The Pageant



Midsummer Day dawned long before most of the performers
destined to take their share in Mr. Geart's religious circus
had awakened from sleep. Mary Crow, however, who was
to take no part in it save as a spectator, was awake soon after
the first glimmer of dawn.

To watch the processes of dawn from a window that faces
west is in a sense like the contemplation of various excited ex-
pressions crossing a human countenance when the cause of such
feelings is absent. The girl propped herself up in bed, reached
for her dressing-gown which was at her bed's foot, wound it like
a shawl round her neck, and watched the slow, stealthy ex-
panding of the grey light. She remembered having heard John
once defend the Biblical account of the creation, when Tom
Barter criticised it as separating the creation of the sun from
the creation of light. John had maintained that light was an
entity quite independent of its immediate origin. Certainly it did
look to Mary now as if light were an entity free of all connection
with the sun.

She could see the great ruined Tower Arch of the Abbey
Church as she lay there, and she could see the tops of the elm
trees beyond it, very ghostly and phantom-like, their greenness
only half-born. The arch, it seemed, assimilated itself to this
dawn-light far less easily than the treetops. It isolated itself in
some way from this process of dawn and emphasised its own
curves and mouldings and masonry, in resistance, as it were, to
these atmospheric effects. But the foliage of the treetops was
part of it. The foliage of the treetops, as Mary watched it now,
seemed to contain -within itself the infinite sadness of this grey,
half-born, Cimmerian light that was now slowly invading the
world and establishing itself in the cold aisles and in the blank
corridors of darkness. Filmy wisps of grey mist hung about
these treetops, mist that was liker to dewdrops than raindrops
and yet did not really suggest water-drops at all. Nor did it
suggest clouds ! They were things by themselves, sui generis,
those dawn-mists, and they seemed to have as remote a con-
nection with Water in any localised form, as the dim light, in which
they dropped and wavered and rose and sank, had with the invisible
sun. "Yes," thought Mary, "something in the foliage of those
trees flows forth to greet this sad light, that does not seem like
sunlight, just as something in me flows out to greet it."

Will it be fine today? That was the next thought that Mary
had. She had been to the Northload Street room for a few
minutes yesterday evening and had found John and Tom to-
gether. They were drinking whiskey and the former was in a
state of complete exhaustion. John had told her that the Mayor
was resolved to carry the affair through, wet or fine, but that
he had somehow convinced himself--"You know the way he
talks to his God, as if He were standing by his side?"--that it
would not be "allowed" to rain on this day of "Glaston Re-
surgens." Mary felt full of doubt and anxiety. All manner ot
troubling thoughts assailed her. Suppose the whole thing were a
monstrous failure? Suppose the performers got panic-stricken
and that French clown lost his head in some wild antic or im-
provisation quite out of keeping with the rest? She had seen
a fragment of the Passion Play rehearsed and she felt totally
unable to conceive how Mr. Evans could even carry his part
off, far less be successful in it. Rumours had been running wildly
through the town for the last week about the police from
Taunton interfering and arresting the principal players, and the
last thing Mary had heard before she went to bed last night was
news brought into the kitchen by Weatherwax that the expected
strike in the Dye-Works had come and that the Glastonbury fac-
tory had locked out all its hands that morning. So far, the gar-
dener's story said, the trouble had not extended to the Crow plant
at Wookey, but that also, so Weatherwax declared, might have a
lockout tomorrow. Even the Wookey hands had demanded, and
apparently had been given, a holiday today, so that as Mary lay
propped up on her pillows, waiting for the first yellow beams
to strike the great broken arch in front of her, she seemed to
catch trouble on the air, coming from every side. Barter had told
her that the town was already filled to overflowing with visitors.
Parties of Germans, Dutchmen, Scandinavians--even a few
French people--had filled the streets yesterday. She herself had
been startled by the crowds as she went to Northload Street.

Mary was of a realistic and practical turn of mind, but her
nerves felt thoroughly shaky now. In this cool dawn-air, alone
with rooks, elm-tree tops, ruins and wood-pigeons, a thousand
alarms and terrors visited her. She imagined all those factory-
hands--the strikers from the Glastonbury works, the holiday-
makers from Wookey--joining in a great mob and invading the
field. She imagined a wild tumult taking place in the midst of
the performance, wherein John would be arrested by the police,
handcuffed, and carried off in a motor car to Taunton. The
pageant itself, she had learned, was not to begin till two in
the afternoon, but since a portion of the field had been handed
over to the ordinary booth-holders, toy-and-sweet vendors, trinket
sellers, fruit-and-nut dealers, and so forth--whirligigs and round-
abouts alone being excluded--and since gipsy caravans too were
to be allowed in by the Mayor's especial indulgence, there would
be festivities going on in Tor Field long before that hour and
plenty of opportunities for such a mixed public to work them-
selves up into a riotous state of mind before the official pro-
gramme began.

It was with a shock of real amazement, as something that
seemed more blood-red than sunlight hit the left-hand column
of the great broken arch, that the girl lifted her head now. She
let her twisted dressing-gown fall loose about her shoulders and
propped herself still higher in the bed, with the palms of her
bands pressed against the mattress, for she became aware that
the sight of this unnatural light--in reality it was a wine-coloured
red, touched with a quite indescribable nuance of purple--was
giving her a spasm of irrational happiness. She leaned forward,
allowing her dislodged dressing-gown to slide down upon the
pillows behind her and quite disregarding the fact that a cool
sunrise wind was blowing against her flimsily clad figure. Her
soul had come back with a violent spasm, like a rush of blood
to her head, and her whole nature seemed to pour itself out
towards the reddish light on that tall column. Her pulse of
happiness was intense. What she experienced was like a quivering
love-ecstasy that had no human object. She could actually feel
the small round breasts under her night-gown shiver and dis-
tend. Her head instinctively fell back a little, while her chin
was lifted up. Her lips parted, and a smile that was a smile of
indescribable peace flickered over her face. She would have
served at that moment as a model for some primitive Flemish
artist painting a passionately concentrated vision of the rape
of Danae.

Whatever it was that stirred her so, the effect of it soon passed;
but Mary told no one, not even John, of the experience she had
had on the dawn of the Baptist's day. The invisible Watchers
however of human life in Glastonbury noted well this event.
"She has been allowed to see It," they said to one another.
"Will she be the only one among all these people?"

When two o'clock struck in the belfries and towers of the
town there was an expectant stir amid the great company of
spectators in the wide sloping field at the foot of the Tor. A
surprising number of seats and wooden benches had been pro-
cured for the Mayor's great occasion, and upon these seats sat
a vast crowd of people, all of them roused at that moment to
a pitch of excitement such as had not been experienced in that
place since the day when the last Abbot of Glastonbury had
met his doom. Like the famous Homeric wind sweeping over
a cornfield, this cumulative wave of crowd-hypnosis shivered
through these assembled people, straightening their shoulders,
lifting their heads, turning their faces towards the grassy terrace
on the slope above them. Had Philip Crow's airplane been fly-
ing low down then, over this tightly packed crowd who had seats
to sit upon and over the equally large crowd at the back of them
and at their flanks who had no seats except the grass, it would
have been of fascinating interest to note the varieties of human
types gathered so close together. Many of those without seats lay
sideways on the sward, or sat crouched and hugging their knees,
while behind them all, drifting about or standing still, as their
vagrant mood dictated, were large stray groups of what might
be termed casual transients. Gipsies from the caravans ranged in
rows along the hedge, nut-vendors, pedlars with their trays, haw-
kers with packs strapped to their backs, beggars, tramps, groups
of astonished and cautious shepherds from the high Mendips,
stray factory-hands from Wookey and Street and the clty of Wells,
all these, mingled with a number of strikers from the Dye-Works
of the town itself, kept circulating and surging, advancing and
retreating, jostling, edging, dodging, hovering, spying, mocking,
criticising, deriding, applauding, just as the wind of accident and
the beckoning of caprice carried them here or there.

The two front rows of seats had been reserved for local mag-
nates, and in spite of all the suspicion, jealousy, distrust, that
was about, these seats had very few empty spaces. Miss Elizabeth
Crow' was there with Lady Rachel. Mrs. Philip Crow ought to
have been there, for although Philip had taken the opportunity
of flying to Wookey Hole, his wife, under the influence of Emma
who was here with Louie and Lily, had decided not to miss what
she now spoke of as "something to rest a person's mind." But
Tilly's dislike of publicity was so great that she had refused
this place of honour and had had to be ensconced in the fourth
row. On the other side of Lady Rachel, however, there was an
empty chair, for the girl had done all she could to persuade
her father to come and there was still a good chance that he
might. Ned Athling, who had written a considerable portion of
the words of the whole performance, was one of the principal
play-actors. Miss Bibby Fell was duly seated by Dr. Fell's side
and next to her were Lawyer Beere and Angela, and beyond them
Miss Drew and Mary. By Mary's side John had found a place
for a foreign priest. In the central portion of the second row of
seats, behind these personages, were the Vicar and his son, for
though Sam had steadily refused to have anything to do with the
performance and was now reduced to agitated burnings of heart
by the presence of Nell, he had been unwilling to refuse his
father when Mat had made an especial appeal to him not to
desert him on this occasion. Next to Mat and Sam sat Mr. Wollop
and in company with Mr. Wollop almost the whole staff of Wol-
lop's shop. Being a bachelor, and also having an equal and un-
failing interest in all mundane spectacles, Mr. Wollop had felt
it incumbent upon him to be found on this occasion "holding
up," as he called it, "his proper end."

It was a sign of something really grandly democratic in the
soul of Glastonbury's leading tradesman that there never entered
his head for a single second a doubt about the staff of Wollop's
--all its "young ladies" and all its "young gentlemen"--being
worthy of the second row of the select seats. It had , however,
several times already entered the head of the Nietzschean young
man--whose name was Booty--that he was in a place of embar-
rassing honour, since just in front of him was the vacant chair
reserved for the Marquis and to his right, for he was at the end
of the row of his fellows, sat Mr. Stilly of the bank.

In the third row of seats, but some distance from Sam, indeed
just behind Mr. Stilly's aged parents, were none others than Will
Zoyland and Nell. Nell had her brother Dave on her right, and
beyond Dave sat the Vicar of St. Benignus, the eloquent Dr.
Sodbury, whose ministrations were so pleasing to Megan Geard.
Persephone Spear had been enrolled rather late in the proceedings
among the players, but though so late a comer, she had been
given a role second to none, having been called upon to play the
part of the Virgin Mother.

It was only in the fourth row, just behind Will and Nell Zoy-
land that seats had been reserved for the family of the Mayor.
Here Mrs. Geard sat, between Cordelia and Mr. Bishop, the Town
Clerk, for Crummie was to take the important role of the Lady
of Shalott in the Arthurian part of the Pageant. Next to the
Town Clerk sat Mrs. Philip, and by Mrs. Philip's side was the
Curator of the Glastonbury Museum.

The fifth row of these reserved seats had been dedicated--Mr.
Tom Barter had been careful to see to this--to the servants of
the leading families of the town and all their especial friends
and relations. In this row, therefore, there sat a most motley
collection of persons, sweet-natured young girls, hypercritical
spinsters, nervous old men, complacent old women, and a great
many very riotous children. Here were Emma Sly, Louie and Lily
Rogers, Sally Jones and her friend Tossie Stickles--this latter,
because of her delicate state of health, armed with her mistress's
oldest and largest scent-bottle--Miss Bibby's latest two servants,
Rose Nicker and Edith Bates, both of whom had twice over
"given notice," those formidable connoisseurs of mortal life,
Mr. Weatherwax and Penny Pitches, those garrulous supporters
of the dignity of the church, Mrs. Robinson and Grandmother
Cole, together with the whole robber band from the alley. Jackie.
Nelly Morgan, Sis and Bert--the last-named being planted by a
devilish trick of chance just behind the curator of the museum
whose devotion to fossils was only rivalled by his maniacal
hatred of children.

At the extreme end of the sixth row, flanked by a voluble con-
tingent of Germans from Bremen and Lubeck. sat Mother Legge
with her faithful bodyguard, Young Tewsy, by her side, the old
lady in her best black silk and the old man in a suit of cast-off
broadcloth, hired from the laundryman, and formerly belonging
to a Baptist minister. On the other side of Mrs. Legge sat Blackie
Morgan, between whom and the old procuress a curious and
quite unprofessional friendship had sprung up.

Mr. Geard had surprised both John and Barter by insisting on
remaining completely independent of the whole thing--inde-
pendent of the actors, independent of the spectators--and the
only indication he had given to his family of his present where-
abouts was a word he had casually dropped after their early
dinner about seeing how the performance looked from the top
of the Tori

The number of foreigners who were present surpassed even
John's expectation and they constantly increased. Crowds of them
kept entering the field long after the performance had com-
menced. Every train that arrived brought more of them. They
were French, German, Spanish, Bohemian, Dutch, Danish, Scan-
dinavian and Russian. There were even two oriental, long-haired
monks from a monastery in the Caucasus. John Crow imagined
these two men setting out on this westward instead of eastward
pilgrimage at the very first hearing of its possibility, when two
and a half months ago he had sent his announcements across
Europe.

The only person among all this immense crowd who had
bothered about trying to get into personal relations with the
organisers of the event was a mysterious-looking priest from Con-
stantinople who called himself Father Paleologue. It was this
man to whom John--when he found that he could speak English
--had given a place by Mary's side, in the front seats. At the
opposite end of the sixth row from where Mrs. Legge and
Blackie were seated were Old Jones and Abel Twig. The Ward
Matron who had brought them--a handsome buxom woman al-
ways spoken of as Aunt Laura--was doing her best to amuse the
two old men. In this task she was not assisted very much by
her neighbour on the other side, who was an exceedingly caustic
French journalist famous for his biting wit. This man, who had
come to Glastonbury solely to report on the doings of Paul
Capporelli, was alternately scribbling in a notebook what pre-
sumedly were light touches of local colour, suitable as a back-
ground for the great clown, and stretching his neck to catch
more of the profile of Lady Rachel. Every now and then he would
turn a ferocious stare upon Abel Twig, who was seated between
Aunt Laura and Old Jones. There was something about Number
One's physiognomy, not to speak of his Sedgemoor dialect,
which this critical Parisian found peculiarly irritating. He was
trying to catch stray sentences--characteristic of English phlegm
and English snobbishness--from the "aristocracy" in the front
rows, among whom rumour had informed him was sitting the
daughter of Lord P., who represented one of the oldest Mar-
quisates in the Kingdom, but Number One's expressions of won-
der as to what had become of "thik big flock of good South-
Downs what old man Chinnock used to turn into this here field,"
were spoken so loudly that it was hard to hear anything else.

If the critic from Paris had desired to put down in his little
book a really significant trait of the English character, he would
have noted how respectfully and tactfully the brigade of Taunton
constables called in by Philip kept themselves in the background.
It was natural enough perhaps that the police-sergeant responsi-
ble for this large body of tactful officers had chosen to confine
their activity that afternoon to the outskirts of the crowd in the
Tor Field, but such strategy unfortunately played into the hands
of the really formidable trouble-makers. These were the revo-
lutionary leaders of the strikers at the Dye-Works. Led by Red
Robinson, who since his rebuff on Easter Monday, had deserted
the primrose-path for blood-and-iron politics, the Dye-Works
strikers with as many adherents as they could collect from the
Wookey and Wells workshops were even now at this very mo-
ment parading the streets with revolutionary banners. By means
of a real inspiration of the genius of "'ate," Red had made a
bid for the Nonconformist element among the populace of Glas-
tonbury and side by side with his political insignia he had
caused to be displayed at the head of his rapidly growing
procession inscriptions denouncing the Mayor's Pageant. ""Down
with Mediaevalism," these crafty scrolls read. "Down with Super-
stition," "No Lourdes, no Lisieux Here," "Down with Religious
Mummery."

Thus while Philip's police force was protecting the morals of
Glastonbury from the dangerous pieties of its Mayor, these
street-rioters were lumping both capitalist and pietist together
as joint-enemies of the people. Up and down the streets tossed
and swayed these varied and singular ensigns, gathering num-
bers as they went and collecting in their train all the roughest
elements of the town. At last the cry arose--inspired by the AEo-
lus-breath of Red's genius for action--"To the field!" and the
whole turbulent tide of people, the actual strikers far outnum-
bered by the less orderly elements, began pouring down Chilk-
well Street towards the scene of the performance. It soon began
to spread, as Lily would put it, "like wildfire," or as Penny
would put it, "like Satan's own stink," through the poorer por-
tions of the place that "The Town was up."

Like an animal organism that has taken an emetic, Glastonbury
now disembogued from the obscurest recesses of its complex be-
ing all manner of queer chemical substances. Such substances,
though they were living creatures, needed a shock like this cry,
"The Town is up," to fling them forth from their profound hid-
ing-places. Most of the destitute people and drunken people and
half-witted people who now poured forth from the most unex-
pected quarters were indigenous to the place. Thus for the first
time since the Battle of Sedgemoor when that strange cry went
about the streets just as it was doing now--"The Town is up"--
the real People of Glastonbury emerged and asserted itself. The
last time it had asserted itself was on behalf of that sweet, honey-
suckle bastard, Monmouth, for it was the "great gentlemen,"
like Lord P.'s ancestor and Mat Dekker's ancestor, who had
brought Dutch William in, not the people. And before that, for
it had allowed the Abbot to persecute heretics and it had al-
lowed the King to murder the Abbot without interfering, it had
responded to the cry "The Town is up" when Jack Cade revolted
against every privilege under the sun. It had rioted in honour of
Mother Shipton, Jane Shore, Lambert Simnel, John Wycliffe, John
Wesley, Lord George Gordon, and had even received and con-
cealed from royal vengeance the crafty Welshman Owen Glen-
dower. In fact the ingrown, inbred, integrated People of
Glastonbury had raised their famous cry "The Town is up!" on
behalf of every scandal that had worried the well-constituted
authorities since under the crazy Arviragus they had defied the
gods for the sake of the blood of a mad demigod, and on be-
half of the abductor Modred had waylaid the lovely queen of
Rex Arturus himself.

These were the people who poured forth now on this historic
Midsummer Day from Paradise and Bove Town and Butts Close
and Manor House Road to join with the strikers from Philip's
Dye-Works and wfith the holiday-makers from Wookey Hole. So
fantastical did some of this queer crowd look, who thus enlisted
themselves under the banner of Red Robinson's "'ate," that the
German and French and Scandinavian visitors--not to speak of
the monks from the monastery in the Caucasus and the super-
sophisticated Father Paleologue--would almost have been par-
doned for taking them as lineal descendants of the dwellers in
Abel Twig's Lake Village.

Unfortunately for Red's purpose his impatience for action got
himself and his strikers much too quickly upon the scene. His
strikers were orderly and respectable Wessex workmen, not easy
to excite to acts of violence. Thus although before they reached
the entrance they were shrewdly hustled by the strategic Red,
over several gaps in the hedge, into the field and thus were en-
abled to approach the western flank of the crowd of spectators
from an unexpected and unconventional quarter, things did not
work out as he had hoped. If this heterogeneous mob of invaders
had come en masse, in one grand rush, there is no doubt they
would have stampeded the players and ended Mr. Geard's
Pageant. But Red's "'ate"--directed equally against Mayor and
Manufacturer--had, as Number Two would have put it, "stam-
peded its wone self" and ruined ail his skilful strategy. He ought
to have waited in Chilkwell Street, opposite St. Michael's Inn--
and what a sight for Mad Bet that would have been!--until his
ragged camp-followers, descendants of the heroic populace who
fought with scythes and bill-hooks against a trained army and
a great general, had all reached the spot. It was the lack of
these irresponsible pilgarlics that spoilt Red's plan, for his
orderly strikers soon found themselves faced by the first five
rows of seats occupied by the gentry of the town, and even the
"Down with Mummery" banners paused and wavered, if they
were not actually lowered, before the indignant glances and the
cries of "Order! Order!" that now arose from these seats. To
the crowd that were following these patient factory-hands such
glances would have meant little. But many of these hands had
come to labour in Philip's Dye-Works from Bath and Yeovil and
Taunton and Shepton Mallet, and they lacked the recklessness of
the true Glastonbury tradition.

There might, however, have been trouble, even then, if Philip s
police had appeared on the scene, but fortunately these officers
had chosen to remain in that portion of the field devoted to the
gipsy caravans, for it was there that the hobbledehoys and riotous
young apprentices of the town who regarded this occasion as their
grand opportunity for causing annoyance, were shouting, sing-
ing, skylarking, making a resounding hullabaloo, and trying to
draw the attention of the vast audience to themselves. The mo-
ment was a crucial one, for the brightly attired groups of the
first part of the Pageant were already hovering about the two
mediaeval pavilions on the ledge of the hillside that served for
a platform, and Red, well-nigh desperate now and ready to risk
anything, was calling upon his banner-holders to ascend the
slope and invade this natural stage.

A spirited verbal altercation now began between Miss Drew, who
happened to be nearest to the banner which carried the word
"Mummery" and the young striker who held one of its poles.
In her excitement, for Mary could do nothing to calm her, and
Father Paleologue only laughed, the old lady rose to her feet
and bandied recriminations with the young striker, who to tell
the truth was more sulky and irritable than violent or rude.

There was an extremely large and very decorative canvas pa-
vilion at each end of the grassy stage where the Pageant was
now beginning and from these the players emerged and into
these they retreated as occasion demanded. These huge tents had
been copied from old books of chivalry; from the tops of them
floated many bright-coloured streamers and the fluttering canvas
that composed them was painted with heraldic symbols. It was
from the interior of the western one of these two pavilions that
John Crow watched in consternation the march of these hostile
banners. He despatched a messenger for Tom Barter who was in
the other tent and when Tom arrived, crossing the grassy stage
with a great deal of haste and not a little awkwardness, the only
thing he could suggest was that they should get the police away
from the caravans as speedily as possible.

"But why haven't they come already?" demanded John.

"They don't realise what's up," cried Tom. "How should they?
They think it's a deputation to the Mayor or something! They're
strangers. They don't know the town. They think it's part of the
affair...those flags and so on! They think it's part of our perform-
ance!"

The two men went to the western entrance of the great heraldic
tent and held open the sail-cloth hangings and stared helplessly
at the disturbance. They could hear contentious voices from the
invaded front rows! They could see figures on their feet among
them. John, concerned for Mary, caught sight of the unmistak-
able figure of Miss Drew brandishing her parasol. "But good
God, old man," cried Barter, "look at them coming across the
field! They're pouring through the hedge! We're being hustled
by the populace. There's no doubt about it! Philip's been rous-
ing the mob to break things up, since his police are no good."

"What are you all doing?" John cried now, turning fiercely
round on the actors with whom the tent was crowded. It was
the moment for the opening dumb show of the Pageant, which
consisted of a concourse of people in mediaeval dress gathered
to watch the Coronation of Arthur and Gwenevere. The part of
Gwenevere was taken by the tallest young lady in Wollop's, but
for the role of Arthur, Ned Athling had brought from his own
village his father's foreman, a majestic-looking middle-aged in-
dividual, bearded and broad-shouldered, but whose red-stock-
inged knees at that crisis were knocking together with panic.
The thrones of the king and queen were now standing near them,
inside the tent, a couple of Mat Dekker's choir-lads, in crimson
doublet and hose, waiting the word to drag them out From the
eastern pavilion the knights and ladies of Camelot--Sunday
School children from St. John's and St. Benignus--were already,
in the absence of anyone to stop them, gliding nervously forth
and presenting themselves before the audience. It was then that
the absence of the thrones--delayed by the consternation of the
officials in the western tent--proved bewildering to these be-
dizened youngsters.

John's fury, directing itself blindly towards the Middlezoy
King Arthur and towards the equally frightened pages who were
to drag out the thrones, was now confronted by the soft pro-
tests of the prostrate Crummie, who, lying upon a lathe-and-
plaster stretcher, roughly bulwarked to represent a barge, was
attended by two lusty youths from the Congregational Chapel
who were to carry her in, at the critical moment of the corona-
tion, and lay her at the feet of the king and queen. Across the
body of Crummie, who was wrapped in a dark blanket over which
her long fair hair fell in dishevelled allurement, a mitred bishop.
Bob Carter, from the Godney grocery, who was clinging fran-
tically to the crown of Britain, which an agitated page, Ted
Sparks from the bakery at Meare, was trying to take away from
him, burst now into angry abuse of Lancelot du Lac. This mel-
ancholy Mirror of Courtesy was Billy Pratt of the St. John's
Bell-Ringers, and Billy had infuriated Bob by insisting that it
was his right to stand at the head of Crummie when the moment
came for them all to emerge into public view, whereas Bishop
Bob declared that Lancelot's place was near the queen. It was
out of the midst of this noisy wrangle of Church and State over
the beautiful corpse that the soft voice of the Lady of Shalott
herself arose, enquiring of John what for mercy's sake was the
matter, and why the performance didn't commence. "It's so stuffy
in here," murmured the love-slain damsel.

"There's the devil to pay out here, Miss Geard," cried John,
in a state bordering on complete nervous collapse. "There's a
mob pouring across the field from the town with flags and sticks
and God knows what, and they're now collecting in front of the
audience. They're pointing at us too and I believe"--he cast a
glance through the tent-hangings--"Christ! They are! They're
coming up the hill, and all the front-row people are on their
feet and the foreigners are beginning to make a row."

John's account of things, however, was a little exaggerated.
Only one flag-carrier--the young Communist who had been
threatened by Miss Drew's parasol--had begun to ascend the hill,
but he had paused when he saw that no one was following him.
It was true that the foreign element in the audience--especially
the Swedes and Norwegians--were shouting protests in strange
tongues, but although matters were critical nothing had yet oc-
curred that was irretrievable.

"Are those Taunton police quiet still?" murmured the caress-
ing voice of the Lady of Shalott.

"Quiet?" cried John, rushing once more to the opening of the
tent. When he came back to her side--for this fair creature un-
der the dark blanket seemed just then all the human wisdom he
could cling to--he informed her that a body of policemen were
even now hastening round between the rear of the audience and
the hedge, with an evident intention of cutting off the strikers'
retreat.

"Stop them!" commanded Crummie, lifting up her lovely
bare shoulders from the black cushions on which they were rest-
ing. "Father said that under no conditions were those Taunton
police to interfere!"

"Tom!" cried poor John, in complete distraction, "Miss Geard
says the police must be stopped!"

Barter approached, fixing upon the Lady of Shalott's shoul-
ders an eye of covetous lechery.

"Are you a friend of mine, Mr. Barter?" said the girl. Into
these words Crummie threw all that world of erotic appeal of
which she was the perfect mistress. Paralysed by her passion for
Sam this appeal had been storing up for the last two or three
months like a precious wine "cooled a long age in the deep-
delved earth," but at this delicate crisis, when the whole success
of her father's Pageant was at stake, it poured forth from her
voice, her hair, her shoulders, her bosom, like undalant music.

"Yours to command, Miss Geard,'' said Ton: Barter, gloating
over her with a drugged, fatuous smile. "She's the most beau-
tiful thing I've ever seen in my whole life." he thought,

"Run down the field, then, Mr. Barter, for mercy's sake, and
stop those policemen! Talk to their sergeant, if he's there. Talk
to any of them. Tell them these people are friends of tire Mayor*
and that it's all right."

Barter didn't hesitate for a second. His face changed, however.
Action always steadied him. "I'm off!" he cried and disappeared
from the tent.

John and the Bishop and Lancelot du Lac and a group of pretty
pages with bare legs and tumbled curls watched the process of
events from the tent entrance. Edward Athling from the other
tent had already saved the situation as far as the Pageant was
concerned, for he had himself carried out upon the grassy stage
the Arthurian flag, "the Dragon of the great Pendragonship,"
towards which, as he planted it in the earth, a group of his com-
panions lifted their glittering sword-points in a reverential salute.
Then leaving the flag there, midway between the two tents, he
had withdrawn his followers from view. Thus from the embla-
zoned folds of the royal standard of Romanized Britain, the
golden Dragon looked forth towards the black heraldic Lions
upon one tent and the Sacred Symbols of Saint Joseph upon the
other. The spectators had now something to hold their attention.

John suddenly resolved that they should have something else,
and he gave a signal to the pages, who were scraping at the
golden thrones with their nails to see how deep the gilding
went, to carry them out and place them on the left of the
Dragon Ensign. Meanwhile he watched with trembling interest
Barter's encounter with the Taunton police. He could see his
friend talking eagerly and earnestly to the sergeant in com-
mand, but he could also see the straggling procession of nonde-
scripts from the town pouring constantly over the hedge and
towards their leader's banners that now seemed to be remaining
stationary side by side with the no longer protesting occupants
of the front seats.

"Begin! Begin!" vociferated some Frenchman from Avignon.
"The Play!" shouted some Spanish students from Salamanca.
"Hush! Hush!" retorted a German contingent from Weimar, to
whose more patient minds, schooled in Faustian mysteries, those
two golden thrones with the sunny hillside as a background,
held a symbolic if not metaphysical signification.

The situation was still very tense, as John well knew, much
more tense than any of these excitable masqueraders in the tent
realised. One of the younger mistresses in the Church School--
the one "who had gone to Yeovil to see her lover on Maundy
Thursday--now appeared in much perturbation to say that there
was a quarrel going on in the other pavilion between Mr.
Athling and the professional directors from Dublin. These peo-
ple, it transpired, a man and a woman, were great admirers of
Monsieur Capporelli and they were indignant now because the
famous clown, who had been sitting patiently in a corner of
the tent smoking cigarettes for the last hour, was being kept wait-
ing so long for his pantomimic performance. Made up as Dago-
net, in a disguisement learnedly and exquisitely copied from
museum specimens of mediaeval costume, Paul Capporelli was
now engaged in a lively conversation with Persephone Spear,
by whose personality, in her blue robe and red bodice, as the
Virgin Mother, he had clearly been fascinated. But the Dubliners
were full of annoyance over this protracted conversation be-
tween their precious Fool and this very local Madonna.

The conversation between Barter and the Taunton police force
had ended in the latter taking their stand all along the hedge to
prevent any more of the mob from entering from that unau-
thorised direction. But there were enough now of the irrespon-
sible element, crowding up behind the assembled strikers, to
make things look very threatening. These newcomers were by no
means of the sort to be stopped by the waving of Miss Drew's
green parasol, and between them and Mother Legge, who was
sitting at the end of the sixth row, there had already begun a
volley of scurrilous badinage that showed every sign of starting
a really unpleasant contretemps. Things indeed had reached that
stage--it was already nearly three o'clock and there was noth-
ing to see on the stage but two gilded thrones and the great Pen-
dragon flag--when the smallest spark, like the accident of Mother
Legge and her Rabelaisian tongue being on the extreme west
of the audience, might have led to a general pandemonium, out of
which, with all these foreigners already getting nervous and
irritable, it would have been impossible to get back to any sort
of order. Such a spark seemed now to have been really struck,
not by Mother Legge, but by the arrival upon the scene of the
Marquis of P.

It was the manner of this nobleman's approach that started
the trouble. Completely unaware of the arrival of the real Peo-
ple of Glastonbury upon the field, my Lord had taken it into
his head to have himself driven by Sergeant Blimp in a light
dog-cart, over from Mark Court. Taking for granted that his
daughter was keeping a seat for him--as indeed she had written
to say she would do--Lord P. told Blimp to drive him straight
round the field--they entered it from a gate at the town-end--
till he reached the front row of seats and there drop him. "'You
can go," he had said, i£ to the Pilgrims' then, Blimp, and put up.
I'll walk round there later."

Now Sergeant Blimp, although he would have submitted to
torture rather than have slept in Merlin's room, had no fear of
a mob. So when it became obvious that there was a mob--and a
rather dangerous-looking one, between them and their objective--
the Sergeant cracked his whip and trotted his tall black horse
all the more resolutely. Then the disturbance which had been
on the edge of breaking out for so long really did seem inevi-
table. Hundreds of angry voices were raised; people who were
further off pushed others who were nearer, right into the path
of the dog-cart; sticks were brandished, and if stones were not
thrown it was rather due to the fact that there were none in
that grassy field than to any want of a will to throw them! Lord
P., though courted by the Wessex bourgeoisie, was--for certain
particular reasons--detested by its proletariat; and his appear-
ance at this juncture gave this latter a chance that was not
likely to be repeated. In all human communities--indeed in all
human groups--there are strange atavistic forces that are held
in chains deep down under the surface. Like the imprisoned
Titans, these Enceladuses and Sisyphuses and Briareuses, dwell
in the nether depths of human nature ready to break forth in
blind scoriac fury under a given touch. In these violent up-
heavals of class against class there is something far deeper than
principle or opinion at stake. Skin against skin...blood against
blood...nerves against nerves...rise up from incalculable depths.

Lord P. himself was not less than astounded at the intensity
of the feeling that his figure in that dog-cart by the side of
his placid servant excited in this mob. It was as if everything
in these people's lives that they had suffered from...indiffer-
ence...neglect...contempt...cold malignant distaste...fastidious
disgust...everything that had weighed on them, day by day, in
a tacit conspiracy to press them down and keep them down,
suddenly incarnated itself in that grizzled man with the small
pointed grey beard and big wrinkled nose. Lord P. was abso-
lutely startled, and, though by no means a coward, he was
even a little frightened, by the looks he caught on some
of the womens faces in that surging mass of people.

While his black horse plunged and reared in its harness, while
men tugged at its bridle and tried to pull the reins out of
Blimp's hands, while there was danger not only of the shafts
of the cart being broken but of the whole equipage being upset,
he caught on the face of one woman from Paradise--she was a
remote cousin, by the way, of Abel Twig--a look of such insane
ferocity, free from every other feeling, that a spasm of sheer
panic seized upon him. It was one of those moments that are
apt to occur in the most carefully regulated communities. My
Lord was no longer under the protection of an invisible net-
work of magnetic wires. He was a man, and a man acquainted
with fear. But what had frightened him was not the violence of
other men. What had frightened him was a glance into a black
crater. For that black crater possessed eyes, and the Marquis
of P., clinging to his swaying and heaving dog-cart, had looked
into those eyes.

People rarely receive these revelations of the underside of life
unaccompanied by some funny little triviality which, like a
mime or a mommet, goes ever afterward hand in hand with that
chimera. The trivial thing on this occasion was some black
horse-hairs which lay smeared in a little patch against one
of the green shafts now in such eminent danger beng broken.
Black horse-hairs, wet with sweat and sticking to painted wood,
were henceforth always associated in his mind with this deadlv
popular fury surging up out of the cracks and crevices of Tor
Field.

It was impossible for the Taunton police to remain long in
ignorance of the nature of this howling and struggling group of
persons who were apparently hustling two men in a painted cart
and trying to pull them out; but for the next three or four min-
utes their official attention was so completely occupied in hold-
ing back the crowd which kept pouring down the lane from enter-
ing the field that they could not cope with this new trouble.
"Even a Zomerset orficer," as one of them said to Lord P. on a
subsequent occasion, "couldn't be in two carners of the same
girt field at the same time."

It was, however, much easier for Mr. Geard, who was, quite
simply, as he had told his family he would be, surveying matters
from the top of the Tor, to get the full significance of the danger
to Lord P. than it was for Taunton policemen. They were forced
to look up, being fully occupied. He was in a position to look
down, having nothing to do. There would certainly have been a
rush from the bourgeois portion of the native audience to rescue
the hustled nobleman; in fact, his own son, Will Zoyland,
would have been at his side in a couple of minutes; if it had
not been for two things: first, that there was a rise in the ground
to the west of that audience, which prevented them from seeing
what was transpiring over there, and secondly that the long-
expected Pageant nowcommenced in real earnest, absorbing
everyone's attention.

A couple of hundred lads and lasses gorgeously attired in
mediaeval costume marched forth now from the two heraldic pa-
vilions and grouped themselves round the Dragon Flag and
round the twp golden thrones. The body of the dead Elaine was
carried in--never in her life had Crummie looked so lovely--
and the Archbishop of Canterbury accompanied by a Knight
carrying the crown of Britain on a green cushion, stood at the
feet of the dead. Lancelot du Lac leaned against the side of
Queen Gwenevere's throne, while, for those initiated in such mat-
ters, the forms of Sir Percival, Sir Galahad, and Sir Gawain,
clearly distinguishable from one another by the devices on their
shields, could be made out conversing together at the back of
Arthur's throne. To the west of the Queen's throne and at a lit-
tle distance from the rest--as if retaining their own mythical
independence--stood Tristram and Iseult, while, in a position
of ferocious skulking, spying, and murderously tracking down
was King Mark of Cornwall.

In regard to the choice of characters for this first part of the
Pageant there had been no difficulty save for one curious excep-
tion. This exception was Merlin. John had been very anxious
to have a Merlin and so had Edward Athling. Mr. Geard, how-
ever, had steadily and--to the mind of the whole company,
obstinately--refused to allow Merlin to be represented at all.
"But we're going to represent Christ, Daddy," Crummie had
pleaded. "You don't mean to say that Merlin's more sacred than
Christ." Mr. Geard had smiled and shook his head. "Christ was
buried in Jerusalem," was his curious answer; by which John
understood him to mean that while for the world at large Christ
was by far the more sacred, here, in Glastonbury, where he dis-
appeared from view, Merlin must always be the "numen" or
the "Tremendum Mysterium" that can be second to none.

Mr. Geard had reached the top of the hill by a circuitous route
long before the Pageant was due to begin. The performance was
divided--and the Dubliners had displayed their nicest virtuosity
in the way this had been done--into three parts. All three parts
had a lot of dumb show, a limited amount of dialogue and a
great many choral songs. But the point in which the high tech-
nical skill of the Dubliners was most revealed was in the manner
in which the Pageant was fused and blended with the Passion
Play, the two together forming a trilogy to which a strange and
original unity had been given by the role played by Arthur's
Fool. The Dubliners, with Irish audacity, had given Capporelli
the leading role in all three parts, and by an artful reversal of
chronology in the interests of symbolism, the thing began with
the latest epoch of time and worked back to the earliest. Thus
the opening dealt with the Arthurian Cycle, the interlude with
the Passion of Christ, and the conclusion with the ancient Cym-
ric Mythology, Capporelli being Dagonet in the first, Momus, a
comic Roman soldier in the second, and none other than the
bard Taliessin in the third.

In the intervals of their violent quarrels with Athling the Dub-
liners had worked very enthusiastically with him over these
mystical effects. Athling had indulged himself with a passionate
wistfulness in the kind of poetry he had made up his mind to
forsake, but the new note, the modern note that was so obnox-
ious to Lady Rachel, had forced its way in. and had given a biz-
arre and even an uncomfortable twist to many scenes of this
strange Pageant. This was especially the case with the scenes
in which Capporelli entered, and the great clown consenting to
use several poignant and mocking apothegms composed by the
Middiezoy poet had added to them certain curious touches of his
own. There was such a distance between the grassy ledge where
the performance took place and the front row of seats that the
voices of individual players were liable to be blown away upon
the wind. This .was. however, compensated for by a printed libretto
which the audience could read while they enjoyed the dancing,
the studied gestures, the symbolic ritual, of the trilogy.

Mr. Geard had many deep and strange feelings as he watched
the gathering crowd from the top of the Tor. He had found
quite a large group of noisy lads up there when he reached the
top, but, knowing the Mayor by sight, they had hurriedly
shogged off, running down the hill at top speed to join in the
sport of baiting the policemen where the booths and caravans
stood in a line under the hedge and where ginger-pop was to be
sold. All except one. This was the small offspring of Solly Lew,
the taxi-driver, a grave little boy called Steve, who had mani-
fested for Mr. Geard the moment he appeared the peculiar fas-
cination that a child will sometimes display for a formidable
middle-aged man. Mr. Geard, finding himself alone with this
child on the summit of the great haunted hill, the hill of Gwvn-
ap-Nud, the Welsh Fairy-Demon, the hill where Abbot Whiting
had been so bloodily murdered, called Steve to his side and made
him sit down with him under the tower.

It was indeed upon a remarkable scene that Mr. Geard and
his small companion looked down now as they surveyed the
verdurous undulations of those island-Valleys--Ynys Witrin.
Ynys Avallach, Insula Avallonia the land of Modred, Melwas,
Meleagnant, Mellygraunce, Aestiva Regio, Insula Pomorum.
Gwlad yr Hav, Insula Vitrea, Isle de Voirre, yr Echwyd, Glast,
Glastenic, Glastonia, Glaston--over which the intense sky, that
Midsummer Day, seemed actually to he bowing down, bowing
and bending and battening upon those lovely green undulations,
as if the greatest and most powerful of all created Beings was
taking His pleasure with the sweet grass-scented earth.

The crowds of people seated on the chairs and benches in the
centre of the bottom of the field resembled a magician's carpet
that Mr. Geard by his incantations from up there under St.
Michael's Tower had caused to be laid down. He himself now,
like a modern Gwyn-ap-Nud, surveyed his astonishing evoca-
tion with a silent gratitude, with an up-welling feeling of fulfil-
ment, deep as that fount of red water whose flowing he could
detect at the foot of the opposite hill. The hats and garments and
parasols of the feminine element in his audience--for they were
all dressed for summer weather that day--caused the great ex-
pectant crowd to resemble, spread out upon the grass, that many-
coloured coat which the original nomadic Joseph had received
of his father Jacob. Westward of the crowd Mr. Geard could see
the roofs of Glastonbury, looking, with all their bright red tiles,
as if a great wave of spray from the chalybeate fountain had
washed over them. Rising from among these red-tiled roofs he
could see the massive tower of St. John's and the lesser tower
of St. Benignus'. These two towers from any distance were, with
the one under which he sat, the characteristic land-marks of the
place, for the Abbey Ruins, although to a careful scrutiny they
were just distinguishable among the trees, were unable to stand
out in clear relief.

Mr. Geard now cast his eyes upon a long, low tent, one of
the biggest tents that he himself had ever seen, which he had
caused to be set up under the hedge, to the northwest of where
the audience was seated, and on the opposite side of the en-
trance from where stood the line of caravans. Inside this big
tent, which was really five or six tents thrown into one, Mr
Geard had prepared a substantial tea--and not only a tea. He
had used as his caterer the landlord of a Glastonbury Inn that
overlooked the cattle-market and had many historic associations,
and this man had brought over from his cellar an enormous
amount of liquour of every kind. This man. whose name was
Dickery Cantle, had the peculiarity of being the weakest and
most helpless human creature that Mr. Geard had ever seen. The
Cantles had handed down this inn from father to son for no less
than four generations. Rumour says that the recruiters for Mon-
mouth's rebellion used to meet here, and that John Locke, uncle
of the first Recorder of Glastonbury, used to sit, of a summer
evening, on the wooden bench outside, drinking gin and cider,
while he meditated upon the pragmatic limitations of the human
spirit.

Dickery Cantle would never have suceeded in avoiding ruin
if it had not been that his stomach was so weak that the least
touch of alcohol made him vomit. His wife was not a woman
of much more energy than her husband and it was notorious
in the town that while their cellar was celebrated for the rare
and high quality of its wines their personal table often lacked
meat and they could not afford to buy new shoes for their only
child, Elphin. Mr. Geard would never have undertaken to pro-
vide such extensive preparations for his audience if he had
not been struck one day by the wasted consumptive look of
Elphin Cantle. This chance encounter, when he was drinking in
their bar, had remained in his mind. "I'll give those Canties
some business," he had told Megan; and this big tent was the
result.

But the eyes of Mr. Geard now turned westward, and in turn-
ing in that direction they caught sight of the mob surrounding
the green-wheeled dog-cart; & scene that was visible to him from
the Tor's summit, although quite invisible to the spectators of
the Pageant.

"They be pulling they chaps out of thik cart. Mister," Steve
Lew remarked; and Mr. Geard very quickly realised to whom
the green dog-cart and the big black horse must belong. Seldom
has an elderly man raced down a hill more quickly than Bloody
Johnny ran now. "He was only just in time," Steve said to
Elphin Cantle afterwards as he was helping him open bottles
and hand round beer-mugs. "Yon Mayor be a good 'un for a fast
sprint, looksee, spite o' his girt belly! 'Twas all I could do to
keep pace wi' he!"

It is always difficult to disentangle the element of pure chance
from the other forces that bring about any startling event, from
the pressure, for instance, of that mysterious undertide that we
call Destiny, or from the creative energy spontaneously gener-
ated, from the central point of its absolute freedom, in the will
of a living organism. What happened now seemed to submerge
Mr. Geard's personal prestige among that crowd, his official
position as Mayor of the Town, as well as the extraordinary mag-
netic power that always burned at any dangerous crisis in his
unholy eyes. Certainly his advance towards the swaying dog-cart
and the plunging horse, when once he approached the scene,
was not an easy one. One ruffian from the slums of Street, down
by the banks of the Brue, struck him in the face with a stick
leaving a bleeding mark across his white, moist, flabby cheek.
A woman from Butts Close--she was a sister of Tom Barter's
landlady, but a more reckless sort of character--dragged at his
clothes and tore his waistcoat open, so that the grey flannel shirt
(that he never would let Megan send to the wash more than
once a fortnight and that he insisted on wearing summer and
winter alike) hung out almost indecently over the front part
of his trousers. It must be remembered that between this surg-
ing mob around Lord P. and the original crowd of invaders of
the field, who had now subsided into quiescence about their
banners, there was a protuberant rib of the hillside which pre-
vented both the Dye-Works strikers and the seated audience from
seeing what was going on. Red Robinson, whose seething and
fermenting " 'ate" had, it almost seemed, been paralysed by the
mere waving of Miss Drew's green parasol, was now drifting
with baffled fury from one to another of the banner-bearers,
cajoling, commanding, imploring, entreating them, like a dis-
tracted leader in a lost battle, to rush forward and invade the
grassy eminence where the coronation of King Arthur was now
triumphantly proceeding, teasing him, mocking him, a veritable
charade of Tantalus, with its glittering and fantastical fooling.
Lord P/s fate depended, therefore, as in most physical struggles
between bewildered human antagonists, upon the configuration
of the ground. If Mr. Geard had not been playing, quite uncon-
sciously, the primeval role of Gwyn-ap-Nud, the old Welsh
Prince of Darkness, and enjoying the spectacle he had wrought
from the summit of Tor, Lord P. would certainly have come to
grief and there would have doubtless appeared some modern
Judge Jeffreys holding grim inquisition into a popular uprising.
As it was, Mr. Geard's desperate struggle to reach the besieged
dog-cart created such a hurly-burly of shouts and counter-shouts,
of imprecations and protestations, that the Taunton police guard-
ing the hedge caught the clamour on the wind and came rushing
across the grassy hillocks to intervene.

