MAY DAY



It was the First of May, and through the open kitchen
window of Elizabeth Crow's little house on Benedict Street
floated delicious sun-warmed airs. The house looked to the
north, across the outskirts of Paradise. There was a small oblong
patch of ground, outside, with a rough wooden fence round it,
identical with all the other back-gardens of that street; and as
in the case of most of the others this patch of earth was devoted
rather to vegetables than to flowers. Beyond the garden was a
triangular field where one of Miss Crow's neighbours kept a
couple of cows; but beyond this, except for the roofs of a few
scattered Paradise hovels, the water-meadows stretched clear
away towards the site of the Lake Village, and Philip's .landing
field, and Number One's Backwear Hut. On the stove in this
kitchen stood a sauce-pan of boiling potatoes and a large black
pot full of some sort of savoury stew. In the centre of the kitchen
was a bare deal table, the well-scrubbed top of which had as-
sumed, so soft and friendly did it look, the whiteness of a pail of
rich cream. On this table was a huge glass bowl filled with an
immense, tightly packed mass of bluebells. The gorgeous blue-
ness, a deep Prussian blue mingled with blotches of purplish
colour, rose up like a thickly packed cloud of almost opaque es-
sence out of this bowl of heavy-drooping blooms and expanded
and expanded till its richness of tint attracted towards it and
seemed utterly to absorb all other coloured things in the room. It
dominated the gleam of the shining pots and pans of that small
kitchen as completely as its fragrance overpowered the smell of
the cooking. An empty basket with a few torn blossoms, a few
long, pallid leaf-spears, and a few sap-oozing stalks, stood on the
dresser, indicating that the flowers had been brought here that
very morning. They had indeed been picked by Jackie and his
little band in Wick Wood, and one could see that they were at
their very height of blooming and would not last much longer.
The children had found two or three early pink campions on the
way to Wick Wood, in the leafy banks of Maidencroft Lane,
and these were now protruding, like carmine flags in a purple
sea, from the midst of the rest. These bluebells must have been
the direct descendants of flowers that had been the background
of many a Druidic May Day ritual round those great oaks. They
brought with them in their oozy stalks and in their drooping
heads the feeling of a thousand springs of English history. They
brought too the sense of masses of hazel-branches darkly clus-
tering around these blue spaces in the deep wood and hiding the
fluttering chaffinches and blackcaps whose songs issued forth
from their entanglement.

Nor had this great bunch lost that imprint of children's fin-
gers that country people recognize so quickly--the stalks plucked
off so short under the flower-heads and the blossoms pressed so
lightly together! In addition to these flowers there were two girls
in Miss Crow's kitchen.

The May-Day feeling in the air, the warm sunshine, the pres-
ence of such a quantity of flowers at their full height of blossom,
gave to the high spirits of the girls, as they chatted volubly to-
gether, that delicious quality of young feminine life which is so
fleeting and so easily destroyed. The presence of a man destroys
it in a second, introducing a different element altogether. Totally
unconscious of what is happening to their young bodies and
souls, girls, when they are thus alone together, give themselves up
to all manner of little gestures, movements, abandonments, which
not only the presence of a man but the presence of an older
woman would drive away. Certain filmy and delicate essences in
young girls' beings come to the surface only when they are alone
like this with one another. When any of them is alone by herself
it is different again; for then her own thoughts are apt to play
the part of intruders and cause these fragile petals of her identity
to draw in and close up.

The two girls I am now speaking of were seated at the table
on straw-bottomed chairs. They were Sally Jones and Tossie
Stickles, the plump form of the latter enveloped in a capacious
white apron, while the former wore a gay spring hat and a bright
scarf round her warm young neck. The girls were sipping hot
cocoa from big steaming cups, and as they chatted across the
mass of bluebells the clock in St. Benignus' Church struck the
hour of noon.

"Did her ladyship open the letter her own self?" enquired
Sally.

"'Twere 'dressed to her for I read the words meself as I came
along. It said 'The Lady Rachel Zoyland, care of John Geard
Esquire, Glastonbury, Somerset.' It didn't say our street and it
didn't say our number. It said 'Esquire.' Be our Mayor really a
Esquire, Tossie., do 'ee reckon, now he be a worshipful?"

"Read it? I should say her didn't read it," cried Tossie. "Not
with Missus watching she and smiling kind-a patronizing all the
while. No, Sally Jones, no, you Simple-Sal! Her took she's letter
up to bedroom, same as you nor me might have done and she
slammed her door and locked it too--bless her pretty heart! She
be a one, she be a one, Sal, and no mistake about it."

"Have you--" whispered Sally gravely, leaning forward,
till the broad brim of her straw hat overshadowed the table.

Tossie put down her cup and nodded emphatically, her eyes
gleaming. "Told she yesterday," she replied. "She were helping
I in kitchen and she talked so natural-like that I just up and told
her. I didn't mention no names, you understand, but I told her he
weren't no marrying man nor never would be. I told her he were
a gentleman; and you should have seen the face she made
at that!"

"There have been a kind of a trouble, Toss, down our way,"
threw in Sally. "I allus knew'd 'twould never last between Red
and Miss Crummie. I telled 'ee so, didn't I, time and again?
Red be a working-man, though 'tis true he baint a common man.
But Miss Crummie be quite different. She isn't a lady. We know
that! But she's different from Red."

"They weren't engaged, were they?" said Tossie.

"Oh, no, it hadn't come to that yet," admitted Sal. "For me
own part I think Miss Crummie was so haughly and offish with
the pore man that he just up and quit."

Tossie opened her eyes wide. She felt it a little hard to visual-
ise this haughty, obstreperous Crummie!

Both girls lifted their cups to their lips and took a deep drink.
They each searched their minds for something startling to say.
Their encounter seemed an important occasion in their lives:
and they 'were very unwilling to let it slide by unenjoyed to
the full.

"Mr. Philip and Mrs. Philip be coming to tea this afternoon,"
announced Tossie.

"Mercy on us!" cried Sally, "and what if this letter to her
Ladyship be to say that Mr. Athling be coming to see she?"

Tossie had now the opportunity she had been waiting for. She
had not seemed to impress her friend sufficiently with the fact of
her intimacy with Lady Rachel. It was not very surprising that
she should have confessed her troubles to Rachel. But surely it
must startle Sal if she revealed that Lady Rachel had mentioned
Mr. Athling to her.

She finished her cocoa gravely, rose from her chair, prodded
the potatoes with a fork, stirred the stew, and then leaning across
the table smelt at the bluebells. Straightening herself up she
next glanced at the door. Then she looked out of the window.
Still upon her feet she stared significantly at Sally. Her expres-
sion said: "These are no light matters."

A thrush was singing in a laburnum bush at the end of the
little garden. A faint scent of trodden grass from where the two
cows were feeding floated in upon the warm air along with that
rich song. Both the girls felt a penetrating thrill of happiness. It
was May Day; and the spirit of Romance was abroad upon
the air.

"He do write poetry," said Tossie in a low, awed voice.
"There he too much talk in this wold town about she and him.
People be awful careless the way they talk."

"Master said to Missus this morning " remarked Sally, "that
he be a true-blood Saxon."

"Meaning he over to Middlezoy?" asked Tossie, sliding down
upon her chair. How teasing it was when a person didn t give
a person the credit for things! Why didn't Sally, instead of tell-
ing her what Mr. Geard had said to Mrs. Geard, cry out, "Oh,
Tossie Stickles, how wonderful it is that Lady Rachel talks to 'ee
so nice and natural!"

"Master said to Missus," continued Sally, "that Athling be the
oldest name round here. He said Zoyland were nothing to it.

"His folks be plain farmer folks," protested Tossie. Then
taking advantage of Sally's cup being at her lips, "He do write
poetry about she."

"Did she tell you that?" cried Sally, really astonished at last.
Tossie was abashed. The truth was that it was she herself, and
not Lady Rachel, who had referred to Mr. Athling. "A little bird
told I," she murmured evasively.

"Be Mr. Philip really coming to tea?" said Sally, beginning
to feel--as she listened to that thrush--that there were too many
little birds in Benedict Street. One wanted more solid facts. "It's
not often, so people do say, that they Elms folk go out together."

"There was extra orders gived for they little rock cakes, to
Baker, this morning," said Tossie firmly.

It was Sally's turn now to bend forward and inhale the heavy
bluebell fragrance. She tilted back the big straw brim of her
hat with her fingers as she did so.

"Be 'ee going to hospital when your time comes?" she mur-
mured between her sniffs at the flowers.

"Maybe," said Tossie.

"Do they let 'ee see Mr. Barter these days?" her friend
went on.

Tossie's cheeks got red. "What do I want with seeing a bloke
that can keep company with they baggages at Pilgrims'."

"Lily Rogers told old Mrs. Robinson," remarked Sally, "that
'Rissa Smith were angling for Mr. Barter to marry she."

Tossie's reply to this was more expressive than polite. She put
out her tongue at her friend.

"Master were all worked up this morning," said Sally, content
to change the conversation now that she had made mention of
Clarissa. "Mr. Philip wrote to he a turble stiff letter about his
Midsummer Circus. He said he'd get the Police to stop it."

"Baint our Mayor above all they Police and suchlike?" pon-
dered Tossie Stickles in a wistful tone. A little bell above the
dresser began to tinkle.

"Missus wants summat," said the girl getting up from her
chair.

Lady Rachel did not breathe a word to Miss Crow about the
contents of the letter she had received till the two ladies were
weeding side by side in the little back-garden.

"I've heard from Ned," she said quietly then, looking across
the sweet-pea sticks at her hostess.

"Yes, Rachel," replied Miss Crow.

"He's coming to tea this afternoon," said the yomig girl, "if
you'll let him."

"Why, my dear, that's as nice as it can he! You know I've
only seen him that once, when the Mayor asked us to meet him."

"He doesn't expect to find anybody else here," said Rachel.

