sea in
upon it, and the north wind down upon it, if I could burn it
with fire and cleanse it with water, if I could purify the air of
it and purge the earth of it, how calm and clean the world-floor
would be!"

"And thus," boomed on above him the monotonous voice of
Bloody Johnny, "the Grail-worship at Glastonbury has be-
come--"

An impulse of anger too great to be resisted took hold upon
John Crow. Leaping to his feet he turned his back to the crowd
and looking up at Mr. Geard who was near enough now to the
edge of the platform to see his convulsed face, he uttered in a
low hissing tone and so that Mr. Geard alone could hear him,
the words--"Lies! Lies! Lies!"

His effort had been so great that his dizziness came back upon
him with a rush. So blindingly it came, that everything swam
before his eyes and he began swaying to and fro at the foot of
the platform, groping at the air with his hands and gurgling in
his throat. As he swayed like this, all began to grow dark before
him, and he had just time to think to himself, "What have I done?
Have I ruined his speech?" when he fell prone on the ground in
a dead faint.

The speaker had drawn back a little towards the centre of
the platform, so that when old Bob Sheperd and Mr. Merry, with
the help of two other younger men, lifted John up and carried
him towards the Rotunda, all that crossed Geard's mind was,
"Someone has fainted," and it never occurred to him to asso-
ciate this incident with that convulsed face and the word, "Lies!"

One of the officials produced the key of the Rotunda and here
they laid John; but it was not till the Mayor's speech was over
and the crowd had dispersed that he really awoke to full con-
sciousness.

"People say these things are lies," shouted Mr. Geard, after
a pause, in a voice that rolled away over that hypnotised assem-
bly with such thunderous force that it reached the ears of Mad
Bet, as kneeling at her window on the other side of the road she
thought of Codfin's iron bar. "People say we must have the
naked Truth in place of these lies. Now what the Spirit and the
Blood command me to tell you is this--"

An inspiration was reaching him at last from the dark recesses
of his being. It seemed to tear itself through him and force its
way out, like a dragon escaping from a thunder-split cavern.
And Mr. Geard felt himself in full command of this inspiration.
Unlike Faust, with his earth-spirit, Mr. Geard held the bridle of
this demonic winged creature. This was proved by the dramatic
pause he made at this point, quietly taking his breath and, as
he did so, glancing towards the Rotunda where they had taken
that person who had fainted.

Then, as if he were releasing, in absolute aplomb, this wind-
dragon of the abyss, he lifted up his voice again::--"Any lie,"
he shouted, "I tell you, any lie as long as a multitude of souls
believes it and presses that belief to the cracking point, creates
new life, while the slavery of what is called truth drags us down
to death and to the dead! Lies, magic, illusion--these are names
we give to the ripples on the water of our experience when the
Spirit of Life blows upon it. I have myself"--here he made an-
other of his dramatic pauses--"I have myself cured a woman of
cancer in that spring ." He stretched out his arm towards the
Grail Fount. "Miracles are lies; and yet they are happening.
Immortality is a lie; and yet we are attaining it. Christ is a lie;
and yet I am living in Him. It...is...given...unto...me...to tell you
that if any man brought a dead body before me...in the power
of what people call a 'lie' I would, even now, here and before
you all, restore that dead one to life!"

His voice died away in a silence so profound that Nancy
Stickles, whose face was distorted with emotion, told Tossie later
that she could hear the tinkle of the far-away sheep-bell, on the
throat of Tupper, the old fence-breaking ram, in the Edgar ley
Great Field.

Heavily and awkwardly and all hunched up, his broad back
stooping as if a weight beyond what he could bear had been
laid upon it, Mr. Geard now began shambling down from the
platform. Having reached the ground he stood for a time with
his whole massive body bent forward, and his eyes tightly shut.
At last, waving his hand every now and then to keep away any-
one who approached him, he moved slowly down the slope to-
wards the road.

There were so many conflicting accounts of what now hap-
pened, that a compilation of them all, and a comparison of them
with one another, would leave upon the mind a feeling that cer-
tain great human events do not occur in a direct, clear-cut abso-
lute manner; but include a wavering margin of actuality which
changes in accordance with the human medium through which
it passes.

As he came down the hill, the bulk of the people remained
perfectly motionless, save for an attempt to pursue him with
their eyes. He seemed protected, isolated, defended from intru-
sion by some interior power.

It was not long, however, before a little group of devotees
who were now pushing their way towards him made a kind of
half-circle round him; but even these did not dare to speak to
him or approach him closely. There had been a great many refer-
ences in European newspapers of late, to the Mayor's desire to
make of Glastonbury a sort of, English Lourdes, where an at-
mosphere of miraculous healing is charged with the electricity
of Faith, and everyone present felt that something momentous
was in the air. But it was not only sick people who were now
awaiting this man in the road below.

There always had lingered among the natives of Glastonbury,
an obstinate notion that their Grail Spring possessed healing
qualities; and no doubt Ned Athling's writings in the Wayfarer
had played upon this obscure belief and stirred it up. At any rate
it is certain that there had spread through Paradise and Bove
Town a rumour that the Mayor wanted all the Glastonbury sick
people, who could possibly be moved, to come to the Grail
Fount that day; and along with these sick people Something Else
had been carried to the foot of Chalice Hill, Something that now-
awaited him there.

Moving straight towards this small dead form, carried upon a
stretcher, while the sick people--none of whom was seriously ill
--forgot their own condition as they watched him, Mr. Geard
followed the example of the prophet in the Old Testament and
stretched himself upon the wooden bier, covering the dead child's
body with his own. The man's disciples while he did this kept
the child's relatives from approaching, all except the mother,
whose hands as she knelt pressed the child's feet to her
breast...

What sceptics said afterwards was that no doctor had seen the
child since he died; and what the parents had mistaken for death
was in reality a death-like trance, from which the exceptional
animal-magnetism of the Mayor's heavy form naturally aroused
him. This was the view taken of the incident by Dr. Fell, who
came upon the scene soon after the child revived. Meanwhile--
inside the Rotunda--John Crow was coming to his senses. When
he did so he found his friend Tom bending over him, and Tom's
overcoat spread out across his legs.

"You're shivering, Tom!" he whispered.

Barter made a wry face at him. "You haven't seen what I've
just seen, or you wouldn't be surprised if my teeth were
chattering."

John sighed. He made a weak motion with his hand. "What's
up? What's he doing now?"

Barter realised that he was talking about Geard; and with-
out delay he poured out his extraordinary story.

"It's that little boy who died this morning. They brought him
on a stretcher. I saw the kid once myself. His mother's a drunken
bitch, who lived in my house. I knew who it was the moment I
heard the woman's voice. Two terrible old trots, Betsy Burt and
Mrs. Carey, were with her when I saw the child then; and they
were with her just now. They all lived in my house. I fetched
the doctor once for this child myself. Dr. Fell said it was a sort
of epilepsy."

"Did he know they'd brought him, before he made his speech?"

Barter cast a hurried glance round the edifice in which they
were holding this intense and strange conversation. In his mind
there was the dim thought that there is something monstrous and
horrible about bringing the dead to life; something that inter-
feres with Nature and has an obscure and shocking profanity in
it. He stared at what was around them in this queer building. It
was crowded with litter and scaffolding, for it was but half fin-
ished; but there was a peculiar personal quality in the work-
manship and in the materials, that separated it from all the newly
erected buildings that he had ever seen.

"It might be something erected to Geard," he thought, "rather
than by Geard!"

"Did he know they'd brought him, Tom?"

"How do I know what he knew? You know him better than!"

"I don't believe he knew," whispered John.

They were both silent then and something very peculiar passed
between them. There are certain topics which resemble certain
substances in the world, such as blood and semen and the lique-
faction of decomposition, in that they trouble some unique nerve
in human mortality and produce, even in the naming, a peculiar
frisson. Such a frisson they experienced now, and as they gazed
m each other s faces in this dim, littered, empty place; these two
cynical East-Anglians felt like dogs who had met an absolutely
new smell; dogs, let us say, who are sniffing at a new-fallen
meteorite!

"Dead? White and stiff and with that look, was he? And did
old Geard "

Barter nodded like a China-mandarin. "Yes, old cock, yes, my
sweet cod, Geard did it "

"Brought it to life?"

"Yes, old top-knot! To life, old white-face!"

"Where's Tossie?"

"She's with Miss Crow and Lady Rachel."

They were both silent then for a while; and during their silence
the uttermost mystery of the world, that unspeakable cold-
ness, stiffness, stillness of an organism that has lived and
breathed, and now has been changed into something else held
them by the throat.

"This child," they both thought, "has been behind life, and if
it could only remember what that Something Else--"

"Where are those two who were here?"

"Sheperd and Mr. Merry?"

"Were they here?"

"They've gone to look at the child."

"They'll kill it again, crowding round it."

"Do you know what I think, John? I think the whole thing
has been--"

Barter was going to say "planned," but once more that shiver-
ing took him; and in his mind he saw that ghastly rigor mortis
which holds the secret of the universe.

John made a desperate struggle to get up. "I'd like to see
that child," he murmured, rising on his elbow, "I'd like to see
someone who has really been dead."

"Dead, old cock; but not buried! Cataleptic, old man!"

"I can't breathe properly," groaned John. "I feel as weak as
a baby. I wish you'd get him to come to me."

"Shut up, you fool! You'll be all right in a jiffy-"

"Water," moaned John. "If I don't have a drop of water, I'll
go off again."

"The child was sitting up on the stretcher. They were feed-
ing it!"

"Water," moaned John, "water."

Barter gave one more hurried glance at the strange interior
around them. Then he went out quickly into the air. Hurrying
under the Saxon arch--the irony of fate thus brought it about
that the first two persons to use that new entrance were Philip
and his ex-manager--he filled one of the little cups that were
Kept there and brought it to his friend.

"Chalybeate," he said with a leer, as John satisfied his crav-
ing and showed signs of recovery, "or Christ's Precious Blood;
you can toss up which it is!"

The prostrate man jerked himself up on his elbow, and stared
at the Rotunda door which Tom had left open.

"I'd like to know," he muttered, "what dreams that child had!"

Barter gave vent to a quick welcoming shout and ran again to
the door.

What's up now?" sighed John, subsiding into his former
position. "Is he coming?"

"He? He's in the town by now. It's Toss, I tell you. Hullo!
Hullo! Here he is! Here we are!"

But John Crow was not the only unbeliever in Glastonbury to
be confronted with the inexplicable that eventful twentieth of
January. The Marquis of P., making his way to the snug little
lodging above the offices of the Wayfarer, where Ned Athling
had his rooms, wondered to himself as he went along whether
after all he was well advised to pay a surprise visit, at ten o'clock
at night, to his daughter's lover. He had dined at the Pilgrims',
where Sergeant Blimp had put up as usual the famous green-
wheeled dog-cart, and warmed by a bottle of first-rate port,
sipped in company with his old servant in the quiet room he
always occupied, he had resolved to make a frontal attack upon
this troubler of the Zoyland pride.

"If they're not married, I don't care," he said to himself. "Sis-
ter will have to swallow it. I'm not going to quarrel with the
girl for Betsy's sake."

It was easier to find the place at that hour of the night than
to discover how to get into Athling's room when he had found it.
What a shabby down-and-out location for the Mayor's official
newspaper!

But one of the battered doors opened easily to his hand, though
there was no bell or knocker. Groping about inside a dark pas-
sage Lord P. began to feel more like a nervous burglar than like
an indignant peer of the realm pursuing his daughter's seducer.

"Athling! Athling P he called out in a voice a good deal less
authoritative and formidable than he would have liked it to be.

There was no response; and, since he had shut the street door,
there was not even light enough to see whether he had to ascend
a staircase, or rap at some chamber, in this musty passage.

"Damn the young idiot!" muttered the Marquis. "Why the devil
don't he keep a light in this place?"

Annoyance increased the power of his voice.

"Athling! Athling!"

A door did open now, at the top of a straight flight of broad,
bare, old-fashioned steps. A bright ray of light, from inside a
warm, mellow, glowing room, streamed down the staircase. A
girlish figure, obviously in a night-dress and dressing-gown,
stood in the entrance of the room.

"Why it's Dad!" cried Lady Rachel in a low, soft, rich voice.
"It's Dad, Ned!" she repeated, turning half-round as the amazed
peer with an indrawn gasp of his breath and a muttered, "Well,
I'll be damned!" gravely ascended the staircase.

"How sweet of you to come and see us!" she cried, in the
same low, rich-laughing, self-composed manner.

The Marquis bowed to the young man who in a rough tweed
suit had clearly just risen up from beside a table covered with
sheets of manuscript. The room was lighted by a dim rose-shaded
lamp. A pleasant fire burned in the grate; and an open door,
leading out of the back of the room, revealed a double-bed, with
the white sheets turned down, and a second cheerful fire, in a
sort of alcove.

"Sit down, Dad," said Lady Rachel, offering her speechless
parent a low wicker chair close to the hearth.

"Get some of that cherry brandy for my father, Ned."

Athling, whose hands were trembling with nervousness, lifted
down from a shelf a beautiful little decanter made of fine cut-
glass of a greenish tint. He spilled quite a lot of the gleaming
cordial as he poured it and it was running down the edge of the
tiny glass over his own fingers as he handed it to the Marquis.

Lord P. declined it with a wave of his hand. "Just had a bottle
of wine," he said. "Blimp ferreted it out for me. I'll have a
cigarette though, if you've got one anywhere."

As he spoke he allowed his eyes to roam over the walls of
the room. They were adorned with nothing but a great number
of striking water-colour sketches, all of them painted in a very
peculiar and extremely unusual manner.

Lord P. was something of a virtuoso in this kind; and in spite
of the dumbfounded condition of his nerves he mechanically
got up and approached some of the more remarkable of these
pictures.

"Damned good!" he muttered. "Which of you children did
these things?"

"They're all Ned's!" cried the girl eagerly. "They're lovely,
aren't they?"

"I should...say...they are." He went solemnly round the room,
carefully examining each one of these singular productions.
As he did so, turning his back to both of them, he thought to
himself : "Betsy needn't know anything about it. They're not
married. She's sure to get tired of him after a bit. I suppose
they understand about contraception."

And he found himself slipping into an imaginary conversa-
tion with his friend Godfrey Bent at his club.

"My daughter's picked up with an artist-chap, you know the
sort of thing, down there in the country. An old family, they
tell me, one of the oldest in the county, but not a brass farthing.
Can't you get him a show of some sort, Godfrey, next season?
They're damned good, his things. They really might make a hit
if they had half a chance!"

When he turned round and took his place again at the fire
he regarded the young man with a very much more sympathetic
eye. Lord P. was totally devoid of any poetical taste; but he
really was a competent connoisseur in painting, and it pleased
him to think that in all his encounters with this lad, the boy
had kept this astonishing talent in the background.

Rachel sat down on the arm of her father's chair enveloping
him in the warm sweetness of her glowing happiness.

"Well, Dad?" she said. "So you're not going to scold, after
ail?"

He looked whimsically at the fingers she had placed in his.
No! There was no sign of a wedding ring.

"You've not gone and got married by any chance?'' he asked.

She shook her head. "I'm not thinking of marrying for years
and years. Ned would like to. But he never teases me about it.
Do you. Ned?"

"Wiser not--to tease 'em about anything; eh, lad?" chuckled
her father, glancing slyly at the young man. "You understand
how to keep--you mustn't be cross at an old man's grossness
--from getting--into trouble, as the servants say?"

Rachel nodded mischievously, and then smiled gravely and
quietly straight into his eyes.

"And what lie do you tell to our worthy Miss Crow, Rachel?
I presume you still ostensibly live with her?"

This time the girl blushed scarlet. He had touched the sore
spot--the one spot that rankled--in her romantic adventure.

"I tell her I have to work all night in the office," she whis-
pered. "She sends me to bed for hours!" she added ruefully,
and without a smile.

He changed the conversation then, asking Ned some very
searching technical questions about his methods of painting. The
talk between the three of them flagged and wilted a little after
that and he soon rose to go.

"Did you hear old Johnny's speech today?" he asked, as he
picked up his coat and hat and gloves.

"Haven't you seen our special edition, Dad?" cried Lady
Rachel, placing in the hands of the grey, elderly man, whose
figure in that warmly lighted room--a room so full of a radiant
atmosphere of youthful happiness--seemed to dwindle at that
moment and become old and pinched and rather forlorn, a copy
of the Wayfarer with the most startling headlines that any hu-
man chronicle could conceivably carry, short of the announce-
ment of an approaching Deluge.

"What's this, eh? What's this? Gad! but he couldn't have
been really dead! Come now, come now, this is getting a bit
too thick. But...of course...if you wild children...are going...to
turn this place...into...into...this will, I suppose...be the kind of
thing--but, good God, Rachel, you don't really think...yourself...
that my old Johnny Geard could--"

The Marquis stood there in that rosy light, between the girl
in her soft night-attire looking like some enamoured nymph out
of a Welsh fairy-tale, and the sturdy young poet-painter in his
Norfolk jacket, frowning and bewildered. He kept folding up
the paper he held, as if to conceal that troublesome word
"Miracle" in those big black letters, and then unfolding it again.
What was the world coming to?

"Good-night, little one," he murmured at last, kissing her
tenderly. "You might send over a few of those sketches before
I leave Mark Court," he added gravely. "I'll take 'em up to town
with me."

He turned to her once more as she held the door open to
light him down the staircase.

"Don't 'ee do this too often, girlie," he said. "The good Miss
Crow is no fool. Besides, we don't want any confounded scandal."

He was at the bottom of the stairs now.

"Remember what long ears your Aunt Betsy has!" he called
back, as he turned to go to the street door.

Once in the dark street, buttoning his coat to face a frosty
wind, and pulling on his grey gloves, an emotion of miserable
depression took hold of him.

His little Rachel, his little Rachel! And yet how radiant the
wench had looked. But, oh, what a man had to see, and bear,
and endure, if, in these days he meant to keep a child's love
and not make her hate him!

"But they're not out for marrying," he thought, "that's one
good thing. And she's playing safe with the Crow woman, I can
see that, though she hates it like the devil! Well, who can blame
her? She'll never be young again. And the lad's a decent lad
...nothing caddish or tricky about the lad."

He was moving along now beside a dark row of wretched
houses. The pavement was uneven. The wind had got up and had
become icy cold. It moaned and whistled over the slate roofs
of this poorer portion of the town. Very old and very desolate
did Henry Zoyland, Marquis of P., feel as he walked along!
Those enchanting, unconventional retreats with his little Rachel
at Mark Court all, all over! She had been restless and distrait,
the last time he had had her with him up there; and those
Bellamys! Their quarrels with poor Blimp were becoming in-
tolerable. Yet he hadn't the heart to turn them out.

"The place is nothing without her," he thought, and he saw
himself sitting by that big, lonely hearth with the ancient stair-
case leading up and up: and then her room, and then that stone
causeway, and the Merlin room--was it during his night in that
place that old Johnny had learnt these devils tricks of putting
life into dead babies?

The man's desolation grew apace as he approached the out-
skirts of Paradise. "Old; I'm getting old," he thought. "And no
Merlin cantrips, learnt by any modern Messire Bleheris, could
make me stir when once I was knocked on the head. No, damn
it! I won't put anything in the child's way. Let her have her
fling. Zoyland women always begin with a passionate romance
in their teens; and then settle down into savage harridans at
forty! Betsy did it; and never married at all! The child's not
half as wild as Betsy was. To hell with middle-class pruderies!
The Zoylands ahvays did what they wanted; and, by gad, my
little girl shall."

Thus the old diplomatist swaggered in his mood, doing his
best to rationalise, as they call it, his doting partiality for that
glowing child in her soft night-dress. But the ice-cold wind went
shrieking over the roofs and wailing down the cobbled alley-
ways, and a feeling of bitter desolation chilled the man to the
very bone.

The touch of her warmth as she sat just now on the arm of his
chair had insinuated into his veins a craving for young blood
and feminine softness. It was for her sake he had given up
that French woman in Soho, the successor of Will's German
mother. For years he had lived like a monk for the child's
sake and this was his reward! And these curst communists turn-
ing Glastonbury into a bedlam of follies, while old Johnny was
working miracles!

He'd better get back to town at once, get hold of a good lawyer
--Beere was no use any more--and make sure that those
ungrateful sons of his couldn't touch a stiver of what he'd left
to Rachel and to Will, of all this new cash.

He was passing Mother Legge's ambiguous domain now and
as he glanced at that familiar "other house," which in younger
days he had so often entered, he saw the door furtively opened
and a man and a woman came out. He stepped into the shadow
of a wall-buttress to let them pass and he could not help recog-
nising them. One was Clarissa Smith, the pretty head-waitress
at the Pilgrims', and the other was a man he'd seen in the stables
there--none other in fact than the converted ostler with whom
the miracle-worker had been drinking that very morning.

"What does the old woman make people like that fork out?" he
wondered. "She must be hard pressed these days if those are
her clients!"

But when he emerged from his retreat he actually found him-
self hesitating for the fraction of a second and imagining him-
self ringing that Cyprian door-bell!

"I suppose Young Tewsy's there still," he thought. "Who was
it told me these communists were going to give the old boy a
job at the Grail Spring? From Camelot to Chalice Hill! Well
...that's how this world wags!"

He could still see the two figures moving along in front of
him, Clarissa clinging tenderly to her ostler's arm.

"I hope he feels the same," he said to himself. "That sort of
thing leaves the girl more loving, but the man--not always! By
gad, if that boy of Rachel's plays any games--"

But the sight of that waitress and ostler clinging together so
happily troubled the senses of this elderly gentleman as he
walked behind them. The girl had the sort of plump figure he
used to like; he could see that well enough even in this dark
street! Garment by garment he undressed the unconscious Clarissa
in that ice-cold wind. He was traversing the very pavement that
Red Robinson had traversed, that night of the party at Mother
Legge's, and precisely the same sort of soul-sick craving for a
warm fire and a warm feminine body came over him as had
devastated the angry proletarian. Had the ambitious Clarissa
only known!

But that young lady continued to cling to her ostler's arm,
whispering amid her endearments, if the truth must be con-
fessed, certain wickedly intimate strictures upon the character
of Mr. Thomas Barter. Strange that the guileless warmth of
Rachel's romance should he driving her father on now to un-
dress Clarissa Smith!

Rachel...Clarissa...oh, how cold the wind blew, and how harsh
and desolate and comfortless the world was! In the warmth of
the bodies of women, in their ways, in their laughter in their
clinging, yes! even in their anger and their mockery there is
the only real refuge, he thought.

"Let em scold and rave. However cruel their words, their limbs
are still satiny to our touch, their souls still free of our curst
laws and labours and fuss and fume."

He slackened his pace, for Clarissa's arm was now round her
companion's neck. He actually stopped again while his heart,
as he imagined himself returning on his steps and ringing that
door-bell began to beat within him in the way it used to do,
twenty, thirty years ago! But the Sergeant would be sitting up
for him. Besides, what was he thinking of? That "other house"
wasnt a brothel. Toung Tewsy would expect--damn it! He was
just a fool. The figures in front of him had turned the corner
now; and he walked rapidly on.

Tommy Chinnock's "I'd like to, Clarissa," ebbed quickly the
life-weary pulses of the Marquis of P. When he reached the
lighted lamps of the High Street, a bare-footed boy came
rushing past him calling out a late edition of a Yeovil paper.

Mir-acle at Glaston-bury!" the hoy shouted. Lord P. smiled
a bitter, man-of-the-world's smile.

"There's only one miracle in this world," he muttered aloud,
that can make old men young and that's not for old men who've
outlived their time!"



THE GRAlL



AS MAY BE EASILY IMAGINED THE SITUATION IN GLASTONBURY
Vicarage as the winter passed, with Nell and her child under the
same roof as her former lover, although it was not strained to
the limit of human endurance, was sufficiently uncomfortable to
all the three persons concerned. It was obvious, too, that the little
boy, though his expressions of it were obscure, missed the rol-
licking caresses of his mother's husband.

Mrs. Pippard who took upon herself all through December
the role of ambassador--though hardly of peacemaker--between
Nell's new sanctuary and her old home, kept them pretty closely
informed of what was going on in Whitelake Cottage.

The trend of events seemed to be that Will Zoyland and Perse-
phone were living out there in an irresponsible trance of amor-
ous happiness, completely self-absorbed and self-contained, and
prepared to await any deluge that fate might send, with the reck-
less defiance of their new-found delight in each other.

It struck Nell that it was totally unlike all she had ever known
of Will, this ensorcerised interim of moonstruck quiescence. As
week followed week at the Vicarage--each week bringing new
agitations between the father and the son, and between herself
and each of the two men,--she was constantly expecting Zoyland
to appear in person, having quarrelled with Percy, and full of
angry and despotic demands that his wife and her child should
return home. But the New Year came and nothing of the kind
happened!

In the end the cantankerous Mrs. Pippard, having played the
part of eavesdropper to the infatuated pair at Whitelake till
Zoyland nearly threw her out, and having clung desperately to
the little Master Henry in the Vicarage, till Penny Pitches ac-
tually did throw her out, retired from domestic labours altogether
and took up her abode with the mother of Red Robinson's bride,
as a partner-assistant in the tea-shop business.

Hearing that Sally was leaving Cardiff Villa in order to be
married to Red, Mrs. Pippard offered herself as the girl's sue-
cessor in tlie Mayor's household; but Mrs. Geard, glad enough
to return to her old freedom from any servants, very brusquely
declined this honour; and thus it was left for the patient visitors
to the town to endure the ministrations and be subjected to the
all-seeing eye of Eudoxia's diplomatic parent.

The astounding nature of the scandals which many of these
innocent pilgrims carried home, along with Mr. Barter's and
Lady Rachel's Arthurian figurines, concerning the more intimate
life of Glastonbury, can thus be accounted for; but it is hardlv
necessary in this modest chronicle to state that Zoyland did not
beat his wife black and blue, and that Nell did not live with
three men at the same time.

But although the wild tales related by Mrs. Pippard were far
from the truth, the two weeks that followed the arrival of Nell
under the roof of her child's father and her child's grandfather
were charged with explosive electricity.

Sam's attitude was the same as it had always been, since he
had decided to trample down and to kill all natural sex pleasure.
He didn't avoid her. On the contrary he snatched every moment
he could, when his father was out of sight, to enjoy her society.
He helped her with the child, though not proving as skilful as
Zoyland in quieting him and distracting him. He kept Penny
from intruding into the spare-room, for they had given Nell the
William-of-Orange bed to sleep in. He tried to coax her to give
up her awkward and timid habit of retreating into the never-used
drawing-room, a room that smelt, not of dust and mustiness for
it was the only room in the house where Penny was allowed to
scrub and tidy up without let or hindrance, but of the Dead Time
itself, like a palpable ghost brooding there inside that locked
door, brooding over the heavy, magenta coloured tassels that hung
down above the front of the mantelpiece, brooding over the green
plush sofa, brooding over the massive marble clock that never
ticked, brooding over the footstool, trimmed with tarnished gold
thread, brooding over the upstanding wool basket of Sam's
mother that had never been touched since that young woman
died.

It was a shock to Sam when one morning, a few days after
the opening of the arch, he found Nell sitting in this drawing-
room with her sewing--which he knew she was shy of his catch-
ing her with--on that gold-threaded footstool, over a wretched
newly lit fire.

"Good Lord!" he cried, "does Father know you're in the
drawing-room? One second--I'll be back in one second!"

Nell smiled and bending her head down drew her needle rap-
idly and nervously through the small, white garment she was
making for her son. There was already descending upon her
that resigned, effortless passivity, patient, docile, unresisting in
which, because of some hereditary pliability in her ancestors, or
at any rate in the women among her ancestors, though Dave
had something of it too, it was easy for her to sink. She was
surprised herself at the drowsy weight of this curious passivity.
It had come over her the very first morning she had awaked
in William-of-Orange's bed. She had cried herself passionately
to sleep the night before; but that had been rather because, in
a briefly snatched talk she had had alone with Sam, he had
nervously disengaged her warm arms from his neck, than because
of any culminating wave of self-pity. Yes! not a tear of all
those tears of that first night could Zoyland claim to have evoked,
nor the treacherous Percy either! It was Sam alone; Sam not
pressing her to his heart, Sam not treating her as his love, Sam
not crying out, "Let's take our child and go away from here,
away from all of them!" that had broken her down. But she had
experienced when she woke up at dawn, a feeling towards Sam
that was like the feeling which those sweet persecuted lemans
in the old ballads, kept, through weal and woe, for their cruel
lords!

Yes, she had been astonished herself, as day followed day
and it became clearer and clearer that Sam's whole nature was
set upon this inexorable quest of his, at the apathy with which
she accepted it. She came near to accusing herself of having al-
lowed her heart to die within her, so numb, so paralysed, so
atrophied did her emotions--after that first night of wild sob-
bing--seem to have grown. Even a strangely detached amuse-
ment had in these last weeks been rising up in her heart; an
amusement that was rather schoolgirlish mischief than a ma-
ternal humor, at the thought of all those great hulking, blunder-
ing men following so crudelv the prickings of their desire.

Under the pressure of this mood she had even begun to feel
friendly again to Zoyland. Persephone was a totally different
matter; and she kept telling herself several malevolent stories
of imaginary encounters with Persephone, during which she
brought down that young woman very wholesomely to her knees!
But to her yellow-bearded Will she did begin to feel indulgent
again; especially when she noted the contorted tricks and ar-
bitrary devices which religion compels its votaries to undergo,
if they are to love and to refrain from loving, as the two Dek-
kers were now trying to do at one and the same time!

Yes, she was wondering to herself now at this very minute,
as she glanced up at the marble clock which had stopped at
twenty minutes past two--perhaps the very hour in the night at
which Sam's mother had died!--what her Sam, and her Sam's
father, in their preposterous attempts not to quarrel savagely
over her, would feel if they could read this queer humorous
turn that her thoughts had taken of late! What had begun to
strike her as specially quaint was the way they seemed to
assume that whatever treaty or truce or peace they patched up
between themselves about her, she would accede to without
any question!

She was like a sack of exciting oats placed in a manger
between two champing steeds. Well! she wasn't so sure that she
would submit to being a sack of oats! As this thought came
upon her once again this morning, the corners of her mouth
quivered in the second silent smile in which she had indulged
since Sam told her to "wait a second"; and her eyes moved
from the marble clock to the green plush sofa.

"What's come over me?" she said to herself. "Am I growing
cynical? Am I getting like Percy?"

A slight puckering of her forehead followed this mental ques-
tion; and as if in proof that her new detachment was a girlish,
rather than a maternal emotion, she found herself hoping that
her little son--it was about eleven o'clock in the morning---
would sleep sound till noon, and allow her to leave him alone
for another hour, in his cradle by the big bed.

Mercy! but she did miss her own house! That at least was
certain. It teased her to think of Percy messing about with her
cups and saucers, and forgetting to put the bread in the cake-
box and the rolls in the biscuit-tin.

"I'm sure she doesn't wash out the, sugar-basin," she thought
to herself, "and I know she doesn't keep the cheese on a shelf
by itself!"

And as she stared at the green plush sofa the incorrigible im-
morality of her woman's mind sighed just a little for the free,
careless swing of the Zoyland attitude to life, compared with the
impassioned pieties of this monastic establishment.

"What I really am now," she thought, "in place of being the
mistress of a wicked baron, is the petted bone of contention in a
hermitage!"

The door which had been left ajar was now kicked open and
Sam came in with a coal-scuttle full of coal in one hand and a
pile of large bits of wood in the other.

"I've told Penny to make you up a good fire," he said, "next
time you want to sit in here; but why you don't stay in the
museum, where Father likes to see you sewing in that chair
while he's writing his sermon, I can't think!"

He spoke irritably; but he knew in his heart it was because
of his own bad humour, when he found her ensconced with his
father, that she had invaded this closed-up shrine of the past.

"Sit down, Sam, my dear," she said, when he had made the
fire blaze, "I want to talk to you."

He obeyed her. But it was not at her side, but upon the plush
sofa that he took his seat.

"You know, my dearest one," she said gravely, folding up
her son's night-shirt upon her lap, "that if you can stand the
way we're living, I can't! Now stop, my dear; stop! Don't inter-
rupt, till you've heard what I'm going to say! I'm not going
to beg you to do anything you don't want to; so you needn't
glower at me as if I were a wicked girl trying to tempt you.
It's only this, dear. I was talking to Dave last week and he says
that Percy refuses to take a penny of his money. He says that
he can't make her take it; but nothing will induce him to keep
it himself. He says if I won't take it he'll just throw it into the
town council fund. I've been thinking about this, Sam dear;
and I've decided that I will take it. Even if Philip chucks Will
out because of Percy they'll be all right. Lord P. won't let them
come to grief. He's always been offering to help Will: and with
all this money he's getting for this great sale--No! They'll be
all right. I'm not going to bother my head about them."

Sam turned and stretched out his heavy hands over his knees,
extending all his fingers. It was as if his hands were yawning with
an amorous relaxation unpermitted to the rest of his frame. His
shirt-sleeves disappeared under the frayed edges of his coat-
cuffs and his wrists showed hairy and red.

"But Nell? What then?" he murmured. "You're not going to
leave Father and me, are you?"

She rubbed one of her ankles automatically with the warm,
shapeless, schoolgirl palms of her soft hands. Then she turned
her head and surveyed Sam upon the sofa. She surveyed, too, an
ironwork stand behind Sam's head, containing several hart's
tongue ferns, kept alive for years by Penny, for whom this room
represented an everlasting Seventh Day of drowsy and futile
piety. A big wastepaper basket with ornamented handles stood
at the end of the sofa, into which nothing had been put--except
Penny's broom--for twenty-five years. By the side of this basket,
resting upon the faded green carpet, lay a large, oblong pebble-
stone from Chesil Beach, upon which the short-lived Mrs. Dekker
had painted, during her confinement, a brightly coloured picture
of her native Swiss lake.

From all these things Nell's nostrils inhaled the same curious
smell, the smell of inanimate objects left in status quo for a
quarter of a century. Why, if she were in such an old ballad
mood of patient docility, had she ever started this disturbing con-
versation, worrying Sam about Dave's money, and protesting
that she, for her part, could not go on as they were? The truth
was she happened to be under the moon that particular day, and
if another woman had asked her why she was behaving like this,
she would have replied that she was "nervous."

As a matter of fact--though what did the simpleton on the
sofa, with the hairy red wrists, know about such things?--the
blind creative energy within her was in the vein for troubling,
for disturbing, for agitating, for darkening all the unruffled
waters it could approach.

"You don't suppose, Sam, do you, that any girl with any
spirit could go on like this?"

Sam pulled in his outstretched arms and thrust them deep into
his pockets.

"I don't see why not, Nell. I don't see why not!"

Her eyes, that had dark shadows beneath them, narrowed sud-
denly into little gentian-blue shuttles of darting anger.

"No, I suppose you don't see!" she cried. "I suppose you and
your father could go on with your precious aquarium and your
precious Holy Grail, till the crack of doom, while a girl ate her
heart out in a place like this!"

"Nell--little Nell!" he murmured reproachfully. The gentle-
ness of his tone disconcerted her.

At that moment what her nerves would have liked above every-
thing else was for him to have risen to his feet and roundly
scolded her; told her that she was his, that she was his chattel,
his possession, his slave, his whore, that her child was his child,
her body his body, her will his will.

"Oh, I don't know!" she breathed wearily, expanding her
breasts and clasping her hands behind the back of her head. "I
don't know what I'm saying, Sam. But I know everything is
all wrong."

But his forehead was corrugated now in a heavy frown and
his freckled chin was wrinkling itself downwards into his neck.

"Your Holy Grail?" he thought to himself, "0 Christ, my
Christ, if you would but once, just once, for one minute, give me
a sign, only the smallest faintest sign that you are really there,
behind it all; then I could go on, without aching to have her, to
hold her, night and day!"

Because of his heavy unimaginative nature, because of his
preference for minnows and stickle-backs and loach over myth-
ical abstractions, Sam had never given much thought to the
legend of the Grail. The Christ whose deadly, cruel imperative
had come between him and his love had been as much of a Person
as Nell herself. Was He a Person still?

How different was Sam's Christ from Mr. Geard's! Mr. Geard'a
Christ was a Power to be exploited. In his weird gnostic dia-
logues with his Master, the Mayor of Glastonbury addressed
Him like a friend, almost like an equal. He was the Mayor's
great magician, his super-Merlin, by whose strength and support
he became strong. Never once had it crossed the threshold of
Mr. Geard's consciousness that it was his duty to live a life of
self-sacrifice.

"I live as I like to live," he would have retorted to any ascetic
protest, "and my Master lives as He likes to live. His Blood is
the Water of Life!"

"Christ in His Grail," repeated Sam to himself, "and Father
in his aquarium and Nell in my mother's room!"

She had turned her face away from him now. She was bending
over the fire, prodding it pensively with the poker. As he watched
her doing this, the feeling came over him that just behind the
physical drama that was going on at the minute, another, a cor-
responding drama, was going on in the Invisible.

"Aquarium-Grail...Grail-aquarium," he muttered; and his
ichthyological mind visioned a Fish that was a real fish and yet
something more than a fish shedding a mystic light out of an
enchanted vessel.

Sam lowered his eyes and let his head sink deeper and deeper
into his chest, while his hands, that were in his pockets, clenched
their fists. He thought of a particular spot on the banks of the
Brue where he had often fished with his father as a boy. It was
at a turn of the river and it was several fields westward from the
wooden bridge where Young Tewsy had caught his recent sur-
prising catch, to the delight of Mother Legge.

"Aquarium-Grail," he repeated, in the dark trans-lunar cave
of his consciousness, "Grail-aquarium"; and it came over him,
just as if his tormented and tormenting God had whispered it
into his ear, that the sacrifice which was laid upon him now was
to leave the Vicarage himself.

"If she can't stand Father and me together," he thought, "and
I expect we have made it too much for her, it's not she that must
go...that's unthinkable...how would she get on alone...alone with
our child?...it's myself that must go...it's you, Sam, that must go."

He had reached a point in his asceticism when he often felt
his imperative soul to be standing over against his reluctant body
like an austere slave-driver. Indeed he had come to think of his
soul as in some way external to his body. There was not much
pleasure about this; but there was just the faintest flicker of a
strange satisfaction in it. At any rate it gave him a sense that his
soul was totally independent of his body and was the proud
master of his body. He pulled up his legs with a jerk and re-
moved his hands from his pockets.

"It's you, Sam, that must go!" he repeated grimly in his heart.

Thus what had begun as a pure wanton troubling of the wat-
ers, because Nell felt nervous, had become another tragic turning
point in the girl's life. Something in her was vaguely aware of
this as Sam rose up from the green sofa.

Impulsively, with a movement that was entirely self-forgetful,
she leapt to her feet and ran towards him; while he--just be-
cause he had given his body its implacable orders and because
this was perhaps a moment that would never come back again--
pressed her so tightly to his heart that she could hardly breathe.
She had just time to think: "This is how I'd like to die...
crushed to death by Sam," when the door opened and Mat Dek-
ker came in. They were so tightly clasped that they were like
two trees that have grown together, each with its bark eroded
by the pressure of the other, each with the same ivy or vine im-
prisoning its limbs, and when they broke apart and turned to
the man at the door it was as if each of them, as they swung into
independent life, carried away something of the living texture of
the other.

"I thought...I understood...began Mat Dekker, and he turned
with a portentous and passionate solemnity to the door by which
he had entered, opening it, looking out into the passage, closing
it again, and finally locking it. He seemed prepared to behave to-
wards this door, the drawing-room door of Glastonbury Vicarage,
as Diogenes behaved to his tub, venting upon its unfeeling wood
emotions excited by the aberrations of human passion.

The truth was that Mat Dekker was seized at that moment with
a murderous fury against his son; and it was only by concern
trating on the door--was it locked? was Penny listening behind
it?--that his better nature was able to steal a moment's breath-
ing space wherein to gather up its self-control.

The door carried above its handle a decorative panel of prettily
flowered porcelain, to protect it from sticky fingers, and over
this cool china surface Mat Dekker now passed his thumb as if
to see whether those hundred-years-old roses would come off.
All this took a very brief time, but it was long enough to restore
to him a modicum of his self-control; and turning now towards
the two of them, he addressed Nell with a slightly forward-
moving inclination of his massive grey head.

"I've been hearing the child crying for quite a few" minutes,"
he remarked. "I came to tell you."

His own words gave him an opportunity to return once more
to the redoubtable door, and he tugged at the handle to open
it--for he assumed she would rush upstairs at once--forgetting
that in his agitation he had turned its key. He unlocked it and
held the door open.

The voice of an extremely impatient infant was now quite
audible from upstairs. But Nell at first drew back.

"It isn't good for him to be taken up the first minute he cries,"
she said.

She knew by instinct that Mat Dekker was anxious to avenge
himself upon his son for what he had just seen. But the glare of
concentrated command that shot out at her from under those
bushy eyebrows, as she lingered, was too formidable to be dis-
obeyed. She flung a hurried, tender, guilty, accomplice's look at
her ambiguous lover; but Sam seemed to be lost in some deep
thought of his own, for he was staring fixedly at the marble clock
with its hands pointing to twenty minutes after two.

"You'll make me spoil him," she cried. "You are all on his
side, however naughty he is."

With these words and giving Mat Dekker a smile that had
something supplicating about it, she passed by him and went
out. Evidently a sense that she had been treated more like a little
girl than a grown woman irritated her as soon as she was in the
hall, for she called back, in quite a defiant voice, "Will was just
the same! You'd all spoil him if you could!" But she ran upstairs
now, and with the closing of the door behind her the child's
angry cries were shut out.

Mat Dekker walked over to where his son stood.

"This sort of thing must stop, my boy."

It was with a palpable effort to restrain his feelings that he
added the two syllables, "my boy."

"As I've been telling you all the time," he went on, "there are
only two things a gentleman--"--he emphasised the word--"could
do in your situation. He could either make her get a divorce from
her husband and marry her, or...or...or he could--"

Sam interrupted his father, looking him straight in the eyes:
"Or he could clear off himself? Is that what you were going
to say?"

The blood had rushed to Sam's head as he uttered this retort;
but in a second he had recovered his equanimity.

"Come along, Father," he said quietly, "let's go into the
museum. It seems unnatural to talk here. I can't talk here."

It was Sam's turn now to open the door with the rose-painted
china panel. It was Sam's turn, too, by the very power of his
calmness, to compel the grizzled, ruddy-faced man with the quiv-
ering upper lip to go out into the hall. Down the passage they
walked together and together they entered the museum. Here in
the presence of the familiar aquarium, the familiar iron candle-
sticks, the familiar daguerreotypes, the father and son faced each
other. Neither of them sat down, and there was indeed little at-
traction about the few fading coals in the grate--Mat Dekker
had evidently been too absorbed in his thoughts to keep his fire
up--to lure them to sit down, but the father on the right of the
fireplace with his hand on the mantelpiece, and the son on the
left with his hand on the mantelpiece, confronted each other like
two duellists.

"Grail-aquarium...aquarium-Grail," ran like a refrain through
Sam's head; and he began suddenly to feel again that queer
sensation he had felt in the drawing-room, a sensation like
that of the presence of a double world, every motion and gesture
in the first being a symbol of something that was taking place in
the second. The sensation was accompanied by an absolute con-
viction of the boundless importance of every thought that a
human being had.

It was also accompanied--strange though it may seem at this
tragic moment--by a faint thrill of mysterious happiness--the
first authentic leap of spontaneous happiness in him that poor
Sam had known for many a month.

He glanced round at the aquarium, as his father began speak-
ing, and Nell's sarcastic cry "your precious aquarium" trans-
muted itself into a spasm of sweetness that was like a prolonga-
tion of what he had felt just now when he pressed her to his
heart.

"It's against all I've believed--this damned business of di-
vorce," burst out Mat Dekker fiercely, "but the church has al-
ways retained the right to deal with special conditions in special
ways; and with that brute, over there, behaving as he is--"

The man's formidable upper lip began quivering again, and
Sam noticed that there was a blood-stain upon the white clerical
tie that in the old-fashioned evangelical manner this eccentric
high-churchman wore round his muscular neck.

"His hand must have shaken when he was shaving," thought
Sam. "Jesus give me strength not to get angry!"

"With that brute like he is, and doing it openly--turning her
out in fact--I can make short work of him. I shall go and see
John Beere this afternoon. It's not a thing"--he made an auto-
matic humorous grimace of disgust--"that I like doing. All
lawyers are rogues. But it's what I'm going to do; and I'm going
to do it willy-nilly as far as she's concerned. She shan't be wor-
ried with it till I've got the thing well under way!"

He looked so pathetically proud of himself in this display of
worldly sagacity before his simple and blundering son, that Sam
felt a stab of remorse at having broken up their life and brought
all these things down on that grey head.

"I wouldn't do that, Father," he cried. "I wouldn't tell Beere,
or anyone else, a word about it unless she asks you to. How do
you know that she wants to divorce him? Women are funny in
these things. Oh, I know, I know she wouldn't like it for you to
do that, without telling her! Besides, Father, I don't believe that
Mr. Beere would even discuss it unless she came herself. They
always have to go themselves. That's how it is in the newspapers.
They have to go to court. That's why they hate it. They can't bear
to go to court."

Mr. Dekker began striding up and down the floor of the
museum. He seemed irritated by his clerical dress at this crisis in
his life. What he would really have liked to do was to go out to
Whitelake and challenge Zoyland to a bout of fisticuffs, then
have it out with his son--he could not quite have explained what
form this scene would have taken--and then--And it was
this "and then" that was the whole crux of the situation.

In his passion and in his professional and religious restric-
tions, this sturdy son of the Quantocks looked like a caged wild
animal as he paced back and forth. His feelings were expressed
in the way he hitched up his long broadcloth coat-tails so as to
thrust his hands into his pockets and the way he let these tails
hang, one over each wrist, as he walked up and down.

To ruffle his priest's attire was a small gesture; but it belonged
to the same category of gestures as his ordering the girl to go up
to her baby and Iris telling Sam about his resolve to visit Lawyer
Beere.

"The best thing you can do then," he brought out now, stand-
ing still by the edge of the aquarium, into which even as he spoke
he could not help giving a sidelong glance, "the best thing you
can do is to take her to see Beere yourself. You'll have to be--
what's their word--co-respondent, of course; that is, if he brings
a counter-suit on his side, as I have no doubt the beggar will."

Once more Sam was aware of a pathetic note of self-compla-
cency in his father's tone.

"The old man," he thought to himself, "is proud of his worldly
knowledge. He thinks I've never heard the words co-respondent
or counter-suit. Christ, don't let me get angry with him!"

The moment had come when he had to tell his father what was
in his mind; but it was a fearful wrench to utter the words and
it would be a worse thing for his father when he heard them.
Aye! he had come to it. He never thought he would; but he had.
He had to tell his father that he was going to leave him. Sam
knew much better than did this grey-haired man, hunching up
his coat-tails, what it would mean to both of them, this separa-
tion. "Of course,' he thought, "I shall be still in Glastonbury,
But it'll be the end of our real life together. It'll be the end of
our long evenings in this room. It'll be the end of our mornings
in the potato garden."

"You know more about the law than I do. Father/' he re-
marked. But he said it only to gain time. "And I certainly should
not draw back from helping her in any way I could."

His father's hands came out of his pockets now and one of
them was thrust into the aquarium! He had caught sight of
something there that Sam, at any rate, had never seen in the
aquarium; no! not since as a small child, he had watched his
father changing its water and its weeds.

There were now three kinds of weeds in the aquarium, two of
them river-weeds, and one of them a pond- weed; and it was in
an entanglement of this pond-weed that Mat Dekker had found
what was such a shock to him and what, at any other time, would
have been an event of the first importance in Glastonbury Vicar-
age. He had found a dead fish.

"Dead! One of the Meare-Rhyne ones!" muttered Mat Dekker
now, holding out the tiny little corpse for Sam to see.

It looked very small indeed in the priest's great browm palm--
very small and silvery--like an "animula, vagula, blandula" in
the hand of God.

"That's what it is--one of the Meare-Rhyne ones!" echoed
Sam.

"We didn't change the water yesterday," said his father.

"Nor the green weed last week," added Sam.

"And we left that duck-week," said his father, "when we knew
it ought to come out."

"And we never got that fresh gravel from Keinton Mande-
ville," sighed Sam.

"Or a trowel-full of that sand we saw at Athelney," groaned
his father.

"It's our own fault that this minnow's dead," said Sam.

"We've killed it," echoed the Vicar of Glastonbury, "as surely
and certainly as if we'd fished it out and thrown it into the fire."

"Put it here," said Sam, hurriedly bringing from the chimney-
piece a little copper plaque with the head of St. Dunstan en-
graved on it.

Mr. Dekker tipped the little fish from his hand into the centre
of this plate where it lay across the sullen brow of the despotic
ecclesiastic.

"Let's see what happens to it now," murmured Sam, tossing
some drops of water out of a tumbler and covering up the fish.

"What'll happen to all of us, my boy!" sighed his father, sink-
ing into one of the creaking wicker chairs, while Sam took pos-
session of the other.

'They surveyed each other in silence; and a moment passed
during which they knew--those two heavily breathing, staring
men--that it would take more than the maddening breasts of that
sweet creature upstairs, suckling her child, really to separate
them, the one from the other.

But Sam pulled himself together. It was not for the sake of
peace with his father that he had to go. It was not even because
Nell had said:--"If you can stand the way we're living, I can't!"
It was because, without question, or doubt, or any compromise,
his "external soul" had commanded him to leave this house.

He drew in his breath several times before he spoke, inhaling
with it that old familiar smell of his father's workroom that
seemed as much composed of some wholesome emanation from
the priest's massive animal-frame as from the fumes of his pipe
and the musty odour of the leather bindings of Dr. Simeon's
Sermons.

"I've got something to tell you, Father," he said.

"Eh, boy--speak up; out with it!"

The tone was identical with the tone which Sam had heard
from him when, on leaving Cambridge, he had announced that
he could not be ordained; but somehow, hearing it now, it put
him ' back into the Eton collar of his first term of the Sher-
borne Prep.

"Don't interrupt me then, Father, please, and I'll tell you."

Oh, these deadly pauses, these creakings of chairs, these swal-
lowings of saliva, when the outer coat of the human stomach
seems to be inflating and deflating itself like the belly of a frog!

"I've decided to leave this house. Father, and take lodgings
for myself in the--" His words came pattering out...tit-tot
...tit-tat...tit-tut...like the tread of the Greylands Cadet Corps
when commanded to advance at quick time--"in the town,
somewhere, and earn my own living. I want to earn it as a
working-man, and I'm pretty sure I can get a job that wouldn't
take me much time to learn at this new municipal factory. I un-
derstand that--no! don't interrupt me, Father!--that there are
several places unfilled there, because they can't find enough peo-
ple to take such poor wages. This won't mean my becoming a
Socialist, or anything like that! They're ready to take anyone;
and they know I'm not interested in politics. I'm going round
to the Tribunal this afternoon to talk to this new lawyer they've
got, this nephew of old Merry's, and when I've got my job, can
'ee guess where I'm going to live, Father? No! Stop! Let me tell
you! I'm going to live in the attic of that old warehouse, with
the Gothic door, that we've so often noticed when we've started
on our walks towards Meare. You spoke of it yourself...don't
you remember?...that day we took our lunch and got as faT
as Bawdrip?"

He stopped breathlessly. Well! it was done now! He had
crossed his Rubicon. He had severed that animal-male link,
stronger in some ways even than the umbilical cord itself, which
had bound him so long, hirsute flesh against hirsute flesh, to his
begetter. He didn't dare to look at his father now. He raised his
head and stared at the aquarium. It was Nell's chance-word that
had suddenly made his path so clear; just as it had been Crum-
mie's chance-word, reported to him by Red Robinson, that had
started the whole thing.

"Girls' words, tossed out without thought--they've changed
my whole life," he said to himself. "I said good-bye to her
in Mother's room and now "

He jumped to his feet, lurched forward and clutching his
father's forehead in both his hands, bent down over it and kissed
it. "And now," he added, in his deepest heart, "I've said good-
bye to him in our room."

After kissing his father's bent head--for Mat Dekker, as if
under the blinding glare of his enemy the sun, had lowered his
face and closed his eyes--Sam walked to the door. As he put out
his hand to its handle he seemed to see the whole of his life as
nothing but doors--study doors, drawing-room doors, church
doors, privy doors, kitchen doors, bedroom doors...

"Sam!" His father was on his feet, straightening his shoul-
ders, tightening his lips, fumbling blindly with his heavy gold
watch-chain.

The priest's thoughts and feelings at that moment were inco-
herent to a point of physical distress. They were like a whirl-
pool, tossing up opposite things, drowned bodies, ravening
sharks, shimmering mother-of-pearl, cowry shells, dogfish, from
the bottom of the mind's deep sea.

"Alone in the house with her...going past her bedroom...alone
with her...Sam leaving me...Sam going out of my house...Sam's
place empty...." Being the man he was, it was natural enough
that the distress caused to him by the conflicting nature of his
thoughts vented itself in irrational anger.

"Sam!"

"Yes, Father?"

"You shan't sneak off like this! Do you hear me? I say you
shan't! Leaving your wench...and your child...and everything.
Have you no natural feeling at all? You promised me you'd
let her alone until she was properly divorced and you
were properly married to her...and what do I find? I find
you turning your mother's room into a place to--" The trick
had worked. The man's upper lip was once more protruding and
trembling with injury and grievance--"into a place to forni-
cate in!"

The ugly word belched itself forth from the priest's contorted
mouth like the dark wine and the gobbets of human flesh from
the guts of the drunken Polyphemus. How could Sam know that
the secret urge of this anger was a wild, heathen delight at being
left alone, alone without a rival, with those suckling breasts
upstairs? How could Sam know that it was the man's own "I'd
like to, Susie! I'd like to, Dolly! I'd like to, Nelly!" of the
stone-throwing Tommy Chinnock, that was being lambasted and
foul-named by this bewildered priest? Mother Legge would have
been the person to have set Sam right upon this riddle of his
father's wrath; though doubtless Mr. Evans, who had seen the
contents of the Camel Bowl touch Nell's lips before all the rest,
might have been able to instruct even the wise Mother Legge
about the maddening power of this girl's fatal passivity. A
bundle she was--that was it! an aphrodisiac bundle of cloves,
cinnamon and aniseed--a fever-raising, fever-allaying bundle of
catnip for one, two, three, and how many more? prowling, feral
carnivores!

And there was, after all,--for Sam was his father's son--a
similar introversion of righteous anger on Sam's side. Why else
should the word used by his father, and associated by his father
with that room of the dumb clock, have made his chin work so,
and a spurt of black anger almost choke him? If he hadn't
forgot--everything--even that it was "the last time"--when he
hugged Nell so furiously in the drawing-room this word of his
father's would doubtless have gone over his head like badly
aimed duck-shot.

It was certainly the word "fornication" that led Sam now, for
after all he was a very young saint, to close this door, of all
doors, with so resounding a repercussion throughout the whole
house, that Nell, doing up the front of her dress after nursing
her baby, ran quickly to the door of William-of-Orange's room,
opened it, and listened in frightened concern.

It was in this manner that Sam Dekker was heard leaving the
house of his birth which he had entered, through the body of the
servant from Geneva, some twenty-five years ago. And what was
the first thing that Mat Dekker did when he heard his son cross
the hall, open the front door, and go out?

He moved slowly to the mantelpiece, removed the tumbler that
Sam had placed over the little fish from Meare-Rhyne, picked it
up from its place upon the surly countenance of St. Dunstan,
and, raising it to his nostrils, snuffed at it with inquisitive
interest!

Meanwhile Sam himself, arrived in the presence of Paul Trent
in the Abbot's Tribunal, soon found that he was completely right
about there being no lack of communal jobs as long as he was
content with the barest living wage. And since such a wage--just
enough to keep body and soul together--was exactly what suited
his life-illusion just then, both parties in this transaction were
speedily rendered content.

And so before that day was over both Mr. Dekker and Nell re-
ceived brief notes from this quixotic young man, notes that were
delivered in person, for he had no desire that Penny and Mr.
Weatherwax should sauce their favorite "gorlas" with his emo-
tional confidences, telling them of his success.

The two devoted boys, Elphin Cantle and Steve Lew, were
Sam's messengers. Steve's hero-worship for Elphin had begun
during the last few months to reproduce almost exactly Elphin's
for Sam, and a mission of this sort being meat and drink to such
romantic lads, the recipients of these missives received them pri-
vately, separately, faithfully, and in all due secrecy before
night fell.

Mat Dekker 's note ran:


Dearest Father,

You can always find me in case of necessity at the top of that
house I spoke of. They call it the Old Malt House and it is in the
middle of Manor House Lane. I'll see you, of course, before
long; but for a week or two I want to collect my thoughts.