It was the sight of these officers' helmets above the heads of
the rioters that, when he recalled his sensations later, remained
with Mr. Geard as the most sinister of his impressions. His other
impressions, the dazzling sunshine, the blue sky, the trodden
grass, the stink of human sweat and foul garments, the taste of
his own blood from his bleeding cheek, the sight of the green
wheels tipped up on one side and spinning round, the hoofs of
the black horse pawing the air, the unmoved countenance of
Sergeant Blimp, the panic in the eyes of the Marquis, the con-
fusion of human arms and legs and contorted faces through
which he struggled and sweated and fought and tore his way,
left upon his mind rather a sense of exhilaration than anything
else. Mr. Geard was one of those men whose physical phlegm
is so thick and deep that it requires a series of material shocks
to rouse the full awareness in them of the taste and tang of life.
Something in him--some savage atavistic reversion to his heathen
ancestors--had tasted blood in this tossing melee of sweating,
dragging, resisting human bodies. The moments when infuriated
women--their bodies forced into contact with his body by pres-
sure from behind--clung to his plump figure, tearing, scratch-
ing, clinging, striking, shrieking, were moments of a wild physi-
cal exultation. Mr. Geard panted like a dog. The spittle from
his thick sensual lips mingling with the blood from his hurt cheek
trickled down his chin. With heaving chest, straining limbs, and
bare head--for he had now lost his hat--he struggled blindly
forward, those spinning green wheels, those almost vertical green
shafts, the scared eyes of the Marquis, drawing him forward, like
the jutting out of a wharf with a swinging lamp in a turbulent
sea. His big mouth was wide open now as he fought his way on,
the black fire in his eyes burned with a terrible glee, his pant-
ings became like the pantings of that beast called the Questing
Beast in the legends. Guttural noises, different from mere human
breathings, rose from his tormented lungs.

The curious thing was, however, that Mr. Geard's mind had
never been calmer or clearer in its working than at that mo-
ment. "This is Life!" he thought to himself; and something like
a sobbed-out chuckle rose up from the pit of his labouring belly.
His old refrain--"Blood of Christ--Blood of Christ--Blood of
Christ"--drummed in his throat and blent itself with his bestial
groanings and with his Hengist-and-Horsa chucklings. As he beat
his way on, reeling, staggering, stumbling, his queer battle-
frenzy increased rather than diminished. "This is Life!" he said
to himself, with exactly the same clear awareness of the enjoy-
ment he was getting, as if he had been a sturdy swimmer in
huge wave-bursts of tossing surf. And there gradually arose in
his consciousness a very queer notion, the feeling, namely, that
what he was doing now was not rescuing a frightened aristocrat
from a mob, but rescuing the Blood of Christ from loss, from
destruction, from annihilation. The fancy lodged itself in his
brain--quite cool and clear above his pantings--that if he could
only touch one of those upheaved green shafts with his hand, if
he could only get his fingers on the bridle of that rearing black
horse, he would prevent the Blood of Christ from sinking into
the deep earth and being lost forever! "Yes, yes, yes," he
thought, "I'll build a Saxon arch about the Chalice Well--a
round Saxon arch!" And then it was that he caught sight of
the helmets of Philip Crow's policemen.

The sight of these officials completely broke up his mood. It
was a policeman's hand--not his hand--that dragged down
those green shafts. It was a policeman's arm--not his arm--that
brought to earth the rearing front hoofs of the black horse. It
was between a couple of Philip's policemen, too, that Lady
Rachel's father was now standing, angrily stroking his beard
and gazing round vindictively in order to point out to the officials
the worst offenders and ring-leaders of the crowd. Not as yet had
the officers of the law laid hands upon anyone, but it was clear
to the exhausted and disconcerted Mayor that this was what
they were now thinking of doing. Many of the crowd were evi-
dently of the same opinion, for they were beginning to sneak
off with extraordinary celerity, each of the retreating ones as-
suming an absent-minded air with regard to immediate phe-
nomena and an intensely interested air with regard to pressing
events which demanded their presence upon the far horizon.

Mr. Geard, disappointed though he was, and with no fire left
in his eyes, now pulled himself together. He tucked his shirt
back into its proper place. He took out his handkerchief and
wiped the blood from his cheek. He buttoned his coat tightly
under his chin. Then he advanced, although with tottering steps
and heaving lungs, and presented himself before Lord P. His
Lordship welcomed him warmly. Luckily he took it at once for
granted that it was by his anxiety for the safety of the patron
of his Pageant that he had caused these officials--like the war-
riors of Cadmus--to spring out of the earth. "Well, Mr. Mayor,"
he began, "this is indeed--" Philip's policemen, hearing the
word "Mayor" and seeing Lord P. shake hands so warmly with
this perspiring, panting, hatless member of the crowd, became
convinced that they were in the presence of another distinguished
victim of this breaking of His Majesty's peace.

Mr. Geard's brain now moved very actively as he shook hands
with Sergeant Blimp, a thing which he did quite as warmly as
the Sergeant's master had done with himself. He spoke in an
authoritative voice, conveying the impression to both the noble-
man and the policemen that he was accustomed to order officials
about. "One or two of you take his Lordship to his seat. It's the
front row. Lady Rachel is keeping it for him. The performance
has begun."

"Won't you yourself--" began Lord P.

"No," said Mr. Geard abruptly; and he surprised the owner
of the dog-cart by clambering up into the high seat along with
Blimp who was already once more in possession of horse and
reins. "I presume he's going to put up at the Pilgrims', eh?" he
said.

"You're not deserting your own show, Geard?"

"Seen enough of it for a while," replied Mr. Geard. "I may come
back before it's finished though. I want to hear how you've
enjoyed it."

Blimp's hands were on the reins to pull the vehicle round.

"You won't mind if I use your cart for a minute before he
takes it back to town?"

"Not at all, Geard, not at all," Lord P. rejoined, "as long as
you don't ask me to get up again!" He uttered these last words
with a grimace that was clearly intended to make a jest of his
recent attack of nerves. Not a soul had seen the fear in his eyes
except Mr. Geard and possibly Sergeant Blimp, but it was char-
acteristic of the man to make a point of honour of this humorous
confession.

"Yes, the front row, officer," the Mayor added, in answer to
one of the policemen. "Lady Rachel is keeping a seat for him."
He laid his bare hand on Blimp's neatly gloved one. "Wait a
little," he murmured. "I want him to get well ahead."

"Right you are, your Worship," said the sergeant.

"You two had a near shave," said Mr. Geard.

"Tut, tut! 'Twere nothing to the dust I've seen kicked up in my
time," replied the sergeant. "His Lordship ain't as young a man
as he was ten years ago."

"A mob's a nasty thing," said Mr. Geard, giving the man such
an understanding glance that Blimp answered with a wink.

"His nerves ain't what they were," he said. The Mayor looked
round. It was extraordinary how quickly the crowd had scattered.

"I don't want any arrests made, nor does Lord P.," he re-
marked emphatically to a policeman who was holding their
horse's head. The animal was still trembling a little.

The man touched his helmet. "As your Worship wishes."

"Drive after your master. Sergeant," Mr. Geard directed, "but
not fast. I want to see him safely in his seat."

The policeman let go of the bridle and the green-wheeled dog-
cart set off at a walking pace towards the scene of the Pageant.
They soon reached a spot from which it was possible to get a
clear view of both audience and performers. ''Pull her up a
second, Sergeant." The man obeyed, and they waited till they
could observe the figure of Lord P., with the two policemen
close behind him, threading their way through the crowd of
strikers. When they had disappeared, "Drive over to that tent
if you don't mind," commanded the Mayor.

Arrived at the entrance to his huge refreshment pavilion, Mr.
Geard told Steve Lew, who had now resumed his fascinated at-
tendance, to run in and ask Mr. Cantle to come out. It was now
the destiny of Sergeant Blimp to set eyes on the feeblest, weak-
est, most worried and most bewildered caterer he had ever seen,
or ever desired to see. "I'm going to send you some guests of
my own straight away, Dickery," said the Mayor. "Treat 'em
well. Don't let 'em get drunk. And turn 'em out without fail
before five o'clock. All out before five o'clock!"

Dickery Cantle, whose eyes were a pale, light, moist blue,
and whose beard was straggly and thin and like bleached tow,
was so surprised at the sight of the green cart and black horse
that he could only open his mouth and blink.

"Is Elphin inside?" enquired Mr. Geard. Steve Lew heard
this, if Elphin's parent didn't, and the young Cantle with his
thin legs in black Sunday stockings soon made his appearance.
"Tell your mother and her people that I'm going to send her
some guests for refreshments in a minute. Tell her 'beer and
wine and sandwiches' and tell her all out before five, will you,
Elphin? All out by five! I don't want 'em to clash with the
other people."

Elphin Cantle's blue eyes--not pale blue like his father's,
who was now muttering something quite incoherent about
"brands" and "vintages"--but deep blue like the broad sky
above them, gleamed with intelligent understanding. "Am I to
tell Mother any...any sum...that your Worship wants...would
wish...her...to " he began.

"Tell her--'all that's reasonable,' " pronounced Mr. Geard
emphatically.

Elphin's blue eyes deepened in colour till they grew nearly
black. Then brushing some dust from his legs, thin as matches,
--those poor emaciated legs that were the fons et origo of this
big tent--he lifted up his face. "Mother will understand. Mother
thanks you from her heart, your Worship! Come, Father!" he
added.

Dickery Cantle followed Elphin into the tent, as did also Steve
Lew, bestowing on the Mayor before he departed a final glance
of fanatical devotion.

The green-wheeled dog-cart drove off now. It encircled the
seated audience from whose throats excited and vociferous ap-
plause was now arising as the King and Queen with their great
golden crowns upon their heads rose from their thrones and
moved to the side of the Lady of Shalott.

The movement of the Dye-Works factory-hands, with their
protestant allies and their secular banners, had not been missed
by Mr. Geard. All the way down that hillside--as he was racing
to the rescue of the Marquis--he was thinking desperately how
to cope with this menacing invasion. He could catch, as Blimp
trotted his horse along the edge of the vast concourse of people,
the constant murmurs of "Order! Order! Hush! Hush!" ad-
dressed to these men, who continued to talk loudly among them-
selves, even though the poles of their banners were now planted
in the earth. When they came level with the row of seats at the
end of which sat Mother Legge, Mr. Geard called upon Blimp
to pull up. Here they waited, watching for the close of the scene
on the grassy stage above. It was near the end. After a second or
two of waiting, it ended, and the play-actors, well contented
with the ovations they had just received, marched off to their
respective pavilions.

A general buzz of excited talk ran through the whole mass
of people. The dog-cart had drawn up close to where Mrs. Legge
and Blackie Morgan were sitting. Between their horse's head
and the ends of the first five rows of seats was the back of a
banner, the poles of which Tested on the grass, carrying the
words, "Down with Mummery!" These words Mr. Geard now
contemplated, as he acknowledged the salutations of the people
near enough to recognise him. Mother Legge herself made an
airy gesture with her black-gloved hand, that was almost as if
she kissed the tips of her fingers to the Mayor of Glastonbury,
and many of the seated crowd looked towards him and nodded
towards him as they continued their boisterous clapping, direct-
ing their applause to the organiser of the performance as much
as to the players.

The crowd of Dye-Works strikers was obviously ill at ease at
this juncture. The big audience behind them had time now to
concentrate their attention on these men, whose banners, "Down
with Religion!" "Down with Capital!" "Down with Mummery!"
flapped beside them in the warm summer wind. Several of
Philip's policemen were now standing about, surveying these
revolutionary scrolls with humorous detachment, but Mr. Geard
observed one of these officers edge himself in front of the knees
of the people in the second row, till he came behind Lord P.,
into whose ear he whispered something, something that made the
Marquis turn round and glance at the strikers.

The applause had been prolonged by the foreigners long after
it had ceased among the native-born, but it died down now and
a general murmur of conversation all over the big audience took
its place in the midst of which some very curious and surprising
preparations were going on on the stage in front of them all. A big
wooden cross was brought out, from which were hanging thick
ropes, like those used on shipboard, twisted loosely round its
cross-beams, and this object was laid on the ground, where the
thrones of Arthur and Gwenevere had formerly been, beside a
capacious hole that had been dug to receive it. Across the faces
of the audience was blown at intervals the warm sun-sweet smell
of trodden grass and mingled with this the pungent smell of
nicotine from the short clay pipes which many of the strikers--
quiet, patient family-men--had lit to cheer their suspense.

It was at this moment that the voice of Red Robinson was
heard in shrill penetrating tones. Red got hold of a chair and
had jumped up upon it. From this elevation he began to scream
forth a hurried torrent of abuse, raising his hands high into the
air and making them tremble there, using in fact that particular
gesture which has become almost a convention with street-orators,
but which still retains a power that has its own peculiar quality.

Mr. Geard saw two or three policemen pushing their way to-
wards this shouting man. "Give him five minutes, officers, if you
please!" This command from the green dog-cart was flung out
in those stentorian tones which used to be the delight of the
slums in Bloody Johnny's revivalistic meetings.

The officers stopped, turned, and remained motionless, glanc-
ing alternatively at Lord P., seated by his daughter's side, and
at the bare-headed Mayor in Lord P.'s cart.

"You Wessex people who 'ave come 'ere to 'ear this folly,
listen to me! And you, foreign people, who have come from hover
the seas to see this folly, listen to me! And you, Glastonbury
comrades, who know what this folly is, listen to me! High 'ave
only one thing to say this harfternoon! The capitalistic system
of society is doomed. In a 'undred years from now, private
property in Glastonbury will be hun-known! This 'ere new Mayor
of hours is no better than the light one and has for Crow hup
there with 'is blasted airpline--" He jumped down hurriedly
from his chair and took refuge within the close-packed ranks of
his friends, for the enraged figure of Lord P. standing erect now
and calling furiously upon the policemen to stop him had coun-
teracted the command from the green cart and the officers had
moved towards him. It was then that Dave Spear jumped up
from his seat and lifted up his voice.

"This man," shouted Spear, "may have been too angry to
choose his words as he ought. But what he says is true! Human-
ity will soon--" At the scholarly intonation of the young philos-
opher all the Germans in the audience--who were the ones who
knew English best--leaned forward, listening gravely and in-
tently. Indeed they cried out in guttural protest against some
nasal French voices lifted up in derision of Spear's words, and
for a moment it looked as if the old hostility between Gothic
blood and Mediterranean blood would burst out that day in
Urbs Vitrea under Gwyn-ap-Nud's mischievous rogueries! The
particular tone Spear plunged into at once, so earnest and so
academic, and his introduction of the word "humanity," be-
guiled the Russians who were present--all except the monks from
the Caucasus who took him for a devilish heretic--and brought
them over to his side. The Spanish contingent, which was un-
usually large, agreed on the contrary very strongly with the
French and joined the French in calling angrily upon the young
man to sit down.

But Dave Spear, in spite of cries of "Order!", "Silence!",
"Turn him out!" refused to sit down. "Humanity will soon,"
he shouted, "be no longer Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Rus-
sians! We shall all be men and women--working for ourselves
--not for the rich--in one great community of Comrades!" The
clamour round him got now so confused that it became impos-
sible to out-shout it, and after calmly surveying the whole crowd
with his eyes and watching them as if he were a shepherd
counting his sheep, Dave Spear sat down.

The group of strikers from the Crow Works were now thrown
into a most awkward and uncomfortable position. The bulk
of them had no sympathy with the communistic opinions of their
leaders. They were unable to enjoy "thik open air theayter" as
they regarded it, because of their near neighbourhood to the
gentry. At the same time, being honest Somerset workingmen,
they were reluctant to desert their flags. One of the most digni-
fied among them, a certain Josh Witcombe from Queen's Camel,
articulated the thoughts of the majority among them when he
said to himself--"What in the name of crikey be I doing here?
A danged fool I be, when I might be digging taties, in me bit o'
garden, this fine holiday! This ere Crow be a bloody blighter.
There ain't two opinions about that, but what be all this high-
falutin' palaver got to do wi' I? Crikey! I wish I were sittin'
peaceful-like in me back-garden, watching me sweet peas how
girt they be grown! This here Glaston will never be a place
for quiet folk to enjoy theyselves in, till both this blighter Crow
and this blighter Geard be drove out o' town."

Mr. Geard was not oblivious of the growing discomfort of
this body of worthy men. Left to themselves now by both agita-
tors and police they were being subjected to the animosity of an
increasing number of the audience, who had come to regard
their presence at the field at all as a lugubrious spoil-sport.
Mr. Geard now made Blimp drive my Lord's cart forward, about
twice its own length, till it was in the very centre of this sulky
and disconcerted crowd. Then he stood up in the cart with his
hand on the sergeant's shoulder. "Gentlemen," he began.

All eyes were turned towards him. He managed to temper his
voice so that it was only audible to the mem he was addressing..
It was an immense relief to him to observe that Elphin Cantle
had joined his young adherent Steve Lew, and that both the boys
were standing now close up to one of the green wheels of his
cart. "Gentlemen," he repeated. "I'm sorry that you should have
come out today only to find things unsatisfactory. I am the
Mayor of this town and I wish all Glastonbury people to enjoy
themselves today. I have told Mr. Cantle down there in that
tent,"--he waved one of his plump hands in the direction of the
hedge--"that I wish him to give all you men of the Crow Dye-
Works something to eat and drink at my expense. Elphin Cantle
I see is here. He'll show you where to go. Take them with you,
Elphin!" Then, as an after thought, he added, "'Twill be a shame
on ye all, and a disgrace to your Mayor, if the good liquour that's
in yon tent be taken back to cellar!"

There was a moment's hesitation, and then Mr. Burt of Stoke-
sub-Ham spoke up. "Three cheers for the Mayor of Glaston-
bury!" he cried. At once another voice in the crowd was raised,
but it was impossible for Mr. Geard to identify him--"Three
cheers for Bloody Johnny!" The cheers were somewhat nerv-
ously and somewhat shamefacedly given, and the big audience
of seated people extending now as far down almost as the hedge
craned their necks to see what new thing now was toward.

Suddenly Mat Dekker rose from where he sat by his son's
side. "Three cheers for the Mayor of Glastonbury who has given
us this " His voice was drowned in a terrific volley of applause.

In every great audience there is a certain accumulation of
magnetic emotion which seems to store itself up, as if in great
invisible tanks, above the people's heads. Mat Dekker's words
had turned the tap of these psychic reservoirs. The crowd lost
its head altogether in its excitement. It had been stirred already
by the romance of the Arthurian scene and by the rich, poignant
fooling, in amazing dumb-show, of the inspired French clown.
Dave Spear's revolutionary speech had increased this tension,
and it now broke loose in a whirlwind of excitement. Women
waved their handkerchiefs and kissed their hands; men jumped
upon their chairs and shouted; children yelled and screamed.
The vague rumours that had hovered about the figure of Mr.
Geard helped to intensify this demonstration. Those in the front
seats who had heard his speech to the striking dye workers and
had been hopelessly shocked were swept along on the current.
Lady Rachel clapped long and desperately, her cheeks white
with excitement, her eyes flashing with girlish ecstasy. The Mar-
quis wore the expression of a far-sighted statesman who has had
recourse to some irresponsible prophet. Old Mother Legge's
spacious and maternal bosom--the bosom of an immoral earth-
mother--was heaving with unsuppressed sobs. Mrs. Geard too
was crying uncontrollably. But Cordelia sat straight up in her
chair. Her eyes were fixed in miserable fascination upon that
great wooden cross lying upon the grass. When the noise died
down a little, Mr. Geard got up upon his feet for the second
time that day in Lord P.'s high dog-cart.

"What will he say?" thought Lady Rachel. "What the deuce
will old Johnny do now?" thought the Marquis. "I would not be
in Geard's shoes for something," whispered Mat Dekker to Sam.

Mr. Geard cleared his throat. Then he bent down over his
impassive driver upon whose shoulder he was pressing heavily.
"The moment I sit down, you drive off, Sergeant," he whis-
pered, "and make her go too!" Then rising to his full height and
throwing back his head he lifted his free arm high into the air.
And there fell upon that enormous mass of people one of those
tremendous and awe-inspiring silences that seem as if they were
supported, like dim catafalques of expectation, by unseen spir-
itual hands. Not unto us," he shouted in slow reverberating
tones, "not unto us be the Glory for this great Day but unto...
unto--" he was enough of a Cagliostro, enough of the charlatan
they accused him of being, deliberately to pretend to hesitate at
this point. It was a subtle oratorical trick and was not defrauded
of its effect--"unto...unto the Christ of Glastonbury!" He
sank back in his seat by the side of Sergeant Blimp, who, since
there was no question of encountering Merlin's ghost was as cool
as he would have been at a Royal garden-party. In a second the
green-painted wheels were revolving at a dizzy pace and the
dog-cart was whirling off westwards, over the grassy slopes of
the great field, as if it had entered a desperate race with some
fairy chariot of Gwyn-ap-Nud.

"I hope Blimp will breathe her a bit before the end of the
field," whispered the Marquis to his daughter.

"Hush, Father!" rejoined the girl. "Do be quiet. The Passion
Play is beginning."

The girl was right. Not oblivious of the dramatic effect of
allowing their sacred interlude to follow quickly on the heels
of Geard's last words John Crow had taken upon himself ob-
livious as to whether the Dubliners or Ned Athling or Paul
Capporelli were ready--to give the sign to begin. And the begin-
ning of their elaborately rehearsed "Mystery" was really a very
impressive spectacle.

The Dye-Works strikers, however, saw nothing of it. Turning
their backs to it altogether and this lime followed instead of led,
by the banner denouncing "Mummery," they made their way
hurriedly down the hill towards the big refreshment tent. Elphin
and Steve--this latter delighted to play so prominent a part in
the affairs of Mr. Geard--ran on in front of them to warn the
Canties of their arrival.

It was at this point that all eyes were concentrated upon the
stage. And there entered upon it first a legion of Roman sol-
diers marching behind their centurion, then--issuing forth from
the other pavilion--the chief priests and rulers of the Jewish
people, and finally, approaching by himself, attended only by
Momus, the comic Roman soldier who served as his bodyguard,
the Procurator of Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate. The part of Pontius
Pilate was played by the assistant schoolmaster in St. Benignus'
church-school, a man who had been chosen for this part by the
eloquent Dr. Sodbury largely on account of his imposing coun-
tenance, a countenance which in its juristic dignity might cer-
tainly have belonged to the supercilious Procurator of Judea.
The Roman legionaries grouped themselves around Pilate who
now, accompanied by his bodyguard Momus, ascended the
wooden rostrum or judgment-seat.

"It's like a magnified Punch-and-Judy show," whispered Will
Zoyland to Nell; nor were the Bastard's words without point,
for in their mutual elevation above the soldiers, and above the
group of Jewish Elders who stood apart from the soldiers, the
figures of Pilate and Momus appeared to be isolated in a a gro-
tesque Punchinello-like proscenium.

Nell made no reply. She was wondering what Sam was feeling
at this moment while Momus-Capporelli was out-jesting Pontius
Pilate in that ridiculous puppet-box, and players and audience
alike were awaiting breathlessly the appearance of the con-
demned God-Man. If she had known what Sam was feeling her
heart would have been less heavy than it was. For such was
the contradictoriness of human emotion that the soldiers' Roman
swords and the elders' turbans made the whole thing so fan-
tastic and unreal to him that in his bitter coldness and deep
melancholy his heart turned wistfully to Nell and her child.
His father sitting by his side felt the same sort of distaste; only
with him it was more positive. Both these big, bare-headed men
--for though the sun was smiting them with that mid-afternoon
heat which seems hotter than noon, they held their hats in their
hands--had something in them that felt deep aversion for this
Passion Play. Mat hated it as a silly, frivolous blasphemy. Sam
hated it as a lifeless and ghastly parody upon the death of his
God.

The two Dekkers had less aesthetic feeling in them for per-
formances of this sort than Mr. Whitcombe of Queen's Camel
or Mrs. Legge of Camelot! Such passionate naturalists were they
that a profound realism, earthy, simple, almost barbarous, re-
duced any theatrical show to something flimsy and childish. They
neither of them could go one psychic inch in sympathy for such
things. What to the father seemed gross profanity, to the son
seemed pure unqualified trifling. They neither of them could
catch any stage-illusion in the whole thing. What they now be-
held was simply "old Sodbury's schoolmaster dressed up as a
Roman Governor, and that wretched skipping Frenchman, bow-
ing and scraping at his side, and making sacrilegious jokes."

And when escorted by more Roman soldiers and with his
hands tied behind him and an enormous crown of thorns upon
his head, Mr. Evans was led slowly across the grass between the
long-robed Jews and the heathen legionaries, Sam turned round
lo his father with the words--"This is awful, isn't it, Dad? It's
worse than I expected. How can they all sit quiet and put up
with such disgusting tomfoolery?"

But his father was watching a butterfly. "I believe that's a
Clifton Blue," he whispered. "Do look at that little fellow, son;
there! over by that thistle!"

But the effect of the appearance of this Evans-Christ upon
Sam's mind was to assail with one swift, terrible doubt the ascetic
ideal of his whole present life and give him a craving for Nell
that made his bones melt within him. That she should be sitting
near him, now, within a few yards of him, so that by moving
his head he could catch a glimpse of her, gave him a feeling
of her identity that was as sharp as he had ever known. A new
sensation began to lift up its rattlesnake head within him, a tor-
ture that he had hitherto been spared, by reason of his dull
imagination and that "dead nerve" within him. But they were
upon him now, those devil's pincers! They had got him now, by
the umbilical cord in the pit of his stomach! Oh, to think that
Will Zoyland could hear that voice day by day, and could see
her as he had never seen her! For what was one blind, rapturous
night of passion compared with what he had? "I have never,"
Sam thought as he watched the Christ-Evans standing before
Pilate, "seen her bare shoulders ."

It often happens that when real love touches with its quivering
dart the covetousness of desire, some aspect of a girl's body, not
usually associated with amorous dalliance at all, hits her lover's
consciousness with a pathos that is well-nigh intolerable. Thus
although he had given her a child, there came over him, as the
Trial of Christ began before his eyes, a craving that made him
heartsick just once to touch her bare shoulders, just to trace
with his fingertips the line of her bare spine. Though he had
lain with her he had never thought of doing just that. Why hadn't
he? Oh, why hadn't he?

The scene that meant so little to the two Dekkers and so little
to the two Zoylands appeared to be of absorbing interest to
Father Paleologue. Mary was thrilled at his quick, intense, pierc-
ing comments. Every movement that Mr. Evans made roused his
keenest attention. Every word he caught--though he could catch
but few--from Christ or Pilate or Momus or the Chief Priest,
became a text for a rapid volley of hurried criticisms. Even Miss
Drew grew calm under the compelling intellectual charm of the
Byzantine priest and began to feel that there could not be any-
thing very blasphemous going on.

"Has he yet said, 'What is Truth?' enquired Mary with shin-
ing eyes. She felt infinitely relieved at the triumphant success
that John's labours seemed to be winning. She put everything
down to John. Athling, the Dublin people, Capporelli, were com-
pletely discounted in her mind. They might have invented a few
details, a few fancies; it was John's imagination that gave the
whole thing that strange and curious unity which Father Paleo-
logue was now talking about to Miss Drew.

"No, lady, not yet," answered Father Paleologue, "but they
soon will be. There! Didn't you catch that?"

And there came to her ears upon the warm June air, scented
with honeysuckle, as the girl intently listened, those words that
seem to come from some mysterious level of life where the laws
of cause-and-effect have no place--"To this end was I bom , and
for this cause came I into the world , that I should bear witness
unto the truth . Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice."

"It's extraordinary," whispered Father Paleologue, passion-
ately, while a light gust of wind lifted Pilate's famous retort and
carried it over the hill, "how that man acts! He can't be a local
shop-man. I've seen every Passion Play in Europe worth seeing
for the last twenty years. Oberammergau of course isn't the only
one. And I tell you I've never seen anything so convincing as this
man. And he's modern too. He's got that queer modern touch
that's so hard to define. He's a strong, ugly Christ too; and that's
a vast improvement. Do you remember Rembrandt's Christ in
'The Healing of the Sick?' I forget where it is. Rembrandt's idea
of Him was just like this. And it's Biblical too!" And the By-
zantine father quoted in an intense whisper in Mary's ears, "He
hath no comeliness...that men should desire Him."

Athling and the two Dubliners, working together, had man-
aged this world-historical scene in such a way as to mingle Our
Lord's trial before Pilate with His trial before the High Priest,
and by dispensing with the Scourging and with the Stations of
the Cross had made the Crucifixion to follow immediately upon
this synthesised condemnation.

"What is that funny man doing. Robert, in the Judge's pul-
pit?" enquired Mr. Stilly's father of Mr. Stilly. Mr. Stilly hur-
riedly consulted the printed booklet which John had caused to
be placed upon all the seats.

"It says he's Momus, Dad--'a Roman Soldier attending on the
Procurator, who plays a part like that of the Fool in Shakes-
pear's 'Lear.' "

Mr. Stilly's mother now lifted up her high-pitched, querulous
voice, the voice of a woman who "didn't like servants messing
about in her kitchen." "But isn't this the simple Gospel story,
Robert? We don't read of Momus, do we? Or is he in the
Apocrypha?"

"Maria! how can you be so stupid!" whispered Mr. Stilly's
father. "There's no New Testament Apocrypha." Mr. Stilly
vaguely recalled having once, in Old Jones' shop, been shown
something extremely like a New Testament Apocrypha, but out
of piety he kept this recollection sealed up in his heart.

"He's talking now, Robert. He's saying such funny things...
only I can't hear them quite," said old Mrs. Stilly.

Momus-Capporelli had scampered off now from the Procura-
tor's side and was passing from group to group of the Roman
soldiers, among whom he was venting monstrous Aristophanic
jests. Some of these jests were improvised in a fantastical mix-
ture of French argot and what might be called dog-English and
they were accompanied by gestures of a kind more appropriate
to the sawdust floor of a Montparnasse dancing-hall than to the
greensward of Glastonbury Tor.

Lily Rogers began to give expression to her discomfort under
the tension of this tragical-comical fooling. "I wish those sol-
diers would arrest that fellow," she murmured in the ear of her
sister. "Our Glastonbury policeman would have arrested him be-
fore this, only the poor man be so deaf."

"These Taunton officers have no more gumption than a lot of
cassowaries," replied Louie.

But the wise Emma Sly put forward a different point of view,
worthy of the daughter of a Mendip shepherd. "That's the devil
in disguise," she explained. "He's telling all those Romans that
if they don't crucify the Good Lord quick they won't be able to
crucify Him at all."

"This isn't like what Master tells we to say in Creed," re-
marked Penny Pitches to Mr. Weatherwax, "when it says 'suf-
fered under Pontius Pilate.' If there'd been a Zany like this on
Green-Hill-Far-Away Master'd have spoken of it, wouldn't 'un, in
the thirty years I've looked after he?"

"'Twere long agone," remarked the wise gardener. "Maybe
Bible itself have forgotten how 'twere. Them hefty lads be Ro-
mans, 'sknow, and Romans be heathens, and they heathens baint
as reverend as your master, my good gurl. But 'tis queer, honey,
and it do make a man's stomach queasy to see such things. 'Tis
like Saturday afternoon in private bar and yet 'tis like Good
Friday in Church. It makes a person feel sort o' wobbly in his
innards."

The opinion of the Marquis of P. upon the spectacle he was
regarding was little different from that of the old gardener and
the old servant. "I can't stand much more of this chap Momus,"
whispered his Lordship to Lady Rachel. "I want to give the little
brute a good caning and kick him out! What on earth possessed
Geard to allow such a hodge-podge as this?"

"It's my young scaramouch nephew John, Lord P.," said Miss
Elizabeth Crow with an indulgent smile, "who is responsible for
all this. Rachel knows more about it than I do, but it's the new
idea, I believe--isn't it, Rachel?--to bring in, what do you call
it? a sort of classical chorus...only satirical of course instead of
serious."

"I don't...know...quite...what I feel, Miss Crow," whispered Rachel
nervously. "I hope...it was your nephew . . but I'm afraid...there
are...others--" In her heart, for she was torn between her ro-
mantic idealising of Ned Athling and her dislike of his new meth-
ods, she heartily wished that Paul Capporelli had been left in Paris!

"Isn't that young man who's jumping about and playing the
giddy goat, Tewsy," Mrs. Legge was now remarking to her
aged henchman, "the same one that made fun of poor King Mark
just now when he was following his lawful wife?"

"And at Lancelot too, Missus! 'A cocked some fine snooks at
Lancelot when 'a seen 'un try to cuddle up gainst Queen Gwen-
derver's sweet shanks!"

"Hush Tewsy! Even though it be the same, as I think it be,
haven't they what pulls the strings the right to choose the pop-
pets? Old folk like you and me, Tewsy, don't have no idea what
young folks have in their heads these days. Why I heard Mr.
Tom Barter tell as how there weren't a wench in Wollop's--
and that's who Queen Gwendy was--who wouldn't slip off her
skirt if a fellow went the right way about it. 'Twill be bad for
our trade, Tewsy, if this gets worse. Who'll give half a sov-
ereign for a private room when every room can tell the same
tale? That's what I say about such performances as this. 'Tis
spoiling the trade, Tewsy; 'tis spoiling the trade."

"You're one for keeping up the family. Mother, ain't you?"
whispered Blackie wearily.

"Why sure I be, kid, sure I be!" cried the old lady with a
wicked leer. "When all be for all without paying a penny what's
to keep the market going?"

Blackie Morgan held her peace. Her enormous grey eyes fixed
themselves upon the ubiquitous Momus and upon the thorn-
crowned figure, to whose side the clown had now skipped, and
the abysmal disillusionment of her gaze seemed to reduce the
solid bulk of Glastonbury Tor to insubstantial vapour.

"Why is Pontius Pilate lolling like that now against the side
of his ricketty platform?" enquired Tilly Crow of the curator
of the museum.

"I hadn't noticed... there's so much going on at the same
time...I was watching that funny soldier wagging his head at
Christ...but yes, Pilate is lolling as you say. Oh, I see what
he's doing, Mrs. Crow. He's reading! That's a roll of parchment
he's got in his hands. Eh? What's that? He's soliloquising now, I
think."

"Could you hear what he said?" asked Tilly anxiously, just
as she would have asked Emma if she could hear what the
groceryman was saying at the kitchen dooT.

"Something about Epiqurus," replied the curator in a com-
placent voice, keeping a shrewd eye upon the libretto in his hand.
'That roll he's reading is the Logoi of Epicurus, Mrs. Crow."

Tilly was silent. She made a mental note that she would en-
quire of Emma, later on, what sort of a mariner Epicurus was,
that his log-book must needs be dragged in at the Trial of
Jesus.

A beautiful Greek slave now appeared upon the scene carry-
ing a silver ewer full of water. "There it is!" cried Mother Legge.
"There's Miss Kilty's punch bowl! Now I know what Mr. Crow
borrowed it for. Don't 'ee drop it now, you long-haired baggage!
Don't 'ee get thinking so much about your bare legs that you go
and drop me silver bowl!"

Sis Cole, who had been till now wrapped in a cloud of beati-
fied wonder at all she saw, spoke up when she observed this glit-
tering silver object being carried so carefully towards the pensive
Procurator. "Be he feeling sick, Jackie, that King with a coronet
on, and all they gold jingle-jangles? Be she bringing he a basin
to be sick in?"

Jackie was as proud of his knowledge of the history of the
world as the curator had been, as he now replied in his shrill
voice just behind that gentleman's back--" 'Tis Pontius Pilate
a- washing of his hands! There's a picture in school that they
must have took it from. Only 'tis a man in picture, not a gal,
what holds the soap and water for'n."

"Be it Pear's soap, Jackie? I don't see thik soap, Jackie."

"I wants to pee!" interposed Bert at this grave juncture.

The curator's head twisted round, and a look of fury was
launched at the shameless infant. Tilly turned too. "Take him
into the field, girl. Take him into the field at once," she said
sternly.

Sis looked helplessly round. There was a deep hush over that
whole vast audience while the Procurator of Judea dipped his
fingers in Mother Legge's silver bowl. "You've gone and done
it," murmured Sis after an awkward pause, but she was too
honest a little girl to scold the child when from her heart she
thanked all the Powers that it was no longer incumbent upon her
to obey this great lady who sat so close to them.

The Curator ostentatiously lit an Egyptian cigarette. "They
oughtn't bring children to a thing that lasts so long," remarked
Tilly. "They can't contain themselves like older people," and
the good lady gave Sis, behind the curator's indignant back, a
reassuring feminine nod. This nod--the symbol of that secret
freemasonry of unfastidious realism that binds all women to-
gether--comforted Sis amazingly.

Bert continued his rapturous envisaging of the visible world.
The stiff back and protuberant skull of the learned man in front
of him was as much a portion of the great general Pageant as
was the dragging of our Saviour--for Athling and the Dub-
liners had altered the details of chronology without the least
scruple--before Caiaphas the High Priest. The laws of per-
spective as well as the facts of chronology had been interfered
with by these daring stage-directors until the Passion Play on
the terrace of Gwyn-ap-Nud's Hill looked as if it had been de-
signed from various primitive pictures and from pieces of very
old tapestry.

It need hardly be said that there was reached through Mr.
Wollop's round little pig's eyes no dissimilar vision of ecstasy.
All that there was in sight was wonderfully comforting and
thrilling to him. The persons in front of him, the deep blue of
the sky, the green grass, a tiny little red spider that was now
crawling across his own plump hand, were of equal interest to
him with Peter denying his Master. For, as in certain primitive
pictures, where a great number of memorable scenes are enacted
close together, these scenes in the Pageant followed each other
in such quick succession and in such close proximity that they
produced, or almost produced, a pictorial unity.

Thus, in immediate juxtaposition with Pilate's prolonged
soliloquy and also with the pantomimic fooling of Capporelli,
as the clown moved from group to group, Christ was led before
Caiaphas, and Peter denied Christ. The part of the cock was
introduced. This was a too dangerous experiment even for the
two Dubliners. They maintained that there was such a deep and
primordial poetry about the crowing of cocks, drenched in the
dews of ten thousand tragic dawns of human suffering, full of
such equivocal, treacherous, and yet Homeric braggadoccio,
carrying memories of women in travail, of dying soldiers, of
millions of tortured, imprisoned and executed victims of Society,
memories of insomnia, memories of madness, memories of love--
that it would be vulgar, sacrilegious, a blasphemy against the
dignity of the human spirit, impious, gross, offensive, ridiculous
to introduce a pantomimic cock upon the stage. Besides--the
two Dubliners had argued--no human eye ever actually sees the
cock that makes its eyelids open. The crowing of the cock
brings with it the passionate revolt of all the desperate lovers
who like Romeo and Juliet would fain, if they could, hold back
the coming of the dawn! It has become--so the Dubliners pro-
tested--one of the eternal symbols of the human race, recognized
from Ultima Thule to Thibet, from Greenland to the Cape of
Good Hope; and to introduce a visual mockery of such a thing
in any performance would not be merely Aristophanic. It would
be diabolic.

But the young poet from Middlezoy countered these arguments
by saying that it was the Betrayal of the Christ by Peter that was
the outrage upon the primordial mystery of the Cock's Crow, and
that by representing the Cock in visual form, this Betrayal was
pilloried as it deserved; and that so, and only so, was its full
tragical sordidness, baseness, weakness, cowardice, emphasised
and felt, as it was meet it should be.

Grandmother Cole it was, who, sitting next to Mrs. Robinson,
had a sagacious word to say upon this matter. When she saw
appearing suddenly, as if out of the side of the hill, perched
upon the steps of Pilate's wooden rostrum, an admirably de-
signed and powerfully conventionalized Cock, the old vestment-
cleaner remarked to the ex-servant of the Bishop's Palace--
"Thik red-combed bird be come to put all chicken-hearted men
to shame. Me old man used allus to say to I when 'a did hear thik
noisy bird--'Ye wiming-folk be all broody hens. It takes a man-
bird to call up the bleeding sun!' But I did tell he 'twere all a
vaunt and a vanity, for though cock might crow ever so, the sun
only rose when it chose to rise of its wone self."

But the only remark that Red's mother made when she heard
this and beheld the feathered apparition, was as follows: "'Tisn't
only to-die that little Ben 'Awker 'as crowed. High've 'a 'eared
'im in our street long afore they pliced all them feathers on 'is
pore little 'ead!"

Grandmother Cole expressed astonishment. As a Somerset-born
woman, a native of Gwlad yr Hav, she had much more power of
accepting illusion than this daughter of the East End. That feath-
ered object, four feet high, with a huge red comb, was to her as
real as the tower on the top of the Tor. It disturbed her mind to
think of it as concealing little Ben Hawker of her friend's alley.
"Be thik bird little Ben then?" she murmured. "What things be
coming on the world when little Ben whose birth I do mind,
and 'a cost his mother a sore time, should be a-crowing like a
cock and making thik bearded man holler and run!"

Saint Peter's remorse of mind did indeed seem so extreme
that it almost looked as if he were going to seek refuge from his
shame in the arms of Lady Rachel, so far down the hill was he
now flying! The Dubliners had told him to run towards the audi-
ence and utter his tragic soliloquy so that every word could be
heard. Ned Athling had composed one of his best poetical rhap-
sodies for this Rock of the Apostolic Church, but he had not
expected the ringing tones with which--only a few paces from
the astonished Lord P.--St. Peter howled out his lines. But
Father Paleologue, Mary was relieved to note, seemed well
pleased by this episode.

"It's as it used to be in the old Miracle Plays," he whispered,
leaning forward with flashing eyes. "I wouldn't have missed this
for the Patriarchate! And look at Christ watching him over His
shoulder! There's been genius in the invention of this! I wish
my Greeks could see it."

The retreat of the errant Saint when he realised how far he
had run was even a greater masterpiece of shame. His back, as
he slunk off to one of the Arthurian pavilions, was the back of
all the deniers of their love since the world began.

"And it's only Billy Bates, the Pilgrims' boot-black!" thought
Mary; and she began to tell herself that this triumph of her
John was worth all her sacrifices.

And now, according to this strange and primitive Gothic pic-
ture that Mr. Geard had caused to be painted upon the slopes
of Turris Vitrea like a veritable enchantment of his favourite Mer
lin, the moment came for the binding of Mr. Evans upon that
great cross of wood. It had been the fidgetty persistence of the
man himself that had got them at last--or rather got Mr. John-
son of the Great Western station timber-yard--to make that cross
out of oak. Nothing but oak, and oak too from one of the spin-
neys of Wick Wood, would satisfy this lover of the Druids.

"Don't 'ee look, girlie! Don't 'ee look!" whispered Sally Jpnes
to Tossie Stickles. "'Twill upset 'ee to see they cruel soldiers
torment thik poor man."

"But 'tis only Mr. Evans," protested the imperturbable Tossie.
"And they be only tying of he. They baint nailing of he, nor
nothing!"

"Don't 'ee look, girlie!" repeated her friend. "Just shut your
eyes tight and I'll report to 'ee how things be with the man, and
how he do bear up under being crucified."

"They're lifting of him now! Oh, looksee! looksee. They're
hauling of him up!"

"Shut your eyes. Toss! Mercy on us, shut your eyes!"

But it was the sympathetic Sally, and not the prospective girl-
mother, who was now the one to shut her eyes. "You tell I, then,
how he be bearing it," she murmured now.

" 'Tis nothing to see, Sal, 'tis nothing to take on about so!
'Twere much worse when I did see a sheep killed, in old man
Chinnock's shed, in this same very field."

"It says 'un...were...like a sheep...it says 'un were...and dumb like
a sheep in slaughter!" The tender-hearted Sally was crying now,
but Tossie, keeping the palms of her hands pressed against her
bowels of compassion, continued to stare at the motionless Figure
suspended on the cross.

It was left to the acute Mr. Weatherwax to remark to Penny
Pitches that there were no Thieves by the Lord's side. "This be
a poor Crucifixion," he grumbled. "This be a stingy Crucifixion
when they've only got one cross to set up!"

"Thee be worse nor Pontius Pilate, Isaac," replied Penny. "It
be the same to the good Lord whether he be hung in company
or hung single; and since it be for we sinners anyway--"

"Old 'ooman, old 'ooman," whispered Mr. Weatherwax, "thee
don't really think, do 'ee, that the murdering of one honest man
could save such beggars and bitches as we be? I baint what you
might call a infidel, but there don't seem no justice nor right
to my mind in me and you being let off because of people per-
secuting one good man--like thik poor man over there! Anyway,
'tis not by tormenting folk that good parsnips be growed and
good 'taties be dug. What us wants in this here town be more
men with Authority, not more o' these here play-actors."

Father Paleologue kept drawing deep breaths of satisfaction
all this time. He was interested to observe that the two bearded
monks from the Caucasus seemed profoundly impressed. The
younger of the two--so he whispered in Mary's ears, but she
was too much afraid of staring to corroborate his words--was
weeping openly and passionately. How deeply this Byzantine
scholar thanked his stars that good luck had thrown one of
John's proclamations into his path! He would never forget this
stupendous spectacle. Mr. Evans' figure, as it hung there be-
tween the two heraldic pavilions--they had carried away Arthur's
Dragon Flag--had a dim grandeur that was really startling.
The man looked majestic, a real murdered Man-God, hanging
there between earth and heaven; and the intense greenness
of the hill behind him with that erect, immobile tower, and the
gleam of the Roman swords, and the richness of the Hebraic gar-
ments, and all this huge gathering of the people, hushed, awe-
struck, solemnised, gave to that single Figure, suspended against
the grassy steep, a magnitude of importance that was over-
powering.

"What are those old men counting up their money for?"

"Mother, Mother!" whispered Mr. Stilly reproachfully, for it was
one of his parents who uttered these words, "that's the thirty
pieces of silver."

"It's easy for you, Robert, of course," retorted the old lady
testily. "Your father and I haven't had your privileges at the
bank, but to me it looks more like round bits of wood covered
with gilt tinsel."

It was not given to Mr. Stilly's parents--much as they loved a
quiet game of dominoes--to catch the horrible pathos of the way
Judas was now behaving.