"Only my nephew and Tilly," said Miss Crow, planting her
fork in the ground and resting her hand, in her rough gardening
gloves, upon its handle. The thrush had flown off into the next
little garden, but from there its voice was still audible. The
warm air smelt of the disturbed earth-mould, but it smelt too of
a more subtle odour than that--it smelt of an odour that came voy-
aging across the water-meadows from spinneys and copses and
withy beds and high uplands and deep lanes and sequestered
gulleys and hidden combes and narrow hazel-paths and mossy
openings in old woods--the odour of Somersetshire itself! It is
only certain days, days under unique conditions of the wind and
the weather, that call out from the soil of a particular district
that district's own native, peculiar smell. And this May Day was
precisely such an especial day. Had any traveller come back to
Glastonbury on this day he would have been aware in a second
that it was one of those days when the spirit of that portion of
the earth distils itself in a rare unique essence. And of what is
this voyaging mystery composed? Chiefly of the smell of prim-
roses! Different from all other essences in the world the smell
of primroses has a sweetness that is faint and tremulous, and yet
possesses a sort of tragic intensity. There exists in this flower,
its soft petals, its cool, crinkled leaves, its pinkish stalk that
breaks at a touch, something which seems able to pour its whole
self into the scent it flings on the air. Other flowers have petals
that are fragrant. The primrose has something more than that.
The primrose throws its very life into this essence of itself which
travels upon the air. But the odour which floated now over that
little garden of Benedict Street and hovered about Miss Crow as
she looked at the proud timidity in those grey eyes that faced her
so steadily, at that light-poised figure gripping so tightly the long
hoe she had been using, had yet another pervading element in it
--the scent of moss. Not a patch of earth in any of those spin-
neys, and copses, and withy beds, that edged those water-mea-
dows, not a plank, not a post, in the sluices and weirs and
gates of those wide moors, but had its own growth, somewhere
about it, of moss "softer than sleep." More delicately, more in-
tricately fashioned than any grasses of the field, more subtle in
texture than any seaweed of the sea, more thickly woven, and
with a sort of intimate passionate patience, by the creative spirit
within it, than any forest leaves or any lichen upon any tree
trunk, this sacred moss of Somersetshire would remain as a per-
fectly satisfying symbol of life if all other vegetation were de-
stroyed out of that country. There is a religious reticence in the
nature of moss. It vaunts itself not; it proclaims not its beauty;
its infinite variety of minute shapes is not apprehended until you
survey it with concentrated care. With its peculiar velvety green,
a greenness that seems to spring up like a dark froth from the
living skin pores of the earth-mother, this primeval growth cov-
ers with its shadowy texture every rock and stone and fragment
of masonry, every tree root and hovel roof and ancient boarding,
over which the rain can sweep or the dew can fall. The magical
softness of its presence gathers about the margins of every human
dream that draws its background from life in the West Country.
The memories of youth are full of it; the memories of old people
who have gone to and fro in West-Country villages wear it like
a dim, dark garment against the cold of the grave; and when
the thoughts of the bedridden turn with piteous craving to the
life outside their walls, it is upon deep, rain-soaked, wet moss,
sprinkled with red toadstools or with brown leaves or with drift-
ing gossamer seed, that they most covetously brood!

"You know what to expect from my nephew, Rachel, because
you've seen him already," went on Miss Crow. "If he doesn't
treat our young poet with proper respect, you and I will squash
him. He's not hard to put down, as you've seen, when a woman
stands up to him."

Rachel shifted her hoe from one hand to the other and lifting
her young head, inhaled the moss-primrose odour upon those float-
ing airs. She listened to the exultant trillings of the thrush from
the unseen bushes in the neighbouring garden.

"You are very kind to me, Miss Crow.'" she said.

"Oh, and I've asked the Vicar," added Miss Elizabeth apolo-
getically. "But there's not a boy under heaven however sensitive
who could mind him. He's as easy to manage as that queer, surly
son of his you didn't like--is difficult. But even poor old Sam
is nice when you approach him in the right way."

"Your nephew won't abuse Mr. Geard, will he?" said Lady
Rachel. "Ned will be rude to him if he does. Ned likes Mr. Geard
as much as I do."

"Oh, you and I will see to that, child," laughed Miss Crow.
"Well be three to one; for Tilly doesn't count. The Mayor will
be well championed, whatever Philip says!"

A couple of hours later and the little drawing-room facing
Benedict Street was full of a lively party drinking tea and eating
rock cakes. So strong, although so tactfully diffused, was Eliza-
beth Crow's protective aura, that not only were troublesome
topics warded off, but the demonic influences from the great
Powers of earth and air were prevented from touching her little
group. Miss Elizabeth Crow not only pulled green-fringed mus-
lin curtains across the little window, but she managed somehow
to place her own substantial frame between her old friend and
his flaming enemy, so that the Vicar--who was often obscurely
worried and fretted in full sunlight--felt unusually happy that
afternoon. There was a subtle reason for his happiness, too, in
a motion of his consciousness of which he was thoroughly
ashamed although its baseness, as he knew, had the grand excuse
of so many base human feelings! Try as he might to take a
larger, more generous, less professional view of the case, he had
not been able to resist a spasm of ignoble jealous relief when
he divined, as he soon did, for he and his son were in close ac-
cord, that some new twist in the latter's eccentric mind was
keeping him apart from Nell Zoyland.

Ned Athling was certainly not the sort of youth that any ordi-
nary girl would have fallen in love with. He was short and very
fair, so fair indeed that his eyebrows and eyelashes seemed al-
mast non-existent. He was much more ruggedly built than Dave
Spear, another fair Saxon, and his hands, tanned and hardened
by farm-work, were as large as they were powerful. A cloud of
nervous timidity seemed to hover over him like smoke over burn-
ing weeds and he had a trick of casting down his full-lidded,
eyebrowless eyes when anyone addressed him and staring intently
at some spot, that conveniently besought attention, in the fabric
of his trousers.

The May Day sunlight, modified by the green-edged muslin
curtains, filtered agreeably into the little room. There was some-
thing piquant in the way Miss Crow had arranged her old pieces
of furniture in this little working-man's parlour. The eighteenth-
century chairs and tables, the seventeenth-century prints, mostly
of sea-faring worthies and of old maps of the West Indies in-
herited from a Crow who had been a Norwich merchant in
Cromwell's time, gave the room a rich and intricate look. This
was increased by a vast amount of old china of which Miss Crow
was particularly fond and the bulk of which had come to her
from a Devereux aunt, a venerable maiden lady who had lived
for half a century in the same small house, at Cromer in
Norfolk.

There were primroses and cowslips and even bluebells about
the room, all with much more greenery among them than was
possessed by Jackie's bunch in the kitchen. The muslin curtains
waved gently in the air that blew in from the street, where the
very dust--recently allayed by a blue-painted water-cart in-
scribed "Town Council"--carried into the house a curious smell
that resembled rain and yet was different from rain.

Miss Elizabeth, Tilly Crow and Lady Rachel had all chosen,
by that human instinct which follows the weather almost as
closely as do the hedge-weeds, especially airy and light-coloured
dresses. Philip himself had put on a new fawn-tinted tie which
looked well upon his heather-mottled suit, while Edward Athling
had a newly budded meadow-orchid in his buttonhole, the first
specimen of this flower that any of the rest of them were likely
to see for several weeks yet.

There was a liberal supply of thin bread and butter, and Tos-
sie had cut it so carefully that even the lady who had Emma for
a servant looked at these two great Dresden platefuls with ar-
rested attention. But the rock cakes were the most daring innova-
tion, most Glastonbury hostesses priding themselves upon not
having to go outside their own kitchens for the replenishing of
their tea-tables. This bold departure from the norm proved, how-
ever, a great success.

"No," Tilly was saying to an enquiry from Mr. Dekker about
the rhubarb in her garden. "I cannot say that I like the look of it
this year as much as I did last year. It is redder than last year of
course. I admit that. But my cook always prefers the stalks that
have green streaks mixed with the red. She says they are more
succulent."

"They are not so sweet, Madam; they are not so sweet," affirmed
Mat Dekker.

"But my cook has her own way of handling rhubarb," reit-
erated Tilly, her black eyes shining. In her mind she resolved to
have a whole morning, presently, entirely devoted to making
rhubarb jam. The question was what sort of brandy to use for
the fastening up of the jam-pots. As she watched Mr. Dekker's
watch-chain and wondered how soon a crumb of rock cake would
dislodge itself from between one of its links and one of the good
man's waistcoat buttons--Tilly longed to brush him then and
there--she recalled how she used to stand for hours in the kitchen
watching her grandmother tie up jam-pots. The smell of brandy
always made her think of a certain blue apron she had liked
wearing in those days, not because it made her look pretty, but
because it made her look grown-up and competent "Always use
the best, Dearie," the old woman had been wont to say to her
hypnotised companion. And little Tilly had vowed to herself
that whatever might be her future destiny she would never use,
like her slipshod mother did, in the making up of jam-pots,
anything but the best brandy. And this vow Tilly had rigorously
kept ever since.

"No, it wasn't exactly yellow from where I saw it."

Philip had been talking dogmatically about yesterday's
weather and the timid poet had been aroused to assert himself
when he heard Philip who had gone to Bath in his airplane--
driven now by a pilot from London--praising the sky for its
yellowness. "It was green when I saw it," he cried eagerly. "And
that's by far the most beautiful kind of sky. I call it the fields of
the sky."

Philip stared at the lad. He was in the middle of telling them
all about his flight to Bath. The colour of the sky was of minor
importance.

"What you say, young man, interests me very much," said
Mr. Dekker. "Most of us don't give enough attention to these
things. When I kept a diary at college--"

"Talking of diaries," interrupted Tilly, "I wish all of you
men would begin ordering diaries at Wollop's! That imperti-
nent young man there--you know the one I mean, Aunt?--
won't keep diaries. He says there's no demand for them."

Aunt Elizabeth burst into a peal of delicious silvery laughter.
She did not often laugh. But when she did her laughter was like
the clearest of rippling streams.

"Why are you so amused. Aunt?" enquired Tilly; but in no
vexed or aggrieved voice. Now that Aunt Elizabeth had a house
of her own she felt very friendly to her.

"Do you keep a diary, Tilly?" asked Miss Elizabeth.

"Oh, dear no! What do you suppose? It's for my cook. You
don't know my cook, Lady Rachel. Her name is Emma."

"You don't mean to say that Emma keeps a diary?" threw in
Mr. Dekker with a chuckle.

"Tilly!" The way Philip uttered these two syllables was a
masterpiece in rich psychological nuances. In the first place his
tone protected his wife from Aunt Elizabeth and from all these
strangers. In the second place his tone warned his wife that there
were proper limits to this fashion of hers of giving herself away.
In the third place his tone expressed an indulgent appreciation,
a tender recognition, that Tilly was Tilly, and that she was the
kind of thing in a person's life that he himself was glad to pos-
sess; though it might seem strange, and even absurd, to others!

"No, no," said Tilly quietly, quite unperturbed at being
laughed at by Emma's favourite clergyman, "she doesn't want
them for that. She wants them to keep accounts in. The ordinary
tradesmen's books don't suit Emma. She has her own ways of
keeping accounts."

"My new pilot's name is Tankerville," said Philip suddenly,
seeing in his mind that bird's-eye view of his Dye-Works which
had made it impossible for him to be sure whether the sky was
green or yellow.

In the general silence that followed this irrelevant observation
Lady Rachel remarked that her father would never have a servant
whose name was more than one syllable. But Philip's mind had
wandered far away from Bob Tankerville. He was saying to
himself, "I shan't replace Barter for a while. I shall wait a bit.
Those office-lads seem able to scramble on somehow. Yes. I shall
wait a little, and get a tight hand on all the reins myself. What
I've got to do now is to give Geard more rope--give him all the
rope he wants--while I egg him on by talk of the Law. He'll
hang himself--if he has rope enough!"

"Seen any otters down your way at Middlezoy this year?" said
Mr. Dekker to Ned Athling, whose shyness was so intense in
this pause of the conversation he had commenced licking his
lips with his tongue just as dogs do when they feel embarrassed.
He now glanced quickly and nervously at Lady Rachel.

"No," he replied with a blush. "I mean," he went on, "that
I wouldn't say if I had." Everyone looked at him and his colour
deepened.

"Oh, I won't tell Will, Ned!" cried Rachel, reading his
thoughts.

"I wasn't...I wasn't only thinking of him" he blurted out:
and then, with a gallant effort to give the conversation a new
turn, "I was telling the Mayor that he ought to hire a real pan-
tomime clown for his show, and have some mummers like they
did in the old days."

"He wants to keep it all for the local talent, doesn't he?" said
Rachel.

