"NATURE SEEMS DEAD"




During the first week in December three new subjects of
the King of England entered this world in the little maternity
annex of the Glastonbury Hospital. Nell Zoyland was delivered
of a boy, while Tossie Stickles--to her immense pride and satis-
faction--was delivered of a pair of lusty girl twins. It was con-
ducive of certain curious encounters that these two young women
and their children should be lying simultaneously in private
rooms opening from the same passage. Tom Barter coming to
visit Tossie found himself confronted in that passage one day by
Will Zoyland and another day by Sam Dekker, while Miss Eliza-
beth Crow, who was devoted in her watchfulness over Toss and
her twins, met on one and the same evening, Persephone Spear
and Dave Spear coming to see Nell, but coming separately on
this errand.

Something certainly seemed--at least up to this present date
which was now the tenth of December---to be favouring the com-
mune conspirators. Dave and Red and their new ally Paul Trent
had evidently been well advised in their choice of a locale that
day, wherein to broach their daring plot. Philip Crow, like many
another Napoleonic tactician, was weakest in the cautious con-
sideration of all probable and improbable contingencies. Like the
impetuous Corsican and like Oliver Cromwell he swept ahead
upon his main idea, allowing sleeping dogs to sleep and open
stable doors to remain open. Never for one second did it cross
his active brain, any more than it crossed the brain of Tilly, ab-
sorbed in making her domestic arrangements for the winter, or
the brain of Mr. Tankerville, growing more and more energetic
in his commercial flights about Europe, that there was the least
chance of any difficulty over his factory leases, the rents of which
remained still only paid up to the beginning of the New Year.
The construction of his new road and his new bridge was for the
moment held up by the flat refusal of Mr. Twig to sell any por-
tion of his small patrimony, but the Evercreech man, more anx-
ious than ever to serve this rich employer, since his father-in-law
--as obstinate about dying as Number One was about selling--
still persisted in milking his four Jersey cows with his own hand,
was already in correspondence with the county officials over the
possibility of exploiting a section of Lake Village Field. BuL
though handicapped over his road and his bridge, Philip had
begun his tin mining under the most promising conditions and
already the sound of picks and mattocks and of cranes and en-
gines could be heard proceeding from a big clearing in the hill-
side under which many unvisited subterranean passages led into
the heart of the hill. Half a dozen truckloads of the precious
metal had already been despatched from the railway station at
Glastonbury; for although this station was further off than the
one at Wells it was easier to make use of and Philip had a much
stronger "pull" with the railroad officials there. It had been just
a month ago, in the middle of November, when the first tin had
begun to emerge, nor would Philip ever forget his feelings when
he beheld the lorry containing it roll off towards the Great
Western station, ready to be taken to Cardiff through the Severn
Tunnel. For the last month the tin had been pouring forth with
such a steady flow that Philip's spirits had mounted up to a pitch
of excitement that was like a kind of diurnal drunkenness. He
dreamed of tin every night. The metal in all its stages began to
obsess him. He collected specimens of it, of every degree of
weight, integrity, purity. He carried bits of it about with him in
his pocket. All manner of quaint fancies--not so much imagina-
tive ones as purely childish ones--connected with tin, kept en-
tering and leaving his mind, and he began to feel as if a portion
of his innermost being were the actual magnet that drew this
long-neglected element out of abysses of prehistoric darkness into
the light of day.

Philip got into the habit of walking every day up the steep
overgrown hillside above Wookey and posting himself in the
heart of a small grove of Scotch firs from which he could ob-
serve, without anyone detecting his presence, the lively transac-
tions at the mouth of the big orifice in the earth, where the trees
had been cut away and where the cranes and pulleys stood out
in such startling relief against the ancient sepia-coloured clumps
of hazel and sycamore, still growing around them upon the leafy
slopes. Here he would devour the spectacle of all this activity he
had set in motion, until he longed to share the physical exertions
of every one of his labourers, diggers, machinists, truckmen,
carters, stokers, miners, and haulers. He yearned to be himself
boring, dynamiting, shovelling, lifting, carrying, driving; and so
intensely had he fixed his eyes on every bodily movement these
men had made, that by this time--by the tenth of December--he
really could have hired himself out, and won commendation
from his foreman in the job, at almost everyone of these several
labours. It must not be supposed that he neglected his office-work
or his dye works extensions and increasing European sales dur-
ing these exciting weeks. He worked steadily at the office from
nine to one every day, and always looked in there again about
five before he went home to tea. After his tea he had recently
acquired the custom of retiring to a room which Emma called
the study, Tilly the north room and he himself the play-room.
Shut up in this room he used to ponder long and deeply over his
affairs, plunging into various mathematical and commercial cal-
culations and making rapid notes in a big, foolscap-size notebook
with a white vellum binding. This notebook had been given to
him by Persephone when she was quite a little girl. Illuminated
upon its front page was his name and hers united by a gilt
border within which were lilac-coloured hearts, strung upon a
green string.

On this tenth of December Philip returned to the north room
after Tilly had gone to bed, and gave himself up to an orgy of
concentrated thought. He had already brought so many new
labourers and working people into Glastonbury that it had begun
to be difficult to house them, and Philip--little dreaming what
a deadly blow was preparing for him from that quarter--had
entered into negotiations with the town council relative to his
housing these newcomers in some of the newly built "council
houses." The fact that there were so many unemployed among the
old-established Glastonbury people, who now saw these lively
upstarts from Bristol and Cardiff occupying houses provided by
their own socialistic government and built out of local taxes,
was a fact that did not redound to Philip's popularity with the
populace. Glastonbury's populace was--as they proved in their
mobbing of Lord P.--not at all inclined to remain passive and
patient when they once got a particular grievance lodged in their
brain; and Philip had been surprised by the sullen looks with
which he was greeted whenever he had occasion to pass through
the poorer portions of the town. He had even heard derisive jeer-
ing when he recently crossed, in his little open car, one of the
outskirts of Paradise. This extreme unpopularity into which he
had fallen was another of these possible causes of catastrophe
which Philip neglected. It was part of that element of sheer
recklessness in him, to which reference has already been made, to
hold public opinion in infinite contempt. Humane enough towards
those immediately dependent upon him, Philip was absolutely
devoid of imagination when it came to be a question of people
he had never seen.

His small, hard, oblong head, very protruding at the back, and
rather flat at the sides where the ears clung so closely, had that
particular look about it that old-fashioned military men's skulls
have. As he pulled his chair round now in front of the fire, leav-
ing the vellum-bound notebook open on the table and sprinkled
with cigarette ashes which he had not bothered to blow away,
he thought to himself quite calmly: "It would be a good thing if
the Glastonbury people would simply die off; die off and leave
their houses empty to make room for me to fill the town with
a different type altogether! But they seem able to live on for-
ever, feeding on mud and mist! Die! Die! Die! Die quickly and
have done with it!" It was at this moment that he saw in the red
coals of the fire, a heap of dead people, dead heads and arms and
legs and feet. It was a totally unreal illustration of the French
Revolution, that set him upon conjuring up this romantic spec-
tacle. It was a picture that he had seen in some silly illustration
of some cheap story; and the queer thing about it was that these
dead people were not disfigured in any way. They were just dead.
"How these Christs and Buddhas," he thought to himself, "ever
reached the point of feeling that it was worth their while to save
the human race is more than I can understand. I don't want to
torture anyone"--here Philip's judgment of himself was abso-
lutely correct, for there was less sadism in him than there was
in Mr. Stilly or in Jimmy Rake or in Elphin Cantle--"but it's
impossible for me to understand this 'value of human life' that
some people make so much of." Once more he stared at the
coals; and once more he saw in those red recesses that curious,
sentimental assembly of neatly dressed corpses with sad, peace-
ful, composed features, laid out in that artistic morgue. And then
there flickered over his hollow eye-sockets and over his hollow
cheeks, as he stared at that fire and stretched out his hands to it.
a grim smile, for he thought of what Tilly would say if she could
read his thoughts at this moment.

Tilly--good housekeeper as she was in her orderings of well-
killed meat--could not bring herself to trap the smallest mouse.
If kittens had been born in her house by the dozens, it would
only have been by the craftiest deception that Emma could have
got her to get rid of one of them. "What actually would Tilly
say," he wondered, "if she knew that if I could cut off the heads
of all the poor of Glastonbury and fill their houses with a picked
set of men and women who could really work I'd do it tomor-
row? As a matter of fact, if by lifting up my hand now I could
destroy those people and get this new population here tonight,
I'd do it! Yes, and sleep quite soundly afterwards!"

One of the most interesting things about Philip, when he in-
dulged in mental contemplations as he was doing now was the
guileless un-maliciousness of his inhumanity. Though it never
occurred to him to ask himself by what right could he condemn
to death, in his thoughts, a whole section of his fellow-townsmen,
he derived no wicked pleasure from the idea of their death. His
grey-black, closely cropped skull was as devoid of such notions
as one of the mattocks of his workmen at Wookey. He experi-
enced now, in his silent house, with his open figuring-book on
the table behind him and these glowing coals in front of him, a
delicious sense of soundness, compactness, integrity in solitude.
"I am I," his whole being seemed to say, "and the world is my
clay and my mortar." Leaving these ill-nourished Glastonbury
incompetents safe in their neat and artistic death-pile, his
thoughts now turned to what he regarded as the superstitions of
the place. Yes, he would willingly, if he could, obliterate all
these Gothic Ruins, lay a good solid expanse of lead-piping to
drain Chalice Well, pull down that old Tower from the Tor
and build a water-tank up there, dig out every twig, sprig, root
and branch of this corrupting thorn bush and really set to work
to have the best tin centre in this spot that existed anywhere in
the world! Here again, in the matter of superstition, Philip's de-
structive desires were astonishingly un-malicious.

John Crow would have derived a most convoluted vandal-
thrill, the wanton excitement of a run-down atheistical adven-
turer, in obliterating all traces of the Great Legend. Red would
have gratified incredible levels of "'ate" by so doing. Barter would
have done it with the grim unction of a sullen executioner, es-
pecially if he could have shogged off afterwards with Tossie and
the twins to Norfolk! Even Dave would have done it with a cer
tain self-righteous doctrinaire-austerity. But Philip would have
done it absolutely without a single arriere pensee. He would have
done it by the pure necessity of his nature, as a dog twines him-
self round on a mat before lying down, or a cat scratches the
dust over its excrement. He would have wiped the place clean,
both of its under-nourished rebellious populace and of its morbid
relics, and then set to work, as inevitably as a beaver returns to
its job after a flood, to build up' an industrial centre out of the
richest tin mine and out of the most scientific dye works any-
where on earth!

It was with his head full of these thoughts--thoughts that
sprouted from his hard skull like scaly lichen from a gatepost
on Brandon Heath--that Philip finally switched off the electric
light in the play-room and went up--carrying his patent-leather
shoes in hand--to his stuffy bedroom, his cold hot-water bottle,
and the invisible wraith of his well-satisfied grandmother.

All the enemies of the Great Legend happened, that night of
December the tenth, to be going to sleep about the same time.
Glastonbury indeed, under its windy, moonless winter sky, was
like many another town that night in the turbulent history of our
earth: it was subject to the psychic tearing down and building up
of the most violently diverse energies. But all these Legend-
Destroyers were of the same sex! That was the interesting and
significant thing to note. Not one single feminine wish, from
Tossie in the hospital to Mother Legge in what she called her
nursery, was lifted up from the bed of sleep in hostility to the
immemorial Tradition. But from the bed of Red, and the bed of
Dave, and the bed of Paul Trent, and the bed of Mr. Barter, and
the bed of Lawyer Beere, and the beds of bank-cashier Stilly,
gardener Weatherwax and Will Zoyland and finally from the
bed in Northload Street of John Crow, there rose up, along with
the destructive will-power of Philip, a cumulative malediction
against the Legend. There had been a time when Mary would
have joined this gang of iconoclasts--she alone among all the
feminine shapes in the town--but, since her marriage, Mary had
relapsed into a veritable undersea of infinite peace so delicate in
its muted dreaming that she would have no more wished to break
up any of its dream-scenery, any of its deep-sea arches, its deep-
sea columns, its leagues of translucent emerald-coloured floors,
than she would have wished to break the heart of Euphemia
Drew.

The history of any ancient town is as much the history of its
inhabitants' nightly pillows as of any practical activity that they
perform by day. Floating on its softly upheaving sea-surface of
feminine breasts the island-city of mystery gathered itself to-
gether to resist this wedge of rational invasion. Backward and
forward, for five thousand years, the great psychic pendulum has
swung between belief in the Glastonbury Legend and disbelief.
It is curious to think of the pertinacity of the attacks upon this
thing and how, like a vapour dispersed by a wind that re-fashions
itself again the moment the wind departs, the moss-grown towers
and moonlit ramparts of its imperishable enchantment survive
and again survive. When the king murdered the last Abbot of this
place he was only doing what Philip and Barter and Red and
Dave and Paul Trent and John would have liked to do to the
indestructible mystery today. In the most ancient times the same
fury of the forces of "reason," must have swept across Glaston-
bury, only to be followed by the same eternal reaction when the
forces of mystery returned. The psychic history of a place like
Glastonbury is not an easy thing to write down in set terms, for
not only does chance play an enormous part in it, but there are
many forces at work for which human language has at present
no fit terms.

This particular night of the tenth of December was in reality
one of the great turning points in the life of Glastonbury, but the
issue of the struggle that went on tonight between the Enemies of
the Legend and its Lovers would evade all but supernatural nar-
ration, however one might struggle to body it forth. Out of John
Crow's head, after he had relaxed to sleep that night from his
lascivious claspings of Mary's marbly limbs, there leapt up into
the darkness the spiritual form of all the suppressed malicious-
ness from which he had been suffering in his service of Bloody
Johnny. This spiritual form was a shape, a presence, an entity.
It was, in fact, the essential soul of John Crow, for the vital con-
sciousness of his sleeping body was but a vague, weak diffusion
of electric force. What else could the soul of John Crow do when
released in sleep from his life of psychic slavery, but join, with
an exultant rebound, all those other wandering spirits who were
engaged in killing the Grail. It was not necessary for any pal-
pable shape to fly out of that window in Northload Street in
order to join, in a sort of Warlock's Sabbath, the ill-assorted
spirits of Philip Crow and Red Robinson. When I write down
the word join, I mean a motion of John's soul that it would be
impossible for any scientist to refute, a motion of his whole
essential being, now his body was asleep and his diplomacy re-
laxed, to kill the Grail. By joining with Philip, on this night of
the tenth of December, to strike this blow at a fragment of the
Absolute, the essential soul of John Crow took a considerable
risk. For one thing, it was a risk to leave his sly, cautious, saurian
neutrality and join his grand enemy. That he did so at all is
only one more proof of how deep John's maliciousness went. In
his service of Geard, in connexion with the Grail and in connex-
ion with Chalice Well, John was steadily outraging the evasive,
trampish, irresponsible essence of his nature. He was taking
sides. He was siding with the Grail against its enemies, when all
the while, in his heart, he longed to kill it! The "something" in
Philip and John and Barter that loathed the Grail so deeply was
not just simply their Norfolk blood. This fragment of the Abso-
lute was too ticklish a thing not to divide human souls in a dis-
turbing and disconcerting manner, setting brother against brother
and friend against friend. All the way down the centuries it had
done this, breaking up ordinarv normal human relations and
exerting whenever it appeared, a startling, shocking, troubling
effect.

It was really a monstrous thing now that John and Philip
should dislike one another so heartily during the daylight hours
but at night rush off together to join in killing the Grail. The
Grail could not actually be "killed," for the Thing is a morsel
of the Absolute and a broken-off fragment of the First Cause. It
could not of course be killed literally; not in the sense of being
annihilated. But it could be struck at and outraged in a way
that was a real injury; real enough, anyhow, to stir up a very
ambiguous feeling in the tramp-nerves of John Crow! After all,
though there was an unknown "element" in the composition of
this broken-off piece of its own substance, that the First Cause
had flung down upon this spot, there was also something of the
"thought-stuff" of the same ultimate Being in the personality of
all its living creatures. Thus, in the psychic war that was going
on above the three hills of Glastonbury, the Absolute was, in a
manner of speaking, pitted against the Absolute.

On this tenth of December the wind blew directly from the
west. Over Mark Moor it blew from the marshes of Highbridge
and, beyond that, from the brackish mud-flats of Burnham. The
tide had been so high indeed in the Burnham estuaries that many
of the more pessimistic fishermen there, whose flat-bottomed
boats--as they had done since the Vikings came--explored those
muddy reaches, prophesied that the dams were going to burst
again, as they had burst in November, five years before, flooding
the whole country. Over Bridgewater Bay it blew, and over the
Bristol Channel, from the mountains of South Wales. A scattered
army of little ragged clouds followed each other eastward all
that night, blotting out from the vision of nocturnal wanderers,
or from such as kept vigil at lonely windows, first one constella-
tion and then another. Thus the nature of the night of that tenth
of December was peculiar and unusual, for no fixed star and no
planet was free from sudden, quick, hurried and erratic obscur-
ings by these rags and tatters of flying vapour. Endlessly they
blew across the welkin, those tattered wisps of clouds, changing
their shapes as they blew into the fitful forms of men and beasts
and birds and tossing vessels and whirling hulks and flying
promontories, and obscuring first one great zodiacal sign in the
heavens and then another. The wind that shepherded these wild
flocks was full of the scent of channel seaweed and of channel
mud, and as it voyaged eastward its speed kept increasing, so
that these cloud-shapes, thus broken into smaller and smaller
wefts, now began to fly like gigantic leaves across the Glaston-
bury hills.

Two human beings, one a woman and one a boy, found them-
selves too restless to sleep that night in this city of sorceries.
These were Nancy Stickles in her attic room on the High Street
and Elphin Gantle in his father's hostelry, the Old Tavern, which
stood on the edge of the Cattle Market. Both these persons, this
young married woman and this boy, left their beds between one
and two that December night and pulling chairs to their windows,
looked out upon those flying clouds. Elphin's room, which was
far away from both Persephone's and Dave's, in the rambling,
faded, old public house, looked out from a sort of stucco tower,
added to the main building in the reign of William the Fourth.
His window was a large one composed of many small panes and
when Elphin in the dead of night threw this open and sat leaning
his elbows upon the window-sill he could not only see a high
garden wall covered with mossy coping-stones, but he could see
a bare larch tree swaying mournfully in the wind, and, beyond
this a little tributary of the Brue, irrigating a piece of municipal
ground that had been parcelled out into allotment-gardens, and
crossed, although its waters were not deep, by several plank
bridges. There was a clump of dead stone-crop upon this mossy
wall, and near the stone-crop a single faded wall-flower which
bowed and swayed in the wind and seemed to emit, as it swayed,
at least so Elphin Cantle fancied, a faint dirge-like sighing. The
boy spread out his arms upon his window-sill and stared at the
pallid waters of the Brue tributary and at the tossing larch-tree
top and at the sighing flower- stalks on the wall. His window was
unusually large, as often happens with that particular sort of
stucco tower, so that there was a dizzy sensation as, well as a very
chilly one as he looked out upon the night. But Elphin was much
more in the night , much more mingled with its vague scents and
its morbidly distinct sounds than he would have been in any
other room in Glastonbury. His mother had decided to let him
sleep in the tower room "till a guest asked for it." Now, as it was
unlikely that a guest would even know of the existence of the
tower room, Elphin was pretty safe.

He thrust his right arm out of the great window and stroked
the stucco wall with his fingers. Something about a stucco wall
always fascinated Elphin, and now with this wind wailing in his
ears, whistling through the larch tree, moaning across the plank
bridges of this Brue ditch, the touch of this material helped him
to think. But he was in a blasphemous and a wicked mood that
night, for his idol Sam had broken his promise to take him out
there, beyond Charlton Mackrell, to the weir at Cary Fitzpaine,
on the River Cary, where several tench had been caught this
autumn, that queer fish gifted' with the gift of healing! Sam had
given him no better excuse for the breaking of this promise than
that Mrs. Zoyland was all alone, that afternoon, up at the hos-
pital, a state of affairs that by no means seemed to justify such
treatment of a friend. Elphin's restless excitement, therefore, in
that wet-blowing wind and his queer pleasure in rubbing his
hand against that old weather-stained tower wall were mingled
with a bitter anger against both women and religion. He associ-
ated them together, which was unfair with that particular kind
of philosophical unfairness, touched with perverted eroticism,
that many famous writers have indulged in. Women were, it is
true, now at this very moment, all over this silent city, nourish-
ing the Grail in their sleep, but the great religions of the world
were not founded by women. The soul of Elphin Cantle, never-
theless, as, on this tenth of December he leaned out upon the
night air, rushed forth to join the souls of Philip and John in
their murderous night hunt of the Grail, just as if on this night
of the west wind's wild rush through the sky, there really had
been a sort of Wizard's Sabbath.

This joining of Philip and John in their orgy of Grail-killing
meant no more than that if anyone could have looked down that
night upon the mental arena of Glastonbury he would have
seen a powerful group of masculine consciousnesses bent upon
completing the work of the bestial King Henry, and destroying,
once and for all, all traces of this Cymric superstition.

Elphin's heart yearned for Sam, and his nerves throbbed for
Sam. His feverish pillow, left over there alone in the darkness
now, as he sat at this huge window, could have told a pretty tale
of nightly desperations, as the lad tossed and turned and quiv-
ered in his perverted passion, while week followed week, and
there seemed no satisfaction for him in sight. And so his fury
turned upon Sam's religion, and this the boy mixed up, wildly
and blindly, in his crazy unfairness, with the existence of all the
feminine persons that Sam was in the habit of meeting these
days, but especially with Mrs. Zoyland. "May the curse be on
her!" cried Elphin now to the flying clouds. "May the curse be
on her!" he cried to the tossing wall-flower, to the bending larch,
to the rippled streamlet, and to all the wet, hollow, dark spaces,
like the wind-swept corridors of a madhouse, that extended be-
tween Chalice Hill and Tor Hill, and between Tor Hill and Wir-
ral Hill. "May the curse be on her, and may she be sorry to death
that she ever met him!"

This malediction was a much more singular and significant
one than poor Nell would have understood. It was in reality--
if the full secret purport of Elphin's thoughts had been revealed
--directed quite as much against the Grail as against Nell. For
the curious thing was that when presently he began again--whis-
pering the words aloud with intense solemnity--to curse the
woman whom his hero was so constantly visiting in the hospital,
he extended his curse, as his outstretched fingers fumbled at the
chilly stucco wall beneath his tower window, to that consecrated
Cup in the hands of his friend's father from which Sam was
always receiving the Sacrament. His boy's thoughts were all con-
fused, and not having been yet confirmed by the Bishop of Wells
he had only the vaguest notion of the meaning of the Mass. The
Cup containing the Wine at those "early services," which, like a
faithful dog watching his master, he was wont to gaze upon from
the back of St. Patrick's Chapel, was the same to him as this mys-
tic Grail, lost or buried in Chalice Hill, of which he heard his
parents talk. Elphin's love for Sam was too passionate to be
vicious, but it was also far too intense to be innocent, and with
a lover's clairvoyant instinct he was fully-aware that Sam's
worship of Christ absorbed many feelings in the man which if
released would turn to human love. What Elphin did not realise
was that it was this very love of Christ coming between Sam and
his mistress that had given him his place, such as it was, in Sains
life. Had this accursed Grail, or this sacramental Cup that the
boy confused with the Grail, become nothing to Sam it would
certainly not have been to the love of Elphin Cantle that he
would have turned! Thus, as so often happens in the coil of
human drama, the very power against which, in his blind pas-
sion, the unhappy lad was now pouring out his imprecations, was
the one thing that kept him in his idol's life! Sam's pity for this
lonely child was part of the grand tour de force of his life of a
saint. To be interested in boys at all was totally against the
grain with him.

While Elphin was at the tower window of the Old Tavern,
Nancy, having slipped from the unconscious arms of the heavily
breathing Harry Stickles, was at her attic window looking on the
back gardens of High Street. This west wind, blowing from the
Bristol Channel, blowing from the hills of Pembrokeshire, blow-
ing from that Isle of Gresholm off the western shores, where
round the Head of Bran the Blessed fluttered that song of the
Birds of Rhiannon which brought death to the living and life to
the dead, this west wind was more than an ordinary wind that
night to Nancy Stickles. It was her sense of this west wind that
had drawn her out of her bed. The feeling of it had reached her
in her dreams before she awoke. Sitting on her hard bedroom
chair at the window which she had managed to open wide with-
out disturbing Harry, she now gave herself up to the power and
the rush of it as it swept past her house. In the other houses
everyone was asleep. Not a sound reached her from the street in
front. There she was, exposed to the far-stretching sky with its
whistling cloud-leaves, to the wide, wet hollows of darkness that
covered the earth, and above all to that rushing wind! About a
quarter of a mile separated her from Elphin at his open window.
The boy had put on his overcoat which had been covering him in
his bed. The girl wore her rough, thick dressing-gown and also
a black woollen shawl. Neither of them had the remotest notion
of the presence of the other, although the identity of each, the
son of Mr. Cantle of the Old Tavern, and the wife of Mr. Stickles,
the chemist, was well-known to each. It was a palpable example
of the way in which the desperate wishes of living creatures flung
out at random upon the air counter and cancel each other's mag-
netic force! The boy cursed the religion of Glastonbury and the
girl blessed it. Yes, she blessed it, as she gave herself to this
wild wind that had been calling to her through her dreams for
the last five hours.

Oh, how delicious it was to give herself up to it...to feel it
take her completely, as she crouched there, with her strong,
firm working-girl's fingers clasped together on the window-sill!
"I wish," thought Nancy, "that it was the wind and not men who
took girls!" And she fell into a fantastic reverie in which she
told herself a story about a bride who gave herself rapturously
to an enamoured wind-spirit. "Oh, I am so glad I am alive!"
thought Nancy, and the brave, optimistic girl, as she let the wind
seek out her responsive breasts under her black shawl, began
adding up in her mind all the good aspects of her life. She was
always doing this. She found it an excellent antidote to all that
she suffered from in her husband--that plump, placid baby with
eyes of insane avarice--and it always came back to the same
thing, to the one grand privilege she had, that of having been
born in Glastonbury! Her employment at Miss Crow's, where she
was now aided by another distant relative of Tossie's, a certain
Daisy Stickles, was a constant delight to her. The walk alone,
through the heart of the town and past St. Benignus' church-
yard, was a solid pleasure; and there were times, especially after
her work was done and she was returning in the evening, that
she could have started skipping down the narrow Benedict Street
pavement. She could even have snatched up a certain ragged
little boy she was always meeting down there and hugged him
to her heart and danced him up and down and made him cry with
surprise and offended dignity, and all from a delight in life
that, as it poured through her sometimes, seemed to know no
bounds. Certain ways of her husband's--certain mean little phys-
ical peculiarities, and Nancy was not by nature at all fastidious
made her feel sometimes as if she could not go on living with
him. But she had devised all manner of devices to deal with
these nasty ways and she never felt hopelessly caught, because
she was always telling herself stories of running away from him.