Perhaps in that whole vast assembly only Father Paleologue
and one other realised the full poignancy of the acting of Judas.
That "other" was Morgan Nelly. The little girl uttered no word.
She allowed Jackie to explain to Sis that it was Judas who was
being repulsed by those old men with the money-bags and that
he was now going out to hang himself. Jackie explained that
these old men were now saying--"What is that to us? See thou
to that!" and that Judas was now going to hunt for a good place
to "see to it" from. But Morgan Nelly's heart leapt up in sym-
pathy as she followed the figure of Judas wandering among
some small thorn bushes and a patch of stunted hollies, looking
in vain for what he wanted. In the end he disappeared behind
the western pavilion, and long before he had disappeared the
main interest of the Pageant had shifted from him altogether;
but the little girl's heart was still with him. She knew who it was.
While the public knew him as a crazy and good-for-nothing elder
brother of the Nietzschean young man at Wollop's, Nelly Mor-
gan knew him as "old Mr. Booty" who used to read Grimm's
fairy tales on the cricket-field when his side was in.

The Madonna now, all dressed in dusky blood-colour save for
her sky-blue robe, was clinging to the foot of the Cross, while
near her the Roman soldiers were throwing dice and playing
cards in stiff circles upon the green grass. Momus, perched upon
the steps of the empty judgment-seat, was idly tossing up a toy-
balloon into the air and catching it as it came down; and to give
the scene its true character, as some old Flemish painter would
have visualised it, as a tragedy, namely, that drew its poignance
from the pell-mell of that human life which was so indifferent
to its superhuman anguish, either the Dubliners or Athling had
brought it about that Pilate and Caiaphas should .be playing
chess together at a little round table in front of that western
pavilion behind which Judas had withdrawn to hang himself.

Persephone's grief at the foot of the cross that bore Mr. Evans
was the finest piece of acting in the whole Pageant. Its emotion
was so sincere that it swept the whole picture together as nothing
else could have done. The girl's monumental gestures were like
those of some classic representation of her own namesake, the
great Goddess of the Dead. Her sublime suffering gave a strange
unity to all the minor groups and personages, their businesses,
their occupations, their pastimes. She seemed to gather the diurnal
preoccupations of the whole race together and with passionate
solicitude to offer it up, like a cup of hyssop, to the lips of the
dying. The other Marys, Mary the sister of Lazarus and Mary
Magdalene, came now to Our Lady's side, however, and with
their approach an unhappy crisis in the directing of the per-
formance came to the surface.

Ned Athling, anxious to try every sort of new experiment,
wanted to introduce a tragic dance at this point by the two
Marys round the prostrate figure of Christ's Mother. This, in
view of their Catholic up-bringing in Ireland, was too much for
the Dubliners. They refused to countenance it. Athling, however
--and this had happened in other cases as well--insisted on go-
ing on with it, with the result that the two girls who were playing
the two Marys, Bessie and Lizzie Marsh from Bove Town, were
completely confused, and as they bent together over the pros-
trate form of the Virgin, they made several sinuous movements
with their flexible hips and several swaying movements with
their bare arms, while at the same time they lifted up their
voices and chanted the ballad-like refrain that Athling had writ-
ten for them.

The nervous blundering of these young and pretty girls was
not at all distasteful to the bulk of the foreigners, to some of
whom it appeared as the final touch of modern art, to others as
a naive example of English barbarism; but to the feelings of
Mary Crow, who recognised at once that someone had made a
mistake, it was a harrowing spectacle. She turned hurriedly to
catch the eye of Father Paleologue, but he smiled back at her
reassuringly, however, and when she murmured her fears, "Oh,
of course one can see that!" he whispered. "But chance has
favoured these people at every turn, and though to many these
dancing gestures--there! they are doing it again!--must seem
ridiculous enough and even outrageous, still you must remember
that the Magdalene must in her time have danced for her patrons.
Why should she not now, poor girl--like the Jongleur of Paris
before the altar--dance for the Crucified?"

"But, Father," she protested, "the other Mary...the type of con-
templation...surely "

"Yes, yes, Lady," he conceded. "It's a mistake. It's the only bad
mistake they've made. But those little girls are sweet creatures
and--"

"Father, I believe you're laughing at us all the time!"

Father Paleologue became in a moment intensely grave. "If I
did that, dear daughter," he said earnestly, "I'd deserve to be
unfrocked. I'd deserve to be cut in pieces like your last Abbot.
I'd deserve anyhow--" and he gave her an irresistibly winning
smile that broke through the mask of his stiff archaic face as
though a lamp had been lit within his soul--"not to have had
the exquisite pleasure I've had today."

"Thank God they're going--those girls!" cried Miss Drew in
a shrill voice. "And they're dancing away, hand in hand, now,
as if it were a may-pole they were leaving, not their dying
Saviour." Her words reached the ears of the Marquis of P. who
turned and gave her a gracious little bow. It was the first time
he had recognised Miss Drew today, but these caustic sentiments
of hers met with his entire approval.

"Are those baggages," remarked Miss Barbara Fell, "who have
just gone dancing off into that tent, supposed to be camp-
followers to those soldiers gambling there?"

Fell returned no answer.

"I asked you, Manny, if those girls--" and she repeated her
whole remark.

"One of them is a Saint still invoked in Glastonbury, sister"
--the doctor's voice was strained to the breaking-point and in
his heart he was saying to himself, "I can't bear it...I can't
bear it...I can't bear it"--"and the other is that Mary, the
sister of Lazarus, who was such an especial friend of Jesus. I
don't know why they swayed about like that. Perhaps they were
so unhappy that they took to drink!"

"What's the matter, Angela," asked Mr. Beere crossly. "You
can't sit still a moment. We can't go before the end. I suppose
it's getting on for the end now." These extraordinary words that
could scarcely have been uttered on the continent of Europe were
luckily heard by no one except Angela and to her they were no
more than the portentous yawn from the old gentleman that
followed them. They were no more than the buzzing of a blue-
battle fly that at that moment flew past her ears. Her face was
white and her whole body was trembling with excitement. The
soul within her yearned to that beautiful form that now with
uplifted arms was embracing the feet of the suspended Figure.

There was another person in that big audience who was as
agitated as Angela Beere and that was the Vicar of Glastonbury.
Indignation had coloured Mat Dekker's face a dusky red and
his heavy brows were knotted over his bushy eyebrows. The
whole business filled him with sick aversion. Why, oh why had
he ever allowed such a thing as this to take place in his loved
town? For all his High Church practices Mat Dekker at heart
was as simple an Evangelical as John Bunyan or John Wesley.
He regarded this whole performance as a monstrous and ghastly
parody of an historic Event that had changed the life of the
cosmos. "I can't stick it out, son, I can't stick it out!" he
groaned.

Sam laid his large hand on his father's knee. "It's the end
now, Dad, I think. Those fellows, lugging that step-ladder, are
going to take Him down. Ned Athling is with them himself.
He's supposed to be Joseph of Arimathea."

"Damn Ned Athling!"

It was at that moment that the Christ-Evans uttered the only
words he had spoken since he had been lifted up. He cried sud-
denly in a great voice that rang out across Tor Field and across
the gipsy caravans, and across Chilkwell Street, till it reached
the blood-red fountain in Chalice Hill: "Eloi, Eloi, Lama,
Sabachthani!"

The two Dekkers rose simultaneously to their feet. "That man
...that Evans...wasn't playing then...Look, me boy, his head's
really hanging down now. I must see to this!"

"Go slow. Dad! He may be all right. It may only be his damn-
ed acting. Don't make a fool of yourself, Dad! No! It's no
joke. They are running out of the tents! They're breaking up.
Something is wrong. He is ill. He's hurt. He's fainted!" They
pushed their way together between the rows of seats and began
running towards the stage. They were not the first to do this, how-
ever. A good distance in front of them Cordelia Geard was rush-
ing wildly towards that great cross of oak-wood. Their move-
ment was a signal for a general uprising. Many others--among
them Dr. Fell--were running now up the slope, towards the ter-
race, where Mr. Evans hung by his armpits. Meanwhile it was
the ironical duty of the pretended Saint Joseph to act in real
genuine earnest in this unrehearsed Descent from the Cross.

Inside the western pavilion there was now a scene of the ut-
most confusion. The two Marys, little Bessie and Lizzie, had
been both sobbing hysterically in shame over their fiasco. John
Crow had been vainly trying to comfort them. "Us have spoilt
the Pageant!" Bessie was moaning. "Oh, why did 'ee let we
do it?"

"Us'll never be able to look anyone in the face again!"
Lizzie was wailing. "I wish I were dead! I wish I were dead!"

But the little maids' distress was now broken into by a wild
uproar. "Evans have fainted! Evans have burst a blood-vessel!
There be blood pouring out of Evans' mouth!" Both John and
Barter--careless now about appearing before the audience in
their ordinary clothes--rushed out of the tent and ran to the
scene of the trouble. The Roman soldiers had already left their
dice and their cards and were engaged in helping the Jewish
elders lift the cross bodily out of the ground and lower it down
upon the grass. There were so many powerful young farm-
hands among them that this was not a difficult undertaking.

Capporelli had come up meanwhile and was gesticulating vio-
lently, talking so rapidly in French that everyone near him only
stared. Some of the Roman soldiers--rough lads from the Sedge-
moor farms--nudged each other and made fun of him. "Play
over. Play quite done ," they cried to him in pidgin English as
if he were a Chinaman.

Cordelia had become cold and calm. She was giving rapid,
incisive directions to the lads who were lowering the cross. Ned
Athling, in a bewildered trance, perched upon the upper steps
of his step-ladder, was contemplating the surging movements
which looked for a time like a dangerous panic, that were
now rocking the excited audience. He tried to make out the figure
of Lady Rachel, but the crowd was too dense.

Barter was one of the few who kept his head at this juncture.
"Did you say that those Dublin people had got a megaphone
somewhere ?" he asked.

Jolm looked at him quickly. "To quiet the audience, you
mean?"

"Of course. We can't let 'em break up without a word."

"Let's go and see."

They crossed over to the eastern tent and there, sure enough,
after a word with the Dubliners, whom they found on their
knees hurriedly flinging all their private belongings into two
black handbags, like passengers in a sinking ship, the mega-
phone was produced.

"What shall we say? Will you do it?" Barter found himself
yelling these words into John's ears as they carried their mega-
phone past the outskirts of the crowd that was now surging and
shouting about the prostrate cross and above the unconscious
form of Mr. Evans. It must have been that vision of the Dub-
liners packing their black bags that compelled him to yell like
that when John could have perfectly well have heard a whisper!

And what unconscious force was it that made the two friends
--like two field-marshals whose army is defeated and in full
flight--carry the megaphone back to their own eastern tent in-
stead of using it at once where they had found it? The power
of habit with these two men had been more quickly established
than one would have believed possible! John and Barter must
have hurried with their megaphone to the spot where they were
used to giving their orders, as instinctively as a dog carries a
bone to his kennel. Probably in a boat of starving derelicts who
have just killed and torn to pieces one of their companions each
man would be driven to convey his portion of the cannibal feast
to his own bench, by the side of his own row-lock. At the door
of their own tent they encountered Crummie freshly emerged
from the ladies' tiring-room and as trim and lovely as ever in
an ordinary summer frock.

"Oh, I'm so glad you've got that thing!" she cried. "I was
just going to ask you if there wasn't something of that sort to
quiet them. I suppose if he's only fainted you'll go on with the
Pageant?"

John looked at Barter and Barter looked at John. What a girl
this was! "I...we...they " began Barter. "We thought we'd let
it end here," said John.

Crummie surveyed the two disconcerted representatives of her
father with a puzzled frown. She then turned her eyes upon the
audience. Yes! they were all on their feet and most of them
pushing and struggling to extricate themselves from the chairs
and benches. Soon they would be scattered in all directions.
Many were already rushing wildly up the hill towards the
pavilions. The girl smiled sweetly. "Better do it now if you're
going to do it," she said. "Tell them that the Mayor bids them
good-bye and thanks them for coming."

John lifted the megaphone to his mouth. "Do I just shout it
out?" he asked her nervously.

Mr. Geard's daughter looked round. The Middlezoy foreman,
still dressed up as King Arthur, was standing nearby, quietly
lighting his pipe. She called the man by name and he slouched
up to them. "Take this," said Crummie. "Run over to Pilate's
what-do-you-call-it, will you? Shout out to them that the Mayor
bids them good-bye, and tell them to go home quietly, and that
Mr. Evans has only fainted!"

King Arthur lost no time in obeying to the letter this clear
command of the resuscitated Lady of Shalott. He ascended the
wooden rostrum and standing erect there--a majestic and im-
posing figure--he bellowed forth in a terrific voice--"Ladies
and Gentlemen; attention all, please!" His words were audible
all over the field. Even the gipsies in their caravans heard them.
The Dye-Works strikers came pouring out of Dickery Cantle's
tent, well refreshed with meat and wine. Everybody stood still
and listened. It was as if the real Rex Arturus himself had
suddenly reappeared to restore peace upon earth and fulfill his
magician's prophecy.

"What a girl!" whispered Barter to John as they followed
Crummie with their eyes as she stood behind the rostrum,
prompting the Middlezoy foreman.

"But Evans may be dead," murmured John.

"Not he," returned the other. "But even if he is--"

"The Mayor wishes to assure ye all that the gentleman be
only fainted. The Mayor thinks best for Pageant to end here
and now. The Mayor thanks ye all for coming, especially those
of ye what come from far. The Mayor hopes ye'll all come to
Glastonbury again. The Mayor--" There was a pause at this
point while King Arthur bent his head to catch his prompter's
words. Then raising the megaphone again--"The Mayor gives ye
all the Blessing of the Living Christ!" The foreman came care-
fully down the creaking wooden steps with the megaphone under
his arm.

Crummie was watching with delight the surprising effect of
these words from the slope of the hill. It was as if, in the very
midst of some wild panic under the urge of an earthquake or a
volcano, every person had been struck mute and immobile, ex-
actly where they were.

Even John and Barter were silent for a moment staring down
at that petrified mass of people. John had time to observe that
when the crowd began to move again it was in quite a different
manner. There was no longer a tendency to rush up the hill
in a dense mob. Everyone seemed to become a separate individual
again. The crowd-hypnosis had been entirely dispelled by this
invocation of the Redeemer of the Individual.

"What a pity," thought Ned Athling, as he came out of his
trance and scrambled down his step-ladder, tripping awkwardly
over his Arimathean robes, "What a pity that they never heard
my verses about the Heathen Grail!"

Meanwhile a burly Taunton policeman, under Cordelia's di-
rection, was pouring brandy down Mr. Evans' throat. Other
policemen were pushing the crowd back, so that the prostrate
man might have more air and space round him. Megan Geard,
supported by Mr. Bishop, the town clerk, and by Bob Sheperd,
the old Glastonbury policeman, was now standing near-by, out
of breath and very much concerned.

"He'll come round now, Marm. Don't 'ee take on. He'll come
round now. Miss Cordy'll bring 'un to's senses, quick enough,
you'll see, Marm!" Thus did old Bob comfort his Worship's
lady while the equally infirm town clerk made feeble efforts to
get down on his knees by the side of the ghastly figure on the
ground. But the aged public servant was so "fat and scant of
breath" that this gesture remained unfulfilled.

"Oh, Mother, Mother, what shall we do, what shall we do?"
moaned Cordelia, losing her nerve at the familiar sound of her
mother's panting breath. "I've poured a lot of this slug down
his throat but he doesn't "

"Doctor be here! Doctor be come!" This welcome cry arose
among a group of Roman soldiers, the smell of whose bare legs,
hot and grass-stained, had become a part of that day that lodged
itself in Cordelia's memory. The Taunton policemen now cleared
a path for Dr. Fell.

"His heart's beating, Doctor!" cried Cordelia. "I've got my
hand on it. It's beating funnily, but it's beating still."

The doctor placed his hat on the grass and knelt down over the
prostrate man who lay with his mouth grimly open. There was
a great streak of blood on his chest and another on his shirt and
his lips were caked with blood. "He's burst a blood-vessel...
of some kind," murmured Dr. Fell. "The question is what kind.
Did he faint away as soon as he had shouted those words?"

It was to Persephone, who had been sitting all this while upon
the fallen cross as it lay on the ground, that the doctor addressed
this remark. She leaned forward to answer him, re-arranging as
she did so the folds of her sky-blue robe. "Yes, Doctor," she
said in a low, rather guttural voice. "It was the strain of that
shout. But I think he was uncomfortable before. I think he was
in distress before. I believe he was in considerable pain, for quite
a long time before!" There was a queer hysterical ring in the
girl's voice as her words mounted up. When she came to the
word "pain" she shouted it with a vibration of anger.

The doctor mechanically wiped off some blood from Mr.
Evans' bare chest with the tips of his fingers. "We'll have to get
him to the hospital," he said, "and, what's more, get him there
as quickly as we can!" He rose on one knee still keeping the tips
of his fingers on the unconscious man's chest. "Who's got a car
on the field?" he said.

Persephone rose to her feet and came forward, catching up
her trailing blue garment round one bare arm, and hitching an-
other fold of it into her belt as she moved. "My car is just over
that ridge, Doctor," she said. "It's by itself there, and there are
no others nearer than the road. If you don't mind my being like
this" and she spread out her long bare arms and gave a toss to
her head from which her curls hung in a loose mass, "I'll drive
him there in a jiffy! Only he must he carried to my car. I can't
get it over that hank!"

Dr. Fell stood up. "Will you carry him, officers?" he said,
addressing the nearest policemen.

Three of the men in uniform stepped forward and under the
doctor's directions lifted up the unconscious Mr. Evans.

Cordelia turned to Persephone. The last time she had spoken
to this girl was in the reception room of Mother Legge and as
their eyes met now they both recalled this encounter. It was Cor-
delia then who had been dressed in blue! "Thank you, thank you,
Mrs. Spear," she murmured with intense emphasis. "You may
be saving his life by this."

The three policemen with Cordelia walking behind them car-
ried their burden where Persephone led. She and Dr. Fell moved
on fast in front, talking earnestly. The doctor was explaining to
Persephone, in as unprofessional language as he could, just
what he feared, just what he hoped, as to the injured man's
chances.

"You'd better go home, Mother!" cried Cordelia stopping for
a moment to turn her troubled face to Mrs. Geard.

"But you're coming back, aren't you, darling?" cried the de-
scendant of the House of Rhys, extricating her arm from that of
old Bob Sheperd. "They'll never have room for you in her
little car!"

Cordelia waved her hand impatiently at her mother, as much
as to say--"You look after yourself, dear!"--but she turned
then, and running after the slowly moving bearers joined the
melancholy cortege without another word.

Megan Geard sighed deeply. "I wish the Mayor were here," she
remarked to the old Glastonbury policeman.

Bob Sheperd cordially endorsed her wish. "If his Worship
had been here that poor man would never have died," he said.

Megan Geard gave a start and a sudden shiver ran through
her. "You don't think he is dead, Mr. Sheperd, do you?" she
groaned.

The old policeman wagged his head. "I've 'a seen many a
corpse in me time, Marm, and not a one o' them but had blood
o' just that colour, dry-like and sticky-like, on they's poor lips."

When they reached the little car it became only too plain that
if one of the policemen sat by Persephone's side to help carry
him in when they got to the hospital there was only just room
for Dr. Fell and his unconscious patient.

"Take care! Go gently! Oh, go gently!" Cordelia cried, clutch-
ing the sun-warmed door-frame of the machine as it swung open,
while they were lifting Mr. Evans in.

But an intruder now appeared upon the scene whose strange
appearance startled and shocked the girl even in her desperate
concern. It was none other than Mad Bet, who had persuaded her
good friend Solly Lew to conduct her to this particular spot,
from which she could observe and not be observed. The kind-
hearted taxi-driver had remained here with the woman for quite a
long while. Then, watching with the eye of a hungry man the
rush of the Dye-Works people into Dickery Cantle's tent, he had
gone off, "to get a bite of summat for five minutes." The mad-
woman had left her hat, trimmed with forget-me-nots, under the
hornbeam bush where she had been sitting, and her egg-white
cranium was a disturbing object even to Dr. Fell who had known
her from his youth up.

To the Taunton policemen, as panting and perspiring, they
withdrew from the car's door, this new apparition was still more
startling. They thought for a moment that she was one of the
players and that this shocking baldness was a mask.

"Only to touch the hem of his garment! Only to touch his coat-
ies or trowsies!" gabbled Mad Bet, pushing Cordelia out of her
way and struggling to stretch her arm into the car. "He told I, at
Mother Legge's," the woman went on, "to come Midsummer Day,
and see he cast out his Devil and I've seed he do it! I've seed
that girt Devil flyin' over Tor-top with wings of dragon! He be
Jesus, his wone self now, the poor man be. Don't 'ee drop 'un in
grave, Doctor! Don't 'ee let them put stones on his poor bleed-
ing heart. Where be going to lay him then, gents, where be?
Where be? Mad Bet'll come and watch over he. Night and day
she will, till he rolls they stones away!"

"Don't do that!" cried Dr. Fell sharply, when one of the
Taunton policemen began unceremoniously pulling the woman
back. "Let her just touch him once. There! There! That's enough
now. Look...here's a friend of yours coming!"

The doctor's words were justified, for hatless as herself and
very much the worse for drink, Solly Lew could be observed stag-
gering up the hill and frantically waving his arms. "He thinks the
police are taking her," remarked the doctor laconically, clamber-
ing in beside the unconscious man, who was lying limp and heavy
across the seat.

Mad Bet caught the word "police" and the word "take"; but her
whole soul was so stirred by what she had seen that no fear for
her own skin could touch her. She had been allowed to do what
she had set her heart on doing, and she drew back now quite
quietly and stood immobile, looking like a ghastly waxwork at
Madame Tussaud's.

Dr. Fell's attention, the moment he had settled himself on the
edge of the seat, against the patient's bare rope-bruised ankles,
was attracted by the sight of a little bird deliberately alighting
upon the topmost twig of the stunted hornbeam. "It's a Lesser
Whitethroat," he thought to himself.

Cordelia's distracted face was thrust into the window of the
car. "He won't die. Doctor, will he?" He could do nothing but
shake his head and murmur, "Careful now, careful now!" as the
unhappy girl snatched at one of the injured man's hands and,
careless of who saw her, pressed upon it a feverish kiss. "He
won't die, Doctor, will he? He won't die, Doctor? I couldn't--" But
Persephone had already got her machine in motion.

"He's in good hands, Miss, in very good hands," murmured one
of the Taunton policemen who had been left behind, as they
watched the car descend the rough cattle-track that led round the
eastern side of the Tor.

"That clever actress be a first-class driver, Miss," remarked the
other man, "and everybody knows Dr. Fell. I've 'a seed 'un
meself many a time, in Tarnton 'Firmary, when he were younger
than he be now. There aint such a man as old Fell, :io! not this
side o' Bristol."

The policemen were so terrifying to Solly Lew that he had not
dared to advance. Mad Bet, however, walked slowly towards him,
keeping her eyes on the disappearing car.

As Persephone drove into town with her heavy load that event-
ful afternoon her nature was undergoing the strangest upheaval.
Since her quarrel with Philip she had spoken to him only once.
There had been indeed nothing to be said between them. She had
"turned," as people say, "against him." His particular kind of
passion had come to be revolting to her. Her deep riddle now was
how she had ever been attracted to him, or let him touch her at
all! In her husband's case she had only arrived at a point of de-
parture towards which she had been steadily moving for months.
With him she had no overt rupture, but for the last week or two
she had ceased to share his bed. But the sight of this man Evans
hanging on that cross had hit something in her that went very
deep. A nerve, perhaps it was, rather than anything else, in her
weary heart; but it was a dark, strange pull, a rending tug at this
queer nerve, an inexplicable feeling, and one to which she yielded
now in an abandoned mood of delicious languor. This sudden,
melting tender sensation--utterly unexpected and mysterious to
herself--did not seem to affect her recognition of Mr. Evans as a
queer, impossible person. He might be the most ridiculous person
in the world; he might be a madman. It remained that something
wild, dark, desperate, in the man, as he hung there, something in
his sombre contorted face, with his great Roman nose and massive
forehead, something in his lean, extended arms, something in his
exposed shoulder-blades, something even in the black hairs on his
chest, now caked with crimson blood, had touched a nerve in her
being, an organic nerve, that went down to the dark deep knot of
erotic mystery in the centre of her woman's nature. She had di-
vined in a way no other soul had done--certainly not Cordelia--
the vein of thrilling exultation in Mr. Evans' mood, that had sup-
ported him in that atrocious endurance.

There always was in Cordelia's attitude to Mr. Evans--there
had been from the start--something at once "old-maidish" and
maternal, something of the passion which frustrated, love-starved
women feel for cats and dogs and parrots--especially the can-
tankerous and eccentric among such creatures. To Cordelia this
whole business of the Pageant had been a vexation and an annoy-
ance. She regarded it as a mere characteristic whimsy of her
father, while Mr. Evans' mania for playing the Crucified she
looked upon as an arbitrary madness, a sort of wilful mental in-
dulgence, that she had feared all the time might lead to disaster.

Persephone, on the other hand, had so many neurotic manias
in herself that she responded like touchwood to the quiver of Mr.
Evans' perverted heroism. As she had embraced that wooden beam
beneath his feet she had felt, vibrating through its dense oaken
veins the wild triumph of his tense tormented nerves, the savage
rapture of his self-immolation. And she had fancied too, in a
passionate delusion that had sent an electric wave of reckless
confederacy through her woman's flesh, that Mr. Evans was not
indifferent to her presence there, was not unaware of the reciproc-
ity of her mood. A strange Virgin-Mother had she been to a sin-
gular Saviour of a wounded world! Pressing her flat boy's breasts
against that oaken post and straining upward towards her imag-
inary God-Man and Divine Son, she had allowed herself to yield
to the uttermost to this new unexpected tenderness for a man she
knew nothing of!

Such and not otherwise had been the feelings of Persephone
Spear as she had lifted up her voice and wailed aloud--"My Son
and my God! My God and my Son!"--as the Middlezoy young
man had instructed her. Little had Ned Athling known, little had
those Dubliners known, the wild maenad-like feelings that their
gothic dumb-show had evoked in this morbid girl. Had she been
aware, as she crouched and moaned at the feet of her madman, of
the psychic waves of swooning adoration, flung towards her fig-
ure, from the white-cheeked girl seated there by the yawning Mr.
Beere? Not consciously aware, of a surety; but such waves of
electric passion seldom, like lightning-bolts, lose themselves in
the unrestoring earth. Some tremour, some vibrant residue, how-
ever faint, reaches, as a rule, the object towards which such feel-
ings are directed, and it may well have been that this shivering,
yearning idolatry for her--reckless as some young nun's worship
of the real blue-robed Maid of Heaven--had quickened the pulse-
beats of her own passion, as she poured forth her spirit in this
strange new tenderness, never felt before.

Such were the feelings of Persephone. But the girl was wrong,
wrong as so many other worshippers of gods and men and beasts
and demons are wrong. Mr. Evans was totally and entirely un-
conscious of her presence at the foot of his cross. That oaken
beam that had carried the trembling of his emotion to her, and
had made it shiver through every channel of her frame till it
reached the centre of her organic life, had, for some occult
reason, absorbed and not transferred the emotion which she felt.
All that wild, dark, lovely sense of being isolated with this hook-
nosed, contorted-mouthed victim of his own strange mania, iso-
lated with him on an austere promontory of confederate fate, was
in reality a groundless illusion. In this particular case--quite
otherwise than in Angela's--there had been a break of contact.
Perhaps a girl's nerves respond to the nerves of another girl and
send out magnetic currents that can be caught from far off;
whereas something in the masculine constitution, something
dense, thick, opaque, obtuse, stupid, has the power of rejecting
such contacts. Or it may be that the erotic emotions, when they
brim over from the masculine spirit, extricate themselves, as
women's feelings never do, from the bitter-sweet honeycomb of
Nature, and shoot off, up, out, and away, into dimensions of
non-natural existence, where the nerve-rays of women cannot
follow.

Those queer analytic elementals, those inquisitive naturalists
that very old places, full of contorted human history, attract by
a species of spontaneous selection, must have derived a malignant
pleasure from the words they heard spoken by Monsieur Cap-
porelli when both the protagonists of the Passion had disap-
peared with Dr. Fell. In true French style, reducing every mortal
human feeling to a rigid pattern of logical amorousness, the
famous clown had uttered to Ned Athling words full of an ironic
and blasphemous amusement when the unconscious King of the
Jews and his blue-robed Mother had vanished together to the
hospital. A touch of jealousy may have mingled, too, with his
sly tone, for Capporelli had been really and truly caught by
Percy's slender hips and her graceless tomboy humour. "An en-
gaging situation," the clown had remarked, as he was changing
his clothes in the gentlemen's portion of the eastward-facing
pavilion, "and a very piquant one, for those two, it's been, we
may be sure, ever since they hoisted him up."

The Middlezoy poet turned upon the laughing brown eyes of
the speaker a pair of blue-grey eyes more chilly-cold than the
wettest sea-fog that comes up out of Bridgewater Bay. "Do you
think so?" he remarked. "It was lucky she had her car so near."

Capporelli fixed a sentimental and whimsical eye upon the
spot where he had been so happy with Percy. "Who knows?" he
sighed. "You people are all so peculiar and so--inhuman that it
is difficult to say!"

The elementals of Glastonbury--those naturalists that had
hovered over the vaporous humours of three thousand years of
criss-cross human tangles--must have howled with laughter when
they heard this clever Frenchman "explain," in accents dry and
logical, the relations between Mr. Owen Evans and Mrs. Perse-
phone Spear.

Mr. Evans had, as a matter of fact, been caught up into a
region of feeling utterly beyond the comprehension of any Latin
or any Teutonic mind. This had gone on since he stood before
Pilate until the moment when he shouted "Eloi , Eloi!" It was not,
as St. Paul has put it so well--he the one among them all who
would really have understood Mr. Evans--it was not with flesh
and blood that he was contending, but with mysterious powers of
evil upon levels revealed to few. No equivocal perversity grati-
fied by divining the feelings of Persephone entered for a second
into the terrible visions with which, as he hung between heaven
and earth, his mind was bruised and broken. The perverse girl
had detected, as Cordelia never could have done, the quality of
Mr. Evans' feelings, but what she had no idea of was the tragic
lengths to which he had carried them. The physical pain he suf-
fered before he shouted that "Eloi! Eloi!" was more acute than
he had ever dreamed of undergoing. Both Athling and the Dub-
liners were to blame, and indeed still more so was John, for not
insisting on Dr. Fell--they could have had confidence in him--
being present at one of their rehearsals. Evans had suffered, but
not acutely suffered, at these rehearsals, and what he had en-
dured he had kept to himself, for it was what he wanted. It was
the prolongation of the scene--drawn out so foolishly by that
luckless Dance of Death of the two Marys--that had brought
about his collapse, and it was the strain on his arms, bound too
tightly by those ropes, and the tension of the muscles of his
shoulders, stretched between the cross-bars, that had caused him
such anguish. But not since the bloody King put the last Abbot
of Glastonbury to death had such physical pain been experienced
by anyone upon the slopes of Gwyn-ap-Aud's hill. But it would
be a mistake to say that the spirit of Mr. Evans yielded, or weak-
ened, or regretted his undertaking. Right up to the end, till by
straining his torso to the breaking-point he lost consciousness,
he not only endured this anguish but he exulted in enduring it.
His exultation kept mounting and mounting--extreme pain and
ecstatic triumph embracing each other in dark mystic copulation.

Mr. Evans became indeed Three Persons as he hung on his self-
imposed cross. One person was his body, another was his soul.
He felt his soul--or rather his soul felt itself--to be entirely out-
side of his body. This phenomenon was to him, as he hung
alone there, looking down on that vast crowd, as much of a
definite, concrete experience as the pain itself. The pain became
a Third Person, and the soul of Mr. Evans kept urging on the
pain. He felt as if that crowd beneath him was the whole human
race and that by the transaction that was now proceeding between
these Three Persons, thus suspended in the air above them, this
crowd, an immense animal passivity, was in some way re-created,
purged, cleansed, transformed. His body, as the pain increased--
as his soul deliberately caused the pain to increase--began to
overbrim the confines of its human shape. His body projected
itself under the pain in great waves of filmy chemical substance.
It flung forth this filmy substance in streams, in torrents, in a
mighty, rushing rain! And then there arrived a moment when
Mr. Evans knew that his body was the whole hill, the whole field,
nay! the whole wide-stretching landscape. Into this landscape,
into this earth-hulk that was his body, his soul kept driving the
pain, compelling it to bury itself deeper and deeper into this
living mass. This continued till his body became more than the
mere immediate landscape. It became the whole round earth,
swinging on its orbit through space. And above this earth-body
hung the master-spirit of Mr. Evans still driving the pain on. He
was the Zeus and Prometheus and the Vulture--all three linked
indestructibly together! And all the while a triumphant ecstasy
poured down from him like a bloody sweat

Nor must it be supposed that Mr. Evans' rational mind--that
portion of his consciousness that indulged its activity apart from
pain or pleasure--was paralysed all this while. Those two man-
ners, which John Crow had noted as long ago as their encounter
at Stonehenge as peculiar to the man, were not superficial. They
represented the workings of his deepest nature. His pedantry as
people called it, was as much heightened by his present suffering
as was his imagination. As other men visualise their past lives at
the moment of drowning, so Mr. Evans, in the midst of his an-
guish,--even while he identified the substance of his flesh with
the whole round earth from which it was projected--was in-
tensely aware of the peculiar history of the spot beneath him.
The pain he endured turned his pedantic acquisitiveness into a
living medium, acutely sensitive, quiveringly receptive, through
which the whole history of Glastonbury began to pour.

Glastonbury seemed to have waited for the sacrifice of Mr.
Evans to exhale upon the air its darkest and most terrible secrets.
That no one heard these secrets, except the man himself who was
the medium for them, mattered nothing to these singular rev-
enants. They found Mr. Evans' anguished entity suspended above
the soil of that historic spot and they seized upon it, just as a
horde of wild and gusty winds, blown here, blown there, might
seize upon an AEolian harp hung aloft in a lonely place. Thus it
came about that another Pageant,--much more grim and much
less romantic than the one that had been played that day--passed
through Mr. Evans' brain. Kings and Prelates, Saints and Sodom-
ites, Madmen and Monks, Whores and Nuns, People Executed
and People Imprisoned, together with a woeful procession of
common, nameless People upon whose toil and hunger others
lived, streamed in a wild torrent of heads and faces and arms
and limbs through the tormented consciousness of Mr. Evans.
And the crowd was not only human! There lay one of the worst
horrors of it. Mingled with the human torrent were other living
things, animals, birds, and even fish. All the eyes that in the long
history of this place had looked in vain into those of the killer--
all these tormented eyes gathered now about Mr. Evans! And it
was all connected with his deadly, his irremediable vice. The
figures that flooded his brain were all torturers or victims, every
one of them; and as the thing grew and grew upon him. as he
hung there, all the victims flowed into one and became one, and
the torturers flowed into one and became one. Then it came
about that between Mr. Evans as the torturer and this one victim,
who yet was all victims, a dialogue arose; so that from their di-
vided localities in space they addressed each other, and from
their horrible association in time they answered each other.

"Forgiveness for you," cried this voice, rising from all the
victims of Glastonbury since the tribes of men had first come
there, "can never, never be. For you did this thing, and went on
doing it, knowing what it meant! Others tortured me from bru-
tality, from insensitiveness, from stupidity. You and those who
were like you did it, knowing what it meant. It was that knowl-
edge, knowing what I felt, and yet not stopping, that has made
forgiveness impossible."

The terror of the voice made Mr. Evans feel like a thing that
twisted on the floor of the Pit and yet out of the smoke of his tor-
ment he uttered a reply. "In Eternity we are as one!" he cried
hoarsely. There was a silence for a moment or--so it seemed to
him, as he hung there--for a thousand years.

Then the voice was lifted up again. "Never can we be as one! I
have looked into your eyes and you did not stop. Each moment
you went on made the difference greater. It can never be crossed
now. It is a gulf in eternity now. You could not hear me if I did
forgive you."

And once more as he heaved himself to and fro he replied
to the voice. "Christ can forgive me. Christ holds eternity in
His hand." And again there was a silence of a thousand years.
"I am Christ!" cried the voice, in a tone that made the flesh
wrinkle like blown sand upon Mr. Evans' bones. "Every victim,
whether you've done it for your science or your ambition or
your religion or your lust; whether it be a beaten prisoner,
a trapped beast, a dog strapped down for vivisection, a racked
heretic, a burnt Negro, a tortured child, is I; yes, is I myself!
And you are right when you say that I hold Eternity in my hand!
These voices come, these voices that are my voice! Can you
gather them up, these victims of yours, these tortured, hunted,
trapped victims, by their thousands upon thousands? Can you
gather them up where you have crucified them? Can you cause
the earth to yield again to you their black blood? Can you cause
the air to return to you their pitiful cries? I have heard the
voices of men--yes! and of wise men too--how they have said,
‘All is equal, all is permitted.' It is I and none other--I, the
Christ--who speak thus to you from Eternity, and I say unto you
‘All is not equal! All is not permitted!'"

Even yet, even after hearing these things--such power hath
the spirit of a mortal creature to fight for its life--Mr. Evans
was still able to reply to the voice. "I could not answer you,"
he murmured hoarsely, "if I were not answering you from the
Cross."

"You forget what you have done," went on the voice, and
it was like the voice of the wind over the sea. "You forget! You
forget!"

Mr. Evans' tone had a terrible veracity now. "Is it you who
say that to me?" he cried out. "No! No! Christ or Devil,
you are wrong there! Never have you let me forget, never for
one moment!" And it was then that the voice became a vast
anonymous voice, gathered up, it seemed, from so much suffering
in the world as to be rendered almost inarticulate! It came to
Mr. Evans' ears out of the gills of fishes, out of the gullets of
beasts, out of the shards of insects, out of the throats of birds,
out of the wounded coils of slowworms, out of prisons, out of
hospitals, out of madhouses and domestic torture-rooms, and as
it rose and sank, as it sank and rose, it accused Man--man the
cruel, man the blood-fiend, man the voluptuous tormentor, man
the rejoicer in pain, man the inventor of pain, man the pain-
begetter, the pain-eater, the pain-drinker, the pain-devil! And
from the abysses of Mr. Evans' consciousness leaped up into the
day, like an eel, out of fathomless mud, a question for the cru-
cified Man-God. "So evil, so cruel, so base, 0 Lord, are the gen-
erations of men, why dost Thou seek to redeem them with Thy
suffering? Why dost Thou not cause a flood to arise--as at the
beginning--and drown forever their itching, biting, stinging,
scorpion-lusts in smooth, deep fathoms of oblivious water?"

And the voice replied to him again and it was now so low and
yet so searching that it was like a wind stirring the horns of snails
and touching the hairs in the throats of night-jars, and moving
the antennae of butterflies, and lifting the gold-dust from the
cracks of puff-balls, and blowing the grey dust from the drop-
pings of weasels, and rippling the brown rain-fall in the cups
of fungi, and fretting the light scurf on the brittle skulls of the
newborn, and the rheum-drops on the eyelids of extreme age.
and the sweat-drops on the forehead of death. And the voice
whispered--"For those that are forgiven there shall be a new
heaven and a new earth!" And Mr. Evans groaned forth his re-
tort to this: "But what of those that cannot be forgiven? Is that
new heaven and that new earth built upon the Golgotha of the
Second Death?" The voice at this became so low that the ears of
the man, clairaudient as he was through his suffering, could not
distinguish words.

"It is God and He is lying to me," thought Mr. Evans. "He is
lying to me. People lie to the condemned for whom there is no
hope."

And Mr. Evans hanging there in his great anguish hardened
his heart against the voice. "We are alone," his soul whispered
to his body and to the pain that he was inflicting on his body.
"They have left us quite alone."

And it was then that he lost consciousness. This was what only
one person afterwards would believe when he told them about it,
namely, that he had no recollection of shouting with a great
shout that "Eloi! Eloi!" which brought the blood from his
mouth.

Cordelia would not believe it, nor would Persephone, nor
would John, nor would Mr. Barter, nor would Aunt Laura, the
matron of the ward where he "came presently"--as the ironic
human phrase runs--"to himself." The only person who believed
it was Mr. Geard; and the extraordinary thing was, when, a
couple of weeks after, the Mayor of Glastonbury was visiting
him in the hospital, and he was telling him about this, such must
have been the heat of the day, or the distressing sights in that
particular ward, that Mr. Geard, after accepting his account
without question, fainted dead away!



IDOLATRY


It was now already two whole months since the Pageant:
and the ebbings and flowings of Glastonbury lives were proceed-
ing under a scorching mid-August sun.

It was a Saturday afternoon; and resting against the warm
bank of a high hawthorn hedge, John and Mary Crow were
watching the tall pale-gold stalks of a ripe cornfield over against
Bulwark's Lane leading to Bushey Combe.

The girl wore a cream-coloured frock covered with little light-
green spots, like the spots upon the inside wings of the butterfly
called a Green-veined White. She had on black stockings and
very thin shoes, and as she lay between the golden wheat-stalks
and the tall hedge-grasses, she allowed one of her outstretched
hands to caress the cloudy pink blossoms of a tuft of fumitory.
Her white straw hat lay on the ground beside her feet, upside
down, and into the place where her head would naturally have
been, John was now with meticulous care constructing an imag-
inary thrushes' nest out of twisted blades of grass and bits of
rubble.

Her face was averted from his as she lay on her side but, as
they both rested on their elbows, John would vary his preoccu-
pation with her up-turned hat by allowing his long nervous
fingers alternately to rumple up and restraighten that green-
spotted frock, so warm, as was the form beneath it, in the glow-
ing afternoon sun.

The girl's whole being responded to these satyrish caresses
with a luxurious and delicious contentment of mind and body,
such as she had not known for many a long month.

She had been married now to John for exactly two days and
she had at last persuaded--or believed she had persuaded--Miss
Drew to allow her to live with him in that Northload room, while
she continued to spend the bulk of each day in her old employ-
ment as that lady's companion. They had not yet had their first
night together; but ever since they had been married, secretly
but not surreptitiously, by Mat Dekker in St. John's Church, the
unbedded bride had been transferring her clothes and other
private belongings to this happy retreat, the first menage that
she could call her own! Whether it would be tonight that the
grand move would be made or tomorrow, Sunday night, she was
not quite sure. She had extracted a sort of reluctant half-promise
from Miss Drew that it should be tonight; but on that issue she
was prepared to be flexible, if, when it came to the point, it had
to be tomorrow instead!

John also was happier than he had been for months: probably
as happy as he had ever been since that day on the Northwold
"big river." This girl by his side seemed on that warm August
afternoon to satisfy his whole nature in a way that he had more
than once doubted it ever could be satisfied.

What a delicious mystery--frond-leaf beneath frond-leaf, shell-
whorl beneath shell-whorl, calyx beneath calyx--the identity of
a girl was! It seemed to John, as he followed with his electric
fingers the delicate curves of this body lying by his side and as
he threw out one trifling remark after another, just to hear her
voice, just to note what such a being would say, or wouldn't say,
that the renunciation of all this made by Sam Dekker was a mon-
strous outrage upon life.

"I'll set Mary at him!" he thought to himself, and then he
thought, "No! he won't listen to any girl. I must fight it out with
him myself. It's mad what he's doing. The fellow's worse than
a murderer. He's got the uttermost mystery of mysteries under
his fingertips, and instead of worshipping it he's starving it
to death!"

He had a delicious opportunity for enjoying Mary at this
moment with his most intense idolatry and concentrated fetish-
worship; for her back being turned to him, she could not distract
him by any look.

Both her words and her silences, as he caressed them now,
along with the rest, seemed to have about them the very lines and
curves of this form that he found so intensely appealing. "What
is it," he thought to himself, as he contemplated her long slim
legs in their black stockings, "what is it about a girl's shape that
excites a person so?"

The girl seemed in such a dreamy and passive state just then
that she appeared ready to yield to the least pressure of the hands
that caressed her. John took advantage of this to make her lie
prone on her face, where she seemed perfectly content to stay
quite motionless inhaling the sun-warm aromatic smells of those
infinitesimal plants such as tiny yellow pansies, that seem to love
wheatfields better than any other place, and idly pushing at the
brim of her grass-filled hat with the tips of her shoes.

He began strewing her prone limbs now with little bits of
grass taken from the bird's nest he had made. Holding these
grasses in the air above her, he let them fall down in showers;
and it pleased him to watch which of them would find rest upon
her, and which would drift aside into the hedge-weeds, caught
by some scarce-perceptible breath of the soft southerly wind.
"What is it about the way they are made?" he asked himself
again; and it seemed to him that the most exquisite thrill came to
him--the thrill that was at once most satyrish and most infinitely
tender--from the feeling of the piquancy of such desirable limbs
being inseparably united to a conscious mind--a mind that bore
about with it, wherever it went, this sweet provocative burden.
"But it's only," he thought to himself as he stopped strewing her
with grass and began smoothing down that cream-coloured frock,
"because it's Mary! If this were another girl, instead of what I
feel I should feel either savage lust or furious disgust. God! I
would not stay here a second with another girl--except of course
Lisette; but that's different. I'd hate for another girl to think to
herself, I've got him! He likes me!' I'd hate for another girl
to have that kind of triumph."

The maliciousness he now began to feel towards this imaginary
other one drew to itself all that natural loathing of the opposite
sex felt in certain moods by both men and women; but such was
John's nature that he could take this repulsion, this sex-loathing,
which is a far more powerful and deep-rooted feeling than any
mere sex-hatred, and bury it in the ground; bury it as a dog
might bury a piece of offal, knowing that if his maliciousness or
his roguery required it, he could dig it up.

The chances are that for pure unmitigated lechery John Crow
ranked highest among the whole population of Glastonbury.
Others might have far more powerful erotic sensations; but for
pure delight derived from lust, John would, with one exception,
have carried away the palm. This exception was Angela Beere,
the chaste-looking, unapproachable daughter of old Lawyer
Beere. Angela lived for nothing else but for erotic dreaming--
her mind by night and day was a temple full of ''chain-swung
censers" to the Cyprian; and in this temple was a sacred niche
that was occupied by many different figures, but by only one
figure at a time. At present the niche was occupied by the figure
of Persephone; and it was before the figure of Persephone that
Angela prostrated herself exactly in the same way that John
prostrated himself before Mary. Between the pleasure that An-
gela was enjoying, at this very minute of time, as she sat at her
easel--for she dabbled in water colours--sketching among the
Abbey Ruins, by calling up Persephone's form, and the pleasure
that John derived from the actual presence of Mary's there was
no difference at all.