"Those professionals are the best though," went on Athling,
while Tilly fixed a nervous eye upon her husband. "To have a
real professional, of the sort Dan Leno was, bred up in the the-
atre or the circus, and to let him play his part like one of those
old mummers or mountebanks...don't you think," he spoke
hesitatingly, diffidently, brokenly, "don't you think...there
would be something...in that kind of thing? I haven't got
it quite clear...but I seem to see in my mind a sort of Passion
Play--with--" he spoke more eagerly and rapidly now, as he
warmed to the subject, "with a real pantomime clown of the
Leno tradition--improvising wild Rabelaisian 'gags'...like
the Fool in Lear...while Our Lord is before Caiaphas or be-
fore Pilate...don't you think there's something in that? The
Mayor caught my idea, I think--though whether "

Philip restrained himself with creditable self-control under
this imaginative tirade. .He thought in his heart--"This is the
only kind of thing our young England is interested in, and it's
absolutely futile. It's not only futile, it's destructive. A Dan
Leno introduced into a Mystery Play of the Crucifixion--that is
exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to this new genera-
tion! They are never happy until they've given everything--even
Religion--an uncomfortable, ironic, disillusioned twist."

Lady Rachel had been watching her friend with a mixture of
pride and bewilderment. Her nature was too direct to be alto-
gether satisfied by something as bizarre as a modern clown at
the Crucifixion, but she liked to see Mr. Crow nonplussed and
Mr. Dekker confused. Their hostess had to come to the rescue of
her nephew.

"You've put off your spring cleaning, Tilly, I hear?" she said.

Mrs. Philip Crow fidgetted in her seat and looked reproach-
fully at her aunt. To interpolate a matter of such primary im-
portance as spring cleaning into this bagatelle about clowns and
crucifixions seemed to her mind a sort of wilful outrage to the
bed-rock of human seriousness.

"Of course not," Tilly rapped out, "but Philip may have to
take a holiday when this troublesome strike and this tiresome
pageant are settled, and Emma and I have been thinking that the
carpets in the front-rooms had better wait until "

Lady Rachel gave her a quick glance of appreciation. Why,
this little lady, with the beady black eyes, really was like a child
who had got a doll's house to play with! "I wonder," she thought,
"what she'd make of the way the Bellamys manage these things
at Mark's Court?"

Ned Athling had begun to grow very restless. He tried not to
stare reproachfully at Lady Rachel. Miss Crow's enamelled tray,
with its bowl of primroses so carefully interspersed with their
heavy green leaves, was the ritual centre of this group of people.
The Vicar's gold watch-chain, Philip's fawn-coloured tie. and the
gay dresses of the three ladies would have lacked their mirror of
platonic essences had the tray been carried off. Athling tried to
concentrate his attention upon this tray.

"I sometimes think," said Mr. Dekker. "that we don't realise
half enough the influence we all have upon the personality of
our town. Don't you feel, Elizabeth, that Glastonbury has a most
definite personality of its own?"

Ned's timid eyes under their pale eyebrows gleamed at the
clergyman's words but he felt shy of asserting himself again.

"I know a place that's got twice as much of what you call per-
sonality than this town has," remarked Philip.

"Tell us!" cried Rachel. "Tell us, Mr. Crow!"

"Wookey Hole!" he announced emphatically, crossing his legs
in their neat heather-tinted trousers and surveying with satisfac-
tion his unwrinkled brown socks. "Wookey Hole has more real
character in its prehistoric stalactites than all your Ruins."

In the silence that followed this remark Miss Crow, who was
shepherding her little party with as much care as Emma's father
in the Mendips ever guided his flock down to the washing-pool,
took the opportunity of handing to Rachel and Ned a veritable
May-Day nosegay. She noticed Philip turn to the Vicar and ask
him for sympathy about Wookey Hole. She noticed that her new
cat, a big stray tabby that Tossie had christened Tiger, had come
in, as Tossie went out, and had jumped upon Tilly's lap. Tilly
was now absorbed in this cat. She had been watching it ever since
it entered, hoping against hope that she would be the preferred
one in winning its favour, and now this had happened she was in
bliss. So Miss Crow turned to the lovers.

"I want you to take Lady Rachel to Chalice Hill, this after-
noon, Mr. Athling," she said. "There was an antiquary down
here yesterday--not the one who found the Edgar Chapel by
the help of that spirit, but quite a different one--and he un-
earthed a stone up there, somewhere to the west of the hill, so
they tell me, and near Bulwarks Lane, which has completely
puzzled him, You might tell me what your opinion of that stone
is, Mr. Athling. At any rate, I'd like you to see it before you
begin your long drive home. And I want you to have a bite of
supper with us, too, before you start."

Rachel's cheeks flamed with pleasure at this, and Mr. Athling
met his hostess' eyes without blinking and smiled with childish
gratitude.

It was a shame that Tossie had left the room too soon to hear
this. As it was, it had been with a deep sigh for the presence of
her friend that she had returned to the kitchen without the tray.
She could hardly bear to look at the bluebells on the table now,
so greatly did she long to tell their absent donor all about what
was going on in the drawing-room.

"You don't mind my speaking freely to you, Dekker, do you?"
Philip was now saying. "But it really won't do; it simply won't
do for you to mix yourself up, and your position and everything,
with this man Geard. The man's a rascal. That's the long and
short of it. He's an extremely cunning rogue and an arrant char-
latan. He'd like to play the part of a sort of Abbot in this town.
This Pageant of his, or pious circus, or whatever it may be, is
getting to be a nuisance. You were saying, weren't you, Aunt
Elizabeth, that you've been worried by these endless notices from
that little fool, John? Geard must learn that in these days fo be
Mayor of a town like ours means nothing at all. This, and that
money he got from my grandfather, seem to have turned his
head. He's begun to encroach on your domain, Dekker--hasn't
he?--with all these rehearsals that I hear are going on."

Lady Rachel glanced quickly at her young farmer, but it was
impossible to stop him.

"I like Mr. Geard," he said, with a rush of hot blood to his
face. "I think he's done a great deal for Glastonbury. I think this
Pageant will bring a lot of people here." He stopped abruptly
and glanced apologetically at his hostess. "From abroad," he
added, "Germans especially."

Philip glanced at Tilly, but she was oblivious to everything
except the cat on her lap. He then sought to exchange with Mat
Dekker the particular look with which older people condone the
impetuosity of youth.

"The most important thing for any town nowadays," he said
calmly, looking not at Athling but at his aunt, "is to give the
populace constant employment. That is not done by Pageants. Is
it. Aunt Elizabeth?"

"What about the municipal factory. Sir?" threw in young
Athling.

"May I ask if you have seen that concern?" said Philip.

"Seen it? No...Yes...I mean I've been to their new shop in
George Street and bought some...some little things."

"May we hear what things, Mr. Athling?"

"Charming things!" broke in Rachel. "I've got lots of them
in my room upstairs."

"I'm glad you've found something, Lady Rachel, among their
toys, that thrills you so much, but I‘m afraid Mr. Dekker will
agree with me that the men employed in making those toys are
being rapidly unfitted for any properly paid job. They hardly
give 'em enough to live upon. I expect you did not know that,
Mr. Athling."

"They're going to let me design some figures for them, Mr.
Crow," said Rachel irrelevantly.

"Who is?" enquired Philip.

"Mr. Barter," the girl answered.

"Barter!" Philip brought out these two syllables as if he had
been King James referring to Guy Fawkes. "I suppose you've
heard, Dekker, the inside story of that man's leaving me? It had
to do with--" He stopped abruptly remembering that the victim
in the story had just been handing him those rock cakes he
had enjoyed so much. "Well, at all events," he went on, low-
ering his voice a little, out of respect to Lady Rachel if not to
Tossie, "Barter, as we know him, isn't exactly the sort of person
that any concern would be proud of. I've never heard, either, that
he knows very much about the manufacturing of toys. You can't
do these things in that sort of slipshod, amateur, arts-and-crafts
way."

"Why do you say "arts-and-crafts' so disparagingly, Sir?"
threw in Edward Athling.

Elizabeth intervened. "I can explain that" she said. "When
Philip was at Cambridge there was a lot of aesthetic tittle-tattle
going on about that sort of thing. It's all very old-fashioned!
You two children are too young to understand the point."

"I can understand that Mr. Crow, being a manufacturer of
machine-made articles, naturally has a dislike of hand-made
things," said Edward Athling, getting very red.

"Just as a farmer," remarked Philip sternly, "naturally has
a dislike of townspeople getting high wages."

"What about this strike in the Dye-Works then? Isn't that for
better wages?" The young man had scarcely uttered these im-
petuous words than he gave a curious kind of laugh and stretched
out his hand to Philip, touching his sleeve. "Sorry, Sir," he said.
"That was an impertinent thing to say. I'm enough of a farmer
to hate the way we ignoramuses rush into arguments. No doubt
there's a lot to be said for your ideas of industry as something
that gives the people steady employment, rather than just a dra-
matic adventure for the moment."

"But the municipal factory is sure to last, isn't it?" insisted
Rachel, noticing how stiff Philip was in the way he received
Ned's gesture and feeling angry with Ned for making it.

Philip shrugged his shoulders in silence. "What I feel in all
this," said Mat Dekker, "is that Glastonbury needs both its
scientific manufacturer and its dramatic Mayor." Mat Dekker was
so happy at this moment, being at once pampered by his ancient
love and jealously pleased that his son was separated from Zoy-
land's wife, that he uttered this peaceful remark with a certain
careless unction, without thinking very much what he was saying.

Lady Rachel looked at him with flashing eyes. That smug
antithesis--"its scientific manufacturer and dramatic Mayor"--
filled her with contempt.

Simple earthy natures like Mat Dekker, especially when they
have, by luck, found themselves in a social position which
cannot easily be menaced, frequently allow themselves to be
dominated by their physical moods. When Mr. Dekker on this
occasion threw out that smug remark about "scientific manu-
facturers and dramatic Mayors" it was in reality no more than
if he had said--"It is May Day. I enjoy rock cakes. I am glad
that my unaccountable desire for Nell Zoyland has been quieted
by Sam's separation from her. I like being petted once more by
dear old Elizabeth. It's nice here, now that she has shut the
sun out." Nothing that was being talked about just then touched
--for Mat Dekker--the real essential things in life. He did not.
in his heart of hearts, think that it mattered very greatly to Glas-
tonbury, or to any immortal soul in Glastonbury, whether it were
Mr. Crow or Mr. Geard who was cock of the dung-hill! And since
this was the case, it was easy for him, treating Philip as he
would have treated a greedy minnow in his aquarium, to give the
man a soothing sop with the surface of his mind, and push the
whole thing away from him as unimportant. But how was Lady
Rachel, trembling with eager excitement in the presence of her
first love and full of the intense partisanship of youth, to be tol-
erant of a hard-working priest's mental indolence? All that
afternoon, as she had surveyed this big red-faced personage
drinking so much tea and letting himself be waited upon by a
gentle, elderly lady, she had suspected him of being a repulsive
time-server and now she knew him for just that.

But Miss Elizabeth Crow was not one to be baffled by any
clash of temperament among her guests or by anything as neg-
ligible as a flash of anger on the part of the excitable little
daughter of Lord P. By the time her elder guests had departed
she had beguiled them all into good temper. Indeed, both the
young people were found making Tilly laugh with girlish delight
by their antics with Tiger in the sunny doorway, when Elizabeth
had finished saying good-bye to her other guests.

When Rachel and Ned Athling had reached the top of Chalice
Hill they spent a happy quarter of an hour hunting about for
that stone of which they had been told. At last, not greatly wor-
ried because they had not yet found it, they sat down together
on a fallen log with the greenest of new-grown ferns and bracken
at their feet and a sweet-smelling gorse bush behind them.