Harry Stickles certainly did possess quite a number of pecu-
liarities which would have been nerve-racking to any less well-
constituted girl. These nasty little ways were made worse by
the man's preposterous and incredible conceit. But Nancy had
been given by Nature one supreme gift---wherein only one other
person in Glastonbury rivalled her, and that was John Crow--
the gift of forgetting. Harry could do something at one minute
that offended her to the quick, something that so scraped, jarred,
and raked her nerves that she could have rushed to the window
and flung into the road one of those big coloured receptacles,
red and green, that mark a chemist's shop ; and yet, three minutes
later, as she sat sewing in her parlour window, what she called
her "fancies" would begin as deliciously as ever! Nancy's fan-
cies were simply her sudden recollection of certain moments
of intense realisation of life as they had occurred several years
ago. They were nothing more than the look of a particular wall,
of a particular tract of hedge, of a particular piece of road, of
a certain hay-wagon on a certain hillside, of a particular pond
with ducks swimming on it and a red cow stepping very slowly
through the mud, of a load of seaweed being pulled up from
the beach by struggling horses, of the stone bridge crossing the
Yeo at Ilchester, of a little toll-pike at Lodmore that seemed
to be made up, as she had seen it from the top of a bus beyond
Weymouth once, of nothing but whitewashed stones and tarred
planks and tall brackish grasses and clouds of white dust. Nancy
could never tell which of her fancies would rise up next like a
fish, making a circle of delicious ripples round it, from the
depths of her mind, nor did she know whether these mental
pictures stored up in her brain were limited in number, and
whether, at a certain point, they would begin recurring all over
again, or whether they were inexhaustible and need never repeat
themselves.

But while Nancy and Elphin kept their vigil, what dreams
there were in Glastonbury! Dreams without any beginning, as
they were without any end. For who ever began a dream? People
always find themselves immersed in the middle of some dream or
other. The essence of sleep does not lie in dreaming; it lies in
a certain dying to the surface life and sinking down into the
life under the surface, where the other life--healing and re-
freshing--exists like an immortal tide of fresh water flowing
beneath the salt water of a turbid sea. It is sufficient to remember
the lovely and mysterious feeling of falling asleep compared
with the crude, raw, iron spikes of the unpleasant things that
happen in dreams to realise the difference. Between the process
of going to sleep and the process of dreaming exists a great
gulf. They seem to belong to different categories of being. But,
however this may be, the fact remains that upon certain nights
in the year--when the tide at Burnham begins to rise with a
weird persistence--the sleep of Glastonbury is a troubled one.
The sturdy northeastern invaders--the ancestors of Philip and
John--beat back more than Mr. Evans' people when they swept
the Celts into South Wales. They beat back with them their
thaumaturgic demigods, the Living Corpse, for instance, of Uther
Pendragon, the mysterious Urien, King of yr Echwyd, the Land
of Glamour and Illusion, the Land whose vapours are always livid
blue, that mystic colour named by the bards gorlassar, and Arawn,
King of Annwn, they beat back, together with those weird pro-
tectors of the heathen Grail, the Fisher King Petchere and the
Maimed King Pelles. All these Beings, so many of whom seem
to recede and vanish away even as they are named among us,
like creatures of a blundered incantation, had the ancestors of
Philip and John and the ancestors of Dave driven back westward.
And along with Mr. Evans' people, and their dark chthonian gods,
these healthy-minded invaders had driven back the very dreams
of these Cymric and Brythonic tribes.

For today it was Mr. Evans and Mrs. Geard and Blackie Mor-
gan, together with that impoverished and mutinous population in
the slums, whose holocaust Philip had seen that night in the
"artistic" pictures of his red coals, who were the true aboriginals,
and the larger part of their blood, like that of the old Lake
Village dwellers, was both pre-Celtic and prehistoric. So that on
this night of all nights, this night of the tenth of December, a
date that always, every year--only none but the witch-wives of
Bove Town and Paradise knew about this---was a significant
date for Glastonbury, what really came back upon this terrific
wind, blowing up out of the western sea and the western isles,
were the dreams of the conquered, those disordered, extravagant
law-breaking dreams, out of which the Shrines of Glastonbury
had originally been built. Nancy Stickles was perfectly right
when she whispered to the darkness, as her white breasts ex-
panded under her black shawl in response to that wind, "What
a thing sleep is--to be in the world!"

It was only upon those happy heads that did not dream, how-
ever, that the true mystery of sleep, carrying those carefree
foreheads deep down under the sacred waters of yr Echwvd,
really descended. Such was the privilege, that night, of both
Lady Rachel and Miss Elizabeth Crow. Such was the privilege
of Mr. Wollop and of Bert Cole. Such was the privilege of
Young Tewsy, of Tittie Petherton and Tilly Crow, of Penny
Pitches and of old Abel Twig. Among the others the eternal con-
test went on, as it had gone on for at least five thousand years,
between the friends of the Grail--that fragment of Beyond-Time
fallen through a crack in the world-ceiling upon the Time-Floor
--and its deadly enemies.

The Grail had come to be the magnet-gatherer of all the
religions that had ever come near Glastonbury. A piece of the
Absolute, it attracted these various cults to itself with an indif-
ference as to their divergency from one another that was almost
cruel. Thus the instinct in Philip and John that drove their souls
forth tonight to go Grail-killing was as blind and overpowering
as that which drove Pellenore to pursue his Questing Beast.

Neither Nancy nor Elphin, these watchers at windows, at the
back of High Street and Cattle Market, were aware of this great
melee of warring dreams, tossing and heaving, with the gon-
falon of the Grail on one side, and on the other the oriflamme
of Reason. Whirled about in that rushing wind, which kept
eddying and ricocheting among the three Glastonbury hills,
drifted those opposed dream-hosts. Every dreamer under those
diverse roofs--from the slate-tiled Elms where Philip lay in
his stuffy room to the draughty stable loft at St. Michae's where
Solly Lew slept his tipsy sleep--was forced, that tenth of De-
cember, to mingle his own private dream with this great noc-
turnal tourney.

John Crow dreamed that they found the Grail on Chalice Hill,
found it in the earth about six feet north of the Well; but when
it was found all the people present turned into a flock of star-
lings and flew away, leaving only himself and that philosophic
wood louse he had imagined encountering the human louse of
the woman with cancer. And he himself was now seized with a
frantic necessity to make water and yet he knew that if he made
water on the earth that wood louse would be drowned. So John
Crow made water into the Holy Grail. When he had finished this
blasphemous sacrilege he observed that the wood louse had
crawled to the rim of the Vessel. "What are you going to do?"
John cried in terror. "Drown myself," replied the louse.

But if that wild wind out of the west disturbed the dreams
of men it did not prove less disturbing to the dreams of women.
Persephone dreamed that green leaves were growing out of her
feet and out of her shoulders and that she was standing stark
naked in the centre of a group of silver-barked birch trees who
were all, like herself, slim, naked girls with green leaves grow-
ing out of their heads and green leaves growing out of their
feet. Near this group, where Persephone was standing, there
grew that nameless tree from the top of Wirral Hill which Mary
had called by one name, Mr. Evans by another, and Mad Bet
by another. And Persephone suddenly saw all the girls turn to-
wards this tree and lifting up their hands begin chanting some-
thing to it. What they chanted was pure gibberish, but Per-
sephone, when she awoke, remembered this gibberish which was
as follows:

"Dominus-Glominus, sow your seed!
Sow your seed, sow your seed!
Glominus-Dominus, rain and dew!
Rain and dew, rain and dew!
We your servants will make your bed!
Make your bed, make your bed!
Some at the foot, and some at the head,
But which of us lies beside you?"

This gibberish was doubtless recalled from some ancient child-
ish jingle, repeated in one of those immemorial games that little
girls love to play together, during which they take one another's
hands and advance and retreat in dancing movements that are
as mysterious to any casual onlooker as the fantastic words that
accompany them. But though recalled to the mind of Persephone
from some half-forgotten game of her childhood, there doubt-
less were words added to it in her dream that could hardly
have been present in the original version, and which were cer-
tainly more suitable to the nature of this wild night of brackish-
smelling Wessex wind than to any harmless ring-of-roses dance
upon a Norfolk lawn. The curious thing was that in Persephone's
own mind, as she dreamed this dream, there occurred one of
those confused metamorphoses which so often make dreams so
bewildering and misleading--the confusion, namely, of this am-
biguous tree with a Cross.

The Mayor of Glastonbury's dreams on that tenth of December
were full for instance of a nightmarish mingling of his daughter
Crummie with Merlin's fatal Nineue, and both Nineue and Crum-
mie with Lady Rachel Zoyland.

Nor were the dreams of the Vicar of Glastonbury less dis-
turbing. Mat Dekker dreamed that he was visiting Nell Zoyland
at the hospital, where he had, as a matter of fact, visited her
already three times, and that he was giving her the Blessed
Sacrament, a thing he had often longed to do, but had never
dared to suggest doing. He was on the point of raising the Cup
to her lips when it grew so heavy in his hands that he could
scarcely lift it. The Cup, in fact, transformed itself into Mother
Legge's silver bowl--or rather Kitty Camel's silver bowl--with
which of course Mat Dekker had been familiar before it passed
into its present owner's possession. Whiter and whiter grew this
sacramental Cup as the priest struggled with it in his dream.
"I must hold it tight," he thought, "I must press it against me."
And then there happened a metamorphosis similar to the one
that had occurred in Percy's dream, only in the reverse order;
for while, with Percy, the tree turned into the Cross, with Mat
Dekker the Grail turned into Nell Zoyland. So deep had been
the wrestling of this man's majestic character with his passion
for this girl, that until tonight, even in his dreams, he had re-
sisted temptation. But tonight there happened to him one of those
occasions when great creative Nature manages to outwit the
strongest self-control. Nature achieved her end by lodging in
Mat Dekker's mind the feeling that at all costs he must hold this
white bowl firm and tight against him, so that it should not spill
a drop of Christ's blood. But as he held it in his dream, and
as it became the body of the girl he so terribly desired, Nature
managed to so numb, drug, dull, confuse, cloud, hypnotise, para-
lyse and otherwise "metagrabolise" Mat Dekker's implacable
conscience, that it allowed him to give way with good heart to
a spasm of such exquisite love-making that it was, to the poor
ascetic priest, like the opening of the gates of heaven!

Little did Elphin Cantle know, as he clutched his father's old
stable coat--now his own bed-cover--tighter and tighter round
him at his turret window, that the psychic current of his wrath
against the Glastonbury superstition was aided by the austere
dream-gestures of Dave Spear from another quarter of the Old
Tavern. Dave's thoughts before he had gone to sleep that night
had been calm and peaceful. He had dined with his wife at
Dickery Cantle's old-fashioned ordinary in the tavern parlour,
and Percy had listened so sweetly to his stories about their
Bristol comrades that he had been tempted to reveal to her the
great scheme he had now on foot. Where communism was con-
cerned, however, Dave was a man of iron; and in spite of the
fact that their whole plan was originally her own inspiration,
he had thought it wiser--as it certainly was!--to hold his tongue
over all that. But to all that he did allow to pass, in that ex-
pressive Homeric phrase, "the barrier of his teeth," Percy had
listened with much more than her usual attention. Something
in the rising wind had roused her feelings to a pitch of imper-
sonal tenderness, and her husband happened, by good luck, to
be the beneficiary of this soft mood. But once asleep Dave's
mind reverted at once to his great conspiracy, and the crying
of the wind in his chimney and the flapping of the blind in his
window worked into his dreams and made them as disturbed
as Percy's own, but to a different issue. For the walls of a real
commune rose up in Dave's dream as that wild wind, blowing
out of Wales, made the historic house about him creak and groan
through all its ancient beams and rafters. Thus had it groaned
when the emissaries of Henry hunted out of its seclusion the
last faithful servants of the Abbey. Thus had it groaned when
the spies of James dragged forth the unhappy preachers who
had supported Monmouth. The whole conflicting tenor of Dave
Spear's life-struggle with himself would have been revealed had
his dream been written down, "For the sake of the future,'' he
kept muttering, when, as dictator of his commune, he gave orders
for the Abbey Ruins to be destroyed and the Mayor's new build-
ings to be levelled with the ground. Clean and fresh rose, in his
dream, the new Ynis-Witrin, founded, this time, not on the
tricks of kings and priests, but on the equal labours and rewards
of workingmen. "For the sake of the future!" he cried in his
sleep as he watched the destruction of shrine after shrine.

But if Dave's dreams that night were drastic, the conduct or
his fellow-conspirator, Red Robinson, who was awake and drink-
ing and making love, in complete imperviousness to this mys-
tical procession of bodiless shapes, was neither very drastic nor
very brave. Red had persuaded Sally Jones to sit up with him
after closing hours in the back parlour of St. Michael's Inn This
was a proceeding that would have got the good-natured land-
lord into trouble had it been discovered, but Red had grown
so tired of his miserably hurried interviews with the girl, in
her mother's home and his mother's home, after her day's work
at the Geards', that he had broken away from his usual caution.
Sally, who had a latch-key of her own, would just have to tell
her mother that Miss Cordelia had kept her late that day to
help with the preparations for her wedding. They had decided
that it was best that Sally when she left St. Michael's near mid-
night should walk home alone and should even make a short
detour so; as to approach her home from the direction of the
Geards "Neighbours be such ones for noticing things, she had
said, "and 'tis no good to start a lot of talk when there be no
cause for talk." To this sentiment Mr. Robinson had given a
cordial assent. He found himself, as a matter of fact, extremely
comfortable in the little, seldom-used inn-parlour with halt a
bottle of gin unfinished on the table and a good fire in the grate.

The old lady of the house--Mad Bet's aunt--had been friendly
to the Robinsons ever since, owing to Mrs. Robinson's employ-
ment in the Palace at Wells, they had first settled in Glaston-
bury. This friendliness--such is the importance of small matters
in small towns--was due to the fact that Mad Bet's aunt had a
sister who had married a man "down Richmond way." The man
was long dead and so was the sister, but the accent of the Rob-
insons pleased the landlady. "The way you folks talks," she
said, "do mind me of sister's husband."

It would never have done for Red to bring Blackie to this
inn, because they knew his mother. Crummie, of course, too
could never have come. But he now began to enjoy the full
benefit of having found a girl at once so respectable and so
simple-minded as Sally Jones. When Sally was going and they
stood talking in the hallway, the landlady pointed upstairs and
spoke in a whispering voice. "'Er been a sore trial today, 'er
been! John had to lock she up in back room. 'Er were so noisy,
you understand, in front. 'Er be asleep now, John thinks, and
'a holds tis best to let she bide where 'a be. She don't, as general
rule, settle down to sleep in back room. Back room ain't what
you might call the room anyone would choose to sleep in, but
Bet ain't as pertikkler as some folks be, owing to her being as
she is" Destiny or chance, whichever it was, now decreed that
Red Robinson, having supped full of the sweets of love, was
to be deprived of the pleasant half hour of luxurious rumination
which he had planned for himself. The old landlord went himself
"a step of the way" down Chilkwell Street with Sally. "The
wind can't hurt a pretty girl," he said, "but it can ruffle and
rumple her worse nor we would ever be allowed for to do."

There was a stir and a confusion now in the little passage
that led from the back of the bar-room to the old cobbled yard.
Solly Lew suddenly appeared in sight from these back premises
dragging after him into the lamplight an extraordinary figure.
"Missus! Missus!" the stableman was crying. "You...must
...pardon...me...if--" Mr. Lew was quite out of breath. He was
panting "like a hound in summer" as he struggled to hold
back the person who emerged with him now. "I've a told
Finn Toller that 'a be too boozed to speak to any Christian
man, least of all to any friend of the family, but 'a says 'a
must speak in private to Mr. Robinson."

"In...private...so I said,' repeated the drunken derelict, stag-
gering to an erect position but keeping his hand on Solly
Lew's shoulder. "In...private it must be. lookee! And old
Finn do know what's in's mind to say to 'un, though ‘a
have had a tidy drop in out-house...but old Finn do know...
old Finn do know!"

The lamplight by which the landlady of St. Michael's now
watched with an indignant eye this invasion of her premises
hung over the back door of the inn. It swayed to and fro in
the wind, and through the open door, behind the two lurching
men. Red Robinson could catch a glimpse of faintly gleaming
cobblestones and dimly illuminated woodpiles and empty beer-
bottles. A large rain-filled water-butt showed too in that gusty
door frame, while along with the howling wind there came a
strong odour of rank straw and sour human urine.

"Yer ain't fit to talk to the Missus nor to her friends!" re-
iterated Solly, "Yer ain't fit for naught but workus, and to
workus ye'll come, yer old rum-drinker, yer old deck-swabbler ! "

"Stand straight and answer me at once, Finn Toller," ex-
claimed the angry landlady. "What were you doing in our yard?
Come, come, now. No nonsense! I say, what were you doing
there, Finn Toller? Speak up! Can't you understand plain
English?" *

"I dunno what to say to 'ee, Missus," muttered the helpless
ruffian, "but I do know well in me mind that 'tis Mr. Robinson
here what I've 'a come for to see...for...to see...for...to..." At
this point, so potent was the Bristol rum to which Solly Lew
had been rashly treating this fish from the bottom of the Glas-
tonbury Pond, that, disregarding the landlady's indignation the
wretch actually began murmuring a lewd catch that had been
formerly popular in Bove Town and Beckery.

"I've a whisper for you, in your mare's-tail-ear';
Pillicock crowed to Kate,
‘I've a whisper for you, me Coney dear,
Your man be away over Homblotton Mere
And I be at your gate.'"

Mr. Finn Toller in his natural condition was no engaging sight
In his present state he was a revolting object. He was a sandy-
haired individual with a loose, straggly, pale-coloured beard. He
gave the impression of being completely devoid of both eyebrows
and eyelashes, so bleached and whitish in his case were these
normal appendages to the human countenance. His mouth was
always open and always slobbering, but although his whole
expression was furtive and dodging, his teeth were large and
strong and wolfish. Mr. Toller looked, in fact, like a man weak
to the verge of imbecility who had been ironically endowed with
the teeth of a strong beast of prey.

Red Robinson did not at all relish the look of things as this
repulsive hang-dog creature shuffled now towards him and fixed
upon him a look of revolting confederacy, a look that seemed
to say: "Here I am, Mr. Robinson! You've called me up and
here I am!" The truth was that at the end of one of his most
eloquent revolutionary speeches to the Glastonbury Comrades,
Mr. Toller had sneaked up to Red and compelled him to write
his name down, in the book they kept, as available for any
activities required--"and the dirtier the better!" Mr. Toller had
added, as he slobbered over the table. Red had got into trouble
with the other Comrades for allowing the man to write his name
down in their book. They told him that it was enough for him
if the filthiest beggar swore he would spit in the road when Mr.
Crow passed by! "That's enough to haul him into the party, eh?"
they said. Nor was their sarcasm unjustified. Red took no in-
terest at all in keeping up the quality or integrity of the Com-
rades. What he was after, as Finn Toller with his wolfish instinct
had very quickly detected, were recruits, not to Marxianism, but
to 'ate.

"My husband will be back in a minute," said the landlady
sternly, "and you remember how he got rid of you the other
night when you were hanging about so late!"

"What I've got...to say, Missus, be for Mr. Robinson's ear
alone. Please allow me, Missus, for all that us poor folks have
got left"--he stopped and threw a very sinister leer at Red--
"be what be put in our minds by they as be book-larned and
glib of tongue, like this clever Mister here, who is foreman of
his Worship's. Us poor dogs hasn't got anything left in the
world, us hasn't, except they nice, little thoughties, they pretty
thoughties, what clever ones, like Mister here, do put into we."
It was clear that the threat of the landlord's return had sobered
"Codfin," as his neighbors called him, quite a good deal. He
seemed able to walk by himself now, for he shook away Solly
Lew's supporting arm. His pale, lidless, blue eyes began peering
about, like the eyes of a maggot dislodged from its native habita-
tion and seeking a refuge. "If Mr. Robinson will come in here
with me," he said now, moving towards the pleasant parlour
where Red and Sally had been enjoying themselves, "I won't
make no trouble for no one; but if Mister here, what be so
clever and so book-larned, won't let I speak to he, I'll raise
such a trouble that you'll have to call for the police."

"What impudence is this?" cried the landlady. "You wait
till my husband comes back. He'll show you whether he has to
call for the police to give you the--" But to the good woman's
complete amazement Red himself intervened at this point.

"High'd better 'ear what 'ee 'as to sigh," he said. " Tis no
good disturbing the plice when 'ee says 'ee'll go quiet as a lamb
of 'is own self, if I tike 'im in there for a jiffy. That's so, ain't
it, Codfin?"

Mr. Toller, apparently completely sobered now, bowed to the
landlady, made a grimace at Solly Lew, and followed his "clever
one" into the parlour where Red shut the door. It would be
difficult to explain the subtle cause of Mr. Robinson's submission
to this demand of Mr. Toller to speak with him, but undoubt-
edly, mingled with other things, there had sprung up, the very
second these two men met, that curious psychic fear, of which
mention has already been made in regard to Lord P.'s attitude
to his bastard. Glastonbury was, if the real truth were revealed,
just as every small town is, crowded with queer, morbid and
even humorous instances of this irrational terror of one person-
ality for another. These fear-links can be grotesquely joined up in
a spiritual mathematical and nervous pattern of psychic sub-
ordination.

Philip Crow himself had been afraid--in this particular way
--of Tom Barter. Indeed these mysterious fear-links brought
together--in an ascending and descending scale of fear--the
great Lord P. and the gentleman called Codfin. For Lord P.
was afraid of Zoyland. Zoyland was afraid of Philip. Philip--
though this latter did not know it--was afraid of Barter. Barter
was afraid of Red. While Red--and here we reach the convoluted
secret as to why he was at this very moment so carefully closing
the parlour door--was afraid of Mr. Toller.

They were an interesting and curious pair as they stood facing
each other now by that parlour fireplace. Red was determined not
to offer Codfin a drink or to ask him to sit down. Mr. Toller's
watery blue eyes, blotched, freckly face and tow-coloured beard
kept turning, with a sort of feeble insistence, like that of a great,
dazed, malignant cockchafer, towards the half-empty bottle.

"What is it?" said Red. "What do you want? Tell me quickly,
for he'll be back in a minute. He's only taking Miss Jones a
bit of the way home." There was no earthly reason why Red
should have informed Codfin that the landlord of St. Michael's
was taking Miss Jones anywhere! This excessive, hurried, eager
confidence, expressed in a cross and peevish tone, was a beautiful
example of psychic link-fear, working in accordance with its
nature.

After shutting the door Red walked to the fireplace, leaving
Finn Toller standing in the middle of the room. Red glanced at
the man hurriedly and then, quite as hurriedly, turned his face
away. From the straggly beard, the watery eyes, the ragged
clothes, there emanated something that Red found extremely per-
turbing. It was one of those moments when the pre-birth stirrings
of a gbaslly idea are huddled and swaddled in an ominous
silence. Certain thoughts, that have been long nurtured in deep
half-conscious brooding, manifest themselves, when they finally
emerge into the light, with a horrid tangibility that is like the
impact of something physically shocking. And into this warm,
firelit room, full of the aura of a young feminine body that
has been so assiduously courted and caressed that its sweet es-
sence pervades the air, there now projected itself a presence
that was monstrous, revolting, intolerable.

From each particular hair of Mr. Toller's beard this presence
emanated. From the adam's apple in his bare, dirty neck, from
the blood-stained rims of his watery eyes, from the yellowish
fluff, growing like fungus on cheese from the back of his hands,
from a certain beyond-the-pale look of his naked, shirtless wrist-
bones, this presence grew and grew and grew in that closed
room. It sprang from Toller; but it was distinct from Toller.
It seemed to find in the fragrance of the courted body of Sally
Jones an air favourable to its monstrous expansion.

Red could not reasonably, normally, have divined the nature
of this horrid thought, of this newly born abortion from the
broodings of Mr. Toller's brain. There must have been within
him some protoplasmic response to it, created by the germinat-
ing poisons of his 'ate, of which he himself was unconscious.
Violence must have called to violence, like deep calling to deep,
between what was unconscious in the one and conscious in the
other. Once more he glanced furtively, quickly, at the man stand-
ing by the table, and this time their eyes met.

"'Twas your cleverness what put it first into me head." Had
Mr. Toller uttered those words or had he thought those words
himself? Red felt a peculiar and ghastly unreality stealing over
him. The gin-bottle looked unreal. The carpet looked unreal. The
low wicker-chair with its flowered cushions where he had so
recently held Sally on his lap looked most unreal of all. "What's
that you're sighing?" His own words seemed unreal now as soon
as they left his mouth.

"A bloated capitalist, like 'im, what do hexploit us poor dawgs,
ought to lickidated." It was Mr. Toller undoubtedly who was
saying that; and Red recognized his own oratorical expres-
sion, "liquidated," the meaning of which, for the word had
reached him from Bristol, had always puzzled him--though this
had not prevented him from using it in his orations.

"A hairy-stow-crat like he be oughter be lickidated!" re-
peated Mr. Toller; and Red's discomfort was augmented by the
manner in which the man's mouth dribbled as the words left
his throat.

"You're drunk...that's what you are...too drunk to know your
own nime...and if I weren't hunwillin' to disturb this quiet 'ouse "

"Lickidated be to tap on's bloody head, I tell 'ee...tap on's
head, till's bloody brains be out!"

It was not the words alone, it was a certain galvanic twitch
that accompanied them in Mr. Toller's hands, that made Red be-
gin now to feel sick in the pit of his stomach. He suddenly found
himself becoming fascinated by Mr. Toller's hands. As he looked
at these hands he noticed that they were not only short and stubby
hands, but--and this was quite unlike most stubby hands--they
were hands that tapered at the fingertips and could bend back-
wards. How patient, harmless, reassuring, most human hands
are! But Red realised now that Mr. Toller's hands were much
more disturbing than any expression in the features of his face.