Above every community, above every town, there are invisible
Powers hovering, as interested in the minnow's, male and female,
swimming about in that particular human aquarium, as Mat
Dekker was in his fish.

It is only a very few human beings, however, in each com-
munity, who are able to slip out of their skins and share this
super-mundane observation of themselves. For the most part the
inhabitants of a given locality--or aquarium--just go blindly
on, unconsciously swimming about, following their affairs, obey-
ing their necessities, pursuing the smaller fry, making their
weed-nests or their mud-nurseries. Nor have we any right to
assume--rather the contrary--that the few persons, who have
this power of slipping out of their skins and joining those super-
mundane naturalists, are nobler, or even wiser, than the rest.
Very often they are the extreme weaklings--dwelling on the
verge of nervous idiocy.

In Glastonbury at this particular epoch, John Crow, Perse-
phone Spear, and that emaciated son of Dickery Cantle, whose
wasted legs so troubled Mr. Geard, were probably the only ones
who could attain this detached view. And certainly it would be
absurd to maintain that any of these was nobler, or wiser, or
nearer the secret of life than Mr. Geard for instance, or than
Miss Elizabeth Crow, neither of whom ever looked down, so to
speak, from above the surface of the aquarium. At this particular
moment of the fifteenth of August, that is to say at nine minutes
and forty seconds past three o'clock, had any of these super-
mundane naturalists been studying the physical and psychic
movements of the Glastonbury aquarium, they would certainly
have come to the conclusion that John Crow, contemplating the
real figure of Mary toying with the little wild pansies, and An-
gela Beere contemplating the imaginary figure of Persephone,
first in one aspect and then in another, as she sketched the
famous ruin usually known as St. Joseph's Chapel, were the
two water-creatures whose amorous excitement was most intense.
And quite apart from super-mundane observers it is likely enough
that the most desirable of all electric vibrations is just this very
sort of erotic desire, neither altogether gratified nor altogether
denied.

A small red poppy, such as linger on after their season, with
so many other cornfield plants, was dying in front of him and
a great black slug was drawing its slime over the pink pea-like
petals of a little rest-harrow. But the curious shrivelled blackness
of the dying poppy, with a strange wet look upon it, as if it wept
in its death, or as if it poured forth the most hidden store of all
its hoarded nepenthe, for nothing but the voyaging south wind,
that needed no anodyne nor any healing, to take and carry away,
did not lessen John's emotion.

Into the poppied juices of black death's own veins that perfect
sweetness by his side had crept, cozening him, cajoling him,
anointing him, with an ointment that was like a Lethe within
Lethe, an oblivion within oblivion.

The girl's yieldingness and sweetness as she lay there, bathed
in that golden sunshine and in those flickering shadows, seemed
to extend itself, like an element of eternal kindness and reassur-
ance, to everything in life.

The little rest-harrow seemed indeed to be holding its breath
till the black slug passed on its way; but its leaves were sturdy.
The slug had eaten only one pea-shaped petal. And lo! in a
moment the small strong plant could breathe again! A scarf of
rainbow-glittering slime it would wear till night-fall, but even if
no dews washed it down there would probably be rain in a day
or two and naught left of that trail. What a thing that he had
found a creature so sweet, so divinely chiselled by the great
Pygmalion of the universe! There had been a long epoch in his
life, all those years in France--though Lisette had been generous
and tender--when he would have mocked at the idea of finding
such absolute content, such fathomless peace of mind, in idolis-
ing a girl's body.

It had nothing to do with Glastonbury; that was certain! No.
it was in Norfolk they had met, and to Norfolk they would re-
turn one day.

Propping himself up upon his left arm and looking across the
girl's body, he could see the mouth of a big rabbit-hole; and
beyond that, lying close under the hedge, an old disused plough.
Upon one of the handles of this plough, which stretched up to-
wards the sky, some child or some tramp had tied a fragment of
red flannel, such as might once have been an old woman's petti-
coat. The sight of this object sent quivering through John's mind
a sudden piercing sense of the tragic pell-mell of human life
upon the earth. That bit of red petticoat tied to the plough
seemed to become a symbol--like a gallant flag held up by the
old battered sun-warmed earth--that there yet remained, in spite
of everything, a hope, a chance, faint, so faint! but still a chance,
that all the hideous miseries beneath the sun might have, down
deep underneath them, some issue, some flickering outlet, some
remedial hope.

"If there is," thought John, "it's through women that it comes
to us now." It seemed to him at that moment as if upon the kind-
ness of women, upon the yieldingness and patience of women,
and upon a certain reassurance--the mere absence from their
nature of the horns of the male beast--that their presence gives,
as of the anonymous weeds and hedge-rubble under his fingers,
all hope for better things depended. "They are all profoundly
immoral," he thought. "This accursed Glastonbury saint-myth
that has gone, like bad wine--like wine made of the poison-
berries of that Levantine thorn tree in the churchyard--into so
many heads in this degenerate town, has never really appealed
to women--they have always seen through it--they have always
known it for what it is."

John, now finding the hand that clutched at the weeds growing
paralysed and numb from supporting him so long as he thus
leaned upon it, moved his position and sat up straight, hugging
his knees with his wrists.

"As long as I don't move or speak," thought the prostrate girl
to herself, "he will go on loving me! " And it indeed seemed as if
Mary was not mistaken in this, for it was as if all that earth-born,
sun-warmed bread of life, rising from the tops of its millions of
golden stalks, had entered into John's being, giving to the thrill-
ing happiness with which he enjoyed her--all untouched as she
was--an infinity of protraction. The hum of insects, the shiver-
ing music of the larks, as if their very heart-strings were voluble
within those little up-borne handfuls of feathers, the distant bark-
ing of sheep-dogs, the, monotonous refrain of some invisible
chiff-chaff in a hedge elm a hundred yards away, the sight of a
mountainous ridge, slope upon slope, peak upon peak, of huge
white clouds on the southern horizon, and, above all, that de-
licious appearance known as heat waves which he could see
hovering beyond the plough handles, like floating nets, he
thought, with which the elementals of the air fish for the amorous
dreams of plants and mosses and lichen and stones, as the sun
draws them forth--all these things partook of the sweetness of
the girl he loved and became part of that sweetness.

"How lucky I am," thought John, "to have had the wit to es-
cape all the traps that the Evil Spirit sets for nervous, excitable,
hypnotised men and women. If I were Sam Dekker, I should be
saying to myself ‘what ought I to be doing now? What's my next
labour and burden, 0 Lord of Miseries and Sorrows?' If I were
poor old Tom I should be rushing madly from wench to wench,
trying to forget that I hadn't money enough to live in Norfolk
or buy an airplane! If I were Philip I'd be working ten solid
hours a day, building up my business. If I were Evans--but it's
beyond me to know what goes on behind those Silurian eye-
brows. But--0 you wheat-stalks and little bindweeds!--I'd like
to leave some dint, some signal, some impress upon this very
exact spot; so that in future times, when some miserable Philip
or Sam or Tom comes groaning along this hedge looking for a
branch on that chiff-chaff tree to hang himself on, he may sud-
denly step into what these air beggars call a pocket of incredible
happiness; and think to himself 'God! I'll trick the Devil yet!'"

The moment finally came when John decided that he would
arouse his prostrate companion. This was a new delight: for. as
he knew by experience, a girl is never so provocative as when
she wakes up from a long trance of passivity during which her
whole being has been charged to overflowing by the electricity
of desire.

He jumped quickly to his feet. "Up with you, my treasure,"
he cried. "I'm getting restless." Nothing, not a shade, not a
flicker, not a glow, not a breath, did he miss of the girl's identity,
as he helped her to get upon her feet. Her benumbed, half-uncon-
scious shyness--for she swayed like a drugged creature when
first she found herself erect--the way her cheeks smelt of sun-
shine and moss, the way her lips tasted of the stalks of grass,
the way she glanced, with an indrawn "chut-chut" of tongue and
teeth, at the untidy state of her dress, the way she half-yawned
and half-smiled, all these things doubled the enchantment with
which he now embraced her, turning her this way and that, as he
pretended to brush the hedge-rubble from her clothes.

The very fact that she was such a grave, self-contained and
dignified girl made all her little feminine peculiarities much
sweeter to him. Mary indeed had got in John what women so
rarely get, a lover who was as conscious as another girl would
have been, only actively instead of passively so, of the thousand
and one little infinitesimal flickerings of physical feeling which
create the aura in which the mind functions.

"Yes, Mary?"

"I believe it would have been easier, after all, if we'd done
the natural and obvious thing and gone straight to the room after
we were married."

"Now don't fuss over that, any more," he retorted, picking up her
hat for her. "It was to please her we did as we did. It was her idea.
She begged you to wait till Sunday and we promised we would.
Nobody knows we're married but her and Tom and Dekker."

"Perhaps...I'll have...to wait...till Sunday," said Mary.

John looked so aghast at this that she kissed him of her own
accord.

"Well...I'll do my best. But how shall I let you know whether
to come and meet me at the gate or not?" she continued
rather wistfully. "She may make such a scene, when it comes
to the point, that I'll have to put it off till tomorrow."

"Oh, I'll come at nine, my treasure, and hang about there for
half an hour, for an hour if you like! And then, if you're not out
before St. John's strikes ten. I'll know you can't do it. But you
will do it--if the woman hasn't fallen into a fit or anything--you
will, won't you?"

"I will," said Mary solemnly; and she felt if she were mak-
ing a vow before that whole, sacred, golden cornfield.

"We ought to have done it as I wanted," he grumbled now,
picking up his stick and his own hat. "We ought to have done it
directly after the Pageant."

"Now stop!" the girl cried with a flushed cheek. "I absolutely
refuse to go over all that again. You know perfectly well why
I wouldn't do it then. You know how mixed up everything was
and how--but, oh, my dear, don't let's quarrel over that old
story now! I'm too happy today. It's all been too lovely today.
Don't let's go and spoil it now, just at the end. My dearest, my
dearest, don't 'ee bring up those old grievances now, please, don't
'ee!" And she slipped her hand into his with a gesture of intense
pleading.

John shrugged his lean shoulders with a gesture learnt in
France; but he obeyed her and let the dangerous topic drop.

Hand in hand they soon recovered their equanimity as they
moved along the hedge towards the gate leading into Bulwark's
Lane.

John never took Mary's hand without a dim, delicious feeling
that he was holding her--as he never yet had held her--un-
dressed and lying by his side.

"Well," he thought, "tonight...tonight!" and then as he
lifted up the heavy gate to close it, when they were safe in the
lane, and took a final glance at that shimmering corn, "I must
never forget this afternoon; never, never!" Slowly, lingeringly,
they drifted down the uneven decline, following the windings of
that narrow lane, and he held her fingers tighter and tighter in
his clasp. Why, oh, why, had he not kept her there in the corn-
field till it was too late for her to go back to the Abbey House;
till there was nothing to be done but just let Miss Drew go, and
lock themselves into their Northload room for the night!

But it was wiser, always wiser, to accept the appointed end of
happy hours! His incorrigible mind set itself wondering now
whether this might not be the real solution of the problem of
evil, of pain, of deprivation and frustration in the world. Sup-
pose things were so made that there was nothing in life that need
interrupt an eternity of August afternoons like this one? Would
that not take away from this afternoon its perfect thrill, its won-
derful essence, its strange and abiding entelechy?

Though he hadn't thought of such matters up there, wasn't it
the awareness, at the back of his mind, of his noisy shanty in the
Great Western yard, of old Tom's cynical troubles, of Miss
Drew's tragic passion, of Geard's mania about Chalice Well, of
Philip's scornful hostility, of the difficulty of propitiating their
landlady, of the way Mad Bet was forever waylaying him, yes!
and of the sights and sounds, so many of them disagreeable, that
crowded in on his days, as he went back and forth between
Northload Street and the railway station, which, like the solid
masonry of the bulk of St. John's Tower, making its rich turrets
and pinnacles so much the lovelier, had given the final magic
touch to those golden wheat-stalks and those black stockings?

John dug his root-handled hazel-stick viciously into the dry
cart-ruts as this thought came to him.

"My sweet!" he cried aloud.

"What is it, John?"

"Do you suppose all our happiness depends on contrast?"

"You mean our having to come down here; and my having to
go back for dinner?"

"That kind of thing...yes!"

"Better walk alone now," she said, drawing her hand away and
moving it quickly to her hat and then to her waistband. "I know
what you mean, John, and I've thought of that too--but some-
times I get a feeling that there's a world, just inside or just out-
side this world, where these opposites that are so hard to under-
stand, lose their difference altogether."

"But that means death, doesn't it?"

She turned her heads towards him and he was astonished at
the softness, the bloom, the glow that suffused her face at that
moment.

"Not...necessarily...not always," she said slowly; and then, before
turning her head away, she smiled one of those deep, mysterious,
feminine smiles, that only the greatest poets and artists, such as
Dante, Leonardo, Blake, have dared to note, depict and comment
on, in their troubled search for the absolute.

St. John's clock struck six as they reached the centre of the
town. "Too late for tea, John," she said. And then she added,
"We'll have our tea at midnight and all to ourselves. But, oh,
goodness! I do feel so frightened all of a sudden."

"What's the matter, sweetheart?"

"Oh, I don't know! John, I'm afraid, she'll be terribly upset.
You won't be angry if I don't come, and you've waited and
waited?"

"Of course not," he replied hurriedly. "By God, it'll only be
what I deserve if I have to come back alone. Besides, it's only
putting it off till tomorrow!"

The girl stared in front of her, fixing her eyes on that well-
preserved Gothic building that is usually called the Abbot's
Tribunal. Something had profoundly disturbed her.

"Tomorrow...tomorrow," she murmured vaguely.

"What is it, my sweet? What is it, Mary?"

She gave a quick sigh and a shake of her head.

"Oh, nothing...I expect I'm just nervous. But when you've
looked forward to a thing for a very long time and it's just--"
She bit her lower lip; she pushed back the hair beneath her hat
with the unconscious gesture of a woman facing the worst tidily.
"Well, my dear," she said resolutely, fighting down a craving
to burst into tears and to cry frantically: "Let's go to the room
now, straight away, quick--to the room--now!" "Well, my dear,
I suppose we'd better part here. I'll just have a comfortable time
to see her for a moment or two before we dress for diitner."

"Will you come over...to the room...in your--dress?" John asked,
feeling as if he were a tramp making a rendezvous with a princess.

"Of course; I've got my warm cloak, haven't I? I'll bring my
little black bag ."

John looked at her with astonishment. That she should be
able--this delicate exquisite provoker of feelings such as could
ascend the steps of the ultimate Heaven--to manage such a dras-
tic undertaking as to have a scene with Miss Drew and leave the
house with a black bag, seemed to him wonderful. That she was
ready to do it, that she was fond of him enough to do it, amazed
him. He had never been a man who attracted women, and he
exaggerated their coldness towards him. Indeed in regard to the
love of women he had a physical humility that was almost a
mania. One of the strongest holds that Mary had over him was
the simple fact that she, a sweet-looking, intellectual girl, could
be in love with him at all! Secretly John regarded himself as the
most unlovable human creature then living in Glastonbury.

As he continued to hold the hand which she had given him
and to stare at her like a person in a trance, Mary had herself
to make the move she dreaded.

"Good-bye...till tonight!" she said and tore her hand away.
But she was back again before John had left the spot. It was
a crowded piece of pavement where they had stopped in
front of the mullioned windows of the old Tribunal, and John,
following the cream-coloured frock with his eyes, had stepped
into the gutter so as not to be jostled.

Here they met as she pushed her way back against the current
of the crowd.

"If I don't come tonight, I'll come tomorrow morning. You
won't go out till I come, will you?"

"I should say not!"

And she had flown for the second time.

She still had that queer disturbed feeling, as coming down
Silver Street, she passed the high Vicarage wall. "It looks like a
monastery!" she thought. She was anything but reassured when
she caught sight of Sam Dekker at the Vicarage gate, talking to
Crummie Geard. Crummie had recently taken to helping old

Mrs. Robinson arrange the flowers for the church altar, and she
had come--quite naturally that Saturday night--to fetch a bunch
of white geraniums from the Vicarage garden.

Sam raised his hat as Mary passed and Crummie nodded; but
the impression left by this encounter was an unpleasant one.

"She holds those white flowers like a nun," Mary thought.
"And she used to be such a lovely, merry creature. I believe that
man is putting horrible ideas into her head! He's got a sort of
furtive inquisitor's look. He'll be making that pretty little thing
enter some terrible Order. How she is listening to him, drinking
in every word! He's worse than a priest--that young man. And
what a shifty sensual look he's got. He gave me a look as much
as to say: ‘Go on and take your pleasure! Go on and break Miss
Drew's heart! A time will soon come when you too will come
here for white geraniums!' "


As Mary hurriedly slipt off her cream-coloured frock--and she
felt a desire to crumple that dress between her hands and press
it to her face instead of folding it up so carefully--and began
taking down her hair, she became conscious that her panic just
now went deeper than the struggle with poor Miss Drew and
deeper even than the difference between the Tribunal and that
golden field. She paused in her task, with her bare arms lifted
to her head at the mirror, and stared into her own grey eyes.
Mary was as little conceited of her looks (nor, to confess the
truth, were they of any startling quality) as her lover-cousin, for
he could hardly be called a husband yet, with those bridal sheets
still cold, was conceited of his.

Into her grey eyes she looked therefore, as a spirit might look
that would fain give pleasure to the man she loved by giving him
her body. "The next time," she thought, "I look in the glass will
be in our room!" She took the comb now and began combing out
her hair, holding her head so far back that she made her long
tresses hang straight as seaweed, clinging to a smooth-oval-
shaped stone. And she really did forget her anxiety now and Miss
Drew and everything; for the electricity in her hair, as she pulled
the comb through it, gave her such a delicate, amorous shiver
that it made her feel as if butterfly wings were caressing her
nipples under her soft shift.

And she thought: "What will it be like tonight? Shall I feel
awkward and ashamed? Will I be able to sleep ?"

There came a puckered wrinkle to her forehead now, as she
put the comb down and began plaiting her smoothed-out locks.
John was funny. John's manias and fastidiousnesses, where girls
were concerned, seemed to be endless. "I'll be a fool, an idiotic
fool, if I let him see me undressed too soon. Td better put out
the lights while I'm slipping on my nightgown."

Her mind pondered on gravely and intently, thinking to her-
self, "Well--there you are again, you curious creature!" It was
indeed a fierce mania of Mary's to stare into her own eyes at the
looking-glass. She did it as a rule more angrily than with any
other feeling; and, when she did it, she always thought of the
self that looked back at her there as something quite different
from the self she was conscious of really being. Her real self
didn't seem to have eyes at all; didn't, in some mysterious way,
seem to need eyes or nose, or mouth! Her real self seemed com-
pounded out of pure ether and totally independent of bodily form.

"I've felt this unsafe feeling somewhere else," she now told
her staring grey eyes; "and I know where it was too! It was the
night when I undressed after being in the boat with John, on the
Wissey; the night when I was in the room next to Dave and
Persephone, and when John was at that inn."

What Mary could not know was that the original cause of this
feeling was that the desperate prayer which they had sent up
from the boat that day had only reached the malice in the First
Cause instead of its beneficence. She tried angrily now to shake
off the feeling.

"If I do make Miss Drew let me go tonight," she thought, "I'll
have it out with you, looking so wild and troubled!" And then,
not thinking of herself as beautiful, she set herself to think of
the best method of procedure when the great moment came. No
young lady from Wollop's, led by Young Tewsy into "my other
house," could have meditated more carefully on the diplomacy
of provocation. But this grave, true-hearted girl, before she had
finished arranging her hair as she wished it to be, had smiled
once at her own image. It was a flurried, faint, flickering smile,
like a watery sun on vaporous ice; but, when she came to kneel
before her chest of drawers to take out her best white evening
dress--that she had not put on since the night when Tom Barter
came--she suddenly fell to laughing aloud. The memory had
come into her head of those everlasting Elizabethan bawdy jests
about the taking of maidenheads. "I don't fancy I'll be much
changed in that respect," she thought to herself, as she unfolded
her big crimson sash.

But she had no sooner placed dress and sash side by side upon
the bed and had begun to wonder what stockings to select, when
there came a faint, hesitating knock at the door.

It turned out to be Lily; and Lily with tears running down her
cheeks.

"What is it? What's the matter?" she cried. "Come in, Lily! Come
in and tell me what it is."

She pulled the girl in and closed the door. "There! There!" she
murmured soothingly. "Don't you cry! You'll spoil your nice, clean
apron. Look! Here's a new handkerchief; and I'll give it to you, Lily,
to keep. It's real Norwich linen."

"Louie was...I thought...Mr. Weatherwax said..."

"Now stop, Lily! There's a good girl. Stop and tell me about it quietly."

"'Twas to do with...'twas because of...'twere about Mr. Barter,
Miss Mary."

Mary was a kind-hearted, generous girl and not devoid of her own
queer slant of Norfolk humour; but her attitude to Lily did uncon-
sciously change a little at the introduction of Mr. Barter's name.

"Well, Lily, what was it?"

"Thank you...ever...so much...Miss...for this love...lovely handkerchief!
I shall keep it as...as a keepsake, Miss."

"But what is it, Lily? What's upset you so?"

"Mr. Weatherwax said he'd tell Mistress that he'd seen Mr.
Barter talking to me in Ruins a week agone come Sunday. He've
a bad tongue, that old man has; and Louie thought if I told you,
Miss, what tales he's going about telling of me, maybe Mistress
would...I mean maybe Mistress wouldn't--"

"But did Mr. Barter talk to you last Sunday, Lily?"

"Not talk--of course--Miss Mary"--and Lily, folding up the
handkerchief into little squares, uplifted a face as innocent of
all guile as a wrongfully accused heroine in a story by the author
of The Channings--"not talk, of course, Miss--Mr. Barter hap-
pened to pass by when I was reading under the wall at Ruins'
End and naturally, being the gentleman he is--"

Mary found her good-temper coming back to her with a rush.
The image of the sedate Lily with her book, the expression,
"Ruins' End," the casual Barter taking a blameless stroll in the
Abbey grounds--in the presence of these things it was impossible
to nourish grievances. Besides, Lily could take care of herself.
Lily was no little goose like Tossie Stickles.

"Tom, Tom," she thought, "you'd better take care. If I know
anything of our Lily you'll meet your match if you don't look
out!"

"I understand, Lily....It's all right. Miss Drew knows how
careful you always are of the credit of her house. If I were you
I would only laugh when old Weatherwax teases you. Answer
him back! Pay him off in his own coin. Above all, don't make
him angry."

Mary paused for a moment, and then, while she moved to her
chest of drawers to finish her dressing, the thought of Crummie
and the white geraniums made her burst out scandalously to Lily
who was fumbling with the red sash on the bed: "We girls can
only be young once, Lily," she surprised herself by saying. "But
we must keep our wits about us, for men are ticklish creatures."

It may be believed how wide Lily's eyes opened when she
heard these words. "Mr. Barter has always behaved very proper.
Miss," she stammered, "and I'm sure, Miss, you know that I--"

"That's enough, now, Lily," said Mary firmly, pushing the as-
tonished maid gently towards the door. "Go and see if Miss Drew
wants any help; and if she's gone down, tell her I won't be a
minute. By the way, Lily, it may interest you to know that I was
married the day before yesterday!"

Lily's face expressed unalloyed dramatic interest; but, a sec-
ond later, bewildered consternation.

"She thinks it's to Tom," passed through Mary's mind. "Yes,"
she went on, "to my cousin, Mr. John Crow, who did so much in
the Pageant."

Lily sighed a deep sigh of relief. "Are you going to...to leave us...
Miss...I mean Mam?"

"We'll see what your mistress says about that," replied Mrs.
John Crow with a brazen chuckle. "I've got two homes now,
Lily--one here and one--not here. Now run off, please, there's
a good girl! Oh, and you can tell Louie to send in some of those
tartlets she made yesterday. I know there's rice pudding; but if
she wants to give me a treat "

"May I tell--" murmured Lily from the doorway.

"Of course, of course! Only say it's a great secret--especially
from Mr. Weatherwax!"

It was only eight by the French clock on the mantelpiece when
dinner was over and Miss Drew and her rebellious companion
were seated opposite each other, with the Dresden coffee-cups
between them. Not a sip of her coffee, however, had Miss Drew
taken. Her face was tense and white, her nostrils twitching, her
fingers fretting with her white shawl, her shoes tapping the
ground, her back straight.

"--like an elopement; that's what it is...stealing off at night to a
man's room...no! it's worse than that...it's like an assignation!"

"It's my husband's room," maintained the girl firmly; and she
said to herself: "I believe she's going to let me go."

Miss Drew visibly shuddered.

"Mary!" she said.

"Yes, dear?"

"Go to the dining-room sideboard, please, and get me half a
wine glass of Mr. Dekker's brandy!"

The girl made haste to obey her and was glad to find that the
room was already nearly dark and that Lily had taken away both
rice pudding and tartlets.

Miss Drew drank the brandy in two quick gulps.

"Is he coming for you tonight?"

The girl nodded.

''I won't have him cross my threshold! I've told you that
already."

"He's not coming in. I'm to meet him at the gate."

The woman rose from her seat and, moving to the chimney-
piece, drew her shawl tight round her shoulders.

There were no flower-pots in the grate tonight. Its cold pol-
ished black cavity looked back at her like the ribs of death.

"This moment had to come," she said in a low voice, speaking
more to herself than to the girl. "It had to come; and now
it's come."

"But I'll be over every day, dear," whispered Mary, wishing
bitterly that she had never let John come for her tonight. "It's
worse than I expected," she thought.

"You don't know," said Miss Drew, "you simply don't know
what you're to me."

"Dear...my dear!" murmured Mary, rising, she also, from
her seat, and making a little wavering, fluctuating movement
towards her friend.

But Miss Drew continued: "No, you don't know, you never
have known! This man...this 'husband' as you call him, this
cunning scamp...has less feeling in his whole body than I've
got in my little finger!"

She must have caught, just then, an involuntary glance of
Mary's towards the door. The younger woman was indeed afraid
that Lily might suddenly appear to carry off the coffee.

But to Mary's amazement Miss Drew now rushed to the door
and locked it! Such a thing as locking the drawing-room door of
the Abbey House to prevent interruption from the servants was
as much of a tragic and historic event--if the real proportion of
things be considered--as the eviction of the royal spy, before
Sedgemoor, from the bar-room of Dickery Cantle's great-great-
great-grandfather.

When Miss Drew came back from crossing the room the two
women confronted each other between the fragile coffee-table and
the fireless grate. The elder wore her usual black silk garment
with the heavy brooch seeming the old lace frill on her withered
neck. Opposed to her gaunt figure; Mary's form, in her low-cut
white dress and big crimson sash, looked very young and soft and
girlish.

"I'd like you...I'd like you not to..."

Miss Drew was evidently struggling to say something that tore
at her vitals.

"I'd like--" she gasped again.

"What is it, oh, what is it?" stammered Mary, awed, a little scared
and completely bewildered.

"I'd like you not to go to him tonight. I'd like you to stay with
me tonight...our last night...as you are!"

"Of course, my dear, if you feel it like that--"

"I mean...not leave me at all...just this once...I mean...let me hold
you...all night...close to me--"

Mary's face must have expressed such trouble, such pity, such
confused agitation, that the old woman changed her tone to a
quieter one. "It would be nothing to you...to watch...to be there
...to be near me...just this once...and then"--she swallowed a
rasping, dry sob--"tomorrow...you shall go."

"Dear! I must think. He'll be at the gate in a few minutes; I
must--I don't know what to say. For him to go back alone--
through the streets--to that room--oh, I don't know what to do!"

She flung herself down on a chair, her red sash trailing to the
carpet, lying on the carpet, like a great stream of blood from a
stab in her side.

Miss Drew leaned one of her long, tight-sleeved arms upon the
mantelpiece and watched her.

The void of her longing for her, of her losing her, throbbed
within her like a hollow cave, round the walls of which a bitter
stifling smoke was whirling, seeking an exit.

The French clock on the mantelpiece ticked on remorselessly:
tick-tock, lock-tick, tick-tock, as if there were behind its hidden
wheels, some demon of the inanimate, that was taking vengeance
for all the hammerings and tinkerings it had had at the hands of
its man-creators.

Mary glanced hopelessly, helplessly, at the clock. She remem-
bered how it had ticked, just like this, the night she had felt so
sad with Tom before the Pageant. Her thoughts kept taking first
one road of trouble and then another. "It isn't fair!" her heart
cried. "I belong to John. It isn't fair!" And then a vast pity for
this unloved, childless old woman surged up within her. "After
all," she said to herself, "it's only for one short night: and how
could I be happy, over there, thinking that I'd denied her such
a little thing?"

"Let me think," she whispered, giving Miss Drew a faint smile
and a reassuring nod. "Sit down, dear--don't stand like that!
You make me nervous. I only want to think...just to think
...a little more."

But Miss Drew did not show any inclination to sit down. She
kept her eyes fixed upon the girl in the chair, as if that red sash
were a death warrant. And something from her Isle-of-Ely an-
cestors now rose up in Mary's nature; something sturdy, earth-
rooted and with a smack of indulgent humour in it, like the taste
of peat-smoke.

"The poor heart!" she said to herself. "John and I can surely
wait for twenty-four hours. If I can--God knows!--he can."

To her consternation Miss Drew now rushed forward and with
a heart-rending groan flung herself on her knees at the girl's feet.
"I'm not a bad woman! I'm not a bad woman!" she sobbed out;
and then to Mary's dismay she began pressing the red sash
against her lips. "I'm not...I'm not a bad woman!" she groaned
again, uplifting to the girl a face contorted with shame and
passion.

"Miss Drew! dear Miss Drew! Get up, for Christ's sake. It's
not right for you--it's not right for either of us! Oh, what shall
I do? What shall I "

But the other had buried her face in the girl's lap and with
her arms outstretched was clutching at the sash where it was
wound about the young woman's waist. She was murmuring all
sorts of wild things now to which the girl could only helplessly
listen, looking distractedly at the clock, which went on with its
infernal ticking in exactly the same tone as if its mistress had
been pouring out tea for Matthew Dekker.

"Oh, I love you so! Oh, I would give up my life for you! I
can't bear it any more--it's lasted too long. But you will? My
child, my little one, my only one, you will? You will be with me,
watch with me, let me hold you, just this one single night? I'm
not a bad woman! Say I'm not, child! It's...its...it's this Love
that's burning my life up!"

The clock selected this particular moment to begin striking
nine, the hour when John was to be at the gate! She had done
nothing towards putting her day-dress and her night-dress into
that black bag she had told him about. The intrusion of Lily at
that juncture had left her barely time to get dressed at all.

She had to struggle now with a definite anger against this
frantic creature; but her sturdy East-Anglian nature stood her
in good stead and she fought that feeling down. She saw in her
mind's eye the drooping forehead, the lowered eyelids of the
nun-like Crummie. She saw Sam Dekker's white geraniums; and
she murmured to herself again: "The poor heart! The poor
heart!"

"Get up, dear! Get up!" she now cried aloud in a voice not
untender but resolute and emphatic. As she spoke, she herself
struggled out of the chair. Standing erect now she felt in more
control of the situation; and she took hold of Miss Drew's hands
and managed to drag her up from her knees. She was startled as
she did this by the burning feverishness in the woman's fingers.
But when she got her safe on her feet the agitated lady fell into
a fit of, violent shivering as if, in the fever of her emotion, she
had been plunged into ice-cold water.

But she resumed her old place by the empty grate; though
Mary could see the thin black arm that she extended along the
mantelpiece was trembling so much that it made a couple of
ornaments that stood there jingle and tinkle against each other.

Miss Drew glanced sideways now at the ticking dock, as if she
could have struck out its life with one blow and left it pointing
at ten minutes past nine in an eternal paralysis!

"Well," she whispered huskily, "why don't you go up and
pack your things, if...that man...is waiting for you?"

Mary walked slowly to the window. She was once more in an
anguish of indecision. The tragedy of passion often consists in
the depths of harsh unlovableness into which it throws its vic-
tims. Miss Drew, by the tone in which she said, "Go up...that
man is waiting," had done her utmost to destroy the very pity
upon which her fate depended. The "poor heart," as her red-
sashed companion had called her in her thoughts, was indeed in
a tragic impasse.

"Well...have you decided against me...against the one thing I've
ever begged...on my knees...of a living soul?"

Her words seemed to come, not from her own mouth, but from
some other Miss Drew,--a towering image of devastated frustra-
tion--that hung and wavered in the air between them.

But Mary continued obstinately staring out of the window into
the round half-circle of trimly weeded gravel, surrounded by
thick laurel bushes from which a winding driveway led to the
gate. The window was open at the top; but not content with this,
she presently pulled aside the muslin curtains and opened it at
the bottom. She now stood there motionless, listening intently,
while the warm August air stirred her gown and, entering the
room, made the candles flicker.

Several little brown moths took the opportunity of flying in
past her white figure. Some rushed to perish at the candles on
the table, while others beat themselves against the lamp till they
fell upon the floor. Neither Miss Drew nor her companion had
any margin of consciousness left for these little suicides of blind
desire. Miss Drew's thoughts flickered much more wildly than
the softly fluttering curtains or the lightly stirred folds of her
companion's frock.

They were a strange jumble, these thoughts; a jumble of old,
conservative prejudices and passionately covetous longings; long-
ings rendered intensely concrete and circumscribed by reason of
their long suppression.

"Mamma...Mamma...never sit on sofas...weakness to sit on sofas
...hold your back straight now...straight Euphemia...Betty Newton
in hay-loft...kissing...Mamma...angry like God...God sees all...he
will hold her all night...a sneak...a tramp...a trickster...a thief...
friend of Geard...Geard meddling with Chalice Well...Geard letting
loose all the devils...burning...burning...Betty Newton...Mamma...bed
all day...bread and water...too long, too long, too long...sweet...so
very sweet...and for him, all for a dirty trickster...no one knows
how sweet but me...too old now...old...old...never sit on sofas...
weakness...hold your back straight, Euphemia...a dirty adventurer
must have her...hard she is...hard to me...soft as clay to him...it
burns...it would be only once...peace, rest...lovely, heavenly peace!
...her red sash...it burns...Lily and Rogers in bed...never knock-
ed...never rang...everything changed since that man became Mayor
...Chalice Well...blood...her sash...red blood...it burns...never for
me...after this...never for me...she'll be gone soon...listening for him
out there...gone...gone...a maid no more...it burns...Lily and Rogers
in bed...two pillows...slept watching...watching slept...mamma...
grand-mamma...crying all night...never came...never heard...it burns
and burns and burns."

"I couldn't be happy in our room tonight," thought Mary. "And after
all--no! I'll do it. The poor woman! It's better than giving her white
geraniums to hold in her hand."

She shut the window with a violent jerk of her strong bare
arms. She turned and came slowly, gravely, gently, towards the
figure by the mantelpiece. She came close up to Miss Drew and
threw her arms round her as she would have thrown them around
a wounded animal.

"I'll stay," she whispered softly to her, "I'll stay, dear!"

The rush of wild excitement, relief, passion, shame, the motion
of racing blood from heart to nerves, brain, throat, were too
much for the wrought-up feelings of the woman.

Her head sank down, like the head of a reed in the water when
a sluice is opened, and upon Mary's shoulders her tears fell now
without stint, while a queer whimpering, like the crying of a
child whose mother has suddenly appeared among a crowd of
strangers, showed signs of changing into hysterical laughter.

"Come and lie down, dear...There! I'm not going to leave
you...not for one moment...my poor, poor darling! Come and lie
down...only just a minute."

Thus murmuring, Mary half-dragged, half-supported her till
she got her safe upon the sofa...upon that very sofa where
""Mamma" had so often told the little Euphemia that it was
"weakness" to recline. Then the girl s practical mind began to
work fast. "I must," she thought, "run out and tell John. I'd
better go and get hold of Lily. Oh, mercy! Her eyes are shutting!

I hope she's not going to faint."

Thrusting a pillow under Miss Drew's head, Mary ran to the
door, unlocked it and hurried down the passage. She had shut
the door carefully behind her; but even so, she did not want the
lady to hear her shouting for help.

"Lily!" she called gently.

There was no answer; but she thought she detected the sound
of hurried movements and disturbed voices in the far distance.

"Lily! Louie! Where are you?"

Then she heard the unmistakable sound of a man's voice--the
voice of Mr. Weatherwax. She opened the kitchen door. "Come
here, Lily, come quick, please; I want you! Miss Drew's ill!"

There was bread and cheese upon the kitchen table and also--
Mary noted it with a house-wife's indignation, even at that crisis!
--the brandy decanter from the dining-room sideboard.

The scullery door opened--just wide enough to allow the
entrance of a very slim virgin--and Lily, hurriedly pinning on
her white cap, slipped into the kitchen, with eyes very wide and
even her pretty mouth a little open.

"Oh, Lily, Miss Drew's unwell--I've made her lie down on the
sofa; and I think--"

"La, Miss!--I mean Mam--does Mistress want the brandy?
Mr. Weatherwax just dropped in to ask how we was off for vege-
tables, and Louie thought "

"Listen, Lily. We must try and help Miss Drew upstairs, and
get her into bed. I shall sleep with her tonight; so you can take
my pillow and things into her room. One minute, Lily! Just go
and tell Mr. Weatherwax not to go for a moment. If she's too
heavy for us, he could carry her up."

"Yes, Mam; yes, Mrs. Crow."

Mary hurried back into the drawing-room.

To her astonishment Miss Drew was standing by the mantel-
piece again, but her whole manner was changed from what it
had been. She was self-possessed now and very quiet.

"Come here, child," she said.

Mary went up to her and she took the girl's head gravely be-
tween her hands and kissed her forehead.

"I've changed my mind," she whispered, very dignified and
commanding. "I wish you to go after all. Run out now quickly
and tell that man to wait for you; and then come back and pack
your things. And I shan't expect you back till Monday morning.
I wish it, Mary! You must do what I tell you. I shall be abso-
lutely all right. I shall get up early and go to St. John's."

The curious thing about this long, hurried speech was that Miss
Drew never raised her voice above a whisper. Mary stared at her.
The sight of their two untasted coffee-cups brought back so
vividly the painful scene she had gone through that night, that
this change in her employer's tone seemed dreamlike and
unnatural.

But, before she had time to reply, Lily came quickly in with-
out even a pretence at a knock.

"Lily," said Miss Drew calmly, raising her voice now, so that
it sounded quite as usual, "you know, of course, that Miss Mary
is married?"

"Yes'm, Miss Mary told me, Mum."

"But she's going to be with us, as before, I'm glad to hear,"
Miss Drew went on, making several little movements with her
hands among the objects on the coffee-tray--"that is, during the
day-time. But I've told her we'll be able to manage without her
tomorrow; for we mustn't be selfish, must we, Lily?"

"Yes'm...no Mum."

But the lady of the Abbey House now turned to the extremely
embarrassed Mrs. John Crow.

"Run out, dear, and tell your--good man, that we're all help-
ing you to pack and that you won't keep him long."

Dominated by the authority in her tone and spared any protest
by the presence of Lily, Mary had nothing for it but to obey her
to the letter. She went to the door, which Lily gravely opened
for her, and slipped out into the hall.

She did not soon forget her queer sensation--as if she had
been turned into a bit of seaweed on the top of a great cresting
wave of compulsion--as she looked hurriedly round for some-
thing to throw round her. There was a big, eighteenth-century
mirror hanging in the hall; and in a flash of queer detachment
as one of her hands mechanically went up to her hair, she thought
to herself, "Women must have wrapped things around their
white shoulders like this, while arrows were flying, guns firing,
torches waving, men shouting, for hundreds and hundreds of
years!" She opened the front door and descended the stone steps.
Then, with the cloak she'd picked up clutched tight round her--
more as a protection from the night, from obscure invasions of
her nakedness, than for warmth in that summer air--she ran
rapidly down the drive. Yes! There he was.

"No...no! Not now, John!"' 1 ,she panted breathlessly, as he
hugged her against him, almost lifting her off the ground in his
thankfulness to have got her again. "There...there! Let me
go, John!"--and when she was free--"I must go- back now for
my things...I only came...to tell you I was--" she could
hardly get the words out in her agitation--"to tell you I was
coming. You wait here, John "

She was off up the drive again, and out of his sight, almost
before his unspeakable relief had found time to flow to his con-
fused brain from the arms which had held her.

He could not remain still. Every pulse in his body was beating
and his heart was as voluble as the French clock, still ticking
behind Miss Drew, as she talked quietly to Lily. He set himself
to pace up and down the road like a sentinel guarding some royal
palace.

There were all sorts of vague delicious scents upon the soft
air that rustled through the laurel bushes, stirred the wall-flowers
in the crannies of the grey wall, went sighing off like the breath
of an invisible spirit over the tops of the trees. But from some
remote cowshed somewhere out towards Havyatt Gap, on the road
to West Pennard, he could hear the pitiful cry of a beast in pain.

As this cry went on, tossed forth upon the summer night with
woeful persistence, John stood and listened nervously, leaning
upon his hazel-root stick.

"Damn!" he thought, "and it must be a pain like that, that
this woman's enduring now, only in the heart...in the heart
...at my carrying off Mary! What a thing--that not one per-
fect day can he enjoyed by anyone without hearing something
groan or moan! What would young Dekker be doing in my case?
Well--it's clear what he'd be doing, by what he's done over Mrs.
Zoyland! Cleared out of it...hands off...and spends his time be-
tween Paradise and Bove Town, comforting the sick."

He resumed his sentry's march, but his mind was beating now
against the blood-stained wedge of the world's pain, and he could
not give up himself with absolute assent to his good hour.

He prodded the crumbling stonework of the wall with the end
of his stick in angry pity: pity for Miss Drew, pity for that suf-
fering beast on the West Pennard Road, pity for the whole array
of anguished nerves upon which the great, blunt thumb of evil
was strumming its nightly gamut amid these sweet summer scents.

Once more he listened intently. How hard not to listen! What
was the trouble with that beast over there? What were they doing
to it? What were he and Mary doing to Miss Drew? If only he
knew that there were a God, who for one second had an ear open,
what things he would pour into that gaping, hairy, stupid orifice.
In the old days their gods made them sacrifice their enemies to
propitiate the great pain-engine.

"I'll put into old Geard's head," he thought, "to burn an image of
God, like a great Guy Fawkes, when he has his Festival of Christ's
Blood."

He resumed his sentry's march. The suffering beast was silent
now. He prayed that Miss Drew also was either rocking herself
to sleep in a fit of hysterics or hardening her heart in pain-kill-
ing hate.

"But if everyone waited," he said to himself, "to snatch their
hour, till not a cry, a groan, a moan, could be heard in the whole
world, who would ever be happy?" There! Wasn't that the open-
ing of the front door? No! 'Twas one of those inexplicable noises
that are liable to occur in all silent places, as though some am-
bushed eavesdropper struck something with his foot.

"What an awful mood Tom was in when I saw him yesterday!
He doesn't seem to like it very much our being married. Perhaps
I oughtn't to have asked him to the church. She said not to! Girls
are wise in these things...wise...There! That surely was the door?
Yes, there are her steps! Oh. the darling! Oh. the heavenly darling!"
He snatched the bag from her hands and laid it on the ground,
flinging his hazel-stick after it. His whispers of rapture as he
welcomed her, touching her, here, there, with his hands, as if to
make sure that it was she and none else, drifted off among the
other faint sounds of the night and went on their airy voyage
eastward. The wind came from the west: so that, long after no
human ear could have heard them, those sounds--or those vib-
rations that would have been sounds to more sensitive ears than
man's--went journeying due east. Over the roofs of West Pen-
nard and East Pennard they went; over Ditcheat and Milton Cleve-
don; over Cogley Wood and King's Wood Warren; over Monkton
Deverill and Danes' Bottom; till they left the West-Country al-
together; and were resolved into thin air somewhere beyond
Stonehenge.

But Mary soon made him pick up her bag and his stick and
set off down Silver Street.

"I was within an ace--an ace I tell you--of not coming to-
night! In fact I'd told her I wouldnt come; and it was quite de-
cided; when, all suddenly, she changed her mind and became
absolutely generous. She just made me come, John, just made
me!"

"Poor old thing!" he interjected at this point. And then he
caught himself up. "Damn it, my sweet, how self-complacent a
person gets, in a second, when luck turns--but I can't help it;
I've got you! I've got you! I've got you!"

Mary smiled to herself in the warm velvety darkness that hung,
like a great priestly alb, around the masonry of St. John's Tower;
for she said in her heart: "How different women are from men!
I suppose we all accept from our earliest childhood, this tragic
division between the happy and the unhappy. Men seem to
discover it, like a new light on things; and at once want to do
something, or at least to make some grand sign of doing some-
thing!" But she forgot Miss Drew herself when they reached that
door in the lamp-lit silence of Northload Street. John produced
his latch-key.

"Think if I'd forgotten it!" he whispered. "Think it we'd had
to ring and bring that woman down!" And she remembered, as
they ascended the two flights of stairs to their top floor, glancing
with an almost guilty nervousness at the various doors they
passed, how miserable she had been so many times, on these
stairs. She recalled the day when she had bought the tablecloth
at Wollop's and had found Tom there and came away without
even knocking. As she followed John now with her hand on the
gas-lit bannisters and watched the ends of his grey flannel trous-
ers clinging about his down-trodden heels, she wondered to
herself why it was that he loved her now so much more than
during those wretched months before the Pageant. Was it Tom's
fault in those days? or Geard's? or just the agitation of the
Pageant?

"I don't understand him," she said to herself, as they reached
their own landing, "but I belong to him, I belong to him! He
loves me more today than he's loved me since the boat on the
Wissey."

Her feelings were a thrilling mixture of contradictions when
they stood in the room at last--alone together--and with the
night before them. But they were all happy sensations; though
so opposite! It was a delicious sense of a furtive, guilty assigna-
tion she had, as she heard him lock the door behind her. But it
was also a heavenly sense, as she looked around her, of being in
a room she had made according to her own taste; for in Thorpe,
at Norwich, it had just been "Mary's bedroom," something she
had accepted exactly as she had grown up in it; and of course,
at Miss Drew's, everything belonged to the house.