"Do you believe it was really here," said Rachel, "that Merlin
disappeared with the Grail?"

Ned did not reply for a second or two. Then he burst out irrel-
evantly--"You're like an Exmoor pony, Rachel, that's what
you're like."

"He wasn't a Christian,--was he, Ned? Merlin I mean. What
was the Grail to him ? That's what I can't imagine."

"Rachel!"

"Yes, Ned."

"Did you have a fear when you were little that you'd never
meet anyone as exciting as the people in books?"

"Oh, Ned, how curious! How like we are! That's just what
I always felt." She picked a cowslip within reach of her arm and
gave it to him. He smelt at it and held it tight between his finger
and thumb, waiting to hide it away in his pocket as soon as her
attention wandered.

"May I ask you something, Ned?" was her next speech.

"If it's not about poetry, Rachel. Since I've known you I've
been changing my ideas about what poetry is and it's got all
confused."

"No, it's nothing about poetry, it's--"

"Well, what is it, Rachel?"

"It's about people, one's own people. Don't you sometimes
feel as if you were a changeling? Don't you sometimes feel that
when your own people are talking and telling you this and that
--quite ordinary things--that you're all the time living in a
different world? I don't mean exactly a different place. The same
place, only seen in quite a different way?"

"It's in that different way I've seen everything, Rachel, since
I've known you. My horses, my cattle, my sheep, aren't the same
creatures that they used to be. Of course those fields, down our
way at Middlezoy, look the same as they always did but they
look more the same, if you know what I mean. I mean I never
knew before how different they are from all other fields and how
much like themselves!"

"Could you ever endure to live anywhere else, Ned, than at
Middlezoy?"

"I used to think I couldn't; but now--" he paused and
plucked at the fern-like leaves of an incipient yarrow, "I believe
I could live almost anywhere if I were absolutely sure of one
thing."

She refrained from pressing him as to what that "one thing"
was.

"I suppose you've sunk your soul into those fields at
Middlezoy!"

"Well, even if I have, I could pull my soul out again, couldn't
I, like anyone might pull out a deep thorn?"

"I didn't want you to say you could. I wanted you to say you
couldn't."

The log they were seated upon was not large enough for any
space to exist between them. At those moments in the conversa-
tion when one or other of them would naturally have indicated
a psychic misunderstanding by a physical withdrawal, all they
could do was to move their knees or their feet a trifle further
away from those of the other. The girl shifted her legs a little
now and in this slight movement the profile of her cheek was
turned. Ned snatched the opportunity and slipped the cowslip
into his waistcoat pocket.

The magic of that moment, the scent of the primroses and the
damp moss, the tremulous ecstasy of the birds and insects, the
unusual greenness that washed up against their feet like a wave
of the primal sap of creation, covered them now as a couple of
early violets might be covered, by lush transparent overgrowths
that guard and enhance their poignant breath.

"If you and I were ever, by any chance, to marry, Ned,
should we live at Middlezoy?"

"Would you marry me, Rachel?"

"I might, Ned. But you mustn't take this as a promise! Be-
sides, what am I saying? I am acting as forwardly as Juliet did!
But we must see each other a lot more, lots and lots more, before
we can know for certain that we dare do it."

Edward Athling sighed deeply, a profound sadness took the
place of the excitement he had just felt. The way she'd spoken--
though anything but frivolous--had not been exactly the kind of
ambrosial food that a lover demands.

"Don't get glum, Ned. Let's pretend! Would we live at
Middlezoy?"

"What do you mean?" he asked. "With my parents?"

She didn't like to tell him--for fear of hurting his feelings--
that that had not been her dream. Her dream included a thatched
cottage at Middlezoy down close by one of those great rhynes
where the otters were found.

But she now plunged boldly on--"With them for a while,
Ned, perhaps, till we had money enough to have a farm of our
own."

A farm of their own! This phrase of hers was so delicious, so
filled with a floating incense of enchantment, that for a second he
dallied with it as if it were serious.

But it was not serious; none of it was serious! He had against
him before he could marry the daughter of the great Wessex
nobleman such a solid weight of conventional obstacles that it
seemed madness to think about it. Noblemen's daughters had
married commoners before now, but not often--and as far as all
accounts went--never a Zoyland! He wasn't an adventurer, he
wasn't a rascally pilgarlic like one of those lean rogues lam-
basted in Rabelais who set their scurvy wits to deface, deflower,
debauch and abduct, some, sweet-blooded noble wench of an
ancient breed.

"It would only be for a time," she began again, "that I'd have
to live with your people. We should soon be able to find a place,
somewhere near Middlezoy anyhow, with a few acres that would
suit us."

"Oh, please stop, Rachel! Please stop!" His voice was really
tormented and the girl looked at him in astonishment. "You
simply don't know what you're talking about," he went on ir-
ritably. "It's impossible to imagine--for one second--your living
with my parents; impossible, I tell you; impossible!"

"I don't understand you," she said. "Oh, well! Anyhow we
haven't to consider it just yet. We'll have many a lovely time to-
gether, Ned--before we have to consider it. So don't look so
sad!" But she herself sighed long and deep, as she looked across
at Glastonbury Tor.

Ned moved now. He had been vaguely conscious for several
minutes that every time he leaned back his shoulders encoun-
tered the prickles of the gorse bush under which lay their log. It
occurred to him that his companion, whose clothes were thinner
than his, might be suffering from these gorse prickles. He twisted
his head round, yes! they must be pricking her shoulders! He
jumped up and pulled her to her feet with him.

"Too near the gorse," he murmured. He had only grasped her
arm, but his touch sent an electric vibration through her, a quiv-
ering like that which sometimes seizes upon one single tree-twig
when everything else is still.

"I wonder how long its been lying there," she said, 'it's
very old."

Both the young people gazed down at their recent seat. The
log was certainly very old. Neither of them could tell what sort
of a tree it had once been, or even if it had once grown near
where it lay. It was covered with dark moss and grey lichen, and
at one end of it was a cluster of little yellowish toadstools.

"It may have been here hundreds of years," she whispered. A
rush of thoughts, vague and indistinct, but full of a curious
pleasure, floated through her mind. How many people, old and
young, must have passed this way and glanced at that old log--
long before she was born! A sense of the wistful and terrible
beauty of life took possession of her--especially of life lived
long and quietly in one place.

"I'd like to grow slowly old, day by day, very gradually, older
and older," she said.

Ned looked at her with his forehead gathered in great puckers.
She looked incredibly childish in her long straight dress and
black straw hat.

"I suppose you never know' what you mightn't find buried on
this hill," he said. "I am glad the Mayor's going to buy the
house where the red spring is and build an arch. He talked a lot
to me, when you were gone last time, about an arch. He's got into
his head that a Saxon arch would be the thing, but someone, the
Vicar I think, had told him there weren't such things as Saxon
arches."

"I hate that Vicar," said the girl fiercely.

"Oh, come now, Rachel! He's not a bad old codger. He told
me, as we were going out of the house, that he collected
butterflies."

"Just what he would do!" cried Lady Rachel. "Think of kill-
ing a thing like that!" And she pointed to a somnolent Meadow
Brown that was fluttering over the green bracken.

"I used to collect butterflies when I was young," said Athling
gravely.

"All the more shame to you!" She longed to scold him, to
agitate him, to make him feel troubled in his mind. Not neces-
sarily about butterflies--about anything! The sun, slanting now
from the west, was drawing out every kind of fragrance from
that hill-slope, but the wandering airs that stirred the curls
under her hat were full of the scent of primroses and moss. Bees
kept flying by them; and every now and then a great blue-bottle
fly drummed past their ears, with that peculiar come-and-gone
quiver of tiny wings that holds a whole summer in its sound.

"I sometimes feel," he said, with an evident struggle in his
mind to tell her something that was hard to express, "that it's
a weakness of mine to go on writing poetry about what I enjoy
and what is so easy to describe. New forms are coming into art,
drawn from inventions and machinery,--well! you know more
about that than I do, having been to Paris and so on--and drawn
too, anyone can see, from the life of people in masses, working
people in masses; and I sometimes feel as if there were something
babyish in going on with the old country themes, with the old
love and death themes, when the other arts are following the
new way."

He had given her her opportunity! With burning cheeks and
gesticulating hands, she freely attacked him now, all the stirrings
of her love transferred to her argument.

"It's pure snobbishness, what you're talking about," she cried.
"You say to yourself, 'I must be modern,' when you ought only
to say, 'I want to find out how to express what I feel.'"

He looked at her gravely. "But isn't it important to keep in
touch with the World-Spirit? I feel somehow, Rachel, as if all
these Grail stories, all this mediaeval mysticism, had grown tire-
some and antiquated."

"You'd better ask Philip Crow to give you a ride in his air-
plane!" Her voice was quivering. Had she come down here from
listening to all this talk in London only to find her Ned repeat-
ing it?

"You'd better go over to Wookey Hole and see the remarkable
electricity they've installed there. And if you're interested in ma-
chines there are some fine up-to-date ones in Crow's Dye-Works!
You'd better go to Philip Crow and tell him how impressed you
are by his great industrial undertaking!"

"What has made you so angry with me, Lady Rachel? What
have I done? It was since I've known you that I've erown dis-
satisfied with my poetry, so full of all the old tags: it's since I've
known you that I've wanted to make it more original, more
subtle, more in line with our times!"

Her face was a picture to see, as she struggled with her con-
tending feelings.

"I don't want you to alter at all; not in anything!" she cried.

"I wish you hadn't made me talk about my poetry," he said.
"I had a feeling it would annoy you."

"It hasn't annoyed me! Only standing on this hill where Mer-
lin was and everything--I feel as if you were taking the wrong
turn. You spoke up so splendidly for Mr. Geard just now in that
house and now you seem to be taking the other side."

"What's poetry got to do with taking sides? Poetry is an art."

"Oh, don't use that word, Ned! If you'd heard what I've
heard--the talk--the affectations--the boredom "

"But isn't it an art?"

Her reply was almost screamed at him.

"No! It isnt! It's Poetry. Poetry's something entirely different.
Oh, I know I'm right, Ned! If you go and get hold of this hor-
rible modern idea that poetry is an art, I don't know what "

She stopped and clasped her hands behind her back.

"Well, anyway, Lady Rachel," he said, "it has nothing to do
with this Glastonbury quarrel between Geard and Crow T ."

"It has . It has everything to do with it! Can't you feel, Ned,
as we stand here that this place is magical? What's Poetry if it
isn't something that has to fight for the unseen against the seen,
for the dead against the living, for the mysterious against the
obvious? Poetry always takes sides. It's the only Lost Cause we've
got left! It fights for the...for the...for the Impossible!"

Young Athling answered in a mumbling, muttering voice. He
stooped down and picking up a bent stick that lay on the grass,
flicked his boots with it. "It was meeting you that started me
thinking of these things; and now you go and ride over me. I
tell you, Lady Rachel "

"Don't be silly. Call me Rachel!"

"I tell you," he went on, "I want my poetry to be a new, living
original thing. I want it to deal with machinery and inventions!
It's all very well"--he kept flicking his ankles harder and harder
with the stick he had picked up--"to go on writing about Middle-
zoy hedges and ditches and Sedgemoor tombstones, but I want
my writing to flow forward, where life is flowing."