In all minds there are abominable thoughts. We are all potential
murderers. But something--some feeling, some motion of the
will, some scruple, some principle--intervenes, and we can-
not act what we think! But there was a look about Mr. Toller's
hands that seemed like the cry of murder in the night, like the
underside of bridges, like shrubberies in public parks, like tin-
roofed sheds near madhouses, like gasworks beside foul canals,
something that unravelled the skein, that broke up the funda-
mental necessity and substituted a monstrous terrifying chaos
...deep, black holes...dangling ropes...the desperate dilemma of
the indestructible corpse...the horror of the secret held by one
alone...

Red now began to see those hands of Codfin at the throat of
life, at the throat of that life which meant the sweet body of
Sally Jones, the carved bishop's chair in his mother's kitchen,
the liver-and-bacon in his mother's frying-pan not to speak of
his nice, new foreman's clothes! It was part of life that there
should be persons like Codfin going harmlessly about...per-
sons that a workingman foreman could pass by, but that the
gentry--like that John Crow who had the office in the station
yard--were bound in honour to treat to drinks. And those hands
were now to be raised against life...the life of a living man!
Those hands were tools of "liquidation." No more liver-and-
bacon, no more bottles of gin, no more girls on laps, when those
hands were lifted up. Unreal! That's what this moment was, and
unreal in the way that makes a person feel sick. That straggly
beard and slobbering mouth were talking of "lickidation"; but
they were thinking of murder. The blood began to leave Red's
cheeks. Poor people might be hungry, sick people might be sick,
weak peqple might have to carry burdens--but they were all
alive! And even death, when it came in the natural course of
things, had a secret inevitable comfortableness about it! You
could talk of such death with a girl on your lap. But murder--
that was a different thing...

"I couldn't do it with a knife, Mister." The words sank down
into the fireplace at which Red was now staring. Red allowed
them to sink, like eight black marbles thrown by a wicked child
into a particularly red hole.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Toller," he whis-
pered in a low voice.

But the other went on: "Nor with a bullet, Mister, for I be
feared o' they little pop-guns." Sharply, after the other eight
marbles, went these thirteen simple words, all of them into the
same red hole. "One of they iron bars 'ud do to do't with, what
his workmen do leave about, up alongside o' Wookey." As he
spoke, the man made a feeble and fluctuating movement of his
whole person towards the table, on which stood the half-empty
bottle of gin, a decanter of water, and a plate of gingerbreads.

Red, as his eyes followed him, remembered with miserable
vividness how Sally and he had played a merry London board-
school game with those gingerbreads, having a racing match to-
gether to see how many they could swallow while the little min-
ute hand of his watch went round the circle.

"Toller!" he rapped out. "What, in 'oly 'ell, are you talking
about?"

The individual known as Codfin patted the stopper of the
bottle with the palm of one of his hands. Then he threw a long,
silent, sidelong glance at Red out of his lidless and lachrymose
blue eyes. He said slowly: "Don't 'ee go and get crusty wi' I,
Mister. I baint a clever one like you be, but I can look up won-
drous long words in dick-shone-ary, I can. They do know I well
in public library. A person don't have to write no slip o' paper
for to take dick-shone-ary down from shelf!"

"Toller!" snapped Red again. "What in 'old 'arry's name are
yer mumbling about?"

"Tirry-aniseed be the word you spoke up, so free and strong,
when you made thik girt speech about lickidation, Mister. And
'twere wondrous to I, when I did see thik same girt word writ
down in dick-shone-ary! Tirry-aniseed were thik long word, and
it do mean a sweet and savoury killing of he that lives on poor
men's sweat."

"Toller!" gasped Red in horrified alarm. "You stove that,
strite and now! You stove it, I say! Shut yer bleedin' mouth and
go to 'ell with your hidiocies! People in speeches may curse
these bleedin' capitalists, but people what Like to iron bars are
murderers, that's what they are, pline, downright murderers; and
people who even 'ear such things be complexes of murderers;
and I tell yer. Toller, I won't so much as 'ear one word more o'
this from yer bleedin' mouth. I'll call the Missus strite now,
and see what she says to your blitherin' hidiocies! Yes, I will.
I'll call her strite now!" He moved, as he spoke, towards the
door, but instead of displaying the least alarm at his threat, Mr.
Toller, with ghastly sangfroid, began deliberately to pull the cork
from the bottle and pour himself out a glass of raw gin.

Red's hand was actually on the handle of the door when he
turned round and contemplated this outrageous spectacle. His
face worked convulsively, as he stood there; the mixture of fear
and fury in his heart almost choking him.

"Put--that stuff--down!" he spluttered; but instead of open-
ing the door he found himself holding it tight shut with a sort
of guilty violence. In a flash he beheld himself in the dock at
Taunton, accused of plotting Philip Crow's murder at the hands
of this slobbering devil. But Finn Toller coolly and quietly re-
placed the cork in the bottle.

"Thik iron bar be the best thing, then," he repeated. "I thought
a man like you be, Mister, would say nothing less! I couldn't
do it wi' a knife, nor yet wi' a bullet. One o' they girt iron bars
be the very thing for anyone what feels on his mind, as thee
and me does, the sweet savour of tirry-aniseed!"

Red glanced past that pock-marked, freckled face, wherein the
weak blue eyes were suffused with a watery rheum, and stared
miserably at the gingerbread on the table. How foolish people
were, he thought, not to enjoy, with a gratitude to fate beyond
expression, every minute of respectable, innocent happiness that
was not in danger of the jail or the rope!

His moment of supreme misery was brought to an end by the
heavenly sound of the front door opening and the voice of the
landlord of St. Michael's Inn, raised in genial badinage. Never
was a tiresome old gentleman's voice more welcome.

As Red opened the door, so vivid had been his plunge into
crime, condemnation, convict's clothes, picking oakum, warders,
jailers, chaplains, executioners, black-caps, drops, and burning
lime, that he vowed that never again in his whole life would he
introduce into a speech the word "tyrannicide." As Finn Toller
sneaked off now, under cover of the lively eulogies of "Miss
Jones" that poured from the lips of the blustering old man, Red
felt that never again, either, would he boast of heroic bloodshed
to his admiring Sally. He had got such a glimpse into the mon-
strous, as he watched the adam's apple in Mr. Toller's throat jerk
up and down while he drank that gin, that he thought as he sub-
mitted to the old gentleman's jokes, "Better listen to such old-
time stuff to the end of me dyes, rather than 'ave the 'orrible
tighst in me mouth what I 'ad just then!"

"Well, if ye baint ashamed of yourself, ye ought to be!" pro-
nounced Solly Lew emphatically as he dismissed his late protege
through the back of the old stables and new garage.

"Us haven't done no harm to they, nor they done no harm to
we," protested Toller in a wheedling voice. "That were wondrous
fine rum you gived I, Mr. Lew, and if the Lord wills I'll pay the
good deed back to 'ee, come Christmas. Good night, Mr. Lew,--
don't 'ee trouble to come no further. 'Tis a wild night for wind,
looks so, but no token o' rain! I never likes these windy nights,
Mr. Lew. They disturbs a person's' mind. Yes, I knows me way,
thank 'ee kindly, god-den to 'ee."

But when Solly Lew had gone back into the house, Mr. Toller
made no hurried departure from the scene. He had long been
practising in Glastonbury certain patient, quiet, humble little
methods of burglary; of burglary so unassuming, so unpre-
tentious, so easily satisfied, that he had only once been caught
at it, and since it was Bloody Johnny who caught him, eating un-
cooked sausages in his larder one November night, Codfin es-
caped even on that occasion with an eccentric reprimand.

He now set himself to survey the back premises of St. Michael's
Inn. He had long been anxious to find out exactly how the land
lay in this establishment, and tonight he felt in very good spirits,
having found out all he wanted, and at the same time, by a stroke
of what in his own mind he regarded as pure personal superiority,
reduced the Mayor's foreman--and how he had done it he him-
self hardly knew!--to a position of nervous subordination.

He now planted himself under the protection of a big plum-
tree that grew against the old stable roof and proceeded with up-
lifted beard to contemplate pensively the rear of the house. It
must not be supposed that all the excited outpourings of human
feeling that were whirling off on that west wind from so many
dreaming heads--not to mention the two watchers at the open
windows--were without their effect upon the nervous organisa-
tion of the watery-eyed Mr. Toller. Had Solly Lew, or any other
boon-companion, enquired of him how he felt just then, Codfin
would have doubtless replied--"I never have liked these here
windy nights. These here nights be turble hummy and drummy
to me pore head."

As his weak eyes slowly swept over the ramshackle roofs and
walls and chimneys before him, Toller's figure suddenly stiffened,
like a nocturnal animal conscious of danger. He became aware
that one of the back windows of the main structure of the house
was wide open and that a human face was intently scrutinising
him; and not only scrutinising him, but making signals to attract
his attention.

Now Mr. Toller, who had no scruple about using iron bars
and who had not the slightest fear of Mr. Sheperd, the old Glas-
tonbury policeman, had from his childhood been awed into hum-
ble respect by the personality of Mad Bet. He recognised now
that there was nothing for it but that he must do this creature's
bidding. He recognised, in fact, with the same instinctive knowl-
edge which Red had shown in his own case, that when in the
presence of Mad Bet he was in the presence of a nature born
to dominate him.

The woman was beckoning to him to climb up upon the stable-.
roof and come to her window"; an exploit which, for a person
with any agility at all, was not a very difficult task. Mr. Toller
accordingly made an obeisance with his head and a sort of
salaam with his hands, such as Sinbad the Sailor might have
made in the presence of some Grandmother of the Djinn, and
set himself to climb. The wind was his chief trouble in this
ascent; for the plum tree afforded him a ladder at the begin-
ning; and once on the roof, as far as the actual climbing went,
all was easy. But the wind made it difficult for the man to keep
his balance; made it very difficult for him to advance. He
crawled forward upon his knees as best he could; but many
times he was forced to lie prone on his stomach and remain
absolutely still while the wind-gust whirled over him.

What did Codfin think about during these moments when he
lay on the cold slate tiles, in considerable peril of being toppled
over and rolled down? To translate his thoughts into ordinary
speech would cause their tang, their salt, their fine edge, to be
lost; but the drift of them was doubtless something like this:
"I'll be glad when Mad Bet lets me go. Mad Bet's got a message
for me. Mad Bet's message is to some man she's taken with. I
wouldn't mind, same as some would, if Mad Bet were taken wi'
I! A 'ooman be a 'ooman; and when a 'ooman do smile at I, it
do wrinkle up her face, all soft and sweet, even if she be as ugly
as sin."

Such, in rough clumsy short-hand, were some of Codfin's
thoughts as he advanced slowly over the stable roof, lying flat
when the gusts were worst, and crawling forward when they
subsided.

According to the wise, if somewhat tragic philosophy of Dr.
Fell, the thoughts of this scum-beetle from the Beckery stews
were just as important, in the total sum of things, that night
of the tenth of December, as the dreams of Parson Dekker or of
the Mayor himself. But it must be remembered too that accord-
ing to Dr. Fell's philosophy there was a deep importance, per-
haps only a little less deep, in the feelings of a bewildered flea
that Mr. Toller had carried away in his vest with him from his
Beckery lodging.

"'Twere sweet as rum and sugar to make that cockney sod
take notice!" Such might be a rough translation of yet another of
Mr. Toller's thoughts as he cowered in the wind under the racing
clouds and tore his finger-nails in the interstices of the slate tiles.
Those old slate tiles, on St. Michael's stable roof, came from the
same part of South Wales as did this great west wind and neither
they nor it seemed prepared to lend themselves easily to the
proceedings of Codfin thus struggling to obey the commands of
Mad Bet.

But he reached her window at last and to his dismay found
that she intended to descend to the ground in his company!
Finn Toller was not the man to shirk; but it must be confessed
that if there had been any trace of tipsiness left in him, this
command of the madwoman's--and it was given with the calmest
certainty of its being obeyed--would have made him deadly
sober.

The woman was warmly dressed and warmly shawled for the
adventure when he finally reached her. That was one good thing.
Another good thing was that her bonnet was tied with very
strong tight strings under her chin. He could never have got her
down in this wind, though he probably would have tried, if she
hadn't herself, with the supernatural cunning of the insane, told
him exactly what to do. She Lold him exactly where he could
find a ladder and she told him how he could fix the end of this
ladder in the projecting leaden rain-pipe and lay it flat along
the roof, thus affording a support for her knees in the wind,
and, when they finally -reached the gutter, an easy way of get-
ting down.

It took so long to make all these moves, especially when he
had the woman out upon the roof with him, that by the time
he had got the ladder safe down from the leaden gutter and had
it firmly fixed in the earth for her final descent, it was about
three o'clock.

"Her be a master-sprite, her be!" he thought to himself, as he
looked up at the wind-blown shawl and flapping bonnet huddled
at the edge of the water-spout; though where he had picked up
the phrase "master-sprite" he could not for the life of him have
remembered.

She made him take the ladder back when she was once on
the ground, to the place where he had found it. Then, for the
first time, she told him what she wanted him to do.

An hour later--but still a long way from the approach of the
winter's dawn--Finn Toller found himself seated inside St.
Michael's Tower on the top of Glastonbury Tor, facing Mad Bet.
Mr. Geard's London architect had lately been making a few
necessary repairs in the interior of the structure and it was only
for this reason that these two had been able to enter. It would
have been totally dark within this stone fortress of Mat Dekker's
God had not Betsy--who had made, during the long half hour
when her liberator was fighting the wind on that stable roof,
the cunning preparations of a crazy one with a fixed idea--
brought with her two or three candle-ends, extracted from candle-
sticks left by chance in her place of temporary captivity.

Finn Toller produced matches from his pocket and proceeded
to light one of these candle-ends, setting it up, by the help of its
own grease, upon a piece of boarding. The flickering little flame
soon illuminated--but there were no living eyes except their own
to envisage the scene--not only Bet's old-fashioned bonnet and
quilted shawl, but the straggly beard, freckled face and watery
eyes of the derelict who sat opposite her, and who now filled
the blackened stub of a clay pipe and set himself to smoke, as
he leaned his back against the eastern wall of their square stone
refuge.

The howling and shrieking of the wind, as these two sat there,
made about their ears a deafening tumult, so that it was neces-
sary for them to raise their voices to an unnatural pitch if they
were to make their meaning audible. So innocently heathen was
Finn Toller that when Bet shouted at him: "Archangel's walls
be strong 'gainst they Devils!" he had the notion under his tow-
coloured poll that Bet was referring to her familiar spirit by
some particular pet name.

But Bet was quite right. Gwyn-ap-Nud's Powers of the Air
were surely abroad in full force that night; and Michael's great
wings needed to be strong indeed to ward off from Glastonbury
these rushing hosts.

"Why don't Mayor Geard build up Archangel's Church?" shouted
the woman, "instead of dipping folk's bodies in thik wold Well?"

Mad Bet had put an unanswerable conundrum this time be-
fore her rescuer. Mat Dekker would have altogether entered into
the spirit of this question. Over and over again had he remarked
to Sam--"There can't be more than a dozen real Christians in
this place, me boy; or instead of these fantastical Pageants I'd
be celebrating Mass up there in a great new church!"

But Finn Toller puffed away at his clay pipe in silence. His
awe in the presence of his companion was so great that he had
actually done what he had never in his life done before; asked
a woman's permission to light this pipe of his! And Mad Bet's
permission had been given in true hieratic fashion. But it was a
different thing when she talked to him of rebuilding churches
to St. Michael. A patient, though not a sulky silence fell on
him then.

Finn Toller took off his cap and leaned back his head against
the stone wall. He couldn't see the stars at the top of the great
funnel in which they sat, because of certain cross-beams which
the Mayor's architect had put across that dark hollow space. He
experienced at that moment, however, one of the nearest ap-
proaches to religious exultation that he had known since as a
child he had been taken to see General Booth pass through town.
To be alone with Mad Bet on the top of Glastonbury Tor was
something to remember. Burglaries and iron bars were trifles in
comparison. But to be alone with a holy 'ooman, as he mentally
named his companion, was not destined to be without its penal-
ties. It was with some perturbation that he saw her now bend-
ing down over their solitary candle-flame.

"What be doing, Mad Bet?" he enquired nervously, using the
epithet mad much as Tossie would have used the word Lady-
ship in addressing Rachel.

The woman was melting one of her other candle-ends at the
lighted candle. Having reduced the wax thereof to the desired
softness she rapidly proceeded to mould it into the rough like-
ness of a human figure.

"Thik be her!" she now remarked, holding up this distorted
inch of wax.

Then, hurriedly rising, she muttered some devilish incantation,
quite inaudible to the dumbfounded Codfin, and proceeded to
stamp upon the image she had made, grinding the wax into a
shapeless mass of candle-grease and mud and saw-dust, under
her heavy heel. As she trod, she began muttering again; but this
time her words were audible to the astonished waif from the
Beckery slum:

"Dirt ye was and dirt ye shall be!" screamed the madwoman
ferociously. "I've a done for 'ee now, ye bitch! Dirt ye be now,
I tell 'ee! Dirt ye be; as ye were afore he picked 'ee up! Dirt!
Dirt! Dirt!" and the grinding heel finished its savage job so
completely that there was soon nothing left of that fragment of
obliterated wax. Then with several long-drawn panting breaths
Mad Bet resumed her seat.

"Can 'ee keep a secret, man?" she shouted at the agitated Mr.
Toller whose watery eyes were now staring anxiously at the tower
door.

It was in Codfin's mind that her familiar spirit, whom he had
heard invoked as "Archangel," might at any second take a pal-
pable shape. This was the only moment in that long eventful
night when Mr. Toller experienced a real shock of agitation, save
for his first sight of the woman at the window.

"I be a grave for they secrets, Mad Bet," he now remarked,
in a resigned voice, puffing furiously at his pipe as if with the
intent to evoke a screen of wholesome smoke between himself
and the supernatural.

"'Twere her what you seed I stamp into nothing," went on
the madwoman. "In Archangel's Tower I stamped on she.
Looksee!--how candle do splutter and spit! Now 'tis done. 'Twere
her I stampit out. Hist! How thik wind do blow! 'Twere me wone
heel what stampit she into dirt. Her be dirt now; and her'll stay
dirt till Judgment!"

Mr. Toller's eyes became more watery than ever owing to the
acrid smoke which he sucked out and blew forth. To his com-
panion's tirade he thought best to make no reply. He had almost
as strong a desire to disassociate himself from these proceed-
ings as poor Red had recently had to disassociate himself from
"tirry-aniseed" and iron bars.

"If I speak her name, Finn Toller, will ye hold 'un mute and
mum in thee's deep soul?"

Mr. Toller's lower lip hung down; and two thin streams of
saliva, stained with tobacco-juice, dripped upon his filthy shirt
and upon his still filthier vest. The flea which he had brought
with him from his Beckery shanty snuggled up to his breastbone,
deriving much comfort from the pale-coloured hairs, smelling
like those of a dead stoat, which grew on the man's chest.

But he answered, as Homer would say, "from his steadfast
heart": "What you do tell to I, Mad Bet, be more hid than they
hanging-stones in Wookey. Folk can see they stones for sixpence;
but not for twenty pound would I betray thee, 'ooman...no, not
for twenty times twenty!"

Thus reassured, Mad Bet spoke her mind freely.

"Her be thik baggage, thik hell's broth piece o' harlotry, what
lives wi' wold Miss Drew. Some do say she be married to 'un;
others do say she be his light-o'-love. But whether or no for
that, she do go to's bed in Northload, every night, weekday and
Sunday. She do bless herself for living soft and cosy wi' thik
old 'ooman by day, and she do mightily cherish being colled and
clipped in's bed, when night do come! Heigh! but she do like
being naked to thik man's dear hand, night by night, and all
so daffadown-dilly in pretty bed-clothes! I do know she's feelin's
by me wone feelin's, Mr. Toller, and I do thinky and thinky,
when night do come, how she do lie so snug and warm wi' he."

Mr. Toller's masculine brain began to be totally confused.
Mad Bet was talking of her enemy as sympathetically and under-
standing as if it were her daughter. Codfin could understand
bringing down an iron bar on the head of a rich mine-owner;
but this sympathising with the feelings of someone you were re-
ducing to dirt under your heel was a subtlety of vengeance be-
yond his grasp.

"I do know thik lass," he contented himself with saying. "I've
a-been inside Missy Drew's fine house wi' Bob Rendle from
Ditchett Underleaze. Us never took nothin', for Bob were fright-
ened when Lily Rogers talked in she's sleep; but I've a-been up-
stairs and downstairs in thik fine house."

Mad Bet pushed back her Sunday bonnet, with its forget-me-
not border, till Toller could see the gleaming whiteness of her
bare skull by the guttering candle-dip. He fidgetted uneasily un-
der the glance she now fixed upon him.

"I've a-never killed a gal yet, Mad Bet, and I be--" It is prob-
able that no effort of any human will, made in all Glastonbury
that night, was more heroic than the effort required from Mr.
Toller as he completed this speech--"and I be too old to
begin now!"

Having made his stand, Mr. Toller must have felt an overpow-
ering desire to soothe what he supposed would be the mad-
woman's fury. He had known from the beginning that her pres-
ent obsession was about Mary; for since Mother Legge's Easter
party Bet's mania for John was one of the chief tavern topics.
If Finn Toller had in his nervous organisation anything resem-
bling what in popular parlance is called a "complex," such a
"complex" consisted in the idea--almost, although not quite,
a complete illusion--that people were continually wanting to
bribe him to commit some murder.

Was Mr. Toller a homicidal maniac? Any glib answer to this
question would, be a misleading one. Human character is far
more complicated than is suggested by these popular scientific
catchwords. Exact and very circumstantial detail would be re-
quired just here. Mr. Toller would, as a matter of fact, have
found it much harder than Penny Pitches or than Emma Sly to
kill a chicken. Cruelty to a child would have been more difficult
to Mr. Toller than to anyone in Glastonbury, except perhaps
Harry Stickles' wife, or Abel Twig of Backwear Hut. On the
other hand, to hide in the bushes with that iron bar; to steal up
softly behind Mr. Crow; to crack, with one sweeping horizontal
swing of his under-nourished arms, Philip's Norman skull; to
beat that unconscious skull into a pulp by hammering it after-
wards with the iron bar; these proceedings would undoubtedly
have been accompanied by a voluptuous glow of intense sen-
suality.

Perhaps the strictly correct view of Mr. Toller's nature was
that he was a "homicidal maniac" only with regard to the kill-
ing of the most powerful personage in his immediate environ-
ment. But it is doubtful whether the definitions of tyrannicide,
given in the public library dictionary, included the element of
voluptuous sensuality in the killing of tyrants. To catch the vibra-
tion of this element Mr. Toller would have to have looked up
other, more modern words; words which, it is quite certain,
would have been to him totally unintelligible.

"Six o'clock Solly Lew do open up," remarked Betsy now,
pulling down her bonnet into a respectable position. "I reckon
it be near five, Mr. Toller. Us better be moving!"

She rose to her feet as she spoke and extinguished the gutter-
ing candle, leaving them with no light at all but that which
descended from the wind-shaken, cloud-bespattered firmament.
This extinguishing of that little yellow pyramid of fire took on
a grandiose significance from the austere and deliberate manner
in which she did it. It was just as if she were washing her sor-
ceress-hands in that small flame; washing them clean of all fur-
ther association with such a chicken-hearted "tyrannicide" as
Finn Toller.

Thus, when they emerged from St. Michael's Tower, and be-
gan to descend the Tor, without having spoken one single def-
inite word, Mad Bet allowed Finn Toller to feel himself to be a
cowardly, effeminate, unreliable, untrustworthy traitor!

It was a melancholy proof of how remorseless a tyrant Eros
is, that Mad Bet should have descended Tor Hill without one
grateful word to her devoted servant! The invisible Watchers
of that Glastonbury Divine Comedy must have recognised some-
thing curiously unfair in the fact that while the madwoman had
this devouring passion for John, Finn Toller had no blinding,
drugging, heart-hardening obsession wherewith to armour him-
self against misfortune. His pale freckled face and straggly beard
drooped together under those windy stars, and his arms and legs
moved like those of an automaton, as he wearily followed that
forget-me-not bonnet and fluttering shawl.

He resembled a scarecrow that this crazy love-bewitched crea-
ture had compelled by her incantations to follow her, up that
hill. He did not pity himself; he did not say to himself: "Women's
ingratitude is like the ingratitude of the Arch-Fiend!" He only
thought to himself again and again: "Her wants me to kill that
gal what lives wi' old Miss Drew; but I never yet have killed no
gal; and I baint going to begin killing gals--no! not even for
Mad Bet!"

The most materialistic of human beings must allow that at cer-
tain epochs in the life of any history-charged spot there whirls
up an abnormal stir and fume and frenzy among the invisible
elements or forces that emanate from the soil.

Such a stir, such an invisible air-dance was at its height as
this man and this woman descended the hill, between five o'clock
and six o'clock, on that dawn of the eleventh of December.

From the poor bones in the town cemetery on the Wells Road
--out beyond The Elms--rose up certain faintly stirred and
barely perceptible responses to this thaumaturgic wind; but if
from these bones a dim tremour came, much more did a turmoil
of subconscious reciprocity--to use the Wessex poet's great word
--gather about Gwyn-ap-Nud's Hill from the royal and sac-
rosanct bone-dust buried beneath the Abbey Ruins. The wind
arrived at Glastonbury carrying feathers and straws and husks
and ditch-vapours with it that it had picked up from Meare
Heath and Westhay Level, from Chilt on-up on-PoIden and Baw-
drip, from the banks of the River Parrett, from Combwich and
Stogursey Brook, from Chantry Kilve and Quantock's Head. But
from Glastonbury it could only carry away, along with other
wisps and husks and straws and ditch-vapours, such dreams as
were the lighter emanations of the place. It could carry away
the dreams of Jimmy Rake and Mr. Stilly, of Bartholomew Jones
and Jackie Cole, of Mr. Merry and of Emma Sly, of Solly Lew
and of his son Steve; but not of the Town's Mayor or of the
Town's Vicar.