Cive my love to Penny.

Your affectionate son,

Sam.

P.S. I've got a good job so I am in no need of money.

P.P.S. Would you mind telling Penny to give the bearer my big
sponge.


The note to Nell, which it was Steve's task to deliver--Sam
had tact enough to make this quite clear--ran as follows:


Nell, my little Nell,

You must forgive me if I hide away from both you and Father
for a week or two. I am all right. I am not unhappy. If I've made
you unhappy, please, please try and forgive me. I needn't tell
you any more about my religion and my new life; but I have
to tell you this, once and for all, that I love you more than I
ever did! Now you may smile, in the way you do; but what I say
is true; and we both realised it this morning. Father knows where
I am living.

Your Sam, spite of all, for ever and always.

P.S. Give Henry a lot of kisses from me.

Sam's job at the municipal factory proved the simplest, as it
was the heaviest that the whole business offered. The new types
of legendary figurines were largely constructed of a certain kind
of clay that was brought in trucks from the neighbourhood and
Sam's job, which was shared by some of the roughest labouring-
men in the town, consisted in emptying trucks of this clay into
hand-carts, and these carts again into receptacles outside the
factory.

Thus he was kept very busy, and felt, during the first week or
so, extremely tired; but his day ended at five o'clock, when he
was free to do what he pleased, and these first free evenings in
spite of his extreme exhaustion were times of more peace and
quiet than he had known for a long while. The heavy physical
labour saved him from morbid broodings and made each night
an orgy of delicious dreamless sleep; while as his muscles began
slowly to adapt themselves to his work--and it must be remem-
bered that Sam was endowed with super-vigorous health--this
nightly weariness grew less and less. What was a torture to him
was the treatment he received, though only at first, from his
fellow-labourers. Intrinsically they were men of no exceptional
brutality. Among themselves they were friendly enough. But
everything about Sam, the fact that he was an educated man, the
fact that his father was a priest, and above all the fact that he
was trying to live like a saint, excited their bitter hostility. If
Sam had not come to this job of clay-hauling and truck-emptying
with the direct purpose of sharing the sufferings of his perse-
cuted god he would have been reduced to abject and sullen
misery by these men.

"Holy Sam " became his nickname almost at once; and the
pleasure with which they tormented him was abominable. It
would be erroneous to say that all good and valuable things
spring from the individual, and all evil things from the crowd;
for everyone is aware on various occasions of a crude and raw
warmth, a radiating glow, a lively enthusiasm, that emanates
from any group or mass of people. And there springs up from
the crowd, too, under certain conditions, a formidable power of
magnetic faith. But this faith which is the most striking thing
the crowd engenders cannot for one second be compared with
the creative faith of the individual. It is by the faith of the indi-
vidual upon which the crowd feeds like an oil-devouring flame
that the latter is able to move mountains, to tear down Bastilles,
to destroy inquisitions, to inaugurate revolutions.

Among his fellow-workmen in this clay-hauling job Sam was
an individual pitted against a crowd. He was not against them.
They were against him. He was no Coriolanus. He was no aris-
tocrat, answering hate with contempt. It was enough that he
lacked their humour, that he did not chew their tobacco, that he
could not fling back their particular kind of badinage. In a situa-
tion of this kind an upper middle-class recluse like Sam was at
a much worse disadvantage than Will Zoyland would have been.
Zoyland's dog-and-gun slang, his Rabelaisian obscenities and
roaring guffaws would have won these people's respect. He would
have browbeaten the more aggressive and cajoled the others. He
would have speedily become a sort of bandit chief among them.

But Sam they totally despised. They regarded him as a softy,
as a preacher, as a spy, as a blackleg, as a dark horse up to some
tricky game, as a ne'er-do-well with a screw loose, as the idiot
son of a canting parson. They amused themselves with him. They
mimicked his mannerisms, they hustled him, they put the heaviest
work upon him. He was their sport, their quarry, their lawful
prey. The fact that he was no weakling gave an added spice to
their bullying. It was like bear-baiting; and all day long they
worried him, like dogs worrying a great patient beast.

But all this was only for a time. It did not last. Little by little
the clumsy sweetness of Sam's nature won its way with them.
What actually was at first, it may be, a tinge of priggishness in
his attitude towards them, wore off. He came to forget that he
was Sam Dekker, the son of Mat Dekker. He became a labouring-
man among other labouring-men. And the psychic awareness that
he really was ceasing to separate himself from them affected
them without their realising it. The manner in which he received
their derision changed insensibly too. He began to cease regard-
ing it as directed especially and maliciously towards himself,
and he ceased to encourage it and stir it up for his own maso-
chistic satisfaction. Thus the telepathic message from his sub-
conscious self to their self-conscious selves which had formerly
called out, "I am different from you. It hurts here. Hit me harder
here!" began to sing another tune and to call out, "'We're all in
the same mill. To hell with differences! All souls at the bottom
are equal."

And this new mood in Sam was no conscious part of his strug-
gle after a holy life. It arose from the innate heathen goodness
of his nature, emitting its sweet odour like thyme or mint that has
been heavily trodden upon. And so by degrees it came about that
the heathen virtue in Holy Sam was responded to by the heathen
virtue in these other Glastonbury aboriginals, and the feel-
ing:--"We are all of one blood"--gave to the clay-hauling upon
which Mr. Barter's business depended a certain autochthonous
solidity.

For Tom Barter with Red Robinson as his foreman and Lady
Rachel as his adviser, was beginning to display his mettle as a
manager; and the figurines, statuettes, plaster-of-paris busts,
hand-painted vases, plates, crocks and jars, which they were now
manufacturing showed signs of spreading Glastonbury wares--
with the help of the visitors and pilgrims--all over Europe.
Both in the designing and executing portions of his business
Barter's personal limitations in matters of art were an advantage
to him. He came upon one young person after another, girls as
well as men, who possessed unusual artistic feeling; and en-
couraged by Lady Rachel, he left these young Glastonbury na-
tives a completely free hand.

The result of this was that there began to spring up--out of
the void as it almost seemed--a very exciting and most original
school of Glastonbury design, genuinely indigenous and wherein
the roughnesses and crudities of drawing, colouring and perspec-
tive, and their variations too under so many different hands,
possessed the imaginative freshness and childlike appeal of an
authentically primitive art, an art which the whole western
world seemed especially to thirst for, an art which embodied in
it not only the communal spirit of the town's socialistic rulers
but something--a nuance, a tinge, a suspicion--of the new re-
ligion of Glastonbury's Mayor! Their earliest output had been
confined to toys and souvenirs; but as soon as Lady Rachel be-
came intimate with Barter--and she had an active ally in Tossie
--the little clay figurines of the legendary personages of the
town's history, from Morgan-le-Fay to St. Joseph, ousted every-
thing else; and the council's timely contract with certain clay-
haulers of the neighbourhood changed the whole trend of the
business, so that toys were forgotten and a real movement of
imaginative art, at once modern and mystical, swept everything
before it.

At the end of a week Sam paid a hurried visit to his father and
Nell; but so distressing and agitating to all three of them did
this visit prove that he did not attempt to repeat it, but hence-
forth gave himself up completely to the raptures and torments of
his Imitatio Christi.

It would have been a different story altogether if his labours
had been inside the municipal factory. There he would have been
under Bartel's eye, there he would have met Lady Rachel. But
except for the first afternoon of his hiring he saw nothing of the
art-work of the place. All he saw, all he handled, was truck-
loads of this particular clay.

Sam's nature, always rather earthbound and earthdrawn, sank
into this clay as into the tomb of his Christ. He washed away his
thoughts about Nell and her child in this clay. In this clay he
soaked up the subterranean sorrow, scarcely less hurting than
what he felt for Nell, of his separation from his father. He was
at once bruised along with his God, by his wrestlings with his
fellow-workmen, and buried along with his God, in this heavy
Somersetshire clay.

What made the task of winning over his companions so slow
was the fact that the men around him were always changing.
Their pay was so poor and their work so heavy that few of them
could stand it for more than a brief time. Then others came--
all of them out of the poorest districts of Bove Town and Para-
dise--and in their turn were tempted to make sport of Sam. None
of them had the toughness or the stamina that he had. They were
lean and lanky men, descendants by centuries of inbreeding of
those heathen aboriginals of the Isle of Glastonbury who resisted
St. Joseph, St. David, St. Indractus, St. Gildas, St. Patrick, St.
Dunstan, St. Benignus and St. Bridget, in their attempts to spirit-
ualise them, who were forever revolting against both church and
state, who seemed inspired in their rebellions by the old chtho-
nian divinities of Tor Hill, whose re-awakened malignity on the
day of the Pageant nearly destroyed Lord P. and whom no-
body but Bloody Johnny seemed able to manage.

What did give Sam a real thrill of natural pleasure was the
scrubbing and the whitewashing of his loft floor at the top of the
Old Malt House. He had no furniture here at all except a small
camp-bed, a kitchen chair, a three-legged table and a white thick
water-jug and basin. When he had whitewashed the walls and
ceiling, he scrubbed the big bare beams of the oak floor till they
were as clean as the cleanest floor-expanse in the town, that is to
say, Emma Sly's kitchen at The Elms.

As day followed day in Sam's new life, finding him working
from seven to five at clay-hauling and then associating, when his
work was over, with the most destitute of his neighbours, the full
implication of his abandonment of the normal human desires
began to unfold. He was so strong, and his health was so sound,
that he very quickly found his day's labour no more exhausting
to him than if he had spent the time walking about the fields.

This growing freedom from physical weariness made it pos-
sible for him, after he had washed himself and changed his
clothes and had his tea, to explore many of the poorer districts
of the town of which he already knew a little. He would leave
Manor House Road about half-past six and make his way through
a small alley, by the side of the house where John and Mary
lived, into a section of Paradise that abutted upon the Burnham
and Evercreech Railway and stretched as far to the north as the
four crossways, where the roads to Meare and Godney met North-
load Street and Dye House Lane.

That Holy Sam, as even the children of this quarter already
began to call him, had an equanimity of temper beyond what
many holy men have had, was proved by the way he let himself
be interrupted upon at least three week-days out of his six, as he
sat down to his well-earned tea in his white-washed attic loft.
This interruption came from Jimmy Bagge, a semi-imbecile beg-
gar, a little older than Sam, who lived with his father and mother
in a one-storied stone house, black with age and smoke, that
leaned against the bank of the Evercreech Railway. Sam had
found Jimmy scraping and groping in a filthy refuse-heap be-
hind the Northload houses and he had brought him home with
him to Manor House Lane and given him. a supper of hot tea and
bread and treacle. After this Jimmy Bagge soon found out how
long Sam worked and the exact hour of his return home; and he
used to sit in the malt-yard, hidden behind a row of ancient
barrels between which he constantly peeped out.

He was too wise to present himself ere Sam had washed,
changed his clothes and made tea; but he had timed these pro-
ceedings to such a nicety that it was pretty well almost always
just as Sam was lifting his first cup to his lips thaL Jimmy
knocked at his door. Sam accepted the situation as if it were his
destiny to spend his life with Jimmy, as indeed perhaps it was,
but he displayed one small weakness on all these occasions,
which betrayed the difference between an Anglo-Saxon "holy
man" and one of Latin or Oriental blood; for he gave up his
one chair to his visitor, and himself sat down on his camp-bed;
not, it must be confessed out of politeness, but with an irrepressi-
ble awareness of the verminous condition of the beggar's filthy
clothes.

It was on the occasion of the fifth visit of Jimmy Bagge to the
Malt House loft floor that the obstinate imbecile suggested, after
many wavering circumlocutions, that Sam should accompany him
to his home beneath the Ever creech railway bank. It was a lovely
evening when the two men set out together with this purpose in
view, and Sam could not help thinking, as he walked along by
his new friend's side, of a certain curious change that had taken
place in his recent responses to the visible world.

The back gardens of Northload Street sloped down into a
region of desolate and forlorn litter where those warm and mel-
low brick tiles for which Glastonbury is famous gave place to
an older style of roofing, of dull grey, moss-patched slate. As he
glanced about him he felt a slight touch again of this new sen-
sation he had been receiving lately. What he felt was a strange
and singular reciprocity between his soul and every little frag-
ment of masonry, of stony ground, of mossy ground, of wood-
work, of trodden mud, of clumps of last year's dusty nettles, of
withered dock leaves or of mildewed palings.

It is true that to the intellectual eyes of oriental spirituality,
or of Latin devotion, Sam's attempts at living the ideal life
would have seemed like those of an ascetic schoolmaster or a
priggish boy scout, childish, and lacking in maturity, dignity,
subtlety, and intellectual passion. Sam's whole system of moral
values--his puritanical stress upon sexual restraint, his fidgetty
preoccupation with isolated acts of benevolence--would have
seemed to a Celtic or Latin nature a form of tiresome and Phari-
saic fussiness, more akin to the pragmatic virtue of some mod-
ern lay-brother than to the sublime heroism of real mediaeval
sanctity. Nevertheless, to the Invisible Observers of the magic-
charged atmosphere of Glastonbury this resolute and sturdy de-
scendant of Somersetshire yeomen displayed a certain humble
simplicity and a certain stolid good-humoured piety that rendered
many more picturesque struggles to live the saintly life appear
trickily theatrical and even self-deceiving in comparison!

And certainly on this particular evening as he adapted his
pace to the shuffling and shambling gait of Jimmy Bagge, Sam
began to be aware that some subtle barrier between his inmost
being and certain particular objects in Nature had begun to give
way. The truth was that without being in the least conscious of
the importance for humanity of the psychic law he had blundered
upon or of its rarity in the world, Sam had found out that when
a person is liberated from possessiveness, from ambition, from
the exigencies of desire, from domestic claims, from every sort
of authority over others, he can enjoy sideways and incidentally,
as he follows any sort of labour or quest the most exquisite trances
of absorption into the mysterious essence of any patch of earth-
mould, or any fragment of gravel, or any slab of paving-stone, or
any tangle of weeds, or any lump of turf that he may come upon
as he goes along.

There is always a peculiar pleasure in arriving suddenly through
a narrow aperture between masses of masonry at some wide-
open expanse; and this is especially the case in the evening
twilight and when such an expanse opens out towards the west.
The misty glow, filtering through the smouldering ditch-vapours
of this open ground, as Sam saw it tonight, lifted into a grandiose
and dusky importance every pigsty, every stickhouse, every
pigeon-tower, every hovel-roof; and under a stone arch where
the muddy path they followed dived beneath the railway Sam
could see, as they approached the dwelling of Jimmy's aged
parents, a great red semi-cirque, like a huge blood-stained mush-
room, which was the setting sun !

His father's arch-enemy was too close upon his own dissolu-
tion over the rim of the planet to throw out any magnetic power,
whether good or bad; but to see him like this at all, as Sam de-
scending from the ramparted greyness of that gap in Northload
Street saw that crimson half-circle, was as if a person saw the
sinking head of some titanic invader retreating from a threat-
ened city.

Such is the human mind--or at least such is the mind of a son
of Somersetshire clay fumbling towards a holy life--that Sam's
consciousness gave a momentary harbourage to the unsanctified
thought that he was glad that his present companion's rags had
not touched his camp-bed; but, like a black fly that lodges for
a second upon the shaft of a moving wagon, this thought was
quickly lost in the outstretched solemnity of that evening scene.

"Fayther be a turble stark man for a bed-rid," remarked
Jimmy Bagge, "'a do eat and drink, Fayther do, all there be,
when there be any! Mum be a thinned-out ghosty compared
wi' he."

The imbecile paused for a moment and looked at the crimson
half-sun as it went down under the moss-wet stone arch, the walls
of which seemed to drip with a moisture that was neither rain
nor dew, but rather some malady-sweat of its own private
enduring.

"Mum do sarve he for nothink and it be a pity to see such
sarvice. He do lie and eat; and her do wear 'erself to bone feed-
ing he! I be afeared of he just as Mum be; but Finn Toller, what
be Mum's nephy, baint afeared of he. Mum do send I to fetch
Finn Toller and when Fayther do zee 'un cooming oop path
through chink o' windy, 'a do beller and holler, awful vor to
hear. 'A do zay, ‘thik Codfin be come to murder I,' and 'a do
hide 'isself under blanket."

"Does your mother let Mr. Toller come in?" asked Sam.

Jimmy's countenance, which was as a rule as empty of intelli-
gence as a washed-out signboard, emitted at that point a pallid
ray of cunning, as if the wind-blown reflection of a streak of
moonlight, caught in a rain tub, had been tossed upward upon
that board.

"Mum do alius zay the seame. She do zay:--Thee‘s pore uncle
be starvin', Codfln. Have 'ee got a bite o' summat for'n today?"

"And what does Mr. Toller do then?"

"'A do empty his wallet on Fayther's bed and sometimes
there be a girt hunk o' sweet Cheddar in 'un; but 'a never sits
down for more'n a minute. 'I must be movin' on, Auntie,' 'a
zays, and then 'a zays to Mum, lookin' at Fayther, wot's head be
hid under blanket--I've 'a jest coom from settlin' woon account
an' I be ponderin' in me mind about settlin' another. I be a grand
settler of accounts, Auntie,' he says, and 'a looks, wi' 'is weepy
eyes, at Fayther's blanket, till bed do creak, Fayther do shake so."

Once seated in that forlorn stone edifice, built long ago under
the railway bank, it came over Sam with a weight like that of the
first shovelful of earth thrown into an open grave, what kind of
mental aura is projected in a given locality by experience of
sheer physical want. Preparations had evidently been made for
what in the Bagge menage passed for supper, for every object in
that miserable room--the walls of bare stone, where patches of
soot and grease and indecipherable and nameless stains alter-
nated with greenish mould and oozing damp, the small smoky
wood-fire under a great iron pot where steamed the most watery
concoction ever wrung from the twice-boiled bones of a skinny
rabbit, bare wooden chairs with their seats full of holes, a broken
water-jug on the smoke-darkened chimney-piece,--seemed to
group themselves round a piece of newspaper laid flat upon the
table on which rested the half of a loaf and two small salted
herrings.

A strong, bony face, angular as the face of a half-starved, over-
worked horse, did Mrs. Bagge turn towards the visitor while she
settled herself on a wooden stool by the hearth and watched his
movements as a hungry fieldfare, that bird of wintry bane, might
sit with ruffled feathers watching an absent-minded tramp in the
road-hedge. Her identity too, like that of the damp walls and the
ricketty chairs and the innutritious liquid in the black pot, and
the broken jug on the chimney-piece, seemed, even while she
gazed at Sam, to yearn towards the half loaf and the two small
fishes upon the outstretched newspaper.

And as for the figure in the bed under a patched blanket--the
figure of the bed-ridden Thomas Bagge--its woebegone rapacious
eyes seemed to point at these objects with the irreversible neces-
sity of a compass needle pointing to the north.

Sam couldn't bear to think he was keeping them from this
wretched meal, such as it was, but he, too, seemed to succumb to
the hypnotic influence of that half loaf on the table. For nearly a
quarter of an hour he murmured various broken comments upon
the new Glastonbury government and the chances it offered of
monetary advantage to the destitute.

The woman's interruptions were however entirely irrelevant to
what he was saying. They seemed more like the feeble echoes of
the mechanical chatter of a gipsy at a fair, and they kept refer-
ring to him as "the sweet lovely gentleman what be minded to
make our Jimmy's fortune." Once she jumped up from her stool
and with a billet of wood snatched from the floor killed a large
bug upon the sooty wall. But the piece of wood as she threw it
down, and her stool as she took her seat again, and another bug
observed by Sam that had escaped her gesture, all these things
seemed to his mind to be focussed upon that half loaf and those
wretched herrings.

Gazing at Mrs. Bagge's hollow cheeks, scoriated neck, cavern-
ous eye-sockets, Sam began to feel as if his attempts to under-
stand the sufferings of a Promethean demi-god had hardly
scratched the surface of the sufferings of his own human race;
and he seemed to hear his "exterior soul" whispering in his ears
that his tortured God was nothing less than a tortured humanity.

As he contemplated the damp stones so sooty and greasy and
stained with nameless stains, above the woman's head, and as he
looked at the bread upon the table, the two fundamental con-
cepts--bread and stone--seemed to associate themselves with the
concept suffering, as forming a sort of ultimate Trinity of Expe-
rience towards which he was being conducted. Thankless labour,
eternal hunger, the deadening throb of a pain that refused to
cease, if these things lived on and on in this room under the
Evercreech Railway bank, why should he have been permitted
to eat sweet treacle and to look out of his window from the top
of the Old Malt House?

From the hollow eye-sockets of this woman his mind reverted
to similar eye-sockets, and far worse ones than hers, that were
at this very second in other parts of the world opening and con-
tracting under the pressure of the cruelty of the First Cause.

Why didn't suffering carried to a certain point, why didn't
pain carried to a certain point, simply kill their victims? And
since they didn't, to what point must a person go, in sympathy
for these things, who had, by pure accident, been spared their
worst scrapings and scoopings?

As he went on mumbling about what the Glastonbury council
would soon be doing for its poor, Sam's under-mind came to
the conclusion that the most serious question of all questions
was at what point, if life was to go on with any degree of endur-
ance, is it necessary to harden our hearts and cease to think of
the pain of others? Mathematicians talked of invisible "points,"
of formal "points," that were the pivots of all the vast spirals of
reality. Here, in this question--how far must we share suffering?
--had he touched the "point of points" round which all sensitised
consciences revolved?

The vital common sense in Sam stirred up an interior honesty
that told him he must draw back somewhere or the natural
selfishness in him would rise like Enceladus and throw off all
restraint. Did St. Francis stop in the midst of composing his
Hymn to the Sun, to ponder on the problem of how far he
ought, in place of giving himself up to such magical ecstasy, to
visualise the fate of the tortured in that neighbouring stone tower
and to ponder on what man at that point of time, was doing to
man, in Algiers, in London, in Seville, in Trebizond, in Paris,
and even in Assisi?

Sam's sluggish nature had been receiving so many jolts of late
and he had been reducing his physical nourishment to so meagre
a point of late that his nerves were much more sensitised these
days than was usual with him. That is perhaps why he stared so
fixedly on that bug on the wall.

"Every locality," he thought, "has its own midges, its own
gnats, its own beetles, its own lice, its own bugs. They may re-
semble the others of their tribe; but they must be affected--few
will dispute this--by the particular climatic conditions which
exist around them. This bug was a Glastonbury bug. Had it any
message for him, a Glastonbury man? Can't you throw light
on this?" he thought, addressing the bug on the wall. But the
bug was so extreme an individualist that it regarded the gibberish
which reached it from this man's brain as the same sort of tele-
pathic nonsense that it was accustomed to hear when in her heart
Mrs. Bagge cried out:--"How long, 0 Lordy, 0 Lordy, how long,
how long?" and it proceeded upon its tortuous way with less
curiosity--not to speak of sympathy--than even ex-May or Wol-
Jop would have felt.

Sam, however, while he exchanged a few words now with his
friend Jimmy who continued to stand at the foot of his father's
bed,--Mr. Bagge himself seemed to be awaiting events in gloomy
taciturnity--wrestled stubbornly in the depths of his mind with
this problem.

"A limit there must be," thought Sam, "to the sympathy one
soul can give to other souls--or all would perish. Absolute sym-
pathy with suffering would mean death. If Christ had sympa-
thised to the limit with the pain of the world it would have been
hard for him to have lived until the day of his Crucifixion. But
what does that mean? Does it mean drawing back from the hell
we stare at? Does it mean that every soul has a right to forget if
it can forget? Sympathy with pain kills happiness. There comes
a point when to live at all we must forget!"

His conclusion left him with a feeling of unutterable weakness,
cowardice, contemptibleness. Submerged in sickening humility he
groaned aloud. He had taken the precaution before starting, in
anticipation of the penury of his friend's domicile, to put in his
pocket several thick slices of bread and treacle and these,
wrapped up in paper, he now took out and handed to his hostess.
It was then that the truth of Jimmy's words about his parents
became most painfully apparent; for his mother, after swallow-
ing two or three hasty bites of one of these sandwiches, presented
the rest of them just as they were to the silent man in the bed,
who when once they were in his hands neither spoke nor looked
up until there was not one crumb left upon the sticky paper in
which they had been wrapped.

He was not an ill-looking man either, Sam thought, as those
sallow jaws masticated the food and his Adam's apple rose and
fell as he swallowed it; but there was something repulsive to the
mind--and even a vague sense of something tragic and ghastly--
in the way the sunken black eyes of Mrs. Bagge followed every
morsel as it disappeared.

"Town council do see us don't starve," said the woman pres-
ently, "but they gives us no food, only money; and Mr. Bagge
feels money be too precious to be throwed away on victuals: so
he puts it where't be safe."

Mr. Bagge's puffy white face--not an unhandsome face--rising
out of his filthy open shirt, lit up complacently on hearing this
and his expression struck Sam as being the meanest human ex-
pression he had ever seen.

"Too precious to be throwed away," he repeated with unc-
tuous satisfaction, "on wittles...so us puts it where't be safe."

Sam was still wondering at the back of his mind what could
be done to a bedridden miser who was starving his wife, when
Mrs. Bagge, who looked positively transparent from lack of nu-
trition, though she was a large-framed bony woman, lifted up
her voice from where she sat on the stool by the fire, with her
discoloured skirts hanging so loosely between her gaunt knees that
it looked as though they had been thrown across the handles of
a plough, and remarked to Jimmy:

"Did yer arst yer friend, the sweet lovely gen'l'man, whether
he could bless this house with half of a silver shilling?"

The wheedling gipsy-like tone of her voice--which yet was
not the voice of a real gipsy--grated unpleasantly upon Sam's
ears. He felt inclined to cry out, "I'll give you a whole shilling
if you'll turn it into food and let me see you eat it!" He men-
tally decided that he would come here on the following day
with some pork-pies that he had seen in the window of a little
shop in Manor House Lane and give one to each member of the
Bagge family and insist upon their eating them before his face

But the voice of the master of the house became audible now
Mr. Bagge was apparently addressing the smoke-darkened, greasy
ceiling.

"When I over'ears folk mention shillinses I zays to meself--
‘put 'un where 'un be safe. Too precious be they shillinses to be
squandered on wittles!"

Sam rose to his feet. "I've got no money on me," he said; and
then, after a pause, "Well, I'll say good-night now, and go down
to the river for a bit, to get a breath of air. I always sleep better
after a breath of air. Don't get up, Mrs. Bagge."

Jimmy followed him wistfully with his eyes as he moved to
the door. The imbecile's face had a certain blank handsomeness,
like the puffy good looks of the man under the blanket, but his
expression was submissive and docile, like his mother's. Sam
was alarmed lest his own conscience, that merciless and authori-
tative voice that nowadays always stood by his side, would insist
on his allowing Jimmy to accompany him. It was therefore with
a certain relief--for which he blamed himself as soon as he was
out of the house--that he heard Mrs. Bagge say:--

"Ye'll get some wood for I, Jim, won't 'ee, afore 'ee do go to
Pilgrims' to arst for coppers? Jim be a good lad, Mister," the
woman called after Sam as he went out. "If it 'tweren't for Jim,
Mr. Bagge and me would be separated from each other and put
in thik Wells wukkus."

"If you're not separated from Mr. Bagge," thought Sam, "you'll
certainly get into the Wells Road Cemetery."

But standing in the doorway he threw back a warm and enthu-
siastic commendation of Jimmy.

"I knew he was a good son," he said, "as soon as he began
talking about you both. Well! I hope he'll have good luck tonight
at the Pilgrims'."

"Not for to squander!" shouted the handsome, puffy-faced
man from his bed, "but for being kept where't be safe!"

And as he went off Sam couldn't help giving vent to a wicked
wish that nephew Codfin would discover this "safe" hiding-
place!

It was nearly dark when having threaded his way past many
scattered hovels and desolate out-houses he finally reached the
bank of the Brue. He was in an excited frame of mind, to which
his anger at the behaviour of the man in the bed contributed not
a little.

As he stood staring at the dark flow of the water he could see
that Adam's apple moving up and down as Mr. Bagge swallowed.
But Sam nodded his head like one making a resolution that must
wait its fulfillment, and began following the bank of the river
in a southerly direction. He was now about midway between the
wooden Northload Bridge and the stone Pomparles Bridge and
in the obscurity of the twilight he could see rising out of the
mud the scaffolding of Philip Crow's unfinished iron bridge.

As has been hinted, for several weeks Sam had begun to notice
with a puzzled wonder that certain unpromising and unlikely
objects gave him, as he glanced casually at them, thrilling spasms
of a quivering happiness. It was only as these sudden seizures
or shocks of unaccountable ecstasy increased upon him that he
came to give them any particular attention. He was not of an
analytic turn of mind; nor was he in any sense what is called
"psychic." It might even be maintained that Sam's temperament
was rather below than above the normal level of what the world
has agreed to name "spiritual." Mystical he certainly was not.
There was more mysticism in John Crow's little finger--for all
his sceptical perversity--than in Sam's whole body. But he would
have been worse than unimaginative; he would have been "duller
than the fat weed on Lethe's wharf" not to have noted these recur-
rences of unaccountable transport in which his whole being
seemed caught up and transfigured. What made this phenomenon
harder to understand was the fact that the objects that served to
evoke this ecstasy were so varied and in themselves so insignifi-
cant. Not one of them was important enough to afford any satis-
factory clue to the nature of the meaning of these thrilling
sensations. It was almost as if some mysterious centre of mag-
netic force had been actually moving for some while through the
thick darkness of the chemical constitution of that Glastonbury
mud and those Glastonbury stones towards Sam's sluggish recep-
tivity; seeking in that receptivity a pre-ordained objective.

He came suddenly at this moment, as he stumbled along the
river bank under the moonless and cloudy sky, upon yet another
of these chance-sent mediums of unaccountable feeling. This was
an aged post, with an iron ring attached to it, used formerly for
the purpose of mooring the small barges that in old days brought
corn up the Brue. The post was but an obscure landmark by the
flow of that dark tide; but Sam knew its exact position and he
knew every detail of the landscape from this particular spot. He
couldn't really see the iron ring upon the post; but he knew so
well that it was there that he saw it without seeing it. But for
some reason the mere sight of this post filled him with the most
releasing, liberating and exultant of all his recent transports.
His mind was so occupied with the idea of pain that he quite
consciously began opposing this thrilling sensation with the
opacity of pain. It was as if he took up great spadefuls of pain
and flung them into the pathway of the delicious current that
flowed through him; and in proportion as the current increased,
so he threw more spadefuls of pain in front of it. But it swept
them away as it flowed on, drank them up, swallowed them all
into itself! And yet it would not be true to say that they became
identical with the rushing flood of this ecstatic feeling. They were
not absorbed as a natural sustenance. They nourished this flood;
but the flood existed independently of them and did not depend
upon them for its origin or its issue.

Sam found himself on his knees by this old post, so thrilled
was he by the transport that poured through him; and, in his
exultation, he pressed his forehead against it and ran his fingers
up and down its damp sides. And he did begin, quite desperately
now, to solve the mystery of all these experiences. He began to
realise that the soul of the inanimate, the indwelling breath of
life in all these ancient lifeless tilings, whereof the town was so
full, was really moving towards him.

The emotion he experienced now was a good deal stronger
than what had been produced in him until tonight by stones, and
gates, and paving slabs, and patches of moss, and fragments of
old walls, and carved mouldings and dead tree stumps, and
ploughed-up furrows, and wayside puddles and gutters; but it
was the same kind of mood.

Something in the atomic nature of the inorganic substance of
these things must have answered to an inarticulate craving of
Sam's, until Matter itself, the old obstinate Protean mystery,
moved and stirred to meet him. He could actually feel a magnetic
power pouring forth into his fingers from this post against which
he leaned.

Sam had been born in Glastonbury. Glastonbury sights and
sounds and smells, the psychic eidola that radiate forth from the
surface of ancient inanimate substances, had surrounded him
from his birth. Having concentrated his sluggish, earthy nature
so steadily and so long upon birds and beasts and fishes, he must
have accumulated an enormous mass of casually imprinted mem-
ories concerning his contact with the inorganic surroundings of
these living creatures. By day and by night he must have touched
--going up and down the fields, lanes, hillsides, valleys, fen-
lands, tow-paths, spinneys, rhynes--innumerable gates, weirs,
walls, marsh tussocks, mole hills, pond rails, heaps of stones,
fallen trees, moss-grown ruins, and all these touches and casual
contacts must have established between his inmost being and the
mystery of matter in these things, deep correspondencies which
were ready to rush forth at any summons.

Where lay the difference between the curious feeling he got as
his fingers ran up and down the surface of this old barge post
and the other recent sensation of the same nature? The difference
was that the feeling he had now associated itself suddenly and
strangely with that little dead fish that his father had taken out
of the aquarium! The secret of matter had suddenly assumed a
definite shape; and this shape was of a living kind--no longer
inanimate but electric with animation. "Ichthus, the World-
Fish,"--where had he picked up this singular expression? Not
from any book he could think of in his father's shelves; not from
the Sermons of Mr. Simeon! That the mystery of matter which
had of late shivered through him in so many accidental contacts,
should resolve itself in its primal leap, in its slippery quiver, in
its up-rising from the pools of silence, into the actual form of a
fish would have been an insane fancy for anyone else, but for
Sam, with his up-bringing and environment, it bore an organic
naturalness. Did he actually see in his mind s eye, then, the red
fins, the greenish markings, the black stripes, the silvery tail, of
any real fish? No! it was more subtle than this. But he did feel
as if the solid matter all round him had become porous, so that
some essence of life could move swiftly through it. In the mute
balancing of this finny life-essence, passing through the primeval
watery element that existed in all things, lay the inexplicable clue.

As he knelt in the damp mud of the tow-path beside this post,
while the darkness deepened over him and the river flowed be-
neath him, he was driven forward once more by the honesty of
his soul to face the ultimate dilemma. He became vividly con-
scious of himself as one entity among all the rest, carried along
upon the night journey of the voyaging planet, and he seemed
able to catch upon the breathing wind, mingled with the gurg-
lings and suckings of the water, the cries of pain which at
that second, all over the world, were rising up. There must be a
limit to pity or the life-stream would stop; all would grow stag-
nant, and "Ichthus, the World-Fish," would float dead upon its
back!

The first motive of every living creature must be to realise its
own identity--to fight for itself against the cruelty of life, while
the second motive of all conscious souls turned about towards
the others.

One-two...One-two...went the heartbeat of the world!
Was there a third pulse there that no one could yet hear? Why
was it that Sam suddenly leapt up in great excitement to his
feet? His fingers had encountered in the darkness at the foot of
the post, an iron chain! This chain was not fastened to the ring,
else he would have detected it before. It was fastened round the
bottom of the post, so that it lay hidden in the grass. Sam crawled
forward on his hands and knees following the course of the chain
and he soon became aware of something floating on the water to
which it was attached. From what he could discern, down there
in the dark flow, it was a small black coal-barge. This accounted
for the constant gurglings and suckings that he had been aware
of for some time, and by which his ear, trained to the river
sounds as it was, had been obscurely fretted.

Hastily he rose to his feet and scrambling down the bank
stepped into the barge. Yes! It still had some coal in it; and
Sam could detect from the sharp turpentine smell that it had
been newly tarred. There was a half-empty coal sack at one end;
and groping with his fingers he turned this over on its side and
sat down upon it, with his back against the barge's stern. The
tarry smell was overpowered as he rested here by the smell of
the river, and soon the flapping-up of some biggish bird--it
wasn't a moor-hen, he knew that, but it wasn't large enough for
a heron--gave him a desire to think out in his mind exactly what
his geographical position was; for this would be a help to es-
tablishing the identity of that bird.

It was a habit natural to Sam and strengthened by long asso-
ciation with his father to take his bearings, as he called it: but
at this juncture it did not seem as easy as usual to grasp the lay
of the land as he sat in this barge. But he got it at last to his
satisfaction. He was about half a mile northeast of Cradle Bridge
Farm and about half a mile southwest of Cold Harbour Bridge
where Young Tewsy had showed him that fish. If that bird, which
may have been a stray wild duck, had flown due west from where
he sat, it would have passed over the roofs of the villages of Cat-
cott and Chilton-upon-Polden, and hit the swampy estuaries of
the Parrett, somewhere about the centre of Horsey Level where
the great Sedgemoor Drain flows into them.

All these places lay behind him as he sat in that barge on the
Brue, for his face was turned directly towards the three
eminences of the Isle of Glastonbury, Wirral Hill, Chalice Hill,
and the Tor. Thus rested Sam Dekker; and then--without a sec-
ond's warning--the earth and the water and the darkness cracked.
...Whence it came, whether it came of its own volition and
whether it was that same transformation of matter, which had
been affecting him so of late, carried one degree further, Sam
never knew; but he knew what was happening to him, and he
knew it without the least doubt or question.

What he saw was at first accompanied by a crashing pain. That
was the word Sam himself thought of to express it--the word
crashing. But as the vision clarified before him and grew distinct
this pain died away. But it was dazzling, hurting, blinding, at
first, and it was associated in his mind with the sense of a sharp,
long-shaped thing piercing his guts. His sensation was indeed
strangely definite. The pain was so overwhelming that it was as
if the whole of Sam's consciousness became the hidden darkness
of his inmost organism; and when this darkness was split, and
the whole atmosphere split, and the earth and the air split, what
he felt to be a gigantic spear was struck into his bowels and
struck from below.

He had ceased to be a man sitting on a coal sack at the stern of
a barge. He had become a bleeding mass of darkness. His con-
sciousness was a dark surface of water; and up through this
water, tearing it, rending it, dividing it, turning it into blood,
shivered this crashing stroke, this stroke that was delivered from
abysses of the earth, far deeper than the bottom of the Brue.

Whatever this "spear" was that struck him, to his whole ani-
mal nature quivering under it, it was as much the shock of
something totally unknown, something new to human experience,
outrageous in its strangeness, that tore so at his vitals, as the
crashing pain that it brought with it.

But when the vision appeared, and it came sailing into the
midst of this bleeding darkness that was Sam's consciousness,
healing everything, changing everything, each detail of what he
saw he saw with a clearness that branded it forever upon his
brain. He saw a globular chalice that had two circular handles.
The substance it was made of was clearer than crystal; and
within it there was dark water streaked with blood, and within
the water was a shining fish.

Sam's first thought was: "This is the Grail! This is the Grail!
It has come back to Glastonbury!" His second thought was: "I
must tell Father and Nell about this." His third thought was
more realistic; and it was one so congruous with his deepest
being that the mere fact that he had had it--when he remembered
the whole thing--put the seal of authenticity upon his vision. He
thought in his heart: "What is that fish? It is a Tench. Surely it
is a Tench!"

So anxious did he become to ascertain, before it vanished
away, that this Ichthus out of the Absolute was what he thought
it was, that Sam actually struggled up to his feet and cried the
question aloud--"Christ!" he groaned in a harsh, queer voice
that resembled the voice of a priest speaking from a scaffold.
"Is it a Tench?"

He had been deriving such transports of late from rubble and
mud and stones, that to see Christ in the form of a Tench seemed
at that moment perfectly natural. He had read nothing of the
Grail legends; so that it was no half-consciousness that all the
successful Grail-seers cried out some crucial question, that tore
from him these words.

Whole-hearted was Sam's groan to the Mystery, carried south-
ward against the flowing waters of the Brue and westward across
its mud-banks, towards Cradle Bridge Farm. It rose from his
pity; it rose from his new insight into pain; it rose from that
blood-stained umbel-cord across the gulf between his own ec-
stasies and the anguish he had glimpsed. It rose from the quick
of his being, where life itself was strangling pity lest pity stran-
gle life in the ultimate contest. It was the final desperate cry
of humanity to the crushing, torturing universe that had given
it birth.

Is it a Tench? Is there a fish of healing, one chance against
all chances, at the bottom of the world-tank? Is it a Tench?
Is cruelty always triumphant, or is there a hope beyond hope, a
Something somewhere hid perhaps in the twisted heart of the
cruel First Cause itself and able to break in from outside and
smash to atoms this torturing chain of Cause and Effect?

The crystal goblet with the two curved handles was quite close
to him now. He could see the darkness in the throat of the shin-
ing fish balanced motionless in its centre, but because of its
position he could not see the Creature's eyes.

"Is it a Tench?" And then all at once it began to fade away.
He felt sure afterwards that it was not his leaping to his feet or
his raising his voice as he did, that made it vanish and he stood
there in crushed humility like a man who says to himself: "It
cannot be I who have seen this! It is a mistake; it was surely
meant for another!"

But after he had remained, pondering upon what he had seen,
for the space of five or six minutes, he clambered up out of the
barge and with one final glance backward at the waters of the
Brue, which looked exactly as they had looked before, he made
his way slowly back to Manor House Road and to his room at
the top of the Old Malt House.

It was a Saturday when Sam had his vision of the Grail and
his first instinct was to take what he had seen and to plunge back
with it into the ordinary routine of his new life. He must, how-
ever, tell his father and Nell about it. "I'll go to the Vicarage"
he thought, "tomorrow night, when Father's mind will be free
from his work and ready to listen." And then he thought: "I
must tell everyone about it. It was a pure chance that it appeared
to me. It has come back to Glastonbury. Many will see it now!"

He remembered that he had promised to go to Backwear Hut
in the course of the next day and help old Abel Twig doctor him-
self. He had been over there several times of late and had found
the old man so grievously afflicted with constipation that he
wanted help with an enema. "I'll do that first," he thought, "and
then we'll see! It's lucky tomorrow's Sunday."

Too excited to go to bed he spent half that night washing and
scrubbing; and completely exhausted, when the work was over,
sank down on his camp-bed under the window" and slept till the
bells of St. John's roused him in the morning. His window
opened due west, and over the roofs of several barns and pigsties
he could see the willows of the Brue bordering upon Lake Vil-
lage Field. He could also see the telegraph posts of the Burnham
and Evercreech Railway, and the white, winding road leading
to Meare.

He noticed as soon as he was awake by the way St. John's bells
were answered by St. Benignus' bells, and these again by many
chapel bells from outlying districts, that it was for the regular
morning service that they were ringing. It was half-past ten
then! He had indeed slept long and deep. He gathered his pillow
into a tight lump and sat propped up in bed, staring out of the
window into a windless atmosphere of delicate haze, where a
vague diffusion of sunlight floated upon the undispersed ditch-
vapours and a sweet, rather sickly smell of mud came up from
the meadows.

It was the sort of Sunday morning he had known so well all
his life--the typical Glastonbury Sunday. He could hear the
shuffling of the feet of the passers-by, some of them going to
church, some of them strolling out to enjoy themselves, many
of them just drifting round to some favourite bridge, or low stone
wall, or tavern-side bench, where they might meet a crony or
two and discuss life.

The absence of the ordinary sounds of week-day work was
something much more than a negation. It was a positive essence.
It wrapt itself around Sam, soothing, drowsing, lulling him. One
after another as he lay there, came memory pictures out of his
past.

But full as he was of quite other intentions than the recalling
of mere memory pictures, he soon broke the spell and jumped
out of bed. Washing himself on his knees by his basin (for he had
no washing stand) he made his preparations for breakfast. Over
his tea package, his half loaf, his sugar, his butter, his tin of
golden syrup, Sam had placed upside-down, a large earthen-
ware bowl. Milk, though he had previously always drunk it with
his tea, he had decided to give up altogether; and this resolution
simplified his housekeeping a great deal. A small tin receptacle
he now placed over a tiny methylated stove and filling it with
water from his jug, for he had no water-bottle, he lit the flame
beneath it. Then rising from his knees he spread out bread,
butter, sugar, tea upon the three-legged table, picking up these
objects from the scrubbed floor where they had been covered by
the earthenware bowl. From the broad window-sill he now took
his knife, his spoon, his cup, his saucer, and his plate, and ar-
ranged them with the utmost nicety upon the three-legged table.

No prayer did Sam utter, whether ecclesiastical or traditional,
but having made his tea he sat down on his kitchen chair and
began pulling his loaf to pieces, crust and crumb, in great untidy
lumps, and with a hungry and simple satisfaction; dabbing the
butter upon these pieces with his knife and the treacle with his
teaspoon.

As he ate, Sam's thoughts concentrated themselves upon what
he had resolved to do now that he had seen the Grail. He had
resolved to obey that "externalised soul" of his in every least
detail, and just see where it led him! If it led him to more and
more suffering, well and good. If it led him to some secret reve-
lation of blinding happiness, all the better! But for weal or for
woe it was the command of his soul that he intended to follow.

As he went on chewing the sticky, buttery morsels and licking
the tips of his fingers, and obscurely wishing that methylated
stoves held a little more hot water, he thought about the change
that had come over his conception of his tortured God since he
had begun his new life on that day he took Mad Bet home from
Wirral Hill.

"In those days," he thought, "He was a tangible Person, a
Person living in Space and Time, a Person conscious of my iden-
tity. But now He is different. I don't quite know what He is now.
But I have seen the Grail and I shall find out what He is!"

Rising impatiently from the table, feeling still thirsty, and
anxious to wash the sweetness of treacle out of his gullet, he
filled his minute tin kettle with cold water from his jug and
poured it down his throat. Then he opened a fresh packet of
Player's Navy Cut cigarettes--for he was troubled with no
ascetic scruples about smoking--and striking a match, which he
was careful to .throw out of the window rather than upon his
newly scrubbed floor, he flung himself down upon his ricketty
little couch and continued his meditations.

"I've got to face it," he said to himself. "I've seen the Grail,
and I've got to face it. He's been dead and buried for two thou-
sand years."

Two thousand years? But even as he shaped this thought there
rose up and stood in the frame of his closed door, as if it were
open, the Figure of the personality he denied. Piercing the ice-
cold, frozen darkness of more death-levels than a universe of
dead suns, this Figure--harder to visualise than Time or Eternity
for it contains the essence of both--gazed upon the man on the bed.

"Have it as thou wilt, my child!"

Sam listened to the bells for a moment. "But of course that's
not putting it right," he thought "What He has become is a
power in ourselves that sets itself up contra mundum crudelem,
against the whole bloody world! Everybody feels it, and now
that I've seen the Grail, it's got me by the throat! Man buried
Him and Man has brought Him out of his Tomb. That's what
the Grail means!"

He stared out at the vague, misty, translucent landscape, shot
with fluctuating sun-streaks and sun-patches. His thoughts kept
contradicting each other. "Christ is in the Stones and in the
Water; it is Jesus who is dead and buried. There's something in
Nature that has turned against Nature and is escaping from
Nature. There's a Christ in matter that is nearer the Grail than
the Christ of the Church."

He heaved up from the creaking little bed, his body alert and
at attention. His arbitrary soul, standing over his body, told it
that it had been enjoying itself long enough at that pleasant
window.

"You know perfectly well what you've got to do this morn-
ing, Monsieur!" his soul said to his body. "You've got to go
over to Backwear Hut and give old Twig his enema."

His body agreed at once to obey this mandate but it craftily
intimated that since it was already so late it would be better to
start at once upon this excursion rather than make the bed and
tidy the room and wash up the breakfast things. But Sam Dekker,
although a very youthful "holy man" had not been a priest's as-
sistant so long without knowing something about the cunning
devices of what St. Francis calls "my brother the ass."

Chuckling to himself at his desire to escape doing his house-
work, he was soon re-lighting his methylated lamp and running
downstairs to refill his jug at the pump in the yard. Even with
this delay he was so fast a walker that he reached Backwear Hut
not long after Number One had put his pot of onions, potatoes
and chicken bones upon his kitchen-stove.

Poor old Abel had been suffering of late from two most vex-
ing physical maladies, either of which would have rendered him
miserable, but which together broke down his spirit. One was
his villainous constipation, and the other a still worse attack of
piles. With the utmost difficulty, under the encouragement of his
faithful crony Number Two, the old man had been persuaded
to go to the hospital clinic; but the slap-dash methods of the
internes, and an interview, in an ether-smelling corridor, with
the competent Aunt Laura, had sent him home trembling with
nervous indignation, and resolute to confine himself henceforward
to his own private remedies--Beecham's Pills for the first trouble
and copious vaseline for the second.

When he reached Backwear Hut, Old Twig ("and small blame
for him," thought Sam) was all for putting off the enema for a
few minutes. There, however, it was--the kind where you have
to pinch an India-rubber ball in order to squirt the water--re-
posing, unused, in its cardboard box, just as Number One had
bought it at the establishment of Harry Stickles.

Mr. Twig, with the proper delicacy of an elderly gentleman
buying medical aid, had peeped through the window of the lit-
tle chemist's shop, till he made sure that the beautiful Nancy
was safe upstairs; and it may be taken for granted that the
avaricious husband of Nancy made him pay heavily for this
engaging shyness! But at this moment the good old man, with
the enema lying safe in its box on the table, cajoled his visitor
into sitting down for a few minutes in his front room. It was
mild enough to have the door open; and as Sam stretched out
his Penny-patched knickerbockers and his Penny-darned stock-
ings by the side of the old man's Sunday trousers, and listened
to his talk as the fowls clucked and scratched on the threshold,
a delicious sensation of calm flowed through him.

Motor cars were few at that hour upon the Godney Road; and
from the distant town there came uninterrupted a murmur, a
rumour of drowsy life, of a life that was not the life of man or
of beast, but of Glastonbury herself, murmuring softly in her
long historic trance of the past, of the present and of the future.

Sam thought to himself: "This Christ that is hidden in matter
and contradicts all cruelty, can He possibly come from Nature?"

"What I'd-ur-zay consarnin' this here commoon," Mr. Twig
was now observing, "is that it be a play-acting of the eddicated.
For such as understands them things, 'tis no doubt a very good
commoon. But I baint a book-larned man. Conservative be a
plain word to I and so be Liberal, in a manner of speaking,
though not so plain; but I reckon a man must be pretty far
along wi' his book-larnin' afore he gets the hang of a commoon."

"Well, Mr. Twig," said Sam sententiously, "my father's got a
lot of books in his study; but I remember quite well when the
first number of the Wayfarer came out and there was a long ar-
ticle about Communism in it by Mr. Athling, he said very much
what you're saying now."

"Me wold pard, Bart Jones, do zay," went on Mr. Twig, "that
it be they noises what he heered in orspital, they rumblings and
blearings from they ruings, what have brought such things to
pass. But if 'ee 'arst me, Mister, what have called down these
wonders to earth, I'd-ud-zay ‘tis thik young man from they Silly
Isles."

"How are your nieces at Miss Brew's?" enquired Sam.

The old man leaned forward, his hands on his knees and his
finger on his lips.

"Lily did tell I, last time they was here, that Louie be keepin'
company with young Tankerville, what be Mr. Crow's new pilot.
Lily says it be tender-'eartedness in dear Louie, seein' Air. Tank-
erville be a lone man with a wife in cemetery."

Sam was not enough of a psychologist to catch the full flavour
of this "wife in cemetery," in relation to Lily's interest in her
sister's good fortune, although there did rise up on the utmost
verge of his consciousness like a beautiful apparition at a
seance, the pure cold melancholy of the parlour-maid's face.

"And what about Lily herself? Hasn't she got a young man
yet?"

Number One gave him the queerest look of mischievous grav-
ity, a look that seemed to say: "Lily of course is our Lily--but
if any outsider considered her wilfulnesses from the point of
view of real common sense, he would be flabbergasted."

"Lily hasn't no young man," Abel Twig replied. "Louie thinks
she've aspired, in her tender 'eart, higher than the state of life
to which it has pleased God to call her. Louie thinks she be
anglin' for Mr. Barter."

The old man leaned back in his chair and surveyed Sam with
quizzical gravity.

"What they gals can say of one another to a wold relative
passes comprehension."

"What do you say to them, Mr. Twig?"

"I listens. I chucks 'em under chin. I tells 'em how pretty their
ribbings be. I waggles my head."

Sam could hear the great pot boiling on the kitchen stove and
the kettle lid rising and falling beside it.

"Well, Mr. Twig," he said, "we'd better be getting to business.
If I thought that you could hold yourself in, between your bed-
room and the end of your garden, I'd say--but I don't believe
you could! Which being so, I fancy it would be wiser to use your
chamber-pot."

Poor Uncle Abel was on his feet now, his knees knocking
together, his face pale.

"When...operation...be over," he stammered, "do 'ee mean that
'ee be going to leave I, alone with me burstin' backside?"

Sam hesitated. In his anticipations of this scene he had visua-
lised every detail of the giving of the enema; but once given, he
had imagined himself saying good-bye. To learn that he had to
wait upon the old man's subsequent discomfort--a process which
might easily take half an hour--was a shock of some magni-
tude. But his soul, like a stern corporal, rose up tall and metallic
and commanded his body to obey orders.

"All right," he said aloud. "Don't you be afraid, Mr. Twig. I'll see
you through to the bitter end."

Having uttered these words Sam picked up the cardboard box
from the table and surveyed its contents.

"I shall want some hot water and some soap," he said.

The melting of the soap, the conveyance of the hot and cold
water upstairs, took a few more minutes; but the wheels of time,
as with people condemned to die, moved remorselessly on, and
the moment arrived when Sam was following the old man up-
stairs to get the thing done.

As he went up behind Abel Twig he thought to himself, "It
would be a much easier thing if it wasn't for the piles." These
piles, as he entered the bedroom and glanced at all his careful
preparations, presented themselves to his mind as a shocking
obstacle.

"Those people would probably hurt you much less in the hos-
pital," his body weakly murmured.

Poor old Abel with his teeth chattering and his braces and
shirt hanging loose, turned upon his man-nurse eyes of such
wild terror, eyes so much like that of a bullock before a
slaughterer, that Sam hurriedly apologised for mentioning the
word hospital. But his cowardly body was still trying to escape.
There was a double-edged treachery in the words he uttered
now.

"It's how you take the whole thing," he said, "that makes the
difference. Well, I don't know what to think. Mr. Twig. It can't
be good to feel--perhaps it might, after all. be better to get
the doc--"

But at the merest suggestion of that unlucky word. Mr. Twig
looked as if he would willingly let Sam cut off his leg.

"Go ahead, Sir," he said. "If I hollers you must be patient
wi' I. I be a dodderin' old man, nigh four-score years old. I
baint as strong as I were once and they pains do make I call
out. They bloody piles be a worse tribulation than any girt zisty.
...Oh, me humpty, me humpty! But I be fearful bad. Be ee
tender of I, Mister; be 'ee tender of I! A man's backside be a
turble squeamy pleace."

Sam was not, it must be confessed, a born nurse; but he was
a born naturalist and an unfastidious countryman. As he strug-
gled with his task, bending over the old gentleman's rear, the
tension of his spirit brought back with a rush the miraculous
power of the vision he had seen. The two extremes of his expe-
rience, the anus of an aged man and the wavering shaft of an
Absolute, piercing his own earthly body, mingled and fused
together in his consciousness. Holy Sam felt, as he went on with
the business, a strange second sight, an inkling, as to some in-
credible secret, whereby the whole massed weight of the world's
tormented flesh was labouring towards some release.

As he kept pinching that rubber tube, for which Number One
had been so scurvily cheated by the unworthy Mr. Stickles,
there came over him a singular clairvoyance about the whole
nature of the world. In the silence around him, unbroken save
when the old man cried out his queer expletive: "Me humpty!
Me humpty!" he seemed conscious of their two figures, cowering
there beneath eternity, towards whom he felt directed, in magnetic
waves, the influence of the sun, and the influence of the great
mysterious ether beyond the sun! He felt as if they were sur-
rounded, there in Backwear Hut, by hosts upon hosts of conscious
personalities, some greater, some less, than themselves. A sharp
pang took him when--in this extremity of clairvoyance--he
realised that his living tortured Christ was now changed to some-
thing else. But whatever Sam's priggishness may have been, it
was mercilessly honest, and he said to himself: "If Christ be
dead, I still have seen the Grail."

The anguish he was compelled to give the old man because of
the piles, made the process a delicate and difficult one. Beads
of perspiration stood out on Sam's forehead before it was over.
When it was over--and, as he had foreseen, it took more than
half an hour--poor Number One was completely prostrate. Pal-
lid and groaning, when at last Sam helped him up from his seat
of purgation, he lay helplessly on his bed. It was all Sam could
do to persuade him to get under the bed-clothes.

"Four-score years old I be, four-score years, come Whitsun,"
he groaned, "and I be a wambly carcass; not fit for a gentleman
to op'rate on. I be a burden to king and country, turble weak
in me stummick and turble sore in me backside."

Through the open window, there came now a shrill chattering
of sparrows.

"Them birds be different nor us be," murmured Abel Twig.
"Them birds can scatter, even as them do fly, and all be sweet
as clover."

In his weakness and helplessness and in the physical relief
he was then experiencing two or three big tears rolled down his
cheeks. In some mysterious way the idea of the droppings of
sparrows being so clean a thing filled Number One just then
with a melting tenderness.

"I'll carry this away," said Sam, "and then I'll bring you up
a glass of something hot. I suppose you're not quite equal to
your pipe yet?"