The girl's face grew stern and very sad. Not realising what he
was doing to her, young Athling had outraged something in her
that was almost as deep as her love for him, that was indeed
mingled with her love for him, and was one of the causes of it.

"Ned, listen to me," she said. "I've heard all about this quar-
rel between Mr. Geard and Mr. Crow. It's been mounting up and
mounting up till it's become, like the Montagus and Capulets,
something you can't escape from. If you and I are to go on
seeing each other we must agree about this. It's...it's dan-
gerous not to agree about it." She uttered these last words in a
low solemn tone.

Ned Athling looked at her in bewildered astonishment. To his
mind it was simply unbelievable that she should take seriously--
even to the point of quarreling with him--these ridiculous local
politics of Glastonbury. He did not realise how deep in her
inherited Zoyland blood the passion for causes and statecraft and
for all the transactions in what is called History went. He sud-
denly felt that it was incumbent upon him, at all costs, to change
their topic of discourse. She herself had called it "dangerous"
and it evidently was dangerous. He looked down at their log. It
was not only invaded by the gorse prickles, but it was now cov-
ered by the shadow of the gorse bush.

"Do you say I could lift that log," he said, "or do you say
I couldn't?"

"I say you mustn't, because it's been there so long, Ned, and
has all those funguses on it!" But she now gave him the first
smile he had had since they got up from their seat on that log.
He threw away the stick he had picked up and his cap after it.
He bent down and handled the log, tugging at it first in one
direction and then in the other. It only moved a few inches. It
was deeply buried in the grass and hundreds of infinitesimal
weeds grew at its sides. He knelt down, the better to get pur-
chase, and lugged at it. It moved a few inches and then fell back
into its bed of a hundred years.

"You can't, Ned! It's silly to try to do something that you
can't do. Let the old thing alone, please, Ned...please...I ask
you to!"

But he did not heed her. He now straddled across the log and,
bending low down, his feet planted deep upon the grass he
folded his hands under one end of the thing, slipping his fingers
carefully through the weeds so as not to disturb the toadstools,
scratching his knuckles on various little roots, but at last getting
a really strong hold upon it.

The girl was watching him now with rivetted attention. Her
hands hanging loose at her sides, began plucking nervously at
her belt, and with one of her feet she tapped at the ground. Ath-
ling possessed the muscles of a farm-labourer. All his life, since
he had revolted at leaving home and had only gone to a dame's
school in a neighbouring village, he had done heavy manual
labour; but he now tugged and strained at this wayward enter-
prise to no avail. All he could do was just to tilt up the end of
the log about half an inch. But he had not yet made full use of
his shoulders or of the muscles of his flanks. Drawing a deep
breath and balancing his feet firmly on each side of the log he
grappled with it again. It began to move. It moved. No! Settling
itself down again with a weight of gravitation that seemed ab-
normal, and as it were intentional, the log slipped from his
hands and subsiding into its former position lay there inert,
motionless, triumphant. He had failed.

"Don't 'ee mind, Ned." cried the girl, coming towards him
and touching his shoulder with her bare hand. That touch was,
as it were, the sweet accolade of the defeated! It was the first
time in their experience of each other that she had made such
a gesture, and at a good moment did she make it now.

"Avanti!" she said, "we must hunt for that stone! Soon we
shall be late for Miss Crow's supper."

Not a word did he speak as he walked by her side across the
hill. Humiliation gnawed at his midriff like a rat at a thick
sweet-smelling board in an old barn.

She was nice about it. She had said, "Don't 'ee mind, Ned"--
and had touched him with her hand; but it was not her pity
he wanted; he wanted her admiration; he wanted her respect;
he wanted her hero-worship.

"It'll be a shame to keep Tossie waiting," she said suddenly.
"But listen; if we didn't bother about the stone any more we
could go round by the Two Oaks. Tliere'll be plenty of time, if
we go hack by Bove Town and straight down High Street. Oh,
let's do that, Ned."

At this point, while several invisible blackbirds were answer-
ing one another from the purple dislance, Lady Rachel offered
the boy her hand.

"Let's run down," she whispered.

Athling proved to be more skilful in guiding a girl past mole-
hills and rabbit-holes, as they stumbled down that uneven
slope, than he had been at lifting logs for her sake. Their speed
gathered and gathered till they were racing with dangerous ra-
pidity through bracken and bent, past thorn bushes and gorse
thickets, over elm stumps, under red-barked Scotch firs, by little
clumps of elder, mingled with holly. He guided her so well that
they reached the bottom without mishap.

"Let's go to the Oaks before we hit the road," she whispered,
slipping her warm ungloved hand out of his and shaking the
seeds and straws from her skirt.

He would have gone further than to the Oaks "before they
hit the road" if it meant the prolonging of their day. That hold-
ing her hand had given him such oblivious satisfaction that all
he wanted now was to remain at her side and forget both grass-
grown logs and Ambrosianus Merlinus.

"Oh, there are people there!" cried Rachel, "what a pity!
Well, we'll go straight to the road now and get home. We should
probably have made ourselves late if we'd gone down there."

The "people" Lady Rachel had seen were, as a matter of fact,
none other than Sam and Nell.

Will Zoyland had been warned of a crowd of sightseers ex-
pected at Wookey on this May Day, though it was no official
holiday, so he had written to Nell putting off a visit home which
he had proposed to make. Nell had promptly communicated
with Sam and they had arranged a meeting at this spot. Nell
had only just this moment arrived. Had Athling and Rachel
scrambled down the hill five minutes sooner they would have
found only Sam there.

"Dear Sam, oh, my dear Sam," the girl was saying now. "I had
to see you again because I must have given you a wrong impres-
sion when I came over yesterday. I didn't mean to worry you,
Sam, or cling to you when you don't want me, but when you ve
given a person a wrong impression you feel you have to do
something. I couldn't sleep last night with thinking what I'd
said. It was wrong of me to get so angry and to say all those wild
things. I didn't really mean what I said, you know, Sam. A per-
son can say things like that without really meaning them."

Sam took her hand and lifting it to his mouth, kissed it long
and hungrily. He had made a rule for himself that he mustn't
kiss her on the lips. "I was thinking about you all last night,
Nell," he said, "I couldn't sleep till dawn. There's a great deal
I want to tell you about."

"Were you really thinking of me, Sam? Oh, Sam," and a look
of wild hope came into her eyes, "were you thinking that per-
haps--"

"Let's find some place to sit down," he said- "There's a cow-
shed back there, half full of hay. I noticed it as I came along.
Let's go and sit in there for a bit. I mustn't smoke there--that's
the only thing--but that doesn't matter."

The look of hope that had come into Nell's face vanished.
There was nothing in his tone to suggest any change of purpose.
But she let him lead her along the lane. He led her in the op-
posite direction from that Wick Wood where Jackie and his
band had picked the bluebells and into which she had herself
gazed this afternoon as she skirted it in her walk to this spot.

He led her to a gap in the hedge through which it was pos-
sible to reach a large field that was lying fallow. Across this
field he led her, their shadows making long monumental out-
lines that were scarcely human as the rays of the sinking sun
fell on their backs. These two vast shadows moved in front and
Nell and Sam followed behind. It was a silent procession in that
isolated field full of so much old corn stubble and so many
small green weeds; for the two inhuman shadows spoke not nor
made any sign and the two solid figures behind them were also
silent. The shadows were, however, luckier than the figures, for
they had the power of overlapping with each other and merging
and mixing with each other, so that they frequently lost them-
selves in each other. This desirable power was denied the human
figures who now followed after them, silent, solemn and tragic,--
two Solids following two Shadows across the dead stubble and
the green weeds.

Nell felt a spasm of bitter sadness as she watched these elon-
gated shadows intermingling in front of them and then separat-
ing again and growing distinct. All over this part of the country,
she thought, there are shadows accompanying people, some of
them in front, some of them behind. And their appearance is the
same whatever is going on in the hearts of the figures that throw
them. People going to be executed, people going to deathbeds,
people going to bury their dead--their shadows look the same.
Shadows, thought Nell, have no hearts. Shadows are like men
who have decided to follow Christ and to leave their loves and
their loves' children!

He led her into that cowshed which he knew of. Yes! it was,
as he had said, half full of last year's hay. He made her sit down
on a heap of loose hay with her back to more hay tied in bun-
dles, and he himself sat down by her side. They remained silent
for a minute or two, and then, with an instinct to put off their
serious talk, he began telling her of various occurrences in town.
He told her that there were rumours that Philip Crow was trying
to obtain some legal injunction to stop Mr. Geard's Midsummer
Pageant. He told her that there had been a fierce quarrel at the
new Municipal Factory between Mr. Barter and some of the
Communists, led by Red Robinson.

Nell's heart sank lower and lower as she listened to him. "How
can he? Oh, how can he?" she thought. "He isn't a cruel man--
he isn't doing it to hurt me. How can he take me into this place
and then talk like this?"

The field they had crossed, with the wide horizon behind it,
and with Brent Knoll rising in the distance out of the northwest,
was framed in the oblong doorway of the shed. The framing
turned the scene they now looked upon into a curious "work of
art," isolating it from the rest of Nature, and giving it a sym-
bolic significance. The sun was now almost gone. It had become
a red, globular excrescence on the horizon. It resembled a Glas-
tonbury Tor from which St. Michael's Tower had been cut by
some celestial sword-stroke, soaking the hill with blood redder
than human blood. Slowly this bleeding convexity sank down
over the edge of the horizon. Apparently it sank into Bridge-
water Bay, into the Bristol Channel, into that South Wales from
which came Mr. Evans, Mrs. Geard, and the "foreign" stones of
Stonehenge; but at any rate it no longer occupied the central
position in that arbitrary picture produced by the door-frame of
the cowshed. Brent Knoll, however, still remained--remained
till the twilight mists arose out of the watery flats of Weston-
super-mare and hid it, and the horizon with it, from the eyes of
Nell and Sam.

"Sam, I must talk to you about it; I must; I have to. Sam,
you can't really mean to go on with your life in Glastonbury as
if we had never met--as if we didn't belong to each other--as if
we hadn't got...now...a new life...to think about, to consider, to--"

"Dearest, listen--listen to me!" he interrupted. "I've been
thinking all the time...all last night I was thinking...till
I couldn't think any more...of some way...of something
I could do...of something we both could do. I know I can't
make you feel, as I feel it, this--this struggle of mine...but
I've come to see...in the last few days...that I've shirked
something...in us...in our feeling for each other...in the child."

It was already too obscure in that shed, as they faced a long
jagged blood-line in the west fading slowly out, the last of the
May-Day journey-prints of the sun, for him to see the faint
flickering up of a tantalised hope that these words of his sum-
moned into her face.

"I must confess to you something, Nell, though it's to my
shame. Penny Pitches, our servant, my old nurse and foster-
mother, followed me up to my bedroom last night and talked
about you."

He had the wit to feel that Nell winced at this and he hur-
riedly added--"You mustn't mind, dearest. I'm only telling you
this because I want you to know the very worst of me. It's a
penance to me to speak of it. But I can't bear--"

"Sam!" She was sitting very straight up now by his side. He
could not see her face but he felt the indignant tension of her
nerves. "Sam, it's like this. I can put up with what you do to me,
and make me bear, when you do it from your own self. But to
have to listen--no! you must hear me out!--to have to listen to
what other women think, of the way you're treating me, it's too
much!"