But even with these the west wind's burden, as it left Glas-
tonbury, was too heavy. For it must needs enter the open win-
dows of the hospital and burden itself with the dreams of Nell
Zoyland's son--a child with the very lineaments of Sam Dekker,
even to his curious chin--and also with the dreams of Tossie's
girl twins which were of such incredible lustihood as to resem-
ble the sturdy dreams of the winter grass, growing in those low
meads where the Evercreech man's father-in-law kept his Jersey
cattle.

Crude and coarse and wholesale are our psychic judgments
about newborn children, compared with the careful discrimina-
tions we use in physical chemistry. To any scrupulous eye among
the supernatural watchers of Glastonbury it would have been
clear that the soul of Nell's little boy was already avid with by
far the most intense, clutching, insatiable life-greed that existed
in the whole town--a greed that made Philip's egoism seem like
courteous absent-mindedness and Red's inbred hate like the itch-
ing of a nettle-sting. It would also have been clear that Tossie's
twins were so easy-going, so sweet-natured, so unselfish, that it
was as if all the humour of Tossie herself had been mingled with
the wisdom of Tossie's mistress and with the piety of cousin
Nance.

By burdening itself with the greedy dreams of Nell's little boy,
who actually cried in his sleep because the nurse refused to wake
his mother so that he might be suckled, and with the vegetative
feelings of Tossie's little girls, who seemed perfectly prepared
to let off their mother and enjoy any alien nourishment at any
moment, the wind seemed to need a greater momentum to carry
it away northeast, towards its resting-place on Salisbury Plain,
than it possessed. It flagged a little by the time it reached West
Pennard. It dropped some of its tiny moss-spores, its infinitesi-
mal lichen-scales, its fungus-odours, its oak-apple dust, its sterile
bracken-pollen, its wisps of fluff from the bellies of Sedgemoor
wild-fowl, its feathery husks from the rushes of Mark Moor, its
salt-weed pungencies from the Bay of Bridgewater.

It dropped fragments and morsels of its burden now, all along
the path, of its eastern flight. It dropped some at Pylle, some at
Evercreech, some at Wanstrow and Witham Friary, some at
Great Bradley Wood, some at Long Leat Park. Wisps of what it
carried floated down at all those little villages called by the
name of Deverill. At Kingston Deverill, at Monkton Deverill, at
Hill Deverill and at Longbridge Deverill little fragments were
wafted to the ground.

The wind gathered more strength as it reached Old Willoughby
Hedge and Chapel Field Bam. But it dropped some more of its
burden at Two Mile Down and yet more of it among the ancient
British villages and the high hill-tumuli that surround Great
Ridge and Stonehill Copse.

At last it arrived at Salisbury Plain; and it was natural enough
that then, in those darkest hours of that long December night,
it should sink down and fail.

But for Mr. Evans, at any rate, there would have been some-
thing significant that it should thus sink down and fail and find
the end of its journey on the very spot where those "foreign
stones" were deposited that must have followed, on their mysteri-
ous conveyance out of Wales, the self-same path across the heart
of Somerset.

It would certainly have been Mr. Evans' opinion that what-
ever happened to the seaweed smells, and the dyke-mists, and the
wild-fowl feathers, and the oak-apple dust, and the brackish
marsh-vapours, the more psychic portion of this wind's aerial
cargo would have been deposited at one place only--at the actual
spot where the two great "Sarsen" monoliths have bowed down,
during the centuries, and fallen prostrate, across the stone of
"foreign origin" that is still the Altar Stone of Stonehenge.



CONSPIRACY



The Marriage of Mr. Owen Evans and Miss Cordelia Geard
had already taken place; and it was in one of the little new town
council houses in Old Wells Road that they had settled down,
immediately after this event--Cordelia not being one to press
Mr. Evans to spend his savings on a holiday just at the mo-
ment when Old Jones was coming to terms over the partnership
in the shop.

So it was against a background of roadside hedges and garden
bushes, stripping themselves, or being stripped, by wind and
rain of their perilous-smelling, morbid umbrageousness that these
two singular persons went through the experience of being in-
itiated into each other's withheld identity.

Nowhere in all the fertile and leafy regions of Somerset, so
heavy in vegetation, does Winter set in with more definite em-
phasis than in the regions around Glastonbury. The thicker the
foliage, the richer the earth odours, the bluer the apple-scented
vapours, the more stark and desolate is the contrast. Then be-
gins a wet, chilly, lamentable nakedness; and the three Glas-
tonbury hills weep together like three titanic mourners over
Arthur and Merlin and Lancelot and Gwenevere.

Mr. Evans felt that to the end of his days he would be com-
pelled to associate the approach of Winter with the intense nerv-
ous reactions through which he was passing in this first intimacy
he had ever had with a woman. All through November, as the
man went to and fro from his small house in Wells Old Road,
a street that lay northwest of Bove Town, to his shop in the High
Street, the gradual unleafing of so many twigs and stalks and
branches and trunks coincided with his closer and closer in-
timacy with Cordelia.

To his surprise he found himself completely spared those
shocks of physical disgust and sick aversion which he had been
expecting and which indeed--in his fantastic self-punishment--
he had assumed as the essence of this new adventure. The situa-
tion was indeed a very curious one; for until the time of his
living with Cordelia every vestige of sensuality in his nature
had been absorbed in his weird and monstrous vice.

Now there occurred a reversion of this; and his sadistic tend-
ency fell into the background for a period. It did not leave him.
His own belief that it could, by some contact with the miraculous
element in Glastonbury, be compelled to leave him still re-
mained; but the moment for that had not yet come. His ghastly
and nearly tragic experience at the Midsummer Pageant had not,
and he never pretended to himself that it had, worked that heal-
ing spell. But it slowly began to present itself to his mind as a
strange and unexpected phenomenon, that in his new relations
with Cordelia there arose in the essential nature of the case, a
situation that lent itself to what might be called a harmless and
legitimate sadism, a sadism that was so mitigated and diffused
that it was difficult to disassociate it from a delicate and tender
attraction.

It was a growing astonishment to Mr. Evans to discover what
a world of exquisite and thrilling possibilities the mere difference
between the sexes creates. It was a surprise to him to find out
what subtleties of receptivity exist in the nerves of a girl who
is in love for the first time in her life!

And just here the presence of his suppressed perversion stood
him in good stead; for it annihilated totally any possibility of
that crude and unimaginative craving for novelty which had led
Tom Barter such a dance.

Accustomed, just as was his friend John Crow, to derive his
wickedest thrills from his imagination, Mr. Evans found that
this strange, dim undersea of feminine self-consciousness, whose
ebbings and flowings now receded and advanced around him, was
a world so full of dark unexpected storms and of mysterious
halcyon calms, caused apparently by a word, a look, a gesture,
that in association with it, it was impossible to suffer from that
withering ennui and horrible life-weariness which hitherto had
been--to take a leaf out of Tom Chinnock's book the particular
Terre Gastee of his destiny. The trend of his mind too--as imagi-
native in his "unpardonable sin" as it was in his antiquarian
fantasies--did both him and Cordelia the unspeakably good turn.
of rendering what is usually known as beauty in a woman totally
unimportant.

Nature was in a position to supply the place of beauty by
her basic insistence upon the fact that this awkward and unbe-
guiling creature was, after all, endowed with both the form and
the susceptibilities of a normal feminine being.

The wise irony of those tutelary spirits which do not desert
in our need even the worst of us, destined Mr. Evans to find his
Glastonbury miracle where he least looked for it; for the pres-
ence of the Grail in that spot has the effect of digging deep chan-
nels for the amorous life of those who touch its soil.

All lovers who have ever visited the place will know at once
what is meant by this. None approach these three Glastonbury
hills without an intensification of whatever erotic excitement
they are capable of and whatever deepening of the grooves of
their sublimated desire falls within the scope of their fate.

Cordelia was a true daughter of Glastonbury; and the magic
of the place, as Mr. Evans in his first manner was always ex-
plaining, had the power of acting as an aphrodisiac of far more
potent force than the famous "sea-holly" of Chesil Beach.

The Grail of Glastonbury--and this is why Mr. Geard was
entirely justified in making it the centre of his new religious
cult--just because of its timeless association with the First
Cause had the peculiarity of exciting human souls to concen-
trate their eroticism upon one single ideal object, as Sam for
instance had done in becoming a mediaeval lover of his tortured
God-Man; while it excited others, among whom was John Crow,
to concentrate upon one real human being.

As for Cordelia, she had been living, all that windy November,
in a state of such wild and wanton excitement that it is doubtful
if there was any woman in Somersetshire through the whole
Autumn, as drunken as she was with the lavish ichor of Eros.

Mr. Evans was so ignorant of the ways of women and so con-
fused by his new experience that he did not realise the emotional
extremity which his caresses were stirring up in Cordelia, nor
the frantic tumultuousness of the feelings which his love-making
aroused. The girl was passion-drunk. She never missed taking Mr.
Evans to the shop. She never missed calling for him at the shop.

On all possible occasions when he had a day off. or when the
shops were officially closed, she would make him take her for
long walks in every direction: but principally to the east which
meant beginning with Chalice Hill.

On these walks she would cling to his arm and pour into his
ear abrupt, excited, and very often hardly coherent rhapsodies.
Love in general was the subject of these spasmodic outbursts,
rather than any elaborations of her own feeling; nor was Mr.
Evans one to miss their poetic quality. Her words flowed and
tossed; and then wavered and sank. They drifted and wilted,
only to rise up again, mounting, gathering, rushing forward,
to a new climax, to be followed in its turn by a new sinking
down to exhausted silence.

One particular walk Mr. Evans never forgot. It was when they
were following a little field-track between Havyatt Gap and
West Pennard that the girl's eloquence mounted to the climax
which so especially impressed him. It was a wild, gusty, rainy
day; though the rain was discontinuous and the gusts intermit-
tent; but when it neither rained nor blew there fell upon that
stripped landscape a cold paralysed interim of shivering still-
ness, in the midst of which Mr. Evans felt that he could hear the
beat of the wings of the Birds of Rhiannon.

On this particular walk to Pennard, Mr. Evans realised that
there were moments when his strange companion gathered up
into her uncomely face a spiritual grandeur that was astonish-
ing. Cordelia's face lent itself to windy and rainy weather. She
had been herself a little shocked, as well as startled by the man-
ner in which, in that twilight escape by herself, seven months be-
fore, to the Two Oaks, she had been obsessed by a feeling of
dominating power.

It was about four o'clock on this early-darkening December
day when their field-path--a very small unfrequented cattle-
drove on the way to West Pennard--led them past a solitary
Scotch fir. The rough, reddish-brown trunk of this great tree
was soaked with rain on its western side; and showers of rain-
drops fell on their heads from a big branch above them which
stretched towards the west like a gigantic extended arm.

Cordelia wore an old cloth cap of Mr. Evans'; and he himself
had come out bare-headed, fearful of not being able to keep
on his head, that gusty afternoon, his familiar bowler hat.

Thus as they paused beneath the tree whose upper branches
groaned and creaked to greet them, the man found he could kiss
the wet cheeks and cold mouth of his woman without the teas-
ing interruption of either of their hats being knocked off, a
thing that was always happening with these two clumsy ones.

"I never knew what it was like to kiss," said Mr. Evans, "be-
fore I had you! I like kissing you at the end of a dark day and
under this Scotch fir."

Their wet cold faces, her shapeless nose and his grotesque
hooked nose like the caricature-mask of a Roman soldier, their
large, contorted, abnormal mouths, made, it might seem, more
for anguished curses against God than for the sweet usage of
lovers, were now pressed savagely against each other and, as they
kissed, queer sounds came from both their throats, that were
answered by the groanings of the tree and by the raindrops as
the wind shook it.

A series of long-drawn cawings reached them now, as four
black rooks with a faint grinding and grating of their huge
wings passed over the tree, aiming for the rookery above Mark
Moor Court.

Down somewhere in the southern hedge of the field where this
Scotch fir grew, an old holly tree was creaking lamentably in
the wind. Uninitiated travellers in that lonely spot would have
casually remarked: "What's that creaking over there in that
hedge?"--but each of these two ugly skulls with the anguished
distinction of the ancient house of Rhys upon their lineaments
thought within themselves: "How lucky I am to be happy when
God delights to make even trees suffer!"

As a matter of fact, although neither of these human lovers
were aware of this, between that Scotch fir and that ancient holly
there had existed for a hundred years a strange attraction. Night
by night, since the days when the author of Faust lay dying in
Weimar and those two embryo trees were in danger of being
eaten by grubs, they had loved each other. The magnetic dis-
turbance of the atmosphere at that spot, while the distorted
mouth of Mr. Evans was pressed against the distorted mouth of
Cordelia, was an agitation to the old tree in the hedge, so that
in its creaking there arose that plaintive yearning of the vege-
table world which comes to us more starkly in the winter than
in the summer.

In the summer when the wind stirs the trees, there is that
rushing, swelling sound of masses of heavy foliage, a sound that
drowns, in its full-bosomed, undulating, ocean-like murmur, the
individual sorrows of trees. But across this leafless unfrequented
field these two evergreens could lift to each other their sub-
human voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and
strong; that cry which always seems to come from some under-
world of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying
acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of
men and women.

It is on such gusty, early December afternoons, when darkness
falls before people prepare for tea, that the symbolic essence of
rain is most deeply felt. And that they should be realised in
their essential quiddity, these whirling gusts of grey rain tossed
obliquely across the darkening hills, they must not come in a
steady, tropic downpour. Floods of rain destroy the quality and
the significance of rain. Drops they must be, many, many drops;
an infinity of drops if you will; but still numberless separate
drops, grey or brown or whitish-grey, in order that they may re-
tain that rain-smell, rain-taste, rain-secret, which separates rain
from ordinary water.

They were both silent for a space after this embrace, standing
under the Scotch fir, and Mr. Evans thought to himself that the
look he now caught upon her profile was one of the strangest
and most arresting he had ever seen on a human face. And it
was no wonder he felt like this; for her face had caught that
mysterious secret of the rain which very few faces and very
few imaginations are able to catch. But Cordelia's face had
caught it today, and held it there now in all its wild far-hori-
zoned meanings.

There are faces made for moonlight. There are faces created
to respond to the wind. There are faces for sandy deserts, for
lonely seashores, for solitary headlands, for misty dawns, for
frosty midnights. Cordelia's face was made for rain. It had
nothing in it that was normally beautiful; and yet it became at
this moment the living incarnation of all those long hours when
rain had mingled with her secretest hopes. Her face was charged
with the rain that had streamed down the window-panes at
Cardiff Villa, twilight after twilight, while her thoughts had
been flying far away; far over dripping forests, far over swollen
rivers to green-black castle walls of which she fancied herself
the mistress or the captive.

The path they were following now approached a steep incline
which led between bare muddy banks and along deeply indented
cart-ruts to a small clump of spruce firs at the top of a con-
siderably high hill. They were both familiar with this hill and
with this clump of spruce firs. There was indeed for Mr. Evans
a special interest in this place, which was some distance out of
Glastonbury. He had himself found a deserted sheepfold up
there, in a clearing in the centre of this little fir wood, a rough
building made entirely of ancient blocks of mossy stone, but
quite roofless and windowless.

Pottering about evening after evening, in the environs of
Glastonbury, Mr. Evans and Cordelia had made more than one
interesting find; but with regard to these old stones, that had
been thrown so crudely together here to form a shelter for sheep,
our Welshman had a theory that made them the most interesting
of all his discoveries. He held very strongly to the opinion--
and he had even persuaded Mr. Merry to come round to his
view--that these stones originally belonged to the little chantry
or hermitage to which Launcelot du Lac retired to die, after the
vanishing of Arthur and after Gwenevere's retreat to tire nun-
nery at Amesbury.

It was a long tedious ascent up to this little fir clump; nor
had the place any striking aspect or any particular beauty
save this ruined sheepfold in the centre of it. And yet as they
struggled up the bare slope in the rain, Mr. Evans remarked
to his bride:

"Haven't you noticed, Cordy, that it's often some small insig-
nificant place like this that comes back to your mind with a
sudden significance, rather than the more famous spots?"

She was not yet so used to being called "Cordy" by Mr. Evans
that it did not strike her as queer to hear it now as they made
their way up this nameless and rainswept little eminence. Names
are like clothes to girls. The name Cordelia, especially when
uttered by her father, always made her feel as if she were
wearing her old, weather-worn tailor-made costume, and beneath
it, her winter underwear against her skin; whereas when she
heard Mr. Evans call her "Cordy" she felt as if she were wear-
ing her thinnest cotton drawers. Since she had been married she
had been "Cordy" almost constantly in spite of the fact that she
was now wearing her winter clothes.

Like a tree that had begun to gather moss and lichen before
it was old, there was so much untouched soil in the rich levels
of this girls nature that the green sprouts of passion grew more
lavish and luxuriant every day.

Between the Glastonbury trees stripping themselves bare and
this Glastonbury native, stripping herself day by day of new
maidenly reserves for the enchantment of her lover there was
a similar parallel. It was to the west wind that the Glaston-
bury foliage yielded and fell; and it was to the gusty inter-
mittent motions of Mr. Evans' erratic desires that Cordys innate
chastity sank away. Not one aspect of her life under those new
brick tiles of her little house, fresh from the local brickyard to
the north of Bove Town, where the council had bought them,
but became associated with her gradual seduction.

The fact that the Welshman cared little for womanly beauty, the
fact that behind the concentration of his desire was nothing but
the diffused sublimation of his suppressed vice, rendered this
girl's initiation into the nervous excitements of Eros an arena of
hidden rapture such as, at that epoch, contained no equal within
the purlieus of the whole town.

The two descendants of the House of Rhys were now halfway
up the ascent of their hill, their boots and stockings already
thoroughly soaked by the wet stalks of the dead bracken. The
slope they were ascending was to the northward of West Pen-
nard, whose outskirts in following their winding cattle-path they
had already passed. Between the summit of this hill topped by
the clump of dwarf spruce firs and by the ruined sheepfold, and
the banks of Whitelake River there was nothing bul the rough
tract of untilled country known as Hearty Moor.

It was thus as unfrequented a spot as could well be found
within a few miles of Glastonbury; and had a circle been
drawn about that town no point upon its circumference save
perhaps Crannel Moor to the west of Godney, would have been
securer against human invasion. Save for an occasional shep-
herd-boy, guarding a flock of black-faced ewes from Norwood
Farm, no one, even in summer, ever came to this place.

Thus when Mr. Evans suddenly cried out:

"There's a light in the sheepfold, Cordy!" his voice was as
startled as if he had informed her of the presence of a gibbet
up there with a figure swinging from it! A steadily burning
light, when you are convinced of being several miles from any
human habitation, is a thing that naturally makes a person's
pulses beat.

"Is it the Norwood shepherd?" panted Cordelia, trying to keep
pace with her companion's long strides.

"Hush!" was Mr. Evans' reply as he quickened his pace still
more.

She followed him in silence; and together they pressed for-
ward, ascending the hill. The wind struck them with such force
as they climbed and the darkness had gathered about them
there so suddenly that Cordelia began to experience that natural
human nervousness which the approach to a flickering light in a
lonely spot can induce even in one not usually subject to com-
mon timidities.

She whispered something in her companion's ear that the
wind rendered inaudible.

"Hush!" replied Mr. Evans again.

It now became apparent that the light they had seen was
brighter than any conceivable shepherd's lantern from Norwood
Farm. Cordelia could not resist disobeying him; and for the
third time during their approach she spoke.

"Someone's lighted a fire," she whispered. "The ghost of
Lancelot!" she added with a wild laugh. Her words and her un-
restrained laugh seized upon one portion of Mr. Evans' conscious-
ness and carried it, like a wild goose with ruffled, helpless
feathers, to a certain imaginary tract in an ancient dream-land-
scape of his, where he always placed this ruined chantry from
the old legend, surrounding it with the melancholy horses--their
long uncut manes full of dead leaves and their burdock-tangled
tails sweeping the wet grass--growing older and feebler year
after year, as their masters prayed, hoping against hope, the
armourless penitents within those stone walls and the armourless
steeds without, for the return of the lost King.

It was fortunate for the silence of their approach, as they
now, having reached the summit of the little hill, stealthily
pushed their way through the spruce clump, that the wind, blow-
ing obliquely across their profiles, carried that hysteric laugh of
Cordelia's over the darkened valley towards Laverly and Pilton
and Folly Wood.

Mr. Evans possessed himself now of the girl's cold hand and
as he drew her after him between the firs, led by that flickering
firelight and by a smell of burning fir-cones that now accom-
panied it, he began to feel, rising up within him, a childish de-
light in adventure such as he thought his terrible obsession had
destroyed forever.

They now heard voices within the walls of the stone sheepfold ;
and as step by step they cautiously advanced, anxious to get a
glimpse of the speakers while they themselves remained unseen,
they both recognised the harsh uplifted voice of Mad Bet. The
other voice Mr. Evans did not know, though he could tell it was
a man's; but Cordelia, being a native of the town, recognised
quickly enough who was the madwoman's companion. It was the
disreputable Finn Toller; and later, when in bed that same night
she told Mr. Evans who it was, she received an obscure shock,
like a premonitory warning, when her husband showed an un-
expected interest in this sinister figure.

It was through a gap in the stone wall that they saw these two
persons now, sitting beside that fire of sticks and dry ferns. They
dared not move close enough to catch any definite words of what
these two were saying; but the psychic aura of their discussion
reached them; and it must have been this, though Cordelia did
not suspect it then, that accounted for Mr. Evans subsequent de-
sire to make Codfin's acquaintance. Just as the gods are said to
know one another under any mask so are those whose peculiar
vice or perversion separates them from the rest of the world
endowed with a sixth sense of recognition.

Retaining his bride's hand in his own, and growing conscious
of some appeal to his perilous nerve in what was going on, Mr.
Evans compelled her to remain concealed. Concealment was as
unsuitable to Mr. Geard's elder daughter as any role he could
have chosen for her; but she was too happy to be anything but
docile; and with their faces brushed by a tall undergrowth of
elders they contemplated through its broken wall that ruined
sheepfold, whose masonry, at any rate, although not in its pres-
ent form, had witnessed the death of the noblest of Glastonbury
penitents.

The dialogue of which they caught only the psychic vibra-
tions, for the two were speaking in low tones, was as follows:
"If so be as thee can't do it to she , may-be thee could do it to
he?

These words of Mad Bet were a startling surprise to Mr. Toller,
for he sat up straight on his log, close to the fire they were
feeding, and stretched out his arms to the blaze, clasping and
unclasping his fingers in its glowing heat so nervously as to make
it obvious he was thinking of something very different from the
physical pleasure of warmth. The man's straggly yellow beard
wagged in the smoke of the crackling sticks as he turned his
watery blue eyes towards his companion. He blinked miserably
with his white eyelids beneath his hairless eyebrows and there
came a look of panic and even horror into his face.

"But he be your true-love, baint he?" he said, with shocked
emphasis and speaking very gravely. "Ye doesn't want me to
likidate, as thik Mr. Robinson do call it, your wone true-love,
Mad Bet?"

The woman was silent; and what the feelings were that seeth-
ed and fermented in her heart it would be hard to put down in
words; but after a minute or two she spoke again.

"If he were dead, never would she sleep with he again in a
pretty night-dress bought for a fairing from Tim Wollop."

But the philosophy of the Glastonbury underworld could not
let this idealism pass unchecked.

"But neither would you ever sleep long-side of he, Mad Bet.
He would be lying in churchyard mould and ye would be yaller-
ing in top-room of old John Chinnock's."

There was a long pause at this point during which Finn
Toller pensively stirred the fiery embers with one hand while
he flung upon their exposed red heart a handful of dry wood
with the other.

"Listen, Finn Toller!"

The smooth and freckled face of the workhouse waif com-
posed itself to receive a painful shock of some kind. Never did
Mad Bet open her lips, but she caused her devotee some kind
of nervous agitation. But so far from decreasing her servitude
this constant state of psychic fear in which she kept him accentu-
ated his devotion. Fear of her kept him in a perpetual ferment
of nervous idolatry.

"Listen, Finn Toller; and answer me careful, for I want to
have the truth of this from thee. Will thik iron bar, what you
knows of, make my young man feel afore he dies? I don't
want 'un to feel. I'd be feeling it me wone self, if he had any
anguish. I don't want 'un to be able to say as much as his patter-
nost, as they papists call it. I want he to be alive, and thinking
about his bitchy; and the next tick of the clock I want he to be
all blackness; blackness and holy bubbles and dear soul gone!"

Mad Bet was wearing a dark shawl over her poor bald pate;
and, as she spoke, she pulled it down over her eyes, as if sym-
bolising this final extinction of her "young man's" consciousness.

"And when 'tis all over," she added from beneath this veil,
"and he be safe buried in earth, hour by hour I'll go and sit on's
sweet grave! She won't be there; for 'twill be in thik graveyard
out in Wells New Road that they'll lay 'un; and that will be
too far for she to wend--'cept on Sundays and Holy Days! But
old Bet will take her meals there; and day and night keep guard;
and that's because it's necessary for someone to drive the devils
away; and that's because the devils always love a sweet corpse;
and that's because sweet corpses same as his'n, always do smell
as sweet as new-mown hay!"

Had Mr. Evans been near enough to see Finn Toller's face
in that firelight he would have been reminded of a famous folk-
lore professor, whose lectures at one time he used to attend.
When some pupil would propound to him a question that was
more audacious than behooved the subject, this good man would
frown in blank, bewildered confusion and would open his mouth
to its utmost stretch.

Thus did Finn Toller look when Mad Bet asked him whether
her "young man" would "feel" anything when that iron bar
crushed his skull.

"If he did feel it I should feel it, Finn Toller," repeated that
crouching figure, pulling her shawl so far down over her face
that the syllables she emitted issued forth in a muffled tone.

Mr. Toller continued to survey this enveloped head. It was
hard for him to tell whether the woman's eyes were scrutinising
him closely from beneath it or whether they were blinded by the
folds of the shawl. But he watched her intently; as a tame wolf
might watch its robber master ere they rose to attack a caravan-
serai of travellers.

From Cordelia's post of observation the madwoman's head,
illuminated by those red flames, resembled an old Bible pic-
ture of the Witch of Endor. Squatting there on the floor of that
ruined chantry she might have been an image of Despair con-
fronted by an image of Murder; the former being conscious of
every implication of the deed they discussed, the latter wrapped
in a dull, stupid, besotted daze of animal uneasiness.