"Oh, you prig! Oh, you asinine prig!" Nell's husband would
have roared at this point. "Equal to it? No, not quite equal
to it yet! Not quite equal! But presently perhaps "

"I be all right without 'un for a bit, Mister," replied the old
man. "I be...thinking...of me chicks and me wold cow;
and how glad I'll be to see all they again, after me operation."

Sam said no more, but taking up the chamber-pot he opened
the door and carried it downstairs. Stepping gingerly along the
stone slabs across the little garden he emptied the thing in the
privy, and carrying it back to the house rinsed it out at Num-
ber One's out-door tap. Then he went into the kitchen and surveyed
the polished sauce-pan wherein the old man had prepared his
Sunday stew.

It appeared to him that the contents of this capacious recep-
tacle, judging by the steam which emerged from under its lid.
was cooked enough to provide at least a fairly savoury soup: so
he took it off the fire, and finding a strainer among Uncle Abel's
utensils he filled a small howl with the onion-smelling liquid
and carried it upstairs.

He found Number One nearly asleep, and instead of being
pleased at the sight of this refreshment the old gentleman seemed
vexed with him for meddling with his culinary arrangements.

Do you want me to pour this back again, then?" said Sam.

Abel Twig nodded faintly and closed his eyes.

"Me and me baccy be best for I," he murmured.

Sam once more assumed the tone that Zoyland would have howled
with contempt to hear.

"A man likes his own tobacco," he said, "or I'd offer you a
pipe of my father's. This is what he smokes."

And he displayed before the eyes of the somnolent invalid a
tobacco-pouch which he had been keeping in his pocket since
he left the Vicarage.

"I be minded to have a wink o' sleep," was Abel Twig's sole
comment upon this proceeding.

To Sam's astonishment, when having descended the stairs and
having poured hack the half-cooked stew into the sauce-pan he
returned to the front room of the house, he found himself con-
fronted by a little girl in the doorway, panting and sobbing.
Floods of tears were streaming down her cheeks and her voice
was hardly audible. Sam knew who she was, though he had had
little to do with her.

"What is the matter...Nelly? You are Nelly, aren't you?"

It gave him a very odd feeling to say the word Nelly at this
hour and in this place.

"I...knows...who you...be!" gasped the child, struggling for breath
and wiping her wet cheeks with the back of her hand, "You be
Holy Sam!"

"I see we know each other, Nelly," he said; "but what's the
matter? Has Jackie Jones been hitting you again?"

Her tears had not yet ceased pouring down, but, at this word.
her eyes flashed so fiercely that it was as if a dark lantern had
suddenly been turned upon him out of a torrent of rain.

"I hit Jackie. I hit he into ditch! 'A said 'twas sport to see
thik poor...dog...stand on...hind-legs...when that wicked...wicked...
wicked man beat at he with beat...at he...."

Her tears fell so desperately, as the image of what she had
beheld came over her, that it seemed to Sam as if her thin little
form would melt away before him. He had never seen a human
countenance so dissolved, so literally melted in pitiful crying.

"Where? What? Who?" he cried. "Tell me, Nelly, tell me quick!"

"Will 'ee come and knock that wicked, wicked--"

Again the floods of tears broke her utterance. Sam pulled the
child into the house and set her down upon a chair.

"Now stop crying, Nelly, and tell me quick where this man is
who's hurting this dog."

"Will 'ee...come wi' I...Holy Sam...and kill thik wicked...wicked...
wicked--"

"Where is he? Where is it?" cried Sam again.

And then the child explained to him, clearly enough now,
through her streaming tears, that it was in that portion of the
town between Paradise and the river--a district known as
Beckery--that this was going on. As far as Sam could gather
from what she said the owner of the dog belonged to a group of
small circus people who had been running a solitary merry-go-
round in one of those outlying Beckery fields that are called
"brides," a name that reverts to the vanished chapel of Mary
Magdalene founded by St. Bridget. The child kept referring to
Beckery Mill; and Sam knew that there was a sort of common
with a right of way through it near that place. Beckery Mill in
fact gave him the clue; and he visualised with instantaneous
vividness the spot she referred to; and this time it was quite
unnecessary for his despotic soul to issue any categorical
commands.

"I'll go at once, Nelly," he cried excitedly, "only listen, child!
I'll only go on one condition; and it's a fair exchange! You stay
here to look after Mr. Twig; and I'll go to Beckery. Yes, he's ill,
upstairs! I've had to put him to bed; but he's asleep now. I wouldn't
go upstairs if I were you till you hear him stirring, or till you
hear him calling. Do you understand, Nelly dear? He's ill in bed;
but he's not very ill: only a little ill."

A few minutes later Sam was making his way with resolute
haste towards the quarter of the town the child had indicated.
Yes! Nelly Morgan was right. Near Beckery Mill he soon found
the crowd of nondescript loiterers; and there was the dog, a little
black cocker spaniel, in the midst of them! When Sam came up
to the outskirts of the crowd he could catch at once by the pe-
culiar timbre of these young ruffians' voices that they were still
engaged in their cruel sport.

The dog was evidently beginning now to refuse to perform
any further tricks and to turn on his tormentors; nor was there
any sign of the circus people. They must have gone to their
dinner leaving the animal to the mercy of these lads.

"Let that dog alone! What are you doing to him? Who does
he belong to?"

His interference was greeted with howls of derision and mock-
ing cries of "Holy Sam! Holy Sam!"

Some of them were throwing stones at the dog who kept run-
ning from side to side within their circle seeking refuge but find-
ing none.

"Who does it belong to?" shouted Sam. "Where is its master?"

"He've a-gived he to I," cried one of the boys, whom Sam
recognised at once as the stone-thrower of Terre Gastee, the
originator of the phrase "I'd like to--"

"He did bite he bad and 'a did give 'un to I," repeated young
Chinnock, making a clutch at the dog's collar which was received
with a frightened snarl.

"Tom be feared o' touching he," cried one of the other lads.

"Tom did try to pick he up," explained a third, "but 'a bit
his hand. He be a nasty varmint, thik black dog,...he be a bit-
ing dog!"

All this while the wretched little creature, which had a coal-
black glossy coat, long flapping ears, feathery legs and a clipped
tail held tightly in its frantic fear against its rump, kept making
desperate and insane rushes here and there. It seemed to have
been hunted and harried quite beyond the stage of barking, and
had grown beside itself with terror.

Sam strode forward into the middle of this circle of young
demons and uttering various assuaging murmurs endeavoured to
catch the black dog. Tom Chinnock who was nearly as tall as
Sam barged against him with his shoulders as if in a game of
football.

"His master gave 'un to I ," he cried. "You ain't got no right
to 'un!"

"Holy Sam! Holy Sam!" shrieked the excited crowd.

"Don't 'ee let 'un have 'un, lads," cried an evil-looking man
who now appeared from the back of the circle.

"Tony Quart gave 'un to Tom Chinnock! 'Tis Tony Quart's
dog. 'Tisn't your'n!"

"Holy Sam! Holy Sam!"

"Take that, ye biting cur!" shouted young Chinnock.

These last words were accompanied by a vicious kick. Sam
threw the lad aside and pursuing the dog, till it crouched snar-
ling on the ground, bent down and picked it up, clutching its
growling form from which emanated a hot, sweet, dog-flesh odour,
against his chest. Blindly the panic-stricken spaniel fixed its teeth
in one of Sam's wrists as he strove to prevent its jumping down.
Impeded though he was by the struggling creature whose feathery
paws scraped furiously against his body as it tried to free itself,
Sam managed to fling Tom Chinnock back when he tried to drag
the dog away. But the lad came at him again, and this time in
such a fury that he hit Sam a nasty blow on the chin.

Sam's right hand, which was quite free at that minute, in-
stinctively clenched itself to strike back; and he was within an
ace of giving the boy a blow that would have bowled him over.
But that portion of his consciousness which had come to feel to
him like an "external soul" issued, in a flash, one of its most
imperative mandates.

"Don't be a bloody fool!" he said sternly, dropping his arm.

Chinnock gave him one glance of wide-eyed wonder and
cringed away.

"Hit 'un with stones!" he shouted as soon as he was safe back
amongst the rest. "Hit 'un with stones! Stones 'ull make he give
up thik dog! Did yer see the girt clip I give 'un?"

His advice was seconded by the grown man in the rear of the
boys; but having encouraged them to go on with the fray, this
individual now began to shog off. evidently feeling that Sam was
a ticklish customer and that there are moments in life when the
satisfaction of cruelty must yield to the dictates of prudence.

Sam looked about him, his mind moving sluggishly as he
hugged the black dog against his stomach. He was surrounded
now by a half-circle of stone-throwers,

"It's silly to stay here and make an Aunt Sally of myself,"
he thought. "The best thing I can do is to break through them
and clear off."

He had scarcely formulated this thought when a stone hit the
spaniel in his arms, causing it to utter a shrill yelp of pain.
This decided him and he made a fierce rush forward, heading
straight for young Chinnock. Although so energetic a collector
of sharp stones, the nephew of Mad Bet had not been endowed
by Providence with the gift of fortitude. At the sight of Sam
clutching the growling dog against his ribs and running straight
towards him, he took ignominiously to his heels.

"You know where to find me," shouted Sam after him.

The flight of Tom Chinnock quelled the belligerency of the
whole crowd and not a single stone was thrown after Sam and
his struggling captive.

Now Beckery Mill lies on the outskirts of a certain municipal
enclosure known as Wirral Park which borders on the lower
slope of Wirral Hill. Sam sank exhausted upon the first public
seat he came to in Wirral Park. Placing the black spaniel on
the ground but retaining his hold upon it, he began searching
his pockets for his handkerchief, till he remembered that he had
left it in Number One's bedroom. After a second's hesitation he
then took off his necktie, and using this as an extemporary leash
he tied it to the dog's collar.

By some curious psychological process no sooner was the dog
secured by Sam's tie than it accepted Sam as the liege-lord of
its destiny; and in quite a symbolic manner, like a feudal servant
of some cruel baron transferring his allegiance to a cockle-shell
pilgrim, he rose up on his hind legs and licked Sam's bleeding
wrist. Having tasted his new master's blood, so desperately shed
by himself, nothing could exceed the animal's intense contentment.

He stretched himself out on the ground at Sam's feet, not
lying as most dogs do, but with his feathery legs stretched
straight out behind him.

Sam had not been long seated on his bench, when a tremulously
vibrant feeling, that could only be described as a shiver of
exultant ecstasy, flowed through him. "I have seen it! I have seen
it!" the heart within him cried; and in a vague, delicious, dreamy
reverie he became aware of an important psychic change in his
inmost self-consciousness. This change was nothing less than a
coming together of his body and soul. Although his soul still felt
independent of his body, and free of his body, it no longer felt
contemptuous of his body. It had ceased to utter its mandates in
the tone of a slave-driver. Its mere presence within his body at
this moment seemed to make Sam's flesh feel porous and trans-
parent, as if large, cool, undulating waves were sweeping through
it.

Presently, towards the seat where he rested, came a solitary
girlish figure; which, as it approached him, assumed the unmis-
takable form of Miss Angela Beere. What this strange girl was
doing in that place, on the edge of Wirral Park, at half -past two
on Sunday afternoon, Sam was not inquisitive enough to ask
her; but it was clear that even Angela's virginal placidity was a
little startled and ruffled by seeing a dishevelled man rise up
from the side of a black dog, a dog whom he held fast by
means of a bright blue necktie!

"What a beautiful little dog!" was however this imperturbable
young lady's greeting, as if it were the most natural thing in
the world to encounter the son of Mat Dekker between Wirral
Hill and Beckery Mill on a quiet Sunday. "Oh, what a darling
little spaniel!"

Sam felt so abysmally happy at that moment that in his con-
fused rapture he raised the small gloved fingers she held out to
him to his lips and made way for her to sit down by his side.

The little black dog who had already shown signs of intense
nervousness at the approach of this composed figure in her cos-
tume of fastidious delicacy, and had even uttered three short
barks, became panic-striken at this. He tugged frantically at
the blue tie, lowering his belly almost to the ground and extend-
ing his four feathery paws in a wide-straddled flurry of panic.
Finding that the blue tie did not yield, and hearing from the tone
of the human invader that she was not at present ill-using his
new master or belabouring him with sticks and stones, the dog
rose to a natural standing position and remained there stationary.
But, although his body was motionless, his short tail pressed
down in quivering terror over the round black rump, uttered
the words, as clear as language could utter them: "Nothing, I say
nothing could persuade me to look round at the terrifying transac-
tions that are now taking place behind me."

"I'm so glad I've met you," Angela Beere observed, rubbing
nonchalantly at a tiny red stain that had appeared on her white
glove, and glancing coyly round at the stiff back of the little
dog, "for I wanted to ask you whether Mrs. Zoyland would like
me to call upon her at the Vicarage. Do you think she would?
I keep hearing"--here her pale lips displayed her white teeth
in a proud smile--" such silly gossip about you all! But Father
always says, 'Believe nothing that you hear, and only half of
what you see!'"

Sam turned his face full upon her. "If I," he said, believed
only half of what I've just seen, I'd be the happiest person ever
born in Glastonbury!"

The girl's arched eyebrows lifted a little upon her smooth
white forehead.

"Did what you saw hurt your wrist?" she said; and then, in
a really charming access of compunction, that brought a rose-
petal flush to her white cheeks, "Let me tie it up for you, Mr.
Dekker!"

She produced a little lace-edged handkerchief; and as she
bandaged his hurt, the softening influence of medical tenderness
that had made Number One weep to think of the innocuousness
of sparrow dung, brought tears to Sam's eyes.

"Will he let me pat him, do you think?" she said, and lean-
ing across Sam's knees she gave a jerk at the straining blue tie.
This movement had the result of causing the dog to sink down
instantly on his belly, straddle his legs wide apart to gain the
necessary purchase, and then tug at his leash with the energy
of a frightened alligator.

"All right--don't 'ee mind!" cried Sam to his new pet.

But the girl drew back with flushed cheeks, evidently a little
hurt.

"Don't you mind!" he repeated, turning from the dog, who
now stood erect, although still shivering with terror, to his dis-
appointed companion, "he's a rather nervous little beast."

"Rather nervous!" laughed Angela Beere. "He's like I'd feel
if I came to see your Nell and she didn't want to see me!"

This "your Nell" ought to have given the stupid Sam an ink-
ling as to how he was regarded by the richer gossips of the town.
He very clearly was anything but Holy Sam in the upper circles
of Glastonbury! But he answered guilelessly:

"Nell would be overjoyed to see you, I know"

"You'd better go home, Mr. Dekker," she said, "and get that
Penny of yours to attend to your wrist."

But when he took not the slightest notice of this, "What,"
she enquired, "did you say just now that you saw?"

The man was far too happy to be squeamish about telling
her everything. He would have liked to have stopped every soul
in the streets of the town and told them everything. He was in
the mood to shout everything to everyone from the top of the
Tor.

"But how can you go on saying, Mr. Dekker," protested Angela
after an interval of silence, when he had talked about it to her
for nearly a quarter of an hour, "as you did just now, that
there's no God, and no life after death, and no Personal Christ.
You couldn't have seen the Grail if there wasn't a God; certainly
not if there wasn't a Christ. Come now, Mr. Dekker! You know
you couldn't! I'm afraid it's a man's pride in you that makes
you talk like this."

"Listen, Angela Beere! Until a few months ago, though I didn't
believe in God or in Immortality, I believed in Christ. I believed
in Him as the tortured Enemy of God, as the friend of all the
oppressed in the world! And I still believe in Him--but not in
the same way--do you understand? No! I suppose you don't!--
not in the same way, but far more than before!'"

He stopped and stared at her; and there was a wild light in
his little, greenish-coloured, animal eyes that made the calm young
lady say to herself: "I must talk to Dr. Fell about him. I believe
he's had some terrible mental shock."

"Do you think, Angela Beere," he went on, while the muscles
of his chin worked frantically, and without knowing what he did
he tugged so hard at the blue tie that he made the dog rear up
like a rearing horse, "do you think a person could give up the
sweetest happiness in his life--not just one great thing, but the
thing, the only thing, if he weren't drawn on by some Reality?"

"You poor darling!" thought Angela to herself. "Don't you
know that people have been driven on by the Unreal--by lies,
and illusions, and fables, and pure madness--to the point of
killing the only thing they've ever loved!"

"I can see you think I've gone dotty, my dear," he added with
an indulgent smile, laying his bare hand on her gloved ones as
they lay clasped in her lap. "And I've no doubt you and your
friends think I've been a devil incarnate to leave Nell. Well,
never mind that! What I'd like to know, if you wouldn't mind
telling me--for I know what a friend you are of Percy's and
that--"

His voice broke when he marked the flood of colour that rushed
to Angela's pale cheeks. Never had Sam beheld such a scarlet
blush. It literally flooded her under her black hat. It flowed
down her white neck. Her very ears seemed to yield themselves
to it. Up went both her gloved hands to her face and the fact
that she had to make this gesture increased her shyness. She
looked to Sam as if she might be going to rise from the bench
and run away.

"I didn't mean--" stammered Sam.

The girl struggled with herself and dropped her hands, star-
ing at him with round blue eyes, while her underlip quivered.
Slowly her colour receded, and her face became paler even than
its wont.

"You seem to know all about us--about our friendship--
Mr. Dekker, or you wouldn't ask me. So...so I may as well
...tell you. All Glastonbury will know in a day or two...Yes,
I've heard from her. I haven't seen her...but I've heard
from her. She's gone to Russia!"

Sam was flabbergasted. He knew so little of the great world
outside Glastonbury that there sounded to him a shock of startling
finality in this. It was a second before he realised the import
of this news in his own life. Zoyland was alone again then!

He looked at the girl by his side. Angela was searching in
the same little handbag from which had come the handkerchief
that now bound his wrist. She brought out a letter in an envelope
now, and snapping the clasp of her bag with an impatient jerk,
threw the letter upon Sam's knee.

"You can read what she says if you like!" she cried.

There was a French stamp upon the envelope and Sam com-
mented upon this.

"Read it! Read it!" she murmured.

The letter was certainly not difficult to read. Written in Perse-
phone's bold boy-like hand it was brief and to the point.

"Darling Angel," it ran, "long before you get this I shall be
in Paris, waiting to catch the express to Warsaw, en route for
Russia. I couldn't stand it a day longer. I couldn't stand any-
thing in our damned country. I must have a complete change or
kill myself. I've gone back to politics, my dear, now that I've
found love a fizzle. I believe Russia will suit me to a T. When
I'm settled I may send for you to join me! if you like me still,
that's to say! Tell Mr. Beere that the meals on French trains are
adorable. Don't be cross now, for it had to be...your hope-
less Percy."

Sam handed the letter back to her while the words "He's alone
at Whitelake again," formed themselves in his mind.

"I'm sorry you've lost your friend, Miss Beere," he said
gravely. "But, as she says, perhaps one day you'll go too--to
Russia."

He uttered these last words as if they referred to some region
so remote--as indeed they did--from his present world, that
it was as if he'd said: "To the Isles of the Blest."

The girl lowered her fair head, in its black hat, over her hand-
bag and replaced the letter with slow deliberation. She seemed
to be pondering deeply; for she remained motionless for a min-
ute, her fingers on the envelope within the little silk-lined recep-
tacle. Then she rose slowly to her feet and shook the front of
her skirt and passed her fingers quickly over the back of it.

"Well," she said, holding out her hand with a smile. "I've got
to prepare my school lesson now, so I won't ask you which way
you're going. But if I were you, Mr. Dekker, I'd go and see your
Penny at once about your wrist!"

Two hours later, in fact just as St. John's clock was chiming
half-past four, Sam left his loft chamber, with the black dog
comfortably asleep under his camp-bed, and sallied forth into
the street. His face was washed and clean. His step was light.
Angela's handkerchief was still round his wrist just as she had
tied it. He came out that afternoon impatient to tell all the
world what he had seen.

"I'll go to Nell and Father tonight," he thought, "but not till
after the evening service."

He was so dazed with his new happiness that he gave no
heed at all to the direction in which he was walking. He moved
along like a somnambulist. Now and again he talked to himself
in low mutterings. For normal persons to talk to themselves is
either a sign of great happiness or of great unhappiness or a
sign that they know themselves to be surrounded by absolute
physical loneliness.

"Is it a Tench?" he kept muttering quite audibly. What he
was always reverting to in his thoughts was the necessity he was
under to tell everybody in Glastonbury that he had seen the
Grail; and several times he stopped various errand boys and
tradesmen's wives, whom he knew by sight, and began to tell
them, or began to gather himself up to tell them, but by some
queer psychological law they seemed inevitably to slip away
from him before he had forced them to listen to him. He came by
degrees to have that queer sensation that we have sometimes in
dreams, that everything we touch eludes us and slides away. He
even got the feeling that the pavements were soft under his feet
and that the people he passed were like ghosts who moved with-
out moving their legs.

At last he found himself walking in the immediate rear of ex-
Mayor Wollop whose corporeality did seem to strike him as
more emphatic, and Sam, hurrying to overtake him, entered into
conversation as they walked side by side. It seemed much easier
to tell Mr. Wollop about his Vision than in these other cases.
This was no doubt due to the fact that it was something seen;
and not something felt, or thought, or imagined, or supposed,
that Sam had to relate.

The great haberdasher took him in tow at once, even going so
far as to rest two of his plump fingers upon the visionary's arm.
Sam's heart so warmed to the man's kind tone that as he talked
to him he felt for the second lime that day the sensation of tears
mounting to his eyes.

Mr. Wollop told him that it was his father's birthday and that
in honour of this anniversary he was on his way to take tea with
Mrs. Legge.

"You know the house," he said, "it is called Camelot," and
he invited Sam to follow him to this auspicious domicile.

"She'll be overjoyed to see you, Sir," he asseverated again
and again. "Overjoyed she'll be! And there'll be nobody there
but we two. Three's company', you know, Sir, ‘and two's im-
morality,' as my old Dad used to say. She'll be ravaged with what
you saw, Sir,...just as I am...ravaged." .

By degrees, under the redoubtable companionship of the
friendly draper, Sam's wits began to grow a little less ensorcer-
ised, and by the time they reached the aged procuress' house his
pulses were beating to a rhythm that was nearly normal.

Behold him now, therefore, this girl-betrayer and child-de-
serter, this--to quote Zoyland's subsequent comments upon Sam's
behaviour--"this double-dyed idiot and arch-prig," seated at
Mother Legge's mahogany table, under the staring eyes of the
smug Recorders, drinking tea--with a touch of Bridgewater
punch super-added--and eating buttered scones! He was raven-
ously hungry; for the black spaniel, refusing to touch the only
raw meat he could procure for it, had swallowed with gusto every
scrap of bread and treacle he had prepared for himself.

And as he ate and drank, and as the strong and delicately doc-
tored tea warmed his blood, his tongue became unloosened as
it had rarely been unloosened in his life before. The rapturous
happiness that thrilled him was not, at least not all of it, directly
due to his sight of the Holy Grail. It was undoubtedly partly due
--but this itself was an indirect result of the vision--to some
new adjustment of his soul and his body. For his soul was no
longer an "external" soul! Yes! It no longer stood apart, by the
side of his flesh, issuing categorical mandates; and indeed he felt
now as if Mother Legge's very tea--Bridgewater punch and all
--was nourishing both his soul and his body.

As his words flowed on--describing every detail of his great
experience--he was surprised to find himself using words and
phrases that he had made use of on that occasion on the top of
the Tor, when he had defended the Incarnation against the
Manichsean doctrines of Mr. Evans. He could even feel under his
fingers the grass roots that he had plucked up that morning,
nearly a year ago, in that sudden outburst of inspiration. His con-
ception of the thing was very different now--for his Personal
Christ had vanished--but with that curious pride in consistency
that even "holy men" feel, he began glossing over this difference;
as if a gardener, when a viola cornutus came up, where he had
planted pansies, were to insist, "It is the same"; and use. his
ancient rigmarole on the beauty of pansies for this totally new
growth!

But there may have entered into his eloquence at this point
some slight stammering and hesitation which gave the aged pro-
curess her cue.

"What worrits a simple old bitch like me," protested Mother
Legge, "is how an atheist, like you say you are, Holy Sam, could
see the Blood o' the Blessed One, when there ain't, and never 'as
been, no Blessed One to bleed!"

Mr. Wollop glanced cautiously round the big apartment and
looked with some nervousness at the heavy black curtains.

"What a man do see," he remarked sententiously, "be one thing.
What a man do think he sees be another. But what a man do say
he sees be a proper knock-out! The mistress 'ere 'ave seed me
poor old Dad--rest his merry soul!--raised up and a-wishing
'er for no good purpose in 'er beauty sleep. But that don't mean
that the old gent really comes out from's grave; do it, Marm?"

He kept his eyes on those black curtains of the late Kitty
Camel's reception-room, as if he greatly preferred that the eldei
Mr. Wollop should remain quiescent where he had been laid in
the Wells Road graveyard.

"Were it like my silver bowl when 5 ee seed it, Holy Sam?"
enquired the old lady, settling her portentous frame more com-
fortably in her tall straight-backed chair and raising her tea-cup
to her lips.

Sam's little green eyes shone radiantly. "It wasn't like any-
thing on earth," he cried. "And the moment I saw it I knew
what it was. Everything will be different from now on, with the
Grail come back to Glastonbury! It was a pure accident that I
was the one who saw it first; but I'm going all round town
today, telling everybody about it; and I expect hundreds of
people will see it. I expect even the visitors will see it."

"Will that 'andsome young man in me shop what I 'as such
trouble with; the one what reads Neetsky to 'arden 'is 'eart
when he gets the gals into trouble, see the 'Oly Grail?"

It would be difficult to believe that Mr. Wollop was not being
facetious, unless you were seated opposite him and saw the
guileless stare in his round eyes. The old procuress was much
less guileless. Indeed she was positively clairvoyant in the subtle
penetration of her next question.

"Have the Vision what you've been privileged with, Holy
Sam, made 'ee forget they torments what the Saviour did bear
for we pore sinners?"

This question of the aged woman--and it may well be that in
the course of her long life as the purveyor of the sweets of sin
she had acquired a diabolical insight--did assuredly hit Sam
between the joints of his armour. But the cresting wave of excite-
ment on which he rode was so great that he answered without a
second's hesitation.

"If you, or our friend here," he said, "had gone through
unspeakable pains for anyone you loved, and these pains had
been turned into heavenly wine and heavenly bread, wouldn't
you feel it ungrateful in that person not to take and eat, not to
take and drink and be filled with gratitude to you?"

It was natural enough, when Sam left the hospitable domain of
Mother Legge, that he should find himself inevitably drifting
towards the Vicarage. But he restrained himself from entering:
and, in place of that, went on a sudden impulse up the drive of
the Abbey House. It can be imagined what a shock it was to him
when, having rung at the front door, he was informed by Lily
that Miss Drew was "not at home."

"But--Lily, my good girl! Where is she if she isn't at home?
She's always at home on Sunday afternoons! She's been at home
on Sunday afternoons, reading the Guardian before tea and
looking at the Illustrated London News after tea, from days
before you and I were born! Come now, Lily, what is it? What's
up? Is she sick? Is she lying down? I've got something to tell
her--something very important--something that would interest
you and Louie too!"

Pestered in this way by a gentleman she had familiarly known
as Mr. Sam" since the days when she wore even shorter frocks
than were the present fashion, Lily broke down, and with tears
in her eyes confessed the sorrowful truth; the truth namely that
Miss Drew had decided in the interests of public virtue never
to have him in her home again.

"She's been to see Mr. Dekker too," Lily went on, after a
glance over her shoulder to make certain that the drawing-room
door was closed, "and Mr. Weatherwax says he heard her,
through the study window, storming at your Dad, Mr. Sam, like
she was St. Dunstan scolding Satan. Mr. Weatherwax says he
heard her tell your Dad that she'd write to the Lord Bishop, in
his Palace at Wells, and tell him that Glastonbury Vicarage
were become an Asylum for Fallen Women."

Sam hardly listened to the latter part of this revelation. He
was thinking to himself: "Such news as I've got for the people
of Glastonbury oughtn't to be confined to masters and mistresses.
Lily is a good girl, a romantic girl, and she'll be thrilled to hear
my news. I've always thought there was a dreamy expression in
her eyes that showed she was--"

"I've had a great experience, Lily," he began, "and that was
what I came to talk to Miss Drew about. It was yesterday it
happened. I may as well tell you if Miss Drew won't see me. I
was down by the river, Lily, and I saw distinctly--"

But Lily interrupted him.

"Another time, Mr. Sam, another time, if you please! I'm sure
you saw something very nice--but I've got to shut the door now.
Louie wants to go to the Methodist Chapel tonight and she's
going to dress now and I've got to lay the supper. Missus have
asked Miss Crummie to supper--so please excuse me."

She gave him one of her most dim, beguiling, and tender smiles;
a smile that seemed to say, "Life is more full of romance than
a simple gentleman like you can possibly know! Even Louie,
when she goes to the Methodist Chapel with Bob Tankerville--"
but at this point she firmly closed the door.

Although Sam was quite in the dark about Miss Drew's new
interest in Crummie, the truth was that as Mary slipped away
from her, the lonely woman had begun to find not a little con-
solation in the spell that the beauty of Mr. Geard's daughter had
already cast over her. Sam couldn't help smiling as he mentally
envisaged the beautiful Crummie seated opposite her entertainer
and listening sweetly to her well-chosen words across the silver
candlesticks; but this piece of news set him off in Crummie's
direction.

"I'll be with Nell and Father tonight," he thought, "but I'll
go to the Geards' now. I'll catch her easily before she starts, if
I hurry up."

He retraced his steps down Silver Street and soon reached the
High Street near St. John's Church. A small group of people
were just coming out from an afternoon's christening, and the
first person Sam encountered was Mrs. Philip Crow, who, under
the advice of Emma, who assured her that "Mr. Dekker be more
'isself when he be preaching to godfathers and godmothers than
when 'tis the common crowd," had attended this brief and
pleasant service.

Tilly shook hands with him cordially; for the gossip retailed
by Emma was of a much more detailed and much more authentic
kind than that conveyed to Miss Drew's ears by Mr. Weatherwax;
and it excited Tilly's particular type of sympathy to think of
this quiet young man living by himself in the Old Malt House.

"He's made a mistake and he's sorry for it," she thought, and
vaguely in her mind she dreamed that it would be nice one day
if she and Emma could clean up that top fioor for this well-
meaning youth who had no wife and no servant.

"You must have heard good news, Mr. Dekker," Tilly said,
"for your eyes are shining. They shone like that when you were
a boy and Philip and I were giving our first party at The Elms. I
recall it clearly, because it was when Emma had just come to us,
and I thought she did so well when the dog we had then--we've
never had a dog since, Mr. Dekker; but I was weak then and
silly about Philip, and Philip was fond of dogs and what was I
saying?--made a sad mess in the dining-room."

"Mrs. Crow," said Sam, staring at the lavender fringe of the
book-marker which dangled from the large prayer book she
carried, and then letting his gaze move to their two shadows,
which the declining sun caused to extend clean across the street
and which resembled a child's drawing of two fantastic dolls,
"Mrs. Crow, I have something to tell you that will interest you."

"Oh dear!" she cried, "don't look so wild! And don't tell me
any of your secrets. I've never said one word to anyone about
you and Mrs. Zoyland, and I'd rather not hear anything."

There came over Sam just then a desire to laugh aloud. That
no one in this town could be brought even to listen to what he
had seen seemed like a crazy dream. He felt as if he were liv-
ing in two worlds at the same time, and one of them, by far the
less real and by far the more absurd, was trying to convince
him that the other was a fantasy.

"Mrs. Crow," he repeated with a certain irritation in his
voice, "what has happened to me has nothing to do with Mrs.
Zoyland. It's a vision--yes! it's the great vision we've all been
waiting for! I've...seen...the Holy Grail...Mrs. Crow."

Sam felt so light-headed just then that he longed to laugh, or
cry, or shout. It would have seemed perfectly natural to him if
Tilly Crow had fallen on her knees, there and then, upon the
pavement, and offered thanks to God. But the little lady only
gave vent to a deep sigh.

"Emma always said," she remarked, looking at him with grave
concern, "that if that woman didn't manage better for you and
your dear father there would be no telling--"

She had said enough. Sam quickly saw that she regarded him
as a well-meaning victim of protracted undernourishment. He
lifted his hat to take his leave; and as he did so his chin twitched
a little and there was a pucker on his brow. His eyes began to
roam up and down the street as if he sought for someone whose
shadow was less doll-like than Tilly's.

Tilly saw that she had hurt his feelings in some way and she
held out her hand to him. When he took it she detained him,
as she often detained Philip when she had misunderstood him.

"I'm sure with so good a father," she murmured hurriedly,
"you could see anything, even angels, Mr. Dekker," and when
Sam smiled at this, she added eagerly, giving to him of her best,
"Your floors up there are all oak, aren't they? Aunt Tappity,
you know, who was Euphemia Drew s great-aunt, used to have
them beeswaxed. Euphemia never likes to talk of that branch
of our family, because of the malt business. But we all have a
drop of bad blood somewhere, haven't we? But Euphemia can
remember sliding on those floors when she was little, so slippery
they were!"

When Sam had left her and was wandering down the High
Street he felt his spirits a little dashed. "I thought," he said to
himself, "that they'd all cry: It's impossible! It's too good to
be true!' Instead of which they seemed ready to accept it as per-
fectly true, but in some way--unimportant!"

He had not got very far down High Street, for it was in his
mind to reach Street Road, where Cardiff Villa was, by way of
Magdalene Street, when he overtook old Bartholomew Jones
shuffling slowly along with the aid of a stick. In spite of its
being Sunday, Number Two was all agog to attend to something
in his shop, probably to attend to his accounts, for he was a
great miser, and the financial problems of his partnership with
Mr. Evans seemed, sometimes, well-nigh insoluble.

The old man greeted Sam with effusiveness. He had known
him from his childhood, and Sam had sold to him many of his
Cambridge books. He now took the opportunity of informing
Number Two of the feeble state in which he had left Number
One that morning.

"I've a-allus told he," said Mr. Jones, "that the 'orspital was
the place for we old folk when our innards turn foul on us.
Look at my girt zisty! If it weren't for that clever head-doctor,
who studied me case with all them European engines, where
would I be now? Abe Twig, he be a fool when it conies to
taking care of 'isself. He do say trust nature; whereas I do sav,
'tis nature what did the damage. Us must go farther afield for
the cure of thik damage. Us must go to Science."

While he was thus speaking, Mr. Jones was staring in sor-
rowful wonder at his interlocutor's bound-up wrist.

"Seems to me. Sir," he remarked, "you'd do no harm to go
to 'orspital, your own self. That wrist o' your'n he bieedin' into
bandage."

Sam instinctively touched Angela's handkerchief with the tip
of one of his fingers.

"I'm too excited today to think of hospitals, Mr. Jones," he
said. "Do you know what's happened to me, my friend?"

He lowered his voice to an intense and concentrated whisper.

"You ain't gone and murdered Mr. Zoyland, have 'ee?" cried
Number Two, retreating a pace or so from the proximity of this
excited adulterer.

"No, no, my good man, Mr. Zoyland and I have never even
had a fight and certainly are not likely to now."

As Sam spoke, the thought came into his head--"Alone at
Whitelake; alone at Whitelake "

But Mr. Jones looked up the street and down the street. Then
he remarked: "I've still got that grand edition of Saint Augus-
tine. I suppose you don't feel inclined to "

But Sam interrupted him. "Do you know what my fellow-
workers call me these days, Mr. Jones?"

"A darned ninny!" was what leapt up in Number Two's mind;
but he responded soothingly, as if addressing a candidate for the
county asylum: "I've a-heered, Sir, that down in Paradise they
name 'ee Holy Sam."

Sam nodded his head, and then began working the muscles
of his chin so violently that the old man longed, as he after-
wards explained to Mr. Evans, "to catch hold of that monkey-
face and quiet 'un "

"I want to tell everyone in the town," cried Sam, "what has
happened. For the most important thing has happened that could
happen; and I have seen it."

The tone in which he said this and the gleaming light in his
eyes alarmed Mr. Jones but it occurred to him that it was just
in states of mind of this kind that young gentlemen were liable
to buy expensive theological books.

"It's the best Saint Augustine on the market," he said.

"I saw Eternity this morning," remarked Sam. Whether in
the long history of Glastonbury, anyone had uttered these sim-
ple words before, no one knows, but if anyone had done so, the
chances are that the remark was received in the same manner
then as now.

"It's a Baskerville edition," insisted Bartholomew Jones.

Sam bade him good afternoon, and strode off quicker than
the old man could follow. He had fully expected to be ridiculed
or scoffed at for his revelation; but it had never entered his head
that his great difficulty would be to arouse any interest in it. He
began to wonder if he were, after all, the only person who had
seen the Grail since the ancient days. Perhaps the Grail had ap-
peared to a great many people and not one of these people had
been able to persuade anyone even to attend to what they had
to say about it! Perhaps life in Glastonbury was full of such
miracles; and yet those who reported them always found their
excitement falling on deaf ears.

He soon reached the curiosity shop itself. At the door he met
Red Robinson, who was about to attend a meeting of the Com-
rades in their old meeting-place at the top of the house. Mr.
Robinson looked a good deal sprucer and more neatly dressed
than when he had accosted Sam last Spring at the gate of St.
John's churchyard. He had a white collar on now; but he still
wore the same old, brown cloth cap, pulled down rather rakishly
over his forehead and tilted a little to one side. This cap, what-
ever else he wore, brought into the Glastonbury High Street an
indescribable air of Whitechapel and the Old Kent Road.

It came over Sam with a rush of emotion how it had been
Robinson's speech, reporting Crummie's words, that had started
him upon this whole new psychic pilgrimage.

"'Ee 'as the fice of a sighnt," had been the man's rendering
of Crummie's fatal sentence; and it all came back to Sam now,
together with Nell's words across the empty tomb of St. Joseph,
breaking the news of her return to Zoyland's bed.

"Hullo, Robinson! Are you speaking up there tonight?" said
Sam with the affable though rather forced geniality of the par-
son's son addressing a working-man.

Red gave him a furtive, challenging look, and yet a quizzical
look--the sort of look that a terrier caught in the mouth of a
rabbit hole would give a setter, as it passed gravely by, on the
trail of a covey of partridges.

"We'll be doing something better than speak soon," retorted
the man. "There'll be a fine stir in Glastonbury soon--and some
that I knows on--some bewgers what doesn't know what's coming
to 'em will 'ave to tike notice!"

"I hear that you and young Trent and Mr. Spear have been
appointed our new aldermen," said Sam politely.

"Aldermen, do yer call it?" snorted Red contemptuously.
"We'll be more than aldermen shortly. Mister; just as Bloody
Johnny's more than a Mayor to-die!"

"Yes, I've heard something about this," said Sam. "It's a kind
of independent Commune, they tell me, that you're setting up.
Well, I wish you good luck, Robinson! I've nothing against any
arrangement that brings more meat into the larders of our
poor people."

But in his inevitable desire to take exception to anything that
a Vicar's son might say, Red now veered round.

"But it's a bleedin' farce, hall the sime! That's what I'm
going to tell 'em in a minute. Commune? 'Ell! This 'ere stunt
'as its pint, in miking some bewgers we know cough up a bit,
but there'll be no Commune in this 'ere bleedin' 'ole till w^e've
got 'old of the bank and the rileway."

"Well," repeated Sam, "I'm for you, Robinson. But I wish you
could persuade some of the labouring men of this town to be a
little less savage when a person works along side of them."

Red eyed him with malevolent glee.

"So yer finds it haint all 'unny, does yer, doing the jobs you
blighters have put on us for hall these years? You're beginning
to know, are yer, what it tighsts like to eat 'umble pie?"

"But if the working-man has been ill-used, as no doubt he
has, why should he take It out on those who wish him well?"

"Tike it out, do yer sigh?" cried Red Robinson indignantly.
"That's just like you virtuous gentlemen. What's got on our
nerves is that very sime tone of yours. It's your why of tiking
things! Is a man a foot-stool, Mister? Is a man a piece of bleedin'
junk, that a bloke should sigh to you: ‘ 'ow kind yer are, Mr.
Dekker, Hesquire' "--Red's whole frame quivered with sarcasm
-- " 'ow kind yer are to work side by side with us and to use
yer own fine 'ands along of us!'"

He paused for a second and then spoke with such a rush of
formidable emotion that Sam, with all his preoccupied excite-
ment, was considerably impressed.

"Don't yer see...will you hupper-classes never see...that you've
been just sitting, 'eavy and sife, on the top of us workers? When
a man's been lying on 'is fiee, hunder the harse of a great bewger
all 'is life long, 'tisn't heasy when he's thrown the bewger off to
talk sweet to 'im. 'Tisn't heasy to sigh, ‘Poor rich man, did I 'urt
yer when I threw yer bleedin' harse off of myfice?"'

Sam was silent. For the first time that day he felt that he
couldn't bring himself to speak of his Vision. And yet what a
thing that he couldn't. Had human beings maltreated one an-
other to such a tune that it was a sort of mockery even to
mention that the Holy Grail had come back to earth?

Without breathing a word of what he had seen to this man,
he could hear him say: "It's because you've 'ad your leisure
from our sweat that you've got any spunk left to fuss with the
'Oly Grile. We be too dog-gone done-in of a Sunday morning to
do anything but sleep in our bleedin' beds!"

Thus it happened that in spite of his having declared to Mother
Legge and Mr. Wollop that he was going to tell everyone he
met, he found, when he went on down Magdalene Street, along
the southern wall of the Abbey meadow, that not only had he not
told Robinson, but that when he met Harry Stickles, the chemist,
bustling home to his tea, and his beautiful Nancy, he made no
attempt, although he had bought his Windsor soap of him a day
or two ago, to interrupt a busy citizen of Ms kidney, with news
of such a bagatelle!

While Sam was approaching the turn to Street Road, Crum-
mie, left quite alone in Cardiff Villa to prepare for her supper
with Miss Drew, for the Mayor and the Mayoress had gone for
the evening to the city of Wells, was sitting, as she often was
these days, by herself in her childhood's bedroom, where all
the pictures on the wall, the little childish sketch entitled "Crum-
mie by Crummie," and the eloquent, if not artistic, Series of the
Seasons, jabbered and gibbered at her, languished and lisped at
her, with memories of the married Cordelia.

As usual the younger daughter of Geard of Glastonbury sat
on the edge of her maiden bed admiring her legs. If it had not
been that Crummie's heart, independently of her legs altogether,
had fallen in love with Sam, the chances are that from sheer
good-nature she would long ago have married one of her in-
numerable admirers in the town. But if the truth about the girl
must be told, Crummie, in reality, was not attracted to men. This
is a paradox which poor Cordelia--who was strongly attracted
to men and was now living a life of intoxicated eroticism with
Mr. Evans--would have laughed at, considering how the sight of
Crummie's admirers had troubled her. But such was the exact
truth! What Crummie was attracted to, was not her men--their
personalities, their looks, their ways--but the reflection of her-
self, and particularly of her incomparable legs, in the mirror of
her men's eyes.

It is the greatest mistake in the world to assume that the sort
of narcissism in which Crummie indulged was selfish or ungen-
erous. It is true she derived an exquisite and indescribably volup-
tuous pleasure from admiring herself, from caressing herself,
as she was doing at this moment; but it was a pleasure she longed
to share with as many people as possible--women quite as much
as men! Nor was she fastidious. Naturally not, considering that
what primarily stirred her was not these alien personalities in
their intrinsic qualities but the degree of their excitement in the
presence of her own charms.

On the other hand the girl was so essentially humble and so
free from malice or spitefulness, that a very small measure of
this excitement was enough to satisfy her. But in Sam's case e-
very, thing was different. Her feeling for Sam was a most deli-
cate, vibrant and totally self-forgetful feeling. Nor would she
have been at all anxious for Sam to enter at this moment and see
her beautiful bare legs. Sam was the only person in the world
before whom Crummie was bashful, shamefaced, super-modest.
She would have felt like sinking into the ground with shame--
that is how she would have expressed it to herself--if Sam had
burst in now and beheld the satiny whiteness of her limbs; soft
and tantalising and of maddening loveliness. What she wanted
Sam to admire in her was her intellect, her searching intelligence,
her ideal sentiment, her religious soul; and the pathetic thing
was that Providence had not only refrained from endowing
Crummie with these gifts but had not even given her a limited
success in the art of pretending to possess them.

Crummie's unique gift from Nature, the most exquisite thighs
that had been seen in Glastonbury since those of Merlin's perfidi-
ous Nineue, and which to herself, in her orgies of narcissism,
were so pleasure-yielding, were, as far as Sam was concerned,
something almost to be ashamed of. She would have preferred
to appear before Sam in a heavy nun's garment descending to
the ground and with her fair hair covered up by a black hood.
How could she have possibly known that it was Sam before
whom she was now destined, to appear, when, hearing the door-
bell ring, she hurriedly put on her skirt, wrapt herself in an
old woolen dressing-gown, and with her fair hair loose and her
bare feet in little tattered slippers ran downstairs.

Her feelings when she saw him standing there were so over-
whelming that for a second she swayed in the doorway and
nearly fainted away. Had she done so it would have been pre-
cisely in the manner of those tender impossible heroines in the
only works of art she had ever honestly enjoyed! What she felt
was something that no consecutive human language, trying to
convey a clear-edged impression, could possibly express. Sam's
figure suddenly appearing before her at her own doorstep evoked
that bewildering, staggering sense of the very nature of things
shifting, altering, transforming, which the Magdalene must have
had when the apparent gardener at the Arimathean tomb mur-
mured the magic word "Mary!"

It was not so much a living man she saw, as her whole secret
life, all the gathered up and accumulated longings, reserves,
broodings, dreams of the last twelve months. He was r.ot a thing
of palpable outline at all, of definite contour or ox solid sub-
stance. He was a cloud of filmy essences, vague yearnings, prec-
ious dreams, dear hopes, wild idolatries. It was a shivering an-
guish as well as a wild ecstasy to see him embodied there, in an
ordinary human form, familiar and natural.

So un-selfconscious did this adorer of her own sweet flesh
become in her rapture of seeing him, hearing him, touching him,
that when she had taken his coat and hat and brought him into
the musty drawing-room and put him in her father s chair with
the bear rug at his feet, she sank down before the fire without a
thought of stirring its dying embers, or of lighting more than
one solitary candle with a spill thrust deep into those flickering
coals. Across her bare feet, before she realised the necessity of
hiding them under her robe, fluttered the rosy fire gleams. Down
upon her loosened hair fell the yellow rays of that solitary' candle,
while from the un-shuttered window, open at the top as her
mother had left it, the cool evening air circled round them
both, full of the dewy smells of the damp meadows at the road's
end.

Even our poor vision-wrought Holy Sam was not so dehu-
manised as not to feel that there was something about this mo-
ment that was charged with portentous issues, something fatal,
something totally unforeseen, something that held the future m
its quivering crucible.

Crummie was in such a mood of unutterable awe and pent-up
ecstasy at having her idol, her more than earthly lover, alone in
the house with her, that she found difficulty in uttering a word,
and when she did speak it was in a solemn, breathless whisper.
So potent however is the concentrated love of the feminine heart,
that although this man, sitting there above her,, had just beheld
--actually in the flesh-- that elusive Mystery which was the cause
of Glastonbury's being Glastonbury, it was the girl and not the
man who dominated that moment, her exultation, and not his,
that held the thunder-flash of that charged air.

"I never...thought," she whispered with intense emotion,
not presuming to raise her eyes above the muddy soles of Sams
boots, "that I'd ever...have you...here alone."

"Dear Crummie!" and he made a timid movement of his hand
towards her head, but quelled by the intensity of her feeling let
his wrist fall back on his knee, where it lay limp, with Angela's
handkerchief round it.

"I've got...so much...to say to you...that it's...hard to begin."

She made an effort to lift up her face and smile at him; but
down her fair head sank again, as if she had been rehearsing
once more her Pageant-part of the Lady of Shalott.

"Dear Crummie!" he repeated in a scarcely more audible
voice than her own.

But then, gathering up the happiness within him as if it were
a crystal cup that he stretched out to her, "I've had an experi-
ence today, Crummie," he said, "that has unsettled ail my ideas;
that's made me feel as if I'd never lived till today. I told Nell
once, Crummie, that I thought I had a dead nerve in me. Well!
Well! You don't "want to hear about that...but it was true...but--"

"I can understand you," the girl murmured. "You needn't stop
telling me for any reason--no! Not for any reason!"

"It wasn't a fancy; it wasn't a madness," he went on, "Crum-
mie dear, I saw it! Yes, I saw the Grail Itself."

Now that he had told her, instead of his happiness being less,
it became greater. Her long, slow, grave, childish look of abso-
lute faith made him feel that this was the first time he had spoken
of it to anyone. To those other people he must have been speak-
ing of something else!

"And the effect it's had on me, Crummie, is to make me feel
that I've seen Eternity. So that now I needn't worry myself any
more about so many things! Behind the tortured Christ, behind
that other Christ, behind the people we love and the people we've
hurt...behind everything that's sacred to us...is Eternity. Do you
know what I mean, little Crummie? I feel now"--there was a
poignant tenderness, not so much an affectionate or even
human tenderness, as it was something resembling the feeling her
father would have shown for a wounded loach, about the tone
in which he spoke to her; and it seemed in a sense to be a gro-
tesque tone for that superbly beautiful creature crouching be-
tween the candle flame and the dying coals--"I feel now that my
life has really finished itself, accomplished itself somehow: and
what I want to do now is just to take it as it is and to give it
to anyone, to anything, to whatever comes along, following chance
and accident, and not bothering very much--do you see what I
mean, Crummie?--taking everything as it happens--since I've
seen Eternity!"

He needn't have asked her if she understood him. She had been
following every word with the absorbed attention with which a
prisoner hears his sentence or a gambler watches his throw of
the dice. When he had finished she moved away from him a lit-
tle, and bending down before the high bronze fender pressed
her forehead against its top bar, while with her hands she
clutched its shining knobs.

It was clear, even to the bemused and bewildered Sam that
she was struggling with herself and making some momentous
decision. Her decision, whatever it was, was made very quickly.
She lifted her head from the fender and rose to her feet, clutch-
ing her robe tightly round her and gazing down upon him, where
he still lay back at ease in her father's big arm-chair.

"I've got something to tell you, Mr. Sam," she said. All his
father's parishioners called him Mr. Sam. Never in her life had
she called him Sam.

He gave her at once his full attention. He sat straight up on
the extreme edge of the arm-chair; his hands on his elbows,
his heels beneath it, his head raised. He looked like a boy whose
pockets are full of apples and pears giving polite attention to
the conversation of an elder sister.

"There are very few men," she began, "who can live alone as
you do, Mr. Sam. But I know you are doing wrong in doing it.
Mrs. Zoyland belongs to you; she has given herself completely
to you; she has had a child; and I know that I am telling you
what's right when I tell you that you two ought not to live sepa-
rated any more. There are things that a girl knows more about
than any man and this is--"

She stopped abruptly. From a portion of her powerful nature--
for after all she was Mr. Geard's daughter--that had never been
roused by Sam, she suddenly felt a wave of irrational anger
against him. Once when she was a little girl and had been
caressing a rag doll, for which she nourished, just as she did
for Sam, a devoted, idealising love, she caught a look on its
face that seemed so unresponsive that, filled with wrath against
it, she snatched it up and dashed it upon the floor.

In the midst of her present speech--it was when she reached
the words "she has had a child"--she gesticulated with her hands,
forgetting to hold the folds of her long dressing-gown. Released
from her fingers her robe fell apart, revealing the fact that be-
neath her skirt her legs and feet were bare.

It was then that she imagined she beheld, mingling with the
dazed, indulgent, stupid courtesy of Sam's attention to her that
particular look upon his face that women are so' quick to catch;
the look, namely, of displeasure rather than pleasure at some
intimate and revealing gesture they have made. That such a look
should have appeared on her idolised Sam's face, on this night
of all nights, hurt her to the quick.

It was a swift blinking of the eyelids, a scarcely perceptible
twitch of the chin; but she received the impression that the sight
of her bare ankles had affected him as something disconcerting.
She knew well that normal men have two distinct reactions to a
girl's bare legs--the first one of provoked desire, with all its
glamour and mystery, and the second, one of fastidious shrink-
ing; and although towards her idealised love she was humble
as a child about her beauty, she was also as shy and touchy as a
child about any personal exposure.

The fact, therefore, that she had caught, or fancied she had
caught, for in reality Sam was not thinking of her legs at all,
that particular look upon his face, made her anger leap up furi-
ously against them both; against herself for forgetting to conceal
her ankles, and against him for that unconscious flicker of cold-
blooded awareness that caused her to feel conscious of them.
Her anger with Holy Sam, like her anger against her old idealised
doll, made her totally forget that this dazed well-meaning man
sitting up in such an absurd posture of forced attention, ^ith
his heels under the chair and his nead raised, was her romantic
idol, and in one swift ungovernable impulse she seized him by
the hair of his head, and shook his skull with all her force back-
ward and forward repeating those interrupted words: "More about
than any man...more about than any man..." over and over again.

Sam in his unimaginative simplicity thought the snrl was
doing this for fun, or at least in amiable irritation. He was so
full of her startling words about Nell that to have his hair seized
upon and his skull shaken was an interlude of small moment.
But when she let him go and flung herself down sobbing upon
the bear rug, he realised that it was anything but fun. He realised
then that he knew no more about the ways of women than he
knew about the philosophy of "Neetsky" in dealing with them.
He crouched down by her side on the hear rug and did his best
to console her, not daring to snatch her arm away from her
eyes, but petting and coaxing her in every way he could think
of, and talking endearingly and tenderly to her. But she seemed
to come to herself quite independently of his blundering conso-
lation. All at once she scrambled swiftly to her feet. A curious
notion had suddenly come into her head.

"Get me your coat," she said. "I want to put on your coat"

He obeyed her. He fetched his great coat. He held it for her,
while she slipped into it. Very gently, as he stood behind her,
he extricated her curls and let them hang free over the collar.
She took him by the hand and led him to the sofa. It satisfied
something very deep in her to feel that old overcoat she knew so
well wrapped about her. It was like covering herself with the
finer essence of her love. She was completely mistress of herself
now, and of Holy Sam too, as this latter felt in the very marrow
of his bones!

Every woman--the most abject as well as the most beautiful--
has certain moments in her life when the whole feminine prin-
ciple in the universe seems to pour through her, and when men,
when every man obeys her in helpless enthrallment as if she held
the wand of Circe. This was the great hour of Crummie's life,
nor was she ignorant of the nature of the magic that now flowed
through her veins.

"Mr. Sam," she said when they were seated side by side upon
the sofa, "you must go back to Mrs. Zoyland; back to her and
to your child--no, stop! I've not finished--I don't mean go back
to the Vicarage! You're perfectly right in leaving your father.
You couldn't live out your new ideas freely without being inde-
pendent. And, as I say, those are some things women know more
about than men; and one is that people who love each other ought
to live alone together--never with a third one! When you left
your Nell, you did it because you thought kissing her and loving
her in that way was wrong. She never thought it was wrong!
And now, Mr. Sam, you must live with her again; for I tell you
those things are not wrong. But not at the Vicarage. She ought
never to have gone there! That's the one thing I cannot under-
stand in Mrs. Zoyland, that she ever agreed to stay under the
same roof with two men like you and your father." She paused
upon this, giving Sam a flash of something more dangerous from
her soft grey-blue eyes than he had ever received. She looked so
incredibly lovely in the dim light of that solitary candle, with
her bright loose curls flowing over his own coat collar that Sam
stared at her in humble admiration.

He was not in a mood to take exception to anything she said;
and once having broken the ice and having got control of herself,
she seemed prepared to say a great deal.

"You are both...very good men," she went on gravely, "but Mr.
Dekker cares nothing what people think. He doesn't seem to
realise what scandal-makers that old man and that old woman
are! You ought at once to take Mrs. Zoyland away. Then you
and she will be the ones to get into trouble--if there is any
trouble, and not your father. We're in the middle of great changes
here in Glastonbury. Mrs. Zoyland and you, if you're brave e-
nough to despise the Miss Drews and Miss Fells of the town, will
have the support of her brother Mr. Spear, and of course of my
father and Mr. Trent. I don't know what furniture you've got in
your attic in that Old Malt House--you see I know all about you,
Mr. Sam!--but if you haven't got enough up there to make a
woman and child comfortable you ought to take furnished rooms.
Why don t you go to Dickery Canties, Mr. Sam? They're not
fussy or squeamish there. Besides Mr. Spear lives there now, and
he's her brother. He'd help you with your expenses. He nets a
good salary since my father s made him one of the big men in
Glastonbury."