"Little Nell"--he spoke with a vibrancy in his voice that was
new to her in him and that awed her a little--"I've come to see
that there is something queer about me...that I didn't realise.
I've come to see that I have thought only of my own feelings and
have been stupid and blind to yours. I've come to see that in the
whole thing there's been a lack in me...I don't know how to say it
...a lack of power to see things, as they appear--as they are--to
others...to you. As I lay thinking about it all last night--after Pen-
ny had gone away--I felt as if I could see myself as I never have
done before. My cowardice...my weakness...seemed to--I don't
know how to put it!--seemed to take an actual shape in the dark-
ness! I shall never forget it. The darkness glittered all about me.
It was phosphorescent. Spurts and splashes of light, shootings and
jetlings of light and there I was in the middle of it...like a great
black slug. It wasn't a nightmare, for I was absolutely wide-awake;
I wasn't even sleepy. But I suddenly knew, when I felt myself to
be that black slug, that I was grosser than other human beings. I
knew that I had a dead nerve...an atrophied nerve...in me...where
certain feelings ought to be."

He stretched himself out by her side and shifted into a more
comfortable position. He mechanically took a packet of cigarettes
from his pocket, fumbled with them, remembered that he mustn't
smoke, and put them back again.

"I mean by a dead nerve that there are feelings in human
beings which save them from acting in a certain way and from
doing certain things...and that this nerve has never been
touched in me. I knew when I became that slug in the middle of
those phosphorescent lights that in the way I'd acted to you I'd
behaved blindly, monstrously--without using that nerve!"

He could not have realised how intently her eyes were fixed
on him. He could not have realised how her mouth was drawn
down and hanging open; how her lower lip was pulled awry,
just as if it were imitating in unconscious sympathy the way his
own face worked!

But he went on as if she had been some exterior conscience
that he was talking to, some conscience to whom he had to con-
fess everything, everything! "It gave me a sudden shock of fear,
of ghastly fear, when I realised that I lacked that human nerve
which everyone else has. I was afraid of myself, Nell. It was as
if I had put my hand to my back and suddenly found that I was
growing a tail! It was as if I had looked into the looking-glass,
and seen, not my own face, but the face of a beast. I felt alone
and set apart, as if I were a pariah, a leper, a half-man."

"Oh, Sam, my dear love, my poor, sweet Sam, come back to
me and let me love you again!"

Any onlooker at this scene catching the emotion in her voice
would have supposed that he would turn to her now and press
her to his heart. He did not do anything of the kind--he went on
talking, but he laid his hand on her wrist as it rested in the hay
and gripped it tight.

"I loathed myself when I saw how blind I'd been about it all
....about you and about our child... and everything. I tried
to think out what kind of a lack it is in me that makes me
so that I can't go straight off with you and leave Glastonbury.
For I can't do it, my sweet! I thought of doing it last night just
before dawn, hours after Penny had gone away. I thought of
making Father give me money, and taking the train with you to
London. I imagined us getting into the train. I could even see
how that little shanty would look, as the train pulled out, where
John Crow works! But when I thought of it I knew--all in a
moment--that I couldn't do it. I grew cold and paralysed, like
in dreams, when I took the first step...but I want to tell you
this, Nell,"--his voice dropped to a solemn whisper--"when I
thought of us getting into the train I thought of us as three. So
you see, though I haven't got that ‘nerve' I've got something. Oh,
Nell, fve been so unhappy these last days! I don't know why
I tell you. What's the use of telling you--you who have to bear
it all? But I've been more unhappy than I thought I could be.
I've been torn in two between you and Christ and it's made me
very unhappy. I knew I'd have to bear a lot for Him, if I let
Him take me, but I never thought it would be anything like this."

"My poor, sweet Sam, come back to me!" the girl whispered,
cuddling close up to him in the hay and clinging to his elbow.

"I can't, Nell," he groaned, "I can't. Christ has got me by
the throat, by the hair of my head. If you made me come to you
tonight He would pull me back to Him. I can't escape from
Him! He's going to hold me tighter and tighter all my life."
Sam shuddered as he uttered these words. With the warmth of
her body against his as they lay side by side in the soft hay, his
nature was so stirred within him that a blasphemous fury seized
him with the Being who was causing him and his love so much
suffering.

"No! He's got me, my darling, my sweet, my only love. He's
got me and there's no help for it."

"Sam, stop! I can't let you talk like this! It's the Devil you're
talking about, not Christ! Christ would never want to separate
people who love each other as we do."

Sam tore himself from her embrace and scrambled up upon
his feet. She saw him outlined dark against the doorway. His fig-
ure seemed to contort and to twist, as with frightened eyes she
stared at him. "Never want to separate us! You don't know Him,
Nell. He's a lover, I tell you--a lover...a lover!" He almost
shouted these words at her as she lay there on the ground. Then
he swung round and stood in the doorway.

The evening of this perfect May Day was of a loveliness com-
parable with the hours that had preceded it. In certain subtle re-
spects it was even more beautiful, just as in certain ways sleep
is more beautiful than waking and death than life. But into the
loveliness of this evening Sam Dekker poured the bitterness of
his heart. He beat his hands on his head and then stretched out
his arms with his fists clenched.

"A lover...that's what you are,...a lover...a cruel lover!" Nell was
not a particularly nervous girl. She took Sam's excitement for a
sort of religious madness--as it very likely may have been--
but she felt vibrant concern for him. In fact, she forgot for the
moment the brutality of his desertion of her in her anxiety for
him. He could not have selected a better psychological trick in
order to make his treatment of her tolerable, and it may well be
--such is the labyrinthine subtlety of the human mind--that
mingled with the genuine anguish of his frustrated passion there
was a thin thread of awareness in him that to simulate more than
he actually felt was the best way of distracting her from her own
suffering.

Beyond the dark figure of her equivocal lover, leaning sullenly
now against one of the doorposts of their shed, she caught sight
of the evening star. This luminous planet hung low above the
place where the sun had sunk; and as when her love was first
menaced by Zoyland's outburst, on the evening when father and
son had come to Whitelake, this planet had cast its spell upon
her, so now once more this great Being, the one which, after the
Sun and the Moon, holds the highest place among the heavenly
bodies, dominated her troubled consciousness and held her at-
tention; until she was aware of a sort of comfort coming from its
beauty as it floated there in that greenish-coloured ocean of space.
But although she knew it not, and in all likelihood, the great
planet knew it not, there flowed forth from that swimmer in that
far-off greenish sea a magical influence which soothed the girl
as soon as it touched her, and brought her a faint return of hope.
After the Sun and the Moon, but a long way before the other
lords of the sky, whether planets or constellations, this great
luminary, either as Evening Star or as Morning Star, has gath-
ered to itself the worship of the generations. Feeling its power
upon her now, though not knowing what it was she was feeling,
Nell got up from her hay couch, brushed her clothes mechani-
cally and came over to where Sam was. There they stood together
staring at the dying glow in that greenish sky and at the increas-
ing size and brilliance of that solitary star.

She put her hand on his shoulder and he let it remain there.
The evening itself gathered them into its own universal and pri-
mordial sadness--the sadness of all lost chances and lost causes
since history began. Under the power of that moment, of the
slow dying of that unequalled day, these two and their child
within her did indeed become a conscious three as he had imag-
ined. But the third was more than a child. The liquid immensity
of that hushed twilight enlarged that little embryonic identity
into something over-shadowing and mysterious, something that
became the premonitory presence of that unknown future which
was before them both. On its soft muffled wings this embodiment
of their fate flew across their vision, its silent flight pressing down
still more, like the fall of a handful of feathers from the brooding
breast of the night itself, the lowered pulse of the earth's huge
swing into darkness.

There came over Nell's mind the slow, faint intimation that
it would be useless to struggle any more to bind Sam to her side.
As she leaned against his shoulder now in her tragic acquies-
cence she felt that this was the moment in her life when she must
gather her forces together and accept her destiny, struggle no
more against it but adjust herself to it as best she might. Always
would she love this strange man by her side, so much older in
his troubled thoughts than he was in inexperienced years. But
her love must accept the hint of this largely expanded, fragrant
twilight, darkening slowly, tenderly, solemnly before her eyes,
smelling vaguely of primroses and moss.

"Sam!” she whispered softly.

He turned his discomforted face towards her, and she seemed
in that obscure light to detect upon it a pitiful appeal to her
that she should have mercy upon him and not drive him to des-
peration; not compel him to struggle to do what it was beyond
his nature to do.

"Sam,” she repeated. "You shall do exactly what you want.
Oh, my darling, oh, my poor Sam! It's more than I can bear to
see you so troubled. Our love has been very sweet to me,”--her
voice trembled a little but it did not break--"but it must accept
what has come to it; and so it shall be. You have changed my
life. In my heart I shall be always yours and never anyone
else's.”

He made no answer but she heard him swallow down a queer
sort of half-animal sob.



OMENS AND ORACLES



Mat Dekker was right when he said that a town which
has had so long an historic continuity as Glastonbury acquires
a personality of its own. And just as in human organisms there
are slowly developed changes, sometimes maladies, sometimes
regenerations, which take place under the surface and then at a
crisis burst out into prominence, so does it happen with any
community as old and intricate as this one. Individual agencies
help to bring about these upheavals, but the preparation for
them is a long, silent, hidden growth, subject quite as much to
the influence of non-human forces as to the will of humanity.

Old Dr. Fell and his sister Barbara were to dine at Abbey
House one day early in June--to be exact on June the Second--
and when this day came there was the usual fuss and stir all
over the rambling, untidy dwelling where for some fifty years
the brother and sister had lived at the corner of Northload Street
and Manor House Road. Though the Fells had lived here so
long it was notorious that their successive batches of maids only
stayed with them for very limited periods, such was the can-
tankerous and testy disposition of Miss Barbara Fell. Thus when
any day arrived for a real dining out, and this came only some
half a dozen times a year, the Doctor's best dress-tie and Miss
Barbara's best piece of black lace, and sometimes even her tiger-
claw brooch set in opals, were apt to be in the wrong drawer or
in the wrong chest of drawers. Dr. Fell took the precaution on
this occasion of being dressed a complete hour before it was
necessary. He had learned by bitter experience that it was ad-
visable that the dressing difficulties of the two of them should
not occur simultaneously! Dr. Fell in this crafty manner took
upon himself to outwit the malevolence of Hobbididance, the
Demon of curst households. And so now he sat In his receiving
room awaiting the forward-glide of events and reading the
Enchiridion of Epictetus. Dr. Fell was not unaware that he lived
in a town which had a very ancient Christian Church. He had
indeed only to ascend the eastern slope of Wirral Hill to dis-
cover, set up by the Town Council, when Wollop's predecessor
was Mayor, a handsomely inscribed marble slab upon which was
recorded the fact that, thirty-one years after the Death of our
Saviour, Joseph of Arimathea brought His Blood to this spot.
Dr. Fell was also in a position to discover in the guide-books the
fact that not only was the church in his town the oldest church,
Orbis Terr arum, in the whole earth, but that this fact had been
sustained against rival churches at the Council of Pisa in 1409,
at the Council of Constance in 1417, at the Council of Siena in
1424, and at the Council of Basle in 1434, establishing beyond
refutation that Glastonbury possessed a church that had been
founded statim post passionem Christi--"immediately after the
Passion of Christ." Nevertheless although he denied not that he
lived in a town where perhaps an altar still existed that had
been used in the original wattle-edifice, built by one who had
touched the flesh of the Man-God, Dr. Fell was not a Christian.
He was, on the contrary, a Stoic, and when he was not reading
for the thousandth time the sturdy logoi of the stoical slave, he
was reading for the hundredth time the wistful meditations of the
stoical Emperor.