Resting with their heads pressed against their protecting elder
bush, both Mr. Evans and Cordelia experienced many queer sen-
sations as the acrid-smelling smoke from this fire hit their nos-
trils. Beating down his darker feelings, Mr. Evans set himself
to recall a certain melancholy passage in Malory, the words of
which, from constant perusal, he could reproduce in their pre-
cise lilt. These, as the damp twigs flapped against his head, and
the wind through the ruined walls made a dull moaning in his
ears, he repeated under his breath:

"'Then Sir Launcelot never after ate but little meat, ne drank,
till he was dead. For then he sickened more and more, and dried
and dwined away. For the Bishop nor none of his fellows might
not make him to eat, and little he drank, that he was waxen by
a cubit shorter than he was, that the people could not know him.
For evermore, day and night he prayed: but sometime he slum-
bered a broken sleep; ever he was grovelling on the tomb of
King Arthur and Queen Guenever. So he fell sick and lay in his
bed; and then he sent for the Bishop that there was hermit and
all his true fellows...."My fair lords," said Sir Launcelot, "wit
you well my careful body will into the earth, I have warning
more than now I will say; therefore give me my rites"...Then
there was weeping and wringing of hands; and the greatest dole
they made that ever made men."

But all the while he was repeating these rhythmical words
with one portion of his mind and in this task using all the
power of his memory, there flitted through the unrecording por-
tion of his consciousness a vague awareness of something going
on over that fire that stirred up his suppressed vice. Mr. Evans
was clairvoyant in these things and though he did not hear those
murderous words spoken, the impression produced on the sur-
rounding air by the mention of Finn Toller's iron bar was so
strong that it roused emotions in him that he had not felt since
the Pageant. And while Mr. Evans was struggling to drive back
his devil by recalling the death of Lancelot, his bride's atten-
tion was hypnotised by the extraordinary figure of Mad Bet; and
she kept saying to herself:

"If it wasn't for Owen having come, I'd have soon gone mad
just like her!"

There was something so portentous about that head muffled
in the black shawl--as if the woman had arrayed herself for
some tragic event and were uttering words that could only be
spoken from a shrouded face--that the girl found the shocking
rags of Finn Toller a relief to look at in comparison.

But what were they talking about? These two queer ones had
not met in that ruined place for the mere pleasure of meeting!
Not from their murmuring voices, not from their dramatic ges-
tures, but from a vibration in the whole atmosphere around them
did Cordelia, as well as Mr. Evans, catch, without witting what
it was, the revolting smell of a crime against human life.

But now came an interruption. A great fluffy barn-door owl,
a galvanised bundle of soft feathers and precipitate alarm,
roused by the heat of the fire, suddenly flung itself out of its day-
long retreat in one of these old walls, and whirled off with a
scream over the elder bush where the two onlookers were hid-
den. Catching sight of them there, it flew sideways with a sound
so unusual that it caused Mad Bet to snatch the shawl from her
head. Hurriedly, Mr. Evans pulled Cordelia back, and following
an instinct, the childishness of which was natural to both of
them, they retreated at a wild rush through the spruces and at
a still faster pace down the slope of the hill!

It was not indeed until they reached their Scotch fir that he
let her pause to take breath; and then, when between his laboured
gasps he tried to kiss her as he had kissed her before, the same
wild, horse-like, hysterical laugh broke from her lips. The sound
was disquieting but it had the effect of soothing the nerves of
her who uttered it. This queer couple resembled each other in
the irrelevant and motiveless way they both were accustomed to
burst out laughing. "Those two were up to some mischief, Owen,"
murmured the girl. But Mr. Evans hurriedly veered from this
grim topic.

"Where the guide books make their great mistake," he said, as
they now turned homeward, "is in treating Glastonbury as a frag-
ment of history, instead of something that's making history.
Your father's absolutely right. It's the future that's important"

Cordelia made no reply. It was always in relation to her father's
ideas that she came nearest to losing her respect for Mr. Evans.
As she felt this cool night wind blow against her face, and heard
her leather boots creak with their familiar little creakings, and
thought of the cake she had made yesterday for their tea today,
and fumbled with the handle of Mr. Evans' stick as the next best
thing to holding his hand, it seemed to her that this masculine
desire to create some "important" future was one of the dreariest
mockeries of human values that existed in the world.

"Keep us alive. Give us food. Give us love. Give us children.
But take your ‘important' Communisms and Capitalisms from
around our waists and from about our necks!"

Thus would Cordelia have liked to have expressed herself if
she could have found the right words. It would have been a satis-
faction to scream out once in her life at the top of her lungs to
her father, to her husband, to Dave Spear: "You are all a lot
of babies with your curst politics!" She would have liked John
Crow to have been there too; and, if the moment had permitted
it, she would have liked that odious wretch to have fallen in love
with her, beyond measure, beyond restraint, and tried to kiss
her, so that she could have slapped his face!

"Our good John said something yesterday that was very true,"
Mr. Evans continued, stirred by an unconscious telepathy. "He
said that a great many material things had certain little tricks
of arranging themselves at certain times, as if they all shared in
the process of some secret ritual to which we have lost the clue."

"Do you know what I'd like to do, Owen, when I hear that
man talk in that sort of way?"

There was a tone in her voice that Mr. Evans had come to
know too well and he had the wit to remain silent.

"I've annoyed her," he said to himself, "by dragging her so
fast away from Mad Bet. She doesn't know that I've lost interest
in Mad Bet, now that she's stopped torturing herself and is just
indulging herself. I'm not sure, after all, that she is the Grail
Messenger. Cordy is more like the Grail Messenger than she is,
but there's a tone in their voices that is very similar."

He was totally oblivious of the fact that seriously to compare
his wife with this lamentable creature had something monstrous
about it. But in Mr. Evans' attitude to women there was an ob-
tuseness that was almost ghastly. Certain human souls suffer
from the psychic atrophy of a particular sympathy in regard to
the opposite sex. Persephone Spear had a similar peculiarity,
only in the inverse way. To Persephone no man was worthy of
the least subtle consideration. Men to Percy were like fish, whose
gills, though they could open and shut, had no feeling in them.

The spirits of both Cordelia and Mr. Evans sank to a low ebb
when they reached their row of red-tiled roofs, above Bove Town.
This depression had something to do with a straggling line of
little labouringmen's houses, newer even than their own--indeed
not quite finished--which the town council was just new erecting
for the workers in its souvenir factory.

Few things are more desolating to certain human moods than
new uninhabited houses. In addition to this cause of gloom Mr.
and Mrs. Evans were exhausted with their walk and longing for
their tea; a refreshment that could not--in the nature of things
--be ready for at least half an hour. But deep down below the
surface it was not the new houses nor their craving for tea that
made them depressed. It was the emanation reaching out towards
them from that ruined sheepfold.

Parlour and kitchen were the only rooms on the ground floor
of Five, Old Wells Road; and when he had unlocked the front
door and entered the house, Mr. Evans went straight into the
parlour and sank down in a big, ugly, purple arm-chair which
stood there. Cordelia meanwhile hurried into the kitchen and
began her preparations for tea before even taking off her hat.
It was not indeed till she had laid the table, cut the bread for
toast, and got out the butter--they ate all their meals in the
kitchen--that she ran upstairs to wash her hands.

The troubled mood which had descended upon them both did
not immediately lift, even after they had been within their
walls for a quarter of an hour; and this was the first time in their
brief experience of Old Wells Road that such a thing had oc-
curred. Never before had Mr. Evans gone into the parlour in
this way and plunged into the arm-chair Mr. Geard had given
them without offering to help his wife get the meal! The arm-
chair was the biggest that Mr. Wollop had had on sale, and it
contrasted oddly with the rest of the furniture of their small
house, which was certainly more picturesque than it was com-
fortable, being in fact almost all the unsalable things in Num-
ber Two's shop which had been lent to Mr. Evans by his partner.

The arm-chair was a purple one and a proud-looking one;
and it had a lavender-coloured fringe round the bottom of it. It
was with the tassels of this fringe that the long nervous fingers
of Mr. Evans were now uneasily fumbling. He had lit the gas-
jet on entering this room which was only separated from the
kitchen by the narrowest of little passages, and he could now see
through the open door Cordelia's shadow, thrown by the kitchen-
lamp behind her, flickering about upon the floor of this passage.

Mr. Evans' legs were stretched straight out on the new carpet;
his muddy boots were resting on their extended heels; while the
skin of his ankles exposed above his ruffled black socks looked
curiously white and helpless in the glaring gas-light. His great
aquiline nose drooped motionless above his chest and his arms
hung down at his sides. His face was pale and he kept sucking at
his cheeks in some queer manner which emphasised the promi-
nence of his cheek-bones. His thoughts hovered around the for-
lorn happenings in the olden times that had left Launcelot du
Lac to perish so miserably in that little chantry, but these
thoughts were affected and the man was not unaware of it, by
what he felt, beyond any definite explanation, about that dia-
logue in the sheepfold.

"Launcelot's death," he said to himself, "was one of the sad-
dest things that have ever happened in this unhappy world." As
he went on pondering upon this tall heroic lover's decline and
how he lost a cubit of his stature among those flesh-scourging
monks, his eyes began to close, and that particular kind of drow-
siness that comes to human beings when the pitiableness of all
human affairs presses wearily upon them, weighed down his
eyelids.

All human minds, as they move about over the face of the
earth, are in touch with a dark reservoir of our race's psychic
garbage. Just as all the thrilling and vibrating thoughts that
have animated human organisms survive the deaths of these or-
ganisms, so all the heavy, cloddish, murderous, desolate thoughts,
in which free will and faith and happiness perish like asphyxi-
ated gnats, roll themselves in a foul torrent into a great invisible
planetary Malebolge. This Malebolge is always present and
near, a little way below the surface, for all our human minds;
and it only needs certain occurrences, or certain arrangements of
matter, to cause an odious and devastating effluvia from its
surface-scum to invade the arteries of our consciousness.

Although their ignorance of what that sheepfold talk had
been about forbade any discussion of it between them, yet some
residue of it floated there above the purple arm-chair and hov-
ered in that little kitchen above the stove, acting as an invoker
of those blighting waters of Malebolge, and saturating Num-
ber Five, Old Wells Road with that sick and sour undersea of
abhorrence which human thoughts in their malice and their
weakness have created for their own torment.

By the middle of their tea, however, they both felt more cheer-
ful. The self-protective will to forget licked up with its sorceress
tongue all these poisonous emanations squirted forth from this
underworld Malebolge. Up and down, like a beautiful coral-
tinted tongue, that will to forget moved--as the magic fumes
of the tea mounted to their heads--and very soon it had licked
up every trace of those waters of hell!

Their conversation became excited, emotional, imaginative, as
it usually was at tea-time; and it was with regret that they sud-
denly heard the sharp tinkle above their heads of the door-bell.

They both got up and moved simultaneously into the little
passage. It fell to Cordelia to open the door and she let in, one
by one, Dave Spear, Paul Trent, and Red Robinson. All the visi-
tors professed roundly that they had had tea in the town.
They even named the tea-shop, which was neither the worst nor
the best available, being the little place kept by Mrs. Jones, the
mother of Sally and Jackie and the sister of Mr. Evans' partner.

Cordelia did her best to find seats in the parlour for them all.
She got Red safely disposed of in the purple chair, with Paul
Trent balanced on its arm; and while she and her husband
propped themselves up, as well as they could, on Number Two's
ricketty antiques, Dave sat squarely down on a kitchen chair
which he himself had carried in. This little touch of officious-
ness on Dave's part--she didn't want any of them in the kitchen
with the tea-things all about--had an instantaneous effect upon
Cordelia's nerves which affected her whole attitude to the busi-
ness on which the three men came. To the end of his days Dave
would never learn the delicacy and charity of not meddling.

"Women ought not," he would have said, "to be fussy about
how their rooms look! Rooms are for human beings to sit in,
when--protected from wind and darkness--they discuss how to
improve the world."

The three conspirators, whose plot, devised originally by
Persephone, had become now a quite momentous and possibly
even an historic affair, had been visiting so many Glastonbury
houses in the last couple of weeks that they had come to use a
sort of stage-method in dealing with people. This method had
been invented by Paul Trent with a full understanding of the
characters of Dave and Red; and what it really amounted to was
that while he himself explained the statistics of the plan, he left
Red to interject the revolutionary dynamite, and Dave the
prophetic austerity. He was the lean Cassius of the plot: Dave
the incorruptible Brutus; Red the vindictive Casca.

But of course this method was hardly required on this occa-
sion, because rumours and murmurs and maledictions of the great
plan had been rumbling and humming at every meal Cordy and
Mr. Evans had recently shared at Cardiff Villa.

But such was the notorious absent-mindedness of Mr. Evans
that Paul Trent felt justified in being as explicit with him as if
he had never heard the subject discussed.

"We came in really," he said, "only to tell you two that
everything is moving according to our scheme."

"Has Father decided to lend the council some money?" en-
quired Cordelia.

Paul Trent was too much of a diplomatist not to sense far-
off the electric flicker of opposition. He made a feline movement
on the arm of Red's big chair, as if he were a cat preparing to
do battle.

"Nothing is decided yet," he said. "We have only been dis-
cussing things." '

"What does Mother say?"

For a second this question nonplussed the man from the Scilly
Isles; for it pushed him out of his legal world into his philo-
sophical world.

"I quite agree with you that a wife's wishes ought to be care-
fully considered when it comes to any big investment but...
I'm afraid...in this case "

"You mean she doesn't agree?" said Cordelia, "and I don't
wonder either," the girl went on, "she hasn't got the least bene-
fit out of Canon Crow's money so far--and now it's all going to
be thrown away!"

Paul Trent leant forward with a flush upon his swarthy cheek
and a contraction of his arched eyebrows.

"Not thrown away, lady!" he murmured softly, "not thrown
away! He'll still be by far the richest man in Glastonbury."

Cordelia uttered a spasmodic little laugh, a laugh which caused
Mr. Evans to give her a grave and anxious glance.

"Your father ," interjected Dave,"--and your mother knows
that perfectly well--would never touch a penny of his fortune
for anything but the good of"

"'Ee'll be the biggest stock-'older in our commune, Miss
Cordy ," remarked Red Robinson, "and 'is will be the only nime
what'll be in all the pipers."

"He never got back half what he spent on the Pageant," said
Cordelia.

At the word Pageant, Mr. Evans gave an involuntary shiver.
He thought to himself: "With Cordy as my Grail Messenger,
I'm on a better path now!"

"Miss Crummie told me 'erself," protested Red, "that 'twere
only the two and a 'arf hinterest 'ee got from the bank, 'ee spent
on that silliness!"

"That is really true, Miss Cor--I mean Mrs. Evans," mur-
mured Dave, staring at her with puzzled wonder. (Why have
women, he thought, so much stronger possessive instincts than
men?) "And everybody knows," he went on, fixing his blue eyes
steadily upon her, "that he's always regarded Canon Crow's
money as a trust for the common good."

"Damn the common good!" cried Cordelia impatiently, "I
don't see what you people have got to do with our money! The
Rector of Northwold left it to Father without the least restric-
tion. He left it to him because he was his best friend. All his
own family had deserted him. Father made those last ten years
of his life the happiest he ever had."

"Are you really going to Mark Court today?" enquired Mr.
Evans. "I've never seen Lord P. Does he appreciate that amazing
old house of his?"

"What we came for officially, Evans," said Paul Trent, think-
ing to himself, I'll make this commune the first real anarchist
experiment that's ever been made; and if this moralizing ass
Spear is as stupid with men as he seems to be with women, I'll
not have much difficulty with him!--"was to tell you that if
Lord P, does sign over to us the leases of his property, your
shtop, together with nearly all the shops in High Street, will
have to deal with us and do your business co-operatively in
future. This will mean," he went on hurriedly, noticing an im-
patient movement from Cordelia, "that Glastonbury tradesmen
will pool their profits. Not all their profits, of course," here lie
gave a sidelong, cat-like glance at Dave, "for the whole idea
will be to have as much complete personal liberty as possible;
but enough to enable the commune to deal as a unit with the out-
side world."

Mr. Evans' attention had been wandering for some while and
his face had grown animated with a child-like excitement.

"Glastonbury," he now cried, rising to his feet and beginning
to walk up and down the little parlour with long strides, "Glas-
tonbury will be like she was before that Tudor Devil, and all
Welshmen know what the Tudors were, ruined her independ-
ence! Glastonbury will be a living Entity again. She will draw
a magnetic life from her Three Hills strong enough to attract
all the world to her side. She will take her place " he paused
and stared gloweringly at Red who was smoking his pipe in the
purple chair with a wry, malicious smile. "This pooling of
profits is nothing," he went on with a wave of his hand. "We
must all earn our living, of course; but that's not it. We must
free ourselves from Teutonic vandals like this Lord P., of course;
but that's not it. We must employ our workers, of course, better
than Philip Crow does; but that's not it. The great thing is to
revive the old life of Glastonbury Herself--the great thing is
to revive the old faith in Glastonbury Herself as an Urbs Beata
to which all the...all those who are...all those who have
been...all those, I mean, who've put themselves outside the
pale may be...may be...purged in their minds!"

His voice had risen so vehemently that when he suddenly
stopped and plumped down on one of Number Two's shakiest
chairs so that its gilded back cracked, everyone stared at him in
embarrassment.

There was a nervous silence in the room. Dave thought to
Himself: "It's the capitalistic system that breeds these eccentrics.
When all able-bodied men in Glastonbury work in our municipal
dye works no one will have time to think whether they've purged
their minds or not! These nervous maniacs are the result of para-
sitism. We shall see to it that this fellow works with his hands
till he's too tired to think about his manias!"

Red Robinson looked round for something to spit into, but
seeing nothing except the fireplace, which was too far away,
he swallowed his saliva with a gulp and crossed his legs in the
purple chair.

"The pint, Mr. Heavens," he remarked grimly, "hain't whether
Glastonbury waters can cure the pox, but whether hus working
chaps can get 'old of the bewger's factories."

"Father tells me you're an anarchist, Mr. Trent," said Cor-
delia, attacking with feminine penetration the weak spot in this
ambiguous conspiracy.

The old, weary film of cultivated patience descended upon
Dave's blue eyes.

Red Robinson struggled to his feet, approached the small coal
fire--the parlour of Number Five, Old Wells Road, was decidedly
chilly--spat angrily into it and came back to his chair.

"'Ee doesn't know nothin' of hanarchy 'cept the nime," he
jerked out, "nor nobody helse neither! 'Tis a bleedin' fancy of
such as 'as never done a stroke of bleedin' work in their bleedin'
lives!"

"Mr. Trent's our lawyer, Red," said Dave quietly. "If he's cle-
ver enough to make Lord P. sell those leases, we at least must
compromise a little when it comes to our commune."

But Paul Trent had turned to Cordelia and was waiting for
an opportunity to speak.

"Real anarchy," he began, in the most caressing and beguil-
ing voice, as if he had been a young Bagdad silk merchant dis-
playing his wares in a luxurious harem, "has never yet been put
into practice. Mr. Robinson thinks it a mere fairy-tale, but if
your town council leases the shops in High Street and takes
over the dye works and gives me a chance to make the few laws
which--"

"Laws?" cried Red derisively, "'Ee's been sighing that we'll
all henjoy ourselves and do just what we like; and now 'ee's talk-
ing about laws!"

Cordelia, who had begun to gloat over the effect of her apple
of discord, surveyed with astonishment the movement of self-
control with which the man from the Scilly Isles patted Red's
shoulder and joined in the laugh against himself.

"If he can do that," she thought, "he'll be a match for Lord
P. and reduce old Beere to nothing."

"I cannot...think," said Mr. Evans gravely, speaking slowly
and emphatically and evidently weighing his words, "that an
anarchist commune in Glastonbury is a...practical possi-
bility."

"Pardon me, Mr. Evans," said Paul Trent, "but perhaps you
spoke just then...without...altogether...realising...how dangerous
it is to...to clash with a man from the Scillies,"

Mr. Evans' corrugated countenance broke into a deeply in-
dented smile and he rose up from his creaking chair and crossed
the room and shook hands vigorously with the anarchist.

"So you read the authors too?" he cried. "I never knew it!
I never knew it! Think of that! And I never knew it!"

When Mr. Evans spoke of "the authors" he always meant one
set of authors, those, namely, that dealt with Cymric mythology
and Cymric superstition. He dropped the young lawyer's hand
now and turned to his wife.

"Cordelia," he said, "you may mark my words that Lord P.
will sell them his land! Mr. Trent reads the authors. Mr. Trent
knows that it was in the Scillies that the oldest of the gods--
Cronos himself--was kept in prison! Mr. Trent knows that since
that day it's dangerous to interfere with a man from the Scillies
who's set his heart on anything."

"'Ee don't believe one word, Mister, 'ee don't," put in Red,
"of they tiles and fibles what yer pins yer bleedin' fithe on!
'Ee thinks they be all my eye!"

Red looked maliciously at Mr. Evans. His reference was obvi-
ously to Paul Trent, who once more astonished Cordelia by his
self-control.

"Well!" he said, "if our host can't believe my philosophy, and
I can't follow his poetry, we can agree at any rate in enjoy-
ing your humour, Mr. Robinson!"

"I don't know whether you realise, Mrs. Evans," said Dave
Spear, "that your father has decided to put off the opening of
his Chalice Hill arch until the end of January; when we hope
to have a ceremonious proclamation of the Glastonbury
commune."

But in his heart, as he spoke, Dave thought to himself: "Since
the only aspect of this affair of the least historic importance
will be its move towards England becoming communist, I must
see to it that the Gazette says nothing of Trent's absurd anarch-
ism." He sighed heavily. It would have been far easier for him
to drill and march and keep step and practise rifle-shooting than
to do all this plotting! But the cause demanded it. His dislike of
it was part of that bourgeois mentality in him which must be
overcome.

"You see, Mrs. Evans," broke in Paul Trent in a soft, caress-
ing voice, "this commune of ours will be a very harmless adven-
ture. We have no intention of bringing the government down on
us; and the fact that your father will naturally be the leading
spirit in it all will keep politics in the background. His interest
in it is entirely...religious...if I can use the word! Our friend
Spear, here, thinks of it as an advertisement for communism.
I am even more modest. I regard it as a quiet little experiment
in philosophical anarchy. Mr. Robinson, whose influence with
the labouring element in our town is so great, is less doctri-
naire in his notions. He will be content if--"

"If it makes that bewger Crow sit up and take notice! I 'ate
the bloke's bleedin' phyz!"

Red added this last remark almost pensively, puffing out such
a quantity of smoke that what Cordelia beheld in her purple
chair was an artisan's torso, with a head covered in a cloud.

"It is true as he says," remarked Spear--and it was notice-
able that all three conspirators, Dave-Brutus, Trent-Cassius and
Robinson-Casca, addressed their remarks to Mr. Geard's daughter
rather than to her husband--"our commune will be a very ten-
tative movement and with many facets. I wish," here he gave
another of his weary sighs, and his blue eyes took on that hope-
less film of disillusionment which had such a curious pathos
of its own--"I wish your father wasn't quite so absorbed in his
religious ideas. He would be such a power, if only "

Cordelia pulled down her muddy skirt hem over her ungainly
ankles and let her eyes embrace all the lour men in one sweep-
ing and rather contemptuous glance.

"Why don't you make him dismiss that man John Crow?" she
threw out harshly. "It's that idiot who urges him on. Father's just
putty in his hands. And he doesn't believe in anything himself
He plays with us all. I know him, through and through!"

The founders of the Glastonbury commune surveyed their
hostess much as a hoard of directors might have surveyed their
office-stenographer if she had suddenly told them that their
window-cleaner was the real danger to the firm.

But Mr. Evans, who had returned quietly to his antique chair
after his discovery that the lawyer from the Scillies read "the
authors," broke in at this point.

"My wife has got fond of John," he said gravely. "And so
she always punishes him and holds him up to scorn."

"Owen!" Cordelia's astonishment at this unexpected attack
was so great that her big mouth became as round as the letter 0
in the "Ora pro nobis" of a missal.

"'Tis Miss Crummie--not Miss Cordy--what's got fond of
Crow's cousin!" interjected Red. "She 'as divided 'er 'eart be-
tween Crow's cousin and young Mr. Dekker. Hain't I right, Mrs.
Heavens? 'Tis 'er and not you what 'ave got soft on Crow's

The insanity of Red's obsession against Philip was so extreme
that it extended itself to every member of Philip's family. To
Red's mind, Miss Crow of Benedict Street as well as Mr. and
Mrs. Crow of Northload Street and even Persephone Spear, at
present domiciled at Dickery Cantle's, had no individuality of
their own. They were the bewger's cousins; and that fact damned
them.

"What's your opinion, Evans," said Dave Spear, anxious to
turn the conversation away from these dangerous personalities,
"as to what form our commune should take, if we really do get
it started in January?"

"'Twas yer hone Missus, weren't it," interrupted the incor-
rigible cockney, addressing Dave, "what first thought of upsetting
the bewger by this 'ere commoon?"

Mr. Evans rubbed the side of his great hooked nose with his
left thumb. Everybody in the room except Red, who now, as he
reverted to his pipe, found his thoughts leaving the Crow family
and summoning up the more soothing image of Sally Jones,
fixed their eyes upon the Welshman.

The little parlour had become as stuffy as it was chilly. The
gusty wind, beginning to shake the not very solid architecture
of Five, Old Wells Road, seemed to join with the bizarre fur-
niture of that small room in calling upon Merlin's biographer
to utter some oracular word. At any rate there occurred just then
that kind of pregnant silence to which groups of human beings
are liable when their private thoughts differ so completely as to
evoke a sort of negative equilibrium.

"I think it won't matter very much," Mr. Evans said gravely,
"what form your commune takes. You yourself," and he stared
at Dave with a mouth from which a small dribble of saliva was
descending, "you yourself will oppose our good friend here,"
and he nodded at Paul Trent, "and that opposition will bring
the whole thing to nothing."

His words were the first words, all this long while, that
brought Paul Trent, who had been half-concealed in the smoke
of Red's pipe, down from his seat on the arm of the chair. The
feminine-complexioned, soft-fleshed anarchist, in his beautifully
fitting clothes, now moved to the fireplace where he stood upon
the rug and contemplated Mr. Evans with a tender indulgence.

The woman and the other men--for even Red seemed conscious
of something unusual in the air--watched these two Celts with
a faint uneasiness. For it seemed as if these strangely different
aboriginals of the Western Isles stared at one another, as though
something was passing between them totally obscure to the
other persons in the room.

"I've only read," murmured Paul Trent, in a much softer voice
than that in which he discoursed on the commune, "books
upon the authors."