Sam's whole nature was in a turmoil. As the girls rapid,
practical words followed one another, thev carried a shameful
conviction with them. Yes, he had been unforgivably selfish in
all he had done! Little thought had he given to the passionate
torment of his father, tantalized by Nell's sweet presence, and
bearing the whole weight of that ambiguous situation. Little had
he thought of what Nell might be enduring. He had thought
solely of himself, solely of his own soul in relation to his mar-
tyred God; and meanwhile he had been cruel to his girl, and if
not cruel to his father, at least completely irresponsible, com-
pletely careless of his peace of mind. With a lover's instinct com-
bined with the instinct of a son he knew exactly what his father
would suffer if he took Nell away; but he knew also--who bet-
ter?--the deep relief with which the older man left to himself,
and free from this daily tantalisation of his darker mood, would
revert to his simple, traditional, unquestioning faith. Besides,
Nell would go and see him. She could go often and see him. He
wouldn't be separating those two. By removing her from the
Vicarage he wouldn't be taking her out of his father's life.

Thus as he watched that white face in the dimness, framed
in its wavy curls, he gave himself reason upon reason for obey-
ing the competent advice which came so impressively from its
lips. But, as he listened, the image of his sweet love's form, the
caressing sound of her voice, the whole aura of her personality,
rose up in the very heart of his being. It was perhaps an ironic
thing, but the truth was that the mood he had been thrown into
by his vision of the great Glastonbury Mystery had abolished
all his ascetic scruples about making love to Nell. Such scruples
seemed to him now like a tight, irrelevant, self-inflicted con-
trariety!

There is no doubt that if ever Sam came to talk of the secret
things of his life--which was not very likely-- with Mr. Evans,
that incorrigible biographer of Merlin would have found this
particular effect of the Grail Vision a proof that the thing was
a thing of magic, and not of religion ; and likely enough--like the
Mwys of Gwydion-Garanhir--was an actual symbol of fertility!

"Well, Mr. Sam, I've got to have supper with Miss Drew to-
night; and it's now five minutes to the hour she expects me!"

Even as she spoke he was making his great decision.

"I'll take you to her door, little Crummie," he said. "You've
been more than a crumb of the loaf to me tonight; and if I do
manage to establish myself at Dickery Cantle's, I'll pray to you
every day as if you were a god."

So he spoke, recalling a passage in one of the old poignant
Homeric scenes, which he had had to read when he was in the
sixth form at Greylands School,

"Will you?" she exclaimed, leaping to her feet and rushing to
the chimney-piece where their only candle was guttering down.
"Will you?" she repeated, occupied with the struggle to light a
second flame from the one that was drowning in its own melted
wax.

And then he became aware from the heaving of her shoulders
under his heavy coat that Crummie was crying--not audibly,
as she had done after shaking him, but silently. Having lit that
second candle, she seemed to be seized with a mania for lighting
candles, and went round the room doing it everywhere, but
keeping her face hid from him. She might just as well have
spared herself this illumination of her tragedy, for the tears were
still running down her cheeks when she turned round.

"I don't know why I'm doing this," she said. "It must be thank-
fulness because you're going to do what I've told you to do."
As she spoke she made an heroic effort to smile. For the beat
of a swallow's wing she could not compass it. Then she did;
and the smile which wavered up, lovely and tender, from the very
bottom of her soul, made her face, under the up-mounting flames
of all her candles, more beautiful than any face that Holy Sam
had ever seen.

On their way to Miss Drew's--and they traversed Magdalene
Street to its end and then followed Bere Lane to the Tithe Barn,
thus avoiding the town--Crummie talked to him unreservedly
about her father. "He is fonder of me," she said in a low voice,
when they reached the great mediaeval barn and paused con-
fronting it, than Mother thinks he ought to be. Mother never
has liked it. But I think nothing of it! I think it's silly to have
those ideas about it. I suppose I'm queer in things like that:
and so is Father, except when it worries Mother. I don't mind--
why should I mind?--his loving me so."

"The last time I talked to him," said Sam. "I thought he was
rather restless; but that may have been these communistic
ways of running the town."

"I've never told this to a living soul," said Crununie, "but
sometimes Father frightens me. Not with his petting and so on:
for I don't care tuppence about that. But once or twice lately
he's talked of death with such an extraordinary look on his
face! Almost always he talks of death when he's been petting
me, or has seemed especially fond of me, but not unhappily,
mind you! It's rather as if--it's so hard to put it, Mr. Sam!--as
if there were another me, someone like me, only of course much
more exciting, down there in Hades. I've seen his eyes, Mr. Sam
--and you know how dark they are!--shine like funnels of black
fire when he's been talking of death and holding me on his knee."

"Were you surprised that I should see the Holy Grail?" asked
Sam irrelevantly.

"I've thought you were seeing it all the time!" said Crummie
quickly.

He was looking at the strange apocalyptic creatures on the
barn now, and he thought to himself that there was something
about them that reminded him of Mr. Geard. In fact it was easy
for him to imagine that Mr. Geard's architect, after the Mayor
was dead, might carve a fifth evangelistic symbol for this new
Gospel. Sam even began to think of his own "Ichthus--the World-
Fish."

He left Crummie at Miss Drew's drive gate, and waited there
till he heard, by the sound of the opening and closing door, that
she was safely in the house. In the confused waves of the exul-
tant happiness which she, the "Crumb of the Loaf," as he had
called her, had given him, soaking up for him and interpreting
in practical terms the meaning of his Vision, Holy Sam had blun-
dered again more grossly, more unpardonably, than he had ever
done in his life. He had made a clumsy and awkward attempt to
kiss Crummie. The girl had turned her head away and he had
only brushed her cheek, but the contact of her flesh, at the en-
trance to that damp and dark shrubbery of the Abbey House,
chilled him to the bone, as if he had touched that other, that
Cimmerian Crummie, in the realms of Death, of whom her father
was so enamoured!

As he turned away and crossed the road to enter his father's
drive gate Sam had the wit to realize that he had acted grossly
in trying to kiss her. He had made the gesture in simple and
spontaneous gratitude. She knew that as well as he did. Why
then had she turned her head away? She turned it away so that
the great Love of her life, the secret Ideal of her girlhood, should
not kiss her on the lips before he went in to her rival. Would
she then have let him kiss her if there had been no question of
Nell; but only the fact between them that he did not love her?
Oh, still less so. Oh, far less so! For it might easily have been
that this matter of rivalry would have led her to snatch fiercely,
wickedly, maliciously, at his proferred kiss; but nothing would
have induced her to let him kiss her on the lips--she loving him
and he not loving her--if that malice of rivalry hadn't entered.
Crummie being what she was, it had not entered, and her lips
remained virginal. And yet she had been kissed full upon the
mouth, again and again, by many of the men who had been wont
to caress her.

Oh, deep beyond understanding is this curious secret! The
whole Being of the coldest, plainest, ugliest girl in the world re-
sembles a sensitive plant whereof her reluctant lips are the leaves.
Organised for receptivity by the whole structure, substance and
nerve-responses of her identity, the electric yieldingness of a
girl's body vibrates to the least pressure upon her mouth. Only
the craftiest and subtlest of lovers know the preciousness, the
tragic, unique, perilous preciousness, of that moment when, under
the pressure of a kiss, her lips are parted.

The two greatest Realists that have ever lived, those super-
human delvers into the crook of a knee, or the dimple of a
cheek, or the furrow of a brow, or the hollow of an eye-socket,
Dante and Leonardo da Vinci, were at one in finding in women's
lips the entelecheia of all Nature s sec retest designs. A man's
laugh--what a simple, nondescript "haw! haw! ho! ho!" that
sound is, half a lion's roar and half an ass's bray, compared
with the subtle waxing or waning, the broken ripple of the
moon's reflection upon flowing water, of a woman's smile! To
Dante a maid's smile meant the latitude of the least little span
of a thin eyelash between inexorable Acheron and the mystical
circles of the Empyrean; and to Leonardo the wavering begin-
ning of a girl's smile carried, folded within its calyx, the blue
veins of her thighs, the wild-rose tips of her nipples, the arch
of her instep, the silkiness of her flanks, the unfathomable reces-
sions of her final yielding to the pressure of desire.

Some shamefaced and scattered inkling of all this hovered
about Holy Sam's mind as he entered the familiar driveway of
his father's home. Oh, he had been brutally selfish in all this
whole business of his relations with the people of his life! But
he would change it all now. He would take this new happiness
of his and lavish it among them!

Sam hurriedly opened the front door of the Vicarage and
plunged at once, as a dog into the odour of a familiar kennel,
into the well-known smell of his birthplace. He heard the voices
of Penny and Mr. Weatherwax raised loudly in the kitchen and
he felt glad that some lively interest of their own had prevented
them from hearing his entrance. For a second he stood listening
and hesitating, "this way and that dividing the swift mind,"
unable to decide whether to go in to his father first, or run up
to Nell.

But it was to his girl and his child that he must betake himself
now; now and for the rest of his days! That was the mandate
of the Grail. That was the dictate of her, whose word, "'ee 'as
the fice of a sighnt," had started him on his quest. As lightly as
he could--'but he was a heavy man and the stairs creaked woe-
fully--he rushed to the upper landing. He found himself actually
forming upon his lips his cry to his Love, "I have come back
to you; back to you forever!" and, as people do, outside a door
that will reveal, in a second, a dear and familiar form, he
hugged her to his heart in his mind with the very cling of reality.
He knocked lightly twice--two little sharp, excited raps with
his knuckles--and then without waiting for a reply flung open
the door.

All was darkness. Faintly between the dark undrawn curtains
he could see the dim shapes of the trees outside, outlined against
a few pale stars. Empty was the great four-posted bed of the
Prince of Orange; cold and desolate in the deserted room.

"Nell, little Nell!" His voice came back to him like the voice
of someone who speaks in a place of the dead. With the first
sickening catch of his heart he thought to himself: "She's taken
him down to supper with Father!" Leaving the door of the big
empty room wide open, he rushed out upon the landing and
ran down the stairs. He opened the dining-room door. Pallid in
the darkness shone the white tablecloth, laid for their evening
meal. It made him think of a cloth upon an altar when they have
put out the candles.

Instinctively delaying--because of something ice-cold gather-
ing about his heart--his plunge into the museum, he opened the
drawing-room door. Doors, doors, doors, always doors--and only
emptiness within! With the musty smell of the fireless drawing-
room--that room where he had held Nell to his heart on the
morning he'd decided to go away--there smote upon his strung-
up consciousness a sharp quick death-odour, the sense of the dy-
ing-woman's body from which Dr. Fell had torn him into this
bitter life, twenty-six years ago!

Well! He must make the plunge. Hearing still tne voices of
Penny and the gardener from the rear of the house and the noise
of chairs being pushed violently about--"They're both drunk,"
he thought--he opened the museum door and went in. The lamp
was untrimmed and smoking. The place seemed foul with lamp-
soot; but this room at any rate was not empty! In his accus-
tomed wicker chair sat his father. But to the son's surprise, for
Sam had never known him do such a thing before. Mat Dekker
had pulled his chair close up to the fire; and he was in the act,
apparently, of making the brightest blaze he could; for his
big hands were fumbling at the grate, and the flames were rising
high from the wood he had been piling on, and it looked as if,
now that his great solar enemy had done his worst to him, he
were making a lonely, sullen, Promethean gesture in defiance of
all these cruel gods.

Sam closed the door behind him. For the first time in his life
he did not give even a glance at the aquarium. "What is it,
Father? Where is she? What has happened?" But even while
he was asking these questions his heart knew perfectly well; for
he remembered what Angela had told him and he recalled that
letter with the foreign stamp.

Mat Dekker raised his head from the flames which were throw-
ing all the indents and wrinkles and corrugations of his ruddy
face into startling prominence. He spoke no word however. All
he did was to make a gesture with his hand towards the table.

Sam went to the table and turned down the smoking lamp.
There, between the lamp and the aquarium, lay a folded scrap
of paper, with "For Sam" written on it in pencil. He read it,
standing by the lamp, while his father went on selecting the most
inflammable bits of wood from the wood-box, at each increase
in the heat of the blaze giving his chair a jerk still nearer. The
pencilled scrawl was of some length, but it was evidently traced
in a great hurry. Nell's hand, however, was so schoolgirlish that
Sam had no difficulty in making out the words:

Sam, my darling Sam, I shall always love you best of all.
Whatever happens to me, whatever anyone says or does, you'll
always be my one Great Love. But he came and made me go back
with him. She's been gone a long time--gone to Russia, he says.
He doesn't like her any more. Will and I spoke freely of every-
thing before I would let him take me away. He says he always
knew the child was yours, but he says he loves it for my sake
and always will. This is true, Sam; and I think baby loves him
more than either his father or mother! Will has no anger against
you and I've forgiven him about her. Oh, Sam, never, never,
never will I forget you. Later [she had crossed out the word
"later" and written "soon"] we must see each other again.
We've got used to seeing each other in your way, haven't we?
But Will was so unhappy, Sam. He said he'd go to Africa if I
didn't come back. I was sad and your father was making himself
miserable about us; so I know it's the best thing. You'll come
back now, Sam, won't you, now that I'm gone, and live with him
again? My arms are tight round my Sam's neck and always
will be.

Your Nell.

P.S. I hadn't time to tidy up my room. Oh, Sam I can't help it.
But I love you, I love you!

He folded the letter up and stood motionless for a while, star-
ing at the aquarium, but seeing nothing except Nell's face. Then
he moved across to his father and laid his hand on his shoulder.

The older man turned round fiercely upon him, and Sam never
forgot the gleam of anger--blind, bewildered, tragic anger--in
his deep-set grey eyes. "Go!" he cried hoarsely. "Get out of here!
Go back to your clay-hauling. When I want your pity, I'll send
for you!" It was clear that the man's whole mind was completely
obsessed at present by his own frustrated passion. His emotions
had smouldered and smouldered till they had become like a lump
of darkly burning peat, self-scorched, self-fed, self-consumed.

Sam sighed heavily and went to the door. He still held Nell's
letter tightly crumpled up in his hand. "Don't set the chimney
on fire, Father!" he called back as he went out. He walked down
the long dark passage and went into the kitchen. Here there
were many signs of some recent riotous scene but the two old
cronies were at peace again, facing each other by the stove, each
with a bowl of the famous "gorlas" on their knees. They were
too fuddled to rise from their chairs at Sam's entrance.

"Why, Penny," he said, "I thought you never drank with Mr.
Weatherwax."

"Her baint drinking wi' I. Her be hearing I zing me zongs,"
and the enormous countenance of the gardener, radiant with
tipsy contentment, burst into his favorite ditty:

"The Miller, the Malster, the Devil and I
Had a heifer, had a filly, had a Ding-Dong,
But now in a grassy green glade she do lie.
Pass along, boys! Pass along!"

But Penny Pitches looked dreamily from one to the other.
"Best for 'un to zing," she muttered brokenly. "Let 'un zing,
Master Sam, let us all zing and ding! I'd 'a never drunk wi'
he if thik bare-faced baggage hadn't called I names to me
veace when I gave she a piece o' me mind. Yes. you may work
your chin at me as much as thee likes, me lad! Herve gone back
where her hasn't to sleep single no more. They baggages be all
the seame! Master Zoyland had only to ring bell and call "Nell,"
and up she picks her baby, and pop goes the weasel! I did me
best for to hold she for 'ee, Mr. Sam; but her only called I
names, and Master Zoyland curst I for a wold bitch.

Seeing that there was nothing better than this to be got tonight
out of his foster-mother; and too sick at the heart to be able to
endure another stave of "Ding-Dong," Sam wearily went on his
way. Slowly, very slowly, as he returned through the crowded
Sunday-night streets to Manor House Road, past the calm, fa-
miliar tower of St. John's, the influence of his Vision came back
a little; and he had regained enough acquiescence in the decree
of destiny by the time he reached his top floor, to receive a cer-
tain homely comfort from the wild extravagant pleasure with
which the black spaniel, emerging from beneath his bed, leaped
up to lick his hands.

His conscious mind was sad, even to the verge of a sort of
inert despair, from this loss of Nell at the very moment when he
was ready to live with her; but, below his conscious mind, stir-
ring still in the depths of his being, was the feeling: "I can
endure whatever fate can do to me, for I have seen the Grail!



THE IRON BAR



It was now the end of February. The newspapers all over
England had contained startling headlines for the last week
about the Glastonbury commune, most of them calling upon the
government to put a stop--by some drastic action--to this scan-
dalous interference with the rights of private property. Nothing,
however, was done except what was done by Philip Crow to pro-
tect the building of his new cement road leading down from
Wookey Hole and his new steel bridge over the Brue on the south
side of Lake Village Field; and Philip's action was confined to
the introduction of police protection.

There had been so many disputes that year all over the country
between town councils and local land-owners that it was difficult
for Philip to make the authorities realise that this sudden trans-
forming of Glastonbury into one single co-operative polity was
anything more than what the chief of the Taunton police called
"another of them sky-larking council tricks."

The government probably would have interfered all the same
--for unemployment in all the big neighbouring towns, such as
Bristol and Cardiff, was acute just then, and there was a danger-
ous restlessness throughout the country--if it had not been that
the really important fortress of private property, namely the
Glastonbury bank, remained untouched by this socialistic
experiment.

On the twenty-third of February Mr. Evans came down to his
shop in the High Street, in exceptional good spirits. The day was
one of unusually delicate atmospheric effects. Grey upon grey
abounded, with occasional fragments of what looked almost like
mother-of-pearl as the ditch-mists were blown here and there over
walled courts and mossy lawns while the sun struggled with the
clouds.

"I have got an exciting bit of news for you when you come
back, Owen," Cordelia had said to him at the door of their little
house as he set off, "but I'll keep it for tea! Only be sure and
don't be later than five, will you?"

"No, no, I'll be back by five, si fractus inlabatur orbis! I'll be
back, Cordy, I swear it," he had replied.

As he hurried down the long, sloping road, flanked by work-
men's houses, the black tails of his tight-waisted overcoat flap-
ping like the feathers of an excited jackdaw heading against the
wind, he wondered to himself what Cordy 's news was. "Some-
thing to do with her father," he thought to himself, "Perhaps he's
found he's richer than he supposed, after counting up his ex-
penses." When he got to the town he met Finn Toller slouching
into Dickery Cantle's tavern. Several encounters of late had Mr.
Evans had with Codfin since a certain momentous meeting, a few
days after the sheepfold incident, when he had actually chal-
lenged the man about his singular encounter with Mad Bet.

Codfin from the start had detected with that extraordinary
clairvoyance which imbeciles share with children, that Mr. Evans
had a morbid interest in physical violence; not even excluding
murder. He felt too that he was absolutely free from any danger
that the "curiosity man"--as he called him to his colleagues--
would ever betray him to the authorities. "He be a funny one, his
wone self," he would say to his friends in the tap-room at Can-
tie's where all the poorest and shabbiest of Glastonbury's dere-
licts were wont to gather.

"I...be...going...to do it...tonight...Mister," Codfin whispered to him
now, with his hand on the tavern door-handle. The blinds of the
place were down. By the law of England it was closed. By the
connivance of the Mayor of Glastonbury people could enter and
be served all the morning from the best cellar in Wessex.

"I can't hear you, man. I'm deaf this morning, deaf as an iron
bar," said Mr. Evans, giving him a look like that of a malevolent
executioner. "If you do anything--anything really, you know,
I'll come and stop it! You understand that I suppose? I'll come,
wherever you are, for I can always find you, and put a stop to it.

He spoke in a threatening tone and laid his hand with a vicious
grip upon Finn Toller's left arm just above the elbow. Codfin,
whose right hand was still on the handle of the tap-room, showed
not the slightest sign of nervousness.

"Tonight will be the time, Mister, then," he said slowly, "for thee
to come and put a stop to it; and I'll be here all morning, 'sknow,
if thee wants to come and hear where thee'd best come to stop
it; and maybe hear too when thee'd best come to stop it. There's
nothink like being in the know, pard; for then a fellow can please
his own self. If so be as thee does drop in ere the mornin's over,
maybe thee'll have a sip of beer wi' I, to christen this pretty day,
'sknow? afore thee comes up hill to see what must be stopped."

The man's straw-coloured beard wagged as he spoke and his
pale eyes swam with an unholy amusement. Every word he uttered
seemed to carry a double meaning, seemed loaded with hints that
his leering eyes completed and confirmed. His weak subhuman
intelligence seemed to wriggle into the interstices of Mr. Evans'
wickedest and secretest thoughts and snuggle and nuzzle and
nestle there, as if Mr. Evans' thoughts were the nipples of the
many-breasted Diana of the Ephesians.

This encounter between the two men was indeed the culmina-
tion of several furtive meetings, in all of which there had been,
below the surface of what audibly passed between them, a word-
less conspiracy of understanding, mounting higher and higher;
just as if their under-consciousness--the worm-snakes within them
-- had learned the art of an obscene intertwining. Codfin had
quickly discovered that his own homicidal instinct, in which the
mental image of the iron bar played so lively a part, was re-
sponded to by something darker and far more evil, as it was far
less simple, in Mr. Evans' nature.

Once he had touched the fringe of this dark knowledge, the
tramp was led on--for all his imbecility--to play most subtly
upon this obscure chord, recognising that the accident of the
sheepfold had helped him to acquire a definite power over this
queer "curiosity gent" who took such an interest in talking to
him. A potential murderer, going about among supposedly nor-
mal people, acts as a perambulating magnet, drawing to himself
a cloud of curious tokens; such an one's recklessness in regard to
the upshot--the police, the jail, the judge, the gibbet--endows
him with the same sort of power over less desperate minds that
an Alpine guide, immune to dizziness, acquires over the would-be
summit climbers whose faltering steps he supports with his rope.

Codfin had already tasted--in his crafty imbecile manner--
this sharp, delicious arctic breath of unexpected power, in his
talk with Red Robinson in Mrs. Chinnoek's parlor. Robinson,
however, had escaped him completely; thereby indicating that
emotional 'ate as an urge to crime, cannot compete with the
worm-snake of the sexual nerve.

"Well! I've got to get on now," said Mr. Evans. "Good-dav to
'ee. Toller! We mustn't carry our joking too far."

"Joking?" thought the tramp as he went in. "That's just the
way you would talk, my fine gent!" He sighed heavily as he
shambled up to the bar counter behind which young Elphin was
standing. "If you'd a-heard Mad Bet tell I last night what she'd
do to I, if I didn't kill her beau quick, you wouldna' talk about
joking!"

As soon as Mr. Evans turned the corner by the Cattle Market,
he saw before him, about three hundred yards away, the familiar
figure of Miss Elizabeth Crow, seated on a wooden bench just
outside a seldom-used cattlepen.

Over the empty enclosures behind her, where the animals
formerly were tethered, over the wooden posts and the asphalt
paving, over bits of stray nondescript paper blown in there be-
tween the iron railings of the bench where she was sitting, the
flickering misty sunlight fell with the same caressing benediction
as it would have carried had it fallen upon the dancing waves of
Weymouth Bay or upon the mossy stones of Mark Court.

Miss Crow was holding a closed umbrella in her hand, with
the ferule of which she was scrawling vague meaningless marks
in the trodden mud at her feet. She was pondering upon an
interview she had had that morning, as soon as his clinic opened,
with Dr. Fell, and wondering why it was that doctors never come
right out with what they know of their patient's case. "Why
didn't he say in plain words," she thought, "'your heart is dan-
gerously affected? Those symptoms you have are an indelible
sign that you might go off at any moment. The best thing you
can do will be to go to bed as soon as you get home and stay
there.' " She had indeed known herself for the last three months
that her heart was getting worse and this morning's interview,
though Fell had been so cautious, was the convincing blow. She
had read the good man's conclusions, shrewd old woman as she
was, like a book; and if he had said to her, "You've only three
weeks more to live," she could not have received her sentence
more definitely than she did from his evasive humming and
hawing.

The chief effect upon Elizabeth's mind was to render her en-
joyment of the air and the wind of this day more vivid and in-
tense than she could have believed possible. It was as if this
verdict condemning her to death had taken away a thin screen
between herself and life.

There was a little leafless poplar tree not far from her bench
with the bark rubbed off its northern side, the side facing the
cattlepens and some dried dogs' excrement fouling its roots on
the side facing the street. In the bare branches of this tree chat-
tered and wrangled half a dozen sparrows and upon its trunk,
out of reach of cattle or dogs, some tall wastrel had cut with a
knife the initials of himself and his girl.

The way the broken misty light fell upon this little tree gave
it that special quality of magic that familiar objects often receive,
whether there is any human eye to see it or not, under certain
effects of the atmosphere.

Elizabeth Crow's feelings were ebbing and flowing just then
between a faint, cold, shuddering recoil from the shock of death
--it was when she felt this recoil that she made those meaningless
marks in the mud with her umbrella--and an intense, lingering,
melting, weeping delight in the smallest familiar earth-objects.
It was the sight of this poplar tree with its rubbed and disfigured
bark and with certain enchanting and almost mystical shadows on
some of its branches, as they wavered in the light breeze, which
transported her then and thrilled her through and through with
a tearful rapture at being still alive.

Mr. Evans took only about two minutes to reach her from the
moment when he first came round the corner; but during those
two minutes Miss Crow had experienced the eternal alternations,
the great antipodal feelings of human experience, the shudder of
death and "the pleasure which there is in life itself!" And she
was a woman to miss little, though she kept her own counsel of
these experiences!

She thought to herself: ‘There's that man Evans coming! I'll
get him to send me that St. Augustine Sam talked about; and I'll
give it to Mat. I can afford that now!'' How fast the mind moves
from margin to margin of these opposite feelings! Mr. Evans was
rapidly coming to a point within hearing; and if she wanted to
speak to him about St. Augustine she would have to stop him;
and yet behind Mr. Evans' approaching figure and behind the
image of that expensive book, and even behind the image of Mat
Dekker's pleasure in the book, that cold, shuddering recoil still
possessed her, and that magical light flickering on the poplar
tree still possessed her.

The invisible watchers--those scientific collectors of interest-
ing human experiences in this ancient town--communicated to
one another the conclusion that certain essences and revelations
are caught and appropriated by an old maiden lady, like Miss
Crow, which are never touched by turbulent, tormented lives like
those of Mr. Evans and Codfin.

How could Mr. Evans, now lifting his hat to greet this digni-
fied figure of voluminous skirts and flounced bosom, become a
medium for these calm platonic essences? What could Codfin,
who was risking the hangman's rope for the sake of the mania of
a madwoman, know of the deep natural shrinking of a normal
heart in the presence of death, or of its rapturous awareness of
the enchantment of what it is leaving?

Miss Crow had arranged to meet Lady Rachel and Athling for
lunch at the Pilgrims' that day. She was a little nervous in her
heart of hearts about this encounter, because in her growing dis-
approval--shared it may well be imagined by the girl's father--
of the intimacy in which the lovers now seemed to be living, she
had of late avoided seeing Ned Athling. Rachel still officially
lived with her; but there had been whole nights when the girl
had remained working, so she declared, in the offices of the
Wayfarer; and gossip had already begun to speak on the pro-
longed visits she paid to the bachelor attic which the young editor
had furnished for himself above these offices.

Lord P. had had recently several grave and diplomatic talks
with Miss Crow as to what measures they could take to stop the
outbreak of a serious scandal; but neither she nor he had yet
dared to risk any drastic ultimatum to the wilful girl for fear of
precipitating the very disaster they dreaded.

"I shan't stay long after lunch," Miss Crow thought, as she
responded to the salute of Mr. Evans, "and I won't go to their
printing-place with them today. I'll get them to leave me free for
the afternoon; and I'll go to Wirral Hill, if I'm not too exhausted,
and sit on that seat where Mat and I used to sit thirty years ago."

She beckoned now to Mr. Evans and he came up to where she
was and stood in front of her. There was something about Miss
Crow--her Devereux mother perhaps--that commanded more
respect from the Glastonbury tradesmen than any other person
in the town.

Mr. Evans, though certainly not a tradesman, was not insensi-
ble to this quality, and he stood awkwardly now, but quite defer-
entially, waiting what she had to say.

"You've got rather an expensive edition of St. Augustine
among your books, haven't you, Mr. Evans?" she said quietly.

"Yes, Mam," admitted Number Two's partner, "the best on
the market."

It is an old and bitter experience of the human race that when
once a gulf-stream of a particular evil has got started, it is always
being whipped forward by some new little breeze, or enlarged by
some new little stream emptying itself into it. A magnetic power,
it seems, in such a gulf-stream of evil, attracts these casual and
accidental encouragements.

Why, of all things, should Mr. Evans have been reminded of
their collection of books at that juncture, and why, of all their
books, of the particular one that was neighbour to "The Unpar-
donable Sin"?

"I think, if your partner has not sold it yet," said Miss Crow,
"I'd like to have that book."

"I'll put it aside for you, Mam," murmured Mr. Evans. "It is
expensive, I'm afraid, but if--"

"I'll be extravagant for once," cried the lady with a smile. "So
I think you can send it today if you've got anyone to send. You
know my number in Benedict Street?"

Mr. Evans bowed. Everyone knew Miss Crow's number. Hadn't
it been the chief topic of the town when she left her nephew's
establishment and went to live in a workman's cottage?

"I hope Mrs. Evans is well?" enquired the lady.

This simple question caused the brain of the hook-nosed
man, bending towards her, to whirl up in an angry revolt against
the smoothed-out pigeonhole of public propriety in which a mar-
ried tradesman lived. It rose to the tip of his tongue, in his
nervous state, to ask this quiet embodiment of conventional dig-
nity some outrageous question in return; such as "How does your
Tossie feel, married to Mr. Barter?" or "How will you manage
about the way Lady Rachel is carrying on with young Athling?"

"Very well, Mam, thank you," he replied. And then he even
took upon himself to add, "We've got a house that's quite easy
for her to look after."

Miss Crow smiled. "I'm glad to hear that. It's a mistake for
young married women to be overworked." She made a little
movement then with the handle of her umbrella to signify that
she had no further need for Mr. Evans' society.

The Welshman straightened his back, bowed to her in a man-
ner that even Mrs. Geard could not have felt disgraced the House
of Rhys, and went off, settling his hat upon his head as he went
in little angry jerks and vowing that he would not remove it
again till he reached his destination.

He was hardly gone--for Miss Crow had selected a very public
place for her matutinal rest--than Comrade Trent, as the
populace in their mocking rustic humour always called him, came
softly and airily by. Miss Elizabeth only just knew Paul Trent
"to speak to," as they say, and she was cordially prejudiced
against the man. She had long ago put down, in her heart, this
whole wretched business of the new regime to this alien from the
Scilly Isles.

It was clearly he who had devised the scheme of buying the
leases and the ground-rents from the lord of the manor and
doling out, in this pauperising manner, all that the visitors
brought in among the town's poor. Neither honest Dave, nor that
hot-headed agitator Robinson, and certainly not Mr. Geard with
his fancies, would have had the wit to plot such a daring move.
Miss Elizabeth had scant admiration for her nephew Philip, but
she felt sorry for him and even sympathetic with him, when she
beheld this affected, sly, young lawyer prancing about the town
as if he were the master of all. In the relations between human
beings it is always natural to attribute the grossest selfish mo-
tives to the people we instinctively dislike.

Of the real Paul Trent, who inherited from his mother an
idealism passionate as that of the poet Shelley, and who would
have perished willingly on a barricade if he could have started
an anarchistic revolution, Miss Crow knew absolutely nothing.

"Good morning, Miss Crow," said Paul Trent, "enjoying this
beautiful weather?"

"Au contraire, Mr. Trent, I'm doing my accounts! Before
plunging into Wollop's, you know, a woman has to think out
what she can afford without ruining herself. I always slip off, in
the middle of my shopping day, to do a little solitary thinking."

This allusion to Wollop's was a covert feminine taunt at this
arrogant young man; for it was well known in the town that Mr.
Wollop owned his shop and the ground it stood on in fee simple.
Wollop's, like the Glastonbury bank, remained an obstinate is-
land of capitalism in a socialistic lake.

"What a treasure your Mr. Wollop is!" murmured Paul Trent;
and taking advantage of this faint crack in the ice--like a cat
rubbing itself against the knees of someone who hates cats--he
proceeded to slip down into the seat at her side. "How do you
like our new Glastonbury constitution?" he asked her in an
airy tone.

"I don't meddle with politics, Sir," she replied; and the way
she moved away from him as she spoke seemed to add: "And
I can't abide politicians!"

"I agree with you entirely," he said; and then, to Miss Crow's
horror, he pulled up one of his soft neatly socked legs upon the
seat between them and slipped his arm along the back of the
bench.

"I'll get up the minute my heart stops thumping," the lady
thought. "What does this objectionable young man want with
me?"

"A woman like you, Miss Crow," he went on, with what she
thought was pure impertinence, "can understand better what I
am doing in Glastonbury than the most intelligent man could."

Miss Crow tapped the ground with her umbrella. Then she
produced a clicking noise between her tongue and her teeth; and
having expressed with these physical movements her disapproval
of Paul Trent, she made her mock-modest retort to his ambiguous
compliment by uttering the syllables "Tut- tut-tut!" But her in-
sidious invader only pulled his rounded feminine knee and his
neatly trousered calf a little further along the seat of the bench
and slid his delicately moulded hand an inch nearer along its
back, till the scrupulously clean nail of his little finger was
within the length of a sparrow's beak of Miss Crow's jacket col-
lar. These outward gestures, which gave his companion a tickling
sensation down her spine, were methods of approach inherited
from his father, a Cornishman who had the suavity of some old
Phoenician trader; but below all this there stirred in Paul Trent
an intense idealistic longing, inherited from his mother, to con-
vert Miss Crow to his revolutionary ideas.

"I'm very serious, lady," he said. "You mustn't get cross with
me. There really aren't so many women one can talk to in Glas-
tonbury. Most of my thoughts are entirely wasted on these
people."

"This nice, unusual day seems to make you moralise, Mr.
Trent, just as it makes me sit in the sun and wonder about
my bills."

"What I've found out is," he went on eagerly, quite oblivious
of this snub, "that none of these people, that you quite properly
call politicians, Miss Crow, know what liberty is. The capitalists
take liberty away from us in the name of liberty, which, under
them, means liberty to work like a slave, or, to starve. But your
relative Mr. Spear isn't much better! He takes liberty away from
the individual in the name of the community. So there you are,
you see! I am probably the only man in Glastonbury who fights
for real liberty---which means, of course, a voluntary association
of free spirits to enjoy the ideal life--but women understand
these things much better. It was my mother who--"

Miss Crow looked at him with surprise. There had stolen into
his affectedly genteel intonation a vibration of such authentic
emotion that it startled her. She didn't repeat that clicking of her
tongue. She allowed her umbrella to lie still, its handle between
her knees. She forgot the sinister palpitations of her heart.

"Your mother who?"

"Who taught me what liberty really meant. Who made me an
anarchist, lady!"

"But you don't mean to say--"

"Stop, Miss Crow! I know what's coming! You're going to
talk about throwing bombs and killing innocent people. No, no.
My mother didn't teach me how to throw bombs. What she taught
me was--what every woman knows in her heart!--that all these
man-made institutions only get in the way of real life and have
nothing to do with it. It's the policeman in our minds. Miss Crow,
that stops us all from being ourselves and letting other people
be themselves."

He stopped to take breath and found that he was gesticulating
furiously with his free hand right in front of Miss Crow's face,
and that Miss Crow had shut her eyes tight, as if she were in the
process of being shampooed, and that in his eagerness he actually
had emitted a small globule of white sputum which now adhered
to the black frill of Miss Crow's maternal but maidenly bosom.

Around this anarchistic spittle, a minute yellowish fly, at-
tracted by the smell of humanity and dreaming perhaps that one
of the old-fcshioned Glastonbury markets was about to com-
mence, hovered with pulsing and heaving desire.

Paul Trent drew out his elegant pocket-handkerchief from his
breast-pocket, and therewith wiped his forehead. Then he hesi-
tated for a minute. He would dearly have liked to have wiped
away that little bubble from his too voluble mouth which still
adhered in annoying prominence to the lady's bosom, but he
simply had not the courage to attempt such a deed. It is easier to
defy society than to outrage a small propriety; and the man
from what Malory calls the country of the Surluse, and what Sir
John Rhys calls the Sorlingues, or Les Isles Lolntaines, replaced
his dainty handkerchief in his breast-pocket and sank back in his
place, with an inward sigh and an outward smile. No good!" he
thought to himself, and a wave of bitter futility swept over him.

During the last four or five weeks he had come to feel as hos-
tile to Glastonbury as any one of the Crows had ever felt. He
would have hated the town as much as Tom Barter did, if it had
not been for this unique chance of giving an anarchical twist to
the policies of the tiny commune. But he had encountered dis-
illusionment after disillusionment.

Simple and direct as Dave Spear's methods were compared
with his, the young Communist defeated him every time their
ideas clashed. The cause of this was obvious. Dave had a clear-
cut set of adamantine principles, which he combined with a prac-
tical and even unscrupulous opportunism that was a perpetual
surprise to everyone.

Thus when the dictators of this microscopic slate came to log-
gerheads, it was always the Anarchist whose principles were
vague and his practice unbending, who was forced to yield;
while the Communist, whose principles were crystal-clear and
his practice malleable and flexible, carried the point. Had Paul
TrenL been more sympathetic to the Mayor's mysticism he might
have won Mr. Ceard over to his view. Had he been more personal
in his destructiveness, he might have propitiated the emotional
Red and plotted with his help some catastrophic blow to Philip's
dye works, or tin mine, or bridge, or road, these wedges of cap-
italism in this co-operative community; but the truth was that
Paul Trent, like the poet Shelley, was far too ideal in his in-
stincts for his instincts to prevail; and in a world where liberty
and independence and sweet reasonableness are forced to yield
to fanaticism and dominating faith, his curious double nature,
wherein his mother's masculine soul concealed in his father's
effeminate body, divided his energy and confused his purpose, it
was easier for him to outwit the Marquis of P. than to turn Glas-
tonbury into a voluntary association of free philosophers. As he
now jumped up from Miss Crow's side, made his courtly Cartha-
ginian obeisance and cleared off, directing his steps towards the
central offices of the commune, which were in the upper floors of
the Abbot's Tribunal, he said to himself that his real difficulty
was with the wayward and emotional nature of the Glastonbury
natives themselves. "And it's the same," he thought, "with Spear
and old Geard; yes! and even with the double-dyed fool
Robinson.

"Our little society can deal easily enough with these pilgrims
and visitors. We can grow rich upon them; and we can make
them obey our rules or keep them out by our requisitions. It's the
natives who'll break this thing up, when it is broken up; and
I don't give it more than a couple of years, at the best! Yes, it's
the natives who'll ruin the whole thing!"

Thus he pondered ; and to the same tune and to the same moan
had Avallach and Arthur, Alfred and Edmund, Dunstan and
Edgar, Whiting and Monmouth, yes, and Mr. Recorder King! all
pondered in their day and in their hour.

He paused for a moment at the gate of the Tribunal, just as
Mary Crow had once done and gazed with a sad, disenchanted
eye upon that beautiful late-gothic facade.

"Does it need a brute like Judge Jeffreys," he thought, "or does
it need a saint like St. Joseph, or like this crazy Sam Dekker,
to deal with these Glastonbury autochthones? Old Geard can
handle them when he wants to; but he never seems to want to.
God knows where that old charlatan's mind is carrying him now.
Not to the building up of any possible community that I can
visualise ! "

His hand was upon the handle of the Tribunal's main entrance
when two little girls--one of them carrying a sturdy child in her
arms--passed close by him.

"Bert can say 'Glastonbury be a commune,' Bert can; just like
teacher tells we to," said the little girl who was carrying the
child.

"C...0...M...com--U...N...E...oon...commoon!" murmured Bert
proudly, from the arms of a still prouder Sis.

But Morgan Nelly, as usual, dashed this simple glory into a
thousand melancholy pieces, to be carried away on an obscure
wind. "Glaston baint no such thing," she cried in her shrill,
mocking elf-voice. "Glaston be a person, like I be, and persons
can't be spelt by no teacher, nor taught by no teacher. 'Twere
Mad Bet who told I that Glaston were a person and I arst Holy
Sam if such 'un were, and 'a said, ‘Sure-lie, girlie, sure-lie. Glas-
ton be the 'Ooman of Sorrows what holds Christ in lap!' The
children passed on, out of the gloomy triumvir's hearing; but,
though anything save superstitious, the young lawyer from Les
Isles Lointaines found it hard not to regard Morgan Nelly's curi-
ous remark as a significant omen. He gazed down the street at
the massive, pinnacled tower of St. John's. It was certainly a
peculiar day for lights and shadows! A soft, elusive, fluctuating
radiance that seemed contained within a delicate sub-aqueous
vapour, at once faintly rose-tinged and faintly greenish, hovered
like the submerged lamp of a drowned ship, over the roofs and
masonry of the ancient town.

Glastonbury a person? Well, perhaps, after all, that was the
solution of their troubles! These old, obstinate, irrational indi-
genes of the place understood this wayward and mysterious Per-
sonality better than any philosophical triumvirate could do, and
had expressed their feeling through the mouth of this wild-
eyed child!

But if this was the solution, was not he, the man from Malory s
Surluse, nearer to the secret than the rest? Or was it, after all,
a mistake to make even the wilfulness and the irrationality of
Persons into a principle and a doctrine? Was old Geard, in the
long run, the one who was the wisest of them all; he for whom
all these exciting events were only half-real, the dreams of an
absent-minded Wayfarer, "drunk upon the milk" of an unseen
Paradise?

The young Anarchist found it difficult to break up this inde-
finable spell into which Morgan Nelly's casual words had flung
him.

He knew so well the trim, prim, fussily orderly look of the
communal offices above his head where the depersonalised mind
of his colleague Dave dominated the very typing macmnes and
the very postage stamps; making everything seem like those scis-
sored patterns in paper, from which patient seamstresses cut
their garments! Why was it that the real reality of life always
struck a person sideways and incidentally, and seemed just the
very thing that no one allowed for?

What Paul Trent felt just then was a dim suspicion that if
everybody in Glastonbury--these difficult natives as well as these
easy visitors--were only to stop doing anything at all, just stop
and listen, just stop and grow porous, something far more im-
portant than a "Voluntary Association of Free Spirits" would
reveal itself!

A feeling stole over him as if all the way down its long history
Glastonbury, the Feminine Person, like Mary at the feet of the
Master, had been waiting for the fuss to cease, for the voices to
subside, for the dust to sink down.

As when a boy catches upon the face of a girl, as when a man
catches upon the face of a woman, that unique feminine look
which forever is waiting, watching, listening, dreaming, in a
trance of mindless passivity for something that never quite
comes, so Paul Trent felt himself now to be watching the Glas-
tonbury atmosphere, on this day of such strange lights and
shadows.

Could it be possible that the secret of ecstatic human happiness
only arrived, when all outward machinery of life was suspended,
all practical activity held in abeyance? Man must live, of course,
and children must be born of women; but was there not some-
thing else, something more important than any conceivable or-
ganisation for these great necessary ends?

A doubt came into Paul Trent's mind, different from any he
had ever felt, as to whether his inmost ideal--this thing that cor-
responded to the word liberty--was enough to live by. Wasn't it
only the gap, the space, the vacuum, the hollow and empty no-
man's land, into which the fleeting nameless essence could flow
and abide? He felt as if he were on the edge of some thrilling
secret, as this thought, this doubt, touched him with its breath.
It was as if all the moments of dark, cool, lovely, quiet empti-
ness that had come to the generations of men living in Glaston-
bury, had incarnated themselves in this Feminine Emanation of
the place, which now seemed brushing him with its overshadow-
ing wings.

Comrade Spear wanted to "liquidate" the Grail Quest on be-
half of Communism, Red Robinson wanted to destroy it because
of the treacheries and oppressions it had condoned. He himself
had wanted to shake it off, as a morbid, mediaeval superstition,
hurtful to free spirits, like a clammy miasma! And all this while
Old Geard was working his miracles by its aid; but casually,
carelessly, almost indifferently; as if he had discovered that the
whole Grail Quest were a mere by-product of some vast planet-
ary reservoir of an unknown force.

Oh, dear! His thoughts had become too analytical, too con-
crete; and his good moment was gone. With a shrug of his shoul-
ders he turned the handle, entered the Tribunal, and ran upstairs
to the orderly rooms from which Glastonbury was now ruled.


When Mr. Evans arrived at his shop after his interview with
Miss Crow by the railings of the Cattle Market he found his part-
ner, Mr. Jones, extremely excited by the quantity of foreigners
there were that day in the town, and bent upon devoting the
whole day to a lively concentration upon their business.

"I know better than thee can know what these Continentals re-
quire, seeing as I've lived in Glaston afore thee was born," per-
sisted the old man, "and the best thing thee can do is to bring up
a pile of they books out of basement and put 'em in windy. Them
Germans and Rooshians be more for books than they be for
bricky-brack."

Mr. Evans struggled out of his tight overcoat, making porten-
tous grimaces as he pulled at its sleeves, hung it up on a nail at
the back of the shop and rubbing his face with both his hands,
prepared to do what his partner bade him. He had taken good
care since his marriage to avoid that descent into his Avernus but
the human mind is so constructed that when he received this
point-blank push from his business confederate, a hundred rea-
sons sprang up like a hundred sly lawyers, each of them full
of subtle arguments why he should do what the old man bade
him to do. This was the third little breeze that had helped for-
ward that day his gulf-stream of evil!

His high spirits that morning had been largely due to the fact
that he had just arrived, in his Life of Merlin, at the beginning of
the final scene where the Magician passes into that state of
Being hinted at in the mysterious word Esplumeoir.

Mr. Evans had been writing, of late, every evening in their
small sitting-room in the Edmund's Hill district above Bove
Town. He would sit on a little chair that creaked under his bony
figure in front of a flimsy table, covered wilh publications of
various antiquarian and folklore societies, and as he stared at
a cheap coloured print in a variegated frame, of a river and a
boat and a woman reading--a print that took the heart out of all
rivers and all boats and all women!--he would give himself up
lo the exquisite and sweet pain of weighing every word he was
writing, changing it, re-setting it, substituting another, replacing
the first, till the particular sort of rhythm he aimed at had at last
been caught.

A boat...a river...a woman reading...this incredibly feeble production,
in which the blotchy frame and the sentimental picture seemed
to melt into each other till they became a weak blur of meaning-
less twists and curves, had grown to be so dear, so sweet, so
familiar to Mr. Evans, whose aesthetic taste was nil, that it not
only reminded him of a picture in his parents' farm but it also as-
sociated itself with the word Esplumeoir. It was under the spell
of this entirely worthless, but to him almost sacred object that
Mr. Evans was now considering and weighing in his mind two sim-
ple sentences: "And so in the wet vapour that hung in woeful
water-drops upon his beard he bowed himself down and stooped
right low over the rain-soaked earth where yesterday had been
the drawbridge of Caer Sidi. The Dolorous Blow had fallen: the
Spear of Longinus had done its work; where was he now to hide
his forehead and cover his eyelids, who knew too well the causes
of all these happenings; their echoes, their ripples, their waxing
and waning moons?"

Pleased with the way these paragraphs sounded in his mind
and finding in his broodings over the word Esplumeoir a strange
vibration of peace, Mr. Evans had emerged from his threshold
that morning,--but now all was different. As he traversed that
little dark staircase from shop to cellar and from cellar to shop,
carrying many enormous armfuls of books, he found his mood
of dreamy self-satisfaction changed into something else. Number
Two was scrupulously honest in his handling of their diurnal
gains, which, with the increase of foreign visitors, began to grow
very considerably. He kept two large collecting-boxes, one of
them with the letters "G.C."--Glastonbury Commune--written in
pencil on it, and he divided all their increment into two portions
and then sub-divided their own share.

During the time that Mr. Evans was bringing up these books,
the shop was crowded with people; and old Jones had all he
could do to deal with the pushing and jostling that was tak-
ing place.

But he was right about the books. Not a German, not a Rus-
sian entered, but he began turning over the pages of these books;
while not a Frenchman came in, but he wanted to see all the
china ornaments that the establishment boasted.

This learned interest in their stock of books--most of which
were old parchment folios--kept Mr. Evans at his job; but his
mood had completely changed. And in a most subtle way it had
changed; for while his broodings were still upon his mystical
interpretation of the word Esplumeoir there slipped into his
thoughts certain episodes in the earlier life of his magician which
led insensibly to his subterranean temptation.

He recalled, for instance, that occasion when Merlin came
rushing down in a howling storm from the forest hills driving
before him a herd of stags, himself riding upon the back of the
hindmost, and rending off one of its great horns, flung this wild
weapon at the daring chieftain who was stealing the magician's
wife.

The dark and bloody violence of this scene disturbed the cur-
rent of Mr. Evans' mind. Something in the sinister action of
tearing out that branched horn by its roots reminded him of
a deadly, a most perilous passage in "The Unpardonable Sin.
The evil tide was indeed full upon him now. With trembling
knees he put down his candle--for little daylight could enter that
cellar--and snatching the book from its place by St. Augus-
tine, he began feverishly turning its pages till he found that
abominable and terrible passage.

His hands shook so much and his knees knocked together so
violently, as he gloated over this dreadful scene, that anyone
beholding him would have supposed him to be the victim of St
Vitus' dance. The man's bones seemed to melt within him as he
read on and on now, passing from this passage to another and
from that to another, till all sense of place or time was com-
pletely lost. The long winter months in which he had lived so
happily with Cordelia fell away from him like a cinematograph
picture passing across an artificial screen.

Nothing in the world seemed to matter, nothing in the world
seemed of the least importance, compared with the overpowering
mania that re-possessed him now. It returned upon him with all
the more irresistible power because of his long suppression of it.
Had anyone been down there watching his face they would have
seen that he was biting his lower lip so violently--sucking it
indeed into his mouth as well as biting it--that his whole coun-
tenance was transfigured. His nostrils kept twitching, opening
and shutting like those of a savage stallion, and his eyes burned
with so insane a light that one could fancy that they would
actually cause the paper upon which these atrocious things were
written to smoulder and shrivel like leaves held into a con-
suming flame.

The man's absorption in his frenzied vice was so horribly com-
plete that when the door at the top of the staircase opened and
Number Two's voice called upon him to come up into the shop
it was no more than if he had heard a moth beating against the
wall. But a moment came--for even in the throes of a cerebral
excitement driven to a pitch like this a human being grows aware
of that calling horizon that we name the future, those beckoning
fluctuating cross-roads, those bridges--Perilous, Pomparles
Bridge, Eel Bridge, Sword Bridge, Water Bridge, that make a
person feel that wicked thoughts are not enough--a moment
came when Mr. Evans resolved to do something. It was no vague
thing that he resolved to do; for his imaginative projection was
as concrete and palpable as the worst of these silhouettes of
horror engraved in the holy excess of sadistic satisfaction, by
Dante's rationalized dementia.

He now closed the leaves of the book, letting the page that had
overpowered him fall down upon its neighbour as delicately as a
person might cover up a wound with its own eroded skin.

He rose to his full height and possessed himself of the candle.
His knees ceased to knock together, his pulses ceased their fran-
tic tattoo, the beads of sweat on his forehead began to dry. It was
the curious phase in the pitiful evolution of temptation when the
insane desire sinks down and sinks in, and the practical resolu-
tion of what we are going to do hardens and crystallises in all
the veins and fibres.

There is no longer now any localised sensual stir in the per-
son's being. All is diffused, all is spread out through body, soul
and spirit. The man does not only want to do this abominable
thing with his wrought-up sex-nerve, he wants to do it with his
whole nature. That sex-nerve is still at the bottom of it. But that
nerve of imaginative evil, now so quietly coiled up--only its
little radium-burning eye, of glacier-livid tint, crossed by flicker-
ing red levin, remaining alert, only its forked tongue quivering
like a compass needle--has projected its dynamic energy through
the whole organism, has converted the whole organism into its
obedient slave, so that its immediate functioning can lie latent.

And the most dangerous aspect of this diffused energy, which
now fills the man's whole nature, so that his intellect is inspired
by it and his soul is inspired by it and his spirit is inspired by it,
is its deadly cunning.

That little coiled-up nerve-snake, now suddenly grown so inno-
cently quiescent that if Mr. Evans were to strip himself naked
there would have been nothing indecent in the exposure, gathered
the dynamic energy which it spread through his whole being di-
rectly from the First Cause.

In the nature of the First Cause there are two windows of mani-
festation corresponding most precisely to the eyes of such crea-
tures as have no more than two eyes. From one of these slits into
the Infinite pours forth good; from the other evil.

When Spinoza taught 'that the will of God was limited by the
nature of God, he was not deducing such doctrine from his in-
timate experience but from his mathematical reason. Intimate
experience of reality--whether it be the experience of the First
Cause or of any one of its innumerable creatures--is always
reporting "magic, mystery, and miracle" and, along with these,
an unbounded faith in tbe power of the will to change the nature
of the organism. The whole stream of what is called Evolution
depends on this autocreativeness of living things. Nor is there any
creature that does not share with the First Cause the power of
being good or being evil at its own intrinsic will.

It is the created, not the creator, who so constantly produce
good out of evil; and this they do of their absolute free-will.
Certain created souls have indeed willed the good rather than
the evil so habitually--and these souls are not confined to the
human race--that they have rendered themselves impervious to
the evil Eye of the First Cause and porous only to the Eye of
infinite compassion. The Mr. Evans who now issued forth from
Number Two's basement and blew out his candle at the top of
those narrow stairs was a Mr. Evans whose will, for that crisis
in his life, was entirely evil and whose cunning craftiness in the
achievement of his outrageous intention, was supernatural in its
flexibility.

"I forget if I told you, Mr. Jones," he said, pulling on his
tight black overcoat with twenty times the ease with which he
had pulled it off, for no overcoats, no fur-tipped jackets either,
slip on so quickly as the ones that are destined for a wicked
quest, that I ve got an appointment this morning with Father
Paleologue?"

"Aye? What's that? Do you mean you're going, Sir?"

"Father Paleologue. You will remember him if you think a
little! He brought a collection of icons to. sell for his monastery.
A Greek monk he is. Catholic monks are discouraged from com-
ing here--their authorities know, by a secret tradition of scho-
lastic warning, what the Twilight, 'Yr Echwyd,' really means,
to which the Grail leads."

Number Two stared at him. "Pardon me, Marm," he murmured
to the lady he was waiting upon.

"I've had very few o' they High Cones in me shop," he went
on speaking quietly and earnestly to Mr. Evans. "Do 'ee think
there'll be a big enough demand for such things as they, to
make it worth our--"

But Mf. Evans was already taking down his bowler hat from
the peg where it always rested.

"I'll bring you back a couple in my pocket to show you, Mr.
Jones, and I'm sure you'll agree--"

The truth was that Number Two, although no bad judge of
a portrait of John Locke, when he saw one, had never seen
an icon and had not the faintest notion what such a thing looked
like.

Bui Mr. Evans had opened the street door and was gone;
while Old Jones, turning to his customer with an air of confiding
all the eccentricities of his partner to her intelligent ear, said
something about the study of High Cones being one of those
branches of his profession that he'd never aspired to. "Do you
happen to have picked up a few on 'em, in your travels, Marm?"

While the lady stared at this curious purveyer of rarities.
Number Two's partner was some distance down the street, walk-
ing very fast towards the Cattle Market. When he reached the
entrance toi Dickery Cantle's tavern, he opened the door marked
"Tap" a little way and peeped in. The tap-room was full of
beer drinkers and the air was thick with smoke.

Mrs. Cantle, a pale, worn-out woman, was serving at the bar,
assisted by her son Elphin.

Mr. Evans opened the door a little further and remained hesi-
tating.

The small place was so crowded, for it was a favourite resort
among those of the Glastonbury unemployed who could lay
hands on a penny or two, that neither Mrs. Cantle nor Elphin
--nor indeed anyone in the room--noticed that hooked nose, and
those gleaming eyes under the bowler hat, snuffing and peering
in the entrance like the Devil at Auerbach's Cellar.

Backward and forward went the thin white arm of Mrs. Cantle
above the counter; to and fro went the thin, frail figure of
Elphin among the little tables in front of the wooden seats. It
must have been a scene that with certain trifling differences in
cut of costume and tone of voice went back to the time when
Glastonbury was a mediaeval town of no small importance.

There was not a man here this morning among those drinking
who had not come to forget his troubles and there was not a
man among all these men who had not already realised that
purpose in the thick smoke-filled air with its strong smell of
beer and cheese and masculine sweat.

