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.