Then, without a moment's pause, as if it were a fragment of
some immemorial ritual of which they both held the mystic clue,
Paul Trent began to recite, in a sort of grave sing-song, words
that seemed to Cordelia to be madness, to Dave to be devilry,
and to Red to be pure gibberish.

"'Complete was the captivity of Gwair in Caer Sidi.
Lured thither through the emissary of Pvvii and Frvderi.
Before him no one entered into it.
Into the heavy dark chain that held--"

Here Paul Trent stopped; but only to give place to Mr. Evans
who caught up the refrain; answering him with a sort of antiph-
ony that seemed to their hearers still worse insanity.

"'The Head of Annwn's Cauldron, what is it like?
A rim of pearls, it has around the edge;
It boils not the food of a coward or perjurer.
The bright sword of Llwch was lifted to it.
And in the hand of Lleminawe it was left.
And before the door of Hell's gate lamps were burning;
Seven alone did we return from the fortress of the Perfect
Ones."

"Did you compose all that, Owen?" enquired Cordelia.

"Certainly not!" answered Paul Trent, speaking for Mr.
Evans. "It's all in the books about the authors. Neither of us
invented it. Rhys, Loomis,--they all quote it. It's from a very
ancient Welsh poem called ‘The Harryings of Annwn' and it
appears to refer--"

But Mr. Evans interrupted him.

"It obviously does refer," he shouted, "to that ancient heathen
Grail, far older than Christianity, which redeemed...and always
will redeem...everyone who understands it...from...from...from...
from the captivity of Gwair in Caer Sidi!"

He suddenly burst into a spasm of suppressed laughter which
had an extremely disconcerting effect upon the ears of his hear-
ers. Mr. Evans was evidently on the edge of a shameless and
vociferous laughing-fit caused by some interior vision which
struck his mind as a monstrous Rabelaisian jest.

It always has an unpleasant effect when a person of a very
dominant physical personality falls into uncontrollable laugh-
ter. There is something indecent in the spectacle of it. This inde-
cency seems to be mysteriously increased when there is an ig-
norance in the hearers--as in this case there certainly was pro-
found ignorance--as to the cause of the explosion.

Swinging his head and his shoulders backward and forward,
making the most extraordinary chucklings, growing at the same
time very red in the face, he allowed these laughter-tears to run
down his cheeks and to fall upon his waistcoat without attempt-
ing the least concealment of his emotion. It was as if he had
suddenly been permitted by a special dispensation of Providence
to catch a glimpse of the monstrous cosmic joke, abominable,
heroic, megalomaniacal, into which the whole creation resolved
itself!

Cordelia rose from her seat and moving to his side laid her
hand on his shoulder. She felt as if her strange mate had sud-
denly turned into a medium for some huge, earth-cracking super-
natural ribaldry, that to her was inscrutable. She looked anx-
iously at the others to see how this exhibition struck them. But
under her touch Mr. Evans quickly recovered himself and what
had so agitated her womanly nerves seemed quite a natural oc-
currence to the other men.

Their host's laughing-fit evidently partook of that extra-mun-
dane humour to which all men are subject and which remains a
mystery of childishness to their wives and daughters.

Cordelia, surveying the diminishing convulsions of her part-
ner's gaunt frame with an irritable concern, became a symbol
of immemorial feminine annoyance in the presence of such a
masculine outburst when to a man--quite suddenly--the whole
cosmos appears in the light of a monstrous joke. Women never
laugh in this sort of way. Their laughter is pure naughtiness and
unadulterated mischief, or it springs from physical well-being
and is the airy happiness of the innocent earth-bubbles of matter
or, finally, it is hysterical, as when Cordelia laughed like the
neighing of a horse.

But she went quietly back to her seat now and Mr. Evans re-
marked gravely: "In this affair of yours, gentlemen, I confess
I'm no politician, what I was going to say was...when a per-
son touches"--he rolled his eyes towards Mr. Merry's nephew--
this basic Secret of Life, that our Bards expressed in poems like
The Harrying of Annwn, these external arrangements of Society
--capitalism or communism--seem unimportant."

Dave Spear rose to his feet, stretched himself, sighed heavily,
squared his shoulders and with his hands clasped behind his
back broke into a low, intense appeal, addressed to Mr. Evans
alone.

"If you could see human beings digging, as I have lately...
up there at Wookey...straining their muscles and going on
and on...and if you could realise that this same manual labour
is required, all the while, to keep the machinery of our indus-
trial system working...and that the people who do it...upon
whose labour we all live...the people who make the machines
and who feed the machines...are robbed by us non-workers
of all but their bare living, you would not, my dear Mr. Evans,
you could not, talk of communism as unimportant. You and
I, with our bourgeois mentality, shrink from it as we shrink
from slavery! But surely it's more righteous that we should all,
quite openly, be slaves of the State, than that by an evil and
crafty trick, and by our hypocritical talk of mental labour being
‘harder' than manual labour, we should prolong this crime...
this unpardonable sin?"

At the words "unpardonable sin," Mr. Evans, who had been
hearing him gravely, gave a guilty start, and automatically looked
sideways to the floor, to the place where, if he'd been in the
shop, the staircase to the cellar would have been.

"You can't have either communism or anarchism in one little
town," he said. "It's the whole country that must go in for it,
or it must be let alone. And even if you were dictator of all Eng-
land, Spear, I tell you it isn't money or position in life that
makes the difference between happiness and unhappiness. It's
something else...and when I think of how unimportant all
these questions are in comparison with...I could...I could...

His face which at this moment was a mixture of Don Quixote,
the Devil, and Dean Swift, broke into certain deep wrinkles, evi-
dences of another laughing-fit, which contorted it considerably,
while he controlled and prevented the outburst

Paul Trent now looked at his watch.

"Well! gentlemen," he said, "I've decided that I want you two,
after all, to come out with me to Mark Moor Court tonight. I
only pray we shan't find Will Zoyland closeted with his father!
I'm afraid if Will got on our track at this juncture he'd ruin the
whole thing. What a blessing he's out at Wookey!"

As soon as the visitors were gone, Cordelia said hurriedly to
her husband: "Better take your stroll now, hadn't you, while I do
the things?"

"What did you say?" murmured Mr. Evans, giving the hack
of the purple chair a push to move it towards the fire.

"Better go out and get your evening stroll over, while I wash
up," repeated Cordelia.

Mr. Evans stared blankly at her. The natural movement of any
couple, in their own house, when a group of visitors have de-
parted, is to draw up to the hearth with an ebullition of relief,
and begin a critical analysis of the evening. This was clearly
what Mr. Evans expected; and he was a little nonplussed. He had
not much to say to Cordelia about communes and commune-
makers; but he had a great deal to say to her about The Harry-
ing of Annwn.

The girl had already left him, however, and crossed the little
passage into the kitchen; so he snatched up his long black over-
coat from its peg and let himself out without a word.

"She's cross," he said to himself, "because I laughed like
that. She thinks I made a fool of myself."

He followed the Old Wells Road till he reached a turn to his
left, called Edmund Hill Lane, which led to the clay pits and
the tile works of Edmund Hill Pottery. This pottery had played
an important part in the modern life of Glastonbury, supplying
the town council with those fine large brick tiles of a beautiful
orange-red colour with which it had roofed all its new workmen's
houses not only in Old Wells Road and Bove Town but also in
Benedict Street. It was from under these bright red tiles, made of
rich Somersetshire clay, that the hopes and despairs of many
generations of Glastonbury people were destined to mount up and
follow in its gusts, night by night, this dream-burdened westerly
wind.

Mr. Evans got glimpses of a tormented half-moon in the sky,
as he walked along, tossed, tumbled, rolled, buffeted by piled-up
cloud racks, driven, themselves, across the rain-swept spaces by
this same wind. Edmund Hill Lane was at that hour a lonely
place to walk in, as it stretched upward towards those isolated
clay pits. Its ruts were clay; its banks were clay: it had been cut
out of clay; and it led to the richest clay pit in the West Country.
And all this clay, which in time would be moulded and hardened
into roofs for the dreams of Glastonbury people: dreams that
would be--so Mr. Evans told himself now as he strode along--
much the same, whether under Dave Spear's commune or Philip
Crow's capitalism!--called out to Mr. Evans and tugged softly
at him, with wet, mute, rainy, dumbly murmuring mouths, and
straining, coldly heavy, corpse-like fingers.

The glimpses he got of that wildly tossed half-moon stirred
the imagination of this man in the tight-waisted black coat and
bowler hat. The wet clay stuck more and more clingingly to his
boots as he advanced up the windy hill, leaving Glastonbury and
its conspirators far behind him, and his mind followed those
weird, old, chthonian deities of his race, whose dim personalities,
veiled under these Cymric syllables, "Pwyll, Pryderi, Liwch,
Lleminawc," called to him out of the wet earth. The very dreams
of the people behind him, mounting up alongside of him from
under the tiled roofs of the town, fell away from him now and
sank down like a flutter of autumn leaves. That iron bar in the
brain of Finn Toller, of which he had heard without hearing,
sank down. The great lorries, full of hermetic tin--diabolus
metallorum--of which Philip, in his house in the New Wells
Road, was thinking, fell away and sank down. The Harrying of
Annwn! How much more there was of the essential sorrow of
things and of the essential exultation of things in that queer
phrase than in all this absurd business of buying legal parch-
ments from the Marquis of P.!

As he walked along under the sickly moon and the feverish
clouds, Mr. Evans thought to himself how much more real the
world of consciousness was than the world of matter.

"In any given spot on the earth's surface," he thought, "the
consciousnesses of men are flowing and floating just below the
blind material surface! They have the same sun, the same moon.
the same stars; but it is with the souls of these things, with their
under-essences that the consciousnesses of men have dealings!"

He came to a heap of clumsily thatched turnips, by a wayside
barn, that the owner had covered up for winter feed for his
cattle, and upon this heap he sat down, pressing the tails of his
black coat under his thin flanks against the damp of this dark
mound. And sitting there alone under that turbulent sky it came
over him that the lives of men upon earth were all subject to
the captivity of Gwair in Caer Sidi, lured by the emissary of
Pwyll and Pryderi; in other words that they were all held in
bond by something alien, by something external to their true,
free essence. But he got the feeling that his own deeper nature
could take hold of his body, yes! and take hold of all this bodily-
world around him, and drive them both, as this wind was driving
these clouds, upon strange, occult purposes of its own.

Mr. Evans rested upon this thought for a second, holding him-
self aloof with an austere effort and grasping fate itself, as a
man grasps the handle of a plough. But even while he was ex-
periencing this masterful sensation there slid into his erotic nerve
the quivering forked tongue of his unpardonable sin.

Something about what he had seen that afternoon in the sheep-
fold had broken a barrier in the fortress of his sensual concen-
tration; and through this hole there now slid, or threatened to
slide, the electric-tingling body of the undying worm.

"I must make use," he said to himself, "of what Geard is doing
with that Grail Spring. The Pageant didn't kill it...but perhaps this
water...these crowds...this white magic of old Geard...may kill it!"

So he spoke; but as if in mockery of "old Geard," and all he
could do, there moved, there stirred, there awoke, in the remote
circles of Being beyond this wild sky, the appalling perilous
stuff in the double-natured First Cause. In its primordial Evil,
as with its wavering searchlight it fathomed the numberless
worlds of its living victims, the First Cause struck straight down
now at the responsive nerve of Mr. Evans' vice, and as it stirred
that poison it gave itself up to an orgasm of egocentric contem-
plation. As for Mr. Evans, he saw himself returning to his house
with this madness and with this horror upon him; he saw him-
self mounting the narrow staits; he saw himself embracing Cor-
delia...and he felt he could not do it...he felt he could not
...go home...just then...with this reptile lifting up its head.

"Complete was the captivity," he muttered to ‘himself, "of
Gwair in Caer Sidi!"

Without realising what he was doing he pressed his left hand
under the wet thatch of the turnip heap and pulled out a turnip.
This, all muddy as it was, he pressed to his face, smelling at it
with his hooked nose, and finally biting it with his strong wolfish
front teeth.

While the Welshman sat on that damp heap of turnips and bit,
with ferocious and yet hardly conscious impulse, into the flesh
of one of the rankest and most astringent turnips in the heap,
spitting out each mouthful after he had chewed it and once more
plunging his teeth into the sharp-smelling substance, it happened
that a microscopic creature--all mouth and yet all belly--was
enjoying, or suffering from precisely the same twinge of ego-
centric mania, as were Mr. Evans and the First Cause, as it lay
coiled up upon the surface of this same vegetable.

Thus it was fated for this particular turnip heap in Edmund
Hill Lane, halfway between Old Wells Road and the Brick-tile
Works to be the occasion of the bringing together, at exactly three
minutes to nine o'clock on the night of the twelfth of December,
of three identical psychic aberrations, that of the infinitesimal,
microscopic parasite, that of Mr. Owen Evans, and that of the
ultimate First Cause.

Human beings are however more sensitive to interruptions
from chance than are gods or insects; and it was Mr. Evans who
was the first to be distracted from this obsession of vicious con-
templation. He became aware of the approach of voices coming
down Edmund Hill Lane from the direction of the brick works.

They were the voices of a man and a boy; and they were amus-
ing themselves by hooting like screech-owls. Apparently some
real nocturnal bird of the species they were imitating was fol-
lowing them in the darkness; for Mr. Evans could hear at inter-
vals a cry that was like an echo of the noises that these pedes-
trians were making, following them at no considerable distance.

He got up hurriedly from his damp seat and threw the turnip
away. In its fall the insect feeding upon its surface was brushed
off; which meant the death that very night of that microscopic
parasite. The First Cause alone continued its unspeakable con-
templation; that motion of evil in the ultimate abyss, against
which all the good that is in mankind is forever struggling.

Mr. Evans advanced up the lane to meet the newcomers. This
he did because he had the peculiarity of always having a nerv-
ous dread of people overtaking him in the dark; and yet he felt
reluctant to hurry off home! He found himself even now pos-
sessed of a morbid fear of their stumbling upon him unwarned;
so,--although with something of an effort--he forced himself to
cry out "Hullo there!" in an almost menacing voice.

"Good evening, Mr. Evans!" came the reply out of the dark-
ness; and he found himself shaking hands with Sam Dekker.

"Do you know Elphin Cantle?" said Sam.

And the boy, coming sulkily forward, shook hands too.

"I had an idea we'd meet someone we knew if we came back
this way," Sam went on. "Elphin and I have been putting up
wild ducks at Decoy Pool and Meare Pool; and we came back
by Crannel Moor instead of by the Godney Road. We had our
supper at Upper Godney. They gave us half a small pike that
Mr. Merry had caught yesterday, when he was over there; in
that pond at Lower Crannel. It tasted good, didn't it, Elphin,
served with fried parsnips and parsley?"

Mr. Evans peered through the darkness into the boy's face. The
name Elphin made him think of Gwydion-Garanhir and of Tali-
essin.

"I'd have liked to ask you in," he remarked, "but Mrs. Evans
may be in bed. What do you make the time, Mr. Dekker?"

Sam looked at his watch and announced that it was after nine.

"You brought back that Saint Augustine I lent you in the
spring so faithfully, that you're always welcome to any books
you want to take from the shop."

Sam thanked him and then became silent. The two men stood
awkwardly side by side; while Elphin, moving to the edge of the
fence, set up his owl cry again.

"I'll walk back with you, if I may. as far as my house," said
Mr. Evans.

But for some reason--perhaps because the boy Elphin was so
occupied with the owls--they neither of them made any move to
start forward.

"Your voice sounded just now as if it were bothered bv some-
thing, Mr. Evans ," said Sam at last after an embarrassing pause.

It was in his instinctive recognition of all animals' moods that
this patient naturalist, transformed now into the latest Glaston-
bury saint, exploited his shrewdest wisdom.

"Have you a cigarette, Dekker ?" asked Mr. Evans.

Sam gave him one and struck a match. This ancient Prome-
thean act brought the two men together as nothing else could
have done just then. On a dark, rainy night even the flicker of a
match-flame has a magical power; and the little circle of light
extending outward from Sam's concave fingers illuminated not
only Mr. Evans' hooked nose, as he bent towards it, not only
Sam's own retreating chin, but the frayed edges of a small duo-
decimo that the latter carried in his rough tweed-smelling jacket
pocket.

"What's your book?" enquired the antiquary with professional
curiosity.

"Only a St. John's Gospel," answered Sam nervously, shov-
ing the volume down further into its place, and pulling his
pocket-flap over it, to hide it.

"The Mayor's favourite book," remarked Mr. Evans. "He says
it's the whole Bible of his new religion."

"Too-whit! Too-who! Too-whit! Too-who!" cried Elphin
Gantle from the fence.

"Listen, Evans!"

Sam blurted out the words hurriedly; and it was with a trem-
bling hand that he lit a cigarette for himself now from the one
which the other was smoking.

"I've been thinking lately, Evans, that our Glastonbury Christ
is like Osiris. They've cut him into fragments; and out of each
fragment they've made a different Person. I don't care much for
this Fourth Gospel. That's why I read it."

Mr. Evans nodded his complete and entire understanding of
such a motive.

"My Christ's utterly different from Geard's," Sam said, "and
different from my father's. My Christ's like Lucifer--only he's
not evil...at least not what I call evil. But He's the enemy of
God. That is, He's the enemy of Creation! He's always struggling
against Life, as we know it...this curst, cruel self-assertion
...this pricking up of fins, this prodding with horns...this opening
of mouths...this clutching, this ravishing, this snatching, this
possessing."

"Too-whit! Too-who! Too-whit! Too-who!" came Elphin's
voice. The lad was on the other side of the fence now.

Mr. Evans cast his eyes round him. The half-moon was dip-
ping, diving, rearing, tumbling, toppling, under that strong, wet,
westerly wind. Some of the clouds closest to it took on every now
and then, a momentary yellowness, sickly and unearthly, but
most of them were of the colour of cold steel. Mr. Evans snuffed
the air like one of the seals of Proteus. He thought he could de-
tect the smell of seaweed on the wind.

"The tide must be high tonight at the Burnham mud-flats," he
thought to himself. "They must be afraid of the sluices breaking
over there."

"Too-whit! Too-who! Too-whit! Too-who!" Elphin and his at-
tendant owl were already across the sloping pasture in the di-
rection of Maidencroft Lane.

Mr. Evans took off his bowler hat, and bending forward tapped
Sam on the shoulder with it.

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" he said. "You're
the son of a priest, aren't you? Can't you say to the Demon:
'Come out of him?' "

There was a moment's pause; only broken by the little mo-
notonous taps--like a man knocking off water-drops against a
doorpost--of Mr. Evans' hat upon Sam's shoulder.

"There! I was only joking!" cried the Welshman at last. "I
expect you don't believe in miracles, any more than you believe
in the Fourth Gospel. You're listening to that boy...that's all
you're doing! You're thinking of owls, as those rascals that came
to my house just now were thinking of leases and communes! It
makes me laugh, the way you all go on...while all the time...the
Harrying of Annwn..."

Here the man's face distorted itself, not with the coming on of
that queer, planetary laughing-fit, which had seized him in the
room, but with a similar feeling of isolation.

"You don't even know what Annwn is!" he murmured.

Then with a deep sigh, he replaced his hat on his head.

"Complete is the captivity of Gwair in Caer Sidi! he groaned
inarticulately, buttoning a loosened button of his tight-fitting
overcoat.

"Elphin! Hullo, Elphin! I'm going on!" Sam's voice rang out
across the fields in the direction of Maideneroft Lane.

"No, I don't believe in miracles ," he said gravely, "any more
than Christ did. What He did was simply to use His will to kill
His will."

"Too-whit! Too-who!" Elphin was at the fence again now and
his attendant bird of the darkness had apparently left him.

Mr. Evans muttered something in Welsh. The thought that
came into his heart was a thought of sick terror.

"This man's Christ is a madman like I am. His will holds the
rod over His will. He's all strain and torment. It's with torment
He drives out torment! I ought never to have spoken to this
man."

Elphin joined them now and they all three moved down Ed-
mund's Hill Lane. Not a word did any of them speak till they
turned into Wells Old Road; but all the while, just eluding his
conscious mind, there hovered about Mr. Evans' soul the sinis-
ter impact of that dialogue he had not heard.

"Will thik iron bar what you knows of make my young man
feel before he dies?"

Even before they reached Number Five of Wells Old Road, or
Old Wells Road--for both designations are in local use--Mr.
Evans could see a light in Cordelia's bedroom. At his gate he
hesitated whether to bid his companions good-bye or to accom-
pany them a step further. An instinct in him difficult to analyse--
perhaps a desire to test to the dregs the spiritual magic of this
disciple of a non-miraculous Christ--made him decide to go on
with them for a little way.

"I'll turn back in Bove Town," he said to himself. Sam seemed
surprised, and Elphin seemed definitely cross, that they had not
been able to get rid of this disturbing intruder even when they
passed his own gate.

Once again a dead silence fell upon all three as they turned
into Bove Town and walked along the well-worn flagstones of the
raised path under the stone wall leading to High Street.

Sam, it turned out, had to go into St. John's Church to make
the necessary preparations, which his father usually made for
himself, for the morning's Mass.

Elphin Cantle hoped against hope--indeed he actually prayed
in his heart--that Mr. Evans would see fit to say good-bye to
them at the entrance to the churchyard. The boy repeated under
his breath, as they approached the great church tower, a sort of
ritualistic incantation:

"This bloke ought to go home! Ought to go home; ought to
go home! This bloke ought to go home; when St. John's clock
strikes the hour!"

What was Elphin's consternation when this prayer of his was
not only not answered, but the extreme opposite of it was brought
to pass!

"Good-night, Elphin!" said Sam when they reached the lamp,
swinging from the arch above the entrance. "We mustn't take
you any further out of your way."

The boy stared aghast, his feelings smitten through and
through as if by a catapult.

"But Sir!" he gasped, "but Sir...but Mr. Dekker! I allus helps
'ee with they rinsings and rubbings. I be especial good at it;
ye said yer wone self, I were!"

"Shake hands with Mr. Evans, Elphin, and run off, there's a
good lad. We've had a nice day together; and we'll have some
more; but I'm busy now. Run off home to bed, there's a good
kid!"

Not a motion did Elphin Cantle make to shake hands with
Mr. Evans or indeed to shake hands with Sam. He turned round
without a word, without a sign, and taking to his heels ran off
at top speed. He dodged between the people on the pavement.
He dodged between the vehicles in the street, and making for his
room in his stucco tower, as a wounded animal makes for his
lair, he never shed a single tear till he threw himself down--
coat, cap, muddy boots, just as he was--prone upon his bed and
cried like an unhappy girl.

But Mr. Evans, egocentric though he had grown to be, was not
one to view a child's tragic discomfiture with equanimity. He
felt angry with Sam. Did the fellow think that he couldn't have
talked to him before that boy? Well, he certainly wasn't going
to talk to him now! The fellow was a prig, a fool, an ass, to send
that lad away...a lad called Elphin too; and he had a curious ex-
pression under that lamplight...a funny face...an interesting face!

Such were Mr. Evans' thoughts as he followed Sam into the
church.

"I know you'll be pleased to see," said Sam, "what Father has
done to St. Joseph's tomb!"

He led him to the famous, empty sarcophagus--one of the
most moving, if not one of the most authentic ossuaries of our
planet's history--where the bones of the man who gave up his
own tomb to Jesus are reported to have been laid.

Mr. Evans could not see very clearly in the dim lamplight that
radiated down the isle what Sam's father had done; but it evi-
dently was no great matter, for the tomb looked exactly as it had
looked to him when he had visited it in the early Spring with
the man who was now his father-in-law. But if Mr. Evans thought
of his father-in-law as he stood tonight by that great scooped-out
concavity, his companion had a much more poignant thought;
for the image of Nell, as he had talked to her and quarrelled with
her here, before the begetting of their child, came with cruel
vividness upon him.

"I may never," Sam forced himself now to say, "have such
a good chance to...to tell you, Evans, what I really feel about
...all these things."

He leant forward wearily as he spoke, for he was tired and
drowsy after his long walk, and he had never felt less clear-
headed and less inspired.

"What I feel is this," he went on, pressing both his hands
against the rim of the tomb and bowing his head forward above
its dusky emptiness. "I feel that the whole Creation is on the
wrong track...all scrambling for happiness and the satisfaction
of the senses. I feel that the only thing to do is to follow
Christ in making the will kill the will."

He lifted his ill-moulded beast-like lineaments and darted a
quick nervous glance at the tall, black-coated figure standing
aloof with his hands behind his back.

"How like the shirt of Nessus is this curst vice of mine!"
thought Mr. Evans, when, to his loathing, he found that the mere
distress of this will-killing Christ-lover had begun to cause him
a lively mental shiver of a dark sort of pleasure. "The poor
devil, the poor devil!" he said to himself. "I must not let my-
self feel like this!"

Tightly he clasped his long fingers behind his back, squeezing
them angrily together so as to suppress his wicked feeling by
their discomfort.

"If I let myself feel like this now," he thought, "I'll be creat-
ing an atrocious thought-imp that'll drive him from worse to
worse. Down with you! Down with you, you living leprosy! I
will wash you off--if it's in my own blood!"

"Don't 'ee see, Evans," Sam was now murmuring hoarsely,
"it's the whole stream of life that's got this possessive instinct,
this snatching, scrabbling, scraping, ravishing instinct. What
Christ has to do is to deny the whole thing, root and branch!
And it's no use saying it's for 'fuller life,' or 'more life,' that He
has to do it. It's all poison. It's all one glittering, shining, seeth-
ing tide of poisonous selfishness! We are all scales, scurf, scab,
on the same twisting, cresting dragon of the slime. The tide of
life itself is evil. That's the great secret of Christ. And what He's
aiming at now--the tortured Anti-God that he is!--is the freezing
up of the life stream! Christ doesn't give a damn for morality,
Evans! That's not the point with Him. He's out for something far
greater and deeper. He's out for the Beyond-Life! Do you remem-
ber what I said to you on Tor Hill, Evans, about His redeeming
Matter? I didn't realise then how He redeems Matter. He does
it by freezing the life force in it. He knows what the life force
is; and he can track it down. He can find it bubbling and seeth-
ing and horning and pricking and taking and tormenting and
triumphing in every direction. And then he touches it with his
cross and freezes it up!"