The present dictators of Glastonbury--that is to say, Dave
Spear, Paul Trent and Red Robinson--would of a surety never
have dared officially to interfere with the national regulations
about the closing hours of public houses, but when once the
local police-force, represented in this case by Bob Sheperd, had
received a hint in favour of greater laxity from the mayor of
the town, it became easy for the smaller taverns, like St.
Michael's on Chilkwell Street, and Dickery's at the Cattle Mar-
ket, to admit a group of habitual customers, while keeping their
blinds down and their shutters closed. Such a group this morn-
ing then, at a time when the public bar at the Pilgrims' was
authentically shut, was enjoying itself after the fashion of their
ancestors and talking loudly about the new commune. No one
took the least notice of the gaunt bowler-hatted individual hesi-
tating in the doorway and searching the room with an eye of
wild expectancy. Apparently he found what he wanted for he
gave vent to a sudden sound between a laugh and a groan. His
hesitation came at once to an end now. Closing the door very
softly behind him he moved through the smoke and the noisy
crowd, past the little tables and the wooden benches, till he
reached the counter. Here he stood in complete silence till he
caught the landlady's eye.

"Good morning, Mr. Heavings," said Mrs. Cantle in a faint
voice. "Have 'ee come about what Dickery do owe Old Jones,
for thik second-'and bed and they 'arf a dozen bedroom chairs?"

"Certainly not, Mam," muttered Mr. Evans. "I've come...I've come
for...I've come to...have a drink and look round a bit."

"What are ye taking, Mr. Heavings? Straight Scotch, or a peg
of Our Special?"

Since neither she nor her husband ever touched a drop of what
they sold this latter alternative was understood by everyone in
the room to refer to a brand of liquour, more potent even than
Mother Legge's Bridgewater punch, which had mellowed for
generations in a great butt in the famous Cantle cellar.

The truth was that Our Special was a species of old sack that
the years had converted into a liquid gold that was heady and
heartening to a degree unparalleled save perhaps by the contents
of one of the great historic casks at Bremen. Only the boldest
visitors paid their half-a-crowns for a sip of this ancestral fire-
water; and a spot of colour came into the hollow cheeks of the
thin lady when Mr. Evans, ignorant of the formality of this offer,
murmured his preference for the select beverage.

"Us can't afford to treat 'ee to 'un, Mr. Heavings. Thee dost
know that, don't 'ee?"

As a reply to this the tall Welshman put his hand into his
pocket and produced a big handful of loose silver. "Will that
pay for a double glass, Mam?" he enquired.

She gave him one of those quick nervous looks that women of
all classes are in the habit of giving when in the presence of
some striking evidence of masculine extravagance. "'Twould pay
for a three times over," she said.

"Give me just that, please, Mrs. Cantle--a ‘three times over.' "

"I baint responsible, Mr. Heavings, if a three times of Our
Special sends thee's stumick into thee's head!"

The smile, if it could be called a smile, with which the unfor-
tunate man replied to this warning, awed the woman into obedi-
ence. "'Twill cost 'ee the best of ten shillingses," she said
solemnly as she turned to give the order to Elphin. Elphin had
been gazing in mute wonder for some while at this unusual
customer.

" Twill be a full tumbler, Mother," he whispered. "Will Dad
be angry?"

"Do as I'm telling 'ee, Elph! The gentleman knows what it be.
'Tisn't for we to say naught if he pours a sovereign's worth
down's throat!"

While Elphin was away on this mission and his mother was
once more serving her more normal customers with beer, Mr.
Evans moved slowly to a wooden bench at the back of the room
where the person was seated for whose presence in that place he
had been hoping against hope. This person was none other than
Finn Toller. The sandy-haired Codfin was sitting alone with an
empty flagon in front of him, gazing vacantly into the smoke-
filled atmosphere. Watery as usual were his staring, blue eyes
within their red circles, and the pale hairs of his eyelashes
showed round those rims like the while bristles of a young pig;
while his under lip hung down like the lobe of a monstrous
purple snapdragon.

"A grey day, Codfin!" remarked Mr. Evans.

"So it be, Mister, I were just thinking there might be rain
afore night; but I hopes not. I've a deal to do today one way
and the other."

"Do you feel when you have anything to do, Codfin, that
everything's unreal, the people and everything, till you've got
it done?"

The man gave him a sudden quick look; for the tone of his
voice was queer.

"Some people be afraid to sit by I, Mister, but you baint
skeered o' little old Coddie, be 'ee?"

"Perhaps you've given them reason to be afraid of you."

Again the queer tone! Mr. Toller experienced the uncomfort-
able sensation that he got sometimes when he woke up at two
o'clock in the night. "Red Robinson be death-sick with fear when
he do see I coming. Tother day 'a turned clean round and showed
'is bleedin' arse sooner than for we to meet."

"How do you account for his doing that, Codfin?" said Mr.
Evans with burning eye.

"Dunno. I've done nothink to 'un!"

"Oh, yes, you have, Codfin--Oh, yes, you have. As I was tell-
ing you in this place before, you and I are linked together in the
movements of the stars and when you come to do what you want
to do I'll do what I want to do!"

Toller's gaze drew itself away from vacancy and became the
expression of a rabbit contemplating a weasel.

"What do you know about I, Mister?"

"A great deal, Codfin, more than you guess! And that's be-
cause we're in the same boat."

"You be laughing at a poor working-man, Mr. Evans."

"Not at all, Codfin. Do you want my hand on, it? There...
there...good luck to you. In the same boat...that's where
we are, Finn Toller, my friend!"

Elph Cantle's eyes nearly started out of his head, when ap-
proaching the little table in front of the two men, with the tum-
bler of pallid gold in his hand, he saw them shaking hands.

"Mother sez 'tis ten shillingses, Sir, if you please," he whis-
pered, as he put Our Special down. It was Mr. Toller's turn to
look surprised when he saw the great handful of silver emerge
from his companion's trouser-pocket.

"Bring us another glass, my lad," said Owen Evans gravely.

Young Cantle went off with the money and returned with the
glass. He was too hypnotised by what he saw to turn away till
Mr. Evans had poured half the drink into this empty receptacle
and pushed it towards the tramp.

"Off with you, lad! This isn't ginger pop, or I'd treat you to
some too."

When Elphin's figure was swallowed up in the smoke-obscured
crowd of labourers, Mr. Evans lifted his glass and nodded to his
companion to do the same. It was not often that what he quaffed
made Mr. Codfin choke; but the man gasped and spluttered like
a woman in his attempt to despatch Our Special at one gulp. As
for Mr. Evans he kept murmuring some queer Welsh syllables of
carnal approval as he sipped and sipped and sipped at this an-
cient sack.

"In...the same...boat...Codfin," he repeated, allowing his eyes, with
a terrible gleam in them, to rest upon the other's, over the rim of
his glass.

There is a danger-instinct in trampish murderers, imbecile
thieves, and rural degenerates, which holds out antennae of
warning more responsive than the petal-edges of sensitive plants.
Had there been the faintest smell of the official, of the normal-
respectable, of the moralistic, of the legal, about Mr. Evans, Cod-
fin would have drawn in his horns and been dumb as a deep-sea
fish. There was the devil's own luck too about this encounter in
that the noisy buzz of talk around them and the fact that their
fellow-topers were all the simplest and roughest type of labouring-
men rendered their intercourse as safe and private as if it had
been held inside Gwyn-ap-Nud's Stone Tower, on the top of the
Tor. It was of this tower that the tramp began soon to murmur,
as his wits seethed up into savage confidence under the fumes of
the Drink Perilous.

Mr. Evans had already spoken of the iron bar; and the drunken
man seemed to have got it lodged in his imbecile brain that this
hook-nosed personage with the blazing eyes had been his con-
federate from the start.

"Her had been better pleased if it had been she rayther nor
he, that I were to hit with me bar. But I never struck a 'ooman
in me life and never will...no! not for Mad Bet herself."

Mr. Evans listened to his words with the blood boiling in his
veins and his wrist-pulses beating so hard that he felt he must
press them against the cold hard edge of the table. The passage
in the book that had driven him forth that day had to do with an
iron bar; and as often happens with the symbolic images of crime,
this eidolon of violence, which had been floating in the back of
his mind ever since that evening at the sheep-fold, drew to itself
like a magnet all the other mental pictures in the book and
absorbed them into itself.

"You're certain, Codfin--absolutely certain--that they're
going up the hill today?"

"Sartin, Mister! In the twilight. That's what Frenchy Crow--
us working-chaps calls he Frenchy--said himself when I were
listening. Tossie--that's the maidie Boss Barter's gone and mar-
ried, since her kids were born--have never been up Tor Hill of
a night-time. And as they all jabbered there and I listed to un,
they said as they was minded--the whole three on 'em--to meet
up there ‘in the twilight' so's to show thik gal what a dark night
be when it do fall on Hill. "Only, us must see it fall!" Frenchy
Crow kept saying. Tisn't naught unless us sees it fall."

"Could...I...be...hid...inside...the tower...with you, and watch
while you...while you...do it?"

"Sartinly you can be inside tower. There be a chink in thik
door; for I've used it many a times to watch for Mad Bet com-
ing and going; and you can see me bring iron bar down on him,
snug and pretty--I'se warrant--from inside thik little pussy-
crack!"

Mr. Evans in his agitation now began humming a mid-Victorian
sentimental catch, that contained the words "In the gloaming,
oh, my darling, ere the night begins to fall," and Mr. Toller
with Our Special mounting to his head, caught the spirit of this.
just as though some ghastly phosphorescence of unholy glee in
the contemplation of murder had bubbled up from both their
brains, and began to troll a similar stave: "Once I...loved ...a-
maiden-fair...and...she did...de-ceive me!"

A few labourers glanced towards that sequestered bench, when
amid the general confusion of voices these cracked tunes rose up
like the wind in a couple of broken potsherds, and Elph Cantle
pulled at his mother's sleeve; but the outburst was followed by
a lowering and pregnant silence.

"To see, to see, to see--through that crack--up-down, up-
down, the iron bar, up-down, up-down, the iron bar, and the
man, up, up, and then down, the iron bar down."

From the livid evil Eye of the First Cause, that evil eye that
crieth throughout eternity, "Up-down, up-down, the iron bar and
the man!" there shivered through Mr. Evans' frame a concen-
trated essence of all the knee-shaking and pulse-beating passages
in his Book of Books.

His hooked nose hung low over his empty glass, low over his
two clenched hands upon the wooden table; his bowler hat--for
he had not removed it--was pushed far back upon his head; and
behold! along the rim of it walked, upon its own purpose bent,
a small black fly.

As Mr. Evans' thoughts drove him on, this hat-walker, like a
complacent acrobat upon a dizzy ledge, paused in his perform-
ance and proceeded to clean his front legs by meticulously rub-
bing them together.

It has long since been noted how Mr. Evans possessed, in addi-
tion to his deeper vision, a furiously precise vein of foreground
pedantry.

He now envisaged with infernal exactitude the minutest details
of the scene to which his whole body and soul--magnetised by
that coiled-up snake-nerve--were rushing forward. And he en-
visaged too--for instead of being dulled or drugged, his intelli-
gence was quickened and heightened--the issue, the issue of
it all.

He felt in advance the sucked-out, scooped-out, blood-rusted
hollowness of the gap--the eye-tooth of the world wrenched from
its nether-place--that would sink down, that rusty-brown gaping
hole that was himself, his very life, down to the deepest abyss.
This deadly clear envisaging of the issue of today's business
would it were done and over with now!--drained up every drop
of pleasure from the doing of it.

What drove him on to it then? What drove him on to this
pleasure-divested horror? The coiled snake-nerve of sex! And the
strange thing is that the insane will to the satisfaction of this ter-
rible sex-nerve does not demand pleasure. Pleasure? Little do
the moralists know! A perverted criminal is called a pleasure-
seeker. Great Horns of God! Why, one little tiny drop of the
deadly nightshade Mr. Evans was now draining--let it follow the
burning path of Our Special down his Cymric gullet!--laid on
the tongue of those who talk of pleasure would teach them how
feel the sucking lips of the undying Wriggler. No, no, that was
the curious thing. Mr. Evans was compelled to contemplate
with cold-blooded precision the state of being to which this up-
and-down iron bar--whatever it did to its victim--would con-
duct himself.

Pity of Jesus! he was there, even now, as he stared at the tiny
golden bubbles in the bottom of his tumbler. He was there and
looking back at the iron bar, at the blood, at the murdered man.
It is a strange fact and a pretty proof of how deep the double
nature of the First Cause sinks, that a person could go marching
on like this towards the iron bar, and derive not one single half
drop of pleasure out of it. Or of satisfaction either!--though it
is the will to satisfaction that drives it forward.

If Mr. Evans' thoughts, in spite of Our Special, were far from be-
ing frolicsome, the thoughts of Codfin were no less accurst and
no less full of "minute particulars."

"I'll have to let this gent see it done," he thought, "for he's so
crazy-bent on't that, if I dunna let 'un he'll go and give I up to
Tarntan Jail. That's where I'll end anyway; and 'twould be Gib-
bet Hill, only they hangs 'em behind walls now, so us pore bug-
gers can't wave to our aunties. I wouldna' mind Gibbet Hill one
arf what I minds behind walls. Behind walls makes a person feel
like a damned abortion, the kind of nothing-no-more what Dr.
Fell sticks in back garden between pig-house and privy. I never
have liked behind walls and I never will." What force was it that
drove Codfin on to the iron bar; that object which he had already
so carefully concealed inside Gwyn-ap-Nud's Tower? It was cer-
tainly not any sex-nerve. It was purely and solely his sense of
honour. Codfin was honourably committed to do the bidding of
Mad Bet, and it had never, for one second, since their talk in the
sheepfold, presented itself to his mind as a possibility that he
could get out of doing it. All this expectation of ending "behind
walls" had been accepted by Codfin at the very start as a Jesuit
accepts his superior's command or a revolutionary assassin his
sealed orders.

While the two heads of these bewitched slaves of the iron bar.
drooped thus low over their empty glasses, there was a sudden
disturbance in that smoke-filled room to which they both re-
mained totally oblivious. This disturbance was caused by the
sudden entrance from the interior of the tavern of Dave Spear.

Dave had quite perceptibly changed since he had become one
of the dictators of Glastonbury. His youthful bloom had faded.
His pleasant good nature had dried up. His out-going impulsive
spontaneity had been replaced by a certain strained reserve, and
his honest simplicity had given place to a worried, self-conscious
caution. The many-sided struggles he was now engaged upon, his
attempt to outwit the incorrigible anarchism of one of his fellow-
dictators, to give a rational Marxist turn to the destructive
Jacobinism of the other, his constant effort to guide into orthodox
Communist channels, the mystic religiosity of their erratic chief,
caused a stiff, troubled, harassed look to descend upon his boyish
countenance, hardening its disarming contours into something
anxious, wistful, and at the same time austere.

His appearance was greeted by a clamour of voices and a rush
towards him of a group of puzzled, excited, acquisitive labouring-
men, who were all dissatisfied with the arrangements of the new
Glastonbury exchequer.

" 'Tisn't the money what worries I, Mister," explained a ca-
daverous shoemaker from Butts Close, "'tis seeing these chaps
what wouldn't work, if they had the chanst, getting the same as
I, who've worked meself into a bloody consumpty."

"What I wants to know," cried a, burly street-cleaner, pushing
himself forward, "is why a man with seven children, same as
I've got, only gets five bob more than them as has got two!"

"Listen here. Mister," cried a chimney sweep from the Beckery
district, "Didn't us read in Johnny Geard's paper last week that
Glaston belong to Glaston folk and none else i' the world? What
I'd like to know, and there's many of us working-chaps who want
to know the same, who 'twere that elected these 'ere Trents and
Robinsons to be bosses over we and who 'twere that gave these
'ere bosses their girt pay? I've got a wife in the family way, four
big-grown hungry kids; whereas this Robinson has got only his
Sail; and I dunno what Trent's got; not one I reckon! And
Trent's not even a Zoomerset man. They tell I 'ee do come from
the Scilly Isles. I wish to hell 'ee'd stayed in the Scilly Isles."
("Hear! Hear!" cried a lot of excited voices.)

"Zoomerset money," went on the chimney sweep, "ought to go
into Zoomerset pockets; and so 'twould if Bloody Johnny had his
zay. Who made this here Trent from Scilly Isles and this here
Robinson from London bosses over we Glaston folk? Us selected
Johnny Geard, 'cause us knows he; and he be a good drinking
man and a good praying man. But us knows naught of this 'ere
Trent and this 'ere Robinson. They may be Rooshians, for all
us do know!"

Dave Spear was so hustled by all these people that he was
driven backward across the room till he was standing close to the
table at which Mr. Evans and Finn Toller were seated. He opened
his mouth with a gasp of astonishment at seeing Mr. Evans and
was on the point of addressing him when a plumber who lived in
a little house by the edge of the river and suffered from asthma
seized him roughly by the wrist.

"Us be going to keep 'ee wi' us, now us has got 'ee, Mr. Spear,"
muttered this man, in a hoarse, unpleasant voice--he had
evidently been drinking heavily and had reached the quarrel-
some stage.

"Let me go! What do you mean by touching me?" cried the
indignant Dave. "You don't know what you are talking about.
None of you do. No, no; none of you do. You are all thinking
only of yourselves. You're all thinking only of getting more
money for yourselves--you're all just as bad as Philip Crow."

Things began to look nasty after this bold defiance.

"‘Knock him on the head!" cried one voice. "Tie 'im up and
gie 'em summat to remember us by!" cried a second. "Where be
you come from, thee wone self?" yelled a voice from the back
of the room, "that's what us wants to know! You baint a Glas-
tonbury man, and us 'ud like to know what you be!" So it had
come at last. He who had no thought in his mind but to lift up
humanity, now saw humanity as it is and was hated, spurned,
rejected by it.

He was standing close to the round table by the wall where
Evans and Codfin were drowsing over their empty glasses. Here
he swung round with his hands deep in his pockets.

"Comrades!" he began in a clear voice.

The uproar stopped, as such turbulence will sometimes, under
the spell of a professional speech.

"I don't think you realise, Comrades, how difficult it is to give
you back what your bourgeois slave-drivers have stolen from
you. You can't get it back for yourselves, because you are dis-
organised and they are organised, because you are without lead-
ers and they have trained leaders. The only way things can be
changed from top to bottom is by a dictatorship that represents
you. Mr. Geard your Mayor--" he was interrupted by shouts
at this point: "He's all right. Bloody Johnny's no bleedin' poli-
tician. Three cheers for good old Johnny Geard!"-- but he went
steadily and quietly on: "Mr. Geard, your Mayor--and I'm glad
you do justice to him--was elected by your town council; and it
is Mr. Geard who has appointed Comrade Robinson and Com-
rade Trent and myself to act with him in obtaining for you by
legal means--for the council has bought up the leases that belong
to Lord P.--what Mr. Crow and his shareholders have been
keeping from " here again he was interrupted. Loud shouts
arose, "We know all about Lord P. Lord P. be feared to show his
ugly phyz in Glast'n! Lord P. can't sell what isn't his'n to sell
Go back to Lord P. thee own self, and tell the old blighter well
knock his bleedin' head off and thee's too!"-but once more
Dave struggled to go on quietly with his speech.

"By legal means it is, Comrades, that we, your representatives
in this town, are now trying, with your assistance and by your
help, to start an experiment that has never yet been--"

"Shut yer bleedin' jaw! Who be you, we'd like to know, that you
should rule over us?"

Violent hands were now laid upon him and .clenched hands
were raised to strike him. The uproar rose again from every part
of the room. Something leapt up within Dave then and he lost all
his calm self-possession. His ruddy cheeks went white. He strug-
gled with the men. He flung off the hands that had begun clutch-
ing at him in the midst of that smoke-obscured confusion.

Like a normal waking-sound caught through the anguish of an
insane dream he heard the feeble voice of Mrs. Cantle calling for
her husband. "Dickery! Dickery!" Like a sardonic drum the re-
frain beat upon his ears:

"Dickery, dickery , dock--!
The mouse ran up the clock!"

He pulled out an empty chair from under the little round table
at which Mr. Evans and Mr. Toller sat and scrambled up upon it.
From this position he cried aloud in a tone so vibrant and so
commanding that it brought the room once more to a dead hush.

"Silence!"

"Dickery! Dickery!" echoed the voice of Mrs. Cantle, now
reaching that room from some remote place in the rear of the
house.

"Oh, brothers, my brothers, you must hear me, even though
you kill me afterward. You ask who I am? I'll tell you who I
am! I am the voice of the Future. I am the voice of what is to
come when we are all dead. You talk of your rights; the rights
of Glastonbury? Brothers, my brothers! In that Future there'll
be no more rights. In that Future there'll be no more Glaston-
burys against Rome, or English against Russia, or West against
East. In that Future there'll be only the human race, sprung
from the earth, returning to the earth, loving the earth. In the
Future none of us, none, I say none, will want to possess this or
possess that! We shall struggle then for one thing alone, fight
for one advantage alone, the right to labour for a victory of life
over want, over disease, over cruelty, over malice, over wicked.
stupid ignorance. Brothers, brothers! Don't let these Christians
say that we who break up their altars and close their churches
only do it for greed. We do it for the Future. We are killing God,
the old God, we are turning from magic and miracles, those old,
outworn, selfish things, but it is for more Life we're doing it.
Oh, can't you feel it, brothers? We all have the same heart, below
our greeds and our angers and our envies; the same heart, the
same heart. We're all equal before the great spirit of life. Oh,
look into your deep hearts, brothers, and feel it. It is the Truth!
At this moment, here in this place, we are all one. I am you and
you are me! We're all the same, old and young, men and women,
it's. one heart we have in us. Here! you can take me. I'll come
down in a minute and you can tear me to bits; but you'll be only
tearing yourselves! There's something in us that's the same, that
belongs to us all; and I'll tell you what it is. It's the Future
being born in us--It's the Future tearing us, breaking us, bruis-
ing us so that it may be born. Brothers, brothers! Even while you
kill me I'll be the same as you are; no different! The same heart
I'll be. For I am Life and you are Life. Life is our child, our
precious child, that we're all perishing for, that we are being torn
to bits for. But in the Future it will know what we did. In the
Future it will say: ‘They took their happiness and tore it to bits
for me. They were the tortured Creators; and I,--I am their
offspring.' The same heart in us all, brothers, and this heart cries,
‘Drop all this furious fighting for your own hands! Slip aside
from it, escape from it, give it up, let it go, melt into the calm,
cool, universal air!' Brothers! Don't 'ee go on with this eternal,
‘I ... I ... I ... I!' Let the heart in you speak, let it be felt; for it
is always there! Slip out of this hard, tight knot, this old evil
knot, this old grasping, greedy knot, slip out of it and be free. .

"The Life in us, in them, in Glastonbury, in Rome, in Jerusa-
lem, in India, in America, in China, is the same heart! Brothers!-
Can't you feel it? Let it melt that stone, that old, hard, wicked
stone, that stone which is Christ's grave. Let it melt it, be it
Arthur's or Caesar's, so that we can all flow into one, one Sea,
one Flood, one great calm...and quiet....and peace. Brothers, you
can take me now and tear me to .pieces. You cannot; kill this
heart in me, this heart that they have buried in Glastonbury,
in Rome, in Jerusalem. You cannot kill it because it's in the
killer as well as in the killed. It needs nothing, it wants no-
thing, it asks nothing. It always gives. It never takes. What
can it take, when it is Life, God, the universe, the future? Broth-
ers, my brothers, don't 'ee feel it? It is melting in me to you
now, and in you to me! It isn't the self any more. It isn't the
Stone against other stones anymore. You ask me who I am. You
say I'm not a Glastonbury man. I say to you, ‘None of ye are
Glastonbury men!' I say to you, ‘Ye are the passing of the pres-
ent into the future, ye are the motion of life into fuller life--the
heart in you melts in tears, in tears, in tears towards me and
mine...melts...in...tears...towards you. Who am I, brothers? I am
the voice of the Future out of the heart of the present; and
that is why...that is...why ... I must be...why I am...a trouble to
you...a thing that you would like...would like..."

He did really burst now into a flood of weeping. The tears--
big, child's tears--poured down his face. They poured down his
face while his face under their stream remained unmoved, the
mouth quiet and stern, the features fixed and rigid, the weeping
eyes fixed upon some remote spot in space.

For a moment, while he stood there like that, crying in dead
silence, crying as if his round boy's head were made of marble
and were a figure in a fountain, Mr. Evans slowly lifted up his
bowed forehead, with its great hooked nose, and stared at Dave's
muddy trouser-bottoms. What Mr. Evans felt now was, "I must
go through with this, though I get no pleasure from it." The
curious thing, in the mind of this slave of the iron bar, was that
it was the iron bar itself that now excited in him this relentless,
pleasureless necessity to go on. What it was that sank down
under the iron bar, a man, an ox, a sheep, a pig, mattered little
to Mr. Evans. That it was his old acquaintance John, picked up
at Stonehenge, who was the destined victim, hardly reached his
intelligence. Nor did he think of the victim as even destined to be
killed. It was not that at all! Oh, it was something very different
from that. It was an anonymous action too. That was the whole
point! "The Unpardonable Sin," like all other extreme forms of
vice, was totally impersonal. It was motiveless--except for its
own single urge--and it was surrounded by a vacuum of
anonymity.

If these were Mr. Evans' thoughts as the young Communist
closed his appeal by this fit of passionate tears, the thoughts of
the crowd who had listened to him were totally submerged in a
spellbound fit of stupefied bewilderment. The room remained
absolutely hushed, no one lifted a finger to meddle with what he
chose to do now.

He stepped down slowly from the chair to the floor. He was
in a trance. That is how it felt to himself and that is how it
looked to the crowd in the room--a trance and a complete for-
getfulness of where he was.

Vaguely and with short shuffling steps, more like those of a
convalescent than a somnambulist, he went to the street door,
opened it, and just as he was, with an overcoat on, but without
hat or stick, walked off towards Street Road. He felt at that
moment a strong desire to look into the sympathetic and yet
non-human eyes of the head of the Glastonbury commune. He
felt purged, relaxed, reduced to an almost feminine softness, and
he longed for the sympathy of Mr. Geard as a young girl might
have done.

When Mr. Evans awoke from the drowsiness caused by Our
Special he no longer perceived in front of him, mounted upon
a chair, a pair of grey, ready-made trousers, and in his sudden
awakening he leaned towards his nodding companion.

"When had I better meet you up there?" he said.

Finn Toller only let his straggling beard sink still lower over
the table. Mr. Evans grew irritable and shook him violently,
gripping the lean man's shambly shoulder unnecessarily hard
with his bony fingers. Not so very many people in Glastonbury
had fallen gently upon sleep that forenoon,--upon sleep softer
than the mosses of Maidencroft Lane, tenderer than the blue
vapours of Wick Wood--but among these fortunate ones there
were certainly only two, Mr. Toller and Owen Evans, whose
thoughts, as they gave way to slumber, had run upon murder.

"When...had I...? better...meet you...up there.

It was not Mr. Evans who spoke these words. It was a little
forked-tongued worm-snake. This worm-snake was jerking and
curving and cresting and lifting a head that kept changing colour
like a salamander; and it was doing all this inside a human
automaton--dead as a corpse--the carcass of what used to be
Mr. Evans! Whatever this worm-snake--which kept emitting a
poisonous froth, like a snail that has been wounded--ordered
this corpse-man, this homo mortuus, to do, the corpse-man
obeyed. To the excited worm-snake it was a swooning, gasping,
fainting ecstasy to think of that iron bar. There was a quivering,
dissolving melting sweetness connected with it. The iron bar and
the life it was going to blot out were altogether detached from
ordinary experience. It was not John Crow who was going to
perish. It was simply the man under the bar. The corpselike
executioner who obeyed the worm was the galvanized body of the
pedantic and highly strung Mr. Evans, who, under normal con-
ditions, could not hurt a daddy-long-legs. Once, when he was
very young and seized by a sadistic frenzy--and it is quite possi-
ble that the whole thing started from his father's forcing his
mother to let him enjoy her long after the child's conception had
begun--he had killed something with a piece of iron. After that
the little Owen would frantically turn over the pages of all his
children's books to find pictures of creatures being killed, espe-
cially killed by heavily crushing instruments. It had to be a thing
of iron and it had to come crashing down, smashing everything,
smashing skull and vertebrae together, or the performance, de-
manded with such a swooning, trembling, fainting orgasm by
the worm-snake, would not be a master one! Mr. Evans' tone as
he said, "Meet you up there" was like the tone of some Asmo-
deus whispering to some Baphomet.

"Meet you up there," echoed the sticky surface of their table.
"Meet you up there," echoed the dregs of Our Special. "Meet
you up there," echoed a little bit of dried-up dog's dung which
had been detached from one of the thick-soled boots of Dave
Spear and left behind on the chair.

To the worm-snake inside what was once Mr. Evans this harm-
less sentence "Meet you up there" partook of the nature of an
overpowering sexual temptation. The actual sound of the brief
syllables..."meet...up...there" was like an erotic provocation of
a kind that none could bear and not yield. The fangs of the
worm-snake dripped with a frothy milk. In mounted and erected
expectancy, in blunt-nosed expectancy, in forked-tongued ex-
pectancy, it danced a lust-dance of delirious joy when it found
that it could make this slave-corpse, this dead soul, this rex
mortuus, that had been a human being, utter these simple
words!

And to what end? To the end of observing how an iron bar,
if given a modicum of propulsion from the thin arms of Codfin,
would obey the law of gravitation!

The pale blue eyes of Codfin opened now just a little. They
were blinking and confused and a moisture trickled from their
lids. "Eh? what's that, pard? Meet ye, did ye say?"

"Yes, yes, yes, yes," cried the cresting worm through the lips
of Mr. Evans. "When shall I meet you up there?"

About five hours later, Mr. Evans was seated on one of the iron
seats on the slope of Wirral Hill, watching the little boys play
rounders. Now rounders might be defined as the innocent child-
hood of baseball, of which it is obviously the original source,
and it is a game of the simplest and most primitive hit-and-run
nature. And Mr. Evans became extremely interested in rounders
that afternoon.

Every time one of the boys hit the ball, Mr. Evans could see
the lean stooping figure; not of the John he knew, but of an
abstract victim whose name was called John, and of a victim so
completely dehumanised and depersonalised that all question of
"saving" him disappeared. The only thing to do was to stop the
horror. As Mad Bet had screamed to Mr. Evans at Mother Legge's
party on Easier Monday, the only thing to do was to "stop" and
then to wash the sand clean in the mind s fatal Colosseum.

But Mr. Evans could not "stop." He watched this hit-and-run
game with peculiar and special interest because it was exactly
what he was going to do himself. He was going to hit and run or
rather to watch, but Christ would say it was the same thing,
someone else hit and run.

Was Mr. Evans mad? Not unless all sexual desire, from the sat-
isfaction of which other sentiencies suffer unnecessary suffer-
ing, is mad.

If any stranger had approached Mr. Evans on that afternoon,
as he sat watching this game of rounders on Wirral Hill, and
induced him to enter into conversation, it is extremely unlikely
that the faintest notion of the man's being mad would have
crossed such a stranger's intelligence. He had, it is true, been
totally unable to eat a morsel of anything since breakfast. But
he had been drinking again. He had gone into a little nameless
beer-house on the way to Wirral Hill and had drunk glass after
glass of beer. "I must drink," he had thought grimly to himself
as he tossed off the heel-taps of each separate glass. "I must drink
to "render myself stupid'; as Pascal said about believing the
Christian faith." But he had not rendered himself stupid. He had,
on the contrary, given himself a racking headache; but otherwise
nothing could be clearer than Mr. Evans' mind. He was to "go up
there" at sunset and wait inside the tower to see--actually in his
flesh to see--what he had been telling himself stories about all
his life long.

Let no one think that the obedient rex mortuus or deus mortuus
that was Mr. Evans' soul, did not weigh the possible consequences,
down to every smallest detail of what he was going to do, making
himself, by thus knowing about it beforehand and doing nothing
to stop it, an accomplice in a murder. "Undoubtedly, I shall land
in jail," he thought. "It's possible enough that it will be worse
than that. Why in God's name then, don't I walk straight back to
the shop, or home to Cordy, and shake off this monstrous weight?
The police? To go to the police? No, no, no, no! The thing to do
is"--at this point the invisible worm itself began whispering a
subtle self-deception, a cunning compromise--"go up there and
get hold of the iron bar myself--yes! yes! yes! That's the thing
to do, from every point of view--to go up there presently--it's
too early yet--and, as soon as Toller appears, just take the thing
from him and pack him off; and then tell Crow, or not tell Crow,
as I consider best at the time--get hold of that thing from Toller
first anyway, and pack him off and perhaps it would be better ne-
ver to tell Crow, or any other living soul, about it--yes, yes, ne-
ver tell anyone about it--but would Toller try it again? It's some
madness of that bald-headed woman--the Grail Messenger--I
couldn't follow it when he was telling me--madness of some kind
--damn!"

His mind called up the image of Mad Bet as she had seemed
to him that night when she had made him kiss her naked skull.
A wry smile twisted his lips as he thought of that night and he
clutched the iron bar--another and a different one--that made
the elbow of his present resting place!

A sardonic and tormented chuckle, a veritable damned soul's
chuckle, broke from his twisted mouth.

"Hee! Hee! Hee! My Grail Messenger! It's all mixed up with
Crow. It was Crow who asked me, that night, if I could embrace
a woman who was perfectly hideous, and I told him then about
the Grail Messenger. Hee! Hee! Malory, you old devil! There's
life still in your Norman book! Yes, yes! you understand these
little things. Life's not changed. It all comes round--round and
back again." What had happened now, as the man sat there
clutching the iron elbow of that cold seat, while the little boys
kept hitting and running in front of him, was that his first na-
ture--the antiquarian one--was all stirred up into a writhing
weft of self-protective fantasy. And this had come about in a
very subtle manner; for by saying to himself that what he must
do anyway was to go up there, even if he snatched the iron bar
from the bewitched assassin and confessed everything to John
Crow, he had covered with a sort of adhesive plaster the gaping
hole of his tormented conscience; and this covering up of the
dark, sweet, irresistible twitching of the snake-worm, left his
normal upper-consciousness free to deceive him to the limit with
accumulated plausibilities; while all the time the worm licked its
devouring fangs in the darkness below!

What the worm said to itself was: "Let us only once go up
there, and the swooning, drowning, dissolving ecstasy of the
Dolorous Blow will soon sweep away all these conscientious
hesitations!" Calmed and eased a great deal by this crafty com-
promise with his conscience which rendered his rendezvous
with the iron bar a necessity it he were to save John Crow as
well as a possibility of playing the ecstatic voyeur at a murder
orgy if he decided against saving John Crow, his eyes now fell
upon the figure of an elderly woman walking heavily and stum-
blingly up the slope of the hill below the level where he was
sitting and the boys were playing.

There was an iron seat, like the one he himself was occupying,
a little below the boys and a little above the woman; and it was
towards this seat that she was evidently advancing.

She was well dressed and she was using her umbrella as a
stick to lean upon; and as he followed her with his eyes, stum-
bling and exhausted, moving up the slope of the hill, he decided
that he knew who she was, and that she was none other than Miss
Crow. Miss Crow indeed it was, and a Miss Crow on the verge
of a fainting-fit from her bad heart. There were several people
passing both ways, both to the north and to the south, along
the gravel path below the place where the lady with the umbrella
was tottering; but it was a group of complete strangers--stran-
gers to her as well as to him, for they were visitors to Glaston-
bury from the northeast of Germany--who, when she fell, as he
saw her do now, rushed up the slope to her aid. There certainly
was a peculiar atmospheric effect abroad, this February day. A
soft, light mist, filmy and gossamery as a wet sea-vapour, hung
over the town; while the sun, shining between heavy banks of
clouds, touched with a curious opalescence, pearly and tender,
the portion of the hill upon which he was now seated.

The boys ceased at once playing their game, when they ob-
served the disturbance made by the lady's fall, and calling to
each other in shrill, excited cries scrambled down the slope and
huddled, as children will, pushing, whispering, jostling to get the
clearest view between the burly figures of the Germans. These
latter were now talking in vociferous and guttural tones across
the body of the prostrate woman. One of them was actually on
his knees beside her, loosening the throat of her dress and trying
to pull off her gloves.

When Mr. Evans joined the group he was accepted at once as
a native of the place and everyone appealed to him as an au-
thority upon what ought to be done with a lady of distinction
and refinement who apparently had had a fit.

He was aghast at the spectacle of the poor lady's face as he
bent over it. In unqualified concern and pity he surveyed the
unnatural redness of her skin, the drops of white froth issuing
from her open mouth, and the family twitch, palpitating still,
though she was quite unconscious, in her flaccid cheeks. She had
been acting recklessly and unwisely all that day after her morn-
ing visit to the doctor. She had stopped at Wollop's longer than
she should; she had kept her appointment to lunch at the Pil-
grims' with Rachel and Athling; and as soon as she could escape
from these young people she had made her way, slowly but ob-
stinately, to Wirral Hill, being seized with a passionate desire
to rest upon the particular iron seat where, thirty years before,
she was accustomed to meet Mat Dekker. As Mr. Evans now
surveyed her unconscious form he found that he was not so de-
void of natural philosophy as not to he grimly aware of the irony
of the fact that he, the insane pervert, was now contemplating
with lively concern the blow which heart trouble, that gentlest
of all wielders of iron bars, had brought down on this warm
mass of corpulent femininity.

It was clear that the players at rounders, as they inserted their
small perspiring bodies between the anxious foreigners, thought
that Miss Crow was dead: and the words "She has it got, my
God!" and "Death her has taken, God in Heaven!" in the thick
intonation of the great Mid-European plain, showed that the for-
eigners laboured under the same delusion. "The woman something
to say wishes!" cried the man suddenly who was bending over
her on his knees. "To fetch the Herr Doctor it better were!"
replied another; and a third--an extremely sturdy little man,
planted upon his heels so firmly, as if nothing could ever bowl
him out--uttered the expressive, the impenetrable, the massively
undying word, consonant to all occasions, reassuring under all
invasions of disorder, the word Police! How fast the mind
works and how self-centred the human ego is!

Even as he came forward and knelt down by Miss Crow's side,
even as he lowered his ears to Miss Crow's murmuring lips, the
Welshman was thinking to himself: "Who's to know--if Codfin
doesn't speak when they arrest him--that I wasn't in the tower
by chance? No...no...no! I shall never in all my life have another
chance of seeing, of drinking up with my very eyes, what I've
been telling my pillow about night after night since I first knew
what...what I was!"

She was murmuring intelligible words now. She was taking
Mr. Evans for someone else, for a different tall bony man. But,
as he listened to her and smelt upon her grey hair, from which
the hat had been torn, a faint scent of eau de cologne, he remem-
bered how more than once he had dressed up that pillow of his
in his own vest and shirt and had pounded it with the poker from
the fender while an orgasm of terrible ecstasy dissolved his
very soul.

"I can't let this chance go...no! not if I'm hanged for it....I can't
...I can't!" But nothing seemed able to keep away from him--
as he heard the sturdy little man, whose feet were so firm in
the grass and so wide apart, repeat the word "Police"--a thin
ice-cold bodkin-point of ice-cold terror--the police...the police
...the police...the police...This is a crime I'm going up there to
see...different from any secret vice, however shameful...this is
a crime...the worst of crimes...and when I've had that ecstasy...
to the end of my days all will be exposed...Owen Evans the per-
vert...Owen Evans the malefactor...Owen Evans the murderer.
They'll have me in Madame Tussaud's moulded in wax ....my nose,
that everyone laughs at so...in wax..."Have you been down to the
Chamber of Horrors yet, and seen Owen Evans? Anyone would
know from his face what he was ....the human carnivore!"

Meanwhile from the contorted mouth of the unconscious
woman, whose eyelids kept flickering but did not open, the
breathing grew louder and less human, and between the great
animal gasps, like the flapping of a bellows, broken, incoherent
words forced out their way.

The German upon his knees by her side seemed to be dimly
acquainted with the sort of attack she was suffering from, for he
lifted up her head and began pouring down her throat something
from a small flask that he produced. But instead of recovering
her from her fit this treatment only had the effect of stopping
her attempts at speech and of throwing her back again into com-
plete immobility.

For a moment Mr. Evans thought she was really dead now; but
the German with his hand on her heart muttered emphatically;
"Life she still has, the poor woman! Life she still has!"

"Has anybody sent for the--police?" Mr. Evans whispered to
the German with the flask. He had meant to say--"for the
doctor."

The kneeling man rose to his feet now, shrugged his shoulders .
and addressed some question to his companions. It appeared
from what they said that nobody had gone for anybody. The soul
of the obsessed Welshman now made a hurried rush down the
corridors of his consciousness, closing the door to the iron bar
chamber down there, and opening more normal vestibules of
awareness. "I...go...get...Herr Doctor!" he announced, sur-
veying these simple guardians of the unconscious lady. Thus
speaking, he raised his bowler hat with a grandiose gesture,
both to the woman on the ground and to the strangers round
her and made off at a great pace down the gravel path that
led to the town.

In the confusion of his wits, however, it was not to Dr. Fell's
house but to his own house that he directed his way; a secret
urge within him driving him now, as in all practical crises, to
go at once to Cordelia. But if a beneficent chance moved him
to this self-preservative action, a malefic chance willed it that
when at last, panting and breathless, he entered his little house
in Old Wells Road he found Cordelia deep in conversation in
her parlour with her mother, Mrs. Geard.

Mrs. Geard had been confiding to Cordelia her growing worry
about the girl's father; how he persisted in spending the bulk
of his time over at Chalice Hill, and how he had been several
times of late upon some mysterious errands to the Glastonbury
bank. "'Tisn't that he be changed, Cordy, you understand. 'Tis
that he be more his own self than I've a ever known him. Crum
sees it too. 'Tis as if this commune silliness has wrought on him
to let himself go. He talks more about the Blood and the Master
and the Water of Life than I've ever known him. He talks every
night, Cordy, on and on, after us have put out the gas. I wish
he would tell me what he goes to the bank for! Mr. Trent brings
him his pay for being Mayor regular enough. There s no reason
why he should go to the bank. I don't like, nor I never have
liked, that young man Robert Stilly. What do you think he goes
to the bank for, Cordy?"

If Mr. Evans had caught a glimpse of Mrs. Geard through the
window he would have shot off again, but fortunately the two
women were seated out of sight of the window, so that it wasn't
till he opened the parlour door that he knew she was there. Cor-
delia recognised at once that something was very wrong with
him; for he stood in the doorway muttering about Dr. Fell,
Bob Sheperd, Germans, rounders, Miss Elizabeth Crow fainting
on Wirral Hill, and his having an appointment at sunset that
night...a very important appointment...at sunset...with Father
Paleologue...at sunset...about some icons.

The mother and daughter were both of them on their feet,
looking at him with an uneasy stare, Cordy with a passionate
and frightened stare, Mrs. Geard with a worried and anxious
stare. "I hope he has not been going to the bank," the latter
thought to herself; and in her heart she began wondering
whether icons were some species of familiar spirits, like her own
Pembrokeshire fairies, that this Mr. Paleologue claimed he could
conjure up.

"I only came in to tell you, Cordelia," said Mr. Evans now
in a clearer, more intelligible manner, "that I've got to send
Dr. Fell to Wirral Hill, where Miss Crow lies unconscious.
After I've been there, I've got this engagement at...at sunset.
Did I say sunset? Yes, at sunset. I hope you are feeling very
well, Cousin Megan?"

At this actual moment, towards this man in a disordered state
of mind--an iron bar tapping on the inside door of his locked-up
intention--and towards two women staring at this man in be-
wildered uneasiness, the First Cause poured forth its double
magnetic streams of white and black vibrations. Out of Nothing,
out of pre-existing vortices of energy that themselves issued from
Nothing by the creative will of this Being, Mr. Evans, his wife,
and his wife's mother had been created. In them the First Cause
reproduced itself, the Macrocosm in these three microcosms; and,
like the First Cause, these three persons, Mr. Evans standing
in the doorway, Cordelia standing by her husband's writing desk,
and Mrs. Geard standing by the purple chair, had the power of
giving themselves up to the good in their nature or to the evil.

For Mr. Evans could at that very moment, even as he gazed
at that picture of the river, the woman and the boat, which he
associated with the word Esplumeoir, have transformed himself
into a saint as devoted, as spiritual, as tenderly considerate as
Sam Dekker, who in his normal state was a good deal less like
a saint than Mr. Evans was! This he might have done, even as
he stood there, after telling these plain-faced women, while the
mother-of-pearl sunlight flickered into the room, those lies about
Father Paleologue; and in doing so have rendered himself mor-
ally superior to the First Cause, if it had not been that from
the word Esplumeoir his mind reverted to Merlin's early life
and to that incident of the horn of the stag. "So good-bye, Cordy.
So good-bye, Cousin Megan. I must get hold of Dr. Fell and I
must meet Father Paleologue."

This moment was a moment of such a fatal parting of the
ways, that the Invisible Watchers who were standing at the brink
of the deep Glastonbury Aquarium, watching the motions of its
obsessed animalculae, had never crowded more eagerly around
their microscope to learn what the issue would be. It all de-
pended upon which of the two vibrations proceeding from the
First Cause Cordelia would welcome and which she would reject.
The destructive vibration, at this important crisis, willed her to
be cold, chaste, inert, irresponsible, absorbed in her own per-
sonal condition, which had never been more interesting to her!

The creative vibration, on the contrary, willed her to be warm,
alluring, unchaste, and self-forgetful, thinking only of her love
for the unhappy man before her! In her earlier relations with
Mr. Evans, Cordy had frequently been stupid and remiss; but
the "sweet usage" to which her ungainly form had been sub-
jected, and the caresses by which her cold nerves had been
quickened, had changed, all this. It was not that she had come to
understand the nature of his perversion; but she had come to
understand, to a nicety, the place in his consciousness where that
closed chamber was, and to be an adept in the art of keeping
it closed. She had discovered that by certain devices--devices
into which it is not necessary just now to follow her--it was
possible to give Mr. Evans so much erotic excitement, of an
abnormal, but perfectly harmless kind, that his soul could go
up and down past that locked-up chamber without a thought of
the temptations it contained.

It was lucky for Mr. Evans that at this crisis Cordelia was
fully aware that to be inert and irresponsible would have been
a devilish sin. The vibration of eternal creative energy which
poured down into her nerves from that remote double-natured
Force at the root of all life was now deliberately welcomed by
the spirited girl and the opposite vibration heroically rejected.
She moved up hurriedly to Mr. Evans, got behind him, drew
him forward by the sleeve till she got him to the hearth; and
then, linking her arm in his, turned emphatically and impera-
tively to Mrs. Geard.

"Mother!"

"Yes, Cordy."

"I want you to call at Dr. Fell's. It won't take you so very
far out of your way if you go by the allotment gardens and
that alley I showed you the other day. And just tell him, or
Miss Barbara, if he's out, what Owen has said about Miss Crow
having fainted--by those seats, wasn't it, Owen?--on Wirral
Hill, and those Germans looking after her. I expect she's all
right by this time; or someone else has gone for the doctor;
but in any case do go quick, Mother, please, because I can see
Owen's very worried about it."

There were no doubt some quick private glances between
mother and daughter after this, in which ihe mother said:
"What's up, my dear? Has he been drinking?" and the daughter
said: "Don't ask me now, but just go! I'll tell you everything
another time"--but the upshot was that Mrs. Geard hurried off.

The good lady's lilac-coloured bonnet rose up like a flag of on-
set from her grey head as she walked down Wells Old Hoad, and
her old-fashioned velvet-sided boots delivered short quick taps
to the brick pavement under the railings of those red-tiled houses,
and every now and then she automatically unclicked and clicked-
up the metal fastening of her purse, as if she were rejecting all
assistance from Mr. Robert Stilly in the management of her
affairs. "I cannot think why John keeps going to the bank,"
she kept saying to herself as she crossed the allotments.

Mr. Evans was now alone with Cordelia; and the first thing
the girl did was something that at once provoked a faint flicker
of natural erotic excitement in the man's perverted nerves. She
began pulling down the parlour's brown blinds upon that sunset
period of the day. Woman-like, she had absolutely no notion of
the explosives she was handling, of the volcano-fires under the
crater-surface she was stirring up. But woman-like, too, she,
who had been virgin so long, was a cunninger adept than a
thousand Thaises in the primeval arts of provocation. Daughter
of Bloody Johnny as she was, her own erotic nature, now that it
had been once excited was inexhaustible in its amorous devices;
and since her moods and her lures were forever changing, Mr.
Evans was in the position of the fortunate possessor of a whole
harem of ardent play-fellows. In none of her Cyprian disguises
could poor Cordy be called pretty; but wanton and freshly
blooming she certainly could be called; such is the magical
power of Eros.

She had a surprise for her man now. Pulling down the blinds
of their tiny parlour on the general principle announced so often
by Mother Legge, that she "could not abide onlookers," and
throwing her hat and cloak on their big arm-chair she went up
to the fireplace where a newly lit flame was making the wood
crackle, and leaning against the edge of the mantelpiece, she
began a rapid flow of excited words. She was going, she told
him, without any doubt, to have a child. She had already gone
two months with it. She had been yesterday to see Dr. Fell about
it It would be born sometime in September.

Mr Evans dropped his bowler hat on the floor and sank down
exhausted in his black overcoat on the big purple chair. Half
of her jacket and the rim of her hat were squeezed under him
as he sank down, for she had just come in when her mother
arrived; but he did not make the least move to extricate them
Nor indeed did she! Watching him with swimming eyes she
waited in silence for what she hoped and prayed would prove
to be a rush of natural emotion at what she had told him. And
drawn towards them by the intensity of their feeling, towards
this embryo grandchild of Geard of Glastonbury, there came
floating into that room through the pulled-down blinds a flock
of obscure, half-material presences, the sort of etherealised
thought-projections that are liable to hover over certain crises
in human lives. Like invisible birds these presences gathered,
sweeping into the room out of the aqueous mists of that unusual
day, gibbering and chittering to one another and circling about
Cordelia.

Neither the man nor the woman, he in the purple chair whose
tasselled valances swept the floor, and she leaning against the
flimsy mantelpiece, could have been conscious at that moment
that this embryo in the room with them was beginning to assert
itself as an entity with its own contact with the life-mysteries.
What they both felt just then as these thought-elementals flut-
tered round the new life in Cordelia's womb, as blow-flies are
attracted to carrion, or as humming-bird moths to the hearts
of carnations, was something very different from these ethereal
visitors. What they were aware of was the dumb, numb, cold,
heavy downward drag of the vast undersea forces that are sub-
human; chemical forces, that belong to that formless world of
the half-created and the half-organic whereof bodies of lower
dimensions than ours are composed and which has a mysterious
weight that draws down, a pull, a tug, a centripetal gravitation,
against which the soul within us struggles and upon the surface
of which it swims, and over which, when the process of de-
composition commences, it spreads its contemptuous wings.

This down-dragging sensation in their nerves neutralized and
counter-balanced these half-embodied air-presences, the elemen-
tal projections of old magical minds upon that sensitised Glas-
tonbury air, floating like a cloud of disturbed river gnats through
those lowered brownish-coloured afternoon blinds, out again into
that subaqueous mist, out again into the wide water-meadows.

No philosopher has yet appeared who has realised as it should
be realised, the creative power of the human mind. Behind these
brownish-coloured, pulled-down blinds on the way to St. Ed-
mund's pottery, where all those little town-council houses car-
ried their red-tiled roofs so trim, there emerged from Cordelia's
mind as she stood with her staring, swimming, dazed eyes fixed
on her mate and her awkward elbow propped on that ridiculous
mantelpiece, such an intensity of feeling that it had the power
to draw out of the air, although she knew it not, these wander-
ing half-lives. Any clairvoyant sense could have seen them there
hovering about her body, and making their weak, chittering sig-
nals to the subhuman progeny of her womb, whose embryo con-
sciousness must have been on a level with their own half-created
fumblings. But why did this thick, dumb, numb, down-dragging
pull of cosmic entropy, this dark gravitation- weight, sinking into
decomposition and dissolution, tug at those two just then, at
the man in the purple chair, with the tasselled valances trailing
upon the floor, and at the woman who had just told him he was
a begetter? Was it because--with that iron bar hammering to
get out from its locked-up prison--Mr, Evans' fungus-grown
mind groped amid after-births and abortions and corpses dead
in their travail?

Whatever the cause may have been of what happened to those
two behind those drawn blinds, both visitations came and went
in no more than a hundred tickings of the watch in the man's
pocket. Phenomena that pass so quickly--thought-elementals
floating in and floating out, and this death-cold touch of the
draught of decomposition--surely they are beneath notice, be-
neath analysis, beneath explanation? On the contrary, the very
essence of life is revealed in such fleeting impressions; and in
experiences such as these Eternity itself can be heard moaning
and weeping, as its Cimmerian waters advance and recede around
the lamplit promontories of Time.

"What shall we call him if he's a boy, Owen?" Her voice just
then was more than he could bear. Nothing makes human nerves
dance with such blind fury as a voice piercing the hollow of the
ear at the moment when the will is stretched out like a piece of
India rubber on the rack of indecision.

"Torture!" he shouted, sitting up in the purple chair and
clutching its elbows furiously, while the rim of her hat was
now completely crushed beneath him. "We'll call him Torture;
and if she's a girl we'll call her Finis, the End. For she'll be
the end. And all is the end."

Cordy's face went white, white as the surface of the little
china pussy-cat which Crummie had given her, and which now
fell over sideways as she jerked her arm from the mantelpiece.
But she wasn't the daughter of Geard of Glastonbury for nothing.
Incontinently she rushed straight to his side.

"You're unhappy, Owen; you're ill; you're hurt. Something
horrible's troubling you."

He pushed her arms away. He lurched to his feet. He bent
down and picked up his bowler hat which was lying on its
smooth crown, its dirty interior uppermost. "It's nearly sunset,"
he muttered. "If I don't go now I'll never go."

"Where are you going, Owen?"

He looked at her wildly. "Well! he must be stopped, mustn't
he? It's one thing or the other, isn't it?"

"What are you talking about, Owen? Are you crazy?"

"Oh, nothing...nothing...nothing...nothing!" he muttered.
"You don't want to see me in the dock, do you? In
the dock, woman!" These last words came from him with a
wild shout.

Cordy glanced at the brown blinds which were bulging a little.
There was a wind blowing up. She went to the door leading
into the passage, locked it, and placed her back against it.
"You don't leave this room, Owen," she gasped.

He was now buttoning up his black overcoat. His hat was on
his head, pressed down so low over his eyes that his eyebrows
were invisible. This produced a most curious effect as he glared
at her from under its shadow. But an unexpected change of mood
came upon him. He began wheedling and coaxing and imploring.

"It's only a little way...just up the hill...it's necessary too...nec-
essary...very necessary...Please move, Cordy, and let me go....
You'll be sorry if you don't....You won't forgive yourself after-
wards...if you don't." He almost wept as he beseeched her. In
his own mind just then to stop a murder and to taste an appall-
ing sweetness were motives both lost in the wild necessity he
was in to get out of this room!

But she kept her eyes upon him all the time and she now
noticed that he had begun casting a furtive, hurried, crafty look
at the window. Nothing indeed would have been easier for him
than to lift up that bulging blind and get out of that window!

"I must do something to keep him here," she thought, "and I
mustn't struggle with him...because of the child. Besides,
he'd hit me. He'd hit me savagely." A wild strange thought came
to her then; came to her from seeing the look of that lowered
blind. Very often in the evening she had undressed for his pleas-
ure, with the blind pulled down like that, and the door locked.

She began feverishly stripping off her clothes. He followed
every movement of her hands with those burning eyes, under the
shadow of that bowler. His coat was buttoned up tight under his
chin. He looked like a man ready to rush out upon pikes or
bayonets. Crossing her arms over her chest she pulled her dress
over her head and then her slip. Then she unloosed her petticoat
and drawers. Stamping with her feet she extricated herself from
these objects, letting her stockings and shoes remain. Backing
against the door, she bent down and pulled off her vest, dragging
it over her head. This final movement, when her head was bent
low, and when her face was hidden, and when the garment,
dragged forward by her eager hands was caught for a second
on one of her hairpins, did stir some deep chord of excited
desire in the man with the burning eyes.

He snatched off his hat and flung it in the purple chair. But
she rose up to her full height now, her back still to the door,
her long arms hanging limp by her sides, her chin lifted high,
her head thrown back. Mr. Evans came slowly towards her. Poor
Cordy's figure was anything but classical. She resembled a nude
of Cranach. But there was such an heroic abandonment about
her pose, and her eyes shone with such a lustrous appeal, that
something happened within that other locked room, the room
containing the iron bar. Not for nothing was this brave girl the
child of Geard of Glastonbury. Roused to the uttermost her
soul suddenly became a psychic force, a magnet of destruction,
an annihilating ray, and the murderous instrument, summoning
up page seventy-seven of that fatal book, crumbled into a pinch
of dust.

Grotesque and Cranach-like though poor Cordy's naked body
was, it was the body of a woman still, it was the ultimate sym-
bol, the uttermost "Gleichnis," of life's wild experiment. Gro-
tesque it might be, as nakedness went, but combined with the
look she managed to fling, like a passion of immortal wine over
the dark flame of his obsession, it overcame, it triumphed....