She felt also--and this was totally unexpected--a hot wave of
shyness mounting up through her as she hesitated for a second
to throw off her cloak. She pressed her knuckles quickly to her
face, before she looked round, and prayed he wouldn't notice
how burning her cheeks were! But he was snatching off her cloak
now; and now he was standing back, for a minute, to gaze at her
with adoration in her low white dress and bare arms and shoulders.

"What a...lovely...sash!" he whispered solemnly; and he seemed
to be drinking her up with his eyes, just as if he were kneeling
at her feet and she were the very cup at the altar. And then his
hands, his lips, his very soul, were pressed rapturously against
her shoulders, her throat, her shy cold breasts.

The touch of her body began very soon to change this worship
of her beauty into a more intense but less sacramental desire.
His fingers began feverishly plucking at the fastenings of her
bodice. But Mary remembered her carefully thought-out erotic
diplomacy and she slipped away from him.

"No...no...no, John, I'm going to undress behind our screen.
That's what I bought it for, at Wollop's! It's my dressing-room
behind there--as well as my kitchen! You go and get quite
ready for bed...give me my bag, though, my night-gown's in
there...yes! get into bed as quick as you like, and I'll turn
out the gas!"

When John recalled every conscious moment of all this night,
after she had left him on Monday, the thing that remained in his
mind as most entrancing was the marbly smoothness of her body
when he held her at last. Being as queer as he had always been in
his amorous peculiarities, and being as frantically fastidious as
he was vicious, this smoothness of Mary's flesh was a new ex-
perience to him. He hadn't exactly expected her to be as scaly as
a gryphon, or even as bony as old Tom was, but this heavenly
smoothness was something quite unlooked for!

And she was so docile, too; that was another surprise to him;
for he had expected, from what he had read in books, that she
would be capricious, nervous, agitated, difficult.

Yes, Mary was indeed "docile." John was right in that! She
too had her surprises that night; and the greatest of all these
was the sense of absolute naturalness and freedom from
embarrassment.

When she had felt that first rush of blood to her cheeks she
had thought to herself: "Mercy! I'm not going to be silly in that
way, am I?" But when once she had turned out that gas-flame
...why! it was all as easy and nice as it had been in the
wheatfield. It was nicer, in fact; for in place of the great Mother's
confederacy with her daughter's psychic ravishing, as she lay on
that sun-warmed bank, here, in this Northload bed, with the
water-meadow scents coming in through the window almost as if
they came from her own Norfolk fens, there was about her an
older, deeper, darker protection than even of the earth; here
there was about her the protection of the ancient night itself,
oldest of all the gods, older than all the Thrones, Dominations,
Principalities, and Powers that brood over Glastonbury, older
than any Holy GraiL And Mary thought to herself: "Because I
have found my love and because I have come to belong to my
love, I will bear now, without making a fuss, whatever chance
may give me to bear! I will think of what I feel now--pure
gratitude; and I'll be sweeter to Miss Drew than anyone in all
her days has been!"

And John thought to himself: "I wish I could get old Tom's
troubles out of my mind! I wish I'd stirred up the Mayor a bit
more to make things easier for Tom at the factory. I wish I
hadn't asked him to come to the church. I wish I'd seen more of
him lately! I've just dropped old Tom, I've just forgot him,
neglected him, let him slide out of my mind!"

And as John lay there, discovering in the smoothness of Mary's
limbs something that was as surprising to him as if he'd found
a white seaweed or a blue wood-anemone, his shame about
neglecting Tom became like a bruise, a definite bruise in some
back-ledge of his consciousness. "I must accept it," he said to
himself; and he began to think, as he slowly sank to sleep--
the girl was asleep at least an hour before he was--that the
only morality he possessed was a feeling of shame whenever
he allowed himself to cry out, "I am miserable...I am un-
happy...I am wretched." Not to pity himself whatever hap-
pened and not to be miserable whatever happened: such was
John's morality. To allow himself to go to sleep feeling dis-
tressed about Tom would have been a lapse from his interior
code of honour.

As he heard St. John's clock strike two he gathered himself
together within himself in a curious habit-gesture of the will.
This gesture he always thought of in a particular way, using a
special image for it. The image he used for it was a certain kind
of black travelling trunk studded with brass nails.

Such a trunk he had once seen on a barge on the Seine. A
man--a young working-man--was sitting upon it; and it was
from this lad's expression that John had derived this particular
symbol of refusing, whatever happened, to be unhappy, which
constituted in his own mind the only morality. At the first
temptation to such weakness, as at this very moment, when he
was tempted to stay awake worrying about old Tom, he would
make this habitual gesture of the will and visualise the black
trunk with brass knobs!

It was a further proof of how women receive the tragedies
of others with a more vegetable-like acceptance than men, that
while Mary went to sleep at half-past one full of a delicious
sense of fulfilment, John found it very difficult, in spite of his
black trunk with brass nails, to get the troubles of Tom Barter
out of his mind.

No doubt a large part of this difference between them lay
in the fact that Mary was much less nervous about sleeping with
John than John was about sleeping with Mary!

Being one layer or one skin, so to say, nearer Nature than
he, her love for him saturated her deeper identity more com-
pletely than his for her; so that the contact of strange flesh--
strange at least under these new conditions--was much less
of a nervous shock to her, for all her greater receptivity, than
it was to him. His deeper soul had not really yet accepted this
new experience, so that while her love made it possible for her
to fall into a childlike sleep of absolute peace and security,
John stayed awake for some while longer, worrying about Tom,
and when he did sleep it was a sleep less deep than hers.

But before the church clock had struck another hour, both
of the cousins were fast wrapt in unconsciousness in that little
Northload room; and the wandering mists from the water-mead-
ows of the Isle of Glass, floating in and out of their open win-
dow, renewed their strength as they slept; for these airs carried
with them a far-off dim remembrance of the vaporous summer
mists that at this very moment were rising from Dye's Hole
and from Oxborough Ferry and from that great pool at Harrod's
Mill where the personality of Tom Barter had first risen up
between them.



TIN



It was now mid-September. The harvest--a particularly
good one that year--had been gathered in, and the apples in
those immemorial orchards of Insula Pomorum, those deep-
grassed, grey-green orchards with their twisted trunks under
which the cuckoo flowers are so dewy-fresh in the spring and
the wasps so drunken-sleepy in the autumn, were beginning to
grow yellow and red.

The elderly curator of the little Glastonbury museum was
walking up and down between the famous Ancient British boat,
over which he had kept guard for forty years, and the almost
equally famous Lake Village pottery, much of which, during his
long indefatigable regime, he had dug up with his own hands.
That old canoe-boat had still a serviceable air. It looked as if
it would almost have served the owner of Wookey Hole himself,
to push his daring explorations beyond that Stone Witch, up
his subterranean river; and the pottery too looked as if it could
still hold the milk and honey of Avalon.

But Mr. Merry felt worried at that moment. It was Wednes-
day--early-closing day in the town--and he had been promised
by Mr. Crow that if he could get down to the starting-field by
two o'clock he should be taken for his first air-ride.

Bob Tankerville, the pilot, was going to fly to a certain fac-
tory town in France that day, one of a series of such expeditions
that Philip had been making of late, but today, the master him-
self being unable to go, he had offered Mr. Merry this unique
chance.

"Tankerville can do my business," he had said. "All he wants
is someone to grumble to."

But it was now a quarter to one and there was no sign of
an expected visitor for whom he had been waiting since twelve
o'clock.

"It'll be a rush to get my dinner," thought Mr. Merry, as
he stroked with his old fingers the edge of the ancient canoe.
Being a bachelor, and very rigid in his habits, Mr. Merry made
much of his dinner hour at the Pilgrims'. Since the Pageant,
he had enjoyed these meals with especial zest, because his bete
noire, Barter, whose flirtations with the waitresses were a source
of perpetual irritation to him, had, since he left the dye works
for the municipal factory, ceased to appear.

A rush! If there was one thing in life that Mr. Merry could
not abide it was what he called "one of those damned rushes
when you don't know what you're eating." And here he was,
heading steadily, moment by moment, towards a rush. Partly
by disposition, for he was one of those slowly moving persons
who savour intensely their own physical functioning as they go
to and fro over the earth, and partly from the habit of his pro-
fession, which dealt in huge tracts of time, the curator had
come to resemble the biblical Creator; for to his erudite and
historic mind, "a thousand years were as one day."

He had been pestered now for nearly a fortnight by letters
from the foreman of the municipal factory--an individual who
signed himself "Radley Robinson"--for permission to talk to
him on what the applicant called "affairs of importance."

Did the passionate Red, whose baptismal name was Radley,
feel any sense of a psychic-philological shock when he mur-
mured to himself, pen in hand, "haffairs of himportance" and
then wrote down the un-aspirated words?

Since the Pageant and since the unsatisfactory compromise--
from his point of view--that had ended the dye-works strike,
Mr. Robinson had been hardening his heart and concentrating
his energies. Deep in his soul shone still the illuminating lamp
of "'ate"; but to his Jacobin destructiveness he had had the wit
to add a great deal of indomitable cockney patience; and on
the strength of this he had been promoted to the position of
second-in-command under Barter. He had set himself to pro-
pitiate Barter with a ferocity of sly, satiric unction, that made
that shrewd East-Anglian positively sick with aversion. But there
was nothing else to be done! The manufacturing of souvenirs
flourished well under Red's astuteness. He alone seemed able to
keep the hot-heads and cranks, of which the works were full,
in any sort of order.

Above all, the Mayor, doubtless at his daughter's instigation,
was evidently anxious to soothe the man's wounded feelings by
giving him material advancement.

Anyone watching old Mr. Merry at this minute, rubbing with
a privileged forefinger this precious aquatic relic, under the
very nose of his own proclamation against such doings, would
have supposed that he was wondering what actual prehistoric
human rump once squatted in this frail skiff; but not at all.
He was thinking to himself "If he doesn't come soon, I'll have
to let the pudding go."

But suddenly the door opened and there, quite unmistakably,
was the pestering man.

Red looked like what is called a ticklish customer. He looked
like a person capable of employment by Scotland Yard. But he
also--with his neat foreman's suit and new cloth cap--looked a
little like a master-plumber. He didn't look the kind of person,
anyway, that Mr. Merry, from forty years' experience, felt he
could dismiss with a well-worn jest about its being "early-
closing."

The curator sighed deeply as he requested his visitor to take
a chair and learned that his name was Robinson.

"He's a pesterer," he thought, "but he isn't an arch-pesterer.
I may have time for pudding."

He was right. Mr. Robinson plunged into business without any
beating about the bush.

"What would you call this, Sir?" he enquired promptly, tak-
ing a stone from his pocket and handing it to the curator.

Mr. Merry took the object in his hand. It resembled a thunder-
bolt. It also resembled a lump of clay. The old gentleman's face
became very animated.

"So you've found a bit, have you? Mr.--Robinson--ah! I
thought--someone would--would find another--before long."

He jerked out these detached syllables as if he were accepting
the object in question for his museum. He did lick his finger
now and rub violently one corner of it.

"Yes; you've found another, Mr. Robinson. That's the seventh!"

Mr. Robinson, who had a friend among the apothecaries, now
uttered a mysterious chemical formula. And then, immediately
afterwards, looking Mr. Merry cheerfully in the face, pronounced
the single syllable--"tin."

"It's the helement, hain't hit, Sir, what the Romans used to
trade in; them that wore the himperial purple? "

"I've know'n this was coming for twenty years," thought the
distracted curator, his face changing from animation to pro-
found dismay.

He looked sharply at his interrogator. How much did this
fellow know? He wasn't a chemist. He wasn't an antiquary.
Could he be palmed off with a learned lie, or couldn't he? But
Mr. Merry as a result of his scrutiny decided that lies were use-
less. "It's begun!" he said to himself. "It's begun! This fellow
will take it to Crow; sure as I'm a dizzard. The beauty of Wookey
Hole is departed! Crow will start quarrying the moment he
sees this. The wonder is that he has missed it himself; he's
always going down there--with his electricity. This is the end;
the end of all those lovely stalactite caves that Clement of
Alexandria talks about!"

"I can see, Sir," said Mr. Robinson rising to his feet, "that
my hinformant was right; and that it his the helement after
which the Corinthians "

"Not Corinthians, my good man; Carthaginians cried the
curator, "and what you've got there isn't an element you must
understand. It's a chemical deposit, precipitated from the sub-
terranean river down there and brought up from some deep min-
eral pocket in the Mendips."

"0 lordy! lordy! lordy!" he thought to himself, "why can't
I hold my silly old tongue?"

"It's the hold Roman metal, henny-'ow," said Mr. Robinson
with emphatic assurance. "I thought it was myself ; but I thought
I'd just run in to-die and arst so as to mike sure. I'm not cryzy
about telling people what hisn't their business any more nor
you be, as I plinely see! But in dies like these dies, it's best to
be sife!"

Mr. Robinson buttoned his coat complacently over the inner
pocket containing the specimen he had brought.

"A mineral the harticle is then, Sir; a nice little mineral! And
this sime mineral is what the himperial Romans used? I thought
so. I thought there weren't no mistike; but I said to myself, 'tis
best to get the word of sich has knows!"

He put on his cap, adjusted it carefully, though with a touch
of rakishness, gave a contemptuous glance at the Lake Village
pottery--as much as to say: "No himperial metal in your die!"
and then, as he said afterwards to his mother, "took me bleedin'
'ook, leaving the old gent, and small blime to 'im, not knowing
'is 'ead from 'is tile."

The next person Red Robinson went to see was a small chem-
ist in High Street of the name of Harry Stickles, a remote rela-
tive of Tossie's. He got into the shop just before it closed; and
when the last shutter was put up, Mr. Stickles took him out
into his little back garden; where they sat down, in that drowsy
autumn noonday on a bench beneath the wall. Opposite them was
a pear tree and under the pear tree a big yellow cat. Several
brooms and mops were propped up against the wall and a
broken earthenware bowl lay at their feet.

" 'Ad yer dinner, 'Arry?" said Red.

"What do you suppose, you bloody Londoner? I dines at
twelve sharp, I'd have you to know, and what's more I've got
as tidy a little missus as any tradesman in town, and don't you
forget it,--when it comes to the cookery department "

Red looked at the yellow cat.

"Where is your lidy now, then, 'Arry? Washin' the so-up-
lidies?"

Mr. Stickles made a gesture with his thumb and a slight mo-
tion with one of his eyebrows. This signified that the mistress
of the house was upstairs just above their heads, and that if
they were to talk blood and iron business it would be wise to
lower their voices.

"You've 'it the mark, 'Arry; you've 'it it strite this time!
'Tis that nice, little metal what mide them hemperors so rich.
You've got it. You've got it! The honely question now his, 'ow
much will you be 'ighbel to soak 'im for."

Red took off his cap and laid it down at his feet, upside down.
The joy of his " 'ate," and the thought of "soaking" his enemy
had caused drops of sweat to moisten the front of this object;
and upon this 'ate-sweat a blue-bottle fly began to feed with
such intense avidity that one might have thought there was a
nourishing potency in Mr. Robinson's wrath.

Harry Stickles did not reply for a while. Both men now took
out their pipes and contented themselves with contemplating
the yellow cat, as their smoke ascended in filmy-blue curves
into the misty air. The cat stretched out its front paws and.
yawned voluptuously, displaying a throat as pink as a wild rose.
Then Mr. Stickles said, in a carefully modulated voice, so that
his wife, even if she was listening at the window above, could
hardly have caught his words:

"The number of sixpences I've a-spent overlooking for this
here thing in Wookey would keep me in tobacco for a year.
But there's a big lot of it down there--a big lot! It only wants
digging for. There be tons and tons, I shouldn't wonder."

Mr. Stickles was a short man, even a dwarfish one, with long
muscular arms and a face like a mad baby. His face was a soft,
round, roguish face, with pleasant dimples; but into it, as if
in some fantastic experimentation, had been thrust a pair of
eyes that glittered with insane avarice. The truth was that long
before Philip had begun charging sixpences for the privilege
of visiting Wookey Hole, Mr. Stickles had been wont to spend
Sunday after Sunday among those stalactites.

"Don't yer let 'im horf under a 'undred thousand!" said Red
Robinson cheerfully.

"Lucky if I get a hundred quid out of him," whispered the
other; "but he can't have found it or 'twould have been in the
paper."

"Piper be 'anged!" whispered Red ferociously. "What price
'im putting 'is gines and 'is tikings in the piper! What eel do
to-die, we pore dawgs will know tomorrow, and that's hall there's
to it!"

Mr. Stickles contemplated his yellow cat with intense and
concentrated attention. Suddenly he slapped his hands on his
knees.

"I'd catch him just about right--after he's had his lunch and
all--if I were to go round and see him now--straight off the
blooming reel!"

Red Robinson squirmed and fidgetted on hearing his friend's
bold utterance. In the secret malice of his heart he had seen
himself as the one, dedicated by a just providence, to dangle the
metal of Carthage and Rome before the eyes of the greedy manu-
facturer.

"He's been flying all hover Europe; so 'is pilot's landlidy in
Butts' Alley told Sally Jones...stealin' secrets from they
foreign dye-works; so 'tisn't likely he'll be in The Helms to-
die."

Mr. Stickles was however already upon his feet, while his
yellow cat, as if to give oracular encouragement to his daring
master, left the pear tree and rubbed himself against his legs.

"Maybe 'twould be better if someone helse, someone that
'adn't no hinterest in the money, someone who were a good
friend o' both parties, some quiet honlooker, you might say,
willin' to serve hall and sundry, were to go and talk to 'im,
rather than he who's the principal hagent!"

"Meaning?" whispered the gnome-like discoverer of tin, with
a leer. "Meaning?"

But Robinson had drawn back in some disquietude; for the
dwarfish chemist had suddenly thrust his face very close to his
face, and was displaying, between his thin lips, the flickering
point of a red tongue.

"Well--why not?" said the cautious foreman of the municipal
factory. "Why shouldn't you ring 'is bell henny-'ow, and tell
the servant you kime? No 'arm in that! Henny gent may ring
henny other gent's front door-bell and arst to see 'is collection
of bricky-backs. No 'arm in that!"

But Mr. Stickles did not feel the same inspiration, or the
same sympathy, in his friend's voice that he had felt in the
yellow cat's uplifted tail.

"I'm off," he said abruptly. "I don't suppose you want to wait
here all the afternoon, till I come back, eh?" he added.

"Oh, you'll come back, quicker nor that!" cried the other.
"Eel not be for arstin' yer to stay and drink fizz with 'im, all
the afternoon, hunder 'is shady helms."

No sooner were both men gone than the head of a pretty, fair-
haired young woman appeared at the window.

"Goin' to see Mr, Crow, are ye?" she murmured to herself.
"Going to surprise your little Nancy with a hundred pounds--
I don't think!"

And then, kneeling on the floor with her elbows on the
window-sill, Nancy Stickles caught sight of young Mrs. Glover
and her baby reclining in a wicker chair by the edge of her
tiny lawn, while Mr. Glover--the ironmonger---with a large
pair of garden scissors was trimming the straggling border of a
bed of London Pride.

At once the girl's thoughts ceased to be malicious, or vin-
dictive, or even self-pitiful! She thrust her fingers into her apron
pocket and extracted a little, sticky paper bag. Out of this she
took a lemon-drop and put it into her mouth.

"He'll be twelve months old, next Thursday, Billy Glover
will! It's nice for Betsy Jane the way Mr. Glover do stay at
home on closing-days and tidy up garden."

It was as if some great consolatory spirit in things, perfectly
indifferent to the blood-and-iron activities of her mate and her
mate's ally, now began to pour out upon this head at the window,
lemon-drop and all, everything that it had to bestow.

A wood pigeon's voice became audible in the small lime trees
at the bottom of Mr. Glover's garden; and in spite of the noise
of the traffic in the street in front, it was possible to catch the
pleasant sound of a lawn-mower in the garden beyond Mr. Glo-
ver's. That mysterious relaxing of everything hard, everything
tense and strung-up, that comes with autumn was all around
Nancy as she looked out, breathing a vague cider-sweet smell
of apples. If moss and primroses were the dominant spring scent
in Glastonbury, apples were the autumn one.

This particular day was indeed as characteristic of autumn
in Somerset as any day could be. A blue haze was over every-
thing, so thick and intense, that it was as if the blueness in the
sky had fallen upon the earth, leaving only a vague grey hol-
lowness in the upper air. This blue haze invaded everything. It
crept through gaps in hedges; it floated over old crumbling
walls; it slipped into open stickhouses and haysheds. And though
it was blue in colour, it smelled strongly of brown mud and of
yellow apples. This blue mist, reeking of cider-juice and ditches,
seems to possess a peculiar somnolent power. Travellers from
the north, or from the east, coming into Glastonbury by train
through Wareham, may be sitting erect and alert as they pass
Stalbridge and Templecombe but they will find it difficult to
keep their eyes on the landscape when the train has carried them
beyond Evercreech and they come into the purlieus of Avalon.

Sleep seems to emanate from this district like a thin, pene-
trating anaesthetic, possessed of a definite healing power, and it
is a sleep full of dreams; not of the gross, violent, repulsive
dreams of the night, but of lovely, floating, evasive day-dreams,
lighter, more voluptuous, nearer the heart's desire, than the raw,
crude, violent visions of the bed.

Nancy Stickles felt a wave of delicious languor steal over her
as she contemplated the Glover family enjoying themselves on
their little lawn and as she watched the blue mists floating over
the old walls and lying in hollows between the narrow alleys,
and hovering in pigsty doors, and privy doors and fowl-run
doors, and flowing like the vaporous essence of some great blue
apple of the orchards of space over everything she could see.
She felt quite friendly to her husband. He never struck her. He
never abused her. He always gave her exactly the same sum
of money every Saturday, whatever receipts the shop brought
in. He didn't drink. He praised her cooking. But on the other
hand--oh, how happy she always was when he was well out
of the way and she was left alone!

There must have been something in Nancy of the unconquer-
able zest for life that the gods had given to old Mother Legge
who was her great-aunt. She was an extraordinarily pretty girl;
and she had so fair and clear a complexion and such a rounded
figure that people turned to look at her as she went by. But
Nancy had no self-pity. It never occurred to her that she had
been wronged by God or by humanity because her father died
in the workhouse and her mother in the county asylum; or
because she had been cajoled by the accident of propinquity into
marrying the poorest and most miserly of all Glastonbury's
tradesmen.

She did not like it very much when Red Robinson, her hus-
band's friend, showed a tendency to take liberties with her; but
she managed to rebuff him without "making trouble," and as
soon as he was out of sight she had the power of casting him
from her thoughts. Nancy Stickles was perhaps more perfectly
adjusted to the ways of Nature, and to the terms upon which
we all live upon this earth, than any other conscious person in
Glastonbury except Mr. Wollop and Bert Cole. But Nancy had
a double advantage over both these adherents of the visible
world in the fact that she included many undertones and over-
tones of a psychological character completely out of reach of
Bert and the ex-Mayor.

She shared with her great-aunt a certain Rabelaisian habit of
mind, or at least a habit of mind that liked life none the worse
because of its animal basis.

At this moment, for example, when it became clear that Billy
Glover had "forgot where he was" and was being carried kicking
and screaming into the house, Nancy Stickles felt no repugnance.
If she'd been called upon at this moment to give Billy Glover
a bath she would have gone into Billy's room without the flicker
of a sigh, and been soon looking out of Billy's window, just as she
was now looking out of Harry's!

When not in acute physical pain, or in the presence of acute
physical pain, Nancy Stickles enjoyed every moment of life.
She liked to touch life, hear life, smell life, taste life, see life;
but she went far beyond Mr. Wollop and Bert, as she did in-
deed beyond everybody in Glastonbury, except its present Mayor,
in the enjoyment of religion. To Nancy Stickles, God was a dig-
nified, well-meaning, but rather helpless Person, like Parson
Dekker; Christ was a lovable, but rather disturbing Person, like
Sam Dekker; the Holy Spirit was, quite simply and quite rev-
erently, a very large and very voluble Wood Pigeon; but all
these Entities moved to and fro in an inner, behind-stage Glas-
tonbury; a Glastonbury with greener fields, a redder Chalice
Well, yellower apples and even bluer mists, than the one Nancy
knew best, but one--all the same--that she felt frequently con-
scious of, and towards which her deepest feminine soul expanded
in delicious waves of admiration, hope and love.

It was not every woman in Glastonbury for instance, who,
running down now to answer a light ring at the closed chemist's
door, and finding her husband's relative Tossie, obviously pretty
far advanced in her pregnancy, standing in the doorway, would
have greeted her with the lively hug and kiss of Nancy's welcome.

Tossie, however, showed no sign of being surprised at these
manifestations. Everyone knew that Nancy "were one for kissing
and cuddling," and the younger damsel behaved now with a
grave, indulgent toleration, and an air that seemed to say, "We
women have a right to be made a fuss of by you girls, but if
you'd had our experience of life you would be less excited."

The two of them moved together into the back garden and
sat down on the bench under the wall, lately occupied by Harry
and Red. The yellow cat was no longer in sight and the young
mistress of the house very soon carried off the unsightly scrub-
bing mops. She even picked up the fragments of the earthen-
ware bowl and carried them in. Tossie, sitting with folded hands,
took no notice of these movements.

"I shan't be going to hospital till after Christmas," she re-
marked. "Maybe not till the New Year."

"Will ye be staying where ye be till your time be come?"

"That's what Missus do say; but her'll have to get a girl to
help soon in house, me being liable to be taken wi' dizzies."

"Do it feel pretty lonesome-like when you do have they
dizzies?"

"Not particular," replied the other carelessly.

As a matter of fact, up to this day, and indeed up to the day
of her delivery, Tossie never had a flicker of either dizziness or
faintness.

"Who be Miss Crow going to have into house to help 'ee?"

Tossie proceeded to add to her air of a mother of the gen-
erations the air of a bestower of sinecures.

"She have asked I if I know'd of a friend of me own maybe;
and I told she, I'll go round, I said, and see Harry's wife, Nancy;
but of course, I said, being well-to-do people, as you might say,
and high-class tradesmen, it's doubtful if Nancy would come."

"I might come--afternoons and evenings," said Nancy pen-
sively.

She was thinking to herself--and yet not thinking--for it was
a less definite process than that--feeling rather, with every
ounce of her flesh, every nerve of her body, every pulse-beat of
her blood, that it would be extraordinarily pleasant to walk over
to Benedict Street every afternoon and have tea with Tossie
instead of at home. "Harry rather likes getting his own tea." she
said to herself.

"Could 'ee cook dinner and help I washing up?" cried Tossie
eagerly. "They'd be having nothing to speak of for lunch. Good-
ness, Nance! but I'd dearly love for 'ee to come. 'Twouid drive
all they faintings away to have thee there wi' I"

Nancy pondered. "I expect," she said, "Harry would be pleased
for me to go. He's been making terrible little in shop this last
year, owing to competition."

"Does Harry let 'ee see what he do make," asked the sagacious
Tossie, "or does he take it out of till and tell 'ee any tale 'a
likes?"

"Men prefers to manage their own business, as a general rule,"
replied Nancy cautiously; and then to change the subject, she
asked Tossie about Lady Rachel.

Tossie became, in a second, extremely secretive and extremely
consequential.

"She's unhappy. Anyone can see that. But she doesn't tell
things to everyone. She only tells things to folks as she do know
very well...folks in house."

"Does Mr. Athling come over regular to see her?"

The importance printed on Tossie's countenance as she pre-
pared to reply to this question delighted Nancy. All this was
part of those undertones of life that she enjoyed quite as much
as the littered surface.

"People can meet people, when they wants to--especially if
them be Ladies of Title--without coming to house, can't they?"

Nancy's eyes sparkled with glee. The idea of being initiated
into fashionable intrigue thrilled her.

"Maybe you'd like to walk up wi' I now, and see Miss Crow?"
said Tossie casually.

She spoke with the airy negligence of one royal ambassador
throwing out a bait to another royal ambassador. Nancy got up
from the bench, went to the window of the back room, the chemi
cal dispensing-room, and looked into the house. It was only five
minutes to three by the clock in that small back room. The litter
in that room, its hand-to-mouth look--not like a real chemist's
shop at all; like an extremely humble apothecary's place, where
there might be a barber's chair!--made her feel more than ever
sure that Harry would agree to her going.

"Yes, if you have rested long enough, Toss, and are sure the
walk won't tire you, I'd love to go with you now. I'm not a bit
afraid of Miss Crow. She talked to me once on the cricket-field
for a long time. I like her. She's nice."

On their way the two young women caught sight of John
Crow, hurrying along on the other side of the street.

"Is that there Mr. Crow still working for the Mayor, Toss?"
enquired Nancy.

"Sure he is; and what is more he's married his cousin who
do live with old Miss Drew out to Abbey House. Missus went to
call on 'em one day last week in Mrs. Boul's house in North-
load. They ain't only got one room; they ain't; and 'tis all
crowded with curtings and cushings and such like oddments.
'Tain't like a real room, Missus did say; 'tis like a Stoodio in
Chelsea-town."

"Did she tell you that, Toss?"

"Me and Lady Rachel," replied Tossie.

"Be Mr. Crow working for the Mayor still, Toss?"

"Some say he be, and some say he baint. Some say he be a
Roosian Spy. But anyway he be Philip Crow's cousin, though
they aren't on speaking terms."

"What's this I hear, Toss, about the Mayor digging great pits
in Chalice Hill for to find Jesus Christ's Supper Cup?"

"That's just ignorant talk," explained Tossie from her su-
perior level. "Mr. Geard baint digging pits; he be setting up
foundations. He be going to build a girt arch, so they do tell at
our place, and make thik red spring run under 'un."

"There be a wonderful lot of they foreigners come to Glaston
since Pageant-day."

"Stop a minute, Nance, while I gets me breath. When you be
as I be you won't skip as you walks."

Nancy obeyed and they paused by the wall of St. Benignus'.

"Sally Jones told I," whispered Tossie, in a tone as preg-
nant as her own form, "that she heard the Mayor tell his lady
there'd be a girt miracle when thik red water do run under his
new arch. Sal said he looked like a prophet when he spoke of it.
She said he told his wife about some Welshmen of ancient days,
with a name what begun with a 'T' like me own name, what
writ about this here miracle afore King Arthur's time."

Nancy contemplated the tower of St. Benignus' Church round
which several black swifts were cutting the misty air, as they
swayed and circled. Her eyes had an entranced faraway look in
them.

"These be wondrous exciting times we do live in, Toss. I've
always had a mind that I'd live to see a miracle since I were
confirmed in cathedral."

As Nancy uttered these words she laid her hand upon the
wall of St. Benignus' graveyard, and gently stroked its green
cushion of thick moss.

"Think, Toss, what it would be like," she went on in a low,
awed voice, "if there were a real miracle in Glastonbury!"

Tossie Stickles felt she was deriving more comfort from the
gentle pressure of that old wall against her fecund frame than
from any conceivable departure from the normal system of
things.

"I don't lay no stock on miracles," she said. "I reckon 'tis be-
cause I've got so much on me mind."

Tossie Stickles was not the only person in the town that fine
afternoon whose mind was preoccupied. Philip Crow, after an
interview with Harry the chemist, looked at the clock in his
study. Only half-past three! He'd got rid of that greedy dwarf
in double-quick time. What a funny-looking man--his face so
round and smooth and his eyes so hungry for bank-notes! He
hurried out of the study, where he had been showing Mr. Stickles
his own specimens of Wookey Hole tin, and went down the pas-
sage. The drawing-room door was open. He looked in. How nice
those phloxes smelt! How well Tilly arranged flowers in a room
--so different from those untidy wildflower bunches, that Aunt
Elizabeth always left about! Dear old Tilly! He closed the door,
thinking to himself: "It must be very unpleasant in those coun-
tries where the rooms have no doors to shut!"

He stood for a second in the hall, listening. The rich, misty
autumn sunlight poured through the lozenge-shaped panes of
mid-Victorian coloured glass, inset above the front door, fell upon
the hall table, throwing a rosy light upon the tray of calling
cards that stood there, upon the top of which Emma, true daugh-
ter of Sly the shepherd, had placed the virgin card of Lady
Rachel Zoyland, fell upon the stuffed pike, brought, like the
famous picture of the poet Cowper's mother, "out of Norfolk,"
and fell finally upon a leather-bound Bradshaw with a brass
paperweight laid upon it.

No! There wasn't a sound in the house. It must be the serv-
ants' day out; and Emma must be "lying down," upstairs. His
eyes fell by chance--perhaps because it was so rosy from that
coloured glass above the door--upon the Bradshaw, and upon
that little brassy Lion of Saint Mark which kept it in its place.
He sighed--a quick, little, deep-drawn sigh. Persephone had
brought him that absurd little brass object from Venice. What a
strange girl! What on earth had he done to offend her, to make
her so cold to him? He had been tender, considerate, tactful.
He had been everything they liked! He couldn't help making love
to her when they slept in those places--Taunton, Bath, Exeter,
Bristol. What else did she expect? Did she think men and women
could lie quietly side by side, like two girls? That was precisely
--as far as he could make out--what she did think. Why on
earth, else, had she turned against him? Well! Let her go.
Alone! That was his manifest destiny; to wrestle with this
chaotic world alone; without the warm comfort of a girl's faith-
ful sweetness. For the flicker of a second as he stared at that rosy
gleam, and the slanting, dust-mote sunglide that led down to it,
he thought that it would be nice, as he got older; if Tilly would
consent to adopt his little Morgan daughter. But her mother
would never give her up ; and Tilly would never consent. Besides
---what a handle to his enemies!

He took down his grey felt hat and chose a stick from half
a dozen that stood there, huddling, as if for protection, in their
painted stand round Tilly's big umbrella. He never bothered
much about sticks. Who was it he'd come across in the last week
who made such a fuss of his stick? Oh, that scallywag John!
He'd met the scamp only the other day, at Aunt Elizabeth's and,
do what he could, he couldn't keep his temper with the fellow.

Well! He must hurry up now and get to the office. But he
wished that rosy light on that brass thing hadn't made him
think of that sweet waist and those boy's hips! He opened the
door and walked with his quick short steps down the drive and
into the Wells Road. It didn't take him long--he had often
timed it exactly, not more than a quarter of an hour--to get to
his office.

"No! It would never have done to fly to the Continent today!"
he thought, as he was greeted by a chorus of anxious appeals
from his young men and saw the applicants for his attention
waiting in his ante-room and the pile of letters, come by the
second post, on his desk.

He settled himself in his swivel-chair in front of the big, fa-
miliar blotting-pad, covered with neat calculations. He gave one
quick glance out of the window at the well-known factory chim-
ney. "Ha!" he said to himself, "There'll be some more of you,
my fine boys, spouting your smoke, before Philip Crow is done
for!"

It took him three-quarters of an hour to dictate his most im-
portant answers, and then another twenty minutes to deal with
his two most important visitors. Then there came a call for him
to go to the telephone.

"That'll be the chap I want," he thought. "That'll be my
good Will!"

Will Zoyland indeed it was; and so pressing and crucial was
the Bastard's communication, that there was a violent running
to and fro in the office of the Crow Dye Works.

"No tea at home today," thought Philip, as he hurriedly set
about despatching the rest of that day's business. He dismissed
all his local suppliants now, telling them to come again tomor-
row; and he gave just ten minutes apiece to a man from London
and a man from Birmingham.

"A busy cove, our gentleman seems to be," said the London
man to the Birmingham man as they went off together. "When
does your train go? The five o'clock to Bristol? I'm going to
take the Somerset and Dorset to Wareham and catch the old
six-thirty to town."

"This little hole's going to look up, I shouldn't wonder," said
the Birmingham man presently when they were halfway down
Benedict Street. "It's a nice little place."

"So long as this freak Mayor they've elected," assented the
other, "doesn't ruin things with his damned Socialism! They tell
me that the bloke's starting a regular commune down here.
They'll be hoisting the red flag next. But they've got a tough cus-
tomer to deal with, that's evident, in our friend Crow."


Philip himself, later that afternoon, was walking rapidly, from
where he had left Zoyland, to the exit out of Wookey Hole
Wood. "I'll start contracting at once over that tin," he thought.
"I'll not draw in one bit with the new Dye Works business. Fll
play 'em off against each other! If the tin does come out in good
quantities, I'll begin that piece of road too, straight away. If
the Romans had a road there, I can have a road there. The good
Will got pretty excited? How his beard wagged."

Philip's mind now ceased to adumbrate forth even the most
blurred sentences. It ceased to evoke even those mysterious short-
hand hieroglyphs, half-word, half-picture, that we so often use.
In the orbic emanation from his body, projected like a moving
nimbus round his figure as he moved, enormous images built
themselves up, and then annihilating themselves as if by the
mandate of some interior stage-manager, built themselves up
anew, in other, stranger shapes.

His energy as he walked along with those quick, short, com-
mander-of-men steps that were so characteristic of him seemed
to be simply limitless! He felt it pouring through him, like some
as yet unnamed magnetic fluid. He felt as if he were tapping
some immense reservoir of power, stored up in those caverns
he was leaving--power that had accumulated there for centuries
and centuries, like the metallic deposit he would soon quarry
out--and in the strength of which nothing could balk him, noth-
ing could frustrate him. The curious thing was that as he gave
himself up to this intoxicating feeling he felt an excitement that
was actually phallic. Nor was there anything unnatural in this.
Both two great forces pouring forth from the double-natured
First Cause possess the energy of sex. One is creative, the other
destructive; one is good, the other evil; one loves, the other
hates. But through both of them pours forth the magnetic en-
ergy that moves and disturbs the lethargy of Matter. Both of
them have abysmal levels in their being that transcend all that
we at present know of the duality of life and death.

There is no ultimate mystery! Such a phrase is meaningless,
because the reality of Being is forever changing under the primal
and arbitrary will of the First Cause. The mystery of mysteries
is Personality, a living Person; and there is that in Personality
which is indetermined, unaccountable, changing at every second!
The Hindu philosophies that dream of the One, the Eternal, as
an Ultimate behind the arbitrariness of Personal Will are de-
luded. They are in reality--although they talk of "Spirit"--under
the bondage of the idea of the body and under the bondage
of the idea of physical matter as an "ultimate."

Apart from Personality, apart from Personal Will, there is no
such "ultimate" as Matter, there is no such "ultimate" as Spirit.
Beyond Life and beyond Death there is Personality, dominating
both Life and Death to its own arbitrary and wilful purposes.

What mortals call Sex is only a manifestation in human life,
and in animal and vegetable life, of a certain spasm, a certain
delicious shudder, a certain orgasm of a purely psychic nature,
which belongs to the Personality of the First Cause.

There are human minds--and they find it easy to hypnotise the
shallowly clever--who apply to the primordial mysteries of life
and sex certain erudite names, and by this naming, and by the
noting of certain sequences, they think things are explained.
Nothing is explained. The only causal energy in Nature is the
energy of the double-natured First Cause and of the innumer-
able lesser personalities whose existence is revealed in the un-
rolling of Time. And the ecstatic quiver of that great cosmic
ripple we call Sex runs through the whole universe and func-
tions in every organism independent of external objects of desire!

Parthenogenesis, as Christian clairvoyance has long a go de-
fined it, is a symbol of what the soul constantly achieves. So are
the Dragon's Teeth sown by Cadmus; and the pebbles cast behind
them by Deucalion and Pyrrha.

The composers of fiction aim at an aesthetic verisimilitude
which seldom corresponds to the much more eccentric and chaotic
dispositions of Nature. Only rarely are such writers so torn and
rent by the Demon within them that they can add their own touch
to the wave-crests of real actuality as these foam up, bringing
wreckage and sea-tangle and living and dead ocean monsters and
bloody spume and bottom silt into the rainbow spray!

They intersperse their "comic" and their "tragic" in a manner
quite different--so hard is it to throw off the clinging conven-
tions of human tradition!--from the ghastly monotonies and sub-
lime surprises that Nature delights in.

All thoughts, all conscious feelings belonging to living organ-
isms, in a particular spot upon the earth's rondure, mount up
and radiate outward from such a spot, overtaking in their ascent
the sound-eidola and the sight-eidola which accompany them!

Philip was now pausing for a minute on the path that led to
the little gate out of the wood. His hands were deep in his trouser
pockets. He wore no hat. He carried no stick. His suit was the
same suit of rough heather-coloured tweed that he had worn in
the Spring at his aunt's tea-party. What he could see of the sky
above the trees was cloudy. The white mist rising from the
Wookey Hole river that issued from the side of the wet green
precipice below him soon lost itself in that peculiar Somer-
setshire blueness which is neither air nor vapour, water nor
cloud, but a phenomenon, an entity, unique to itself.

With this atmospheric blueness there came to his nostrils a
sweet, pungent, rather morbid odour, an odour which Philip
would have simply called "the smell of Autumn"; but which was
really composed of the dying of many large sycamore leaves, the
emanations from certain rain-sodden, yellow toadstools, the faint
fragrance of bowed-down ferns, the wholesome but very musky
scent of herb Robert growing amid faded, tangled masses of
dog's mercury and enchanter's nightshade.

Philip stared at the ground in front of him in a species of
trance. There were a few dark-green shiny leaves of heart's
tongue ferns hanging over a muddy ledge just there, and near
them the smooth round roots of a beech tree covered with a
black, oozy moisture. Cupped within the folds of the beech roots
that were nearest the trunk were infinitesimal pools of ink-black
rain water, the presence of which reduced the duskiness of the
vegetable ooze that trickled near-by, to an indescribable green-
black. Across the roots of this tree lay several small, rotten
twigs, some of which were covered with a soft, brilliantly green
moss out of which protruded those minute fungoid growths which
children call fairy-cups.

What Philip would have simply called a "feeling of Autumn"
manifested itself also in the clamorous cawing of the rooks above
the taller trees and in an obscure smell of damp leaf mould that
came drifting by, like a tremulous and voluptuous breath out of
the very mouth of Death itself.

When he jumped into his car to drive back to Glastonbury he
found that by making this effort to explain things to Will Zoy-
land, who had a mind which was about as capable of grasping
such matters as Coeur de Lion's would have been, he had not
only cleared up a great deal in his own head but had made
several drastic decisions with regard to immediate action.

Zoyland's careless "desperateness" had not been without its
effect upon him, childish though the fellow's notions of business
were, and as he swept through the narrow lanes to hit the main
road without the necessity of going through Wells, he kept think-
ing, under the damp, overclouded sky where not a star was
visible, that a really important crisis had at last arrived in his
carefully-laid schemes.

"I'll begin mining at once," he thought, "and I'll fly to Taun-
ton tomorrow and see those road-contractors. Better get well
ahead before the frosts begin in earnest. But the weather will
stay open till Christmas! It always does in these muggy regions
--so different from Norfolk!"

He drove faster and faster through the damp, chilly night,
and the earth-scents that rose round him from the deep ditches
and the wide fields became so much nourishment to his dominant
thoughts. He did not articulate his feelings abput life. He was
no philosopher. But there came over him just then, like a de-
licious plunge into ice-cold water, a sense of his absolute lone-
liness in the world.

As he turned those leafy corners and allowed the low-hanging
foliage to brush against his machine, he felt an exultant pride
in being thus alone and fighting for his own hand against the
whole system of things! Like many another competent states-
man, both before and after Signor Machiavelli, the obtuse nar-
rowness of Philip's atheism, dogmatic with the dogmatism of
instinct rather than of reason, discounted all possibility of super-
natural aid in this crisis of his affairs. He did feel a certain
outward-rushing urge, surging up from deep within him; but
how was he--with his innate incredulity--to know that this was
the umbilical nerve within him vibrating in response to the nerves
of the Great Mother?

He did feel a faint, strange, far-off intimation of some fount
of energy, kindred to his energy, outside the dense, damp, au-
tumnal darkness that flowed around him; but how was he to
know that this was the eternal movement and counter-movement,
in its abysmal pools of being, of the First Cause of all life? He
was not even quite oblivious of an obscure something, hostile to
him, unappeasably inimical to all his schemes, struggling un-
weariedly against him in the world. But how was he, with his
small, narrow Bayeux Tapestry skull, to know that this some-
thing was the undying Personality of Christ?

When he reached the main road he began to drive faster still.

"This Glastonbury mediaevalism," he thought, "won't stand up
long against the crowds of modern workmen I'll bring into the
place. My trouble will always be the same--strikes engineered
by these damned Communists."

Tilly had gone to bed when he got home and so had Emma.
He had not slept in the same room with his wife for years; and
things were always arranged for him so that he found whiskey
and biscuits and butter and cheese left out for him on a black
tray on the green tablecloth on the dining-room table; and his
bed nicely turned down and a hot-water bottle, usually quite
cold when he arrived, but giving a friendly look to the bed
where the clothes were uplifted into a little hill near the foot.

All these small things, the particular look of that black tray
against the green tablecloth, the particular appearance of the
napkin that Emma always placed over the butter and cheese, the
welcoming friendliness of that stone hot-water bottle--Philip
was old-fashioned in certain matters--gave him a delicious sense
of being humoured and considered, not only by one, but by two
competent housewives. He found tonight, so careful had Emma
been to tuck his towel tightly around the metal hot-water jug in
his china basin, that the water was still hot; and as he washed
his hands he thought to himself:

"My life is exactly as I like it to be. This year is going to be
the crisis of my life."

No knee did Philip Crow, Esquire, of The Elms, Glastonbury,
Somerset, bend to any supernatural power, as he clicked off his
electric globe, climbed into bed, and stretched his feet downward,
delighted to find there was still warmth in the stone bottle.

"There's an autumn feeling in the air tonight," he thought.
"It was chilly in those lanes."

But he did a thing then which proved how excited he was
after his resolute conversation with Zoyland. He pressed his
knuckles against his closed eyeballs. When he had been quite
a little boy--after his Devereux grandmother had repeated over
his pillow in her stern and yet doting voice:

"Angels one and two and three guard thy counterpane for thee;
While above thy sleeping head be the wings of Michael
　　spread!"

he had been accustomed to do this; finding that the kaleidoscope
of astonishing colours which this pressure made to pass before his
vision was curiously soothing to his young mind in the black
darkness.