Mr. Evans became aware that old Mrs. Robinson, who had
been waiting for Sains late appearance before going home, had
now crept up with her broom and duster till she was within hear-
ing. The ex-servant of the Bishop must have caught some word
of their discourse--one of those tragic clue-words of our human
Tournament such as old women rejoice to lap up, as cats lap
milk--and she probably thought of this scene at the Arimathe-
an's tomb as a sort of moving-picture close-up, which, if she
could get a good seat, "'ud be the sime as the theayter."

"I can't help thinking. Mr. Dekker," said the Welshman now.
"that your ideas have changed a good deal since you talked to us
that spring day on the Tor. It seems to me that then your ideas
were more orthodox. I seem to remember your quoting the words
of the Mass, Verbum caro factum est, but from what you say
now "

"Yes, yes, yes,--I have changed, Mr. Evans, and everything
about me's changed; and the whole world has changed! The
world can't go on devouring itself, as it's doing now, snatching,
biting, stinging, poisoning, ravishing its flesh, and pressing it-
self with its beautiful breasts"--he threw a very queer expression
into these last words, the reason of which was obscure to his
chief hearer, but from the way her little rat's eyes glittered in
the dusky aisle, not so obscure to Mrs. Robinson!--"against
reality!"

Mr. Evans found it very difficult to look at this agitated figure
on the other side of the tomb of the great tomb-lender without
a stir in the coils of the nerve-snake within him that fed upon
such food.

"You are lucky in one thing, Mr. Dekker," he said. "I mean in
your quiet life at the Vicarage with your father."

"I'm afraid Elphin's feelings were hurt," said Sam, looking up
and turning his head towards the door.

His eyes fell upon Mrs. Robinson who was dusting the seat of
a perfectly spotless oaken pew and edging nearer and nearer.

"Hullo, Mrs. Robinson!" he called out; and his mouth worked
convulsively before he could say another word in the irritation
of her presence and his desire to get rid of her.

"Will yer be wantin' me henny more, Mister?" the old woman
responded. "Because, if not, I'll be miking me way 'ome."

"Nothing, nothing, thank you!" he replied, impatiently and
added in the same tone, "You can go now, Mrs. Robinson."

("'Twas a shime to 'ear the way they two were talking," the
old lady said to her son when she got home that night. "Ondecent
'eathen talk 'twere such as never ought to be 'eard hinside of a
'orspital, least still of a church. Mr. Sammy, 'ee 'urried me hout
of door as if I'd catch a palsy by stighin' a minute in their
company!")

"Boys are very sensitive creatures, Dekker," announced Mr.
Evans sententiously. "When I was young there was an old man
in the Pembrokeshire hills, where we lived, that I used to watch
milking his goats. I used to catch them for him sometimes. He
used to get angry with them and I used to be glad when he got
angry with them. But one day he sent me away for throwing
stones at them. And--do you know, Dekker, I wouldn't go home!
I stayed out on the hills for a whole summer's night. I slept in
a gully on a heap of heather, and all that night when I thought
of the goats--" He stopped abruptly; for he saw that Sam
was no longer listening. Sam indeed had only heard a small por-
tion of this speech and that portion not very distinctly. He was
keeping his eyes fixed on the retreating form of old Mrs. Robin-
son; but the eyes of his heart were fixed upon Nell Zoyland.

The girl was back again now from the hospital, and estab-
lished--with Mrs. Pippard as a nurse for the child--once more
at Whitelake Cottage.

Mr. Evans had done more than blush as he told about the
goats. A deep swarthiness had actually mounted to his cheeks,
his forehead, his neck. For this story was a sacred story. Led on
by the hour and by the place he had told one of the important
stories of his youth.

But Sam Dekker wasn't interested enough even to know
whether he had been speaking of goats or of rabbits or sheep.
Mr. Evans' black-coated figure had begun to grow misty and
faint for Sam; and Mrs. Robinson, issuing forth from the church
door, had become for Sam like some fantastical curlicue on the
lettering of a tragic volume. Even a saint cannot bear up always;
and at that moment, so great was his physical exhaustion that
something in him nearly broke down.

Mr. Evans little knew how near this student of the Fourth
Gospel, standing over the tomb of the man who had buried
Jesus, had come to crying out a wild curse upon the divine
Lover.

"She's my girl! She's my girl!" Sam moaned in his heart.
"What hast Thou given me; what canst Thou ever give me, in
exchange for my girl?"

When they were all at last out of the church and got home--
Sam asleep ; Mr. Evans asleep; Mrs. Robinson asleep; but Elphin
Cantle still sitting at the window of his stucco tower--there ensued
a singular dialogue without words between the red light of the Re-
served Sacrament and the empty sarcophagus of St. Joseph. This
was one of those dialogues which it is never fantastical to inter-
pret in human language, because no one can deny that in some
language they must be perpetually occurring.

"Aren't you tired, red light, of shining so long without a pause
in front of this Miracle of the faith?"

Thus, in a cold, flat, toneless voice, enquired the empty
Sarcophagus.

"Yes," answered the red light, "I am very tired."

"If you could get anyone to move you," said the Sarcophagus,
"you could rest here, within me; for I am tired of being empty!"

And the echo of the clock in St. John's Tower, coming down
through the belfry into the church, repeated in a voice faint as
an old man's last whisper :

"Tired...tired...tired...tired...tired...tired......tired...tired...tired...
tired..." as it echoed the striking of the hour of ten over the
roofs of Glastonbury.



THE CHRISTENING



Tossie Stickles' lusty twin girls were christened by the
Vicar of Glastonbury--bastards though they were!--with all due
ceremony and at the regular hour for that ritual, after the chil-
dren's service, on the day following the Evans' visit to the ruined
sheepfold. Immediately after this ceremony the young mother and
her small daughters were established once again under Miss Eliza-
beth's roof in Benedict Street. Nancy Stickles still continued to
come each day "to help out"; so that Toss was enabled to divide
her time between looking after her infants and cooking for the
family, which still included--after several battles royal with my
Lord's sister in Bath--the independent Lady Rachel, who now
went regularly to work with Ned Athling in the little office of the
weekly Wayfarer.

Deep in Miss Elizabeth's heart was lodged the fixed idea that
eventually Mr. Barter would marry Tossie; and with a view to
this natural and ethical contingency, she now had begun encour-
aging the manager of the municipal factory to pay constant vis-
its to his illegitimate family under her roof, going so far as even
to give up her drawing-room, whenever that gentleman came, to
his conversations with Tossie.

It was one of those fantastic and incredible arrangements that
in real life are always occurring; situations which, in premoni-
tion, seem absurdly impossible, but which are the very ones that
Nature, moulding the prejudices of men to her own views, takes
a humorous pleasure in bringing about.

The christening of Nell Zoyland's child was something much
less easily dealt with; just as the fate of its mother was in the
hands of more eccentric and wayward persons than either Tom
Barter or Miss Crow. Will Zoyland had made up his mind that
his father, the Marquis, should stand godfather to the little boy,
who was to be called Henry after the great man. But the Marquis
had a nervous dislike of appearing in public in Glastonbury--
a place which he had come heartily to distrust and dislike since
he had been mobbed by the rabble on that eventful Pageant-day
--and so after long discussions and procrastinations it had been
worked out that Nell's child was to be baptised at Whitelake
Cottage by Mat Dekker on the fifteenth of December.

Hearing that Lord P. was coming for this occasion, as well
as Dave and Persephone who were the little Harry's other god-
parents, what must the good Mrs. Pippard do--who was related
to half Glastonbury--but beg from her mistress the privilege of
giving a little christening party of her own to celebrate this aus-
picious day. Thus the fifteenth of December that year was to be
a lively occasion out at Whitelake; and it was a fortunate occur-
rence, and a good omen too, for babe Harry, that this day, after
so much rain, was one of cloudy and intermittent but still of
quite perceptible sunshine. Harry was a tragic little boy in cer-
tain ways. He clung desperately to his mother; and it was always
touching to see the struggle in his small heart between his intense
greediness and his hatred of being fed by any other "Mwys," as
Mr. Evans would have called it, than his mother's lovely breasts.

The proletarian contingent of Master Henry's party was to
include Mother Legge and her now quite convalescent niece,
Tittie Petherton, Nancy Stickles, who was also a relative, Sally
Jones who had once been in service along with Doxy Pippard,
the old woman's daughter, and last, but not least, our old acquaint-
ance Mr. Abel Twig, who was Mrs. Pippard's cousin.

All these persons were to have their tea in Nell's kitchen, while
Lord P., together with Mr. and Mrs. Spear and the Vicar, re-
freshed themselves in her small parlour.

The present dwellers of Whitelake Cottage included not only
Mrs. Pippard herself, but her daughter, Eudoxia, a girl who was
now acting as the Zoyland's housemaid. Both mother and daugh-
ter slept in the ante-room of Will's private retreat at the back of
the cottage, while Nell and her child slept in the front bedroom.

Since the show season at Wookey had come to an end Will
Zoyland had been employed by Philip in the much more impor-
tant role of assistant-overseer of the new tin-mining works. The
head overseer--an industrious and clever technician--was not
good at keeping his subordinates up to the scratch; nor had he
much initiative with regard to tracking out new veins of metal-
deposit. Thus Zoyland's job at the tin mine was partly a dis-
ciplinary one and partly a geological one, neither of which oc-
cupations exactly suited his peculiar gifts. But he did not demand
much salary; ten times less, in fact, than Philip would have had
to give to anyone else; and all the labourers on the works held him
in respect because of his name.

Lord P. had announced that he would drive over in his dog-
cart from Mark Moor Court, picking up Lady Rachel on his way
through Glastonbury. The christening was roughly timed for
between four and five; and Mat Dekker had told Nell that he
would try to come over himself soon after three, so as to enjoy
a little talk with her alone before her other guests arrived.

Will Zoyland had come to the secret conclusion, after first
setting eyes on his wife's infant, that this was none of his; but he
had concealed this certainty so successfully that Nell had not the
least suspicion that he had divined the truth; and this secret
knowledge of his gave him a great and unfair advantage in the
daily struggle for the mastery between them; for he found that
to have such a weapon, and not to use it, was the strongest
weapon he could possibly have; and he took full advantage of
this. His position, just then, was in many respects a singular and
crucial one. The fact that Nell was suckling the child herself,
though old Mrs. Pippard helped her washing and dressing him,
made it psychologically difficult for Will to start making love
to her again. He had a curious penchant for babies, amounting
almost to a mania for these odd little poppets, whose angers are
so nerve-racking and whose philosophical calm is so soothing; so
that he won Nell's maternal gratitude willy-nilly by his tender-
ness to her offspring, especially as he consented to sleep on the
couch in the parlour and to leave her and child the uninterrupted
use of their bedroom. It had given Nell a queer kind of shock
when she saw Mrs. Pippard making up that particular couch for
the master of the house; that couch which had not been used as
a bed by anyone since that day in March!

But Will's passionate devotion to the child disarmed her com-
pletely because it was more than she had dreamed would hap-
pen, and she took it to imply that he had not the least suspicion
that the little Harry was not his.

The baby, on its side, seemed to take to Will with a degree of
awareness and attraction unusual at that age. He was a child of
colossal egoism and of an immense power of love. He loved Nell
with a piquant zest that was delicious to behold; but his love for
her was a hot, feverish, violent thing; while his response to
Zoyland was a sort of rapturous calm. In his furious fits of tem-
per, which were of a tragic intensity and prophetic of a future
that made the girl tremble to think of, Zoyland alone could
handle him, quell him, console him. Time and again, old Mrs.
Pippard, who could do nothing with him, would say to Nell--"If
it weren't for the measter, thik mommet 'ud fling 'isself into
convoolsions."

"He can't not think it his own child!" Nell would say to herself ;
but how he could have been so deceived, when its pathetic little
chin was so exactly like Sam's, she never considered. She was
very grateful, too, at being let off all love-making; and this she
attributed to Will's passion for the child; and it made her un-
easy, with a sort of shamefaced discomfort, to think that she owed
her escape from his amorous advances to this deception. But in
this matter, too, as much as over the child, the girl, for all her
feminine insight, had been completely outwitted by the crafty
huntsman. It was really the sly old Zookey Pippard who engi-
neered this treachery. Perhaps, being a relative of Mother Legge,
she had it in her blood to play procuress. But it was she who
had persuaded her daughter to come up to Whitelake Cottage
from a very good place at a farm near Witham Friary, and her
arguments must have been very subtle ones; for the wench re-
ceived, in return for her work, probably the lowest wage that has
ever been paid to a maid, at any rate in a gentlefolk's house,
from Westbury Beacon on the north to Huish Episcopi on the
south. But Zookey was--as Mr. Weatherwax, who knew her "up
hill and down dale" said to Penny, when those old gossips first
"larn'd who 'twere were looking 'arter Missy Zoyland"--"the
cunningest bitch-badger this side o' Tarnton."

Eudoxia Pippard, when she finally appeared in response to
her crafty parent's beguiling hints, completely turned Will Zoy-
land's head.

Having lived a chaste life for nearly half a year and having
recognised the fact that he had been made the bread-winner for
another man's child, Zoyland found nothing in his passion for
Nells baby to prevent him from committing delicious adultery
with Doxy Pippard. Eudoxia was indeed dedicated, it seemed, to
give immoral delight to Lord P.'s bastard.

She was not at all what you would call a pretty girl. Her lips
were much too thin, her nose was a little twisted to one side and
her neck was decidedly too long; but she had one peculiarity
which, as soon as he discovered it, set Zoyland's Varangian senses
on fire, and that was the most satiny skin that ever a Glastonbury
amorist had clipped, as Malory would say, since the days of the
damosel Linet, of the Castle Perilous! It may be easily that, in
the category of feminine desirability, such polished flanks, such
slippery knees, such satiny hips, and all such other sinuous slen-
dernesses, do not by any means constitute what is called "classi-
cal beauty" or even romantic charm; but whatever they constitute,
as they slide in or out of a seducer's arms they evoke a ravishing
and transporting satisfaction.

Now there was an outside wooden staircase at the back of the
house, leading into the ante-room of the "smoking-room"; so
that when Nell and Sam's child were fast asleep, in the front of
the house, Eudoxia could easily come in through the kitchen
door. This door, if Zookey remembered to leave it ajar, had well-
oiled hinges; so that when Doxy found herself--at first with agi-
tated surprise, but later with entrancing coquetry--clothed only
in her night-gown and in the presence of the master of the house,
lying upon his couch bed, there was no danger of surprisal if
they spoke in low whispers.

Now Nell, although Zoyland had loved her dearly and had got
great enjoyment from her, had never been really responsive to
his embraces. Her body had responded faintly, her heart a little,
but her inmost imaginative nerve, the crucial chord to the essen-
tial quiver of a girl's stirred senses, not at all. The full-blooded
bastard, as may well be believed, had had many loves before he
became infatuated with Nell Spear, but none of these had been
adepts at the art of provocation, none of these had been viciously
exciting.

Now Doxy Pippard possessed, among other original character-
istics, a curious mania for retaining her virginity. Vicious and
inflammable as she was with the feverish, reckless, almost swoon-
ing intensity of the pseudo-consumptive type, she had lavished
her nervous provocations on all her men and yet had managed
matters so skilfully as to be a maiden still. The mere idea of
lying in the arms of the son of the Marquis of P. was intoxicating
to the romantic yearning in her snake-smooth, leaf-cool body;
while the herculean proportions of Zoyland as a human being
fulfilled all her secretest girlhood's dreams as to what a real
masculine bedfellow should be.

On the eve of the day of the christening Eudoxia had come
down to him soon after midnight, entering the kitchen by the
door left unlatched by Zookey; and it was after a couple of
hours of paradisiac dalliance, wherein her protection of herself
from "mortal sin" prolonged her companion's tantalised delight
beyond what he would have dreamed possible, that the couple sat
up suddenly on that single-pillowed couch-bed under the heavily
curtained window and started to listen with all their ears. What
had disturbed them was an outburst of crying from the child,
followed by Nell's voice calling Will's name. It is probable that
no possible re-arrangements of society--not even that most ideal
commune pictured by Paul Trent--will ever bring it about that
the fear of discovery in erotic infidelities will be abolished. Such
"alarums and excursions," such panic-stricken beatings of the
heart, seem as deeply implicit in the fatality of human relations
as is the indestructibleness of jealousy itself.

Zoyland had already thrown one of his herculean limbs out of
bed; and with his heel on the floor was clutching the bed-clothes,
'preparatory to obeying his wife's summons, when Eudoxia, who
had curled up her supple slenderness like a frightened grass-
snake, close under the window-sill, heard Zookey's voice reassur-
ring both mother and child.

"There's Mother!" she whispered. She was right. For once, it
seemed, the old woman's influence had succeeded with the head-
strong baby; for they heard its shrill cries die down now; and
soon after they could catch the creaking of the heavy shoes she
wore and the drag of her lame foot--for Zookey suffered from
eczema and the chief ornament on her extemporised toilet-table,
which was a big black trunk with Nell's maiden initials on it.
was a great china pot of zinc ointment--as she returned into the
ante-room.

Even his herculean capacity for amorous play being exhausted,
and this alarm having roused them both to extreme wakefulness,
Zoyland and Miss Pippard fell to talking in low whispers.

A luminous half-moon, disencumbered tonight of those eter-
nally eastward-travelling clouds, threw a silvery stream between
the brown curtains of their window; a stream which fell on the
man's bushy beard and on the girl's old-fashioned night-gown
and on her slippers tossed down upon the floor. In his rough
eagerness, Zoyland had torn away the top button from the front
of this gown, and the girl's long thin neck protruded wantonly
and weirdly; sometimes entering that ray of moonlight and some-
times receding from it, like a slender birch-trunk surrounded by
swaying bracken. Close beside Miss Pippard's faded blue slip-
pers Zoyland had thrown down his own muddy boots, one of
which lay on its side, contented and at ease, in that little pool
of moonlight, while the other, left in the outer darkness, stared
sadly at the ceiling.

They were both sitting up in the bed, their backs against the
western wall of the cottage, while the stream of moonlight enter-
ing on their right hand and illuminating the girl's neck and the
fringe of his beard, left their upraised knees, over which the rum-
pled bed-clothes extended in confusion, partly in light and partly
in shadow. One of his arms was hanging loosely over the edge
of the couch while the other, flung round her waist and against
her bare side was teasing his tired senses with an aftermath of
delicate tantalisation. As he rested there, Will Zoyland felt ex-
tremely grateful to Miss Pippard for the pleasure she had given
him and for the pleasure she was still suffusing through every
nerve of his deliciously lethargic frame. Sexual gratitude is an
emotion much less frequent in modern days than in mediaeval
times, owing to the fact that industrialism has cheapened the
value of the sex-thrill by lowering the ritual-walls surrounding
it. In modern times it needs a profoundly magnanimous and even
quixotic nature to feel this emotion to any extreme degree. It is
doubtless this absence of sexual gratitude that accounts for the
cold-blooded and savage hatred that so many separated couples
feel for each other today; and the furious vindictiveness of their
disputes over money. But it is a sign of meanness in a man or
a woman, and of a certain thinness of character, when such grati-
tude is so quickly forgotten. A large nature may find it necessary
to hit fiercely back; may find it necessary to escape altogether;
but even in its retorts, even in its avoidance, it retains a certain
fundamental tenderness and indulgence, based upon physical
gratitude for the thrilling sensations of the past.

It was largely his over-brimming gratitude to Nell for the
thrills which he had got from the touch of her body that had
made Zoyland so indulgent in the matter of Sam. Men that sail
the sea are as a rule, by reason of their isolation from women,
more grateful to them for their favours than landsmen are. A
jealous peasant, a jealous tradesman is much more common than
a jealous sailor; and though Lord P.'s bastard had never sailed
the sea, his Norse ancestors had, and that manner of life lay deep
in his blood.

Miss Pippard was a complete stranger to Will Zoyland; and,
for this very reason, the fact that the shuffling of life's cards--or
as some would say, the machinations of Zookey--had given him
the thrilling privilege of enjoying the satiny texture, cool and
slippery as the leaves of waterlilies, of the girl's limbs, endowed
their moonlit whispers with a piquancy as delicate and exalted
as a bird's song or a butterfly's flight in a monastic cloister.

"I'm glad your mother's asked Mother Legge tomorrow," whis-
pered Will, "for I've always had a fancy for that old lady. She's
a classic figure, if you know what I mean, my dear. My father
used to say she made him think of a whore-mistress in Rome."

"Is it true, Mr. Zoyland," came a faint response from the white
figure at his side, "that the Mayor of Glaston cured poor Tittie
of a killing cancer?"

"God! my dear, I don't know! I've been out at Wookey all
the autumn. Perhaps it wasn't cancer at all. You'd better ask her
tomorrow and see what she says. I wouldn't go to that pious old
humbug, if I had the worst cancer ever known. I'd shoot my-
self first."

"They say there'll be rare doings," went on Miss Pippard,
offering as she spoke just the kind of resistance to his caresses
that enhanced their value while it did not waylay their direction,
"when Mr. Geard opens his new arch on Chalice Hill. They say
they foreigners be due to come in trainloads to see 'um. I were
out at Moorleaze, by Witham Friary, on Pageant Day. Missus
went to it, and so did the childer; but Master kept I by 'un,
to" She interrupted herself with a little click of her tongue
against her teeth. This sound usually denotes some gentle disaster
when uttered by a young girl. In the case of Miss Pippard it
denoted an indulgent awareness of amorous advances.

"To play in the hayloft with him?" whispered Zoyland,

"There were a lot o' new goslings," Eudoxia continued
gravely, "out there by Croft Pond; and I were the only maid in
Dairy what he trusted wi' they. Old Madge Dill was too rheu-
matic to cross barton. She be the one I told 'ee about, Mr. Zoy-
land, what got the rheumatiz, from picking watercress."

"I remember, sweetheart," whispered Zoyland. "She was the
one who stinted you in butter till you scared her by that tale of
the corpse candles."

"So she was," sighed Eudoxia, "and arter that tale I were the
richest-nourished woman in Mid-Somerset. I wish often--and
sweet Jesus do know I wish it now!--that Mother had never
made me leave that good place. Master often would say I were
the deftest maid for smelling out mushrooms that he'd ever seen.
He often said that when I married he'd give me a solid gold
bracelet wi' filgree lacework on 'en." Thus whispered Eudoxia
and sighed heavily.

She gave her bed-fellow plenty of time to meditate on the
lavish liberality of Moorleaze and upon ways and means of
rivalling it. Then she sighed again.

"I'd like Mother to try if the Mayor's Miracle Spring on
Chalice Hill could cure her eczema." This pious wish was
breathed into the moonlight with intense gravity. And then, even
at the very moment when her resistance to her seducer's one-
handed caresses perceptibly slackened, she added in a still graver
whisper:

"It makes her toes itch terrible--poor Mother! I'd give half
a year's wages to ease her of thiccy devil's smart!"

Zoyland's lechery was of a very subdued kind just now, so he
could afford to moralise at this moment to any extent. "Some-
times," he said to himself, "these girls seem to have no nervous
system at all. They can respond without responding, and think
of God knows what! If anyone asked me what I valued most in
a woman I'd say attention! It's like dealing with a creature that's
half an animal and half an angel. The larger part of your talk,
of your love-making, of your ideas, of your thoughts, pass over
them like water off a duck's back!" He had arrived at this finale
in his meditations when the girl suddenly stiffened herself like
a galvanic wire and shrank against the brown curtain, pulling
the bed-clothes over her head. Zoyland had time to catch one
faint rustle on the staircase leading to the bedroom above, and
one slight creaking of the bannister; but he had no sooner leapt
out of bed and stumbled over the girl's slippers, than the door at
the foot of the staircase was flung cpen, and Nell--in her blue
dressing-gown and with a flat silver candlestick in her hand--
stepped into the room.

To the end of his days Zoyland remembered the expression of
Nell's face. Her eyes were gleaming with a fierce, hard, bright
lustre when she first came in; but as she raised her candle one
side of her features was blotted out in shadow.

"Aren't you ashamed of yourselves?" she cried in a clear ring-
ing voice, and with a hand that he could see was neither trem-
bling nor shaking she carried the candle into the middle of the
room and laid it on the little green card-table, pushing a vase
of small-flowering chrysanthemums that stood there out of the
way with the candlestick rim.

The bearded man, looking very tall and formidable in the
candlelight, held his ground and remained with his massive legs
firmly planted on the rug, his bare feet widely apart, his flannel
shirt hanging loose over his bare thighs. But Nell came right up
to him and with an imperious gesture with her hand made as if
she would push him out of the way as she went to the couch to
confront Miss Pippard. Not being able to do this and apparently
surprised at the man's imperturbable sangfroid, Nell made a step
sideways toward the wall on her left and called out to the hud-
dled figure on the couch.

"Aren't you ashamed of yourself, Eudoxia? Aren't you ashamed
to treat me like this and your mother upstairs too; and me with
little Harry? I can't understand you, Eudoxia. I can't understand
how you could do such a thing!"

While Nell was thus expressing her indignation to the form on
the couch, Zoyland's mind was rapidly considering two alterna-
tive lines of action. Should he pick up his clothes, which lay
there, piled up on a wicker chair, near the bookcase--that book-
case that contained the massive volumes of Arabia Deserta--and
retire with them to his "smoking-room," leaving Eudoxia to the
mercy of Nell? Or should he, by hook or by crook, compel
his wife to go back to her bedroom and her child? Huntsman
as he was, Will had only to decide on the line to take, and he
would follow it up recklessly and defiantly. Up to this point,
Nell, in her righteous anger, had had the whiphand over both of
them. But Zoyland's one clear instinct now was to save Miss Pip-
pard from further humiliation. Lovely though Nell looked in
her blue dressing-gown, the banked-up righteousness of her in-
dignation seemed to have changed her personality in a very
subtle way. Zoyland could not help experiencing a queer shock
when he saw how this gross incursion had dragged the beautiful
girl into the role of jealous, sport-spoiling domesticity, wherein
it is hard for any woman to play an attractive part.

The man's sensations followed one another, like straws on
a splashing water-fall, during the few seconds of Nell's words to
that tumbled couch from which his own burly form now warded
off the candleflame.

"Come on upstairs, Nell," he said, moving toward her. "We'll
talk this out better upstairs. It's not Eudoxia's fault."

"Don't come near me--don't touch me!" cried his wife, with
scarlet cheeks and flashing eyes.