One hour later Mr. Evans and Cordelia might both have been
seen jumping with frantic haste out of Solly Lew's taxi, and to
the astonishment of that not easily surprised conveyor of mortal
men, racing with desperate impatience up the slope of Gwyn-
ap-Nud's hill. "They're there, Cordy! They're there! I see them!"
panted Mr. Evans, trying in vain to out-distance Mr. Geard's
daughter.

It had been with some reluctance that Tossie Stickles--now
for some heavenly months Tossie Barter--had been persuaded to
leave her babies and accompany her husband and John Crow
on this fanciful excursion to see the night fall upon Glastonbury
from the summit of the Tor. Barter himself had been followed
by one good piece of luck after another ever since they had
been married. He had hired spacious and airy rooms in the
same house in Northload Street where John and Mary lived,
and between the two menages there had been unruffled and unin-
terrupted harmony. With the establishment of the new regime
in Glastonbury he had been entirely freed from the annoying
presence of Red Robinson at the Factory. Robinson had now
become what might be called the third triumvir among the mag-
nates who, under Mr. Geard, dictatorially administered the af-
fairs of the small community; and Barter was at liberty to
manage the making of souvenirs entirely at his own discretion.

The one topic of conversation in these days that Barter in-
dulged in and upon which he expatiated at inordinate length to
Mary when they were alone was, what had been the psychological
reason for the miserable way in which he had lived before he
met Tossie. Into Mary's private thoughts--and they were subtle
and ironical enough--as she listened to these discourses, it is
not necessary to go; but what she said to Barter was, that all
unattached men are curiously ignorant of "what things a girl
can do"--such was Mary's expression--to make life pleasant.

Meanwhile, so happy was Tom Barter these days, that in a
brief two months his whole expression changed and the whole
cast of his countenance was altered. He positively looked fatter,
too; and his manner of speech was different. He spoke in a
tone much more easy, much more assured. It was their Rabe-
laisian sense of humour that was one of the greatest links be-
tween Tom and Tossie; and morning and night--with the twins
sometimes included and sometimes not--their fits of giggling and
chuckling and unrestrained laughter, going on and on and on,
made the second storey of that gloomy old house sound as if a
party of hilarious schoolboys was staying the night with a party
of hilarious schoolgirls.

The mention of school is relevant enough in this connection;
for what this vita nuova of Tom Barter really meant was that
Tossie had picked up what might be called the man's lost flesh-
and-blood pride just where he had dropped it in his youth under
his unlucky experiences at Gladman's House at Greylands. Some-
thing in him, some psychic organ full of a delicious, animal
gusto for simple things, and an invincible desire to giggle at
everything in existence, had been restored to him by his contact
with Tossie and not only this: for it soon became apparent, even
to John and Mary, that Barter was no longer afraid to "stand
up," as Toss would put it, to "they bloomin' gentry." This aspect
of what the girl had done for him had been brought especially
into evidence of late by reason of his association with Lady
Rachel, who--still unmarried to young Athling but still con-
stantly at his side--found herself asking Barter, in place of any-
body else, to meet her father whenever he came to the Pilgrims'.

Lord P. was constantly coming to the Pilgrims' now; not be-
cause he loved a communistic Glastonbury, for he was still
excessively nervous of the mob that had attacked him; but be-
cause he had become seriously worried about Rachel s relations
with her Ned; and the queer thing was that with his Norfolk
youthfulness restored to him, and the Gladman House years
erased from his life, by these perpetual giggling fits with Tossie,
Barter proved much more a match for the elderly nobleman and
a much more agreeable table-companion to him than anyone
else that Rachel could have picked up.

Lady Rachel's own genius, too, for these little souvenir figures
that his factory was now turning out by the thousands and send-
ing all over the world, had by this time really got Barter in-
terested in his job. The souvenir factory was doing by far the
most flourishing business in Glastonbury. More money was being
made by it than either by the new dye works that the municipality
had communized or by the old dye works that Philip was still
running, and far more than by the Crow tin mine at Wookey,
which now began to show signs of having exhausted its vein of
the precious metal; and Barter's professional pride, as the head
of so flourishing a business, being mingled with his new psycho-
logical self-respect and his new freedom from the wearisome hunt
for erotic novelty, made him just now the happiest and best-
balanced male animal in the town; although in the intoxication
of a pure zest for life in its essence he was probably surpassed
not only by his own radiant Tossie but also by Tossie's relative
by marriage, the beautiful and mystical Nancy.

"'Tis a shame," Tossie remarked to Mary as she poured out
tea for her and John while awaiting Barter's return from the
factory, " 'tis a shame for you to stay and look after the kids.
They'd really stay^ asleep just as they be and no one would dis-
turb 'em if I just locked up the place."

"I wouldn't think of it, Toss dear," said Mary emphatically,
"so don't speak of it again. Tom'll be back soon, John; so don't
finish the tea-cakes!"

"I wasn't thinking of finishing them," protested John indig-
nantly, "but to make sure, I'll put 'em on the stove, if I may,
Toss?" He rose, as he spoke, and replaced the dish in question
near the big smoking tea-kettle. As he surveyed the scene at
the table, Mary's dark head and Tossie's fair one, both bent
towards the cradle at its side, and a bowl of snowdrops, their
stems protruding from green moss, resting near its edge with
a baby's milk-bottle propped against it, John got a sudden de-
licious feeling of the continuity of these domestic vignettes, as
they gather themselves together and take varied patterns all the
way down the centuries! He paused for a second, his hand on the
dresser shelf above the stove where Tossie kept her pepper-pot
and salt-bowl, and the fanciful idea seized him that groups of
this sort--the two girls' heads, the cottage-loaf on the rough
linen tablecloth, the two babies' heads in the cradle on the floor
--were all answering and responding as they reappeared down
the ages, from the dawn of lime, to some invisible pattern of
pre-ordained harmony which was forever being struggled after
by Nature and forever being just missed, or lost as soon as it
came together.

As he stood there watching those four feminine heads, the
grown ones and the others, grouped about that cottage-loaf and
that bowl of snowdrops, the scene wavered and fluctuated be-
fore him, melted, dissolved and changed. Through that Glaston-
bury room, as he gave himself up to his waking-trance, flowed
the big river at Northwold, rose the span of Foulden Bridge,
whitish and narrow, deepened and darkened the dim pools of
Dye's Hole, under their ancient willow roots! Why should he
wait for old Tom's return, why should he wait till he and Mary
were alone together, to tell her the thrilling news with which
his mind was brimming over that afternoon? He had come to
this tea-party at Tossie's to find Mary already there; and except
for what his wife could read in his excited face--and he knew
she had read something already!--he had had no chance even
to whisper to her by herself. Where had John come from on this
twenty-fifth of February, this day of such unusual atmospheric
effects ?

He had found a little note from the Mayor when he reached
his office-shanty down by the railway after lunching with Mary
at his favourite Othery Dairy in Street Road; and hack again to
Street Road he had immediately dragged himself, not a little
peevish at having to retrace his steps across the whole width of
the town. But once inside Cardiff Villa, once ensconced in Mrs.
Geard's chair, with the well-known knitted antimacassar of
bright coloured wools behind his head, and old Geard nodding his
great white face opposite him, he had known, by one of his swift
vagabond instincts, that, as far as he was concerned, this day
of strange under-water lights was a bringer of incredible, un-
dreamed-of luck. To the end of his days would John Crow re-
member that interview with his master. The first thing he had
noticed--for he had seen little of Mr. Geard since the man had
become so much more than the Mayor of Glastonbury--was that
Bloody Johnny had got older. Yes, his hair was greyer, his face
was whiter, his plump hands were more wrinkled and the stomach
over which they were folded was more capacious.

"And that's why, lad," Mr. Geard said, "I can talk to 'ee about
things I can't speak of to anyone else. 'Twould make Crummie
unhappy, and the sweet lass is unhappy enough over Holy Sam,
and 'twould make Cordy nervous; and as for my dear wife.

The truth is, lad, I've been telling He, ever since our opening
of the arch, that His work for me here be about done. At first
He wouldn't give ear to what I said. He thought 'twas laziness,
or the Devil in me bosom. But when I went on telling He how
'twere, He came little by little to give heed. Tweren't that He
were deaf, even afore, ye must understand, sonny; but 'twere that
I be such a queer one, and that I had summat in me--yes, laddie,
that's the solemn truth--what He couldn't get the hang of!"

John looked at the diabolical black eyes--now gleaming like
two fuliginous mine shafts out of some Tartarean tin mine--
and he thought to himself: "I don't wonder that Christ finds it
hard to understand him. The truth is the old chap's never been
more than half a Christian."

"You are not easy to understand, Mr. Geard," he murmured
aloud.

The remark seemed to displease the Mayor of Glastonbury.
"That's because I'm too simple for 'ee. I be too simple for any-
thing in this clever town. I be a Montagu man, I be."

"I don't call you simple, Mr. Geard!" John was growing ex-
cessively bold in this interview with his master. Was it that his
drifting tramp's mind had gathered up an inkling that this was
the very last time, upon this earth, that he would talk to Mr.
Geard face to face? It is not often given to human beings to be
able to treat a fragment of time that can never return again
with the intense and ritualistic concentration appropriate to a
moment irretrievably slipping away into an everlasting impos-
sibility of repetition.

But on this February afternoon John Crow did touch exactly
and precisely such an intense concentration. He attained it--and
again and again, after it was all over, he thanked his stars he had
attained it--partly because of his childish and greedy high
spirits under the pressure of his instinct about some incredible
good fortune and partly because, beneath the semi-hypnotism that
Geard's black eyes exercised over him, there was a direct trans-
ference of thought between them.

But was it really possible that Christ Himself found it hard
to understand in this singular Servant of His, what he, John
Crow, the eternal heathen, the Stone-worshipper, the forehead-
tapper upon Stones, understood quite easily? What he did see
was, or at least, what he imagined he saw was that Geard of
Glastonbury, having built his Saxon arch, having worked his
Miracle, having inaugurated his new, mystical, Johannine and
anti-Pauline cult, had decided that it was an appropriate time--
although there was no hurry about it and it was necessary to
avoid any unpleasant shocks--to leave this misty, rainy, sub-
aqueous atmosphere of Glastonbury and pay an exploring visit to
the Isles of the Dead.

"I believe you are so little of a simple person. Sir," John had
the gall to say to him now, "that you are meditating what many
people would bluntly call suicide, although there might be, I
am ready to admit, other and prettier names for it."

Bloody Johnny lifted his left eyebrow at this, a sign with him
that he acknowledged the receipt of a palpable hit. He shuffled
in his chair, leaned forward a little and smiled. "But I've hardly
begun my talks to these foreigners," he said.

"If you'll excuse my saying so, Sir," said John, who now
seemed driven on by some demon within him to try and frighten
away his good luck even at the moment when it was on the
point of falling into his lap, "I think you express your ideas
more effectively by just being what you are and talking casually
to your friends. Leave it to Athling and Lady Rachel, in your
Wayfarer, Sir, to make your thoughts reasonable and logical.
Christ, if I may be allowed to refer to Him, left it to His fol-
lowers to round off His ideas."

Mr. Geard leaned back again in his chair. With half-shut eyes
and with the tips of his fingers held together in the way old
family lawyers hold them, he looked dreamily and a little quiz-
zically at John.

"I...would...rather like...to ask you a question, young man," he
said slowly.

"Say on, dear my Lord," quoth John.

"Could you conceive anyone, could you, in fact, for there's
no need to beat about the bush, conceive me, committing sui-
cide out of love of life, instead of out of weariness of it or out
of hatred for it?"

"Love of life?" questioned John.

He pulled up his legs under him in Megan's chair and lean-
ing forward with his hands on its elbows allowed his lank frame
to relax with a certain voluptuousness and then grow rigid with
an eager, intense, magnetic curiosity. "Death and what's beyond
death," went on Mr. Geard, "are only what ye might call the
unknown aspects of life. What I want to ask you is, do you sup-
pose anyone's ever committed suicide out of an excess of life,
simply to enjoy the last experience in full consciousness?" John's
eyes were now shining with lively curiosity. He had forgotten
all about his premonition of his master's benevolence. His whole
being quivered with a hyena-like lust for spiritual blood. Curi-
ously enough, it was exactly at that same hour, in this afternoon
of sub-aquatic lights and shadows, that Paul Trent pulled up his
legs, on to the bench by the Cattle Market railings, to reveal his
secret feelings to the death-doomed Miss Elizabeth.

It was the privilege of that stricken lady to listen to the con-
fession of a feline idealist. It was the privilege--or the trial--
of Mr. Geard to be inquisitioned by a prowling sceptic. In a
town of so many "heavy-weather" somnambulists, these light-
footed jungle cats and jackals seemed lured, by a necessity in
their nature, to rub themselves with excited tails or with panting
nostrils against the most formidable characters, in their vicinity.

"But, Sir," John protested now. "Don't you think that whatever
the minds or spirits of people want to do, their bodies, or the
central vital nerve in their bodies must always hold them back
at the last? Don't you think, Sir, that though our minds can
desire death for many reasons it's a different story when we
come actually to try killing ourselves? Don't you think that
something automatically leaps up then, that loathes death, and
must fight against death, do what you can, until the bitter end?"

Hearing these words from the figure in his wife's chair, Mr.
Geard emitted a sound that might be rendered by the syllables
"rumti-dum-ti-dum."

"But if this quick-spring-nerve or this jumping-jack-nerve in
us, boy," he said, "gets in the way of what we yearn for, can't
we pinch its throat, or give its fretful pulse a little tap?"

John sighed and the light died out of his face. He uncurled
his long legs and straightened them out. He ceased to be the
eager intellectual jackal, and became the helpless, slouching,
sunshine-loving tramp. There had suddenly come over him as he
looked into the eyes of this man a chilly sense of something so
monstrously different from anything he had ever met, that it
frightened him. The tone in which Mr. Geard had said "pinch
its throat" sounded like the shuddering heave of all the ground
underneath all the things that were warm, familiar, natural.
What were the huge antennae of Bloody Johnny's soul fumbling
towards, out of the depths in which it stirred and moved?

"I shouldn't wonder," thought John, "if the old man's not
got bored to extinction by all this Grail business and miracle
business and new religion business. I shouldn't wonder if what
he really wants is that delicious death-to-boredom that I get when
I make love to Mary. The old girl upstairs couldn't give him
any thrill of that kind and he's been snubbing Rachel lately. I
know that; for I've seen 'em together; and he cares nothing for
boys. I believe he's turned against the whole caboodle of this
Glastonbury stunt. Sick to death of it he is; and I don't blame
him, the poor old beggar! What he wants is a plump little
Abishag to cuddle. He's a warm-blooded old rogue and he's gone
cold i' the vitals."

Thus did John struggle, by the use of the most cynical consid-
erations from his heathen Stone-worshipping nature, to cover
up the primordial ice-crack, the glacier-crevasse among his sunlit
earth-rocks, which the problem of Mr. Geard perhaps quite er-
roneously--had uncovered before his pessimistic imagination.
To an earth-loving vicious East-Anglian it was impossible even
to conceive the idea that Geard of Glastonbury might deliberately
kill himself in order to gain more life. He could do it to escape
from life; that was easily imaginable; but not this other.

"No, no," thought John. "There never has been, and there
never will be, among all the millions and millions and millions
of suicides, since the beginning of the world, one single one like
this. It's as impossible as for a man to get out of his own skin.
Life itself would fight against it with tooth and nail. The old
chap is just fooling himself. What he really wants is a sweet
young doxy to his bed...but, heigh-ho! The fellow would
never hurt his old woman to that tune...so there we are...
I wonder if he is going to pension me off?"

It was at this point in this memorable interview--the last that
John was ever destined to have with his grandfather's friend--
that Mr. Geard did turn to practical matters,

He laid before his secretary the whole array of the startling
things he had already--though strongly against the advice of
Mr. Robert Stilly--arranged with the bank to have done.

It was a sad witness to the difficulty of starting a real inde-
pendent commune in the midst of an old kingdom like England
that the Glastonbury bank remained absolutely untouched by the
new regime, save in so far as the large sums of money piled up
by the town passed into its hands.

Mr. Geard had bought small annuities for his wife, for Cor-
delia, and for Crummie. He had also--John was perfectly right
in his instinct there--purchased for John himself an annuity of
one hundred and fifty pounds a year.

He had, in these arrangements, entirely exhausted the whole
forty thousand pounds' legacy left by Canon Crow.

And so John was wondering as he stood by Tossie's dresser
watching those four feminine heads, whether to wait till tonight
to tell Mary, or whether to tell her at once, and obtain her reac-
tion--and Tossie's too--to the exciting news before Tom came in.
He recalled exactly how Mr. Geard had looked, as he let him out
of his front door only an hour ago, and how the man had abrupt-
ly cut short his almost tearful gratitude by the curious words:
"'Tis His Blood-money, lad. 'Tis His Blood-money. And ye must
never forget that, none o' ye, when Easter comes round and ye
eat and drink the Life in the Death!"

John found himself, when later in that spring twilight they
were walking past the Vicarage gate together, sorry he had not
waited till he got Mary alone to tell her about it, instead of
blurting it all out as he had done, and making her jump up from
the table with her grey eyes big as saucers.

It was the way Tom had taken it, when he came in, that
troubled him now. They hadn't been very considerate of Tom's
feelings, chattering together, he and Mary, about how they would
clear off to Northwold at once and hunt for a cottage on the
Didlington Road.

It was Toss, of course, who had been the one--not he or Mary
at all--to notice how Tom was hit. The girl had begun hur-
riedly talking at once about how Tom and she would have to
save up and come and join them in a few years when the twins
were bigger.

"But Toss," Mary had murmured at that point, "you'd never
bear to leave Glastonbury, would you?" and the words had
hung suspended in the air, full of subtle reproach for them both.
It was then that he had for the first time caught the grim bitter-
ness of what Tom was feeling and his aching longing for his
native soil and his craving to show Tossie the wide waters of
Didlington Lake full of pike and perch and waterlilies.

They caught sight of the shirtsleeves of Mr. Weatherwax as
they passed the Vicarage gate. The old rogue was pulling up
weeds underneath some rhododendron bushes at the edge of the
shrubbery; and as he laboured he sang: "The Brewer, the Miller,
the Malster and I lost a heifer, lost a filly, lost a Ding-Dong;
When DafEadowndillies look up at the sky; Pass along boys!
Pass along! The Brewer, the Miller, the Malster and I Left a
heifer, left a filly, left a Ding-Dong; Down in a grassy green
grave for to lie; Pass along boys! Pass along!"

The gardener's back was turned to them and he did not rise
from his stooping position as they passed. Something, however,
about the sound of his thick bass voice, muffled and muted by
his bending position, was so gross, so earthy, so suggestive of
rank-smelling roots, tossed up lob-worms, slug-slime on a pronged
fork, and bitter-sweet human sweat, that when Barter, who al-
ways relished talking in Rabelaisian fashion to Tossie in front
of the fastidious though not exactly squeamish John, made some
coarse joke about the fellow's enormous rump, John got a sud-
den, quick, spontaneous revulsion from his old friend* which
was not lessened when Tossie started off on one of her ringing
peals of Benedict Street laughter.

"Oh, how glad I'll he," he thought to himself, "when I'm safe
back in that boat on the Wissey! By God! I know what I'll do.
I'll hire that boat in Alder Dyke from that fellow, so that we'll
have it when we want it."

It suddenly occurred to him that it was in connection with
the smell of alders and with the look of their dark sturdy foliage
that he had thought of Tom that day he was with Mary and he
set himself to recall the boyish figure of his childish memories.

As they debouched into Chilkwell Street and were passing the
old Tithe Barn, John heard Tossie, Glastonbury girl as she was,
say something about one of the evangelistic creatures. It must
have been a remark of more surprising lewdness and more amus-
ing originality than John could quite follow, and it did not win
much favour in his ears.

"The truth is," he thought, "I'm not suited for a sociable life,
or to make merry with my friends. When once I've got Mary to
myself in Northwold, I swear I won't see a single soul; and I
won't invite a single soul. We'll live absolutely alone, Mary and
I; absolutely alone and to ourselves! This girl's a decent girl,
and her kids are nice kids; but I couldn't have stood living in
the same house and having everything a quatre much longer.
This hundred and fifty from the old man is a heavenly escape.
It's a windfall out of the air; it's a benediction. Tonnerre de
Dieu! It's as much one of his miracles as his curing any of
those people. Christ! I'd soon be converted to the worship of
Geard the Saviour if the old chap did kick the bucket. I hope
he saw how grateful I was. I did kiss his hand. I'm damned glad
I did that; for I think it pleased him. Perhaps in his whole life,
the life I daresay of one of the greatest men who've ever lived,
I'm the only person who's ever kissed his hand! And think of the
number of ridiculous society-whores whose hands are kissed
every day. Oh, damn and blast this human breed!"

They were passing all Mr. Geard's improvements on Chalice
Hill now. In the green twilight, in spite of the litter and the
presence of many unsightly shanties, the Mayor's Saxon arch
stood out nobly and impressively. Beyond the Grail Fount, too,
they could see the newly erected Rotunda and this also had a
dignity of its own at this hour. It was indeed a sort of heretical
temple Brat Bloody Johnny's architect was building. John sur-
veyed it with infinite disgust.

"The dear old chap," he thought, "ought never to be betrayed
into playing the mountebank. If he's anything, he's the founder,
not the expounder. He'll spoil it all if he goes on trying to
explain."

"Who were them Saxons, Tom?" enquired Tossie as they
passed these various erections. "Were 'un savages, them Early
Christians? Did 'un worship King Arthur?"

Her question seemed to tickle Barter hugely and he at once
began chaffing her about her ignorance of history. But John
thought to himself, "Evans would say that the real cause of
old Ceard's getting on the rocks and talking of suicide is his
disregard of Arthur and his Welsh Demons. I wonder if it's pos-
sible that--" and his mind went back to that inexplicable
event that had happened to himself at Pomparles Bridge. John's
hatred of Glastonbury and its traditions was betrayed to the end
by his incorrigible interest in psychic problems. Mr. Geard's
mysticism had always influenced him more than he was willing
to admit; and in any case he was a temperamental heathen
rather than a materialist. He was quite as sceptical of materialistic
explanations as he was of the occult occurrences that gave rise
to them.

The fancy came into his. head now that in his daily visits to
Chalice Hill and his constant disturbance of that dangerous earth
Mr. Geard might have come under some deliberately evil spell
prepared long ago by these old Celtic magicians.

"Evans ought to have stopped him," he said to himself as they
passed St. Michael's Inn, "from fooling those Welsh fairies by
resuscitating a great thundering Saint like Dunstan!"

"Mad Bet's window be shut," said Tossie, "and shes curtain
drawn. I be afeared thik means her's peeping out at we and
making faces at we."

"Bosh!" muttered Barter crossly.

For some reason this particular fuss that all the Glastonbury
girls made about Mad Bet irritated the man's Norfolk stolidity.

"Bosh, Toss! What a baby you are! The window's shut because
it's a chilly night. The woman's probably in bed."

"No more in bed than thee be, Tom!" replied his wife with
spirit. "Tom don't like I talking about Mad Bet," she added,
"He be more afraid of she than I be!"

"I tell you," grumbled Barter, more vehemently than the
occasion seemed to demand, "that woman is in bed; or else
she's strolling harmlessly up Tor Hill, just as we are, in the cool
of the evening. You Somerset people make too much of an old
trot's eccentricity. Your Betsy, or whatever you call her, wouldn't
excite any attention at all if she lived in Norfolk. You've pam-
pered her down here and petted her till she thinks she's a regular
Mother Shipton."

So spoke Tom Barter; and his temper about such a trifle
might be considered as a premonitory sign that he was not com-
pletely impervious to the distant hum of the catastrophic
avalanche.

At that very moment as the three of them reached the gate into
Tor Field, the obedient and respectful Codfin was helping Betsy
Chinnock to ascend a complicated system of precipitous work-
men's ladders which now connected the interior floor of St.
Michael's Tower with its ruined belfry, and this again with its
airy summit. Here, once more, the Mayor's tireless architect from
London had been at work; for the communal council had de-
cided that if a light circular wooden staircase were erected in-
side from bottom to top, it would be possible to charge a shilling's
admission to this magnificent watch-tower, which would greatly
increase their weekly revenue. Alone among the council's recent
expenditures this invasion of St. Michael's Tower interested the
Vicar of Glastonbury, who regarded it as the beginning of that
rebuilding of the old church of which he had been talking so
long.

Mr. Dekker had indeed several times of late, before even Penny
Pitches was down in her kitchen, slipped out of his lonely house
and ascended the hill and climbed all these ladders in order
to challenge the sunrise and to think about Nell and about his
son. They were not difficult ladders to climb; and being inside
so narrow a space, a climber was not so liable to dizziness as
would have been the case if they had been propped up on the
outside.

Not a soul in Glastonbury, if we rule out the infuriated spirit
of Gwyn-ap-Nud as too insubstantial a presence to be called a
soul--had beheld the Quantocks man's dark figure, standing
erect up there at dawn, defying his ancient enemy as it rose
like an enormous red balloon out of Bridgewater Bay, and pray-
ing there for his son and for his son's lost girl.

It was not the first time that Codfin had attended Mr. Evans'
Grail Messenger upon a climbing adventure, and if overpower-
ing sexual passion had not made the woman's knees shake, very
much as Mr. Evans' own knees did when he opened "The Un-
pardonable Sin," Codfin would have got her to the top very
easily.

To the top he did eventually get her, after a long rest at the
black worm-eaten Jacobean oak-beams that were all that was
left of the ancient belfry; and if Gwyn-ap-Nud had been more
than an insubstantial presence he would surely have taken these
two for a real witch being helped to her pulpit of far-flung
curses by her attendant demon. Once at the top and leaning
over the edge like two mediaeval gargoyles, Codfin snuffed the
pure twilight with aesthetic rapture. The fact that he was, in less
than half an hour, going to commit murder, rather enhanced
than otherwise this natural ecstasy. How could Codfin contem-
plate so calmly, as he surveyed this aerial landscape, the idea of
putting to death a person who had never done him any harm,
simply because he was moved to this maniacal issue by this
crazy woman? How could Codfin, when he himself enjoyed in
so intense a fashion the physical thrill of breathing this fragrant
twilight, deliberately condemn another man to eternal uncon-
sciousness, and himself to an almost certain death in a prison
courtyard?

The feelings of hired assassins, and such really was Codfin--
though what hired him was religious awe for his witch-queen--
must be of a different nature from those of all other murderers.

Completely devoid of any previous personal attitude to their
allotted victim they take upon themselves to establish between
them the most personal of all attitudes. But how could Codfin
risk the gallows for the sake of the frenzy of Mad Bet? Ask the
fanatic devotee of some outraged idol how he can risk death
to avenge his deity!

Mad Bet had become Codfin's deity. To obey Mad Bet had
become Codfin's religion. Between two unpleasant experiences--
the hangman's rope which he had never felt, and the look of
reproach in Mad Bet's eyes which he had felt--he selected, with-
out giving the alternative so much as a second thought, the one
that shocked his imagination the less. Compared with the prob-
lem of Codfin, however, how easy, how natural, was that of
Mad Bet! Mad Bet was actuated, just as Mr. Evans had been,
till the nakedness of Mr. Geard's daughter exorcised it, by the
nerve-worm of sex.

To be middle-aged, to be of a personal hideousness that was
revolting, to be threatened by the county asylum, to be the
laughing-stock of the children of several streets, to have a skull
under your hat bald as an egg, all these things weigh in the
balances as nothing when that little nerve-worm begins to heave
and froth and spit.

"There 'un be! Do 'ee see 'un, Missus?" cried Codfin sud-
denly, lowering his head below the level of the battlements and
pressing his companion's shoulder to force her to crouch down.

"Thee be sure 'twon't make 'un suffer, Finn Toller?" she
said, as their four eyes watched the three figures entering Tor
Field.

Codfin emitted a faint chuckle at this. "Didn't 'ee see thik
bar?" he whispered. "Thik bar did make me poor arm ache wi'
carrying 'un. Thik bar be enough to stunny a elaphint."

"Oh, me king, oh, me love, oh, me sweet marrow!" cried the
madwoman from the bottom of her worm-driven heart.

"Don't 'ee let they see thee's head over edge of Tower," re-
marked the other calmly. "I be going down now. And don't 'ee
scream nor cry out anythink when I do it, and don't 'ee holler
if thik Barter catches hold of I. Just 'ee stay where 'ee be till
all be quiet; and don't 'ee say nothink either to no one when
tomorrow be come and they've a put poor Coddy in canary-
cage!"

As Finn Toller scrambled quickly down the long ladders to
the belfry and then down the others to the floor, he said to him-
self: "I knewed Mr. Curiosity wouldn't come after all his talk.
They scholards what reads of fornications wouldn't fuggle a fly,
nor them as reads of stiff uns wouldn't drown a cat. But 'a won't
tell tales of Coddy neither, for fear of 's own skin!"

With these sagacious comments upon human psychology Mr.
Toller went calmly to the place where he had propped up his
murderous weapon. Chance or fate--or the air-squadrons of
Gwyn-ap-Nud-- seemed resolved to make Mr. Toller's task as easy
as possible that night.

When the three friends reached the top they turned round and
stood panting and out of breath on a ledge of grass a yard or so
below the threshold stone of the tower.

Tossie quickly turned their attention to the vast, sad, greenish-
coloured plain stretched out before them; and even before they
had got their breath she entangled them in the absorbing and
piquant subject as to exactly at what spot in this airy map their
own Northload house was situated. This was where Chance--or
the spirit of Gwyn-ap-Nud--was so favourable to Codfin; for
unless the girl had started some especially beguiling topic the
second they paused, John would, almost certainly, have gone
straight to the tower, following the natural human instinct of
attaining an objective, and also obeying a personal fondness for
touching cold stones with his hand, and thus made it impossible
for the assassin to steal forth from that door with the monstrous
piece of iron on his shoulder.

This is however exactly what the murderer was permitted now
to do. Step by step, as the girl pointed towards one spot and
John pointed towards another and Barter protested that both
were too far to the south, Finn Toller came softly and quietly,
down the slope behind them, with the iron bar now lifted up in
both his hands.

Nature the great healer is also the great destroyer; and the
tendency to giggle at the same things and at the same second
which had wiped out all memories of Gladman's House for
Barter now wiped out for him all memories of every kind. For
a remark that John now made started off the pair of them utter-
ing such ungovernable peals of laughter that Barter was forced
to shift his position a little.

In that shifting of his position he saw in a flash the figure of
Codfin standing behind John and he realised in the twinkling of
an eyelid that the hideous instrument in the tramp's hands was
already trembling in the air.

The inevitable material laws of balance, of rhythm, of gravi-
tation, of dynamics, had already decided that the iron bar was
going to descend on John's head. What they had not counted
on, or taken into their mechanical consideration, was the auto-
matic swiftness, swifter than the descent of death itself, with
which the instinct of a Norfolk gentleman could express itself
in action at a deadly crisis.

To ward off this blow, to arrest this descent of the iron bar,
Barter now plunged forward, with the natural result that, in
place of the thing descending on his friend's head, it descended
on his own, cracking his skull full above the forehead and kill-
ing him instantaneously.

Just as twenty-five years ago the young Tom had come so
often to John's rescue when their boat got entangled in the weeds
of the Wissey, so the grown-up Tom, father of twins, and husband
of Tossie Stickles, now gave up his life for the same friend on
this Somersetshire hill. He was killed instantaneously, the front
of his skull being bashed in so completely, that bits of bone
covered with bloody hair surrounded the deep dent which the
iron made. His consciousness, the "I am I" of Tom Barter, shot
up into the ether above them like a released fountain-jet and
quivering there pulsed forth a spasm of feeling, in which outrage,
ecstasy, indignation, recognition, pride, touched a dimension of
Being more quick with cosmic life than Tom had ever reached
before in his thirty-seven years of conscious existence. This
heightened--nay! this quadrupled--awareness dissolved in a
few seconds, after its escape from the broken cranium, but
whether it passed, with its personal identity intact, into that
invisible envelope of rarefied matter which surrounds our as-
tronomic sphere or whether it perished irrecoverably, the pres-
ent chronicler knows not.

Tossie flung herself on Barter's body with a piercing scream
that rang out over the whole valley. Scream after scream tore
itself from that soft mass of clinging female loss till her fair
hair was dabbled with Tom's blood and actually entangled with
broken bits of hair-covered bone that had been Tom's hard
skull.

Some said they heard her screams as far down the valley as
Tithe Barn. Lily Rogers maintained she heard them as she picked
parsley for Miss Drew's dinner in the Abbey House garden.

John made an instinctive movement to pursue the murderer;
but the tramp, hearing wild cries from the slope of the hill, and
seeing Mr. Evans and Cordelia rushing up the ascent towards
him, dashed back into the tower and clambered, swift as a
monkey, up the tall ladders inside. For quite the space of a
couple of minutes, after his first motion of pursuit, John stood
stock-still, his face so contorted with horror that it assumed the
appearance of a wooden puppet, listening in spellbound, frozen
apathy to the girl's heart-rending screams.

A semi-cirque of flying rooks, just seven in number, flapped
with creaking wings across the top of the tower, making their
way northwest towards Mark Moor. Little did they reck of the
cracking of the skull of a man upon a patch of grass! As for a
tiny earth beetle that was foraging for its insect prey just there,
it scurried away from Tom's blood as if it had been a lake of
brimstone.

In addition to this, a panic-stricken hare, fleeing in wild
terror from the man and woman who were rushing up the hill,
came with its long desperate leaps almost up to John's feet,
and then, remaining motionless there for a second, rushed past
the tower and away down the slope towards Havyatt Gap. The
appearance of this hare aroused John from his paralysis. He ran
to the door of the tower and pulled it wide open. The couple
of minutes' delay, however, had enabled Finn Toller to ascend,
for he climbed like an animal rather than a man, to the top of
the last ladder; but here he was met by Mad Bet, in a cold
paroxysm of frenzied remorse. Without giving her unfortunate
devotee time to reach the stone platform where she knelt to
receive him, the woman seized the thin bare wrists that Codfin
extended towards her and flung him off the ladder. Finn Toller
fell backwards, head downwards; and John, stepping hurriedly
from the door at the man's death cry, saw his body crash to the
ground in a cloud of dust and heard the ghastly thud upon the
ground with which his neck was broken.

Like a great bald-headed vulture that has been shot through
the wing, Mad Bet, on the stone summit of the tower, crouched
with convulsive shudderings against the parapet. Here she lay,
without thought or purpose, moaning in a low voice to herself,
and covering the cold slab against which she pressed her face
with piteous tears and murmuring endearments, as though it
were the mangled body of the man who had roused that terrible
nerve-worm that devours hearts. Mad Bet had not seen what
had really occurred down there. To her disturbed and tragic con-
sciousness, it was John who lay dead at the foot of the tower
with his skull smashed in.

There is that about an uttermost sorrow which levels all
distinctions; and not Deianeira for Heracles, not Iseult for Tris-
tram, moaned and murmured to her lost love with more abso-
luteness of pitiful grief than did this bald-headed creature on
the top of the tower to her supposedly dead idol. Round about
her crouching form a couple of great swifts, those pointed-
winged demons of the high air, flew in narrowing circles, uttering
their short shrill cries, and these sharp sounds were answered
by the melancholy and more familiar wailings of the peewits
in the lower levels of Tor Field, disturbed by Tossie's screams
and calling out warnings to one another.

Broken under that bar, Mad Bet envisaged the sweet head of
her dear love; while the wild screams of Tossie over Tom's body
joined the age-old chorus: "Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
tam cari capitis?"

The green twilight was being sucked down now by undula-
tions of the green earth. The invisible dews were falling. A gusty
night-wind was rising up from beyond Queen's Sedgemoor. The
first cold stars were coming out over the three horizons. Where
the sun had gone down in the west, there lingered only a faint
dying trace of the livid before-night whiteness. At this actual
moment of the earth revolution, although under very different
atmospheric conditions, in China, in India, on the banks of the
Danube, by the Black Sea and in the tents of the Sahara, in
battle, murder, pestilence and shipwreck, in bolted doom sudden
death was rushing on the hairy scalps of men.

Did Tossie feel her grief worse than any of those who mourned?
Or were the moans of some old Chinese wife on the banks of
the Yellow River yet more heart-broken, the terrible silence of
some despairing Malay in a Singapore hovel yet more crushing?

As for John, the worst moment of the whole unspeakable
nightmare was when he lifted that plump bundle of wild hysteria
from off the body of his friend and laying her on the grass
dabbed with his handkerchief at her brow and cheeks and ac-
tually removed with his finger and thumb a fragment of Tom's
smashed skull from her sticky hair. She rolled over--and he
was glad she did, for her face was shocking to him--and began
smothering her convulsions in the green grass, her fingers pluck-
ing and clutching at its cold earthy roots.

It was then, just before Evans and Cordelia reached them, that
he snatched off his overcoat and covered Tom's head and shoul-
ders with it.

"Oh, what has happened? What has happened?" panted Cor-
delia, "Has that man gone? Has he hurt you? Who is hurt? Is
Mr. Barter hurt? Has. he killed Mr. Barter? Where is he? Have
you let him go?"

Mr. Evans spoke not a single word. He did two things. And
these he did with the punctual, mechanical precision of a con-
summate actor performing a long-ago perfectly rehearsed part.
He stared round him till he caught sight of the iron bar lying
on the ground; and stooping down he lifted up the bloodied
end from the earth and deliberately wiped it with a handful of
grass. Then he went over to where the body was lying. Hesi-
tating for the flicker of a second, he fell on his knees and re-
moving John's coat from Barter's crushed head, gazed at what
was revealed.

The sight had an immediate physical effect upon him. He re-
placed the coat calmly enough; but rising to his feet and turning
his back to the corpse, he began vomiting with cataclysmic heav-
ings of his tall frame. Was the sexual nerve in Mr. Evans, that
sadism-drunk Worm of the Pit, stirred to abominable excitement
as he went through these motions? Mercy of Jesus forbid! That
nerve-worm lay, stretched out in the man's vitals as he vomited
there, cold and constricted, limp as the sloughed off skin of a
summer snake.

Cordelia, who had showed signs of being more concerned over
Mr. Evans as he swayed and retched, and retched and swayed,
than over the murder itself, now sat down on the grass by Tos-
sie's side and took her head in her lap. The first time she did
this the distracted girl beat her off with her hands and tried to
get up and rush over to Barter's body; but the sight of that coat
hiding the crushed head brought so sickening a sense of her
loss that she hid her face between Cordelia's knees and broke
into piteous wailings. These wailings carried no longer, however,
that terrifying note in them that her first shrill screams had had,
and by degrees they sank down from sheer exhaustion into low
moans; till at last the unhappy girl lay quite silent and still.

Mr. Evans, whose paroxysm of vomiting had ceased now,
obeyed John with humble docility, as the latter demanded his
help in dragging forth the body of the murderer from the tower.
This quiet but by no means stupid docility became a fixed habit
with Mr. Evans from now on. It was not that the man's sanity
was affected by the accumulating shocks of this day. What it
seemed to be was a substitution of a definite sense of guilt over
Barter's death for the less tangible but far more deadly remorse
over his sadistic dreams and fantasies. This new guilt of his the
man took calmly, and in a certain sense sanely; but it had a
much more disastrous effect upon him from an external and
practical point of view than the other. When the twenty-sixth of
February dawned poor Cordy was startled to discover that her
Owen's hair had turned white. He had indeed become visibly
and palpably and in every physical respect, if not an old man,
certainly an elderly man.

It was lucky for Cordelia that the tiny annuity, so carefully
purchased for her by Mr. Geard, was enough for their bare needs
in that little house above Bove Town, on the hill leading up to
St. Edmund's Brick Yard; for after this crisis in his days, Mr.
Evans found himself quite incapable of going on with his work
in Number Two's shop. That really elderly and indeed extremely
aged gentleman did not feel it incumbent upon him to regard
his now sleeping partner as in any way entitled to share
ensuing increment from their more than ever lucrative business;
nor, in spite of Cordelia's indignation, could she induce Mr.
Evans to make any claims.

Slowly and laboriously--sometimes writing no more than a
few pages a day--did Mr. Evans continue working at his life's
task, the monumental "Vitus Merlini Ambrosiani"; but luckily
for him Cordelia did not extend to the intellectual interests of
her husband that impatient contempt which she always felt for
her father's religious doctrines.

That culminating scene when she had exorcised, by her heroic
gesture behind the brown blinds, the nerve-devil in Mr. Evans,
had endeared the man to her in the way mothers are endeared to
a deformed or an idiot child; and when her real child perished
later after a premature birth she lavished upon its helpless
parent all the savage maternal protectiveness that the infant
would have claimed if it had lived.

Visitors to Glastonbury can still see, when a little weary per-
haps of romantic antiquities they wander up Wells Old Road
towards Edmund Hill Lane, with a view of inspecting those
famous tile works that have given the town its mellow roofs, a
slow-moving, absent-minded, white-haired gentleman, reading a
blue-covered book as he walks along or as he leans upon the
fence that leads into those suburban fields between Wells Old
Road and Maidencroft Lane.

This book, if any passer-by were bold enough to peruse its
title, would turn out to be Malory's "Morte D'Arthur," but such
a stranger would not be able to guess that what Mr. Evans is
searching for there is something not to be found in Malory at
a ll--nor indeed in any Grail Book, since the time of the great
Welshman Bleheris--namely the real meaning of the mystical
word Esplumeoir.


It was not, as the devoted Codfin had warned her it had best
not be, till all was dark and deserted upon Glastonbury Tor that
Mad Bet climbed down those long ladders and made her way
home to St. Michael's Inn. So great was the hubbub of voices,
all relating various and contradictory versions of that evenings
tragedy, and so crowded were bar-room, parlour and kitchen, that
it was easy for the demented woman to slip back into her unlit
room unobserved by old John Chinnock or by his wife. It was
indeed Tom Chinnock, her nephew, who found her outstretched
on her bed when he came long after closing-time to bring her
her supper. She was still alive and perfectly conscious; but she
had hurt her heart in some way in climbing alone down those
steep ladders, and she never left her bed again.

Not a word did she breathe as to her share in Barter s death.
Not a sign did she make that she wanted to see her "Dilly
darling gent," her "sweet moon's marrow" again before she
died; but Tommy Chinnock reported later (for the Terre Gastee
stone-thrower was her best friend at the last, though Solly Lew
used to come up and sit by her bed of an evening) that the day
before she died, which happened on the first of March, she had '
asked him to go for Mr. Geard.

No one, save Tommy, till his aunt was safe in the Wells Road
Cemetery knew that the woman herself had sent for the Mayor;
though they all knew that the Mayor had gone up to her room--
after having a stiff glass of ale with old John--and had stayed
there for nearly half an hour; but no one at all ever learned
from the Mayor what passed between them.

Dr. Fell had been summoned to hurry to Wirral Hill long
before Mrs. Geard reached Manor House Road, and he had
found Miss Crow already in full possession of her consciousness.
He thanked the Germans heartily, especially the one with the
flask; and then in spite of her weak state, he took the opportunity
of scolding Miss Crow very earnestly and roundly for her fool-
hardy behavior that day.

"A woman like you," he said as he carried her home in Solly
Lew's taxi, "ought to know better than to act like this! What
you've really done, Miss Crow, is to try and commit suicide."

Elizabeth was too weak to defend herself. It did strike her as
ironical however, that this doctor, who she knew was in the
habit of defending the right of self-killing, and whose death by
his own hand Tossie's Mr. Barter was always predicting, should
lapse into this mode of speech.

Dr. Fell had the wit to read what lay behind the smile she
gave him.

"The wrong of it lies," he said, growing rather red in the
face and displaying signs of peevishness at being caught by his
old friend in so conventional a vein, "the wrong of it lies in
the example that a happy person like you, with so lucky a tem-
perament ought to give to us poor dogs."

She was clever enough to take this chance, when she had dis-
turbed his professional aplomb, of asking him point-blank how
long he supposed she had to live.

"Five would astonish me," he said. "Three would surprise me.
From my personal experience, such as it is, I'd give you about
two."

"Years, Dr. Fell?"

"Years, years, years!" he answered querulously. "What else
do you think I meant? Love-affairs?"

She peered out of the taxi window at the tower of St. Benignus'.
She thought of the thousands of times she had looked up at that
solid mass of masonry that shared with St John's and the high
Tor the distinction of giving its visual character to the town of
Glastonbury from all the quarters.

"Is that a shock to you?" he said in a more kindly tone. I oughtn't
to have told you that, I expect."

She still continued to look out of the window without reply-
ing. Miss Crow's thoughts, just then, were indeed those wordless
thoughts of the Vital Principle itself, when the days of the years
of its brief life have had their term set by constituted authority.

"You're not upset, I hope?"

The simplicity of this question, addressed to her when she might
easily, it was clear, have been lying dead on Wirral Hill, tickled
Miss Crow's fancy.

"So upset, Doctor dear," she replied, "that I hereby invite you
to have tea with me in Benedict Street this day three years

The twenty-fourth, isn't it?"

Dr. Fell corrected her. "The twenty-fifth, he said.

"Well? Will you come? And if I'm dead you must come to my
grave in the cemetery. Is that a promise, Doctor.

He lifted her hand courteously to his lips. Both of them turned
after that to the dirty windows of Solly Lew's taxi; but not to
the same window.

The problem that arose immediately after Barter's death, that
arose in both John's and Mary's minds before his body was
taken to the police station, was the problem of Tossie and her
twins. It was Mary--as she and John lay awake in their room
on the floor above, after Dr. Fell had given the stricken girl a
sleeping-draught, and Nancy Stickles had been called in to spend
the night with her--who first broached the startling suggestion.

"Why don't we take Toss and the children with us to North-
wold? Toss could easily get charwork, or laundry-work, or
something like that, to do; and I could look after the babies
while she was out. Old Tom will be happy in his grave if he
knows his children are back again in Norfolk. Nothing would
please him more than the thought of our taking them with us
on the big river."

"The thought of your taking them!" said John.

"Hush! How can you? You know perfectly well," she retorted,
"which of us it was that he really cared for."

"I do know," he doggedly repeated. "It was you."

"John!" she cried indignantly, pulling her arm from under
his head and sitting up in bed. "You've no right to say such a
thing. It's you, first and last, that Tom loved! He came to me
when he was in trouble and sad; just as I went to him when I
was unhappy; but in his heart of hearts it was always you."

So she spoke; but neither of them realised how that ill-fated
prayer from the boat on the Wissey had been neutralised by
Tom, any more than they thought of those silvery fish and those
green weeds as things that the dead man would never see again.

"What I cannot for the life of me understand," said John, for
he was too cautious and selfish to commit himself in a hurry
to her plan of taking Tossie, "is what motive that man had for
murdering him. Old Sheperd said he'd had his eye on him for a
long time, and that he suspected him of several burglaries; but
what possible grudge could he have against Tom?"

"Why, didn't you hear what Toss was talking about in her
hysterics, when Fell gave her that drug?"

"No, I can't say I did. I wasn't listening. I was talking to the
policeman and to Mr. Bishop. I didn't come in till you got her
quiet again."

Mary stretched out her hand to the little table which was
upon John's side ol their bed. She stretched it out above John's
face, and he caught at it with his hand and playfully, and yet
not without malice, bit it sharply.

"What are you doing? You hurt me!" she cried with asperity.
He chuckled to himself as the taste of her flesh, that taste he
loved so well, hung about him, while she busied herself with
matchbox and candle.

When the little yellow flame was mounting up and her red rug
and red curtains were coming by leaps and starts into view,
she drew back and resumed her own place. But she balanced
both her pillows between her shoulders and the head of the
bed and sat straight up.

"I've been meaning to tell you this ever since we came up-
stairs," she said, "but I kept putting it off." As she spoke she
remembered another occasion when she had kept putting off--
an agitating topic; and that was when she had had to tell him
about her friendship with Tom, in that boat on the Wissey.

"To tell me what? Something that Toss cried in her fever?
God, Mary! She might have cried out practically anything. You
saw what a state she was in? But let's have it. Let's hear the
great revelation!"

"Toss spoke as if she'd seen that tramp aiming his iron thing
at you; and Tom rushing in to take the blow."

John certainly got a queer sensation as he heard this. The
odd thing was, however, that while he accepted what Tossie had
said without questioning it, he did not feel a rush of tender,
melting gratitude to his dead friend! The truth was he had so
Iong played the feminine role with Barter, so long leaned upon
him" and relied upon his strength that he only felt now as if
they had been in some desperate melee together, where Tom as
he always did, had taken the lead; and for that reason had got
hurt...had...got...in fact...killed; but when it came to making Tom's
tragic death a sublime act of sacrifice and of sacrifice for him,
John dodged that tremendous conclusion with shamefully blink-
ing eyelids.

"But what on earth could the fellow have got against me?"
said John, "Or do you suppose he meant to kill us both and
ravish Tossie?"

He had such a very quaint expression, at once cringing and
quizzical, panicky and humorous, as he sat up in bed, his flannel
pyjamas, with their pierrot-like black-and-white stripes, showing
so fantastical in the candlelight, that Mary could not suppress a
smile. She thought, in her heart: "How queer men are! Here he
is with his best friend--his boyhood friend--dead to save him;
and all he can do is to try and scare himself like a child!"
She sighed heavily when her smile died away. "It is in these
matters of life and death," she thought, "that men and women
are especially different. Women want to suck up to the last dregs
every drop of the awful things that happen. They want to soak
themselves in their feelings, to swim in them, to float on them,
to drown in them, whereas John is squeezing all the love he
really feels for Tom into a tight little juggler's ball and throw-
ing it from hand to hand!"

She turned her head towards him from its white pillows. From
each side of her cold clear forehead the brown hair was drawn
smoothly back; and she had pulled the coil of it from off the
nape of her neck and allowed it to fall over her left shoulder in
a long single plait. She did not know that John had thought to
himself, as in his heart-felt bewilderment he had done what he
had never done before in his life, put on his pyjama-trousers
over his drawers: "How queer girls are! Mary is looking in the
mirror to see whether she has plaited her hair properly. I sup-
pose she'll loosen it with her fingers, over her ears, just in that
same careful way, when I'm lying in my coffin as cold as
poor Tom!"

"Give me a cigarette, will you?" was what she had apparently
turned her head towards him to say. It was his turn now to fum-
ble among the objects on the little table at his side; but they
were soon, both of them, smoking in pensive peace.

"What's the time, John dearest?"

He pulled out his watch from under his pillow. "A quarter past
three," he told her.

"You don't think that drug's stopped acting, and she's awake
again, do you?"

John was silent; trying to catch every least sound in Number
Fifteen, Northload Street.

"Could you bear it, dearest, to have Toss and the children
with us out there?"

It would have been as impossible for John to have said "no"
to this speech as it would have been for him to have got up and
gone down to the room below.

"Of course, if you could!" he said.

Mary sighed. "Well, that's settled then. And the sooner we
get away, the better for Toss. We could all stay in that North-
wold Inn, couldn't we, till we get our place and get these things
out there?"

"Tom must have left...a fair sum...in the...bank," murmured John
in a ruminating voice.

"Now, you stop that!" cried Mary. "Tom's money must be
kept for those little girls. These people here...Spear and
Trent and Robinson...will have to get us all out there! It's
the least they can do, with all Tom has done for their factory."

John relapsed into silence again. It was impossible for him to
refrain from thinking how his delectable plan for being left
absolutely alone with Mary out there was now smashed to bits.
"Do you hate Glastonbury as much as you ever did?"

Mary was surprised at herself for asking this question. It
seemed to have come into her head and rushed to her lips inde-
pendently of her conscious will.

"No," said John laconically.

"Why not?" pressed the girl.

"Oh, damn it all!" cried John. "A person never knows why
he feels these things. It's old Geard, I think! I've got fond of
that old rascal in some odd sort of way." He bent over the little
table and extinguished his cigarette.

"I'll miss Geard like the devil!" he muttered hoarsely.

Mary was conscious of a funny sensation, like the impact of a
piece of ice against her bare bosom. Had this queer being to
whom she now belonged, body and soul, transferred his dis-
turbing and perverse sexuality from Tom to the Mayor of Glas-
tonbury? To conceal what she felt, "It's Geard, then," she said,
"not his Grail or his new religion, that interests you?"

"I don't know, Mary, and that's the truth," sighed John. And
then, as if continuing some line of thought that he had not re-
vealed, "I wish, my dear, we could all stop on our way at
Salisbury and see Stonehenge."

"Well, we can't do that, John, dearest, so it's no use your talk-
ing about it. We've got to take Tom with us, you know!"

John turned round upon her with a startled swing of his pier-
rot-like white-and-black figure

"Take Tom?" he echoed.

"Of course! you don't think Toss is going to leave Tom in
Glastonbury, do you? If she did, I wouldn't."

"No, I suppose not," he murmured; and it was his turn to
feel a funny sensation go shivering through him. He had always
been careful to avoid any probing of his feeling about the rela-
tions between his wife and his friend.

"Bury him in the Northwold churchyard, eh? Where Grand-
father is, and his people? Yes, I suppose that is the thing
to do!"

They both were silent for a while after that; and into that
rosy-coloured room, where their two shadows hovered so waver-
ingly and ambiguously over Mr. Wollop's simple furniture, there
came the etherealised essence of that road across Brandon Heath
where they had met nearly a year ago; came the phantom-faint
image of Harrod's mill-pool, of the spacious drawing-room with
its low windows opening upon that grey twilit lawn, of their
boat carried so fast on the glittering tide above the weeds and the
darting fish of the Wissey, and of the great ash tree in that
open field, where they said their farewells to their native pas-
tures. Well! they were going back to those pastures again; going
back to them to live the life they had dreamed of then but had
not dared to hope for, going back to bury her friend and his
friend, where that old man lay--his curly hair still fresh and
white as the Head in the Apocalypse--who had been the friend
of Geard of Glastonbury! Why was it then, that they both felt a
curious and irresistible sadness as they thought of their return?
Had they been captured in spite of themselves, by the terrible
magic of this spot? Was John’s clinging to his strange master a
sign that something would be gone forever from each of their
lives, when they went away, something that their dearest love for
each other could only replace in a measure, in a fluctuating
substitution? Did Mary recall the dawn of St. John’s Day?

“Come back to us, Tom! Come back to us!” the big river
and the little river were both calling; and it was with Tom that
they were going back to the place where they would be; but
they were carrying a corpse with them; not only the corpse of
Tom Barter but the corpse of their stillborn never-returning op-
portunity of touching the Eternal in the enchanted soil where
the Eternal once sank down into time!



THE FLOOD



The great waves of the far Atlantic, rising from the
surface of unusual spring tides, were drawn, during the first
two weeks of that particular March, by a moon more magnetic
and potent as she approached her luminous rondure than any
moon that had been seen on that coast for many a long year.
Up the sands and shoals and mudflats, up the inlets and estu-
aries and backwaters of that channel-shore raced steadily, higher
and higher as day followed day, these irresistible hosts of invad-
ing waters. Across the far-stretching flats of Bridgewater Bay
these moon-drawn death-bringers gathered, stealing, shoaling,
rippling, tossing, waves and ground-swells together, cresting bil-
lows and unruffled curves of slippery water, rolling in with a
volume that increased its momentum with every tide that ad-
vanced, till it covered sand-wastes and sand-dunes, grassy shelves
and sea-banks, that had not felt the sea for centuries. Out of
the misty western horizon they came, rocking, heaving, rising,
sinking, and beneath them were shoals of unusual fish and above
them were flocks of unusual gulls. There was a strange colour
upon them, too, these far-travelled deep-sea waves, and a strange
smell rose up from them, a smell that came from the far-off
mid-Atlantic for many days. They were like the death mounds
of some huge wasteful battlefield carried along by an earthquake
and tossed up into millions of hill summits and dragged down
into millions of valley hollows as the whole earth heaved. They
were not churned into flying spray, these swelling spring tides;
they were not lashed into tossing spindrift. Each one of them
rolled forward, over the sand and the mud, converting these
expanses from a familiar tract of yellow-grey silence into a vast
plain of hummings and murmurings that went on all night.
Wide, wet reaches of sand, over which for years fishermen had
walked in the dawn with wavering lanterns and whispering
voices, and where decrepit posts, eaten by centuries of sea-worms
and hung with festoons of grass-green seaweed, leaned to the left
or leaned to the right, as chance willed it, were now changed
into a waste of grey water. Ancient sand-sunk boat skeletons,
their very names forgotten, that had caught for years the blood-
reflections of sunset in the pools of dead memories and lost,
disasters, were now totally submerged. Many of these incoming
deep-sea waves had curving crest-heads that were smooth and
slippery as the purest marble, heads that seemed to grow steadily
darker and darker, as they gathered towards the land, till they
added something menacing to every dawn and to every twilight.