"Manny! Manny!" It was Barbara's voice ringing through the
house. He was Manny. His name was really Charles Montagu.
Manny had been a nursery nickname, and since it reduced his
dignity more completely than anything else his sister was never
tired of using it. He wearily got up and opened the door. "Tell
Rosie I want her, Manny!" He made three or four steps to the
stairs that went down to the basement where the kitchen was and
opened the door. "Rosie!" he called. "Yes, Doctor!" "Your mis-
tress wants you."

Back he came to his study, and again sat down. This time he
closed the Enchiridion and flung it on his desk. Once more in
that warm dusty June sunshine his head sank down over his
knees; and he thought how his sisler had managed to spoil the
whole of his life. He thought to himself--"What on earth have
I lived for all these years? I've not really enjoyed myself, I
suppose, on an average, for more than a single hour every day.
An hour a day! I wonder how much more than that most people
in Glastonbury get, when you add up their pleasant moments?
I can't believe I'd hold back from those morphia tablets for an
hour a day! No! It's the hope that keeps me going on. just going
on; for that's all it is. It's the hope." By what he always thought
of in his mind as "the hope" the Doctor meant nothing less than
the death of his sister Barbara.

"Manny! Manny!" Out of his chair he sprang again and out
of his study he flew. Once in the passage he waited for a second,
praying that she was only having a row with Rosie, and that this
calling for him was a strategic move in a feminine battle.
"Manny!"

"Yes, Barbara?"

"Oh, don't say 'yes' in that tone"--she was leaning over the
bannisters--"Come up, quick! Come here, come here! You must
hook me up. Rosie is too helpless for anything!"

Dr. Fell sighed heavily and began mounting the stairs. Weari-
ness and a great disgust for life weighed upon him. He followed
Barbara into her bedroom, even to cross the threshold of which
was a purgatorial punishment to him; and as he hooked her up
his loathing for her was so intense that the idea of murder came
into his mind.


Euphemia Drew's dining-room had all the windows open; but
so still was the atmosphere that the six steady flames above the
silver candlesticks--for though the western sun came slanting in
from between the columns of the Tower Arch she had made Lily
light up the table--preserved their small, blue-burning centres
of life undisturbed.

"How nice your candles look!" cried old Lawyer Beere, who
with his daughter Angela and Mr. Thomas Barter made up the
roll of the guests. The old man's grizzled head, flaccid cheeks,
and thin, spectacled nose bent again over his plate of clear soup,
on the surface of which floated minute wafers of white paste.

But Angela, a grave, fair girl, of about twenty-seven summers
--an old man's child--improved upon her father's observation.
"Candlelight by daylight always makes me think of Rome," she
remarked.

"So unnatural, the girl means," said Barbara Fell, "but you always
did have a taste for the artificial, Euphemia.'

Lily Rogers, removing Miss Ribby's soup plate at that moment,
was so arrested by this indictment against her mistress that
she touched the lady's brimming wine glass, and a tiny trickle of
claret ran down upon the cloth. "Salt does it! Don't fret, girl,"
cried Miss Fell, covering the red stain with the minute crystals.
Lily was not one to fret at such a misfortune while Mr. Barter
was looking at her. She plunged, on the contrary, into a pro-
longed and pensive reverie. But Charles Montagu glanced in
surprise at his sister. Why was she so considerate to Lily and
so harsh with Rosie?

Was he wrong in disliking that thin, angular, grey face with
such heart-burning detestation? She was always amiable to Tom
Barter. If Rosie were Lily and he were Barter, would peace, love
and harmony reign at Old Town Lodge?

Tom Barter spoke up now. He was impatient to throw all his
weight upon the side of the Pageant before these formidable
women began condemning it. "I've got a personal favour," he
said, "to beg of you three ladies," and he made a gallant little
bow in the direction of Angela whom he had only met once or
twice before, and of whose cold, chaste, direct glances he was
somewhat afraid. "I want you all to make sure you get good seats
at the Pageant by buying your tickets early. There are a lot of
foreigners coming--several whole parties of them from Ger-
many--and it won't look nice if the front rows are vacant. The
Mayor has been saving the front rows for the leading ladies of
the town. He has not let his agent sell one ticket for those."

At this reference to the Mayor's "agent," Mary, who was sitting
next to old Mr. Beere, hesitated not lo lift up her voice. "It isn't
whether you approve," she said eagerly and with a heightened
colour, "or disapprove, of the thing as a whole. It's simply
whether you would care to be entirely absent from something
that's likely to be...quite an historical event in the life of
...of everybody here."

Euphemia glanced quickly at her, as she accepted a gold-bor-
dered plate from the dreamy Lily. "Only too historical," she
thought, "in your life, my unhappy darling." But she said to
Miss Fell--"I think perhaps Mary is right, Barbara. We all owe
a duty to Glastonbury, and whatever we may personally think
of our new Mayor and his methods, we must admit that the man
has the place very much at heart."

"There won't be anything Romish about it. will there?" said
Miss Fell.

"I can answer for that," cried Barter hastily. "Oh. no! Our
fear at first was that, in his Evangelical simplicity. Mr. Geurd
might be laughed at by some of our cleverer church people. But
the Vicar has been talking to him and has made him see--"
He stopped abruptly, anxious not to overdo his argument and
also, it must be confessed, a little puzzled how to round off this
imaginary conversation.

The sun was sinking now and through the open windows float-
ing lightly and gently across the Ruins, came the fragrance of
many hayfields. Uncut as yet, the grass had become tall and
feathery, and mingled with its vague aroma was a foretaste of
something far more intimately sweet, the first breath of budding
honeysuckle and dog-roses. Angela Beere--beneath that calm
white bosom in the low-cut light-blue frock, under that quiet
forehead with the fair hair parted so smoothly--was thinking just
then very strange thoughts. She had recently met Persephone, for
the first time after a long interval, and the attraction of that
equivocal creature had grown upon her night by night, since she
had talked with her, into something like a feverish obsession. It
had been difficult for her to behave adequately, even politely, in
Persephone's presence, so troubling had the girl's personality
been. She had wanted to run away from her; she had wanted to
toss herself tempestuously, distractedly, into her new friend's
arms! "Did she like me," she was thinking now, "did I look
well? What did she mean by talking to me as she did, if she
didn't want me for a friend? When she said that about life being
so difficult, and the love of men being so gross and brutal, and
it being so hard to find a person you could love whole-heartedly,
did I make her understand how I sympathised?"

"There's going to be a bad strike in this town," announced
Mr. Barter, "if those Crow people aren't careful. You'd better
give your cousin a hint, Mary. He wouldn't take my advice." He
paused and looked at old Mr. Beere, anxious to make the lawyer
believe that it was over a pure point of industrial politics that
he had quarrelled with his late employer.

Mr. Beere, however, as he ate his cutlets at once greedily and
daintily with his old wrinkled face close to his plate, was think-
ing to himself--"It's astonishing how Crow could put up with
this fellow so long. He's an interloper. He's an intriguer. He's
thoroughly shifty. I hope he doesn't take a fancy to Angela. No
doubt he was feathering his nest in some scurvy way when Crow
kicked him out."

"Who's this Capporelli they're talking so much about in the
Gazette?" enquired Miss Euphemia Drew.

Since no one else seemed inclined to reply Mary began ex-
plaining to her friend how the person in question was one of
the famous old French clowns of thirty years ago. "He's retired
for a long time," she said. "But he comes back occasionally for
things of this sort. He's had an unhappy life. His wife ran away
with a Chinaman. Cousin John told Geard about him. He took
me to see him at one of the rehearsals. He's acting Dagonet in
their play."

"Acting who, my dear?" enquired Miss Bibby.

"Dagonet, Miss Fell, King Arthur's Fool."

Barbara turned to Mr. Barter. "I thought you said that this
performance was an Evangelical affair, something like Pilgrim's
Progress?"

Old Mr. Beere lifted up his head. "I expect 'tis pretty well
what the boys and girls like best," he said. "A little incense and
a lot of kissing."

"It cannot of course be true, Mr. Barter," threw in Miss Drew,
"what dear old Wollop told me yesterday, when I talked to him
at that cage he's always shut up in?"

"It's true, Madam," threw in Mr. Beere with a humorous gri-
mace. "You can count on it's being true if Wollop said it."

But Miss Drew shook her head. "What he said was that the
part of our Saviour was going to be played by that shabby
Welshman who's looking after old Jones' shop."

"Mr. Evans is a queer bird to look at," said Tom Barter gravely,
catching the eye of Lily as he spoke, and giving her one of those
lightning-quick recognisant glances of his that girls always under-
stood and responded to, "but be was at Jesus, Oxford, he tells me.
He certainly knows more about the history of this place than an-
yone else ."

"But to act the part of Our Lord--" reiterated Miss Drew. "It has
always struck me as strange that anyone could do it. even in
those old Miracle Plays; but now--and with this French clown
you talk of--"

But Mr. Barter's mind had already wandered some distance
from Paul Capporelli. He answered vaguely that he felt sure Miss
Drew would find nothing objectionable in the Pageant. He
thought to himself, "I've been a fool to tie myself up with that
designing little bitch at the Pilgrims'. I must edge out of that
I must give her the go-by. She's begun to rate her bloody virtue
a trifle too high. I wonder if Lily would--But of course there's
her sister! That's what has always stopped me. But by God
she's a beautiful girl--yes! and a sensible girl too." And the
incorrigible imagination of Mr. Barter began calling up such
enticing and seductive images that when the real Lily, in her
puritanical black dress and apron, came in again, the sight of
her gave him quite a shock. She had re-assumed her normal at-
tire with a too-bewildering rapidity!

The dinner drew to its end at last. Lily was now taking the
cheese-plates away and placing before the guests Miss Drews
best set of Dresden fruit-plates. The Meissen coffee-cups too
were brought in and a silver pot that had belonged to her grand-
mother. She had even instructed Mary to buy a box of cigarettes
for the close of the meal and Mary--knowing the taste of her
friend Tom--had bought some first-rate Virginian ones. The con-
versation began to revolve round the enigmatic figure of the new
Mayor.

"Young Robert Stilly at the Bank ," said Lawyer Beere, "tells
me the fellow's spent thousands on this affair. I should think
his family must be feeling it"

Mr. Barter hastened to bring forward an aspect of Mr. Geard
that had nothing to do with the expenditure of money. His re-
ward for leaving Philip bit at his conscience like a maggot at
a rosy-cheeked apple. "He talks of Our Lord," he remarked,
"as if He were standing close beside him."

"The man's always smelt of drink when I've been close behind
him," said Barbara Fell.

"Rogers tells me," said Miss Drew, "that he's been seen mak-
ing faces at that poor slobbering boy who always stands on the
pavement outside the Pilgrims'."

"I don't think," threw in Barter, "that Louie got that story
quite right. The version I've heard"--and he glanced at Mary,
for his informant had been none other than John--"is that he
made that boy understand him by signs, and that he always stops
when he passes him and that "

Mary interrupted. "I believe he's got some weird nervous sym-
pathy...mind you I don't like him...there's something unpleasant
about him...something frightening...but from all I hear he has
some nervous peculiarity which makes him imitate every infirm-
ity he meets. That must have been what Louie meant. He must
act idiotically whenever he talks to that idiot."