And now as he removed his knuckles he beheld the Glastonbury
which his present plans would create. He beheld his heavy lor-
ries tearing along a broad road from Wookey to the outskirts of
Lake Village Field. He beheld his good concrete road cutting
diagonally over the meadows from this point to the centre of
Street. He beheld his great new bridge (making the old Pom-
parles one--the Bridge Perilous of the Legends--look insig-
nificant and negligible) by which his motor-trucks would cross
the Brue. He beheld three tall new factory-chimneys rising up
from his dye works in the town. He saw the rows and rows and
rows of workpeople's cottages--not silly, fancy ones, but solid
serviceable ones--to which labouring men from Bristol and Car-
diff, and even further afield, would be attracted. He saw the sign
"To Let!" set up over their precious, socialistic toy-factory,
which he would not even bother to purchase from them!

"And I alone shall have done all this," he said to himself.

One quaint and surprising peculiarity Philip had. He always
slept--except in the very warmest summer nights--with his win-
dow shut. This was a peculiarity that, without his being aware
of it, he shared with most of his factory-hands. But it was no
doubt one of his old-fashioned early-Victorian habits. Grand-
mother Devereux used, for instance, always to say, "Beware,
children, of the night air!" Thus, as he now turned over upon
his left side to compose himself to sleep, the smell in his nostrils
had very little of that autumn feeling that had made his stone
bottle so welcome. It was a composite smell, a smell composed
partly of his quilled eiderdown, partly of the paint of his hot-
water jug, partly of his cake of recently used brown Windsor
soap, and partly of a large cedar press in which Tilly and Emma
kept his winter clothes.

Small physical movements, nay! the scarcely conscious physi-
cal positions of human bodies in sleep have at many great crises
of history tilted ponderous scales. Had Constantine, for instance,
slept on his right, in place of his left side, before his decisive
battle, had Caesar slept on his right side instead of his left be-
fore they called him to the senate-house, had Boadicea slept on
her back before fighting the Romans, or Cleopatra on her face
before sending Antony to fight them, great issues might have
fallen out in a changed manner and the upshot of vast events
been different.

Philip Crow on this occasion turned over on his left side to
sleep. Now when he had slept with his cousin Percy he had
always had the girl on his left side and therefore it was natural
enough that when the ferment of his schemes had died down
and he tried to sleep, instead of sleep coming upon him, love
There is doubtless in certain old, indurated families a deep
ineradicable strain of what might be called centripetal eroticism.
A tendency to inbreeding is not always a sign of degeneracy in
a race. It is often an instinct of ethos-preservation, suspicious
of the menace of mixed bloods. Doubtless something of the in-
ordinate individuality of the Crows was due to a constant inter-
marriage between cousins among them, doubling and redoubling
the peculiarities of their "Gens."

It was Persephone's long slender waist and narrow boyish hips
that tormented Philip now. He had often in his life fancied to
himself that he was chaster than most men, because of the cold,
critical eye with which he was able to regard women. His only
passionate love-affair before he met his cousin again, after a
long separation, had been with a boy at school, whose figure,
girlish for that of a youth, was almost identical with Percy's.

The natural softness, sweetness, submissiveness of normal girls
had always been repulsive to him. To quicken his pulse at all
there had to be something wilful, evasive, difficult, withdrawn;
and since all these qualities were of the very essence of his
cousin's nature she had attracted him fatally, the first second
she reappeared. She was still in Glastonbury. He knew that,
though he had not seen her for weeks and weeks, and had not
spoken to her for a couple of months. She had apparently left
Dave. At any rate, he had returned to Bristol without her after
the strike ended. The gossip of the town--reported to Tilly by
Emma and retailed by Tilly to him over some subsequent tea-
table--declared that she had become the inseparable companion
of Angela Beere.

Philip knew Angela well, of course, as her father, by no
means an incompetent lawyer although a besotted glutton, had
often done work for him; but her Madonna-like coldness--she
certainly was "withdrawn" enough--had somehow repelled him.
That a passionate friendship should have come to exist between
such a silent, cold-blooded creature and the lively Percy struck
him as weird, incongruous, incredible. But then--as he knew well
enough--it was the incredible that was always happening in
these things.

After the Pageant, when the fellow was well enough to leave
the hospital, Tilly had reported the most fantastical tales of
"something going on" between that crazy Welshman and Perse-
phone. This he had never believed; but he had thought he un-
derstood the cause of the report, knowing only too well his
cousin's passion for the bizarre and the exotic.

Philip stretched out his right arm now as he lay on his left
side and seized in the dark the cold rosewood bedpost at his
pillow's head. Out of the dream-dimension which surrounds our
visible world the wraith of his Devereux grandmother struggled
frantically to give him a warning. To be able to see his small,
neat, well-moulded head--for these insubstantial tenants of the
etheric envelope of our material plane find physical darkness
no hindrance--lying on the pillow and not to be able to attract
his attention was an atrocious tantalisation to this proud spirit
from beyond our palpable dream-world.

The occasion was indeed only too characteristic of what the
First Cause, in its malicious moods, delights to evoke; for while
Philip, in a spasm of savage yearning for the slender waist of
his cousin, gripped angrily that smooth bar of wood, the wraith
of the only woman who had ever passionately loved him wrestled
frantically with the laws of the universe to give him a sign, a
token, a warning, that he was putting, not a blind hand upon a
bedpost, but a blind foot upon a road that led to desperation and
madness.

"Perse! Perse! Oh, Perse, where are you? Come back to me,
Perse!"

But Persephone, in a little cheap bedroom she had taken at
Dickery Cantle's dilapidated place, was even then, with her
flushed cheek resting on her thin arm and her dusky boyish
curls making a nimbus of darkness within the darkness, dream-
ing peacefully of Angela's devotion as they wandered together
beneath the ruined carvings, so delicately foliated, so tenderly
moulded by long-buried fingers, in Saint Mary's Chapel!

Into that narrow Bayeux Tapestry skull, while:--"Stop think-
ing that! Stop thinking that!" cries the old ghost-wraith more
and more desperately, come scattered memories now of little
inn-rooms in Taunton, in Exeter, in Bath, in Bristol, in Dor-
hester, in Tewkesbury; a curtain from that room, a flapping
blind from this, a bedpost from that, a coloured print from his,
a cock-crow full of a thousand misty Wessex dawns, a dog's
marking, the rattle of early milk-cans--and mingled with all
hese things those slender hips and the waist like that torso--
what the devil was it called?--that she had brought back to
how him when she went to Italy!

To lie awake wanting, wanting, and with so little hope; to turn
over on the right now ("But it's too late now, Philip my grand-
son; you should have done that at once!"), to turn on your
back now, kicking the stone bottle viciously aside; and stretch-
ing out so stiff and so straight, till the soles of your feet press
against the woodwork; to snuff up nothing but the smell of
brown Windsor soap, and eider-down coverlet, and a faint odour
of dog's dung from your muddy boots, in place of that mad-
dening fragrance that always made you think of the sun-baked
apricots in Canon Crow's walled-garden, the sweetness of those
bare sun-burnt shoulders, was all this the result of that "autumn
feeling" which you had encountered as you went to your interview
with Zoyland at Wookey Hole?

"I could bear it," he thought; "I could bear it if only her
hips weren't just like they are...yes! yes!...and if only
her curls didn't curl so tight against the back of her neck! It's
those curls and those hips together that torment me so!"

He went to sleep at last, just about three o'clock; and while
Emma was dreaming that she was helping old Sly on the Men-
dips to shear a great black -faced ewe, with a face like the face
of her mistress, and while Tilly was dreaming that the new silk
lining of her ottoman had dyed itself--without the help of her
husband's dye works--into an incredible shell-pink, the master
of The Elms dreamed that the Mayor of Glastonbury brought
him a vast basin made of glittering tin and held it before him
and cried "Vomit!" and he dreamed that although he retched
and retched he could not bring up anything except a little white
saliva! But behold! Mr. Geard himself spat into that huge caul-
dron; and it came to pass that out of the mingling of their
spittle there was created in the centre of that glittering vessel
of shining tin, a little homuncula...a little dazzling girl-child
...and Philip found himself hoping frantically that the face
of this homuncula would be Percy's face. But when the dazzling-
ness of the little creature lessened or when his eyes could bear
its brightness better, the features disclosed to him were such as
he had never before seen. But Mr. Geard lifted up the cauldron
to the Jull stretch of his arms and cried out with a thundering
cry: "Who is the Tin-Merchant now?" and then as Philip
looked up at the vessel in the man's hands, behold! the bottom
of it became ruddy as blood, and even as he gazed, drops of
blood fell from it upon the ground and the ground was dyed
purple; and he murmured in his dream:--"The lost dye! The
lost purple dye!" and he fell on his knees beneath the vessel
and he made his hands into a cup and he thought in his heart:

When he has gone I shall take this to my dye works...and
it will go over all the world; and it will be called the Glaston-
bury Purple!"

It was with his head full of the image of this dye that he
finally sank into a dreamless sleep; and when he awoke, long
after the birds of his garden had greeted the dawn, of all his
dreaming it was only the dye he remembered. Geard, the shin-
ing vessel, the girl-child with the unknown features--all these
he had completely forgotten.

And the slim waist of Persephone Spear had also receded into
the far background of his mind.



WIND AND RAIN



We will have a grand opening, Crow," said Mr. Gears to his
faithful John as they sat talking after supper in the old
faded parlour of the Geard house. Not a thing had been done to
improve this grotesque room since those times when, as Philip
had assured the assembled family after his grandfather's will
had been read, Geard had been "a nuisance to everyone, with
his two sprawling daughters, his preaching and his poverty."

It was the first of October and a spell of wild stormy weather
had set in. As John sat on the sofa by Mrs. Geard's side--for
both the girls were out that evening--and watched his employer
rubbing his big white hands and nodding his big white face over
a warm fire of mixed coal and wood, the rain was streaming
down the panes, and every now and then the two gas-flames hang-
ing from the ceiling were caught in a draught of wind (for Mrs.
Geard cared more for air than for the protection of curtains),
and were blown sideways, in spite of their glass globes, in
sinister tongues of blue flame, producing a startling flickering
effect all over the room.

"We'll have more than that. Sir,” responded John, "if you and
I are still alive.”

Round that faded old room, in that faded old petit bourgeois
house, the October wind seemed to howl as if it had been sent
from Stonehenge to hunt for Mr. Geard and was rejoicing at
having found him.

"Hunt out this False Druid,” the gods of that Altar Stone must
have said, "and put our Terror into him!”

There came into Mrs. Geard's thin, long face, with its mobile
eyebrows and queer, troubled, flickering smile, a very curious
expression as she looked up from her knitting. A Rhys of Pem-
brokeshire, as she was, there was something in a night like
this that appealed to a deep-buried instinct in her, and in some
odd way she relished the spectacle of all her old domestic ob-
jects cowering under the storm.

Funny old things they were--Mrs. Geard's possessions--the
woollen antimacassars, the sickly yellow pears and blue grapes
under a big glass covering, with red plush round its base, the
staring picture of her father, the Plymouth Brother, with whis-
kers like a sailor and a mouth like a letter-box closed for Sun-
day; the old, worn, ash-coloured carpet, the black bear rug with
broad red-flannel edgings and more mouse-grey skin than black
hairs left to view, and all the ancient, stained, blotched, greasy
cushions that always were to be, and never had been, re-covered;
and the ricketty little tables with glaring tablecloths, and so
many brackets with green and red tassels hanging from photo-
graph frames, containing groups of Geards and Rhyses, the
former a good deal less pompous-looking but hardly less stiff
and uncomfortable in their photographer's parlours--all these
things made up a sort of dusty, cushiony ensemble, like the huge
nest of some kind of stuffed bird, now extinct.

And Mrs. Geard derived such a queer, sensual pleasure, as she
listened to the wind howling round this room, just as if its ceil-
ing were the roof of the whole house, and its walls the walls
of the whole house! She had the feeling that this whole warm,
cushiony, greasy, human-smelling place were being carried along
through vast spaces of rainy night-air. She put down her knit-
ting, left John's side, bade him "please remain seated, Mr. Crow!”
and going to the window opened it yet a little more at the top,
so that the gas-flames grew still more agitated and the red cur-
tains bulged into still fuller convexities.

"Always the one for fresh air is my good wife,” said Bloody
Johnny contentedly, as he watched this move of his lady's, and
then returned with a zest to his conversation wuth John.

But Mrs. Geard, as she took up her knitting again,--thick,
grey socks for her man's winter-wear--felt a further increase of
voluptuous satisfaction as the draught from the window fumbled
about with its blind gusty fingers through that comfortable room.
Perhaps her princely South-Wales ancestors had felt something
of the same feeling when the arras bulged out from their chilly
walls and the smoke blew into the hall from their blackened fire-
places.

In good spirits that night was the Mayoress of Glastonbury,
for her eldest daughter had told her, when she and Crummie
were putting on their waterproofs and galoshes to go out to
Lawyer Beere's party, that Mr. Evans had asked to have their
banns read out next Sunday at St. Benignus' Church.

So the flickering smile on the woman's face kept returning,
as she knitted, and her eyebrows kept wrinkling up and wrinkling
down, as they did when she was listening to Dr. Sodbury's ser-
mons. If at this moment, in her high spirits, she had done exactly
what she would have liked to do, she would have put on her old.
weather-worn cloak, covered her head in her black shawl, snuffed
up the whole cosy essence of this adored parlour of hers with
one rapturous sniff, and set out to "call for" her two children,
doing it just as if she had been a nurse, come to take her little
charges home from a children's dance.

Then as they took off their wet things in the hall she would
have whispered to Cordelia, "I'll give you my wedding umbrella
when you're married, Cordy!" Nor was Mrs. Geard's wedding
umbrella a gift to be despised, for it possessed a handle of
solid gold carved in the most majestic proportions.

"You're sure, Sir, that that London architect understood your
design?" the crafty John was now remarking. "Some of these
local people laugh at the idea of a Saxon arch associated with
a Byzantine dome."

"Ain't Saint Sophia's got a dome?" said Mr. Geard. "Ain't
there domes in Russia? And ain't I seen a Saxon arch with me
own eyes in a wall at Greylands ? 'Tis true it were walled-up,
that good Saxon arch, but an architect from a place like London
can un-wall 'un, can't he? I mean, see what 'twould be, if the
stones were took out and make one similar to 'un?"

One quaint and very characteristic peculiarity now manifested
by the Mayor of Glastonbury was a strong tendency, since
his accession to wealth and power, deliberately to revert to his
old South-Somerset dialect, which was a mingling of the purer
Somerset speech with a tincture of Dorset.

"Somewhere around Christmas would you have it, Mr. Geard,
your grand opening celebration?"

Bloody Johnny smiled.

"Maybe then, and maybe not then," he answered laconically.

"It all depends, Crow, and you know it do, on how things work
out."

"As I've said before," remarked John, "you won't get a real
rush of people from the Continent till you've had a Miracle
performed by this chalybeate spring of yours."

Mr. Geard threw upon the fire another piece of wood. Most
people in Glastonbury kept a wood-box by the side of their
coal-scuttle. And then he amused his secretary, but did not at
all surprise him, for John was getting used to the man's little
ways, by a sly wink. "They shall have their Miracle all right.
Crow; they shall have their Miracle!" he chuckled.

"The man's a prize charlatan," thought John, "and yet he
isn't! God knows what he is!" But aloud he said, "Well, Sir,
supposing it gets into all the English papers, and supposing the
Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Brussels, Rome, Madrid, Copen-
hagen papers report it, and supposing a regular Lourdes and
Lisieux kind of a rush begins, how do you propose to stop the
Anglicans, or the Roman Catholics, from exploiting such an
event?"

"Ah, my boy," grumbled Bloody Johnny, "you've hit our
trouble in those words of yours, pretty closely, but I have me
Blessed Lord at hand, and He's already begun taking up that
matter with me." The man rubbed his shins meditatively and
leaning forward in his low arm-chair, pulled with both hands
the shiny black material of one of his trousers close round his
leg. This action seemed to give him some kind of spiritual com-
fort and he continued to enjoy the warmth, gazing into the fire
with a curious film over his black eyes, the sort of film that
might have covered the ophidian stare of the world-snake, at
the bottom of the Northern Sea.

John Crow crossed one of his own scarecrow legs over the
other and watched him, listening to the clicking of his com-
panion's knitting needles and to the moaning of the wind in the
chimney.

"The moment has come," murmured Mr. Geard, thinking
aloud, "for a fresh shoot to appear from the Glastonbury
Thorn."

"Why don't you keep a cat?" burst out John irrelevantly, turn-
ing to the lady at his side.

But it was from her husband that the answer came.

"All flesh is a conductor of force, didn't 'ee know that, lad?
And when thoughts are being born they must be fed. He here,"
--and the extraordinary man actually made a jerk with his great
thumb towards the space in the centre of this snug, cushiony,
be-tasseled, be-rugged, be-fringed, be-carpeted interior--"He
here wants all the force there is about, if I'm to keep Him
close!"

John bit his under lip and looked down at those mouse-grey
hairless islands in the black bear rug. He thought to himself:
"Damn the fellow! He's nothing but a gross, overfed Cagliostro!
What the devil am I doing in this muggy hole, selling my soul
and swallowing all this tosh?"

"So our Mayoress isn't allowed to keep even a cat?" he
brought out in a tone that did not conceal his feelings.

There was rather an uncomfortable silence for a while after
that, broken only by the queer plop...plop...plop which
the curtains made, as they bulged out and then went limp again,
answering the gusts. But John thought of his nights with Mary in
their Northload room. "It's worth it!" he said to himself. "I
never knew a girl could be so sweet."

"You'll be more indulgent, laddie, when you've seen a little
more of me," said Mr. Geard suddenly, sinking back in his arm-
chair and clasping his plump fingers together over his heavy
gold watch-chain. "If you'd been a young Arab in the tent of
Mahomet you'd have heard the Prophet break wind once and
again!"

"John!" cried Megan Geard, letting her knitting sink upon
her lap.

"It's all right, apple of me eye! The old man were only talk-
ing." And he cast upon her a glance of such radiant affection,
the heavy films vanishing from his black eyes, that John's emo-
tions were once more swung in the opposite direction.

"I believe you've got in your head, Sir," he couldn't help
blurting out, "a whole new religion--but what I can't see is, how
you're going to graft it upon the old one. These curst Anglicans
are bound to give your Miracle their own twist. They'll say it's
a proof that Rome hasn't a monopoly, and so on. They'll say it's
the Grail of Arthur come back. They'll say--"

"Let 'em," cried Bloody Johnny, in a hoarse, thick voice.
"Let 'em say all they like and the Papists too. I've got a little
something in store for 'em, lad--a little surprise--that even you,
sly as you be, you rogue, haven't guessed yet!"

The ball of grey wool now rolled off Mrs. Geard's lap and
John Crow got up to fetch it for her. He was still standing up
holding the ball in his hands and trying to wind the loose thread
when above the noise of wind and rain came the sound of the
front door opening, and the excited voices of the girls come
back. Both their parents rose to their feet and John, handing the
woollen ball to Mrs. Geard, hurried out to help them take off
their cloaks. He caught sight of Cordelia's rain-drenched profile
as she struggled to shut the front door against the storm.

"She isn't a bad-looking girl after all," he thought. "It must
be the party!"

Crummie meanwhile had taken a seat on the only hall-chair,
a miserably battered upright wicker chair, bought at a sale by
her mother before she was bom. John bent upon one knee to
help her get off her galoshes. Aye! how the rain ran down in
little pools from her drenched clothes. Both the parents had
appeared now and her father was tugging awkwardly at Crum-
mie's mackintosh, while Mrs. Geard helped Cordelia to push
the bolts to of the closed door. Then she also turned to Crummie.
"How nice you do look, child, if I say it myself."

"She always was the prettiest little wench in town, wasn't she,
my chuck?" and Mr. Geard kissed the girl's wet cheeks.

John hurried to Cordelia and held her dripping cloak while
she slipped out of it. "You come out, like a Naked Nannie from
its calyx!" he whispered. And then, as he held the drenched cloak
in his hands, not knowing where to put it, "What's that you were
saying to Cordy, Mr. Crow?" threw in her mother.

"Only telling her how well her evening dress suits her, Missus!
And so it does; don't you think so, Sir?" and he hung the cloak
up on the only peg that was not overcrowded.

"No! Not there!" cried Cordelia sharply. "You're putting it
over Mother's."

It was the first remark either of the girls had yet made, but
it let loose a flood of chatter from Crmnmie as they all went
into the parlour. "Angela looked sweet, Dad. You'd have loved
her. She had on that white dress I told you about. Mr. Wollop
himself ordered it from London. She had one, little, single moss-
rose pinned on the front. She looked bewitching, and she was
more animated too than I've ever seen her. Oh, and you should
have seen Mrs. Spear! She had an old-gold dress on. How she's
been keeping it I don't know, in that awful room she's got at
Cantle's. It looks out on the yard! She took me up once, when
we met down there. It's the worst place for a girl like--" She
caught her breath, remembering John's relationship to this pres-
ent cynosure of delicate scandal. Mrs. Geard broke in at this
point as they all stood round the fire; Crummie with her frock
folded up above her petticoat crouching on the bear-rug, with
her white arms spread out to the blaze.

"May I tell Mr. Crow--for he's such a friend of the family
now, and knows us all so well--what you told me when you
started out tonight, Cordy dear?"

Cordelia's whole body stiffened. Her dislike of John had by
no means modified with closer knowledge. The more she knew
the more she disliked! She turned towards him now a pair of
the coldest, haughtiest eyes that had ever challenged him.

"It's nothing. Mother makes much too much of it. Besides,
you probably know it already, being such a friend of Owen's.
It's only that our banns are to be given out next Sunday."

John made a funny little bow. "I'm sure," he said, "I con-
gratulate you--I mean I'm sure I congratulate Mr. Evans."

"You ought to give my daughter a kiss, lad," chuckled Mr.
Geard, and he drew Cordy's proud head down with both his hands
and kissed her himself on the forehead.

"He'd better kiss Crummie," the tall girl murmured spitefully.
"Perhaps it'll bring her the same good luck--if it is good
luck."

Her voice had died away to so faint a tone as she breathed
these last words that only her father caught them.

"Hush, child!" he whispered, patting her bare shoulders with
his plump hand. "You'll feel quite differently bye and bye."

Mrs. Geard, with a delicacy worthy of the House of Rhys,
avoided her daughter's eye as her husband spoke, while Crum-
mie, with the laudable desire of drawing the general attention
away from her angry, confused sister, glanced roguishly at John.

"Aren't I going to have that kiss?" she laughed.

John had expected this, and he had made up his mind exactly
what he would do. He sprung forward, caught Crummie's fair
head in both his bony hands exactly as her father had held
Cordy's and gave it a gentle shaking, ending up with the lightest
possible brushing of his lips amid her wavy hair.

"You tease! You tease! You tease!" he cried, as he shook her.

Between Crummie and John quite a piquant understanding
had arisen. The pretty girl, in her silent, tantalised passion for
Sam Dekker, had dropped all association with her other men
friends. Red she never spoke to now, and in avoiding Red--for
they worked in the same place--she found it easy to avoid
Barter. To John, in a sense, she found herself positively cling-
ing, and as Mary seemed, just at present, far too happy to be
jealous, and as it was a situation that lent itself perfectly to
John's artful nature, Crummie's spirits had revived a little dur-
ing the last month or two; a little, not very much. Not very
much! How often to her hot, tear-soaked pillow had the wretched
girl moaned out the madness of her relentless love! What was
the use of having a father who could exorcise devils, who could
give sleep to the tormented, if he could not heal his own child's
wounded heart?


At the very moment when John was tickling his lips with
Crummie's shining tresses, the queer object of the girl's unfor-
tunate craving was having a prolonged and distressing argument
with his father on the subject of Nell.

"I tell you it only torments the woman the way you treat her!
Better never see her at all than sneak off over there every day
he's away!" The museum actually echoed to the indignant tone
of the Vicar, and the lid of his tobacco-jar that stood adjacent
to the aquarium tinkled ominously against the glass.

"But she's gone seven months with our child, Father. And
since the end of August he's been at Wookey nearly all the time."

"But Mrs. Pippard's with her, boy! You found Mrs. Pippard
for her yourself. She's fond of her, isn't she?"

"But, Father, when a woman's going to have a child she's
nervous and sensitive anyway, and when it's your own child
she's going to have--"

The Vicar's rugged face had become very red and his formid-
able little eyes--like Sam's, only much greyer--had ceased to be
grey and had become a curious blue colour under his bushy
eyebrows.

He rose from his chair and stood with his broad shoulders to
the mantelpiece, angrily jerking up the tails of his long black
coat and holding his hands beneath them while he warmed his
back at the fire.

"It's all wrong," he shouted. "The whole thing's outrageous!
If you'd had the spunk of half a man in you you'd have made
him divorce her; you'd have--"

He suddenly remembered that divorce was one of the things
against which the party in the Church to which he belonged was
especially opposed.

"Well, anyway," he added. "You'd have done one thing or
the other; not gone about dickering and havering and dodging
in the way you have."

Sam was silent for a second or two. His face did not show 1,
the faintest trace of any resentment against his father. Then
he suddenly said, "Would you like her to leave Zoyland, Father?
Would you like her to come and live with us here?"

His father's mouth opened with astonishment and he stared
blankly.

"And be divorced, you mean? And you marry her, you mean?"

"No, no! Just live here with us. I'm not going to marry her
nor any other woman--just live with us here, I mean."

"As your mistress, after the child is born?"

"Father!"

"Well, isn't that what you mean? But perhaps you don't want
to wait till the child is born. Perhaps you'd like to sleep with
her, as she is, under my roof!"

If Sam had been endowed with a little more penetration he
would have understood better what surge of suppressed feeling
underlay his father's outburst.

As it was he could only sigh helplessly and cast his eyes upon
the aquarium. Often and often had the sight of those fish, dis-
turbed by the lamplight and behaving in a manner contrary to
their ordinary routine, distracted his mind from weightier
troubles. He got up now and placed over them the kitchen dish-
cloth, which, in the agitation of that night, both he and his
father had forgotten.

"I suppose she'll be going into the hospital," he said, as he
sat down again, "in another month."

His father let his coat-tails drop and began striding up and
down the room. "I can't understand that fellow Zoyland," he
flung out, "any better than I can understand you. That sweet little
woman between you two rogues! Yes! That's the word for it,--
between you two rogues!"

He glared at Sam out of eye-sockets that seemed like two deep,
livid-blue holes in a rock of red clay.

Sam surveyed him helplessly, not shrinking from his gaze, but
looking at him as he would have looked at Wirral Hill if it had
suddenly become a volcano. His father's wrath was beginning to
affect him like a wild dream out of which he felt he ought to be
able to force himself to awake.

"What would you wish me to do, Father; if I did exactly what
would please you?"

"Please me, does he say?" roared the exasperated man. "I
tell you I hate the whole affair; and I've a mind to--a mind to--
wash my hands of it!" It was on his tongue to say--"my hands
of you!" but he corrected himself in time.

"But what would you tell me to do, Father, if I did exactly
what you told me?"

This point-blank question did quiet the angry man a little.
He put his hands into his trouser-pockets, and walked with a
somewhat less assured stride. Sam had nonplussed him a bit by
this question. It was much easier to storm and rage at his son
than to give him intelligent advice. But he satisfied both his
anger and his conscience when he finally came out with his
reply.

"I think, if you haven't the guts to act like a man in the mat-
ter, you ought to leave this girl alone." This was probably the
wickedest thing Mat Dekker had ever done in his life--the utter-
ance of this opinion.

Sam's strange fixed idea of sharing in Christ's sacrifice might
quite conceivably have put it into his head that it was his duty
to do exactly as his father bade him, in which case Nell would
have had the experience of losing her headstrong lover at the
precise moment when the sort of companionship he felt allowed
to give her was exactly the comfort which she craved most to
receive, which was indeed all she could receive. But Sam was
not yet a complete maniac; nor had his father's constant harp-
ing upon this string of "being a man" and "having guts," failed
altogether to arouse a natural reaction. He rose firmly to his
feet. "Well, Father," he said, "if tha's all the help you can give
me, I think we'd better bring the conversation to a close." He
paused for a moment, and then, ashamed of the abruptness of
his tone, he added more gently, "You've always been good to me,
Father. This is the first time in my life that I've--troubled you
like this. I daresay we'll both of us see things more...calmly
...more...more quietly...later...on." He took a few steps towards
the door and then stopped and turned. It had always been their
custom, a custom rather unusual among sons and fathers in
Glastonbury, and perhaps one that was an emotional legacy left
to the atmosphere of that house by Sam's Swiss mother, to kiss
each other good-night. On this occasion it needed one of the
greatest spiritual efforts he had ever undertaken when Sam
forced himself to go up to his father and make the motion
of offering to kiss him.

A red-faced, righteously indignant, dignified and outraged
man is not an easy objective for such an advance as Sam now
made. But the power of habit is great, and Mat Dekker, after
all, loved nobody in the world--certainly not this girl whose
troubling beauty had so upset him--as much as he loved his
son. So now, though in deep and gloomy gravity, he did bend
his head and allow his rough, bristly cheek--for he was a man
who needed shaving twice a day--to touch, for the tenth part of
a second, Sam's up-raised and twitching chin.

"Good-night, Father."

"Good-night, my boy."

Sam's betaking himself to his bedroom that night coincided,
after about five minutes leeway, with the departure to bed of
another Glastonbury bachelor, namely, Mr. Thomas Barter. The
steps up which this gentleman slowly and wearily climbed were
much less pleasant to ascend than those dusted and polished by
Penny Pitches. Mr. Barter was no longer in his High Street
room. Since his salary at the Municipal, as it was called, was
based on the success of the venture under his management and
as his task in organising it was a Herculean one, he found himself
for the moment with a very meagre income. He had been forced
to economise if he were to be able to continue his daily table
d'hotes at the Pilgrims', and not to continue these meant the last
straw of misery. His adventure with Lily had turned out any-
thing but a success. This dreamy, romantic maiden had unex-
pectedly proven herself a past mistress in the art of giving nothing
for nothing! As much kissing as he liked, where the auspicious
Ruins--an entrance-fee every time, for Lily refused to steal into
the grounds over the Abbey-House wall!--hid such chaste delin-
quencies; but beyond kissing, absolutely not one single stolen
sweet. Thus, for the last month, for he had long ago quarrelled
with the mercenary Clarissa, Mr. Barter had been compelled to
be chaste. His sole pleasure during this epoch had been the tender
but rather anxious one of snatching difficult assignations with
Tossie Stickles.

In default of all other feminine society, for Mary seemed,
since her marriage, deliberately to avoid seeing him alone, Mr.
Barter clung quite pathetically to his interviews with his "ruined"
Toss. Her sweetness to him knew no bounds. With her, if they
could only manage to escape observation, everything was per-
mitted; nothing was forbidden; and all was for pure love. He
got fonder and fonder of Tossie. Her ways, in her state of preg-
nancy, astonished him by their sweetness and quaintness. He even
became interested--and this for the first time in his masterful
career--in his future progeny. Many were the whimsical col-
loquies, interspersed with bursts of impious merriment, that they
had together over this serious event. The girl had recently got
into her head, so big had her belly grown and so violent were
the movements within her, that they were destined to be the
parents of twins; and even this prospect, conceivably one of
humorous horror to an unscrupulous Don Juan, appeared to
be by no means distasteful to Mr. Barter. But dear to him as
were these happy encounters, they had become so infrequent
of late as the girl's time drew nearer, that they no longer served
to remove the gloom which kept gathering deeper and deeper
upon him.

Tonight, as he mounted those disgusting stairs in George Street,
after a long wretched evening spent in his miserable little res-
taurant, he really felt as if he were approaching the end of his
tether. When he had turned on the gas-jet--the burner had not
even got a globe--he sat down on his chilly bed and surveyed
his washing-basin and heavy white jug with a nauseated resent-
ment that could see nothing in front of him but a leaden urinal-
wall of blank despair.

"God!" he thought, "this won't do. I'll go cracked if this goes
on. I must get hold of a new girl." But the worst of it was when-
ever he tried to think of a new girl, and he knew quite a lot of
them--Wollop's alone had at least half a dozen and only one
of these was impossible--he always thought of Toss. What was
it about Toss that caught him so? It must be the way she laughed.
She laughed with such rich merriment. She went off at anything
he'd say or do and nothing could stop her. He'd never known a
girl before who laughed with such a bubbling chuckle and then
such ringing peals. And she used to laugh like that when he
was making love to her. God! she would laugh sometimes when
really--a girl ought to be grave. But he didn't care. He liked her
to laugh. Her laugh was like all the curves of her plump body.
Well! Well! She won't laugh, poor little thing, when her time
comes. But perhaps she will. Perhaps her child will be born
in one prolonged, rich peal of laughter. Her child? Her twins!
A boy and a girl. A Toss and a Tom. Yes, her laugh was like
her arms between her shoulders and elbows--the inside of them,
when she bent them. Her laugh was like those rings above her
knees, made by those ridiculous garters.

A new girl? Damn them all! Thin, sour, puritanical, avaricious,
cold-blooded hussies!

He turned his miserable gaze upon his one wretched pillow,
dirty from his head, for he had grown remiss in having his bath
since the weather got so chilly and "the woman down there"
made such a fuss about hot water. He unlaced his boots. His
socks were a sight! "I must do something about all this," he
thought. "I can't go on like this." He took down his pyjamas
from a hook behind the door and surveyed the cold thin cotton
sheets and the frayed edge of the cheap blanket. "I'm damned
if I'll take off my vest and drawers," he thought, "just for to-
night!" This "just for tonight" had been repeated ever since
the middle of September. Mr. Barter, the sturdy fen-man, was
certainly becoming degenerate.

He turned off the light and got into bed. "I can't go on like
this," he repeated. And he set himself to do what he disliked
extremely to do--to consider his financial position. He had saved
up, since his parents died, leaving him nothing, exactly a thou-
sand pounds. He remembered the day when, in his balance-book
received from Mr. Robert Stilly, he had first beheld the figures of
that sum. It was just before John came. It was when he was
going about with Mary. To have saved a thousand pounds, all
earned by yourself, when you were only thirty-five--that was
something as things went in England nowadays! No! He could
not, he must not, break into that thousand. But what could he
do if he didn't break into it? Until the factory was really on a
production basis he had to get on as best he could. His din-
ners at the Pilgrims' always cost him five shillings--that is, if
he had two bottles of ale. And he must have ale. Ale to his
meat. Ale to his pudding. It might not be a gentleman's taste,
but it was his taste. He had been a fool to leave Philip. But
there it was! How was he to know then, what he knew now, that
he'd have this brute Robinson to work with?

He tried to imagine himself back again with Philip, but some-
how, miserable though he was, those galling, rankling insults--
no! they were worse than his present nervousness with Robinson.
At any rate he could heartily despise Robinson--even while he
recognised the man's infernal industry. And he couldn't despise
Philip! He hated them both, but it was better to live with what
you loathed and despised, than with what you loathed and ad-
mired! God! how it was raining tonight and how the wind
howled! He remembered the look of the old chimney-stack on
this wretched house, as he came just now along those few yards
of streaming pavement. It looked damnably shaky as the rain
beat against it. He wouldn't wonder if one of these nights it
didn't come down. And what room would it hit? His of course;
his room. What a nice death that would be. Crushed under that
filthy ceiling, covered with bricks, cement and wet mortar. Who
would have my thousand then? One of those fourth-removed
Warwickshire cousins? "I must certainly make my will," thought
Mr. Barter. "And I'll leave every penny of that thousand to Toss.
God! these ricketty old houses, how they do shake in a storm."

He began to hope that Tossie wasn't frightened by this high
wind in her room at the back of that Benedict house. "I sup-
pose if she got scared," he said to himself, "she'd call out and
Miss Crow would go to her." And Barter's mind went through
the process--it took less than half a second--of summoning up
the image of Miss Elizabeth and giving this image his hearty
commendation. He did not articulate this in the sort of words
he would have spoken--such as, "Miss Crow's a decent sort," or
"Miss Crow's the only lady in the whole blooming family except
Mary," but it was as if towards the portly figure of Miss Crow
he gave a sort of mental nod as a man entering the Salon Carre
in the Louvre might give a nod towards the Mona Lisa, as much
as to say, "So you are there still-"

His reflections were interrupted by an unusual noise and his
heart gave a most unpleasant jump. Some door on the landing
below--the house was let in single and double rooms--had been
flung open and a voice was shrieking--"Call the doctor, some-
one! Who's there? Someone must go for a doctor at once!"

Mr. Barter was for a moment tempted to pull that cotton sheet
and the two thin blankets tightly over his head. "If a person's
fast asleep," he thought, "they can't disturb a person."

"Mrs. Smith! Betsy Burt!" screamed the voice on the landing
below.

"It is extraordinary how fast I sleep--I was deep asleep then
and never heard a sound." These were the words that passed
through Barter's head as his excuse on the following morning.
But the curious thing was that even while he was completing
this rigmarole he was already out of bed, striking matches,
lighting the gas, and pulling on his trousers. Mr. Barter's arms
and legs, it appeared, were more benevolent than his thoughts.
Not only did he pull on his trousers but he hurriedly began put-
ting on his boots. That done, he went to his door and threw it
open. "One minute, down there!" he cried. "One minute, and I'll
go." He flung on his waistcoat, coat and overcoat, snatched up
his cap, shut his door and ran downstairs.

It appeared that the child of a solitary and rather unpleasant
woman who lived in the room parallel to his own on the floor
below had been taken with some kind of fit. It was a little boy
of six and the child was now, as Barter pushed Mrs. Carey and
Betsy Burt aside, lying on the bed with a ghastly white face and
his eyes tight shut.

"'Tis convulsions, Mr. Barter," said Betsy Burt, when he
pushed his way in.

"'Tis 'pocalypse, Mister," cried old Mrs. Carey, "for I do know
how it takes 'em. 'Twere 'pocalypse that thee own blood-brother
died of, Miss Burt; so you oughtn't to be the one to talk of
convulsions. But I do know! I've a seed un and handled un in
many a corpsy, and they was all took just as this child be. He's
gone already--looks so to I. First they gets red and then they
gets turble white. 'Pocalypse takes them i' the heart, 's know,
and that's what do make their colour fly!"

The woman whose screams in the middle of that night had
brought nobody out of bed but Mr. Barter and these two crones,
was kneeling on the floor frantically chafing the hands of her
child.

"I'll bring the doctor here in five minutes," Barter said, touch-
ing her on the shoulder, but the woman did not turn round;
did not, as a matter of fact, take any notice at all.

"She were whoam late last night, Mister," said old Mrs.
Carey, tugging at his coat as he hurried out. "Don't tell doctor
I said it! Don't bring no inquest tales on I!" she called after
him, as he went downstairs.

It didn't take him long, for he ran fast all the way, butting
against the deluging rain like a Norfolk gamekeeper, to reach
Dr. Fell's house at the corner of Northload Street. Luckily--
though it was long past twelve--the doctor was still "reading"
the "Enchiridion" in his study. In other words, his favourite book
was open on his knees and his broad low forehead, with the
grizzled hair sticking out of it like the bristles of an aged hog,
was nodding above the book. He opened the street-door himself
and let Mr. Barter in.

He agreed to go at once, but when they opened the door again
to make a start the rain was so terrific that he begged his sum-
moner to wait till he got back. "Then I can send anything by
you, Barter, that they may want. Besides, no use your getting
wetter than you are. It can't go on like this. I know the house.
There's whiskey on my table, man, and a glass somewhere. Take
a good pull. It'll do 'ee good."

It was an incredible comfort to Mr. Barter to pour himself out
a half-and-half tumbler of whiskey and water, and to draw in
his chair close to the red coals. He made towards his friend,
the doctor, the same sort of mental nod of inarticulate approval
that he had made towards Miss Crow. A warm glow of the first
unadulterated pleasure he had had since he last saw Miss Stickles,
ran through his veins as he gulped down the good drink and
dried his wet boots at the fire. "I believe I'll give up my dinners
at the Pilgrims'," he thought, "and buy whiskey with that money!
Drink's better than the best cooking, when a man's got the
doldrums."

Half an hour passed. Barter went to the doctor's table and
poured himself out half a glass more, which he now proceeded
to sip, without putting in any water. He moved to the doctor's
big leather chair and placed his glass upon the floor. A de-
licious drowsiness began to flow through him like a ripple of
warm etherealised honey.

In an hour the doctor entered. "He'll he all right--the little
lad," he said cheerfully. "It was that kind of mock-epilepsy that
children sometimes get. He's asleep now, and so I hope is the
mother. There's no hurry for you to go, my boy. Wait till the
rain's subsided. Let's make a night of it. I've got plenty more of
this stuff. It's good, isn't it?...That woman will kill that child
with her drunken ways, unless I get the Society to take him
away from her," he went on when they had settled down. "Do
you know that I know at this moment one, two--five mothers
that are killing their children in this town?"

"Well, they'll be out of it when they're dead," said Thomas
Barter.

"And do you realise, my good friend, that Tittie Petherton's
cancer is following a track that won't kill her for months and
months--maybe not for six months! I made sure it would finish
her off in a week or two, when I examined her in August, but
not at all!"

"Well! in a year, anyway, she will be dead and all that pain
wiped out."

"Wiped out, Barter? What are you talking about? Are you
such a happy man as really to believe that in the whole sweep
and surge and swing of things pain like that is wiped out? I
read a Russian book once, Barter, by that man whose name begins
with D, and a character there says he believes in God but rejects
God's World. Now I feel just the opposite! I think the whole
of God's World is infinitely to be pitied--tortured and torturers
alike--but I think that God Himself, the great Living God,
responsible for it all, the powerful Creator who deliberately gave
such reptiles, such sharks, such hyaenas, such jackals as we are,
this accursed gift of Free Will, ought to have such a Cancer--"
The quiet doctor actually jerked himself forward to the edge
of his arm-chair, till, with only the tip of his buttocks--where
his erect and angry tail would have been switching if he had
possessed one--resting upon its very verge, he drew with his
forefinger a crucial outline upon the air--"such a Cancer," he
cried, "as would keep him Alive and Howling for a Million
Years!"

"I went through Paradise yesterday," remarked Barter. "The
poverty's pretty bad down there still, in spite of all this new
work that Crow's been giving people."

The doctor, who had now relapsed panting into the depths of
his chair, took up the subject with a groan. "I should think it
was pretty bad! It's few of the natives who get this work. He's
brought in a lot of new men from Bristol and Bath, a stronger,
better-fed type, and more docile too! Therell be another riot
before our folk expect it, and a much more serious one than that
little affair at the Pageant, when they mobbed Lord P."

"What do you think, Doctor, will really come of all these
diggings and buildings out at that well? Do you think Geaid
will get a steady crowd down here every year--or only just on
the day he opens the tiling? John was telling me it would be
opened between Christmas and the first of January,"

"My good friend," said Charles Montagu Fell, pointing at Bar-
ter with the stem of his cherry-wood pipe, "what people forget is
this! In all these improvements, whether Geard brings them in or
Crow, the real pain of mind and body goes on where people
haven't the heart or the health to get the benefit of such things.
That's the point that's always forgotten. I'm a doctor, and a
doctor's profession's naturally with the unfit rather than the fit.
And I tell you the tragedy of life is in the rubbish heap. People
talk of the sufferings of the strong, and how you ought to help
"the strong rather than the weak, as if the weak were a type of
animal that didn't feel. I tell you suffering is like a fungus that
the strong can carry about with them, and still bustle and strut,
whereas with the weak the fungus is too heavy. They can't hold
it up. It pulls 'em down. But it don't numb their feeling! They're
nothing else but feeling--feeling and fungus!"

"But aren't the poor used to it?" protested the man from
Norfolk.

Dr. Fell sank back in his chair and pushed his fingers through
the stubbly grey hairs that stuck out from his low forehead.

"He's one of the ugliest chaps I've ever seen," thought Barter,
"but he has good ideas and good drink."

"No, Barter, no, no! that's another pretty, comforting, easy
lie! The human consciousness is not confined to what you can
see of the body, or of the habits of the body. We all carry about
with us something distinct from the body, the thing that says,
‘I am I.' This something, this soul, never gets used to any human
situation! It finds itself ‘landed' or it finds itself riding the
waves. It's never used to anything."

At this point in the conversation both the men started up
straight in their chairs and glanced at each other.

"Someone's moving about, up there," said Mr. Barter grimly.

Dr. Fell's countenance expressed savage loathing. He listened
intently. Then he gave a sigh of relief. "It's the rats, Barter. It
must be the rats. They become lively in the Autumn."

"I hope so," remarked the other.

They both listened again. No! that was the sound--to the
doctor's ears quite unmistakable--of heavy woollen slippers, a
little too large for the feet that wore them, stumping, plockety-
plock...plockety-plock, along the landing above.

"It's her!" whispered the doctor. "My God! It's Bibby!"

They listened again and once more there was silence. Every-
thing in the house was as still as the centre of a wood covered
with new-fallen snow. And then the sound began again--plockety-
plock...plockety-plock...above their heads.

Mr. Barter was not easily disturbed, but he was shocked to
see a man he liked as he liked the doctor, give way to his nerves
as he did now.

Charles Montagu Fell leapt to his feet and began hitting that
low forehead of his with his two fists, hitting it quite hard and
repeating as he did so, over and over again, an expressive if not
ancient English word of one syllable, which the propriety of
learned taste has excluded from the Oxford Dictionary. .

"Sorry, Barter," he murmured, with a shame-faced grimace,
when this manifestation was over, "but you've never known what
it is to live with someone who...with someone who...gets
on your nerves to such a pitch." He came up close to his friend
now and laying a finger on the man's sleeve, whispered in his
ear: "You don't know what the word loathing means, do you,
Barter? Loathing...loathing...loathing! It's much worse than
hatred. I can tell you that, anyway!"

Once more they drew apart and stood listening. And once
more those flopping steps inside those loose, soft slippers be-
came audible.

Mr. Barter was of an unimaginative disposition, but even he
became aware of something rather horrible in the sound of those
steps, combined with its effect upon the nerves of his friend.

"I don't like going off," he said, looking round uneasily, "and
leaving you like this."

"Oh, she'll quiet down as soon as we open the door," returned
the doctor. "You note how she does. It‘s really rather funny;
but the joke, as Heine said of something else, is somewhat stale."

He moved to the door as he spoke and opened it, making a
sign to the other man to listen. It was exactly as he had said.
The steps in the loose slippers retreated, with that peculiarly
unpleasant sound, a little accelerated, as they caught the vibra-
tion of the closing of a door.