And as these tides came in, over the brown desolate mudflats,
they awoke strange legends and wild half-forgotten memories
along that coast. Ancient prophecies seemed to awake and flicker
again, prophecies that had perished long ago, like blown-out
candles in gusty windows, cold as the torch-flames by which they
were chanted and the extinct fires by which they were conceived.

Between the imaginations of men, especially such as are stirred
up and made tense by wrestlings with the Unknown, and the
geographical pattern of the earth’s surface, are subtle correspond-
encies that may survive many sunken torch flares and many lost
harp notes once heard across the capes and promontories. And
the western coast that Spring seemed almost to welcome this
sea invasion. Liberated from the frost and ice of winter, a
thousand unfrequented backwaters, bordered by dead, wind-swept
rushes, clammy with salt-smelling marsh-lichens and thick-stalked
glaucous-grey weeds, seemed actually calling out to the sea to
come and cover their brackish pools. Salt amphibious growths,
weeds of the terraqueous marshes, they seemed to be yearning,
these neutral children of the margin, for the real salt sea to
rush over them and ravish them. Little did they dream how soon
this ravishment would take place, how soon they would be
drowned and with how deep a drowning!

Amid the forlorn and untraversed mudflats in that singular
region various patches of cultivated ground appear and inhab-
ited buildings, some of stone, some of wattles and lath-and-
plaster cement. It is about these outlying farms and hamlets--in
this strange region of sluices and weirs and dams and rhynes--
that so many curious Celtic syllables still cling, like the appella-
tive Gore, for instance, syllables full of old mythological asso-
ciations.

It was from these isolated farm-houses, situated among sandy
reaches where such old magical names lingered intact, that the
first rumours began to spread of a serious sea invasion. These
rumours, once started among these outposts of human habitation,
excited anxious alarm; and well they might, for that whole
district is a very peculiar one. On one side of it lies the great
Western Channel of those moon-drawn tides, and on the other so
many brackish ditches and inland meres that the dams and
dykes, if they once yield to the mounting-up of the waters, are
liable to give way in vast numbers. In the memory of the older
dwellers in those regions--a queer amphibious race, descended
from Norse invaders and from Celticised aboriginals--was a
vivid image of the last time the sea-banks had broken and the
land had been flooded, an image of drowned cattle and ruined
pastures and hurried and tumultuous human flights and escapes.
On that occasion the waters of the sea had swept so far inland,
mingling with the waters of the land, that the configuration of
the country had completely changed. Overtopping the banks,
breaking the sluices, turning rivers into huge floods and tiny
streams into rushing rivers, the sea had come so far that the
land -- in many cases always lower than sea-level -- had reverted
to the sea and become part of the sea. With the waning of the
moon, on that occasion, the waters retreated, but not before they
had left their tribute. Many infinitesimal sea creatures, tiny
sea animalcule and microscopic salt-water beings must have
been carried over the land where these unnatural tides pushed
their w-ay, and it is likely enough that many of these marine
invaders, when the waters receded, were deposited in the rich loam
of the Isle of Glastonbury. An island indeed did Glastonbury
become in those strange days! Mr. Sheperd, the Glastonbury
policeman, and Mr. Merry, the Glastonbury curator, would fre-
quently speak of that epoch with bated breath.

Well! if some of the rumours that ran along those sandy flats
and leapt, like living messengers of disaster, from bog-tussock to
bog-tussock, were not without cause, there was likely to be this
year, ere March ended, an inundation even more serious than
that land had known since very ancient days. For these dark-
green waves, smooth and slippery, without spray, without spin-
drift, and smelling so strangely of the mid-Atlantic, brought
memories of far-off mysterious disasters. Intimations, they
brought, of lost islands and submerged sea-reefs, where, if
Plutarch is to be trusted, Demetrius the Traveller, a hundred
years before Christ heard tales of superhuman personalities
living remote and sea-encircled.

Yes, even before the fifteenth of March these terrific ocean
waves had disturbed the cormorants at St. Audrie’s Bay and
scattered the gulls at Black Rock, at Blue Ben, and at Quantock s
Head. The dwellers at Kilve Chantry had grown uneasy: and
from Benhole to Wick Moor, and from Stert Flats to the mouth
of the River Parrett, and over Bridgewater Bar to Gore Sand
there were wild gusts of ragged wings and shrieking sea cries
and vague sobbings and lappings and murmurs in the night; and
all this under a moon that continued growing larger and larger,
until it reached a size that seemed pregnant with terrifying
events. The mouths of the Parrett and the Brue are not far from
each other, opposite Stert Island, and the whole seven miles from
Otterhampton to Mark’s Causeway, across Pawlett Level and
Huntspill Level, inland from Highbridge and Burnham, are in-
tersected with dams and sluices and weirs, holding back the sea
floods. From Huntspill Level to Glastonbury cannot be much
more than eight miles’ distance, as the crow flies, and it is across
these eight miles that the waters of the Channel would flow for
it is all beneath sea-level--if those dykes, as they had done at
least once in the memory of living men, should yield to the
rising of the tides.

Of all mortal senses the sense of smell carries the human soul
back the farthest in its long psychic pilgrimage; and by these
far-drawn channel airs and remote sea odours the inmost souls of
many dwellers in northwest Somerset must have been roused, dur-
ing those weeks of March. It is the old recurrent struggle with
the elements, as the sense of these things reaches the spirit 'by the
sharp sudden poignance of smell, that brings one age of human
life into contact with another. There is a comfort in these con-
tinuities and a feeling of mysterious elation, but strange forebod-
ings, too, and uneasy warnings. That hidden wanderer, incarnate
in our temporary flesh and blood, that so many times before--
centuries and aeons before--has smelt deep-sea seaweed and sun-
bleached driftwood and the ice-cold chills of Arctic seas, sinks
down upon such far-off memories, as upon the stern of a voyag-
ing ship, and sees, as if in a dream, the harbours and the islands
of its old experience.

Thus as these unnatural tides under this unusual moon gath-
ered and rose out of the Western Channel, feelings that had not
come to the population of those places for many a long year
caught them unawares, as they went to and fro about their busi-
ness, and disturbed them with thoughts "beyond the reaches of
their souls."

But the people of Glastonbury that year--especially the ones
with whom the reader has most to do in this present narration--
were so preoccupied with the exciting public events of that epoch
that they gave little heed to these "airy syllables.” The humbler
people, especially, continued to buy and sell, as the new fashion
dictated, much as their fathers had done before in their fashion,
without paying any attention to these fleeting intimations drawn
forth from the recesses of their beings by these ocean smells,
smells so soul-piercing and so mysterious, following the waxing
of this portentous moon.

Meanwhile the strangely constituted Glastonbury commune--
a little microcosmic state within the historic kingdom of England
--continued to function in its own queer, unprecedented manner.
The London newspapers had grown recently a little weary of
this nine days’ wonder and the various protracted lawsuits, evoked
by the small commune’s interferences with private property, ex-
cited much less attention than they had done a couple of months
before, when the thing began.

Philip Crow no longer required the protection of the Taunton
police for his non-union labourers, brought into Wookey from
Bristol and Birmingham; and all the various legal actions that
he had initiated against this new tiny state--this microscopic
imperium in imperio--were dragging on in the London courts
without doing anything to change the curious status quo at Glas-
tonbury. Both his new road, however, proudly skirting Mr. Twig’s
fields, and his great new bridge, proudly disregarding the an-
cient Bridge Perilous, were growing towards completion. Of solid
cement the new road was, and the new bridge was of solid steel,
and the chief troubles that still spasmodically arose were wordy
battles--mounting sometimes to fisticuffs and the throwing of #
stones--between the Glastonbury mob and the men hired by
Philip’s Taunton contractor.

The surveyor from Shepton Mallet--whose father-in-law, with
demonic longevity, still continued to milk his Jersey cattle--ap-
peared and disappeared at intervals in that debatable ground,
replacing his stakes and strings along the edge of the Lake Vil-
lage Mounds, tokens of private possession which, although
watched imperturbably by Number One’s inquisitive Betsy, were
always being carried off by invaders from Bove Town and Para-
dise, invaders not unaided, you may be sure, by a familiar
robber band.

It was surprising how the new co-operative or collective sys-
tem of retail trade introduced among the various shops that had
been included in the new lease from the lord of the manor, pro-
ceeded, running much more smoothly than anyone would have
supposed possible. This, however, was largely due to a some-
what extraneous cause, namely the overwhelming influx of re-
ligious pilgrims into the little commune from every portion of
the inhabited globe.

Not quite three months had passed since the Mayor’s notorious
opening of his Saxon arch and doubtless there were places in
Africa, India and China where pilgrims were only then just set-
ting out for Glastonbury; but the world was so unsettled and
there was such a spirit of restlessness abroad, that this new out-
burst of magic and miracle in a spot so easy of access, had been
responded to in a wave of excitement from every country upon
the earth. And as all these pilgrims had to be fed, and as all
these visitors wanted souvenirs to carry back to their homes, the
town began to grow rich. Thus when the Glastonbury council-
men--now promoted to be bureaucrats in an independent com-
munity--came to divide, as they did on the first day of each
week, the profits of the new commune, these profits were found
to be so considerable and so far beyond anything that the worthy
tradesmen had ever earned for themselves under normal condi-
tions, that their tendency was to make hay while the sun shone
and allow the methods and sources of this new increment to pass
unquestioned.

They were of course unaware, these good men, for Providence
had not endowed many of them with the acquisitive wit of Harry
Stickles, how large a portion of what came to the town from the
feeding of pilgrims and from the selling of curiosities, both to
the religious and to the profane, was divided among the real
proletariat of the place; but since this proletariat, in its turn
not accustomed to such wealth, hurried to spend it in these very
shops, there was--as can easily be believed--a sort of revival of
those fortunate mediaeval times, when the whole of Glastonbury
throve and grew fat upon the Saint Joseph’s Pence of religious
Christendom.

Mr. Geard himself, in these, lucky days, grew more and more
indifferent to the practical and economic aspects of his great de-
sign. Having, as we have seen, taken measures to get rid of every
penny of Canon Crow’s large fortune, the Mayor accepted what-
ever salary, as head of the commune, was set apart for him each
week by the energetic assessors and bothered his brains no more
about the matter. Had he been "Head of Hades," or Lord of that
"Annwn" of which Mr. Evans had so obstinately murmured; had
he been a reincarnation of that old Celtic divinity mentioned in
the Mabinogi as Bendigeitvran, or Bran the Blessed, he could not
have worried less about these mundane affairs.

What he was now doing all this time was receiving religious
disciples, or, if it is too early in the history of the new Glaston-
bury Religion to call them by that name, followers, learners,
pupils, neophytes. These he received, not in Cardiff Villa--indeed
he was seldom to be found in Cardiff Villa now; and Megan had
required all her dignified Rhys blood to be reserved and patient
over this--but in that solid erection, something between a farm-
barn and a collegiate chapel, which his London architect had
built for him near his Saxon arch within sound of the trickling
of his Fountain of Life and that had come to be called "The
Rotunda."

It was with a positive genius for what might be named the
psychic nuances of building, that this great adept in stone had con-
structed out of timber, bought in the same woodyard of the worthy
Mr. Johnson where Mr. Evans’ Cross had been purchased, a sort
of Platonic lecture hall. Like the Saxon arch which now rose tri-
umphantly over the Grail Fount, this wooden erection, when Geard
first spoke of it, sounded as if it would be something in unbe-
lievably bad taste. But the very reverse of this was what devel-
oped. By an extensive use of carving--for many of the heavy
cross-beams of this edifice were terminated by massive heads of
the old Saxon Kings, while a colossal image of Saint Dunstan
looked down from above the entrance--this secular hall was made
to correspond with the mystical arch which covered the path to
the Grail Spring.

The ritual, or, if the reader prefers it, "the procedure," that
came to establish itself in this singular hall, originated in so
spontaneous and natural a manner as to excite in the architect
--who refused to leave the place till he had satisfied himself
with what he did--a desire to supply an organic outward form
for such a repetition of spontaneous religious gestures.

Mr. Geard--growing more and more obsessed by his ideas as
he was given a fuller chance to express them--had caused a mys-
terious altar to be constructed and placed in the centre of this
wooden building, an altar dedicated to the worship of his hereti-
cal Christ. The bulk of this altar was made of oak, in harmony
with the finely chiselled wainscotting that the architect had de-
signed for the lower portion of the walls, but on the top of this
wooden base--placed there suddenly in the night, none but Mr.
Geard himself knowing its origin--appeared a square slab of
about five inches thick, of a substance, colour, texture and polish
completely different from any stone that had, until that day, been
found in Glastonbury.

Mr. Merry the curator shook his head very knowingly, after
he had spent some time examining this stone, which he declared
was much older than the one in St. Patrick's chapel, and in
private conversations with his nephew, Paul Trent, he main-
tained the daring opinion that it was an altar stone of the Bronze
Age, "probably used in the invocation of some god of fertility."
How Mr. Merry deduced this opinion, or what evidence he found
for it in his examination of the stone has not become common
knowledge; for the curator held the view that there were enough
mischief-makers already in the town; and far too much talk
about subjects which, in wiser times, were restricted to the learned
alone. Our architect from London, however, by no means confined
himself to the erection of this altar upon which Bloody Johnny’s
younger daughter had placed in little vases of clear glass the
season’s earliest primroses. He also caused to be constructed,
in the same solid oak, a hieratic seat for the founder of the new
western religion. Few things about this "Hall of Marvels," as
John Crow called it, interested the Mayor less than this pontifical
throne. Its extreme discomfort was, nevertheless, modified by
Megan Geard, as soon as she saw it. She unceremoniously threw
over it the familiar threadbare bearskin snatched up from the
floor on the Cardiff Villa drawing-room. The architect did make
a somewhat wry face when he saw what she had done; but he
uttered no overt protest; and from his place in this singular
chair of office Mr. Geard continued to expound, day by day--it
seemed to be the dominant purpose of his life now, and he pur-
sued it with massive concentration--the doctrines of his new
mystical faith.

The strange man never lacked an audience for these uninter-
rupted discourses. Sometimes indeed that circular hall was packed
tightly wdth people. But whether there were many there, or the
merest handful, the Mayor would always be ready to carry fur-
ther and further his mystical doctrines about the Blood of his
Glastonbury Christ. Megan and Crummie brought him his meals
once or twice out there; but this soon became unnecessary, be-
cause Mrs. Jones, Sally’s mother, who through Red Robinson,
her son-in-law, possessed an advantage over the other tea-shops of
the town, started a refreshment booth just inside the entrance to
Chalice Hall.

This ramshackle edifice, run up over-night by some artisan-
relative of Mrs. Jones, ruined entirely, from a purely aesthetic
point of view, the whole beauty of what the architect had done.
But the architect only laughed when this was pointed out to him,
declaring that the reason why the gaudy tinsel ornaments in a
Roman Church were less irreligious than the collegiate dignity
of a London church, was that they were the expression of the
inherent barbarism and crudity of rank human nature with
which any genuine Religion--to he really organic--must keep
in close touch. "Our communal refreshment-booth," he said to
Paul Trent, whose taste was offended by this circus-looking
shanty, "is like the crowds of beggars outside St. Peter’s, or the
guides outside the Mosque of Omar. If Glastonbury is destined
to become--as with all these foreigners it looks as if she were--
a mystical rival to Rome and Jerusalem, you must expect worse
things than a few catch-penny cook-shops!"

And indeed with this concession of the architect--for the man
had come to exercise the dominant influence over what was go-
ing on in Chalice Hill--Mrs. Jones’ initiative was followed by a
rush of enterprising pedlars who set up far more unsightly stalls
than hers. They had to turn over their gains to the assessors every
evening, but as their bookkeeping was very casual and as private
property, in spite of Dave Spear, still existed in Glastonbury, it
was an extremely approximate sum that was thus poured daily
into the community’s exchequer.

But the heart of Glastonbury was still the Fountain on Chalice
Hill. To this Fountain, passing to and fro under the Saxon arch,
came a constant influx of visitors. Mr. Geard had insisted upon
one restriction alone, namely, that there should be no sacer-
dotalism. Women were allowed to come bareheaded. Men were
allowed to bring their hats and sticks. Children were allowed to
drift in and out at will. At the Fountain itself, dressed in cordu-
roys like a gamekeeper, stood, in the morning, none other than
our friend, Young Tewsy, while in the afternoon, when the
crowds were much greater, a strapping youth from the upper
Mendips who had been "converted" by Bloody Johnny in his
street-preaching days and who was too simple in his wits to
notice the difference between what the man taught now and what
he had taught then, kept the crowd in order. This powerfully
built lad had been dismissed for poaching by one of Lord P.’s
tenant-farmers, and he had turned up in Glastonbury in his old-
fashioned shepherd’s smock with an eye to communal flocks and
herds. It had been Paul Trent--the only one of the town’s rulers
who had the faintest artistic feeling-- who had advised Geard to
let the lad wear this primitive garment when he was about the
business of guarding the Grail Spring; and the Mayor, who re-
membered a highly-coloured picture in his native national school
of Our Lord Himself, clothed in a costume resembling that of
old Bill Chant, Farmer Manley’s head-shepherd, had jumped
at this proposal.

Curiously enough it was the eastern-Europcan visitors--or pil-
grims, if you will--and indeed there were many of both types,
who seemed most impressed by these discourses of the head of
the new commune; and among these none were more affected
than certain monastic wayfarers from the slopes of Mount Athos.
There was no lack of scribes taking serious and copious notes
of all the man said; and although the London papers had
grown weary of him, "Geard of Glastonbury" was already a
legendary figure in Bulgaria, in Bessarabia, and in many a re-
mote religious retreat upon the Black Sea. The main drift of
Geard’s singular Gospel was that an actual new Revelation had
been made in Glastonbury.

The crucial thing for Western humanity at this moment was to
concentrate a magnetic flood of desperate faith upon this magic
casement, now pushed a little open. "Scientists," explained Mr.
Geard, only he used homelier and less abstract language, "are
continually finding new cosmic vibrations, totally unknown or
only suspected before; and why should not a new element be-
longing to the Unknown Dimension in which our present dream-
life floats, be discovered by psychic, in place of physiological
experiment? It is all a matter of experience. The miraculous is as
much a portion of the experience of our race as is the most thor-
oughly accepted scientific law. The human soul"--so Mr. Geard
in his sublime ignorance of modem phraseology hesitated not
to declare--"possesses levels of power and possibilities of expe-
rience that have hitherto been tapped only at rare epochs in the
world’s history. These powers we who live in Glastonbury must
now claim as our own; and not only enjoy them for ourselves,
but fling them abroad throughout the whole earth."

It was on the fifteenth of March that Mr. Geard’s morning dis-
course--for he was often found in his Heathen Pantheon, as Miss
Drew called it, as early as eight o’clock--was interrupted in the
startling and dramatic manner that has now become part of Glas-
tonbury’s history. There had been disturbing news for the past
three days from Burnham and Highbridge. On the twelfth of
the month information had come to the town of the flooding of
the Parrett Valley as far as Bridgewater and of the complete sub-
merging of such low-lying districts as Horsey Level, Puriton
Level, and Pawlett Hams. On the thirteenth the long-stretching
clay banks that defended the month of the Brue were reported
to be down and the Burnham and Evercreech line under water.
By the afternoon of the fourteenth there was definite news that
a great flood was advancing rapidly, hour by hour, between
Tadham Moor and Catcott Burtle; and that the flats from Moore
Pool to Decoy Rhyne, and from Decoy Rhyne to Mudgley, were
already one unbroken lake. On the night before the fifteenth
many old residents of Glastonbury who realised the danger much
better than the younger generation refused to go to bed. In sev-
eral of the workmen’s cottages down by the river on the way to
Street and in others in the district called Beckery people carried
their more precious belongings into their upper rooms before
they dared to sleep; and in not a few of the smaller beer-houses
certain among the habitual topers refused to go home that night.

It was not only the pusillanimous among the dwellers along
the banks of the Brue and along its tributaries who trembled a
little as they pulled up their blinds on that morning of March
the fifteenth. The more weather-wise among the inhabitants of
these cottages were too restless to await that delayed dawn.
For the night seemed as if it would never come to an end; and
seldom above the Glastonbury hills had so grey a twilight pro-
longed itself to so late an hour. Cold and steel-like, when it did
come at last, was that dawn; livid and menacing as the stricken
light that falls upon a lost battlefield. There were many indica-
tions that a heavy rain would shortly add a new burden of
waters to the already accumulated volume; but until eight
o’clock, the hour when Mr. Geard, with the tattered bear rug
pulled over his knees for warmth, usually began his prophetic
monologue, no actual rain had fallen.

From the windows of Cardiff Villa itself no view was available
of the surrounding country extensive enough to enable the fam-
ily to get any idea of what was occurring; so that at four o’clock,
which was the hour when the last of the neighbouring dams broke
and the flood of waters began sweeping through the streets of
the town, the Geards were as ignorant of the extent of the dis-
aster as was Red Robinson in his little new house in Rove Town.
This ignorance of the authorities of the new commune as to the
extent of the flood in the early hours of the fifteenth was brought
against them afterwards in the general public criticism of these
events; but as a matter of fact both Dave Spear and Paul Trent
were up and out of their rooms by half-past four that morning.

It was about six o’clock that the railway lines became impass-
able; but before that hour the early luggage trains that left the
town brought news of the coming disaster to Taunton, to Bristol,
to Yeovil, to Wareham, to Bournemouth, to Greylands, to Dor-
chester.

Dave Spear and Paul Trent were doing their utmost to convey
warnings to the threatened houses and to get the people out of
them; but when officials from Taunton began interfering with
them they relinquished their authority and handed over the
whole management of affairs to Lord Brent, a cousin of Lord P.,
who at that time was the High Sheriff of Somersetshire. This
energetic gentleman who had a house not far from Middlezoy,
had been rendered sleepless by the fact that his own dwelling was
on low-lying ground. Lord Brent had kept in close touch with
both police and military all through that agitating night and
was on the spot at a very early hour. It was he who, before the
little commune’s authorities had thought it necessary to make
such an appeal, had stirred up the local air-force commanders
and caused military aircraft carrying tents and provisions to
land at Wirral Hill and establish an emergency camp up there.
Thus before the Mayor of Glastonbury had the least idea that
the water was pouring down the High Street and standing at least
a foot deep amid the Abbey Ruins, airmen with searchlights
and soldiers with lanterns and spades were already established
upon the summit of Wirral Hill.

It was from this point of observation, while he rested from
his labours of directing rescue-parties, that Dave Spear surveyed
the ghastly dawn of that fifteenth of March. By his side as he
stood up there was none other than Philip Crow. Philip, like
Lord Brent, and for the same reason, had kept his clothes on all
that night. The water was already three feet deep in Wells Road,
and drowning deep in the Lake Village Great Field, He had soon
realised that there was no chance of using his airplane, and in-
deed he felt he would be very lucky if it were not utterly ruined.
But what worried him, as he stood by Dave’s side now, was not
his airplane. It was not his wife, either. Hours ago Tilly and
Emma had been driven away by Bob Tankerville, safe to Wells.
No; what was worrying Philip as he surveyed through his field-
glass that rising expanse of waters was the peril to his half-con-
structed steel bridge over the river. He felt nervous, too, about his
new cement road, leading down from Wookey Hole, though he
kept telling himself that a few days’ labour would clear away the
mud and the silt when the flood sank down. But the half-finished
bridge? He had already felt some qualms as he turned his glass
upon those cement bases, those wooden scaffolds, those jagged
steel uprights; and now, as he gazed at them, it seemed to him
that part of the scaffolding had been already washed away.

In his anxiety he handed his glasses to Dave. "Doesn’t it seem
to you that some of my bridge supports are gone?" he said.

Dave obediently surveyed the objects in question. "The whole
thing. Cousin Philip, I’m afraid," murmured the Communist
grimly as he returned the glasses. "The whole business will go
in a minute or two. The tide’s terrifically strong just there!"

"Damn it, man. But it can't wash those things away! I saw
them put in; and they were--"

"You’d better come over to us , Cousin Phil, before you’re
ruined! We’d give you the biggest salary of all; and you’d have
no more worry or fuss over anything, for the rest of your life!"

But Philip was in no mood even to chuckle over this. "If my
bridge goes," he said, "it’s more money washed away than I
would dare to tell anyone! It’ll knock me out. It’ll mean bank-
ruptcy."

"Haven’t you paid for it then?"

"Paid for it!" The contempt with which the manufacturer
rebuked Spear’s ignorance of high finance was an edifying spec-
tacle.

"Well, you’d better say your prayers. Cousin, and prepare for
a quiet life; for there won’t be much of your bridge left in a
few minutes." Dave spoke without bitterness, for he felt none.
He had been thinking several times that morning: "I hope those
people at Whitelake haven’t slept too long and too sound. But
probably they’re safe in Wells by now. They’d never try to get
across Splott’s Moor."

"Well, Cousin Phil, I must be off to the boats again. I wish
you’d tell that Colonel What’s-his-name, up there, to stop those
women from shrieking so. They’ll start a panic, if he’s not care-
ful. Good-bye! Looks to me as if old Pomparles was standing
up to it pretty well."

Philip bit his lip. It was hard to believe that the innocent Dave
hadn’t meant that remark, at least, as a nasty dig at the modern
bridge-builder. Damn! It would be just like the devilish irony
of things for that old stone bridge to survive, while his new steel
bridge was washed away! He lifted his glasses again. What a sight
it was!

The sun had risen now, and though its red orb was hidden
by lowering grey clouds, the ghastly expanse of water spread
away before him under a light that displayed the full extent of
this overwhelming "Act of God," which had reduced the differ-
ence between Capitalism and Communism to such a tragic neu-
trality. By the aid of his glasses Philip could see some very
curious details of this appalling panorama of a drowned world.
He could see certain birds, for instance, that were obviously
blackbirds or thrushes, collected in sheer panic-terror upon a line
of telegraph wires that followed the railway and that had not
yet been swamped. He could see the bodies of several drowned
animals--he could not make out whether they were cows or
horses--floating rapidly along the tide of the river, which was
differentiated from the mass of waters both by the colour of its
waves and the speed of their flow. He could see huddled human
figures on the roofs of several houses in the Paradise slums and
still more of them along the outlying quarter of the town known
as Beckery. He could see the boats of the rescuers moving about
among the semi-detached houses and villas in Wells Road, and,
as far as he could make out, there was a large crowd of people
on the roof of Dickery Cantle’s tavern near the Cattle Market.

But it was the livid tint of the waters where there were no streets
that was so particularly ghastly.

Philip, as we know, was the extreme reverse of an imaginative
person; but even he was struck by the lurid effect produced by cer-
tain isolated houses, near the sinister rush of the main current of
the Brue. The water positively foamed, as it swirled and eddied
about these luckless edifices, which hardly looked like houses at
all now, but rather resembled ugly and shapeless islands of dark
rock, against which the tops of the wretched garden trees were
swaying and tossing, as if they were masses of green seaweed. One
especial thing that struck his pragmatic and literal mind was the
extraordinary difference between this murderous-looking flood-
water and all other bodies of water he had ever seen or known.
The brownish-grey expanse before him was not like the sea; nor
was it like a lake. It was a thing different from every other
natural phenomenon. A breath of abominable and shivering
chilliness rose up from this moving plain of waters, a chilliness
that was more than material, a chilliness that carried with it a
wafture of mental horror. It was as if some ultimate cosmogonic
catastrophe implying the final extinction of all planetary life had
commenced. A wind of death rose from that mounting flood that
carried a feeling of water-soaked disfigured corpses!

Philip knew that the actual victims could only at the worst
amount to a few score; but that death-look upon those livid
waters suggested a disaster that could not be estimated in
physical numbers. That hard, narrow cranium beneath its grey
cloth cap was not stunned or numbed, was not distracted or
crazed, was not even bewildered by what it confronted. This might
prove the final Waterloo to this furious strategist; but it left his
limited, concentrated, fighting intelligence quite unclouded, in-
deed strung-up and abnormally alert. As far as his emotional
response to it was concerned, it was the response of the most
average and thick-skinned person; and for that very reason it
caught the spectacle of what lay before it in what might be called
its primeval animal-skin shiver. "Glastonbury is in peril, is
what Ned Athling would have felt; but apart from the fate of
his bridge and his road, what. Philip was aware of was simply
the threat of a down-swallowing, in-sucking enemy.

Let it be noted, here and now, that no living human being
who passed through the appalling hours of that fifteenth of
March was less frightened--in the ordinary sense of that word
than was Philip Crow. It had always been--secretly, exultantly,
proudly--with the natural elements, rather than with men and
women, that Philip had felt himself contending. Such a skin-to-
skin, belly-to-belly contest with Nature was his notion of the
whole meaning of existence; so that unlike other minds, who had
to see torn away an elaborate psychic complication of social
feelings, before they came down to the bedrock issue, he was con-
fused by no marginal qualms.

Its eccentric Mayor was not the only magnate of the little
Glastonbury commune who awoke that day to a somewhat belated
knowledge of the approaching catastrophe. Red Robinson and
his easy-natured bride were so enamoured of each other and so
busy in preparing breakfast in their small dwelling on the slope
above Bove Town, that they discounted for quite a long while
the agitated bustlings to and fro of their less self-centred
neighbors.

"There go the people from the end house!" Sally cried out as
she left their table and rushed to the little window. "There go them
others, Reddy, and they be carrying their pots and pans! Flood
be come, me darlin’. But us baint going to run away, carrying no
sauce-pans nor no teapots, be us?"

Red put down his knife and fork and joined his wife at the
window, pushing aside the muslin curtains and leaning across
the girl’s big sewing machine. There certainly was an unusual
stir abroad and startling shouts and cries upon the wind! And
yet Red could see the three yellow crocuses and the two purple
crocuses in their patch of garden that had been there yesterday
and the green paint that he had put on their little gate in the
afternoon.

"High’d give ten pounds for this ’ere bloomin’ flood to ’it the
bewger’s bloody bridge and soak the cligh till the bewger’s
bleedin’ new road falls in! But it’ll be pore men what’ll suffer,
girlie; not rich ones like ’im, if these ’ere waters rise hup and
hover."

Sally put her plump arm affectionately round his neck. "You
never loved Miss Crummie like you. love me, did you, Red?" she
whispered coaxingly.

"Garn!" cried Red.

They were both silent then, Sally thinking to herself, "Shall
I ever dare to ask him about Jenny Morgan? And what should
I do if Jenny Morgan came to see Mother?" and Red thinking
to himself, "High wouldn’t care a wriggle what ’appened to this
bastard commune, has long has the bewger got it in ’is bleedin’
neck!"

This passive trance of Red and Sally at their window was
interrupted by the inrush through Red’s green gate of a couple
of excited neighbours: "Jenny Morgan be drowned in flood,"
they cried, "and little Nelly be clinging, fit to perish, to her
mother’s corpsy."

Sally Robinson turned quickly to her husband. "We must go
down there, Red," she said.

Red sighed heavily, but he did not gainsay her words.

Long before the flood had reached the point at which Red and
Sally were called upon to confront it, the Mayor of Glastonbury
was making his way dry-shod to his morning lecture at Chalice
Hill. Before his wife and Crummie were out of bed and before
any sign of the incoming water had reached the end of Street
Road, Bloody Johnny was hurrying in blind excitement, with his
head bent and his hands clasped behind his back, to his beloved
Rotunda. His own word for all the buildings on Chalice Hill was
simply Town’s End--an old Montacute name which helped to
make him feel at home there. "I’m off to Town’s End, my pre-
cious," he would say to Mrs. Geard; or "I’ll be back from Town s
End, my sweet, by tea-time today, never fear!"

On this historical morning the Mayor’s head was so full of a
new inspiration which he had received, or dreamed he had re-
ceived, from his Master that night, that he had not even paused
in his kitchen to make himself a cup of tea before setting out.
It would be a mistake to assume, as some afterwards did, that
Bloody Johnny was oblivious of the perils of the waters that
just then threatened Glastonbury. The man was like some des-
perate mediaeval artist, some frantically inspired craftsman who,
even though the enemy is at the gates of his city, must, by an
urge that endures no withstanding, complete his unfinished
statue, his picture, his fresco, his molten cast. To enter into the
real heart of what he had been feeling during the last forty-eight
hours it would be necessary to remember that the man had for
weeks, nay, for a couple of months, dropped all active connexion
with the administration of that tiny dictatorship of which he
was the technical head. What he felt in his mind now was only
an intensified awareness of what he had been vaguely feeling
ever since that momentous opening of his Saxon Arch. "The
Lord’s going to let me take my life," he kept saying to himself,
"and I must finish my work before I go." What he thought of
as his "work" was the rounding off and completion of his Fifth
Gospel, delivered to all and sundry at Town’s End.

Had the flood been accompanied by a fire, had the flood and
the fire been accompanied by a murderous uprising of the mob,
and that again by signs and portents, by thunderings and light-
nings, in air and sky. Bloody Johnny would still have hurried
off to his heathen Academia. He had hardly slept at all that night;
and now quite heedless of the rumours of the broken dams, heed-
less of the overcrowded state of the threatened town, heedless
of any danger that might be threatening his wife and menacing
his daughter, thinking always in his heart: "My end is near and I
must finish my work before I go"--Mr. Geard arrived at Chalice
Hill. He found himself, before he knew what he was doing, help-
lessly fumbling at the closed door of Mrs. Jones’ tea-booth, which
stood not far from his Saxon arch. Mrs. Jones, however, like
most of the Glastonbury people, was far from sharing the Mayor’s
indifference to the overwhelming catastrophe that was imminent
that fatal day. It began to look as if Bloody Johnny’s craving
for tea--which his sleepless and rather feverish night had
rendered extreme--was not destined to be satisfied. By good luck,
however, young Elphin Cantle and his friend Steve Lew had slept
together that night in Solly’s loft above the St. Michael’s Garage.
Mat Dekker had shaken his head of late very gravely over what
he called "that young degenerate’s seduction of such a whole-
some lad," but without avail. Elphin was a more slippery cus-
tomer than Tommy Chinnock! Young Cantle at this moment
had the key to his father’s little booth among this assemblage of
acquisitive wooden shanties and the two boys had already got
their kettle boiling in this little shelter, and were just beginning
to enjoy their bread and jam when they heard the Mayor thump-
ing at the door of Mrs. Jones’ ramshackle storehouse.

Elphin peeped out. "It’s Master Geard!" he whispered excitedly
to his friend. "And he be all white and shivery. He’ve a heerd
summat. He’ve a heered the girt flood. He be come to tell Mother
Jones she best climb up Tor-top wi’ he!"

Steve Lew stood up with wide-open eyes. His mouth was full
of bread and jam, but he was too agitated to masticate or even
to swallow. The wild and extravagant thought rushed through
his head that perhaps Mr. Geard would condescend to share their
amateur repast. "It would...be fine, Elph, wouldn’t ’un," he
blurted out, "if Mayor drank a cup o’ tea along wi’ we?"

Elphin sighed. He had anticipated the pleasure of uninter-
rupted colloquy with his young friend when he had strengthened
his heart with raspberry jam. He wished the Mayor of Glaston-
bury at the devil! Why was fate always snatching the few' hours
of romance which he had in life away from him? It had been
like this when he was with Mr. Sam. Someone was always
interrupting!

Elphin stood hesitating in the doorway now, one agitated eye
upon the obese, bare-headed man, who was now muttering to him-
self and gazing hopelessly around, and one upon his stuttering
and excited friend. But the Mayor of Glastonbury had caught
sight of him.

"Do ’ee know where a man could get a sip of hot tea, me boy?
he enquired humbly, almost in the tone of a thirsty tramp.

Elphin scowled savagely; but his sense of honour compelled
him to report the great man’s request to the boy in the hut.
"He be asking for summat hot," he whispered.

Steve swallowed his mouthful so hurriedly that it almost
choked him, and rushed to the door. "Please come in here.
Sir!" he cried, pushing his friend unceremoniously out of the
way, "Me and Elph be having a bite, us be, and us ’ud be proud
to give ’ee all!"

Bloody Johnny responded to this invitation with alacrity and
his gratitude and good temper when he had eaten and drunk
were so winning that even the jealous heart of Elphin Cantle
was beguiled. Sounds of such lively merriment soon began to
emerge from the Cantle beer-shop that the little crowd of early
visitors who had already assembled in front of the Saxon arch
got the impression that the master--rumour soon told them where
he was--had been drinking all night in that shanty. This story,
that on the morning of the fifteenth, the day above all others
when the man’s wits should have been clearest, he was found
hopelessly drunk "in company with two degenerate slum-boys"
spread all over Somerset before the end of the week and was
mixed up in the most hopeless manner with the official accounts
of the Glastonbury flood. But Bloody Johnny thanked his young
entertainers with a pure heart and a clear head and made his way
into his Rotunda. He paused for a moment, however, to speak
with Young Tewsy whose cadaverous grin above his neat cordu-
roy suit suggested a death’s head in the attire of an operatic
forester.

"Mother Legge ’ad ’er breakfast upstairs, and her bided up-
stairs," the old man reported.

It was astonishing how full of people the Rotunda was when
Bloody Johnny finally pushed his way to his uncomfortable
throne and took up his mystical discourse where he had left it
the day before. It was a relief to him on this occasion, when he
was obsessed by the idea that he had had a special Revelation,
to notice that there were a couple of young men from his own
Wayfarer in the corner of the Rotunda armed with the most pro-
fessional-looking notebooks. "He knows his business," he thought,
"that Middlezoy lad. I’d ’a never have supposed he’d send ’em
to Town’s End when flood be rising."

Slowly he let his formidable black eyes glance over his audi-
ence. There seemed to be a predominance of Welsh people there
this morning, judging from the rising inflexion of the excited
murmurs that he caught from many parts of the crowded circle.
"I expect being mountaineers they know nothing of floods!" he
thought. "I hope they’ll all get safe home." And then he became
aware of Young Tewsy standing at his elbow.

"Flood be rushing down ’igh Street, your Wash’p! Town coun-
cil be meetin’ in Church so as to be near tower in case of acci-
dents. Town-crier save been sent round to tell the foreigners to
take to the ’ills; and they’ve a-commanded every boat there be on
river, and Mr. Trent and Mr. Spear and Mr. Dekker and the fire-
brigade men and the Boy Scout lads be taking folk from their
’ouse-windies and carrying of they to the foot of Wirral. Old Bob
Sheperd be waiting outside, your Wash’p, for to take 'ee to where
town council be."

"Tell Sheperd not to wait for me, Tewsy," whispered the
Mayor. Tell him to tell them I’ll come later, when I’ve finished
what I have got to do here. Tell him to tell them to telegraph for
boats to Taunton and Bridgewater and every town with a river;
and do it quickly--before the wires are down. Tell them to tele-
phone to Bristol if the wires aren’t down and make ’em send a
dozen airplanes with bread and wine and milk straight to Wirral
Hill; and tell ’em that they can make a landing beyond those
trees up there, though it’s rather difficult. But I know it’s possi-
ble--tell ’em--because I’ve seen poor Barter do it when he pi-
loted Crow." He paused for a moment while the whispering in
the audience rose to an agitated pitch. "Are the trains running
still, Tewsy?" he enquired.

"They wasn’t when I left ’un, your Wash’p, and th^ 0 ^ nere
waters be mountin’ up hour by hour. No trains ’ull lea'* ston
today, your Wash’p. If I were the council, meesr*^ s ^ e ' send
town-crier round to say that all foreigners whatever of any
kind leave this town at onst on pain of being shot."

The Mayor chuckled at this; and the audience looked at each
other and smiled. They were evidently thinking to themselves:
"He must have heard that the floods are going down, or he
couldn’t take things so easy."

Young Tewsy went off to convey his message, or what he could
remember of his message, to Bob Sheperd.

Bloody Johnny pulled himself up upon his feet by the carved
oaken arms of his great chair. He felt languid, indolent, weighed
down by a "whoreson lethargy." In the manner of a lazy monk,
in some perfunctory office that he has repeated so often that his
mind can think of other things while his lips utter the sacred
incantations, he turned his back to the audience and faced the
altar. Candles were burning on the altar, by the side of Crum-
mie’s primroses, and in the chilly light which floated in beneath
the majestic, drowsy, heavy-jowled Saxon Kings and Saints--for
Geard of Glastonbury had kept his word and it was the Saxon
element that predominated in the Rotunda--he shut his eyes tight
and repeated the formula: "Christ give strength to our souls, so
that we may drink up Life and defy evil. Blood of Christ give
us peace. Blood of Christ give us rest. Blood of Christ give us joy
forever!" These words Mr. Geard uttered in the mechanical tone
of one who has so much faith in the magic of the syllables that
he has no need to intellectualise them or to emotionalise them.
Some of the audience remained seated while this invocation took
place; others stood up, a very few fell upon their knees. But Mr.
Geard swung round now and sat down, pulling the bearskin over
his thighs for he suddenly felt cold.

It was the man’s extraordinary sangfroid, his heavy, languid
aplomb that many people found to be so effective. To the Welsh
element in this particular audience, itself so highstrung and ex-
citable, this unruffled phlegm of the prophet was profoundly
impressive.

"The point I had reached in my argument, my dears," he
began, had to do with the souls of microscopic insects." This
personal appeal to his hearers as "my dears" always had a very
queer effect when people heard it for the first time. The sturdy,
virile, moralistic hearers were often so shocked and felt such
deep resentment and distaste that the man lost them completely.
They became enemies for life, from the moment when the word
"dears" left his mouth; but others felt exactly the opposite, felt,
in fact, a responsive tenderness towards Mr. Geard. "You often
hear people say," he went, "that insects have no souls. Now what
Christ came and told me this very night is that every insect, down
to the smallest mite, microbe or bacillus, has an immortal soul.
It must have been about half-past two last night that the Master
told me about insects having souls. I know it was about then,
because I’d heard the Church clock strike two. And I asked him
if worms, and such things as slugs and snails had souls. ‘Every
Jack one o’ them, Sonny,’ he said, ‘every Jack one o’ them.’
All these souls, my dears, the Master explained to me, though
perishable in relation to the visible, are imperishable in relation
to the invisible. They do not...as the heathen poet says...die all.
Something in them sinks down and escapes into the under-
sea of undying Being. Bodies are only one expression of souls;
and when the bodies of worms and gnats and zoophytes, yea! of
the smallest amoebae that exist, perish in this dimension, some-
thing, perduring and indestructible, that has been the living
identity of these tiny creatures, escapes into the dream-world
whose margins overlap ours. This other world, this invisible di-
mension, is as much a dream-world as our o-wn. Into this se-
quence of dream-worlds our souls drive us forward, drinking up
Life and struggling with evil; seeking rest and peace. To ask
where can there be space, where room, for all the myriads of
consciousnesses, spawned by the life-stream since our planet
began, is to ask a babyish question! Space and time, such as we
know them, have no meaning in this other dream-world into
which the undying souls of all dead organisms pass. Chrisfs
Blood, my dears, is the life-sap that pours forth when any or-
ganism, pierced by the thorns of this troublesome dream, passes
into the one that surrounds it. Out of this deeper dream there
fell of old upon our Glastonbury Something that bewilders and
troubles us unto this day. To approach it gives us a a shock, a per-
turbation, a spasm, a shudder of the life-nerves. None can touch
it without a fit of travail-throes, an ecstasy of sweet insanity.
None can take it up wholly into themselves and live. To touch
this Thing at all is to drink up Life at its source. Such a draught
renders us strong as lions. Fortis imaginatio generat causas, as
the old Schoolman says; and with wills thus fortified we can
drink up day and night from all things in the world--from the
winds and the rains, from earth and fire and water and air--the
Blood of the Eternal! And the Master told me more than this, my
dears. Be we men or women, He said, our souls can embrace the
sweet bodies of one another till flesh and blood yield up their
essences. Only good can come, my .dears, from every embrace.
It matters not at all from what cups, or from what goblets, we
drink, so long as without being cruel, we drink up Life. The sole
meaning, purpose, intention, and secret of Christ, my dears, is
not to understand Life, or mould it, or change it, or even to love
it, but to drink of its undying essence! Drinking up Life in this
manner, we become more and more identified with that in us
which death cannot kill, with that in us which sinks down,
through dream after dream of what passes away, into...into
...into something, my dears, that is...something that is ...is...the
Blood and the Water and the...

Geard of Glastonbury stopped without finishing his sentence.
The two young reporters from the Wayfarer received the impres-
sion that he might have finished with: "and the mud and the
sand, and the sea and the land," or any other indolent and sleepy
gibberish. Stretching out his legs, however, he allowed the tat-
tered bearskin to fall away from his knees. Shamelessly then, in
front of them all, he lifted himself up a little in his chair and
broke wind. Then, with unabashed aplomb and scarcely covering
his mouth with his hand he yawned portentously.

"Any question for me, my dears?" he muttered in a voice still
half-strangled by his yawning.

An unemployed Welsh miner--tall, lean, starved, tragic--who
had worked his passage to Bristol from Fishguard and then had
tramped to Glastonbury from Bristol, and who was now subsist-
ing orn a special fund that Dave Spear had placed aside for
working-class visitors, rose up on his feet at the back of the
Rotunda, under the great, placid, comfortable head of King
Edgar, the peacemaker, and said in a low, troubled tone that
rang through that assembly like a broken harp-string: "I'd like
to know, Mr. Mayor, now that you’ve finished telling us to enjoy
ourselves like the beasts...when you think King Arthur is going
to come back!"

Instead of waiting for any reply to this question, which was
uttered in a voice trembling with indignation, the tall miner, with
a contemptuous jerk of his shoulders that expressed deep loath-
ing for the Rotunda and everything in it, pushed his way through
the crowd at the back and left the place.

But the bolt he had flung down created a violent disturbance
among the audience. High words arose. The Welsh people in the
hall began arguing fiercely among themselves, some of them sym-
pathising with the man, some of them denouncing his uncivil
outburst.

"Hush! Hush! Let Mr. Geard answer!" These words came
from the lips of Nancy Stickles, who from the very beginning of
what she called "the Mayor’s Ministry" had left her house day
after day, the moment she had got her Harry’s breakfast, and
slipped off to Chalice Hill.

The two young neophytes from Athling’s office, who had been
nudging each other nervously as they noted how ruffled and dis-
turbed the great man in the big chair seemed to be by what had
just transpired, looked at each other excitedly when they heard
Nancy’s voice. "Quite right, Mrs. Stickles!" one of them could
not help crying. "Quite right!" It was these two young men who
when their prophet was dead maintained steadily that he com-
mitted suicide from pure disappointment over the fiasco of this
final discourse. It certainly did seem that the reference to Rex
Arturus, just at the climax of what had been revealed that day,
hit Bloody Johnny some sort of incalculable blow. The inter-
ruption seemed, however, to cause huge delight to his Welsh
audience.

The curiously airy and upward-tilting intonation of the Welsh
accent began to echo through the Rotunda, drowning everything
else. It seemed as if nothing but the inexhaustible complacency
of King Edgar and the two King Edmunds kept the Rotunda
from complete domination by these excited Celts. Geard of Glas-
tonbury surveyed his disturbed flock, like a bewildered shepherd
whose woolly subjects have plunged into a forbidden field. In
vain he stared at the calm lineaments of King Edgar. In vain he
turned his gaze upon the majestic gravity of Edmund Ironsides.
The best he seemed able to do, just then, was to look with a
pitiful and wistful appeal into the intent, grey eyes of Nancy
Stickles. "What...do...you think...Missis," he stammered, "about
what our brother has...

It was a supreme moment in the life of Nancy. If the truth
were known, this mystic-minded girl was playing now the historic
role of the devoted disciple who, at an unexpected crisis, sup-
ports the Master’s weakness with a faith greater than his own.
Nancy got up upon her feet. All the heads in that circular room
were turned upon her; for all could see that the man in the
carved chair was waiting anxiously for her to speak.

The Welsh controversy died down; the angry disputants were
silent. A few puzzled Germans, not having caught the miner's
words about King Arthur, cried, "Hush, hush!" in their own
tongue.

"Mr. Geard," began Nancy Stickles. The girl was in her morn-
ing print dress with an old faded jacket hanging loose from her
shoulders. She was bare-headed. Wet or fine she never stopped
to put on a hat for this morning excursion. Her big umbrella with
a black curved handle, the only one of her wedding presents that
Harry hadn’t put away as "too good to use," was propped up
against a chair by her side. "Mr. Geard...and kind friends..." She
was so sweet-looking, as she stood there, with her back to the
oak panelling of the Rotunda, that a low sigh of appreciation
rustled, like a faint breath over reed-tops, across the whole
audience.

Bloody Johnny’s discourses had often closed with questions;
and Nancy’s modest "kind friends" was a familiar opening at
many an Adult School meeting in Pembroke and Glamorgan:
"The brother from Wales, who asked your opinion, Sir, about
King Arthur’s return, seems to me like the Jews who are still
waiting for a Messiah. Most of us in Glastonbury feel that God
has been kind enough to us already, in sending us a man like
you; a man from whose mouth, as we have just heard, the Living
Water of Life flows!"

The girl stopped and searched about in her mind for some-
thing else she was obscurely anxious to say. "This terrible flood,"
she went on in a low voice, "that we must all face in a few min-
utes when we go back to the town, must have been sent as a
Sign." She paused again and then went on in a louder voice. "A
Sign that all this tin-mining and road-making and bridge-build-
ing is contrary to God’s purpose." She sat down blushing deeply
and staring at her lap.

Bloody Johnny was displeased rather than pleased by the girl’s
reference to his enemy’s activities. He sighed heavily, and,
sinking back in his carved seat, closed his eyes. He felt weary,
disappointed, dispirited. All night long he had been telling him-
self of the incredible impression that his divine Revelation--for
so he felt it to be--would make upon these people; stirred up.
excited, panic-stricken as they already were by the rising waters.
But in place of one great final outpouring of the Spirit, obliter-
ating all divisions, all quarrels, all maliciousness, and setting
him free, they were back again in the old wrangling human
arena, Celt against Saxon, Capitalist against Communist, and
every Philip against every John! Mr. Geard had come to Town’s
End that day in the mood of Elijah when he was transported to
Heaven in a chariot of fire. But now he began to feel that his
Lord had forsaken him and left him alone with the false
prophets.

"I cannot quite see," an interested watchmaker from Lland-
overy was explaining to the meeting, "why the perfectly sensible
question of the departed brother from Fishguard should have
met with the disapproval it seems to have met with in our hon-
oured chairman. It is natural enough to mix altogether"--his voice
now took on that irritating intonation which self-sufficient ma-
terialists assume when they indicate their mental superiority to
their hearers--"to mix together Arthur’s Return and Geard’s
Water of Life. Both are myths. Both are imaginary. Both belong
to that world of fantastic unrealities which--"

"They both are true!" cried one of Athling’s reporters. "We’ve
got one of them with us here now," cried the other, "and Arthur
will yet come!"

A deplorable hubbub now arose. People argued with one an-
other in every part of the room, some siding with the Llandovery
atheist, some repeating the words of Nancy, others putting for-
ward long-winded compromises of their own. Mr. Geard re-
mained quiescent in the midst of all this. He lay back in his
carved chair with his eyes half-closed. As upon that occasion
when he had been locked into Wookey Hole, he felt that sleep
was his only refuge. In this tendency to fall asleep when things
were crucial, Bloody Johnny resembled Mat Dekker; the only
difference being that Dekker’s sleep was lighter and more easily
disturbed. There was undoubtedly something in the chemical
composition of that climate, in the languorous blue vapour that
hovered over Glastonbury most of the year, and that seemed to
emanate from all those drooping, heavy-lichen'd apple boughs
and from all that green moss, which conduced to sleep, as the
grand panacea for the strong characters of the place. What hap
pened now was that in proportion as his crowd of Welsh theo-
logians got more and more absorbed in their complicated
arguments the Mayor got more and more sleepy.

Nancy could hardly bear to see him nodding so awkwardly
there, with his big head drooping, first on one side and then on
the other, while every now and then the sheer weight of that
massive skull would wake him up with an unpleasant start. But
there was nothing the girl could do; and she had already stayed
away from the shop as long as she possibly dared. "God knows,"
she thought, "what I shall find when I get back." She pushed her
way between the chairs to the entrance of the Rotunda and hur-
ried out of the door. The majestic and self-satisfied head of St.
Dunstan did not give her a glance. With abysmal and unctuous
contentment it continued to gaze into space, while it seemed to
murmur to itself--"What matter if Arthur never does return. I am
here." St. Dunstan would have been much more horrified than
Nancy herself was, and she was a little shocked, at the nature of
the thought that just then the devil put into her head; the thought,
namely, what a relief it would be, if, when she got back, she
found that her husband, Harry the chemist, had been painlessly
and peacefully drowned!

Young Tewsy had hardly turned away from following Mr. Stickles'
departure with the eye of a veteran connoisseur of ladies, when
a yet more beautiful apparition met his gaze entering the Rotun-
da. This was none other than the Mayor of Glastonbury's young-
er daughter. Crummie was not altogether surprised to find the
place in a state of noisy commotion and her father fast asleep
in his chair. "Poor darling!" she said to herself, "I expect he
didn't sleep at all last night. But he must come. He must come
straight home now." She went up to him and shook him by the
shoulder. "It's me, Father...it's all right...it's only me! But Mother
says you must come home. The water's quite deep in Magdalene
Street, and oh, they've got boats there, Father. And it's coming
up Street Road now from both ends! Mother's afraid she'll be
caught in the upper rooms if she goes upstairs. I told her not
to wait for us if anyone came by with a boat!"

"How hot and panting you are, my pretty. There, there, get your
breath! I’ll come, I’ll come." He pulled himself up from his chair
and stood by Crummie’s side for a second, regarding the quar-
relsome mystics from the principality with an amused stare. He
was still only half awake. His face was puffy with sleep, his eyes
blurred and filmy. "Let’s go, let’s go, my treasure," he murmur-
ed, dragging her to the door by the arm.

As they left the Rotunda Crummie saw him turn sideways in
a very quaint and casual way and automatically make a hurried
inclination of his head towards the altar. Nothing would have
induced Crummie to imitate him in this, for Sam’s influence was
still strong, and he had said: "God knows what sort of a Deity
your father s got down there," but it did strike her as a curious
thing that Mr. Geard should have already grown so used to this
place that he could treat his devil-worship, or whatever it was, in
that self-forgetful, careless, mechanical fashion. They had hardly
reached the road than they met Paul Trent, calm and feline as
ever, though he was drenched to the skin from the waist down,
and his teeth were chattering.

Five deaths already, Comrades," he announced grimly, drawl-
ing his beautifully curved womanish lips aw’ay from his white
chattering teeth, in a grin worthy of Young Tewsy. "Two children
out in Beckery, and a mother and two children in Dye House
Lane. But there are probably lots of others by now; for the water
keeps rising every moment! It’s sea-water, Mr. Geard; that’s
what it is; and till this moon wanes the tides will go on keeping
at this height."

"Have any boats come? Have we got enough boats?"

"I should think they have come! From every direction they’ve
been arriving. A motor-boat, if you please, has come in from
Bridgewater. But there aren’t half enough yet. It’s been rowing
and wading, rowing and punting, rowing and hauling people out
of top-windows, and pulling people off roofs, since six o’clock
this morning! My hands are blistered with rowing. We’ve missed
you sorely, Sir. I can tell you that. All the poor people in Para-
dise--" Here Crummie pushed herself between her father and
the man from the Scilly Islands and pinched his arm as hard as
she could. But Paul Trent was not to be stopped. "All the poor
people in Paradise are saying that the Mayor deserted the town
and that he left last night by the last train that ran...for Yeovil
or somewhere."

"Did you really hear that said?" Bloody Johnny’s voice was
so menacing that Crummie thrust her hand into his, and then
turning to Paul Trent cried in vibrant tones: "Stop that now!
You only say that to torment him. You knew where he was. You
could have got him any moment! You’ve always hated Father,
Mr. Trent; and now you’ve got your chance, you’re happy to hit
him! Yes, you are...you’ve always hated him."

But Mr. Geard stopped dead in the middle of the road and
caught the young lawyer by the sleeve. "Did you really hear that
said?" His voice was like the rumble of underground thunder.