"All I can say is," said Miss Bibby, "it's an outrage for a
town like ours to have a Mayor who's not responsible for his
actions."

"He's a better doctor than I am in such cases," muttered her
brother crustily.

"Hear how you talk, Manny!" the lady cried. "Anyone would
think you were one of his converts, I've heard he drinks at the
pubs with the worst characters in the town. And they say that
last bank holiday he got so drunk at the Legge woman's party
that he took that sick niece of hers--Manny goes to see her--
she's got some frightful disease--on his knees."

"I'd be ashamed to talk like that, Barbara!"

Everyone looked at Dr. Fell. He had spoken in a low voice,
but with bitter distinctness.

Miss Drew intervened. "We're all of us talking scandal, I'm
afraid," she said. "You're right to rebuke us, Doctor. What do
you think about it, Mr. Beere?"

Mr. Beere looked up from his grapes. "Stilly thinks the fel-
low's mad," he said. "He's been spending money like water this
last couple of months."

Charles Montagu Fell thought to himself--"If it wasn't for
my Mary here, and some of those young girls who come to my
Clinic, I swear I'd take those tablets and end it." He finished his
coffee in a gulp and there came over him, as he put the empty
cup down, a sensation that he had been suffering from several
times lately, a sensation as if his life were merely running on
by the mechanism wound up within it, while its heart, its soul,
its meaning had fled somewhere else and he had only to cry out
in a loud voice: ''But it's all husks and hollowness! But it's all
worm-rot and dust!" and it would crumble to pieces....The
conversation drifted on now to an uneventful exchange of local
gossip.

While Miss Drew's dinner-party ebbed thus to its lame and
impotent conclusion, Mr. Philip Crow emerged from the drive
gate of The Elms to inspect the appearance of the weather.

Once out in that lovely June evening--it was now only a
few minutes after eight--he strolled into the town. In the open
space outside St. John's he encountered Mr. Stilly, the cashier
of the Glastonbury bank. Mr. Stilly had himself come out after
an early supper--he was a hard-working man of forty who sup-
ported a pair of aged parents--to take the air, walk the streets
a little, and see what was toward. Mr. Stilly had thin, reddish
hair, a still thinner, reddish mustache, and a drooping, melan-
cholic face. But he was not really a melancholy man. Mr. Stilly
accepted the pin-pricks of chance and the joltings of time and
tide with patient equanimity. He concealed a passion for taking
photographs beneath his unruffled demeanour and he was also
extremely fond of using a fret-saw. He adored his parents, who
were both exacting and tyrannical; and, one of the greatest
pleasures of his life was when at this time of the year he went
down to the brooks so that the old people might have water-
cress to their tea. Mr. Stilly had unbounded respect for Philip
Crow. When he found himself tonight overtaken by this gentle-
man his tendency was at once without question to nod to him
politely and sheer off. It was with surprise--and even with some
misgiving--that Mr. Stilly heard Mr. Crow express a wish that
he would accompany him to Tor Field to have a glance at what
might be going on out there, on this fine night of the second
of June. Mr. Stilly, conscious that he had left his "only father
and his only mother," as he was accustomed facetiously to call
them, playing at dominoes, acceded to the manufacturer's sug-
gestion.

The two men walked rapidly down Chilkwell Street, past the
Vicarage Gate, past Miss Drew's gate, past the Tithe Barn, from
which the symbolic creatures of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
regarded them without an eyelid's flicker, past St. Michael's Inn,
where Mad Bet made silent faces at them, past Chalice Well
where the red water gurgled at them in disregarded neglect, till
they came to Tor Field. The gate was open and they went in.
It was just like the field of any ordinary Fair, this place tonight,
with sail-cloth barriers pegged firmly into the earth and a con-
fusion of lively voices reaching them through the warm twilight.
They skirted the barrier and standing behind a crowd of casual
intruders, whom the Players had no authority to exclude, they
surveyed, with the distasting wonder of grown-up people in the
presence of childish nonsense, the bewildering chaos of the un-
usual scene.

Mr. Stilly opened his mouth twice to utter some suitable com-
ment before he had the courage to speak. Then he said: "It makes
one think of what one reads about America."

"What do you mean?" asked Philip. This natural but not very kind
question disturbed the play of Mr. Stilly's already agitated intelli-
gence.

"They perform...performances...a good deal...don't they...in the...
open air?" muttered the cashier of the bank.

"Do they?" said the other, laconically. "I was never there."

Mr. Stilly murmured something about Indians and sank into
nervous silence. To be standing at this hour with the owner of
the Glastonbury Dye-Works and in the presence of such an un-
usual scene was too much for him. He hoped that his parents
had not yet noticed the length of his absence.

It was apparent that it would not be for lack of varied and
fantastic costumes or of contradictory and vehement directions,
or of excitable crowds of emotional young people, that the
Geard Pageant would fail, if it did fail. Philip glared at it all
with a cold, pinched disdain from beneath his cloth cap. There
shot forth into the hurly-burly of that motley assembly, from
this man's concentrated detachment, radiated waves of accumu-
lated contempt. His angry thoughts pursued one another through
his brain like marching soldiers. They came and went; they
wheeled and counter-wheeled; they obeyed the commands of
Philip's will in much better order than these excitable lads and
lasses were obeying their distracted Professionals from Dublin.

"Humanity!" he thought. "As they were two, three, four thou-
sand years ago, so today! To mould them, to drill them, to domi-
nate them--it's all too sickeningly easy." And he thought: "How
much more worthy a resistance is offered to me by the deep,
dark, interior rocks of the Mendips! How much better to struggle
with machinery against the inertness of blind matter than to
try to make anything of such insects! It won't be necessary to
plot and scheme to defeat Geard. All I shall have to do will be
to hold off my hands. This crazy confusion, these bewildered
people; these bare legs and riotous dancing, why! it's a Baccha-
nalian orgy. He'll make the town a laughing-stock. The thing
he's stirring up here--any fool can see it--is pure religious
madness under the mask of theatricals. The man's a lunatic. This
sort of thing never has been, and never will be, tolerated in
England."

to go now, Mr. Crow. I didn't expect to
stay out so long. My...my people will be wondering where
...where I am." It had taken Mr. Stilly a long time to make
up his mind to utter this daring ultimatum. His voice w'hen he
did utter it was like the voice of an unhappy school-hoy mur-
muring something about cricket or football to a preoccupied
headmaster absorbed in a nice point of Thucydidean grammar.

"Eh? What did you say? Oh, all right," returned Philip. "Wait
one minute, Stilly, and I'll walk back with you."

They left the field, passing on their way out that fallen trunk
on the mossy sides of which Sam Dekker had searched for rare
toadstools on the day when Mr. Evans first thought of taking
the part of Christ in the pageant.

Meanwhile this same Sam, struggling pitifully with his love for
Nell, had entered his favourite shrine in Glastonbury. This was
a little chapel dedicated to St. Patrick lying behind the Women's
Almshouse near the entrance to the Ruins, a chapel which still
possessed an original stone altar left undisturbed by the Prot-
estant Reformation and carried upon its wall the heraldic arms
of St. Joseph, a green cross between two golden cruets.

Never had those Arimathean arms, never had that stone altar,
beheld a worshipper such as poor Sam showed himself that
night.

He was on his knees at the altar. He was alone in the little
chapel. Lower and lower he bowed his head, clenching his fingers
as he bent forward.

But it was not in the attitude of prayer that his hands hung
by his side. They swung there savagely in the manner of a prize-
fighter's fists and, as they swung, the backs of his knuckles kept
striking against the front of the stone altar.

There was something about his posture as he knelt--swaying
his whole body backward and forward--that was pitiably gro-
tesque. An imaginative observer might have received the impres-
sion that an animal was praying.

Was there any portion of Sam's nature that exulted in the
atrocious task that he had laid upon himself--the task of doing
not his will but what he conceived to be the will of a tragic
superhuman Being?

Yes, the soul itself, in this grotesque swaying body with
clenched fists, exulted in what it was doing! Sam's soul seemed
to be able to gather to itself a peculiar consciousness quite apart
from the rest of Sam's sensibility. His soul seemed to be holding
his body and his will in a tight leash, as a man might hold a
wild-eyed bull, by a ring through its nose.

His soul seemed to be saying to his natural senses and his
natural will: "You must go through this because Christ went
through it! I care not how you suffer; so long as you go on,
day by day, doing His will and not your own!"

And all the while Sam suffered there, swaying in his anguish
like a great bleeding animal held by a steel ring through his
nose, the Man-God that he invoked was struggling in vain to
reach the consciousness of this mad perverter of His secret. In
vain! In vain! Against the power-lust in the soul of a man, when
it has once tasted the wild delight of taking up its own body
and its own will and its own nervous sensibility and forcing them
to act against the grain, there is only one Deity that can prevail:
and that Deity is not Christ. How could Christ as He swept now
like a cloud of weed-smoke under the door of St. Patrick's
chapel, relax the tension of this soul, that pulled and jerked so
remorselessly at the nose of a praying earth-beast?

But Christ was not, on that vaporous Glastonbury afternoon,
oblivious of His poor, besotted servant Sam. Although He tried
in vain to change by invisible reasoning the incorrigible obstinacy
of Sam's perverted mind, upon external events He could exeicise
a certain degree of control.

He now put it into the head of young Elphin Cantle, with
whom Sam used sometimes to go for walks, to come surrepti-
tiously into the church. Elphin, like many other boys of the
town, had a passionate love of Sam. Mother Legge, when in
her cups, had recently said to Young Tewsy that Sam Dekker
had become a seducer of boys. Nothing could have been more
pathetically unjust! Sam did not in his secret heart, care at all
for boys. His walks with the oddest, queerest, and most unhand-
some among them--and Elphin was certainly one of these--
were part of his general scheme of life. He knew that there were
lots of boys in Glastonbury who, hating cricket and football
and not caring for girls, were profoundly lonely and unhappy.
To these boys he gave a good deal of his attention, which they
repaid tenfold, as far as emotional response was concerned; but
Sam knew nothing of the strength of the feelings he excited.

When Elphin peeped into St. Patrick's chapel he was thrilled
but not surprised to find Sam there. He had looked in before,
under similar occasions; but had never dared to approach the
object of his passionate adoration. Today, however, pushed for-
ward by the invisible pressure of a Hand upon his shoulder,
the thin-legged, pale-faced boy moved shyly up to his idol's side.
As he approached, he fancied he caught the sound of a huskily
drawn sob in the man's throat. This sound hurt him to the
quick. Well did Elphin Cantle know what it was to go into soli-
tary places and utter sounds like that!

The boy went close up to him and still pushed forward by
the invisible Hand, whispered his name, doing as he whispered
it, what Russian serfs in former times did to their masters, that
is to say, kissing him lightly on the shoulder. Anyone but a horn
naturalist like Sam would have started violently and even uttered
a cry; but long training in the woods and fields had given Sam
under any nervous shock--and indeed in all these things his
nerves were like tough wood--the poise of a Red Indian.

."Oh, it's you, Elf, is it?" was all he said. And he began rising
stiffly to his feet, unceremoniously wiping his eyes with the
back of one of his relaxed fists.

Elphin Cantle said not a word.

"Had your tea yet?" enquired Sam, stretching himself and
looking round for his cap and stick.

Elphin shook his head.

Come on then. Let's see what Penny has got for us today!"