"Gone to earth," said the doctor grossly, and he proceeded
to open the street door. They stood together on the doorstep.
The rain had ceased, and there was upon the night a faint taste,
like a thin, diffused chemical salt, of that early hour of the
morning.

Suddenly there was uplifted into the silence of the sleeping
town a premature cock-crow. At once, though it was really just
as dark, both of the men seemed to feel the approaching dawn,
feel it like the smell of some kind of sea-breath brought up on
the winding tidal ditches, from Bridgewater Bay. The absolute
stillness of the wet pavements and clammy cobblestones and
slippery roofs and drenched eaves had a curious effect upon the
two men. They both had the same feeling although neither told
the other. They both felt as if Glastonbury, at least, in her sleep,
were an actual, living Creature!

Barter turned round before he descended the dripping steps
to the silent pavement and shook hands with his friend. Very
tightly did he grasp the man's fingers.

"Finish the bottle before you go up!" he said, and the words
seemed to fall upon the wet nakedness of Glastonbury like a
rattle of shot from a boy's catapult.

"One of these days I'll murder her," returned Charles Mon-
tagu. "Would you come to the Taunton Jail to see me, Barter?"

"Shut up, you fool, and finish that bottle!" But when he
glanced back, before he went down Northload Street towards
High Street, he saw that the doctor was standing there still,
watching him go. "Maybe I ought to have stayed all night with
him," he thought. He waited for a minute watching his figure
at that door and wishing it would go into the house. Something
seemed to be holding Thomas Barter back on that spot, and
not allowing him to depart and forget Dr. Fell. No situation
between human beings is more curious than when, after a sepa-
ration, two people look back at each other. It is especially
curious when, as now, they both seem unable to stop looking
at each other, clinging to each other with their eyes! Barter had
the feeling that it was not he who was going off--but his friend.
He felt as if the doctor were standing on the deck of a liner,
and as if he had just one more chance of running down the
gangway. But no! The bridge was up now, and a widening gap
of wickedly dark water was separating its hull from the wharf!

He waved his hand. He could not resist the impulse to do this.
It was indeed the merest chance that he resisted the urge to
run back. But the figure on the steps turned now without making
any sign and went into the house and the door was shut.

Mr. Barter proceeded slowly down Northload Street. He walked
a little faster when he reached the centre of the town, directing
his steps towards his George Street room, but, for all the good
whiskey he had drunk, his thoughts were heavy, cold and stiff,
like a load of staring-eyed dead fish on a blood-stained wheel-
barrow. He met no one--not even the old Glastonbury police-
man, not even a prowling cat. All the shops had their shutters
fast closed. All the houses had their blinds down. He cast an
indifferent lack-lustre eye upon these houses as he went along.
Here was one a little bigger than the others and even more ob-
stinately closed up. There were iron railings with spikes upon
them in front of it and along these railings rows and rows of
minute raindrops hung. The whole place was so silent, under the
chilly darkness before dawn, so motionless and sepulchral, that
these little quivering rain-drops catching specks of faint light
from a pallid street-lamp seemed more alive than such water-
drops usually are. Barter, however, cast an unseeing, unapprecia-
tive eye upon them. It would be hard to say what natural object
at that moment--short of a falling meteorite--would have ar-
rested his attention. Probably even his foreman at the Municipal,
an artist in his showing off before Sally Jones, had more of
what is called aesthetic appreciation than Mr. Barter. But he did
observe one object with a faint interest in connection with this
particular house, as he moved along by these pallid raindrops,
and that was a massive gilded plate, which was also illuminated
by the neighbouring lamp, and upon which he read the words
"John Beere, Solicitor." He had often been nudged by a loqua-
cious waitress in the Pilgrims' dining-room--this was in Clarissa's
day--and told to observe the passionate gluttony of this short-
sighted old gentleman. I'll buy whiskey in future," he thought,
"and keep the bottle at the restaurant. That girl would look
after it for me. The woman at home would drink it"

His mind called up the alternatives, and he tried to weigh
them against each other. The cosiness, the good cooking, the
ale, on the one hand, but with hostile wenches, set on to bait him
by Clarissa; and on the other, a filthy, dreary little chop house,
with wretched cooking, but with a buxom, nice girl, to bring him
his bottle, carefully guarded by herself, and with hot water
and lemon gratis if he wanted them!

The importance of this dilemma had brought his steps to a
momentary stand in front of Lawyer Beere's house, and before
going on he glanced up at its mellow Queen Anne fagade. There
was a night-light, at any rate, some extremely faint lamp-light,
burning behind the closed blinds of one of the upper rooms.

"That awful Angela!" he said to himself with a little shudder,
as he went on down the street. To a nympholept, of Barter's
pragmatic complex, the mere fact of a feminine creature being
unresponsive to his advances relegated her to a worse than unde-
sirable category.

Angela Beere, as a matter of fact,--for Barter was right about
it being her room---always put out her light when she went to
bed, but today, because of the terrific storm of rain that had
descended upon the close of her party, she had pressed her
friend Persephone to stay the night with her and not to attempt
to return to Dickery Cantle's unappealing place, and to this
proposal Percy had consented, making the stipulation, however--
for she never slept in total darkness--that there should be at
least a night-light in the room. At the very moment Mr. Barter
was going by, the younger of the two girls, excited and restless,
was whispering to the other.

"I can't read enough of those books about it," Angela was
saying. "He's got the most thrilling ones--every one that's been
written, I should think!" She was referring to the heathen Grail
of the old Celtic mythology and to her new friend, Mr. Evans.

There was something weird about this whispered conversation
in those last hours of that night, before the faint, cold dawn-
breath--more like a sigh of something dying than a cry of some-
thing newly born--crept over the wet hills, stole along the tow-
paths, touched the gateposts and the dams and the stone bridges
and the floating weeds in the ditches with its silent approach.
Both the girls were sensitised and spiritualised to an unusual
pitch of feeling, but nothing could have been more different than
the way they felt.

"I love to hear you, Angela! Go on, go on! Tell me more!"
Thus did Percy reply; thus did Percy encourage her, but in her
heart she drew away. Why was it that nothing seemed to satisfy
her, to hold her, to cast a spell upon her that could last? A curi-
ous and subtle weariness weighed upon her now. There seemed
something mysteriously sad about everything in life, as she saw
things now, in the deep silence, only broken by this feverish
voice at her ear.

Had Mr. Evans been permitted--like Iachimo in Shakespear's
play--to pass a vigil in that chamber, his Druidic imagination
would certainly have been stirred to the depths by the sight
of those two lovely heads under the faint illumination of
that flickering night-light in its small crimson glass. How white
was the complexion of the younger! How gipsy-brown that of
the other! Persephone's dusky curls lay against her pillow like
autumn leaves upon snow, and her face had a far-away, weary
look, as if the enchantment she sought were not here...not
anywhere in this rain-drenched, silent town...not anywhere
in all this Gwlad-yr-Hav of Somerset...perhaps not anywhere
in all the round earth! The soft hair of the other head, on the
contrary, under that dim light, looked like a heap of scattered
autumn crocuses, but her cold eyes and her smooth white cheeks
were alive with feverish excitement as she narrated, in her pas-
sionate, furtive whispers, the story of the Cauldron of Ceridwen.

"That Cauldron was the real Grail, you know, and it was that
that made Taliessin young!" Then, without a second's pause,
catching her breath in a particular way she had, she plunged
into the tale of Math, Son of Mathonwy, which Mr. Evans had
shown her in the Mabinogion. "Arianrod---which means Silver
Circle--laid a destiny upon her son Llew," she whispered, "that
he shall never have a wife of the race that now inhabits this
earth. 'Well," said Math, "we will seek, thou and I, by charms
and illusion, to form a wife for him out of flowers.' So they
took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom,
and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them
a maid, and they baptised her and gave her the name of
Blodenwedd."

As she told this story to Percy, Percy could not help feeling,
as she looked at the transparency of this white face by her side,
that the girl herself might well have been named Blodenwedd!

Lovely were they both, as they lay there in that glimmering
light, but whereas Angela seemed to draw to herself from out
of the storm-cleansed darkness everything that was pallid and
phantasmal in the rain-soaked meadows, in the dripping hazel-
spinneys, in the cold, moss-covered hill slopes, Persephone
seemed, as she lay listening to her friend, as if she were an
incarnation of all the magic of the brown rain-pools and the
smooth-washed beech boughs and the drenched, carved eaves of
fragrant woodwork, and the wet reed roofs of the dyke-hovels
down there in the marshes of the Brue.

"I believe I know who you are in these Grail stories!" Angela
was now whispering. "You are Lorie de la Roche Florie, the
mistress of Gawain!"

"I've not found him yet, anyway," smiled the other.

"He says," whispered Angela, "Mr. Evans says, that Mayor
Geard is really in league with the old magical Powders, and that
the new inscription theyVe found on Chalice Hill has to do
with Merlin, and not with Saint Joseph at all!"

The girl's Madonna-like face had a flaming spot on both her
cheeks and her breath came in quick gasps as these hurried syl-
lables left her lips.

But Percy listened languidly. Her lonely, unsettled, restless
soul bad not yet found what she craved. "Perhaps," she was
thinking now, "what I want is not in this world at all!" Some-
thing in her anyway--probably her sceptical Norfolk blood--
felt profoundly suspicious of all this chatter about the old gods.
She liked flirting--if her ambiguous relations with the Welshman
could be called by that name--with Mr. Evans, but his Cymric
mythology left her absolutely cold. She fancied she had made
the discovery of late that there was a certain type of nature that
could not enjoy life in a frankly amorous, or honestly vicious
way, but must be always complicating the issue by bringing into
it all sorts of half-mystical, half-religious notions.

While the fair girl continued her esoteric whisperings with
burning cheeks and eyes growing brighter and brighter, Percy
was thinking to herself, "If Dave would do nothing but talk
about Communism in his curious way I could live with him for-
ever. If Philip would go on driving me in his car sans cesse,
I could live with him! And it's going to be just the same with
you, my angel, only the other way round! I like your being
fond of me but your ideas wear me out. What a wild, excited
way she's whispering now! God bless me! Owen Evans hasn't
discovered any new sins that aren't practised every day among
people who've never heard of his Guardians of the Grail or his
Daughters of King Avallach!"

She knew that the dim light from their little night-light fell
upon her face, and she knew that the other's spasmodic outburst
of hot, quick, excited words would cease in a second and the
girl's feelings be cruelly wounded if she realised the effect she
was having. So, born actress as she was, Percy assumed an ex-
pression of exhausted but responsive intentness. But her soul
wandered far away.

Ned Athling, who had come to know her quite well during
their rehearsals together, had introduced her recently to Lady
Rachel, and Rachel's passionate love of old ballad-poetry and
her hatred of everything modern, had amused her not a little.
The image of Rachel hovered now very clearly before her mind.
Mr. Evans' pupil in mysticism would have been staggered and
her heart stabbed had she been able to read her friend's thoughts.

Taliessin and Aneurin, Bendigeitvran, or Bran the Blessed,
Terre Gastee and Balyn's Dolorous Stroke, Arawn, King of
Hades, Caer Pedryvan, where PwylFs Cauldron was found by the
heathen Arthur, the Mwys of Gwydno-Garanhir, without which
Kulhwch might never have Olwen to his bed--all these would
have sunk down into the sluices of nothingness, into the weirs
of oblivion, if the fair girl had known the bitter truth!

So the exhausted and intently smiling brown-skinned mask
listened to her friend's voice, but beneath it the girl's unsatisfied
soul wandered off far into the darkness. Over the head of Mr.
Barter it wandered, as he weighed his whiskey against his ale,
over the house of Dr. Fell, it wandered, where the word murder
had been so lately breathed, over the Mayor's bedroom it wan-
dered, where Mr. Geard could still derive amorous pleasure
from embracing Megan, over the sleeping head of Sam in his
Vicarage room, over the tossing, sleepless head of Sam's be-
getter, in his room, out, far out, away from all these people,
away from all these roofs, covering desire and torment and rap-
ture and lechery and despair and paradisiac peace, It wandered
free,--free of them all, free even of the body of its own pos-
sessor, but still unsatisfied, still wanting something that no flesh
and blood could fulfil,--something "that might not be in the
world at all," or at least so hidden that none could find it.



THE MIRACLE



Just one word, Mr, Mayor," said Dr. Fell as he stood
with his hand on the window of Solly Lew's taxi. "I must have
it completely understood that, as this woman's medical adviser,
I refuse to give my consent to your taking her."

"Quite right, Doctor," replied Mr. Geard from inside the ve-
hicle, where he was supporting the groaning Tittie, "I receive
your protest. Mr. Crow here and my daughter are your witnesses.
I take full responsibility." He raised his voice. "You want to
come, don't you, Mrs. Petherton?"

"Yes, yes! Oh, Lord! Anything. Oh, Lord! For to make thee
stop; for to make thee stop even for a little while, Lord! Yes, yes.
Oh, there thee be again!"

The tortured woman had come recently to talk to her cancer
as if it were a living person. She called it "Lord"; for it repre-
sented the nearest and most wilful power she knew. It was this
peculiarity that had begun to get on the nerves of the worthy
Nurse Robinson and was one of the chief reasons why she had
asked to be relieved from her task. " 'Twill be better for hevery
one concerned, for 'er to 'ave a change." she had said when Mat
Dekker who had made himself responsible for the nurse's salary
protested at this decision. "She'd be far better horf in the 'ors-
pital," she said. And it was this word, overheard by the patient
a week ago, that had now made it essential that there should be
a change, for, after this, the woman's feeling towards the nurse
was like what a heretic would feel towards an Inquisition official.
The frightened Tittie would not let her come near her without
screaming.

"I'll bring house down if yer moves a step!" she threatened;
and once she had begun shrieking and struggling so terribly that
the neighbours had run in and made a scene.

"Drive on, Solly!" commanded Mr. Geard.

Crummie and John, sitting opposite the two principals in this
strange event, kept up together--under cover of the unhappy
creature's groans--a rapid exchange of comments.

"She's too far gone," said John. 'That's what I'm afraid of.
If she weren't so far gone she might help him by her faith in
him. But she's beyond that!"

"He doesn't care what she thinks, if only he can get her there!"
gasped Crummie, wincing with sympathy at every movement the
woman made.

"I can't make him out," said John. "He doesn't seem worked
up over it. You saw what a good dinner he ate...all that
Yorkshire pudding! I'd feel happier about it if he were more
stirred up. Could you imagine a worse hour of the day for such
an experiment? There's St. John's church striking half-past two
now'."

"What's he going to do with her?" asked the girl. "Has he
told you?" she went on. "He can't be going to dip her in that
water! I won't let him, we mustn't let him, if he tries anything
like that."

"Oh, he'll be sensible," said John, "as far as that's concerned.
He's got a head on his shoulders. Better leave him alone."

It would have been easy to talk like this before Mr. Geard's
face, even if the woman had not been groaning and twitching as
she was, for he had a peculiar power of being at once there and
not there, at the same time, under certain conditions.

"Careful!" he shouted out loudly now to the driver. "Don't go
through the Square! Go by Bove Town, and down Silver, into
Chilkwell."

"Right ho. Sir! As your Worship wishes," replied Mr. Lew\
Mr. Geard was certainly at that moment deliberately engaged in
breaking a good many natural laws, or at least refuting a good
many conventional notions of such laws. With his great belly
stuffed with Yorkshire pudding, with the weather around him.
hot, moist, muggy and windless, with the sceptical John watch-
ing him with the scrutiny of a detached lynx, with the clocks
striking that time of day, of all others the most material and
when human souls are most drowsy and uninspired, with Crum-
mie full of that particular kind of tender, practical, feminine
solicitude, which is of all things most antipathetic to the drastic
urge of creative energy, with the subject of his proposed cure
so distraught with pain as to be almost out of her mind, it might
indeed have seemed that he could not have been more handi-
capped in his amazing projects unless perhaps if Dr. Fell, still
vehemently and professionally in opposition, had accompanied
them.

Conditions were worse for their purpose when they finally ar-
rived at the spot, than even John or Crummie had anticipated;
for they found the place occupied by a gang of callous working-
men frpm the slums of Paradise, still lingering, though their
dinner-hour had been over a long time, at their jests and bois-
terous fooling.

Solly Lew stopped his taxi just opposite these men and John,
opening the door, gave Crummie his hand. His consciousness of
the moment--of the accumulation of impressions that made up
what the moment brought--had never been more alive. He was
surprised--and ashamed too, so that the blood rushed to his face
--when he found that the grasp of Crummie's warm, electric
fingers had given him a disturbing pleasure. "She's a plump
young baggage," he said to himself, in order to destroy this feel-
ing. "Her legs aren't like a boy's, as Mary's are!" But the truth
was--although he hated to acknowledge it--that his sensual hap-
piness with Mary had made him much less impervious to fem-
inine charm than he had ever been in his life. "There's no de-
pending on my wicked feelings," he said to himself. "I seem to
be just exactly what that Austrian says all babies are--poly-
morphous perverts!"

John had had nothing for lunch himself except a cup of tea
and two mouthfuls of a bath-bun; so that although it was only
thirty-five minutes past two, his nerves were as alert as if it had
been four or even five o'clock. He had had his breakfast early
too, so that he felt like a priest who had fasted in preparation for
some especial function.

While Solly Lew was helping Mr. Geard get Tittie out of the
car John glanced through the great torn gap in the hedge to
where the workmen were engaged. They were beginning to work
again now, with many suppressed glances and whispers and
nudges directed towards the Mayor.

Behind where they were working at this moment, digging a
ditch for further foundations, there already might be seen several
quite substantial rows of walls--the beginning of Mr. Geard's
Byzantine rotunda and Saxon arch. These walls, now risen to
nearly seven feet high, totally concealed from where the men
were working all sight of Chalice Well; for the Mayor's London
architect, an expert, it turned out, in the mystical intention of
compass-points, had got the entrance arch facing due east, so
that vistors to the Well, following in the footsteps of the great
Joseph--Agathos-Dikaios, as St. John calls him,--might approach
its waters, moving, if they were religious, on their knees, and tap-
ping the ground with their foreheads, in a 'westerly direction.

"Come!" said Mr. Geard now, in a husky, authoritative voice,
addressing his daughter and John.

Helped by Solly Lew he half-carried the suffering woman, still
keeping up, heedless of where she was, her hysterical dialogue
with her tormentor, over the littered hedge-gap and straight
among the workmen.

Most of the men touched their caps, some went on working,
all glanced at the Mayor of Glastonbury with that mingled fa-
miliarity and respect which he always aroused in the populace.
He had come so often to watch them work, and had brought
with him so many curious companions, that none of them seemed
particularly astonished at the sight of Tittie's contorted figure.

He directed Solly to prop Mrs. Petherton up for a minute
against an overturned wheelbarrow; and then drew the man aside,
beckoning John and Crummie to join them.

"What I want you three,” he said emphatically, but speaking
in a quite unexcited, natural voice, "to do for me now, if you
will, is to stand in line between here and the Well, and not let
a soul go up there! No one will probably want to. But if anyone
does try they must be stopped. That's all! If I want you, Crum-
mie, I'll shout. But I probably shan't want anyone. I won't be
long. Bless us and keep us!”

Without any further words he moved over to the prostrate
woman and lifted her up in his arms, holding her pressed against
his chest.

"He be going to christen she, looks so!” said Solly Lew. "Well,
Missy, I reckon us had best do what 'a said; hut it's sore in me
heart to wish poor Bet were wi' I! Thik poor 'ooman would
give the eyes out of she's head to see these grand doings I”

John was the only one of Mr. Geard's three singular disciples
who had the gall to cast a furtive glance over his shoulder to
watch the Mayor's sturdy, cautious steps, as he carried his dis-
tracted burden out of sight behind the newly erected masonry.
When the twain had vanished from view, however, he also turned
round and took up his sentinel's post. Thus John was standing,,
on the extreme west, Solly on the extreme east, and Crummie in
a position that might be called east by south. Here they all three
settled themselves to wait, as calmly as they could under the
circumstances.

It was remarkable how little notice the labouring men, pre-
occupied with their digging, and anxious to show the Mayor's
daughter that they were earning their pay, took of their em-
ployer's proceedings. John himself, as he watched the motions
of their mattocks and spades, felt a queer trance-like feeling
steal over his restless mind. His gaze, travelling over the stoop-
ing backs of the men on the level ground and over the heads
and swinging picks of those working in the ditches, noted, in
this curious dreamlike numbness of his senses--so alert a few
minutes ago--that a flock of sheep was being driven up the road.
These woolly creatures packed close together, but raising in the
damp windless air no cloud of dust, and much less than usual of
their accustomed bleating, were moving en masse, like a river
of grey, curly wool, eastward, away from the town.

Three figures, a man, a boy, and a sheep-dog, as grey and
woolly as the flock itself, walked patiently and somnolently be-
hind them. As he watched these figures and that moving river of
grey backs in front of them his mind was carried away upon a
long vista of memories. Various roads where he had encountered
such sights, some of them in Norfolk, some of them in France,
came drifting through his mind and with these memories came
a queer feeling that the whole of his life was but a series of
such dream-pictures and that the whole series of these pictures
was something from which, if he made a strong enough effort,
he could awake, and feel them all dispersing, like wisps of
vapour. Pain was real--that woman crying out upon her cancer
and calling it "Lord! Lord!"--but even pain, and all the other
indescribable horrors of life seemed, as he stared at the backs
of those moving sheep, to be made of a "stuff," as Shakespeare
calls it, that could be compelled to yield, to loosen, to melt, to
fade, under the right pressure.

Gone were the sheep now; and a second later, following them
in that same dreamlike movement, gone was the man, and the
boy, and the dog. John's mood changed then with an abrupt jerk.
Something in his mind seemed to fall with a machine-like click
into its normal groove.

Slyly he turned round and glanced at Crummie. The girl had
slipped off her cloak, spread it on the ground, and was sitting
with part of it wrapped round her knees. She waved to him as
he caught her attention and he waved back. None of these work-
men had the least desire to spy upon the master. Bloody Johnny
was at liberty to perform any crazy ritual he liked behind those
walls. "I might just as well be sitting by Crummie's side,” he
thought. He peered round the other way to see what the taxi-
man was doing. Solly Lew also was sitting down--on a stone or
a log or something--calmly smoking his pipe and contemplat-
ing the workmen. But John's imagination was at work now. What
on earth was Geard doing to that woman? Most repulsively--
for John's mind had a Goya-like twist for the monstrous--he
saw his employer dipping that poor creature in his precious
chalybeate water! He saw the scene with hideous and telescopic
minuteness. He saw the filthy underwear of the poor wretch, un-
changed for a week no doubt while she beat the nurse away,
and all stained with ordure. He saw vermin, frightened by the
water, leaving her clothes and scurrying away across the slabs
of the fountain where they would undoubtedly perish miserably.
He saw the loathsome image of the cancer itself. Geard was
bathing it in that reddish water and muttering his grotesque invo-
cations, while the woman--John could see her face--was terri-
fied into forgetting her pain by the cold shock of the water. No
doubt it had come into her simple mind that the Mayor had de-
cided to rid Glastonbury of her. John's imagination after being
so dazed by the sheep was now seized with a terrifying clair-
voyance. He followed one of Tittie's vermin in its flight from
Bloody Johnny's vigorous ablutions. And he saw it encountering
a lusty wood louse which had had to turn itself into a leaden-
coloured ball to avoid Mr. Geard's feet but which, appearing now
in the other's path like an immense Brontosaurus, had un-
curled itself to the view of the human louse.

"All is strange to me,” said the human louse to the wood
louse. He spoke the lice language with its beautiful vowel sounds
to perfection.

"On the contrary,” said the wood louse, speaking the same
ancient tongue but with a rude rural intonation," you are the
only strange thing here to me.”

"Could you direct me ” the human louse enquired, giving
its words a classical resonance, indicative of the fact that its
ancestors had lived with the Romans, "to any human skin in this
vicinity?”

The wood louse rudely disabused this dainty traveller of his
high hope; and reported that the only skin except the bark of
trees available in that quarter was the skin of a rabbit that had
been caught in a trap a year ago.

"Nothing can save you from dying of starvation that I can see,”
said the wood louse, "except to be discovered by some bird
small enough to snap you up. If you like I will pass the word
round that you are in such mental anguish that--”

Here the story John had told himself broke off; but he con-
tinued thinking about the monstrous arrogance of the human race
in lumping together in one clumsy and ridiculous word--"in-
stinct, instinct, instinct”--all the turbulent drama, full of criss-
cross psychic currents and convoluted struggles and desperations
of the subhuman world.

The thought of the luckless fate of this miserable vermin in
the unchanged clothes of this rebel against Nurse Robinson
brought into John's mind just then, under that heavy sky, the
real ghastliness of the word relative. "It's relatively important
that those vermin should escape starvation,” he thought. "It's
relatively important that Geard should have his miracle. It's
relatively important that this wretched woman should be eased
of her pain. It's relatively important that my life with Mary
should be exquisitely happy. It's relatively important that this
grave ass Philip should get the town council's leave to make
his road over the marshes. God! What a mix-up it all is. I don't
care! I didn't make the world. I'm not responsible. There could
not be a sweeter creature than Mary--no! not from Glastonbury
to Jerusalem!”

While these thoughts were passing through John's mind, Mr.
Geard, stark naked in the Grail Fountain, the water of which
came up beyond his waist, and watched by the petrified aston-
ishment of Tittie, who reclined with her back against the base
of the Saxon arch, was extending his arms in some sort of com-
mand, John was utterly wrong in his imagination. Not once did
Mr. Geard call upon the Blood of Christ. Not once did he
sprinkle with the blood-red water the woman with cancer. Mr.
Geard's clothes lay in a neat heap at Tittle's side; and the woman,
in stupefied amazement, was watching his uplifted fingers as
they kept mechanically opening and closing in the tempest of
his mental struggle.

Mr. Geard was not praying. That was the difference between
this occasion and the other occasions when his therapeutic
powers had been used. He was not praying. He was commanding.

If the question were asked, what precisely was Mr. Geard think-
ing and feeling as he lifted his arms from the Red Fountain,
the answer would have to be that he was assuming to himself
the role of a supernatural being! As a matter of literal fact--
such were the childish limitations of this singular man's nature
--Mr. Geard had, for one second, visualised to himself a pic-
ture in the Sunday School at Montacute, representing Our Lord
in the process of being baptised in the Jordan! There was no
conscious blasphemy in this flickering thought, and it had not
lasted. Now he was neither thinking nor feeling. Now his whole
body and soul were absorbed in an act. This act was the act of
commanding the cancer to come out of the woman; commanding
it on his own authority; so that the growth in Tittie's side should
wither up!

The truth is that this chalybeate fountain on this particular
hillside had been the scene of such a continuous series of mystic
rites, going back to the neolithic men of the Lake Village, if not
to the still more mysterious race that preceded them, that there
had come to hang about it a thick aura of magical vibrations.
That rabbit's skin in the trap, referred to by John's wood louse,
might lose its virtue owing to rain and frost and bleaching sun;
but this psychic aura, charged with the desperate human strug-
gles of five thousand years to break into the arcana of Life, no
rains could wash away, no suns could dry up, no frosts could
kill.

Immersed to the waist in this ruddy spring which had been
the scene for five thousand years of so much passionate credu-
lity, it is not strange that Mr. Geard, whose animal magnetism
was double or treble that of an ordinary person, should find
himself able to tap a reservoir of miraculous power.

No sacred pool, in Rome, or Jerusalem, or Mecca, or Thibet,
has gathered such an historic continuum of psycho-chemical
force about it as this spot contained then, and contains still. But
Mr. Geard did not confine his reservoir of healing power to what
this locality had stored up. He wrestled at that moment with the
First Cause Itself. Now it can be understood why he chose a day
so damp and dark and windless, so brown, so neutral, so apa-
thetic, so heavy with drowsy mists, for his grand experiment. It
was because--led by an instinct which he himself could never
have explained--he wanted to get into touch with the First Cause
Itself uninterrupted by the dynamic energy of the Sun or Earth
or any subordinate Power. The man was now like an athlete
of some kind as he stretched out his arms and concentrated his
massive and mountainous energy.

The curious thing was that his mind remained perfectly calm,
clear and quiet. It was always rare for Mr. Geard to lose his
sangfroid , even at the most culminating crisis; and he was now
quite coolly saying to himself--"If I do it, I do it. If I don't do
it, I don't do it--and the woman must die. But I shall do it. I
feel it in me. I feel it in me.”

What Mr. Geard kept his mind steadily upon, all this while,
was that crack, that cranny, that slit in Time through which
the Timeless--known in those parts for five thousand years as a
cauldron, a horn, a krater, a mwys, a well, a kernos, a platter,
a cup, and even a nameless stone--had broken the laws of Na-
ture! What Mr. Geard really did--being more practical and less
scrupulous than Sam Dekker--was to associate this immemorial
Fetish with the Absolute, with Its creative as distinct from Its
destructive energy. Sam, in his passion for the crucified, opposed
himself to the First Cause, as Something so evil in Its cruelty
that a man ought to resist It, curse It, defy It, and have no deal-
ings with It. Thus in his loathing of the evil in God, Sam. the
Saint, refused to make any use of the beneficence in God: and
this refusal was constantly handicapping him in his present "all-
or-nothing” existence. Mr. Geard on the other hand was prepared
to make use of this ambiguous Emperor of the Cosmos without
the slightest scruple.

Mr. Geard now happened to catch the sound of a peewit's cry,
a sound that was one of his favourite bird calls, for he associated
it with certain particular fields on the road from Montacute to
Yeovil, and he regarded it, reaching his ears at this crisis, as a
most blessed omen. Simultaneously with this cry, which was not
repeated, he noticed, to his intense satisfaction, that Tittie Peth-
erton was yawning! "I've done it'' he said to himself, and strain-
ing every nerve of his nature, body and soul together, he forced
himself to envisage that cancer as something towards which he
was directing arrow after arrow of blighting, withering, deadly
force. "The great thing is to see it,” he said to himself, while his
black eyes now alight with their most burning fury, stripped the
poor woman of every stitch of clothing.

His arrows of thought now became a spear--the Bleeding
Lance of the oldest legends of Carbonek--and with an actual
tremor of his upraised, naked arms, he felt himself to be plung-
ing this formidable weapon into that worst enemy of all women!
"I've done it,” he repeated, for the second time, as he saw Tittle's
eyes begin slowly to close.

And then Mr. Geard shivered and his teeth began to chatter.

Perhaps he wouldn't have succeeded after all if there hadn't
come into his head at that moment an actual vision of one tiny
living tendril of that murderous octopus under the sleeping
woman's flesh. With one terrific upheaval of the whole of his
massive frame, its gastric, its pulmonary, its spinal, its phallic
force, and even lifting himself up on tiptoe from the gravel at
the bottom of the fount, he plunged that Bleeding Lance of his
mind into the half-dead cancer.

Then he bowed himself forward, like the trunk of a tree in
a great storm, till his forehead touched the surface of the water.
From that surface he proceeded to gulp down, in long, panting,
gurgling gasps, enough water to satisfy the thirst of the Quest-
ing Beast. "Blood of Christ!" he spluttered; and it was the first
time during this great struggle that his favourite expression had
crossed his lips.

And then his former utterance escaped once more from the
depths of his throat, like a veritable grunt of that Questing
Beast; and almost inarticulately the words rose from the chaly-
beate water, "I've done it!” sighed Mr. Geard for the third
time.

He now scrambled out upon the new stone slabs, took one quick
complacent glance at the foundations of the Saxon arch, and
began hurriedly drying himself. For this purpose he used, not
his grey flannel shirt, as anyone would have expected, but a
new black woollen waistcoat which Megan had just finished knit-
ting for him.

When he had got all his clothes on, including his thin black
overcoat and a sort of Low Church parson's hat, which was his
favourite headgear and which he now squeezed low down over his
forehead, he lifted up the sleeping woman very carefully in his
arms and carried her out between the pedestals of his arch. It
was Crummie who had dressed Mrs. Petherton for this great ex-
cursion--certainly the most important she would ever make, till
"the young men,” as the Scriptures would put it, "carried her
out for her burial”--and Crummie had found an old purple bon-
net in a cardboard box which she had placed on her head, tying
the strings round her neck.

From Mr. Geard's fingers, spread out now under the woman's
back, this hat now dangled by one of its purple strings, flapping
against his knees as he carried her down the hillside.

Bloody Johnny's three attendants hurried anxiously to meet
him and great was their relief--shared to the full by Mr. Lew--
at the cheerful tone in which he greeted them.

While this momentous event was occurring upon Chalice Hill,
a certain young man, who was a newcomer in the town and had
only recently opened a lawyer's office in High Street, was talking
to Merry the curator and to Mr. Sheperd the policeman on a
bench in the little gravelly court-yard outside the Museum.

This young man's name was Paul Trent, and the impression he
produced upon sensitive people was that he ought to have been
endowed with a less brief and less masterful name than this. He
was indeed as silky and soft as a moth; and like a moth were
his gentle movements. Brown were his eyes, with long lashes;
very dark brown was his hair; while his skin was of a delicate
ivory-yellow tint with a faint brownish tinge in the cheeks and
chin. His lips were red and full, the under lip a good deal larger
than the upper; and his mouth, usually a little open, showed
beautiful teeth.

Taking him all in all, there was something warm, feline, and
caressing about this man, and a certain air, too, for all his gen-
tleness and quietness, of being a tartar, as they say, to meddle
with or provoke.

He gave the impression--which was not entirely erroneous--
of coming from some region bathed in constant sunshine. He
had been called once by an antiquarian friend "Phoenician-
looking”; but there seemed to be more of the sun in his composi-
tion than of the sea; and an ordinary person would have thought
rather of Persia in connection with him than of anything Punic.

Trent was a nephew of old Mr. Merry and it was in consequence
of what the curator had been telling him for the last six months
in regard to all the new movements in the place that he had de-
cided to come and practise in Glastonbury, He had already made
friends with John Crow and Tom Barter and by their means had
won for himself an entrance into the Geard household where
his original personality had pleased Bloody Johnny so well that
be had introduced him to Mr. Bishop, the town clerk. "The Coun-
cil ought to have its own lawyer,” the Mayor had remarked to
Mr. Bishop. "Besides Beere is much too conservative.”

The Mayor of Glastonbury in the depths of his South-Somer-
set heart, nourished a profound suspicion of all lawyers; but he
had too many definite reasons for distrusting Mr. Beere to allow
a few indefinite ones to prejudice him against Paul Trent.

"What I haven't yet been able to find in your town, Mr. Sheperd,”
the sallow-faced young man was now saying, "is a good vegetarian
restaurant.”

The Glastonbury policeman opened his left eye wide and half-
closed his right eye. This was not a wink, for Mr. Sheperd would
have regarded that historic gesture as a confession of confed-
eracy in roguery. Besides he had the peculiarity of being able to
retain this particular mask for as long as the precise tone of the
conversation required it; namely the narration of something
wonderful to the speaker but not wonderful to the hearer. "They
eat raw turnips and such-like in them places, don't 'un?” Mr.
Sheperd said. "I reckon us country folk see so much o' they
things in daily life that us don't want to see 'un when us be
enjoying ourselves at public house. Us likes to see a bit o'
good meat then; such as a labouring man when my father were
young, never saw all the year round 'cept Squire gave a parish
dinner at Christmas.”

It had for so long been a recurrent refrain in Mr. Merry's con-
versation--"When my nephew Paul comes to practise here”--
that when he did come, and even persuaded Grandmother Cole
to give up to him her famous front bedroom, looking out on the
High Street, everyone was frantic with curiosity. Old Mrs. Cole
had retained for twenty years a neat little notice at the door
of her High Street house, which contained the words "Front
Bedroom To Let for a Single Gentleman” but the old seamstress
was so fastidious in her Single Gentlemen that this pleasant sunny
retreat had become for years a sort of unused state-parlour. Mr.
Barter had visited it on his first arrival; but the presence of
Sis and Bert in the back room, for Barter had no love of chil-
dren, would have prejudiced him against the place even if the
austere morality of the old lady had not been so apparent. But
"my nephew from the Scilly Isles” as Mr. Merry always called
Paul Trent, seemed to have no fear of either children or moral-
ity! and something about the long-nosed young man, perhaps
his mania for elaborate ablutions in absolutely cold water, per-
haps his passion for seedlings in window-boxes, perhaps the un-
bounded respect in which the whole town held his uncle, had
induced Mrs. Cole, not only to give him her front room on trial.
"till I sees where we stands and how we feels," but to let him
retain it indefinitely.

But if the old Glastonbury policeman had opened his left eye
when he was questioned about the vegetarian restaurant, he posi-
tively gasped at the next remark of "my nephew from the Scillv
Isles.”

"Are there any philosophical anarchists, Uncle, in this town
of yours?”

"Bless me! Tut! Tut! You don't mean to say you have those
notions in your head still, Paul? No, I should say not! I should
think notl Wouldn't you, Mr. Sheperd?”

But the old policeman was too dumbfounded to do more than
open his right eye as wide as his left.

"Of course I'm the same as I always was, Uncle. You ought
to know that! I wouldn't have come here if you hadn't told me
so much about the new Mayor and his municipal factory.”

"But Mr. Geard isn't an anarchist, Paul; is he, Mr. Sheperd?”

The policeman spat on the gravel at his feet. His expression
seemed to say--"I can't answer for these harum-scarum officials
of recent date; but I know that when I first joined the force
young men would not dare to talk so wildly.”

"Haven't you ever seen an anarchist before?” Paul Trent en-
quired point-blank of the horrified officer.

"I heard Dickery Cantle say,” replied Mr. Sheperd, "that his
grandfather served drink to a Chartist once, and were men-
tioned by name for such doings, in a sermon at St. John's.”

"I met John Beere in the square this morning, Paul,” inter-
rupted Mr. Merry, in order to change the topic, "and he asked
me about you. I thought he would be crusty about your being
made the Council's legal advisor; but he spoke quite nicely about
you. He told me that Mr. Spear from Bristol was in town again
and staying at Cantle's, though not in the same room as his wife.
Angela, he told me, has made great friends with Mrs. Spear.”

The old policeman looked up sharply. "Thik Spear be a Roo-
shian spy,” he murmured, "leastways that's what they tell I down
at Michael's Bar; but I can't vouch for't, ye understands.”

"Talk of the devil ” cried Curator Merry, for at that mo-
ment Dave Spear, accompanied by Red Robinson, entered the
courtyard of the museum. "Ah, Mr. Spear!” cried the old
Curator, "We were just talking about you. How do you do, Mr.
Robinson! Mr. Robinson here was one of the first to discover
this vein of tin in Wookey, Paul, about which the Western
Gazette is talking so much. This is my nephew from the Scilly
Isles, gentlemen, Mr. Paul Trent.”

"Well, Mr. Merry, I think I'll be taking a step round they
Ruins,” threw in the old policeman at this point, feeling unequal
to cope with such an invasion of revolutionary persons.

"Don't get up, Mr. Sheperd,” said Dave kindly. "I don't want
to disturb you--or you either, Mr. Merry! We were looking for
your nephew at Mr. Bishop's office; and he told us we'd prob-
ably find him here.”

"I'll come. I'll come,” murmured the moth-like young man,
smoothing down his silky hair with a sun-burnt hand and pick-
ing up his felt hat from the gravel. As he went off with them his
uncle could not help noticing how well his loose-fitting brown
clothes suited his general personality.

"We wanted to see you, Mr. Trent, please,” began Red Robin-
son, "on a very important High Deer of Mr. Spear's, an High
Deer which kime to 'im in Bristol.”

Dave Spear gave a nervous little laugh. It was part of his
training as a good Communist to restrain his personal feelings
in the furtherance of the cause; but he had never in his life met
with an ally, or a tool, or a confederate, more alien to his spirit
than Red Robinson. The man's vitriolic Jacobinism--reducing
everything to a personal hatred of Philip--got on Dave's nerves.
He had small reason himself on any account, to be indulgent to
Philip, but there was that in Red's tone whenever he referred to
him--a feverish murderous ferocity--which shocked and repelled
his whole nature.

"If you two people don't mind,” said Dave, "I'd like to get a
little exercise. It's lighter than it was. The sun may come out
presently. But even if it doesn't, I'm sure it's not going to rain.
Let's go to Chalice Hill and see how Geard's buildings and dig-
gings are getting on? I've not seen that new inscription up there,
either, that everyone's talking about.”

Spear's two companions agreed at once to this suggestion and
they set out along Silver Street, past the Vicarage gate, past Miss
Drew's gate, past the ancient Tithe Barn, till they arrived at
Chilkwell Street. They did not delay very long contemplating
Mr. Geard's improvements. As they peered between the rudi-
mentary columns of the Saxon arch at the disturbed waters of the
well, Red Robinson announced that in his opinion the labourers
down there had been "bithing” in the fountain. Dave protested
strongly against any such idea. "It's not the weather for bathing,”
he said. "Besides,” he added, "they're all Glastonbury men; and
everyone here respects this place.”

"High'd bithe 'ere if I 'ad the mind,” muttered Red.

When they reached the top of Chalice Hill they hunted about
for the newly discovered inscription but without success.

"It's either a fike or a bloody superstition,” said Red. "If I 'ad
my way I'd clear out the whole bilin' 'eap of these, bloomin'
relics.”

"Let's sit down,” said Dave, "and then we can tell Mr. Trent
what we've thought of.”

They all three sat down on the already brown and fast-wither-
ing bracken and leaned their backs against a hillock of green
moss. Red Robinson became silent now, leaving it to Mr. Spear
to explain to Paul Trent what their idea was. Although he would
never have confessed it and indeed would have been handicapped
by his manner of speech in the expression of it, Red felt at that
moment, as the sun began to show signs of breaking through the
clouds, a vague feeling of sensuous well-being very unusual to
him. The personality of Sally Jones presented itself vividly to his
mind. He had been seeing a lot of Sally lately ^and had come to
the conclusion that he would ask her to marry him. He knew
it was his mother's notion that he was Sally's social superior,
she being the Geard's maid-of-all-work and he being foreman of
a factory, but he had grown to be so fond of the girl that he was
inclined to risk his mother's social disappointment.

It had been a good deal of a strain upon him, his former as-
piration for the hand of Miss Crummie; and it had been worse
than a strain the rebuff he had suffered from Blackie Morgan.
With Sally he felt, for the first time in his relations with any
Woman, completely at ease.

Thus as he sat between these two gentlemen, conscious enough
that they neither of them liked him, conscious enough that he
had offended them by his word about "bithing” in Chalice Well,
the effect of that faint flicker of sunshine upon the hillside was
to throw around the sturdy figure of Sally a consolatory and
comfortable warmth, like and yet unlike, what he used to feel
for his mother when he was laughed at at his East-London
Board-school.

"It's nice on this hill,” said Paul Trent.

"Yes,” agreed Dave, "and look at the way that shaft of sun--
like a Rubens landscape, isn't it?--falls on Tor Field! It's pe-
culiar to this place, a day like this, with the sun breaking through
in spots, and those golden patches on the side of the Tor, and
those workmen's figures in the haze. How do you feel about
Glastonbury, Mr. Robinson? Have you come to get fond of it?”

"High hain't one for these hart and nighture feelin's,” said
Red bluntly; but so paradoxical is human psychology, that the
moment after he had made that remark he felt an overpowering
longing to have Sally Jones by his side up here, giggling when
he tickled her; and crying out, "Oh, Mister Robinson, how cyni-
cal you be!” when he denounced "all this fike and 'umbug!” He
didn't think of Rubens and he didn't know purple from gold in
the diffusion of all these drifting vapours; but by giving himself
up to this melting tenderness towards Sally Jones as associated
with what he was now looking at, there took place within him
a certain blending of the man's flesh and blood with the chem-
istry of the elements, such as made that misty October scene
really more memorable to him than to either of his companions.

"It's strange to think," said Dave, "that when the Mayor has
his grand opening ceremony for this new shrine, this whole hill-
side may be covered with a surging crowd of people from all
over Europe."

"Yes," said Paul Trent. "But you won't get a crowd like that
unless there's a miracle; and the time of miracles is past. What
I'd like to see in Glastonbury is something very different from
any of this miracle-mongering. I'd like to see--but you had
something to ask me, hadn't you? We'd better come to business
now--and talk later."

Paul Trent sat upright upon his rather womanish haunches,
with his arms curved tightly round his knees in their soft brown
covering, and his delicate hands clasped together. His figure blent
harmoniously with the bracken on which he sat. and the misty
sunshine seemed to caress his silky brown head as if it were
thankful to find some object more amenable to its wooing than
the stubbly cranium of Dave or the carrotty poll of the cocknev.

He looked, sitting there, like a figure brought to that spot by
the far-journeying sun itself, so that it should be sure of at least
one whole-hearted devotee in that land of green shadows.

"Well, gentlemen? What did you want to see me for?" re-
peated this visitor from the Scilly Isles.

Dave looked at Red; and Red looked at Dave. They both were
conscious of that curious nervousness which so often descends
on people who have an important communication to make. It is
at such times as if the piece of news itself stands with its bearers
at the closed door of the unwitting recipient's mind and appears
suddenly, to these very attendants, like a bride they have chosen
by lamplight and that they feel a little abashed by in the light of
full day.

But Dave plunged in boldly and explained how his Bristol or-
ganisation, which was the largest in Wessex, had come to the
conclusion that with a little skilful local handling a real com-
mune might be established in Glastonbury. Dave confessed that
the original idea of this commune had not come from the organi-
sation but from his wife Persephone.

"She's probably forgotten now what she said," he explained.
"But she has these inspirations sometimes; and when I enlarged
on her idea to the leaders of the Party in Bristol they were at
once struck by it. You see, Mr. Trent, we all feel that Glastonbury
may never again have the luck to have a Mayor like Mr. Geard
and that we ought to exploit such a great chance."

The eyes of this moth-like figure grew suddenly lambent with
excitement. "Did I...hear...you...correctly?" he cried. "Did I hear
you say that your friends thought of starting a commune here?"

"They didn't think of it--nor did I think of it--it was my--"

But Paul Trent had leapt up from the ground and with his
arms behind him was surveying the autumnal contest that was
going on between the fitful sun-bursts and the swallowing clouds.
He seemed to be staring at this scene in order to associate it for-
ever with the idea of a Glastonbury commune.

"Goodness gracious!" he cried, "what a place this is for mists!
A commune...Yes! I would damned well like to see a commune!"