Paul Trent shrugged his shoulders and looked at Crummie.
Under normal conditions the Mayor’s intensity of emotion would
have overawed him; but he had seen such sights and had had
such experiences in the last few hours that he was in a mood to
face anything. "Of course. And not only in Paradise. I was in
Butts Close and Beckery and Manor Road and Dye House Lane;
and wherever I was I heard the same thing. They don’t care much
for our commune, and I don’t blame ’em. That confounded little
ass, Spear, has ruined everything with his absurd assessors and
his meddling and fumbling with people’s lives. But if our com-
mune ain’t popular, our Mayor--no! I’m not going to stop, Miss
Geard! Why should I stop? I owe nothing to Glastonbury. I’m a
Cornishman; and I give you all to the devil, and your drowned
town too!--our Mayor is despised! Yes, your poorer fellow-
comrades, Mr. Geard, say on all sides, as the police from Bridge-
water and the soldiers from Taunton come in to help--it’s eleven
o’clock now and they say the whole Cadet-Corps from Sherborne
School will be here by noon!--that the only person no one has
seen near the water is the Mayor! I’ve been telling ’em that the
Mayor was praying for ’em; but they say the Reverend Dekker
and the Reverend Dr. Sodbury are hard at work in the boats,
and it seems funny that--" The man’s ungovernable spiteful-
ness was brought to a pause at this point by the chattering of his
teeth and by a fit of violent shivering that took possession of his
whole body.

These physical manifestations were not lost upon Mr. Geard,
and, as if an actual hand had smitten the scales from his eyes,
his awareness of these things transformed in a second the whole
cast of his feelings. "Yes, I ought to have got up earlier, much
earlier!" he said. "You are right, Trent. You are quite right. No,
no, my precious," he went on, addressing Crummie now and
speaking calmly and sadly. "We do what we can, but we are all
weak...all blind and weak. Well! come...come...come . Let us go
on and save all we can. One minute, though, my dears! " With
the familiar expression "my dears" the old dark fire resumed
its accustomed glow in Bloody Johnny's eyes. He dropped
Crummie’s hand and began searching in his pockets. Pres-
ently he brought out a brandy flask and quickly untwisted
its glass stopper. "Here, sonny," he cried, in a tone he might
have used to Elphin Cantle or Steve Lew, "take a swig of this
and finish it if you can. You’ll be feverish soon."

Abashed and uneasy, Paul Trent, instead of putting out his
hand to take the proffered liquour, addressed himself nervously
to Crummie. "You’d better not come any further, Miss Geard,"
he said. "They’ll have taken your mother off by this time. You’d
better make straight for Wirral. Depend on it you’ll find her
there now. That’s just how people come to grief, wading madly
through the water to get to their homes."

But Crummie tossed these words aside. "Drink what he gives
you, when you have the chance," she said, "and don’t be silly."

Under the weight of the combined authority of father and
daughter Paul Trent received the brandy from the Mayor and
put it to his lips. Deep and long did he drink; and when he re-
turned the flask his voice had a very different tone. "Avanti!" he
cried. "Let’s get into any boat that can carry us, and do some
more roof-climbing!"

The last few hours in the life of Paul Trent had been more
stirring and exciting than any he had ever known; and there
came now to both father and daughter one of the queerest sen-
sations they had ever known when from the raised footpath under
the great Tithe Barn they actually encountered those rushing
waters. The first sight of that brownish flood, flecked with foam
that had ceased to be foam, foam that had become a whitish
scum entangled with every sort of floating refuse, was something
that no one who saw it could forget until the day of his death,
More dramatic sights, more tragic sights might follow, and did
follow for both Bloody Johnny and his daughter that day, but it
was that first impression of the power of the waters that sank
into the girl’s mind and returned to her afterward, again and
again, to the last hour of her consciousness. The things that she
saw floating upon that turbid flood were what lodged themselves
most in Crummie’s mind. Dead puppies, dead kittens, dead chick-
ens, children’s dolls, children’s toys, bits of broken furniture,
pieces of furniture that were not broken but were upside down
and horribly disfigured--such were some of the objects she
caught sight of, as they stood on that stone-flagged curb with
the flood swirling at their feet. She saw towel-horses and laundry
baskets. She saw wicker cradles, and pitiful wooden chairs with
their legs in the air. And these were only a few of the intimate
utensils of human life that were exposed in that primeval inde-
cency to the eye of the onlooker as the eddying torrent whirled
them forward. Fire is the great devourer; but it is so swift and
deadly with its blinding flames and suffocating smoke, that it
spreads a kind of vacuum round it, a psychic vacuum, created
by the annihilating suction of that Heraclitean force which is the
beginning and the end of all life. Water, on the other hand,
except in the wildest tempests at sea, kills more calmly, paralyses
more slowly; and the terror that it creates does not shrivel up
the normal nerves of our human awareness. For this very reason
the slow ghastliness of death by water seems more natural to
humanity than the swift horror of death by fire.

It was a quaint example of the obstinate self-assertion of
human beings that now, as they were waiting there, Paul Trent
took upon himself to point out that a flood was the sort of occa-
sion when governments and states showed what frauds they were.
"There’ll be a boat this way in a minute," he said, "but it’ll be
rowed by private people, not the soldiers!" The lawyer’s teeth-
chatterings and shiverings had ceased after that deep drink from
the Mayor’s flask. "It’s like Venice. It’s like waiting for a gon-
dola," he chuckled with a leer.

Bloody Johnny’s bare head was bent forward a little as he
fronted the rushing, swirling torrent at his feet, but his eyes
were turned westward in their deep sockets, and were staring
intently at the corner of Silver Street, round which the expected
boat seemed most likely to appear. Crummie stooped down and
turned up several times the bottoms of her father's black trou-
sers, revealing his loose, bedraggled bootlaces. ‘There’s a boat!
There’s two of ’em!" cried Mr. Geard. Two boats did indeed
now appear, shooting round the corner of Silver Street with a
great deal of splashing and shouting. Both were rowed, in spite
of the anarchist’s prediction, by a soldier; but in one of them
was a large and huddled group of sobbing children, while in the
other, a much bigger boat, save for the figures of Lily and Louie
Rogers clinging tightly to each other in the stern, there was no-
body at all.

The young soldier who was rowing the large boat was evi-
dently totally unused to handling oars and it was his clumsiness,
angrily rebuked by the older man in the crowded boat, that pro-
duced the splashing and confusion. Every time his oar slipped,
or got caught between the rushing water and the wooden rowlock,
Lily would turn an appealing glance, like the gaze of a Christian
Martyr in an early Victorian print, towards the older soldier
whom the helpless oarsman seemed to be addressing as corporal.

"Tike the lidy aboard, Bill!" now commanded the corporal.
"Tike the two gents as well. Blime me! Do ’ee think yer goin’ to
do nothink but row young lidies? Do 'ee think yer in Wyemouth
Bye, of a Satur-die arternoon? Tike the three on ’em aboard at
once! Pull with yer other oar, ye bleedin’ bibe! The other one,
yer prize fool, the other one. Gawd damn yer! Yer'll brike that
oar to bits in a jiffy. Stand up, yer fool! Stand up, and pull it
out o’ the bloody water! Gawd, Almighty! was there ever such
a ninny born of man’s ’oly seed!"

The martyrised glances of Lily, lovely in her pallor, seemed
to increase the bewilderment of the hapless young soldier even
more than the abuse of his corporal. Three times the big canal-
boat from Bridgewater was carried by the flood past the place
where the three stood. At the fourth attempt, when it looked as if
the corporal, purple with rage, would soon be upsetting his own
load of now screaming children, Paul Trent, wading up to his
knees in the brown flood, clambered into the boat. What have
you done with your mistress?" he threw out hurriedly to the
sisters Rogers as he regained his balance.

"Miss Drew couldn’t leave her things, Sir," murmured Lily
faintly. Once inside the unwieldy craft--for there were other
oars under its seats--the lawyer had no difficulty in bringing it
so close to their vantage ground that both father and daughter
could clamber in without entering the water. Both Mr. Geard and
Crummie were staggered at the sight that awaited them when the
keel of their boat grounded at last in the trodden mud at the foot
of Wirral Hill.

All Glastonbury seemed to have taken refuge on this eminence
and there were terrific hummings and dronings from the air and
frantic screams from the hillside, and wild contradictory cries
from both above and below, as several private airplanes and a
couple of capacious military aircraft landed and re-started again
in a roped-off enclosure. In fact the whole of the southern por-
tion of Wirral Hill had been by that time taken over by the
authorities and it was perhaps the best distraction that the terri-
fied children of Glastonbury could possibly have had, the thrill
of watching these constant landings and departures and seeing
so many soldiers. Army tents had already been put up and sack-
cloth shelters; and the whole hillside was a tumultuous scene of
confusion. Parents with convulsed faces and distracted wits were
rushing about looking for children they had lost, and a wildly
struggling crowd kept fighting to get to the flood’s edge at the
arrival of every boatload that reached the hill from the sub-
merged portions of the town. It was the aged town clerk, strug-
gling among the crowd at the water’s edge, who was the messen-
ger sent by Mrs. Geard to bring them to the tent the officials had
set apart for her, and Crummie was so caught up out of herself
by the wild scene before her, that she kissed the old gentleman
when he turned to her from some altercation that he was having
with a small boy. "What’s that?" she asked, noticing in Mr.
Bishop’s hands a curiously bound book that looked as if it had
been floating in the flood for several hours. "A boy here picked
it up out of the water," replied the old man gravely. "It’s about
pardoning sin; but I’ve lost my glasses."

As Bloody Johnny stepped from the boat upon the slope of
Wirral Hill he first glanced back at the level expanse of brown
water and then turned and surveyed the singular scene of shock-
ing disorder and scrambling confusion which that familiar grassy
eminence offered to his view. It was indeed a unique spectacle.
Its movement and agitation carried an aura completely different
from anything he had ever seen. It was not like a fair at Yeovil.
It was not like a military field day at Dorchester. It was not like
a scene on Weymouth Beach. On the other hand it was not like a
refuge camp in war, famine, or pestilence. A certain minority of
the younger people there--especially lads between seventeen and
twenty whose relatives were in no danger--were evidently hugely
enjoying the excitement. But the queer thing was that everyone
seemed to carry some flood-mark about them. Their clothes were
wet or they were mud-stained, or some particular article of attire
was missing. They would have resembled the inhabitants of a
town escaping from a bombardment save that the fear of water ,
the flood-panic, evokes an utterly different atmosphere from the
fear of bursting shells or exploding bombs. A flood-panic is a
steady and continuous presence lacking in the expectancy of any-
thing crashing or deafening. A flood-panic is essentially a silent
thing; and in this respect has nothing of the wild distraction of a
shipwreck, or of an ocean-storm, or of a mob-riot.

"Out of the way there, please!" Two men were lifting a wom-
an’s body from a boat to the land. The Mayor recognized Dr. Fell
as one of them and he laid his hand on his arm. The doctor
greeted him; and addressed by name the man at the dead wom-
an’s feet. "Stop a bit, Dickery, it’s Mr. Geard!"

No one knew better than Dickery Cantle who it was, but he
was so dazed and stupefied that all he could do was to tighten his
hold upon the ankles of his burden, as if Mr. Geard were a
body-snatcher.

"I’ve been trying to revive her for an hour, Geard," went on
Dr. Fell, "but it’s no use. She’s out of it God! I wish I were!"

But Bloody Johnny did not hear him. If he had said "I've
decided to take those tablets tonight and end the whole thing,"
the Mayor would not have heard him. The Mayor’s attention was
rivetted upon the body in their arms which was of extraordinary
beauty, though a bloody scar from a recent fall crpssed her
forehead.

"Who is she," asked Mr. Geard. "I don’t know her. She has a
lovely face. Who is she?"

"She’s Jenny Morgan. She’s the mother of that little girl Nelly.
She’s the woman Red Robinson wrote about in the Gazette till
you stopped him. She was Mr. Crow’s girl at one time."

"Is the child drowned too?"

The doctor shook his head. "This poor creature wouldn’t have
been drowned if she hadn’t been practically dead-drunk. She was
fishing things out of the water at the end of Dye House Lane.
Her little girl was with her."

"Where’s the child now?" As he asked this question Mr. Geard
noticed that some small insect, a minute beetle or fly it was, with
tiny yellow stripes, was moving gingerly across the dead girl’s
face just as it would have done over a leaf or a stone. He flicked
it off with his finger-nail. That she couldn’t feel that small tick-
ling seemed stranger than that she couldn’t open her big eyes.

"The child’s with Comrade Robinson and his wife," replied the
doctor. "Nelly knows those two very well; better than she ever
knew this beautiful creature, I expect. Well! you died the easiest
death, my dear, that anyone could die, just as easy as--" Dr.
Fell’s mind wandered off from the calm face where the dark-
fringed eyelids were covering those eyes that had always seemed
too wide, as if they were forever seeing the things that normal
people dodge, and he was thinking in his heart: "It’s funny...
but I believe I’ve got a real idea while I’ve been holding this
girl. Why don’t I just simply leave Bibby in the house and take
lodgings with this chap Dickery? Dave Spear lives there; and
why shouldn’t I? I could keep my clinic."

As he thought of this, and imagined the triumphant way in
which he would lock up his consulting room in Manor House
Road every time he left it, he suddenly caught upon Mr. Geard’s
face the most extraordinary expression he had ever seen on the
countenance of any human being. Bloody Johnny had raised his
hand again to the dead woman, this time to re-arrange a fold of
her dress which her rescuers in their attempts to save her had
disarranged. But no sooner had his hand encountered that ice-
cold exposed bosom than he left it there, lying like a heavy horse-
mushroom on the girl’s breast. And with his hand resting there
his face took upon itself the very expression of this dead woman.
His eyes closed. His jaw fell open. His nostrils grew pinched and
thin. Certain lines disappeared from his face altogether and
certain completely new ones showed themselves.

"Are you faint? Are you ill, Mr. Geard?" The doctor could
not let go his hold upon Jenny Morgan, but the sound of his
quick, anxious voice seemed enough without anything else to
deliver the other from this curious sort of fit. His eyes flickered
and opened, his nostrils quivered and expanded, his mouth closed
tightly.

The doctor and Dickery Cantle moved off now with their
burden and Mr. Geard was left standing by the water watching
the manoeuvres of Paul Trent. But Crummie, who had carried Mr.
Bishop off to ask him about her mother and had learned that
Lord Brent had put aside one of the officers' tents for the Mayor-
ess, now returned and asked who that woman was and whether
she was dead. Her father dodged her questions about the dead
girl and told her to thank Paul Trent and say good-bye to him.
Paul Trent was still engaged in a struggle to be allowed to keep
the big Bridgewater boat, but Crummie noticed that after he'd
deposited Lily and Louie safely on the muddy grass he turned
out the young soldier too. "Take these young ladies to the top of
the hill, my lad," he commanded, "and give them something hot
to drink. Hi there! You look as if you could row! Come on in
here and let's push off!"

His words were addressed to none other than Tommy Chin-
nock. "Sure I can row, Mister Trent! Sure I can! I larned it
down to Bridport when I were wi' uncle. I can row with two oars
if I be wanted to!"

Paul Trent was considerate enough, however, to wait for the
arrival of the young soldier's superior officer before finally dis-
missing him.

"Please yourself, Sir," conceded this authority. "Please your-
self; and tike them lidies to their famblies, stright now, Thomp-
son; this ain't no bloomin' esplanade."

When they reached the tent that had been allotted to Mrs.
Geard, she certainly embraced her husband and daughter with
more emotion than she was accustomed to display. Did she feel
any premonition of what was coming? There can be no doubt
that some curious electric telepathy does sometimes link together
the present and the future. Not always, however! That mysterious
act of the human will, that resembles creation out of nothing and
that every living soul shares with its begetter, the First Cause,
has the power of breaking up and completely altering any fatal
series in the mysterious streams of causative energy. But so pow-
erful, in Bloody Johnny's case, was his desire to die, so strong
was his conviction that his Master had resolved that he should
die, that this arbitrary wilful power in his nature could naturally
be discounted in advance. This being the case, while for Mrs.
Geard and for Fred Thompson, the soldier who could not row,
and for Nancy Stickles and for Young Tewsy, the future might
be malleable, for Mr. Geard the future was decided--and decided
entirely by himself.

"Well, my chicks," he now remarked with an easy sigh. "I
can't stay all day with you up here in this elegant tent. Bugger
me black, but these officer-lads know how to make themselves
comfortable! Is this the sleeping quarters they've given us?
'Tisn't like whoam, ha?...but it's all shipshape. Well! I'm
off, my pretties. There'll only be need for one night for'ee up
here. I know that. So tomorrow you'll be back in the old bed,
Megan."

He looked queerly at his wife as he said this, weighing to him-
self what she would feel tomorrow night without her John. The
man's detachment just then was so abysmal that he could even
conjure up the way she would go about the house without him,
and how in the midst of her bewildered grief she would get com-
fort in thinking out every detail of his funeral, including the very
smallest matters, such as whether to bury him in one of his old
flannel shirts, or to use one of her best linen counterpanes. She
would wonder, too, he felt sure, whether to let Crummie wear
her new black hat, which was black, but not mourning-black, or
whether to buy her a real funeral one at Wollop's!

"Well, I'm off," he repealed, but, instead of departing, he took
his seat on a shaky camp-stool and pulled Crummie down upon
his knees. "'Tisn't every man o' my age," he murmured, using,
as he always did when he was upset, the old Montacute accent,
"has a darter as pretty as you be and unmarried, too, and a com-
fort to thee's wold parents."

"Well, if you be going to go, John, ye best go now," said
Megan crossly. She never liked it when Crummie sat on her
father's lap and she was afraid now that the soldiers could see
into the tent. She was unpacking her old black vanity-bag at that
moment, into which she had stuffed all manner of alien objects,
and the way she did this, trying to make herself at home under
these weird conditions, and glancing at herself in the little mirror
she took out, and pushing back her grey hairs with both her
hands under her lilac bonnet, struck Bloody Johnny with a sud-
den rush of overpowering tenderness.

"Don't'ee forget, my precious," he blurted out, addressing
his wife from behind Crummie's white neck, which filled his nos-
trils with a faint, sweet smell, as of new-mown hay, "don't'ee
forget to go every month now, and draw that monthly annuity
I've arranged for Bob Stilly to pay'ee. I be liable, 'tis a great
sin, but so it is with me, to get so lost in me work at Town's End
that my memory baint what it used to be."

"What are you talking about, John? There be no need for us
to go to bank, as long as these councilmen bring your salary in
a chamois-leather case like they've always done. What are you
thinking about? You ain't going to try rescuing folk, be'ee, in
one of them tipply boats?"

"No, no. That's all right, my angel. I only meant--I only
mentioned--I'm not going to get into any boat--don't'ee think
it!--only I've got things to see to. After all, I be Mayor, my
treasure; and mayors be like captains of ships; they don't sit in
cabins. They go on deck."

Crummie slipped off his knee and faced him. "I won't have
you going anywhere, Dad!" she cried with flashing eyes. Moth-
er's quite right. Your place is with us when things be as terrible
as they be today."

Bloody Johnny got up slowly and stiffly. His expression was
such that Crummie yielded at once. The voices that reached their
ears through that tent door were of a kind that he had never
thought to hear in Glastonbury. Some woman was now screaming
pitifully, someone was dragging her away. "Good-bye till to-
night, my chicks," he said in a low voice. "I suppose," he added
to Crummie, "your mother and I are to sleep in there...and
you are to sleep here? Is that how they've fixed it up? Well--
the same earth will be under all our beds, I reckon, wherever
we sleep. Don't'ee be afeared! I won't be long."

He moved aside the flap of the tent and went out. There was
no sign of the woman he had heard screaming; but he noticed, as
he emerged, that some kind of orderly had been placed at the
entrance, with the idea, evidently, of keeping less privileged
homeless persons from encroaching upon the Mayor's privacy.

"A bad business, Sir," said the man, peering past Bloody
Johnny into the interior of the tent. The psychology of refuge
camps had already begun to work, and the beauty of Crummie's
person had not been missed by this guardian of her retreat.

"All life's a funny business, lad," replied Mr. Geard; and
then, fumbling in his pocket, he produced one of the councils
half-pound notes. "Put this in your pocket, boy," he said, "and
don't let anyone frighten the ladies. I'll be back soon."

"Oh, Mother, Mother, what shall we do?" cried the girl, when
the tent-flap swung back and the two were left alone, "I don't
believe we'll ever see him again!"

Megan Geard hugged the agitated young woman to her heart,
a thing she had not done--not in this solemn way--since Crum-
mie was a small child. "We must pray for him, my pet. Don't
'ee take on so; don't 'ee, Crum! The good Lord be above all
still."

No one took the least notice of the burly bare-headed man in
his old greenish-black coat and his turned-up shiny black trou-
sers, as he hurried off down the hillside towards the surging
crowd at the flood's edge. There happened to be a very small
boat emptying itself of a lanky young labourer from Paradise
who was carrying an infant child.

"It's my boat," growled the youth sulkily, as Mr. Geard, push-
ing impetuously through the crowd, snatched up the oars.

"It was your boat," replied the Mayor; but he added more
kindly, a second after, as he pushed one of the oarblades deep
into the grass to steady the little craft while he stepped into it.

If you can find anyone to take your child, sonny, ask for the
Mayor's tent and tell Mrs. Geard that Mr. Geard said--"

His voice was lost in the arrival of a big flat barge, punted by
Sam and his father, each armed with an enormous pole. It was a
hay-barge from the Brue; and the Dekkers, after having been
twice upset out of less solid craft, had at last found a vessel
suited to both their weight and their strength. Water dripped
from their drenched clothes. Sweat poured from their tired faces.
But the impression that Mr. Geard received from them both was
that of an exultant happiness.

It is a recurrent phenomenon in the affairs of men that certain
emotional conflicts, which no normal events can affect nor any
spontaneous efforts alter, are brought to an end, reconciled, har-
monised, blotted out, by some startling elemental catastrophe. It
was not until they both had been working desperately for some
hours at rescuing marooned people that the father and son met,
but when once they had met--without a word having been spoken
between them of a personal character--it was taken for granted
by both of them that they should remain together. Once in pos-
session of this huge hay-barge they began picking up the terri-
fied and stranded people from their flooded houses in far larger
numbers than any other rescuers, except, perhaps, those who used
the motor-boat from Bridgewater.

It gave Mr. Geard, in the midst of all the conflicting emotions
that were surging through him, a feeling of puzzled satisfaction
to confront this glowing emanation of primeval life-zest. He
looked at the two big men in amused wonder. They seemed drunk
with delight at simply being together. Strong and deep love be-
tween a father and a son is not rare. But the maudlin, doting,
inebriated rapture of these two as they helped their tottering
cargo to disembark, for it had been people from the old men's
almshouse they had been rescuing, seemed the most extreme
example of such a feeling that Mr. Geard had ever encountered.

The Dekkers were both completely exhausted. It was easy to
see that. But the passionate surge of life-joy which they revealed,
hauling, dragging, heaving, lifting, balancing and wading, was
something that carried a curious and special elation to Bloody
Johnny's mind. It was no easy task to get their cargo of aged
and feeble almshousemen out of their barge and on to the land;
and some of the old people looked quite dazed and at the end of
their tether. But Mr. Geard, taking hold of one of his own oars
with both hands, was able to give the stern of the big barge a
most timely propulsion, for which Sam, who was nearest to him,
gave him a grateful nod.

"Thank you, Sir! That's just right. One more shove and you'll
get us in."

Mr. Geard repeated his effort, but being not much more skil-
ful at these manoeuvres than young Private Thompson, there was
no small danger of his falling headfront into the water between
the boat and the barge. Sam, however, caught at his oar-blade
and flung him back. He collapsed across the seat of his tiny
skiff, but the little tub righted itself, and all was well.

"Look'ee here, Mr. Mayor, what my father insisted on put-
ting in!" Taking advantage of Mat Dekker's lifting one of the old
men out and wading with him through the water, Sam stooped
down in the stern of the barge and lifted up a rabbit-hutch.
"Three lop-ears and one little black one!" he shouted above the
uproar. "The Vicarage, you know, is high and dry; and I think
Miss Drew's all right, though her servants got panicky. I saw
them perched on their drive gate calling to every boat that
passed. But I'll have to hang on to this hutch till Father goes
home. We found it in the water near Backwear Hut, where Abel
Twig lives. We couldn't see anything of the old man. We punted
far out of our way till we were quite close to his place. But noth-
ing except the chimneys could we see. It's so near the river. The
water's terribly deep there. All you can see are a few mounds--
the Ancient British mounds." All these remarks Sam shouted to
Mr. Geard as the current of the flood swept between them and
carried the latter's little boat away.

Bloody Johnny nodded farewell to him as he took his oars
firmly in his hands and set himself to row in the direction of
those Ancient British mounds. He rowed directly towards the
river which he realised he could easily follow by reason of its
swifter current, and which he knew, after it had skirted Beckery
and Paradise, would lead him near Lake Village Field. What
Sam had said about Abel Twig's rabbit-hutch and about the old
man's chimneys being all that was visible had been accepted by
Bloody Johnny as an omen sent by his Master. "Rescue Abel
wig," he muttered to himself, "Rescue Abel Twig "

He was now resolutely set upon dying, set upon dying before
night fell. He did not think of this as suicide. The thought of
suicide never once crossed even that nimbus of feeling which
connects the double horns of the mind, like the old moon within
he crescent of the new moon. Mr. Geard had the peculiarity of
believing absolutely and without question in the existence of the
next world. He also knew for certain, by the evidence of personal
experience, that a living Being, who might, or might not, be the
Christ the churches worshipped, awaited his presence in what he
called "the. next dream." Mr. Geard had been made to understand
by the mediumship of this Being, that conditions of life after the
death of the body were immeasurably superior to those now ex-
isting. He had also been promised that this Being would meet
him face to face and would satisfy to the full the accumulated
erotic desires, at once mystical and sensual, which were the
master-craving of his nature.

Not long after Mr. Geard's death, not long after the sifting
out of all these dramatic events, one of the cleverest women psy-
chologists of our time brought forward an interpretation of the
man's mood on this fatal day that deserves to be recorded. Ac-
cording to this view of his feelings during these last hours of his
life, the stress ought to be laid upon the curious pathological
necessity, under which he was known to labour, of actually shar-
ing with all his bodily nerves the physical suffering of those
around him. This authority hesitated not to point out that in the
case of Tittie, and in the case of the idiot-boy outside the Pil-
grims', and in the case of Owen Evans in the hospital, the man
had been seen to display actual physical signs of suffering ex-
actly parallel to those endured by Mrs. Petherton, and by the
boy, and by Mr. Evans as he told his stupendous story. The
amazing--but surely not impossible explanation--offered by this
penetrating woman is that a violent psychic radiation from all
the minds of the twenty-seven people, including children, who
were actually drowned during those twelve ghastly hours riddled
Mr. Geard's hyper-sensitised and super-porous sympathy with
what might be called the drowning-spasm, and produced in him
a craving for death by drowning that really amounted to a kind
of drowning-hypnosis. This brilliant writer points out further,
in regard to the mystery of the death of Geard of Glastonbury,
that his growing preoccupation with the Grail Fount on Chalice
Hill was itself a hydro-philiastic obsession. While many patho-
logical subjects, this writer maintains, seek a pre-natal peace in
death, what Mr. Geard in his planetary consciousness desired
was a return to that remote and primal element of Water, which
was literally the great maternal womb of all organic earth-life.
It was this woman's far-fetched pamphlet that with its use of
pathological technical terms had such a large share in turning
the attention of intellectual people away from the religious as-
pects of the problem.

What Bloody Johnny was really struggling with, however, as
he splashed along in his frail tub, past the outskirts of Beckery
and of Paradise till he reached the swirling current of the flood-
swamped river, was his love for Megan and Crummie. Of Cor-
delia he hardly thought at all; though it must be confessed that
a faint and clinging sweetness, like a fragrance within a fra-
grance, drew his mind now and then towards the figure of Lady
Rachel.

It was painful to him to condemn his wife and daughter--left
up there on Wirral Hill in that strange camp tent--to what he
knew well enough would be a pitiful if not a rending shock. Over
and over again he placed the alternatives before himself--to go
on with his life and spare them this blow, or to follow the de-
vouring death-lust which had gathered upon him and ruthlessly
plunge them into this human loss.

He was in the river current now, flowing westward in furious
angry eddies which the incoming sea tide forced back upon them-
selves. In spite of the roll of the great flood eastward, as soon as
he reached the centre of the river the current swept him west-'
ward, rocking his tiny skiff in the most threatening manner and
rendering it totally unnecessary for a while even to attempt to
use his oars. So he just pulled them in and let them lie across
the little boat in front of his big stomach. '

Mr. Geard's character will never be understood--or the mon-
strous inhumanity of his departure from the visible world con-
doned--until it is realised that the unruffled amiability and the
unfailing indulgence of his attitude to those near and dear to him
concealed a hidden detachment from them that had always been
an unbridged gulf.

The mass and volume of his being was composed of a weight
of cold phlegmatic substance that was always sinking down, by
a weird gravitational pull, to a species of preorganic cosmic
inertia. His great moments came when this heavy inertness, pull-
ing him down into the silt and slime of the chemical basis of
life, was roused to activity by his erotic mysticism. For the truth
is that the psychic-sensual life-lust in Mr. Geard was always
being lulled to dormant quiescence under the weight of his slug-
gish physical nature. The spirit within him needed to be roused
and stirred up, before it could feel really alive, by some super-
formidable and super-dramatic Quest. Such a Quest had been his
passion for the Grail Fount; till that Welshman's question about
Arthur had confused his mind.

But he was weary of all that now; and if his nature was not to
sink back into its heavier elements of sluggish neutral indiffer-
ence, he must get into closer contact with his invisible Master
than was possible in this "muddy vesture' of earth-life!

He was muttering to himself now as his little boat began
whirling round and round in one of these dangerous confluences
where the salt flood met the river's current. Ha! The ocean smell
was in his nostrils, and there in the water, whirling round with
his cockle-shell boat, was an authentic piece of white seaweed!
He stretched out one of his plump hands--his left hand it was--
to clutch this bit of seaweed, his mind racing back to old childish
days at Weymouth Beach. This would have been the end of him;
for the water was very deep here, and Mr. Geard had never
learned to swim; but at the moment he began this stretching ges-
ture which--carried an inch further would have upset his boat--
the river current defeated the sea flood, and swept him on, out of
the dangerous circle of that vortex, and carried him forward with
increasing rapidity towards Lake Village Great Field. He had lost
the white seaweed; but he had escaped being drowned by an ac-
cident. But what was this? Something vast and glittering swept
into view in the very midst of the river.

A portion of Philip's new bridge! Torn from its shaft holes in
the mud banks, and dragged, steel and scaffolding and crossbeams
and all, into the centre of the torrent, this towering symbol of the
power of Capital, of the power of Science, was now the sport of
what looked like a mocking, mischievous, taunting cuckoo-spit
out of Chaos itself!

Mr. Geard neither smiled, nor chuckled, nor congratulated
himself at this surprising sight. He just surveyed it with a lively,
objective, inquisitive interest, an interest worthy of Bert Cole or
of Timothy Wollop.

But the apparition of this costly piece of wreckage served to
divert the drifting of the boat that carried him, sweeping it, as
the two objects collided, across the submerged northern bank of
the Brue towards the middle of Lake Village Field.

Here the water was a little shallower; but still quite deep
enough to drown a man whose height was not over six feet, and
in special hollows on the edges of the mounds much deeper
than that.

Mr. Geard now re-claimed possession of his oars, thrusting
them into the row-locks and pulling energetically towards all he
could see of the dwelling of Abel Twig.

Yes, Sam Dekker was right. There was not much else than the
chimney of Backwear Hut, together with a small fragment of its
roof, visible across the surface of a mud-coloured lake, above
which its brickwork showed almost black. But several of the
bigger mounds of the old Lake Village were still visible, their
round tops protruding from the waste of waters like diseased
excrescences on the wrinkled surface of a vast brown leaf.

But Mr. Geard found himself confronted now by several ob-
jects more exciting to a human brain, lodged in a wooden tub on
a brown flood, than mere chimney-tops. He became aware that
upon the largest of these Lake Village mounds there were living
figures, consisting, as far as he could make out, of a man, a
child, and an animal, among whom the man and the child were
desperately summoning him to their aid. There was something
floating in the water too, with a dark object clinging to it that
was also waving to him.

So detached was the man's mind at this juncture, with his own
life and death held in the balance, that he found himself in the
coolest and calmest fashion comparing the scene before him with
an old Bible picture of the Flood which used to obsess his mind
as a little boy at Town's End in Montacute. Here, again, the dif-
ference between water and fire rose up and manifested itself !
Had the element that threatened the lives of all these living
creatures been fire, there would have been such an automatic beat
of panic fear in his pulses that such mental detachment as he now .
felt, would have been impossible.

Living spirits they were--he and these two gesticulating fig-
ures--each one of them with a whole world of clear-cut feelings,
images, memories. And now, against them, this swirling brown
mass of water, this enormous entity without consciousness, or
purpose, or feeling, or pity, was gathering itself up to obliterate
in one swallowing gulp of drowning suction, everything, every-
one--until blackness alone remained.

Blackness? But what was he thinking? It was not to gain
blackness that he was choosing to die rather than to live this day!
Or was it? Was what he fancied to be his superhuman mania for
heightened life in reality a secret longing to plunge into the dark
abyss of non-existence?

Mr. Geard now allowed his oars to rest on the water, which
was comparatively calm just here, and hoisting himself up on
the palms of his big hands endeavoured to get a clear sense of
what confronted him, before he took any action. "Why didn't
the Dekkers see those two?" he thought. "That barge of theirs
must have come from the other side of the Hut and unless they
were so occupied with their rabbit-hutch "

He could now observe that the ground beyond the Hut, on the
further side of Godney Road rose up well out of the water; and
it occurred to him that a strong swimmer, from any of these
mound-islands, could reach dry land without much difficulty.

"Bugger me black!" he muttered to himself, "if there isn't a
man on that floating thing over there!"

With distended eyes he surveyed this man astride of the out-
stretched wing of what he now recognized as the Crow airplane.
Yes, it was Philip himself! Drawn by an irresistible instinct to-
wards his steel flying machine and his steel bridge, the manu-
facturer had done exactly what Mr. Geard had been thinking
a spirited man might do, he had swum from the high ground
above Godney Road--which he had managed somehow to reach
on foot--and had got hold of the airplane. The unlucky thing
was that when he got there he found himself seized with such an
evil cramp in both his legs as rendered him totally hors-de-
combat.

Seeing the man clinging so helplessly to the wing of his sub-
merged machine, Mr. Geard naturally supposed that, like him-
self, Philip was no swimmer. Without thinking very much about
it he vaguely took it for granted that the manufacturer had tried
to land from the air in the darkness of last night, and had found
water where he had expected to find grass.

"He must have been hours in the water, poor devil!" thought
Mr. Geard. "I'll deal with him first and let the ones on the mound
go for a while." He began--after his curious fashion--to shiver
and shake just as he imagined the man in the water must be
doing, after so long an immersion! Why it was that he began to
experience, as he gazed at him, an extremely unpleasant feeling
in his legs, was more than he could explain.

He now proceeded to row straight up to the floating airplane;
a movement which evoked cries of disappointment and then a
miserable silence from the man and the boy on the mound. But
Philip received him with a smile of intense gratitude. The rival
kings of Avalon met thus at last on what was certainly a spot--
though it could scarcely be called a ground--of undeniable
neutrality.

"I don't think she's seriously injured," was Philip's charac-
teristic remark as Mr. Geard clutched at the edge of the great
protruding wing and steadied his cockle-shell craft.

"Legs hurt?" panted Mr. Geard, thinking of the man rather
than of his machine.

"The bridge is down," went on Philip, his face giving a con-
vulsive, involuntary twinge as he dragged himself a little further
out of the water. Being a Crow, this twinge, which was repeated
every time he made this least movement, took the form of the
twitching nerve in John's face. Mr. Geard thought of John as he
saw this twitching face above the water-line.

"I'm glad he's safe out of this anyway, the poor lad," he said
to himself.

"Legs hurt?" he repeated, refusing to join this builder of
bridges in his present straining effort to get a glimpse of that
steel wreck.

"I've got a devilish cramp," murmured Philip.

"You swam out here?"

The manufacturer nodded. "Only from just over there," he
said. "From just beyond the road. I've got cramp," he repeated.

"We'll deal with it," said Mr. Geard, "presently. Only first we
must change places. It's only your legs, eh? Your arms are all
right?"

Philip re-assured him about his arms with a feeble smile.

"There are people on those mounds," went on Mr. Geard.
"When we've got you safe to land, we'll cope with that trouble.
But one thing at a time is my motto--and I daresay it's yours
too. We're agreed anyway there. And I think we're agreed too,
Mr. Crow, whatever folk may say, on one other thing."

"What's that, Mr. Mayor?" enquired the twitching white face
above the airplane's wing.

Bloody Johnny noticed that the water had been washing so
long in the same place--for the man's legs hurt him at the
slightest move--that it had deposited a sort of windrow of
minute bits of scum and weed across Philip's neck. A bit of
green dyke-scum clung, too, to one corner of the man's mustache,
producing an effect that was unpleasantly grotesque. But Mr.
Geard's mind had already forgotten what it was; this second
point upon which their characters agreed!

"What we've got to do now, Mister," announced Bloody John-
ny from his seat in his coracle--and the jostling in the water
of these two vessels, the boat and the aircraft, were like the com-
ing together of two aeons of time--"is to change places! You've
got to get into my boat...and I've got to get into your airplane!"

Philip smiled a rather sickly and tantalised smile.

"You've come to mock me, Mr. Mayor! When I first saw you
coming I thought, here's someone who'll pick me up, but I see
now that your little tub couldn't possibly hold-- Well, off with
you! And if--"

"Thats just what I say," remarked Geard of Glastonbury, and
without more ado, he began divesting himself of his coat, his
trousers and his drawers.

Philip, with the green weed hanging from his mustache and
his neck surrounded by a windrow of scum, contemplated these
movements with astonishment. There was even a faint glint of
class-conscious physical distaste in his white flood-dirtied face
as he beheld, so shamelessly displayed before him, the private
parts of the tenant of Cardiff Villa.

But Mr. Geard now pulled himself close to the wing of the
airplane and peered down into the water where the other man's
cramped legs were twisted between him.

"Are you standing on anything?" he asked.

Philip did not seem to hear this question. The wrinkles of his
forehead as he hoisted himself a little out of the water showed a
swift, violent, interior conflict.

"If I take his offer," he thought, "I'll get into the town and
have him picked up much quicker than he could do it for me.
The fellow's no more good at rowing a boat than he is at spend-
ing a fortune! Damn! I suppose the noble thing to do would be
to refuse his help. But what if I get cramp in my belly? My
plane's ruined. My bridge is down. My road is sunk. Not an
ounce of tin in Wookey for the last three weeks. That Birming-
ham man thought the whole vein's exhausted. The new dye works
--all that these demons have left me--a foot deep in water!
What have I got to live for?"

But the hard, narrow, invincible back portion of his skull vis-
ualised the new start of his career as if it were a steam-tug in
this brown littered water!

"Begin again," he thought to himself; "and to Hell with mock-
heroism! Geard and I are two beasts fighting for our lives. I
know it. He doesn't know it! His soft, crazy idealisms, his I-am-
the-one-to-give-my-life-for-my-enemy, is simply his handicap in
our struggle. If the man does drown before I get back, it'll only
prove that he preferred his ideal gestures to life. I prefer nothing
to life. Oh, to the devil with these haverings!" In Philip's secret
heart was a blind confidence in the airplane as equal to this crisis.
He had so closely identified himself with this potent, yet pliable
structure, that below all practical reasoning he had a superstitious
faith in the spirit of his machine to outmatch the elements.

If any of those invisible Watchers of human psychology in
Glastonbury had been overlooking these two just now--the man
in the coracle and the man in the water--a lively discussion
might have risen among them as to which of the two was the
stronger lover of life.

"Begin over again!" This was the cry of the man in the water,
with the yellowish scum adhering to his neck and a weft of dead
seaweed--the kind that has on it those slippery blown-out pus-
tules that children love to pinch between their fingers--caught in
his hair, and the wisp of green sea-gluten twisted into his mus-
tache. And this "Begin again!" was the out-jetting of the inmost
essence of his nature. As he formulated this "Begin again!" the
image of a steam-tug crossing this swirling flood, with a resolute
tick...tick...tick...of its engines, became the image of his recovery
in spite of all opposition.

But Bloody Johnny's exultation as he peered into the water to
see what was beneath his rival's cramped legs was of a very
different sort.

"So this is how I shall do it!" he said to himself, with a con-
vulsive chuckle, a chuckle that caused the pit of his stomach to
flutter up and down like sail-cloth on a beach that is held in its
place by pebble-stones. "What...could...be...better?

A huge dark wave of indescribable emotion rose up from a
psychic reservoir within him that seemed to reduce all this busi-
ness of drowning to a mere splash of rain.

"Megan...Crummie...forgive me...my treasures!...I won't be divided
from you...I'll be nearer you...but I must drink it...the Water...the
Water of..."

"Standing on anything under there?" he repeated; but again
the muddied hawk-face above that brown tide only twitched wilh
the intensity of its thinking and with the pain of its cramped
legs.

The eyes of the man in the coracle lifted themselves away from
the eyes of the man in the water. Bloody Johnny was always a
person of punctilious scrupulousness when it came to eaves-
dropping; and to watch this face before him just now was eaves-
dropping of the worst sort.

"He'll change with me," Geard thought. "But he don't altogether
relish the situation!"

By the mere mental motion of having chosen death of his own
free will the Mayor fancied he had acquired easily, naturally,
inevitably, an advantage so great over this desperate life-clinger
that he could afford to treat him like a child. Whether in the
eyes of those mysterious Watchers, this fancied advantage of the
death-lust over the life-lust could really establish itself as a ma-
turer, wiser, superior mood, was a very different question! What
is certain is that Bloody Johnny felt himself just then to be like
a grown person dealing with a child. And this was something that
would have certainly astonished Philip had he realised it.

"Are you standing on anything?"

"I'm astride of her wing," said the other. "I expect I could
find more of her if I cared to, only I don't want to press her
down any further than she is."

"You think of your machine as if she had a soul," whispered
Mr. Geard, slipping down over the side of his little craft into
the water.

It may be believed how the coracle of this heavily built ma-
gician leapt up out of the flood when relieved of his weight! It
soon sank again, however, though not as before, to within a few
inches of the row-locks, when Philip, actuated now as much by
a fear lest their combined weights should sink the plane as by
a desire to save himself from drowning, scrambled, groaning and
cursing, for his cramp was cruel, into the empty skiff.

"Don't let go!" he cried as he rowed off. "If you'll only hang
on to her she'll hold up till I send someone. If I can get that
motor-boat--"

As he turned the boat round a shrill cry from the child on the
half-submerged hillock arrested his attention. The sight of this
small figure made him think of his little daughter whose where-
abouts in this disaster had been constantly in his mind during
these agitating hours. "This thing would hold a child all right,"
he thought. But the cramp that contracted his legs was so intense
that the idea of any delay seemed more than he could bear.
"They're in no danger," he said to himself. "It's Geard who's got
to be thought of." He glanced towards the Mayor's large face and
black staring eyes which were a good deal lower in the water
than his own had ever been. But those black eyes had evidently
not missed this moment of indecision; for they flung a look at
him that was like a command. "Best take'un while'ee have the
chance!" came his thick voice out of the water. Philip's cramp
was agonising. His face was contorted with what he endured. Most
men would have crumpled up, moaning and helpless. But the
Norman will in the man--that will that had ruled England since
the Conquest--compelled his arms, though his legs were doubled
up under him, to. perform the motion of rowing, and of rowing
with smooth, powerful, calculated strokes. It only needed a little
adroit steering to avoid the mounds that were almost submerged
and that might have struck the keel of his craft, and a little hard
pulling against a wind that was beginning to ruffle the water, to
reach the big tumulus upon which were collected these living crea-
tures. They were barely known to Philip Crow; hut to many
Glastonbury people they would have been absurdly well known;
for they were Number One's cow, Betsy, Jackie Jones, and Num-
ber One himself.

It was certainly an exciting experience for Jackie Jones when
with his slender figure reposing between the cramped feet of Mr.
Crow he saw himself being rowed rapidly toward the town. "I'll
come back for you," Philip had explained hurriedly to Abel
Twig.

"One of they girt barges, Mister, be the thing I wants," had
been the reply of Number One, "what'll take me wold cow in
'un!"

"Have you seen Nelly Morgan, Jackie?" enquired that young
lady's father with a hesitating shyness as well as an acute anx-
iety, when they were approaching safety.

"Her were out with her Mummy, Mister, picking up Treasure
from where it be washed up."

"Treasure?"

"They things what be washed up, Mister! Us calls'un Treasure
by reason of us being Pirates and Smugglers."

Mr. Geard, low down in the water now, observed his late
coracle flying over the flood propelled by Philip's vigorous
strokes. Between two sheds in the outskirts of Paradise it was just
possible for the submerged man to catch sight of the top of Glas-
tonbury Tor. He had very quickly found that the body of the
airplane kept sinking deeper and deeper in the water under his
heavy weight. He could just rest on it now with his feet, and that
was all. Clenching his teeth he gave it a violent kick. It sank
immediately out of his reach. He was now propped up solely
upon the wing of the machine; but since he was floating in the
water and divested of coat and trousers, a very little support was
enough to keep him up. "Well," he said to himself, "I be the
same Johnny Geard as used to see West Drive and Drive Gates
and Batemoor and Scotch Firs and Yeovil Road. I can see'em
now as clear as I can see this machine wing in this water! And
I be the same what used to follow Father up Park Cover and over
to Pitt, and back by Woodhouse Lane. I be the same what Mother
used to take to Zunday School, longside o' King's Arms." He
fumbled with his hands along the surface of the wing that sup-
ported him.

"Thee be a-drowning, thee be, Johnny Geard, and airplane be
a-drowning, s'know! Thee's rung Montacute Bells in thee's time,
and airplane have been up so high as a'seed Glaston no bigger
nor a waspy's nest."

The plane's wing that supported him now began to sink still
lower in the flood. It sank so low that Mr. Geard's chin was on
a level with the water. He gulped down a mouthful; and this
mouthful tasted like the cold salt sweat of a corpse. This mouth-
ful gave him the first pang of physical shrinking from what he
was doing that he had yet known. This mouthful struck him as
not only a forerunner of choking suffocation, but as carrying
with it a sensation of atrocious strangeness, of ghastly unnatural-
ness, of perfidy, of the unallowed-for! He gulped down his sec-
ond mouthful now; and with the outrage to his whole body that
this gulping of salt death brought, the spasm of strangeness
shivered through him and hummed in his ears and drummed at
his heart Yes, this was the end.

Bloody Johnny lost. All dark. The bed is deep...Where is
Megan's head? Gulp--gulp--gulp-- He was drinking it fast
now; and it was going up his nose too. Yes, it was getting into
some cavity between his nose and his mouth and doing something
there that had the effect of making him gurgle and gargle and
choke and spit. If only this deadly coldness hadn't smelt so vilely!
It smelt of vinegar. And this vinegar was getting into his lungs.
Not to breathe--when you had to breathe! Not to breathe, but to
sink gurgling down; and to see and to touch and to smell and to
taste and to become something that gurgled and gargled and
gulped!

Sinking, that was what he was doing now, gulping and sinking.
That wing had yielded. He had leaned on it with his full weight
and it had gone clear down. Nothing to lean upon. Nothing but
brown darkness that sank under him and sucked and sucked. He
came up to the top now and gasped at the air with heaving in-
drawing spasms. Physical necessity had him by the throat like
the dripping mouth of a dog, of an enormous brown dog. It was
the turn for his face to carry now those blotches of scum and
tidal slime upon it! His black eyes were opened preternaturally
wide, staring across the water. What he stared at now was Glas-
tonbury Tor; and on the top of the Tor was the tower; and the
tower was like the handle of an enormous cloudy goblet that
grew larger and larger and larger--

But down he went again--Geard of Glastonbury--dying his
chosen death by drowning. Yes, it was all at his own volition;
but when the final beating and lashing and threshing with the
arms began, and the final gurgling and gulping in the throat
began, it seemed as if the man's condemned body ran amok and
revolted. Bloody Johnny's body danced, in fact, its own private
death-dance, in brute defiance of the spirit that had brought it to
this pass.

For the last time he came up to the surface. Again his black
eyes opened; opened so wide that anyone would have thought
their sockets must crack. He was staring frantically at Glaston-
bury Tor, but what he was seeing up there now will never be
known.

The books say that Arthur saw the Grail in five different
shapes; and that what the fifth shape was has never been re-
vealed. Perhaps it was this fifth shape now that caused the black
demonic eyes of Bloody Johnny to start out of his head. The feet
treading water where there was now nothing for them to rest
upon; the big white cheeks sinking down, while the water lapped
around them, in the same way as it would have lapped round a
log that was sinking; the sensual mouth opening wide, using just
the same muscles as it did when he was preaching or yawning;
the thick lips with the same abandoned relaxation dividing them,
as it did when he used to kiss Crummie; the heavy shoulders, the
great belly under its soaked flannel shirt, all engulfed, all going
down, all with nothing to rest upon.

The little bubbles of brown water that swam so persistently
round that open mouth and round those staring eyes, behaved
just as they would have done if it had been a waterlogged
chamber-pot rather than a living man full of thoughts "that wan-
dered through eternity." They were in such a hurry, those bub-
bles, to float over the empty space where his head had been.
They could not wait to float freely over that particular space on
the surface of the water. There! They had their will now. Noth-
ing remained now but broken brown bubbles going slowly round
and round in reduced circles; and in an incredible silence!

But great creative Nature, working her vast death-magic, be-
yond the magic of any Merlin, brought it about, in her fathom-
less inhuman compassion, that all suffering, all struggling, all
beating with the arms, all frog-action with the legs, subsided,
collapsed, ceased, fell upon an unbelievably delicious calm. Nor
was Bloody Johnny's mind clouded any more. His body had
made its automatic protest. It was now docile. It was now obedi-
ent. Geard of Glastonbury's will to die enjoyed at last its pre-
meditated satisfaction.

In calm, inviolable peace Mr. Geard saw his life, saw his
death, and saw also that nameless Object, that fragment of the
Absolute, about which all his days he had been murmuring. He
was now totally free from remorse about Megan and Crummie.
The ruthless element in his leaving them, purely for his own
satisfaction, seemed to him justified in these last moments. He
was at peace, too, about what should happen in the future to his
new Religion. It was as if he had ceased to belong to our world
of looking-glass pantomime wherein we are driven to worship
we know not what; and had slipped down among the gods and
taken his place among those who cast their own mysterious re-
flections in the Glastonbury of our bewilderment.

The brown flood that drowned him--bitter and cold from the
Arctic tides of the far Atlantic--stirred up in his consciousness
at the last all those buried layers in his nature that were so much
greater than his speech, than his theories, than his achievements.
In his dying moments, Geard of Glastonbury did actually pass,
consciously and peacefully, into those natural, elements that he
had always treated with a certain careless and unaesthelic aplomb.

He had never been an artistic man. He had never been a fas-
tidious man. He had got pleasure from smelling at dung-hills,
from making water in his wife's garden, from snuffing up the
sweet sweat of those he loved. He had no cruelty, no culture, no
ambition, no breeding, no refinement, no curiosity, no conceit.
He believed that there was a borderland of the miraculous round
everything that existed and that "everything that lived was holy."
Such was the Mr. Geard who was now drowning in the exact
space of water that covered the spot where the ancient Lake
Villagers had their temple to the neolithic goddess of fertility.
He would be dead and past reviving by any charm--charmed
they never so wisely--in a few minutes.

For an eternity of time there had been no Mr. Geard of Glas-
tonbury. For an eternity of time there would be no Mr. Geard
of Glastonbury, though there might well be some mysterious con-
scious Being in the orbit of whose vast memory that particular
Avatar was concealed. This moment, however, along with many
infinitesimal animalculae, the Mayor of Glastonbury lived still,
though he did not breathe, above Philip's airplane, below those
revolving air-bubbles.

What was he thinking about now? Not of Glastonbury; nor
of Death. He was lying in the green spring grass of the Park at
Montacute; and an incarnate Sweetness that was his daughter and
yet not his daughter was running to meet him with outstretched
arms.

That it was in his power to rise up and meet .this figure and
feel as he embraced her that he was embracing the very Life of
Life was doubtless the result of what he had seen--the Grail
under its fifth shape--upon the top of Gwyn-ap-Nud's hill.

Unlike the experience of his patron and friend, the Ejector of
Northwold, the consciousness of Bloody Johnny's soul suffered
a complete suspension after his body was dead. Whether this sus-
pension outlasted his burial in the Wells Road Cemetery, which
happened immediately after the flood, and whether it will out-
last the life of this planet, and of all other such bubbles of ma-
terial substance that the torrent of Life throws up, is unknown to
the writer of this book.

It is certain however that Mr. Geard was not mistaken when
he decided that to plunge into the bitterness of death in order to
gain more life was an action that at least would destroy what he
had found so hampering to his spirit in the infirmities of his
flesh. Gone now forever, gone like his own breath, were the bub-
bles that had floated rejoicing across the place where he had
sunk.

Over the fragments of Philip's bridge, over that old Lake Vil-
lage Mound, with the figures of the crouching old man and the
frightened animal, over the great mass of swirling waters, drifted,
floated, faded, dissolved, the dying visions of the drowned man.

Above the mounting flood rose still the broken tower arch of
the ruined Abbey, rose still the tower of the Baptist, rose still
the tower of the Archangel. These remain; enduring this deluge,
as they had endured others; but the doomsday of these also must
finally come. Towers are they, like those of Rome and Jerusalem,
built to storm the Infinite, to besiege the Absolute, but subject
like those others to the shocks of time and of chance.

For the great goddess Cybele, whose forehead is crowned with
the Turrets of the Impossible, moves through the generations
from one twilight to another; and of her long journeying from
cult to cult, from shrine to shrine, from revelation to revelation,
there is no end. Mountains have rolled down upon many of her
temples. The depths of the Atlantic and Pacific have gathered
others into their dim silt and monstrous slime at the bottom of
the world. The obliterating sand storms of the desert have buried
not a few. Some are lost in the untraversed forests of the new
hemisphere. The days of the years of men's lives are like leaves
upon the wind and like ripples upon the water; but wherever the
Tower-bearing Goddess moves, journeying from one madness of
Faith to another, these pinnacles of desperation mount up again.

The builders of Stonehenge have perished; but there are those
who worship its stones still. The builders of Glastonbury have
perished; but there are people, yet living among us, whose eyes
have seen the Grail. The ribs of our ancient earth are riddled
with desperate pieties; her hollow caves are scooped out with
frantic asseverations; and the end is not yet.

The Towers of Cybele still move in the darkness from cult to
cult, from revelation to revelation. Made of a stuff more lasting
than granite, older than basalt, harder than marble, and yet as
insubstantial as the airiest mystery of thought, these Towers of
the journeying Mother still trouble the dreams of men with their
tremulous up-rising. Bowed beneath the desolation of futility,
eaten by the worm of despair, these tragic Towers still rise from
our planet's surface, still sway disconsolately in the wind of its
orbit, still gleam cold and white under its recurrent moons.

The Philip Crows of this world build their new roads and their
new bridges; but She, the ancient Tower-Bearer, neither follows
one, nor crosses the other. By different paths she moves than
those made for the engines of traffic. The ships of the air turn
aside as they approach her. The inventions of men touch her
not. About her turreted head blows the breath of what is beyond
life and beyond death; and none, but such as are covenanted
and sealed as her own, discern her goings and her comings.

The powers of reason and science gather in the strong light of
the Sun to beat her down. But evermore she rises again, moving
from the mists of dawn to the mists of twilight, passing through
the noon-day like the shadow of an eclipse and through the mid-
night like an unblown trumpet, until she finds the land that has
called her and the people whose heart she alone can fill.

For the turrets upon the head of Cybele are made of those
strange second thoughts of all the twice-born in the world; the
liberated thoughts of men as they return from their labour and
the brooding thoughts of women as they pause in the midst of
their work. The powers of reason may number the Stones of
Stonehenge and guess at the origin of the Grail of Glastonbury;
but they cannot explain the mystery of the one, nor ask the re-
quired magic question of the other.

No man has seen Our Lady of the Turrets as She moves over
the land, from twilight to twilight; but those "topless towers" of
hers are the birth-cries of occult generation, raised up in defiance
of Matter, in defiance of Fate, and in defiance of cruel knowledge
and despairing man.

Men may deride them, deny them, tear them down. They may
drive their engines through the ruins of Glastonbury and their
airplanes over the Stones of Stonehenge.

Still in the strength of the Unknown Dimension the secret of
these places is carried forward to the unborn, their oracles to
our children's children.

For She whom the ancients named Cybele is in reality that
beautiful and terrible Force by which the Lies of great creative
Nature give birth to Truth that is to be.

Out of the Timeless she came down into time. Out of the
Un-named she came down into our human symbols.

Through all the stammerings of strange tongues god mutterr-
ings of obscure invocations she still upholds her cause; the cause
of the unseen against the seen, of the weak against the strong, of
that which is not, and yet is, against that which is, and is not.

Thus she abides; her Towers forever rising, forever vanishing.
Never or Always.


THE END