It was quaint to hear the mild feminine expletive of "goodness
gracious!" followed by so revolutionary an aspiration.

"Mr. Trent," cried Dave, his cheeks red with nervousness and
his blue eyes blinking, "you're not by any chance a Communist,
are you?"

The voluptuous mouth, with its heavy underlip, broke into an
amused smile. He shook his head vigorously and, as he did so,
resumed his seat on the bracken.

"No, Mr. Spear," he cried, laughing lightly, "I'm an anarchist!
My commune is just the opposite of yours! It's a voluntary asso-
ciation altogether. But part of its natural habit would be to pool
its resources for the common benefit; voluntarily of course; not
by compulsion; but it would pool them, Mr. Spear!"

The flush upon Dave's cheeks died away; and the gleam faded
from his blue eyes. He gave vent to the familiar little sigh which
everyone who knew him was so used to, the sigh of an honest
man forced by the logic of action in a world of expediency to act
against his nature.

"Well," he said, repeating this sigh, "we can work together
over this, anyway. In the Paris Commune there were Communists
and Anarchists; so why not in the Glastonbury one?"

"I won't be 'arf glad to see a guillotine set up in this 'ere
bloody 'ole," threw in Red Robinson pensively.

"You're confusing your dates, my good man," chuckled the
Phoenician-looking stranger.

"What price dites if I 'ave the bloody 'ead of P. Crow hesquire?"

"You're vindictive, Mr. Robinson," said Paul Trent, turning
his warm brown eyes upon this savage Jacobin.

"Hif you'd 'ad the hinsults high've 'ad, you'd be the sime,
Mister," rejoined the Cockney touchily.

"I take the liberty to doubt it, Sir," laughed the other. "Good-
ness gracious! What's the point of getting spiteful? Besides per-
sonally I don't like the knife and I don't like to see blood." He
gave a little shudder and made a grimace.

"You prefers bombs, I suppose," said Red sulkily. "If I hain't
smart with me dites, and if I be 'spiteful' as you call it,
high'd never lower myself by throwing them dirty things!"

"Have you never heard of a philosophical anarchist, Mr. Rob-
inson, or of Kropotkin or Tolstoy or Thoreau or Wait Whitman?"

"High'm a workin' man, high ham," said Red bitterly. "They
don't teach hus them 'igh-class continental writers in the Old
Kent Road!"

"Come, come, you two," cried Dave Spear. "This is far too
important a meeting to be wasted in discussion. We've got to es-
tablish our Glastonbury commune, before we begin quarrelling
how to govern it! Shall I tell Mr. Paul Trent all we've thought
of, Red?"

"Has you please. Mister; but I won't 'ave none of that dirty
foreign bomb-throwing where high be. 'It the bewger 'ard is
what high says; but don't go blowin' up a lot of gals and
kiddies!"

And once more, under what he felt to be the contemptuous
hostility of both these men, Red recoiled with a delicious slide of
his imagination into the soft admiring arms of Sally Jones. He
too looked at the sun-smitten vapours on Gwyn-ap-Nud's hill, and
allowed his body--the body of an unwearied, neatly dressed
foreman--to mix with the elements; registering a vow that the
very next afternoon he had a chance he would coax Sally to
come up here with him.

"Well, Mr. Trent," said Dave, "it's like this. It appears that
the whole of the land on which Glastonbury's built belongs to
Lord P. And it appears that on the first of January all the leases
of it come to an end. For the last twenty years, as far as I can
make out, old Mr. Beere has collected these rents and renewed
these leases; but this year, Persephone tells me, the old man is
getting very shaky and peculiar. Angela tells Persephone that he
thinks of nothing nowadays but his meals. Lord P. of course has
no idea of what's happening. But the truth is his agent is in his
dotage."

While Dave was speaking, Paul Trent's whole nature was
leaping for joy. He was one of those people whose souls do not
extend, as some souls do, outside the limits of the body. The soul
of this man from the Scilly Islands penetrated his resilient,
sensitive flesh and blood as the eddying water in a rock-pool
might penetrate a sea-sponge.

He thought to himself, "Can it be true that I'm not in a dream?
Can it be true that there's a real chance here--if it's only one in
a thousand--of trying the great experiment?" His mind whirled
back to this and that good omen which had come to him on his
journey to Glastonbury, To feel free of all compulsion...to feel
the physical caress of air and water and earth upon his life,
as he earned his living, a free man among free men, the stu-
pidity of society broken up...if he could only know it for one
year! Through every vein in his warm body rushed wave after
wave of excited thought. He remembered a hideous phallic
scrawl which he had seen on his way to Glastonbury in a public
lavatory at Exeter, the sight of which had given him a sudden
loathing for the human race. "It's restraint," he thought, "that
makes people like that. Free them, free them! Free life from
every compulsion and people will be naturally kind and gentle
and decent."

Red Robinson, while Dave was speaking, had got quite deep
into a dialogue with Sally Jones, as they lay side by side on
this patch of bracken. Sally was now beginning to express not
only admiration for his mental qualities but in her own sweet
roundabout way a wish that their position on the hillside were
not so exposed. "Let's go to Bulwarks Lane," Sally was just say-
ing with a delicious gleam in her eyes.

"The Party's idea was," said Dave Spear, "I mean my idea was,
or to be absolutely correct Persephone's idea was, that we should
get the town council to offer a bigger rent for the ground where
Crow's new factory is than Crow has ever paid. But it won't be
only that land that we'll offer to take! We'll get the town
council "

At this point Paul Trent's excitement at the chance of realising
a dream about which he had thought night and day since he lost
the fifth form essay on Freedom at Penzance by advocating free
love, became so intense that he remembered the name of his first
nurse; a name he'd forgotten for twenty years and had tried
again and again to recall. The woman was called "Brocklehurst";
and he now repeated to himself this harmless name, several times
over, the name of a thirty-year-old corpse buried near Ashbury
Camp in Cornwall and now serving as a Eureka of anarchistic joy
upon the top of Chalice Hill.

"We'll get the town council," went on Dave Spear, "and that
really means we'll get Geard, for he does just what he likes with
them, to rent from Lord P. the whole of his Glastonbury prop-
erty; and we'll bribe Lord P. into this by giving him a much
larger rent than he's been getting from the tradesmen. Why, all
High Street belongs to him, except the Abbot's Tribunal, which
goes with the Ruins! Once in the position of lease-landlord for
the whole of the town, the council could get rid of all opposition
and start a co-operative commune. It would have its factories. It
would have its own retail shops. Though the Ruins belong to the
Nation, or to the Church--I forget which--Chalice Hill, Glaston-
bury Tor, Wirral Hill, all belong to Lord P.'s estate; and though
of course Geard couldn't buy the land, if the council got a long
lease it would come to the same thing. He'd have the right, that
is the council would have the right, to admit visitors, or not to
admit them, as it pleased. The Ruins would remain, of course--
but they'd remain as church property or national property,
whichever they are, in the midst of our commune. They'd be a
little island of medievalism in the most modern city-state in
the world!"

Paul Trent sat straight once more upon the extreme tips of
his buttocks. He rubbed back his brown hair with both his hands.
"Uncle hinted to me that I'd find things pretty interesting down
here," he said, "and goodness gracious! I certainly have. Mercy
me! What good luck that he told me to come!"

"Of course," said Dave, "I have not had time to get any
definite word from Geard yet. It all depends on Geard. He may
have to help the council with money on January first, if they
can't offer Lord P. enough out of their local taxes. Yes! It all
depends oi Geard; but when I talked to him about it a few days
ago he seemed interested. At least I thought he was. But I always
feel awkward and uneasy with Geard. I don't know why. I feel as
if I were looking down a precipice where ferns and roots and
grasses protrude but where you can't see the bottom. Do you
have any feeling of that sort, Red?"

The man from the Scilly Isles took this question addressed to
their companion as a deliberate piece of irony; but he was
totally wrong.

Red Robinson's opinion of Crummie's father, uttered in the
attentive ears of his two fellow-conspirators, showed that to
him at all events there was no guile in the question.

"Geard's a 'oly old 'umbug. That's what Geard is. But he's
a harss hover money. No more high-deer of money 'as Bloody
Johnny got than my boot-sole 'as. 'Ees strugglin' to ruin 'isself
as 'ard as you or high are tryin' to better ourselves; and that's
sayin' a lot!" And the foreman leered at Dave, as much as to
say: "We know what a good thing you mike of being a
Communist!"

Did any one of these three conspirators to establish a Glaston-
bury commune realize their deep psychic luck in having let their
idea escape upon the air, for the first time, on the summit of
Chalice Hill?

Not one of them! And yet to the invisible naturalists of Glas-
tonbury, commenting curiously upon the strange history of the
place, it must have been apparent that they were led to select this
spot for the inauguration of their wild scheme by some kind of
instinct.

It was at any rate in a voice full of solemn intensity that Paul
Trent now enquired point-blank of his two companions whether
they wanted him to be their intermediary with the great Glaston-
bury landowner, and Dave and Mr. Robinson delayed not to
make it clear to him that this was precisely what they did want
him to do.

"As a lawyer," Dave said to him, "you'll realise better than
we do what arguments to use. But everyone knows how badly
Lord P. is in need of money these days; and of course the coun-
cil has the power to raise the local taxes; and of course the
Mayor--in so important a matter--would be prepared to advance
a good big sum on the Council's security. We ought to be able to
offer him at least half as much again as Philip Crow can afford.
The man must agree. He can't help agreeing when it's a question
of so much money! It may just tide him over these difficult days."

"It mikes a pretty enough tile, Misters," said Red sarcastically,
"but high think, if you harsts me, that when Christmas comes we
shall be sitting 'ere on our bloody harses just the sime has now,
and that blasted Crow--you must excuse a workingman's feel-
in's, Mr. Spear--siling "is airplines just the sime! 'Tain't as
heasy, as you misters seem to think, to 'umble these 'ere capital-
ists. They wants lead put in 'em--that's what they want--a few
hounces of lead in their tin-digging bellies. That's what would
settle 'em! Set 'em up against a wall and pump some good lead
into 'em!"

"Still feeling spiteful, Mr. Robinson?" said the man from the
Scilly Isles. "Well! I'll do my best, Mr. Spear, with this land-
owner of yours. When do you want me to see him? Does he live
about here? When will you have a definite offer, ready in writ-
ing, for me to show him? And when had I better talk to Geard?
Shall I go round to his house after dinner tonight?"

Dave nodded eagerly, his blue eyes radiant. "Yes, yes!" he
whispered, as if they were already in the ante-room of Lord P.,
"by all means go round to Geard's tonight. I don't think I'll go
myself. He doesn't like a lot of people fussing about him. Better
be quite frank with him about your being an anarchist and so on,
and about the Comrades in Bristol being so keen. Better tell him,
though, that it wasn't their idea. Tell him it was my wife's. He's
a great feminist, Geard is!" And Dave grinned like a schoolboy.

While this conspiracy against him was going on on the summit
of Chalice Hill Philip Crow, with the Taunton road-contractor
and a land-surveyor from Evercreech at his side, was standing
between Lake Village Field and the rain-swollen river.

The childish robber band from Red's alley and from Paul
Trent's back room had left their friend Number One's garden-
fence and had advanced in loose formation, across the big air-
plane meadow, to see what was going on. While the Evercreech
surveyor made his measurements and while the Taunton con-
tractor with notebook and pencil, lost himself in his calculations
Philip was left alone with his own thoughts. He was leaning upon
one of those many walking-sticks of The Elms' umbrella-stand
that lived under the matriarchal rule of Tilly's umbrella. He was
following with his eyes the building of the bridge--at present
more imaginary than the Eel Bridge or the Sword Bridge of the
legend, which was to take his tin across the Brue.

From where he stood he could see dimly through the sun-
smitten mists the vague outlines of Pomparles Bridge on the road
to Street, where John had had his vision of the falling sword of
the British king. The mist-enveloped sun was luminous enough to
cover all the meadows around him with a rich glow. This glow
became pure yellow light when Philip, hearing the voices of the
children approaching him, turned away from the two men and
looked westward. A small lombardy poplar stood up, darkly out-
lined in the midst of yellow luminousness, and Philip could see
a dark bird of some kind--it was really a six months' old rook--
perched on a swaying twig on the top of this little tree. The rook
was heavy and the twig kept bending under its weight; so that
in order to retain its balance it was compelled to flutter with its
great wings every now and then. It was Philip's long motion-
lessness that alone had allowed it to settle so near a human
being.

It was at the moment when Philip saw the rook fly off with a
terrific flapping of its wings and with an angry caw, that he ob-
served three children, a little boy, and a little girl holding a
small child by the hand, standing about three hundred yards
away and watching intently the curious movements of another
little girl who was apparently approaching him by the furtive
method of running from tree to tree.

The child had now reached the poplar from which the rook
had just flown and Philip was able to detect her tumbled brown
hair and rough grey skirt peeping out from the poplar's trunk.
He took a cautious step or two in the direction of the tree. "It's
all right, child," he called out. "What is it? Is it a game you're
playing? Come here and tell me. I won't hurt you!" Thus spoke
the instinctive father in Philip; for he had been quick to recog-
nise the little daughter of Blackie Morgan.

The effect of his call was twofold. It sent the three other chil-
dren scampering off at top-speed towards the safety of Number
One's fence, while it caused Morgan Nelly, in order to prevent
herself from yielding to a similar panic, to cling tightly to the
poplar trunk with both her thin arms.

It was thus that Philip found his only child when he reached
the tree. Her forehead was pressed against it and her fingers were
frantically clutching its bark. He began to speak caressingly the
moment he approached her, for he was touched by the look of
those thin arms; and when he reached the tree he did what was
perhaps the wisest thing he could have done, he sat down with
his shoulders against it, so that the back of his cap almost
touched her clasped hands.

Morgan Nelly could have escaped now if she'd wanted to and
run straight off to Number One's fence, from behind which
Jackie and Sis and Bert, under the protection of Number One
himself, were watching with intense interest the development of
this exciting drama; but when her father calmly lighted a ciga-
rette and began to talk to her without trying to pull her arms
away from the tree she felt at once reassured.

"I know who you are, child," said Philip. "I knew when I saw
your friends. For I know the children you go about with."

There was no reply; but he caught a faint sound over his head
which indicated that she'd unclasped her fingers.

"If you'll come and sit down here for a minute and talk to
me, I'll give you a penny."

There was no reply to this either; but the surface of the poplar
tree served so well as a whispering gallery that he could hear her
talking in a low murmur to herself. This was an old psychologi-
cal device of Morgan Nelly's; and it was a way to exchange
thoughts without the overt shock to one's shyness of officially
addressing a stranger or being addressed. The stranger listened--
indeed if he was wise he listened in silence--and Nelly acted as
chorus for both.

"Jackie is just the same as Sis and Bert," she rambled on. "He
dared me to do it and said he'd follow me and come close when
I were talking to Mr. Crow; but he ain't following me. He's
talking to Number One. But they're all looking to see if Mr.
Crow takes me up and sends me to jail for running after he. If
he did do that, I'd be glad! I'd be glad to go anywhere that isn't
here--even if 'twere jail."

Philip puffed on at his cigarette, keeping a sharp eye upon the
contractor and upon the surveyor who were now engaged in an
earnest colloquy and an alert eye upon the three children and
the old man. The only observer of his dialogue with his daughter
upon whom Philip cast a relaxed, carefree and devil-may-care
eye, the eye of a true begetter of bastards, was Betsy, Number
One's brown and white cow, whose neck was stretched beyond all
decency and restraint between the rails of her master's fence so
as to crop the less familiar grass of Philip's field.

"Perhaps--I say perhaps--I might pay for a little girl I know,
going to the seaside or to some very nice place."

This was a bribe beyond the power of resistance in Philip's
daughter. She slipped round the tree and stood in front of him,
her hands behind her back.

"Mummy wouldn't let me take no money, for nothing," she
said emphatically, looking down upon her progenitor with
knitted brows. "That is, Mummy wouldn't, unless she were a little
squiffy but not too squiffy. When, she's too squiffy, Mummy do
cry for Dad."

"Was your Dad's name...Morgan?" enquired Philip with intent
to discover how much the child knew.

Morgan Nelly nodded vigorously. "But you," she added, "be
me godfather...and a wicked, miser one; what'll never do
me no good if I wait till Judgment Day."

This revelation of the manner in which his name was passed
about between mother and daughter was very significant to
Philip.

"I mustn't set fire to the grass, must I?" he remarked amiably,
extinguishing his cigarette by pressing it into the side of a mole-
hill. He hitched himself up, after this, and fearing dampness in
the grass thrust his cap beneath him.

"Your hair baint very grey!" exclaimed Morgan Nelly.

Philip smiled and instinctively smoothed his hair down with
both his hands under this feminine scrutiny.

"Who said it was?" he enquired casually.

"Red said you was a grey-haired bewger," said the child.
"Wliat be a bewger, Mister?"'

"Red? Oh, you mean that chap Robinson, that I dismissed for
cheek, is he a friend of your mother's?"

"He baint now," responded Nelly confidentially. "Mummy do
loathe the sight of his ugly mug."

‘Tm glad to hear that," said Philip grimly. "Your mother and
I are in agreement there, anyway."

‘'Number One says that they wold funny men do walk about
when 'tis dark in this here girt field."

"You mean old Abel over there?" said Philip. "What funny
men is he talking about?"

"Them as lived where they moundies be...them as had King
Arthur for their king."

‘"Your friend's shaky in his history, Nelly," said Philip, and
he was conscious of an agreeable warmth under his ribs as he
called his daughter by her name.

"Weren't King Arthur king in them days?" she asked.

"Not till much later, Nelly, according to most accounts."

"Who were king in they times when folks lived on hurdles in
water?"

"Heavens, child! I don't know," groaned her father. A sharp
pang at that moment shook some nerve within him. It would be
nice to come home of an evening from the office and listen to this
child's chatter. "I wonder if Tilly would--" he thought.

But the little girl had become very pensive. She too found it
extremely nice to have someone in addition to Number One with
whom she could talk on the subjects that filled her mind. Jackie
always wanted to be the hero of every conversation! What she
liked was to enjoy prolonged speculation with someone clever
enough to know when King Arthur lived but too grown-up to
want to be King Arthur.

"'Tis queer," she remarked, "to think of they old funny men
rowing in their boats where you be sitting now!"

But though Philip had no desire to be King Arthur, or to be
any unknown neolithic hero, he resembled Jackie in his inability
to brood for more than a minute over the mystery of the passing
of time.

"Have you seen that boat in the museum, Nelly?'" he enquired
now, bringing the subject down to something concrete.

"No, Mister, I ain't seen 'un; and don't want to see 'un if Mr.
Merry be there. He scolded me turble once when us played in
museum-yard. He took Jackie's ball away and never gived it
back. He kept Jackie's ball, he did, for his own self. 'Tweren't
right of 'ee. Jackie said he'd tell policeman. But policeman be his
friend. Policeman be allus in thik yard talking to he."

Philip was silent. His daughter's attitude to these local mag-
nates was so different from his own that he felt at a loss for a
suitable comment.

"If you was one of they Lake Village men, Mister, and I were
talking to 'ee, would you have a girt stick with a sharp flint on 'un
and thee-self all naked like, or maybe a few big dock-leaves
round thee's waist?"

Annoyed with himself for not being able to deal better with
her rambling talk, which had now become so easy and natural,
and was thus very agreeable to him, Philip actually felt his
cheeks beginning to burn.

"You'd be glad enough I had a spear with a flint top," he re-
marked, "if that cow over there were a sabre-toothed tiger or a
mammoth."

The little girl's eyes shone. "Would 'ee go after it now with
thik spear and rip its belly open for it?" she enquired with pant-
ing eagerness.

Philip began to experience a definite fear that the child would
soon want him to play a game with her, and rush off across the
field with his stick, pretending that the harmless Betsy were a
mammoth.

"Do you learn history at school, Nelly?" he enquired.

"Would you spear 'un under his ugly tail or would you spear
'un in his girt mouth?" said Nelly, disregarding his reference to
school and to the study of history.

Philip liked it when she called him "you" instead of "Mister."
He stared at the ground beyond his daughter's grey skirt. Yes,
it was certainly a queer thing that this grass should have been
covered with a brackish expanse of water in those old days; but
it was not a thing he cared to think about. In some subtle way it
seemed to make his present activities less important. She cer-
tainly had a mind, this child; but it was more like her mother's
than his! He remembered that it was just this sort of vague and
to him rather desolate brooding that the big-eyed char-girl used
to indulge in when he talked to her in Mrs. Legge's "other
house."

"I'm going to make a new road into Street and a bridge over
the Brue," he suddenly announced to her. He had not intended to
say these words. He had not intended to refer to his present
undertakings at all. It must have been a subconscious desire to
boast of some great deed before his offspring, so as to make up
to her for not going on with that story about mammoth-spearing.

"I don't like roads," said Morgan Nelly. "I likes tow-paths
and cattle-droves best. Jackie and me's going to play Indians in
Wick Wood when the leaves are all down!"

"What will the gamekeeper say?" said Philip, whose idea of
woods was associated with the sporting activities of his friend
Zoyland.

"Oh, Jackie do know a gap into they woods! Sis can't get Bert
through thik gap, but I can. I lifts he and pushes he till he be
over. Us get bluebells there--bunches on 'em! And Jackie found
a Muggie's nest wi' five eggs when us were there. Do 'ee hold wi'
taking more'n two eggs, Mister? Sis says 'tisn't right to take 'em
all. She did cry, Sis did, when Jackie took 'em; and I made him
put 'em back; all but two. Sis said the mother bird was wailing
something pitiful, but Sis be soft over such things."

"I'm going to make a bridge over there," repeated Philip. He
seemed driven by an impulse he could not resist to try at all
costs to impress the child's mind. "If you don't like roads, Nelly,
you surely like bridges?"

"That's Pomparles over there," she said in an awed whisper,
"where King Arthur threw away his sword."

"I'm going to build a new bridge, another bridge, much bigger
than Pomparles."

The child looked at him with a look of horror. She was evi-
dently deeply shocked.

"Not anywhere near Pomparles, are you?" she asked; while
an expression of aversion and distaste came into her eyes.

"But, Nelly--" he pleaded with her, as if she were a grown-
up person, "my bridge will be ever so much bigger and
broader; and a great many lorries will pass over it. Pomparles
is a shaky old erection. Probably it'll have to be taken down.
Progress can't stop because people are sentimental about a heap
of old stones. That's narrowness, Nelly; that's prejudice, that's
being soft and silly--like you said your friend Sis was!"

But he had shocked the little girl through and through by
what he had said; and no special pleading, no references to Sis,
could undo the harm he had done.

"Pomparles taken down? King Arthur's Bridge taken down?
I don't like you, Mister! I hate you!"

Philip was astonished at the contortion of fury into which
her face was convulsed.

"Come, come, come," he said, "don‘t let's quarrel the moment
we've begun to make friends." He jumped up lightly to his feet
and made as if he would lay his hands on her shoulders.

"They won't let you pull Pomparles Bridge down!" she cried,
.skipping back out of his reach. "Mr. Geard won't let you! "

"Mr. Geard couldn't stop me if I decided to do it," cried Philip
rapidly growing as angry as the child was. It was not a sign of
Philip's littleness but of his greatness that he could get so vehe-
ment in a dispute with a little girl. Napoleon would have done
so; so would Alexander the Great; so would Nelson, so would
Achilles. Most modern rulers would have laughed at her and re-
torted with some quip too ironical for her to understand.

"He could! He could! He could!" cried the little girl and put-
ting out her tongue she shook her small fist violently at him and
scampered off at a wild rush towards Number One's cottage.

Philip put on his cap very carefully and gravely, picked up
his stick, and walked with leisurely steps towards the two men.
"I shall say I scolded her for her bad behavior," he thought.
"She got impatient, like a spoilt child, in a minute, and answered
rudely and ran away." Thus would he explain to anyone who had
seen their quarrel what it was that had happened.

"You've taken all the steps, I presume, Sir," said the con-
tractor to him a little later, "about getting leave from the county,
and so on, to have this new road and this new bridge made?"

"Certainly. Of course!" replied Philip. "I've been to the gov-
ernment offices in London about it, as well as to the countv
offices in Taunton. The only thing that could possibly delav it
would be some of these small proprietors--like that old man
over there--making difficulties and asking too much. From what
you two gentlemen tell me it would really be most advisable to
purchase his permission." He raised his voice at this point so as
to include the Evercreech surveyor in his audience. "I was saying
that I think it will be necessary to pay whatever compensation
that old Mr. Twig demands. If we brought it through Lake Vil-
lage Field there might be some red-tape difficulties with the Na-
tional Office and those things always delay matters so."

"They do, Sir," said the surveyor.

"That's what I always says myself, Sir," said the contractor.

It was at this point that Philip's eye caught sight of two fig-
ures advancing along the tow-path on the high bank of the Brue.
They were coming from the direction of Street and following the
river in its northwesterly windings. Philip had no difficulty in
recognising these figures--for he was as long-sighted as an Isle-
of-Ely heron watching for fish--as those of Lady Rachel and Ned
Athling.

Ned Athling was making his plans to leave his parents at
Middlezoy and take a job which Geard had offered him in the
town, the alluring job of editing an official Glastonbury news-
paper--to come out every week. Ned was to have a completely
free hand as editor of this paper, which was to deal with every
aspect, political, economical, social, poetical, mystical, of the
life of the town.

Lady Rachel's feminine relatives, especially the old Lady in
Bath, had been pressing her father with every kind of impor-
tunity to bring to an end her stay in Glastonbury. Day by day
however she had assiduously been drinking those chalybeate
waters, several springs of which could be reached in various
places in the town much nearer than the hillside where they
originated, and her health was obviously making such improve-
ment that Dr. Fell had had little difficulty in persuading Lord P.
to disregard his family's clamourings.

It was a question, however, how far this attitude of his would
change--Lady Rachel had now passed her nineteenth birthday--
when it reached his ears that Ned Alhling was in town and that
the girl was assisting him, as she fully intended to do, in his
editorial labours. It was about this peril to their exciting project
that they were now talking, with their heads close together, as
they came drifting along that tow-path, far too engrossed in each
other to notice the man and the little girl under the poplar tree
or the child's wild escape across the field.

The first number of the Glastonbury paper was to come out
in a month from now. The printing presses, the type-setting ma-
terials, the machinery and the office furniture were already in
working order in a very old building in the outskirts of Para-
dise, one of the oldest buildings in that neighborhood and one
much easier to adapt to their purpose than anything they could
have found in the centre of Glastonbury. The only point where the
Mayor had not given his editor a free hand was in the matter
of the name of the paper. Mr. Geard wished it to be called The
Wayfarer.

Philip had no desire just then to encounter "Lady Rachel and
her young man," as everyone in Glastonbury called them; but
his searching fen-man's eyes, unconsciously combing the land-
scape on every side for signs of living creatures, was arrested
now by the figures of two men advancing along the same tow-path
from the opposite direction. Philip recognised one of these men
at once as Sam Dekker; but the other puzzled him for a time. At
last he decided, and decided correctly, that it was young Jimmy
Rake, a subordinate of Mr. Stilly's in the Glastonbury bank.

Sam had begun to make it a custom of his to befriend the
friendless in Glastonbury, of which there were, he very quickly
discovered, more and queerer specimens than he had ever sur-
mised existed in the days before he was caught in his Vita
Nuova. Jimmy Rake was one of the loneliest of all these friend-
less ones. The other lads persecuted him at the bank. Mr. Stilly
found him incompetent. His landlady in George Street regarded
him as "not all there."

The truth was that James Rake, an orphan from the little town
of Ilchester, was a youth paralysed by shyness. His miserable
shyness was indeed his only claim to his landlady's view of him
and the principal cause of Mr. Stilly's contempt for him. In other
respects his character was simple, colourless and commonplace. If
what is called "distinction" by virtuosos in human qualities was
the chief hope of the lad's salvation, Jimmy Rake was undoubt-
edly damned. "Rake is a Fool" was what one of the little boys at
the Oreylands Preparatory had scrawled in chalk one morning
on the headmaster's blackboard; and even that indulgent gentle-
man, as he wiped these marks away with the duster kept on his
desk, made no denial of this popular verdict.

Rake was a fool. He was a fool at cricket, a fool at football,
a fool at examinations, and the worst fool of all with women and
girls. There was an old canal in the marshes some six miles from
Glastonbury on the borders of Huntspill Moor and because of
a rare kind of water-mint that grew there this was a place where
Sam and his father had for two or three seasons, and as late as
October too, found specimens of the Large Copper butterfly.
James Rake was interested in butterflies. He was not stirred over
them to the passionate intensity of the two Dekkers; but he was
interested; and he had made a gallant effort to overcome his shy-
ness when Sam invited him to this walk on early-closing day.

They had gone by way of Meare, and Westhay Level, and
Catcott Burtle, and the northern fringe of Edington Heath; and
they were now returning by way of Meare Heath and Stileway.

Sam had quickly discovered that there was a solid, compact
mass of what might be described as "honest wood" in Jimmy
Rake's nature. The lad had the power of walking steadily on, for
miles and miles, without uttering a syllable; nor were his re-
marks, when he did speak, of any very vivid or original char-
acter. The most striking observation he had made today in the
whole of their ten-mile walk was what he remarked as they were
crossing some fallen branches in a spinney near Edington Junc-
tion, on the Burnham and Evercreech Railway, "The white ones"
-- he was speaking of toadstools--"seem to grow on the dead
wood; and the black ones on the living wood." Sam had taken
advantage of this remark to expatiate at some length on the
toadstools of the neighbourhood, in which he and his father had
specialised together for one whole autumn a couple of years ago;
but his discourse seemed only to prove that the abundant "woodi-
ness" in the nature of Rake the Fool was not the kind upon which
either black or white fungi spontaneously flourished.

At the moment when Philip's long-sighted vision was concen-
trated upon the man and the woman approaching from the south
and the two men approaching from the west, Sam himself real-
ised to what an encounter he was leading his shy friend and he
looked about him, wondering how to avoid this couple who were
directly in their path. Ned Athling too became just then aware of
a group of three men standing in the field to the north of them
and a couple of men advancing from the northwest. There was
a small unimportant bridge over the Brue just at that place,
called Cold Harbour Bridge, and it was quite close to this spot
that Philip was now standing. A little tributary of the river left
the main stream at this point and flowed southeast to Northload
Bridge, and thence lost itself among the orchards of the town.
This Cold Harbour Bridge formed, in fact, the centre of an imag-
inary circle on the circumference of which these three groups of
human beings were now arrested in a threefold consciousness of
one another's presence.

To the surveyor from Evercreech there was nothing in the least
remarkable about the fact that two men should be approaching
Cold Harbour Bridge from the west, and a man and woman from
the south, following the same tow-path. The contractor was won-
dering whether he would be permitted to bring his own workmen
from Taunton for the construction of the new road or whether
the town council of Glastonbury would insist on his employing
local labourers upon the job. The surveyor from Evercreech was
wondering if his wife's father, now suffering from an attack of
pleurisy, would leave them his small dairy farm of four Jersey
cows, when he came to die.

But there was, as a matter of fact, no geographic section of
the environs of Glastonbury that had not been so often the stage
of portentous human encounters that chance itself seemed, in the
weariness of her long experience, to have found it easier to slide
events through the smooth grooves of fate than to shake them
into her favourite surprises; for from under Cold Harbour Bridge
which was the precise centre of the equilateral triangle formed
by these now quite stationary groups of people, all wondering
how they should avoid contact with one another, arose the tall
lean shape of Mother Legge's aged doorkeeper, Young Tewsy.
holding in one hand a large blood-stained fish which he had
just killed and in the other a long fishing-rod.

"I've a caught he! I've a caught he!" he kept repeating and
gazed round him with the frantic gestures of one demanding an
audience.

Philip looked from the surveyor to the contractor with the air
of a monarch who asks his courtiers to rid him of an intrusive
churl.

"He's a tramp," said the Taunton man.

"He's one of the town's idiots," said the gentleman from Ever-
creech who was hoping for the death of his father-in-law in order
to inherit four Jersey cows.

But Young Tewsy was so anxious to tell the whole world of
his successful kill that he climbed up upon Cold Harbour Bridge
and held his catch in the air; waving it first in the direction of
Sam and Jimmy and then in the direction of Lady Rachel. It
was enough for Lady Rachel that an old dilapidated beggar was
appealing to her in some way. She ran forward at top-speed to
the bridge, followed at a slow and indeed at a sulky pace by Mr.
Athling who began to feel extremely uneasy at the presence of
so many people. People seemed to be appearing from every
quarter of the horizon. Mr. Athling could see Sam and Jimmy in
one direction, Philip and his two companions in another, while
in addition to these he could perceive in the distance, on the
other side of the big field, a group of children, an old man, and
a cow with its head outstretched between wooden railings.

The sun was breaking through the clouds in so irregular a
manner that one stream of light fell upon the tall heggar wav-
ing the fishing-rod and another upon the children and the cow.

If Rachel Zoyland followed her hereditary instinct by rushing
to the spot where a flag of appeal or of disturbance had been
raised, Sam Dekker followed his hereditary instinct by running
at top-speed to where s n excited a fisherman was brandishing a
great fish. Poor Jim Rake, however, though not from pique or
sulkiness like Athling, but from a paralysing spasm of nervous-
ness followed Sam at a snail's pace. He looked neither to the
right or to the left, for fear of being summoned to shake hands
with someone, but kept his eyes fixed on the blood-stained fish,
whose own eyes, which five minutes before had been searching
the vistas of flowing water through the weed stalks of the Brue,
had already taken upon them that glazed lidless stare of a dead
creature upon a marble slab.

"You have caught a wonderful fish!" panted Rachel, when she
reached Young Tewsy's side upon the narrow bridge.

"Ain't I, your ladyship,"--for he knew her well by sight--
"ain't I?" gasped the old man. " Tis the girt chub of Lydford
Mill come upstream for they autumn flies. I've a-dipped for he
every mornin' since September and every noon when Missus
could spare I to come out--and now I've a-hooked 'un. There
'un be, your ladyship--there 'un be, Mr. Dekker"--for Sam,
bowing awkwardly to Rachel, was now on the bridge too--"and
'twere I what hooked 'un! Ain't he summat to see? Looksee
what a girt mouth!"

"You've killed it too roughly, Tewsy," said Sam. "You
shouldn't have bloodied it so." He took the fish in his hands.
"Yes, he's right," he remarked to Rachel. "I've seen you myself,
haven't I?" he added, this time addressing the fish, as he lifted
up its dorsal fin with his forefinger. "I've seen you, down at
Lydford in your own Mill Pool; but I never thought to hold you
in my hands on Cold Harbour Bridge."

Philip, Jimmy Rake, and Ned Athling were all standing on the
tow-path now, while Young Tewsy, supported by Lady Rachel
and Sam, remained above them on the bridge. Philip took off his
hat to Lord P.'s daughter and made some laconic remark about
the nourishing quality of Brue mud.

"Look, Jimmy!" cried Sam, holding up the fish for his friend's
inspection.

"It won't be nourishing much longer, Mr. Crow, if your chem-
icals begin to get into it," said Ned unkindly, venting his vexation
upon the manufacturer.

"My chemicals!" murmured Philip, "I assure you, Athling,
that nothing from my--"

"This is Mr. James Rake, Lady Rachel," said Sam, handing
back the fish to Young Tewsy.

Mr. Rake tried to remember that it was best to take his cap
off by the front rather than to clutch it by the top. The lad's
cheeks got very red when Rachel remarked that she had seen him
in the bank.

The man from Evercreech, forgetting about the four Jersey
cows, now approached the group, while the contractor in order
to retain his self-respect began writing in his notebook. His West-
Country awareness of the presence of Lord P.'s daughter, how-
ever, made him feel so self-conscious that all he could write down
were the words "Saunders Brothers, Builders and Contractors,
Taunton."

So deep however were the centuries-old grooves, into which
fate had moulded the historic atmosphere round Lake Village
Field, that chance now, playing at being fate, brought to the
lips of Young Tewsy a significant retort, as if to compel some-
one among these people to take note of what was going on. The
contractor from Taunton had just added to the words "Saunders
Brothers" the words "Due from Mr. Philip Crow," when Philip,
putting his hand into one of his trouser pockets and bringing out
a lot of loose silver, said to Young Tewsy, who was endeavouring
to take his rod to pieces--"I'll give you ten shillings for that
chub, my good fellow!" Philip had been hesitating between men-
tioning five shillings or ten; but he had decided on this enormous
sum, because of the presence of Lady Rachel, to whom, as soon
as he had obtained it, he intended to offer the fish as a chival-
rous gift.

It was then that Young Tewsy had uttered the following
remark.

"'Tis for Missus, Sir. Tain't for sale, Sir. Missus 'ave been
hinterested, Sir,"--Tewsy in his excitement was reverting to his
North London accent--"hever since I began fishing for the fish.
The fish 'ave been on Missus', mind, Sir. She 'ave dreamed of
the fish, Sir. She wants to heat the fish, Sir. She says--yes, my
Lidy, 'tis Mrs. Legge I be speaking of--she says, Sir, when she
was little, Sir, they 'ad a sighing in town about the fish. She said
they used to sigh:

‘When Chub of Lydford do speak like human
On grass where Joseph has broken bread,
Be it a man or be it a woman.
In the Isle of Glaston theyll raise the Bead.'

And this 'ere fish"--he had laid the chub down upon the grass
while he pulled his rod apart and wound up the line--"this 'ere
fish cried ‘Whew! Whew! Whew!' just like a dying Christian,
when I 'it its 'ead to stop its floppin' on grass. Missus 'as been
all wrought-up, Sir, in a manner of speaking, by thinking on
this 'ere fish. If I were to sell 'ee the fish, thanking 'ee kindly,
Sir, all the sime; or sell it to your Lidyship, thanking you kindly
all the sime. Missus 'ud be terrible fretted. She do yearn to put
5 er 'ands on this 'ere fish's tile and to scratch 'erself with this
'ere fish's fins, and to thrust 'er thumb down this 'ere fish's
throat. 'Tis meat and marrow to Missus to 'old this 'ere fish to 'er
bosom. So thankin' you, Sir, all the sime and thankin' you, my
Lidy, it 'ud never do for me to let a living soul 'ave this 'ere
ancient fish, save only Missus."

Having uttered this diplomatic ultimatum, the old man, leaving
behind him in Lady Rachel's nostrils a mingled odour of sweat
and fish-slime, shuffled down the bridge steps muttering: "God-
den, gentles, god-den, Lidy!"

Philip could not help following him with a wistful glance as
he went off towards Mr. Twig's hut; for he thought to himself--
"She will like to see that fish!"

The group of persons at Cold Harbour Bridge now began hur-
riedly to escape from one another; Sam and Jimmy Rake follow-
ing in the track of Young Tewsy towards the Godney Road,
Lady Rachel and Ned turning to their right and pursuing the
tributary of the Brue that led to Northload Bridge and the cen-
tre of the town.

The great goddess chance, still finding her line of least resist-
ance in the smooth fate-grooves of Glastonbury, now decreed
that, as the two lovers passed Number Two's shop they should
catch sight of Mr. Evans and old Bartholomew Jones talking in
its interior with the door wide open.

Mr. Jones had left the hospital; but finding that his business
had increased considerably, owing to the town's curiosity--espe-
cially the town's feminine curiosity--with regard to the eccentric
Welshman, he had begun to negotiate with Mr. Evans, a slow and
infinitely cautious proceeding on the old man's part, on the sub-
ject of some sort of partnership. Rachel caught Mr. Evans' eye
as they passed and the lovers drifted into the shop.

Ned Athling, his temper now quite recovered, had been dis-
cussing with Rachel as they came along the possibility of making
this capture of the famous chub of Lydford the subject of his
first article for The Wayfarer.

Old Jones bowed himself off on the appearance of the two
young people; for he said in his sly old heart, "Me pardner will
be sprightlier in coaxin' they to buy summat if I baint there."

Athling therefore lost no time in narrating to Mr. Evans the
whole adventure of the fish; while Rachel, tired after their long
stroll by the river, sank down to rest in one of the big Louis
Quatorze chairs. The girl had noticed before that some of her
happiest moments came to her when she was feeling exhausted
like this. She had noticed it especially since she had come to
Glastonbury. She had even spoken of it to Ned. "It's a delicious
feeling," she had told him. "It's just as if I sank down through
some yielding element, into a world like this one; yes! in every
particular like this one, only with all the annoying things
left out."

She took off her hat now and let it lie in her lap while she
pushed back her brown curls from her forehead, glancing as she
did so at one of Old Jones' gilt mirrors. "How white I am," she
thought, "and how hot and untidy and funny-looking! I wish I
could get the smell of that old man's clothes out of my nose. How
some smells do cling to anyone. And there's fish-blood on my
hands too." She lay back in the big gilt chair and crossed her
legs, clutching the rim of her hat. Yes! It was coming, it was
coming, that lovely sensation. It was like sinking through deep
water, water of a pale glaucous colour, and seeing everything
through water.

"Is that because Glastonbury was an island once?" she thought.

But how perfect it was to sit here, with the sounds of the
street and the air-waves of misty sunshine coming in together
through the open door! How handsome Ned looked talking to
this man; and what passionate interest the man was taking in
what he was telling him! But everything was so lovely and
tender and wavering to her as she let her head sink back. "There's
something heavenly," she thought, "about this feeling. It's just
like being dead and yet intensely happy. I've had it before, I
think, in this shop. Certainly I had it the other day in the souve-
nir shop. It's something about this place. I don't know what it is.
I'll tell Father I won't go to London, whatever Aunt Betsy says!"

The girl was right about Mr. Evans looking passionately inter-
ested. He looked as if he were plunged into some interior vision
that rendered him totally unaware of what he was doing with his
hands, or with his feet, or with his body. For instance, the mo-
ment Ned Athling had finished his narration Mr. Evans sank
down on a small chair opposite Lady Rachel and stretched out
his long legs with their great square-toed boots and grey socks
and allowed his long arms to hang down on each side of the
chair. His shirt, as well as his coat, was so much too short for
him that not only were his bony wrists but perceptible portions
of his lean arms nakedly visible to view, as his hands swung
there with the long fingers dangling.

Lady Rachel was unable to resist a slight flicker of retreat
from the presence of these great boots and rumpled grey socks
thus protruded towards her; but being the well-bred girl she
was, she restrained this movement at once and did not even draw
in her own slender legs. Thus between the boot-soles of Rachel
and the boot-soles of Mr. Evans there was not space to drop a
feather.

Athling approached the back of his lady's chair and leaned^
both his elbows upon it so that his knuckles almost touched her
head. Thus as Mr. Evans began his commentary upon what he
had just heard there was no more distance between the lovers
than there was between Mr. Evans and Lady Rachel and the mag-
netism that accompanied the Welshman's words linked them all
three for a space together.

The extraordinary thing about Mr. Evans' face this afternoon,
as the lovers watched it, was the rapidity of its changes from a
mask of hollow, expressionless desolation into lineaments of
prophetic and inspired passion.

"I never thought I would be here...in this Death-Island of
my people...for Glastonbury is the Gwlad-vr-Hav, the Ely-
sian Death-Fields of the Cymric tribes...on the day when
that fish was killed. Of course I knew about it. Friends of mine,
when I was at Jesus, went down to Lydford to see it. They never
did see it themselves; but they talked to old men and old women
who had. It must be fabulously old, that fish! Tewsy ought never
to have done it; but if anyone was to do it he was the one. Of
course he won't live the year out. But he'll have the happiest
year he's ever had in his life; and he'll probably die in his
sleep. What I am now telling you two...and you can believe I
would not tell everyone these things...is mostly from the
Book of Taliessin and from the Triads and from David ap
Gwilym and from Lady Charlotte's Mabinogion and from Sir
John Rhys, and from the Red Book of Hergest, and from the
Vita Gildae and from the Black Book of Carmarthen, but in my
own Vita Merlini I've gone further than any of them into these
things. Few Glastonbury people realise that they are actually
living in yr Echwyd, the land of Annwn, the land of twilight and
death, where the shores are of Mortuorum Mare, the Sea of
the Departed. This place has always been set apart...from the
earliest times...Urien the Mysterious, Avallach the Unknown,
were Fisher Kings here...and for what did they fish? The
Triads only dare to hint at these things...the Englynion only
to glance at them...Taliessin himself...did you know that?...
was netted with the fish in the weir, by Elphin the son of
Gwydno Garanhir...And for what...and for what did this Fisher
King...

Mr. Evans' voice now rose to a tremulous pitch of excitement.
Ned Athling's hands crossing the back of Lady Rachel's gilded
throne were now actually in contact with the girl's neck, nor did
she move her head away. A mutual impulse made it seem desir-
able that they should touch each other at some point while Mr.
Evans was talking about "yr Echwyd."

"For what did these mystical Figures...rulers in Ynis-Witrin in
the time of my people...seek...when they fished?" The curious
thing was that Mr. Evans' body seemed at that moment, while his
two young hearers watched him, to grow more and more corpse-
like. Those hare hanging wrists, those outstretched feet in their
great boots remained absolutely motionless. It was as if his
physical form had already sunk into the waters of that Cimmerian
sunset-realm which he called "yr Echwyd," while some power
from outside of him was making his lips move in his corpse-like
face!

"They sought for more than a fish, for more than any great
chub of Lydford...they sought for the knot of the opposites,
for the clasping of the Two Twilights, for the mingling-place of
the waters, for the fusion of the metals, for the bride-bed of the
contradictions, for the copulation-cry of the Yes and No, for the
amalgam of the Is and Is Not! What they sought...what the
Fisher Kings of my people sought, and no other priests of no
other race on earth have ever sought it...was not only the
Cauldron and the Spear...not only the sheath and the knife,
not only the Mwys of Gwyddno and the Sword of Arthur, but
that which exists in the moment of timeless time when these two
are one! What they sought was creation with-out-generation.
What they sought was Parthenogenesis and the Self-Birth of
Psyche. What they sought was the Stone without Lichen which
the people before my people worshipped, when they set up

The voice proceeding from the lips of the corpse-face of Mr.
Evans became so hoarse and broken at this point that it hardly
seemed like a human voice. Lady Rachel could clearly hear the
footsteps on the pavement outside, through the street door which
they had left ajar; and these steps sounded to her like the steps
of all the generations of men treading down the stammerings of
the Inanimate Bottom of the World.