"Come on upstairs, Nell!" he repeated in a quiet voice that was
full nevertheless of a formidable resolution. Those invisible
naturalists--belonging to regions of Being more powerful, I will
not say "higher" than ours--who take a peculiar and doubtless
sometimes a decisive interest, as Mat Dekker did with his
aquarium, in human dramas as tense as this--must have been
impressed by Zoyland's calm and masterful handling of this
situation. They would have seen that all his real tenderness was
for his wife--they would have seen that he regarded his affair
with Miss Pippard as of no more consequence than if he'd been
caught stealing cherries. But they would also have noted that he
had the rare gift of using violence in cold blood. For instead of
being in the remotest degree intimidated by Nell's electric fury--
and in her fit of blind sex-reaction the gentle girl struggled like
a pantheress in his arms--he lifted her up, as Zookey might have
lifted little Master Henry, and carried her bodily up the stairs
into the room above, when he laid her--Zookey Pippard having
discreetly closed the door of the ante-room--upon the bed, by
the side of her sleeping first-born.

The aforementioned celestial naturalists would not have been
deceived, as certainly the terrified Eudoxia was, into regarding
Nell's furious anger as a deep and tragic feeling. They would
have commented to one another--over this Whitelake aquarium
of anthropoid minnows--to the effect that had Nell been really
tragically hurt she would have hugged her baby to her heart
where she was, and never come down those stairs so deliberately,
so softly, and so bent on righteous retribution!

What Eudoxia beheld when she removed the bedclothes from
her head was the wide-open door of the staircase, the flickering
candle on the table, the twisted blue girdle of Nell's dressing
gown lying in the same pool of moonlight as her own slippers
and her paramour's boot, and the untouched heap of the master's
clothes piled up in the wicker chair over by the bookcase.

Sitting up in bed with beating heart, the girl surveyed these
objects for a second or two. Then, under her breath, deeply,
passionately, concisely--and it must be confessed with no little
justification--she cursed "the womb that bore her and the paps
that had given her suck." .

"It's all your fault, Mother!" she wailed in her heart. This is
the last time I'll listen to 'ee! I'll go back to Moorleaze tomor-
row, so help me God!"...


The first of the guests to arrive on the following afternoon,
which turned out to be a neutral day, as days go, neither wet nor
fine, neither windless nor gusty, neither warm nor particular y
chill, was the Marquis of P. and the Lady Rachel.

Lord P. arrived in a thoroughly nervous and crusty humour.
Zoyland and Nell had barely finished their late lunch, cooked by
Zookey in sulky silence--her daughter having gone off to catch
the nine o'clock bus to Frome, intending to quit the bus at
Wanstrow, and make the best of her way, without even risking
a telegram, safe back to her deserted goslings of Croft Pond.

The Marquis went at once for a stroll by the river with his
son, leaving Sergeant Blimp to dispose of the green-wheeled
dog-cart and the black horse, as best he might.

"I've got a piece of news for you, Will," he declared with an
assumed eagerness, as soon as they were out of hearing. The
bastard shrugged his great shoulders. He knew his father too
well. The long-winded dissimulation of the House of Lords
pulled no wool over his eyes.

"The Governor's been making an ass of himself," he thought
grimly. "This is his regular beginning!"

The old man's profile, as he watched it moving by his side
with the scrubby Vandyke beard and prominent nose, seemed to
have grown perceptibly sharper since he saw it last. The aged
nobleman had a pinched, frustrated, tired look on his old war-
rior's face, as if he'd been wearing his suit of chain-armour too
many years, and would be glad enough to make his will and lie
down with his forefathers in Wells Cathedral.

"I shan't have to sell Mark Court," said Lord P., "that's one
good thing. I did a good stroke of business last night, me boy.
I wish you could have seen how I led 'em on and hustled 'em and
rustled 'em and tussled 'em."

"Christ, Dad!" cried the other, in great alarm, snatching at
his father's sleeve and bringing him to a halt, while he swung
round to face him. "What have you gone and done now?"

"They came last night," said the old gentleman. "Three of the
devils came! One was your wife's brother, the Bolshevist--an
honest chap, by the way, that fellow is,--and an agitator of some
sort--an impossible individual; and the third bloke was a clever
lawyer from the Scilly Isles--called Trent. He very soon realised
with whom he had to deal. The other two had seemed inclined to
sermonise me. They took the tone that if I didn't let 'em have
their way this time now, I'd be far worse caught later on. But I
soon let 'em see I wasn't the sort of person they could rush like
that! But this fellow Trent seems to have made a pretty close
study of all the Glastonbury leases and properties; and he helped
me to make your Bolshevist relative see my points when I ex-
plained the situation."

"For God's sake what have you done, Sir?" cried the bastard,
mightily alarmed.

The old man straightened his shoulders and leaned forward
a little, bowing stiffly from his waist, like a soldier and a courtier,
but digging his cane deeply into the tow-path mud.

"Well, I'll tell you, lad," he said, leaning on the handle of
his stick. "I've fixed things now so that I shan't have to worry
any more about my income, for years to come. I've been looking
up the entail and those brothers of yours--damn their souls!
A lot they care for my troubles!--have no word to speak in this.
The Zoyland entail doesn't touch Glastonbury."

"You've gone and sold " cried the bastard.

"No, I haven't, lad. Don't get excited too soon. All I've sold
to 'em, and for a good round sum too, I can assure you, is that
section of the dye works properties that are on my land. That's
the newest section, you know. That Crow fellow will look yellow
in the gizzard when I clear him out; and a good thing too. He's
been taking things too much for granted, the snappy close-
mouthed rogue! But for the rest; for the High Street shops and
for the Bove Town and Paradise property; I've let 'em have
those on a fifty years' lease, and at a thousand pounds higher
rent, too, than I got from the tradesmen and the slum-tenants.
It's a first-rate piece of business, lad! Old Beere is furious, of
course. But that's because I did it over his head. But a lot he's
done for me these last years--except eat my pheasants and tell
me indecent yarns about his daughter and your wife's sister-in-
law, who everybody told me was soft on Crow! He's in his
dotage, old Beere is. He thinks it's a great glory and a mark of
gentility in him that he's got a daughter who don't run after
the boys! I told the old fool that his sort of gal would murder
him for his cash if he wasn't careful."

William Zoyland jerked himself uncivilly away from his father
and took a hurried step along the tow-path.

So this was what that slippery lawyer from Cornwall had
been up to all these weeks in that new office of his! Had he
got round old Beere? No!--impossible. But brother Dave was
certainly behind it! Who would have supposed that that funny
little man would have had the gumption. But of course
the fellow at the back of the whole thing was that wily old
humbug, Geard. He was the one! "I must run off and tell
Philip," he thought, "this afternoon; as soon as the christening
is over. The newest section of the dye works sold!--Why it's
a serious blow! Of course he has the others...but it's serious,
it's terribly serious. How on earth will Philip take it?"

He came striding back to his father.

"Well...you have gone and done it!" he rapped out bru-
tally. "But let's see if I've got it clear what you've done. You've
sold that newest piece of factory-land to them? The one north
of Manor House Road and southeast of the Burnham and Ever-
creech Railway? That other one, east of the cemetery, doesn't
belong to you? Philip Crow is still safe there? But listen--are
you sure that the buildings on that newest section are yours to
sell? I mean the whole plant? Didn't that man--what's-his-name,
that Crow bought out--sell him all those buildings with the good-
will?"

The Marquis stroked the point of his grey beard.

"Couldn't sell what wasn't his, lad! No, no! That newest sec-
tion of buildings near the Burnham Railway, was built by the
business man of our family, your great-uncle, Lord Edward.
That was before the days when you were a baby in petticoats,
out there at Limoges. I took your mother to see 'em...had a
pretty narrow shave too, that day, of being nabbed...she had
the devil's own spirit, that woman,...when it came to skating
on thin ice...just like you, me boy!"

While this conversation was going on, Lady Rachel was being
introduced to little Master Henry.

Zookey Pippard recovered her temper a little in the excitement
of dressing the babe in its christening-robe; and for some reason
only known to its own passionate and highly strung spirit the
infant took a violent fancy to Rachel, clinging to the finger
she gave it smiling and slobbering in rapture when she re-
ceived it in her lap.

The next to arrive among the expected guests was none other
than Mat Dekker. The tall massive form of the priest was ar-
rayed in his long black Sunday coat, and he had taken a lot
of trouble to wipe his thick boots with swathes of grass before
presenting himself at the door of Whitelake Cottage. He had
forgotten, however, to change his week-day trousers, and these
looked more faded and shabby than usual. The man was ob-
viously strung-up and full of seething emotions; but he kept
himself well in control, and begged quite naturally for a little
tete-a-tete with the mother of this newly enrolled soldier of Christ.

It was a strange moment for both of them when the mother
and the grandfather of Henry Sangamore Rollo Zoyland sat
opposite each other in that low-ceilinged bedroom, at the top
of those stairs down which the girl had carried her candle to
such drastic purpose the night before.

She lay now at full length on the bed, propped up on two
pillows, while her child, though fast asleep in its cradle between
them, did not separate her very far from the priest.

Fortunately or unfortunately, as it may chance to be, the
amorous clairvoyance of a woman is lulled, drugged, drowsed,
deliciously stupefied, by the magical sensation of giving suck.
Although her child was fast asleep now, the feeling of its exact-
ing lips, of its masterful thirst for the fount of her life, was still
clinging to her responsive body, and rendering it dull, tranced,
entoiled, preoccupied, to all other sensitised awareness! Thus
as she allowed Mat Dekker to retain her cold schoolgirl fingers
across the counterpane of the sleeping child, resting her hand
with his, in fact, upon the wicker edge of the cradle, it never
entered her head that this man--her dear love's father--had
anything in his heart toward her except a deep priestly sympathy.
She knew she felt no shyness of him; she knew she felt a lovely
and relaxed security in his presence; she knew she was deriving
from the touch of his rough fingers an inrush of spiritual
strength; but beyond this she experienced, or, was conscious of
experiencing, no intimate link between them.

There was one restraint, however, that did come over her, and
that puzzled her a little as she struggled in her mind to overcome
it--a singular difficulty in mentioning his son's name to him. She
longed to call out to this silent, rugged, friendly supporter: "And
now tell me everything about my Sam!" But some inexplicable
force always held back the words, just as they slid, like drops of
recurrent rain from the smooth stalk of her happy peace, to the
tip of her tongue.

"Why can't I ask him how Sam is?" she thought to herself.
"It must be because of his religion. He's come to baptise Sam's
child--but he doesn't want to think of us together."

With this explanation in her mind, she let herself relax again
on her pillows and close her eyes, pressing the hand that held her
own in a confiding and trusting clasp. It was Mat himself who
broke this silence, at last.

"I've been thinking a great deal lately, Nell," he said, "about
this grand consecration day of the Mayor's. It's to be in January
they tell me now; and I hear the wildest tales, as I go about
among my people, as to what the man is planning." He sighed
heavily, as he spoke, and Nell took the opportunity of repossess-
ing herself of her right hand which she promptly made use of
to pull her blue robe more tightly about her.

Deeply had Mat Dekker sighed when he spoke of the Mayor
of Glastonbury; and the girl, in her maternal atrophy of the sex
nerve, had put the sigh down entirely to the delicate professional
problem of how to deal with Mr. Geard's wild and fantastic
schemes. But, of course, in reality, not more than a thousandth
part of this heavy sigh had anything to do with Mr. Geard's
activities.

They were interrupted by the appearance of Zookey Pippard
who came to tell them that all the other guests had duly arrived
and that his Lordship was growing impatient for the ceremony
to begin.

Zookey approached the cradle and Mat Dekker stood up.

"I hope this isn't the first time, Zookey," said the priest with
a kindly chuckle--he was always a transformed man when he
dealt with the native-born, a touch of the old Quantocks' accent
entering, so to speak, his very manner as well as his intonation--
"that you'll have heard me say a prayer, since--but us won't let
the Missus know how well we know each other, shall us?"

Under normal conditions this indulgent indiscretion, referring
to an occasion when the worthy man had rescued this tricky old
baggage from the clutches of Mr. Sheperd, would have met with
a roguish retort. But the naughty old woman was still smarting
from Nell's anger over Eudoxia.

"His Lordship said to her Ladyship just now," Mrs. Pippard
retorted, humming and murmuring over the baby and giving its
tiny red cheek a fillip with her finger-nail. "What be Dr. Dekker
doing upstairs? Be he a-baptising of she?"

"Nonsense, Zookey!" cried Nell, "aren't you ashamed to tell
such fibs? But you had better go and get ready, Mr. Dekker.
Tell them Zookey and I will bring Henry down in less than five
minutes...."

"And so she said her must go; and Doxy said Mister would be
best pleased for she to go, her wone self." These exciting words
echoed through the kitchen of Whitelake Cottage half an hour
later, when the christening was well over and the upper-class
portion of its audience was having their tea in the parlour.

"She shouldn't a-spoke up like that," said Nancy Stickles re-
proachfully, putting down a great piece of new bread and black-
currant jam, for they were all squarely seated round the kitchen
table, and looking with a straight open gaze into the equivocal
face of Zookey--"After all it weren't nice for Mr. Zoyland to be
talking to she on sofa in parlour, like you says he were, and she
in bed with Master Henry, and house all hushed and still."

"Will you have another piece of sponge cake, Auntie Legge?"
threw in the hospitable Zookey. "Us all do know how 'spectable
and proper you be, Nance Stickles, when all the town know of
how Red Robinson was turned out of house by your Harry be-
cause of the fuss you made of 'ee and the clipping and colling
that went on when your Harry was to bed. I do know for sure
how 'twere, because Mr. Robinson told me of it, his wone self."

It was at this point that Abel Twig broke in, interrupting this
altercation among the women with such a quavering faint voice
that it seemed like the voice of Philosophy itself come forth from
those old Lake Village mounds.

"Thik Red Robinson were zour, no doubt, when Mistress Nance
didn't let 'un do what 'a wanted to do...and so 'a went and cast
up this tale agin' her, same as thik dirty Potiphar-scrub did
agin' King Joseph in History."

There was an uncomfortable silence round the kitchen table,
during which the more peacefully inclined among the guests
turned to Mother Legge for protection. That great provider of
Cyprian pleasures had so far hardly uttered a word. She had kept
her eyes fixed upon the door which led into the parlour; a door
which had been carried bodily to the cottage from Mark Court
and was of excessively thick oak.

"Don't let them get quarrellin', Auntie," pleaded Tittie Peth-
erton with her mouth full of buttered scone.

Sally Jones added her voice to that of Tittie, from whose ap-
pearance no one certainly would ever have supposed that a few
months ago she was screaming so pitiably for morphia.

"Mrs. Legge!" cried Sally, as if the old procuress were very
deaf. "Didn't 'ee hear, Mrs. Legge, what Zookey Pippard said to
Nance Stickles?"

The mother of Eudoxia was not slow in defending herself.

"Auntie be hard of hearing," she threw in spitefully, "when her
eats her tea with poor volk in kitchen, 'stead of with gentry in
parlour."

These words hit Mother Legge straight to the heart. For the
truth was that the old lady had half-thought when she received
the invitation to attend the Zoyland christening, that her place
would have been with the gentry rather than with her humble
relatives. It was indeed in pensive consideration of this unhappy
nuance that the portly lady, though they had given her the only
chair that had arms and the only tea-cup that wasn't a kitchen-
cup and had taken care to help her first to every dainty on the
table, now stared gravely at this great oaken door through which
the one voice of the people within that was at all articulate--
and that only now and again--was the voice of William Zoyland.
The other voices were lost in a vague indistinguishable murmur.

Zookey Pippard was among the few women in Glastonbury
who ever stood up to the present tenant of Camelot and of "my
other house." But there was a majestic dignity in the rebuke
that the old lady administered now and an incredible daring too.
She actually got up from her chair, walked to the oaken door,
opened it wide enough for her person to fill the whole space and
said with perfect sangfroid to Nell: "Your servant here, Ma'am,
is unwilling to leave us to look after ourselves; but you must
please, tell us the moment you need her; for we can get on per-
fectly well without her."

"Oh, thank you, Mrs. Legge; thank you very much!" cried
Nell, half-rising from her chair in that particular flurry of per-
turbation that young hostesses feel when there are signs of a
mutiny below deck. It was the Marquis who saved the situation.

"Why, if that isn't my old friend from Paradise! They never
told me they'd got you here! Where have they been hiding you?
Come over here--is that all right, Nell?--and sit by me." He
gave the arm-chair in which Persephone was seated a little jerk
with his finger and thumb--he behaved exactly as if he had been
Theodoric the Ostrogoth, patronising some harem at Algiers and
indicating by the slightest tap upon his Gothic sword-hilt that he
would be more amused by the aged story-teller of the tents than
by the cleverest young houri.

Persephone as she languidly rose, smiling very sweetly upon
Mrs. Legge and extending one of her long arms toward her, gave
Lord P. one single quick, flashing, steel-piercing glance that not
only succeeded in making the old despot feel uncomfortable,
but in making him heartily wish her back; so lovely did she look
in her anger.

"She could have stabbed me, the little minx," he thought.
"And I must see her again," he thought.

Once settled in this capacious chair, with all her black satin
flounces and her voluminous black laces deposited about her,
Mother Legge gazed round her with impenetrable aplomb. Under
the protection of my Lord she felt ready to be indulgent to her
enemies and more than bountiful to her friends. She even felt
she owed something to Zookey Pippard for having been the one
to give her the final prod that had led to this public recognition
of her true status in Glastonbury society.

"He be fast asleep, the pretty babe," she remarked now, glanc-
ing upwards at the ceiling. "You splashed 'un well with the
holy water, Passon! It put me in mind of me wone Baptism to
see how they drops did trickle over 'un."

There arose at this moment a pressing necessity for more hot
water in Nell's best silver tea-pot, which had been a present
from her communist brother. To that brother the young mother
looked now, for she noticed that Persephone, in her reaction
from the rebuff she had received from my Lord, was flirting out-
rageously with Will.

Dave got up with alacrity, opened the thick oak door and
entered the kitchen, allowing a clatter of excited women's voices,
mingled with the husky bass tones of Number One, to pour into
the parlour.

He returned with the kettle and filled up the tea-pot, which
his sister carefully held out to him across the sun-burnt wrists
and clean Sunday shirt-cuffs of the Vicar. The door between the
two rooms remained open while this transaction went on; and
that curious tension that comes over two confronted groups of
people, between whom yawns the social gulf, reduced Whitelake
Cottage to one complete self-conscious silence. It was through
the middle of this silence that Dave, like a young doctor walking
down a ward of expectant patients, took the kettle back to the
kitchen and returned to his place, closing the oak door be-
hind him.

"I can't think how we people," he said, "can be content to go
on with this sort of thing. I suppose there isn't one of us here
who casts a thought on all those picks and shovels that are work-
ing now, over at Wookey, getting out that tin which Nature put
into the Mendips for the benefit of everybody."

Will Zoyland rolled his amorous blue eyes lazily round from
his contemplation of Percy's supple figure and stared at the
speaker, who now look his seat by Lady Rachel.

A splutter of bullying raillery burst from him before his brain
had the wit to think of a good retort.

"What is your name?
Elacampaine!
If you ask me again
I'll tell you the same,"

he chanted in an aggravating manner; and then he added:

"You and I and the Vicar, Dave, my friend, are the only ones
here who could use those shovels for five minutes; and we
couldn't use them--at least I couldn't--for half an hour with-
out getting exhausted. What are you going to do about that, eh?
There must be division of labour in this world."

"But we're not labouring at all!" cried Lady Rachel, making
room for Dave to take his seat by her side.

"Not labouring, Rachel? That's a nice thing to say," cried Zoy-
land in a great voice, "when I've given up my one single holiday
for months to entertain all you people and have Henry chris-
tened! You should see how I work out there, my good child.
Why, I'm often in that draughty little office, hours after Spear's
precious shovellers have gone home to their suppers."

He shouted all this so loudly that Dave's answer was made the
more effective by its extreme quietness.

"We all can't dig, Will. That's true enough; but we'd all dodge
it if we could. I'd be content if those who did the dirty work got
more pay than the rest of us--instead of much less; and being
looked down upon by us as well."

Zoyland must have been conscious of the advantage that
Spear's quietness gave him. He must have been nourishing a bit-
ter grievance too about Eudoxia and a still deeper one over what
his father had just told him with regard to the sale; for he now
cried out quite uncivilly:

"Bosh! Rats! All these theories are the merest clap-trap! It's
the same all over the world! Wherever you go you see men or-
dering and men obeying. Would you yourself be found with a
pick and shovel, I'd like to know, if you could drill us all into
your precious commune tomorrow?"

A humorous smile flickered across Dave's face at the mention
of the word commune. "They little guess," he thought to himself,
"how near they are to a commune in Glastonbury!"

But before he could reply, Lady Rachel had leaped into the
breach.

"The point you entirely slur over, Will," cried the young girl,
quoting with a touching faithfulness to her lover, a paragraph
in next Saturday's Wayfarer "is whether these labourers would
prefer working for a single individual like Philip Crow, or
working for themselves--that's to say for the community."

"Well said, Lady Rachel!" murmured Mr. Spear.

There were actually tears in his eyes as he looked at her, so
delighted was he to find how far she had travelled along the
path, since he had last talked with her.

"Well said, little traitor!" mimicked Zoyland.

"If you'd think a little more and shout a little less, Will, it
would be a good thing," retorted his half-sister with a red flush
on her cheeks.

"What she said is unanswerable," remarked Dave Spear sternly.

The Marquis of P. rose to his feet

"Will," he said in a slow drawling voice, "I wish you'd be so
good as to tell the Sergeant to put my horse in and bring him
round." He then turned politely to Nell, fumbling for a minute
in the pockets of his coat, and finally producing an object tied
up in tissue paper.

"I picked up Rachel at the curiosity shop in Glastonbury," he
said, "and she helped me to choose this little trifle for the child.
That man?...that extraordinary individual...who's always there
now...took a long time hunting it up...but it's genuine...he said
it was rather valuable...it's got our arms on it anyway...which I
thought was a rather happy coincidence."

However long Mr. Evans may have taken in finding the object
referred to, he certainly hadn't taken very long in tying it up;
for, as Lord P. brought it out of his pocket, the tissue paper was
already in tatters. It was a tiny little cup, but it was apparently
made of gold; and there was a general rush of the company to
look at it.

Nell made a very pretty, hesitating, upward tilt of her face;
and the bastard's father didn't hesitate to take advantage of this.
He held her upraised chin gently between his finger and thumb
for a second as he brushed her full lips with his grey mustache.

"Bless you, my dear," whispered the old man softly. "After all
it's you mothers who are the real workers."

The fuss over the golden cup, which Nell presently, to prevent
the portly lady having to struggle to her feet, placed in Mother
Legge's lap, occupied the company sufficiently and laid--like the
council's water-cart--the cloud of controversial dust, until Ser-
geant Blimp appeared at the back door with the green-wheeled
dog-cart.

The Marquis and his daughter had to pass through the kitchen
to reach the vehicle, and Zookey Pippard wisely placed a block
of wood against the oak door to keep it open.

The Sergeant and his big horse were soon surrounded by a
mingled company from both the two rooms; for a horse is
still the one thing in England that obliterates all social
embarrassment.

"How be, Sergeant?" said Abel Twig familiarly to the sol-
emn-faced coachman.

"Pretty tidy, Mr. Twig, thank'ee--I'd like it well enough down
here and be glad enough--I would--to stay down here, if
'tweren't for they Bellamys. Those two old warlocks, Mr. Twig,
were made by Satan, to bother a man's life out of him."

"I can believe it. Sergeant, I can believe it. I only once set
eyes on thik wold couple; and that were at Somerton girt Fair;
but I seed 'un haggling wi' they gippoos in a manner onbefitting
decent Christian volk. I were sorry for they gippoos...and
that's the truth, Sergeant...when I heerd how thik pair were
carryin' on."

Sally Jones now hurried forward to stroke the mane of the
black horse.

"How does yer uncle Bart enjoy 'is-sell, Sal, now he be back
in shop?"

"He ain't doing only half what he were, Mr. Twig," replied
Sal, "and 'ee have gived up his place over shop too. He have
taken a room at Dickery Cantle's where he can see the cattle
market from his windy. He says, Them as has had a zysty as
bad as my zysty do like to see a bit of the girt world, afore they
caves in.' "

When the Marquis and his daughter appeared upon the scene,
and were helped into the dog-cart there was quite a little crowd
around them.

Though most of these friendly adherents were only women,
Lord P. received an old-fashioned feudal ovation as he drove off
by Blimp's side with Lady Rachel perched upon the back seat.

"'Tis fine to smell a whiff of good horse's dung again," said
Abel Twig to Zookey, as they turned back into the house, "in
place of this here gasoline."

"That's what my darter Doxy said, only this very marnin', as
her went off to get the Frome bus. ‘Mother,' my darter said, I
reckon I'll go back where people aren't so finicky and so per-
tickler, and where they girt cart-horses have silver bells on
their necks.' "

Indeed with the departure of the head of the Zoyland family
a strange and uncanny irritation seized that whole group of
people, an irritation that seemed to flow like an evil electricity
from kitchen to parlour, and from parlour back again to kitchen.
The little golden christening cup, with the Zoyland falcon on it,
which the Marquis had brought, became now the innocent cause
of a violent quarrel between Zookey and Sally Jones.

Nell had brought the cup in to show them, as soon as the dog-
cart had driven off, and Sally had said that Uncle Bart had told
her long ago about that gold cup and that Miss Crummie had
wanted to see it, but Miss Cordy, what's now Mrs. Evans--had
said 'tweren't right "to show things to people unless people were
thinking of buying things."

It was then that Zookey had rudely remarked:

"Thik wold Number Two do blurt out lies as fast as his lungs
do pant. I reckon he thought thik cup were common silver-plate
till Mr. Evans told 'un 'twere gold."

To this insult Sally had replied in an incoherent rush of
words, the drift of which was that she had heard Mr. Geard tell
Mrs. Geard that if he were blessed by Providence to find his dear
Lord's cup, there'd be something in Glaston that would divide
lies from truth forevermore. "And that," Sally had added
fiercely, "that would be the last of thee, and of thee's devil's
tongue!"

"Ye'll be saying next that his Lordship's gold cup," retorted
Zookey, "with his Lordship's wone trade-mark on it, be the
Mayor's cup. That comes of letting Red Robinson take 'ee, where
no decent woman should be took! I've a seed ye two, sneaking
whoam at night down Chilkwell Street and if thee don't mind
thee's manners, I'll let the Mayor know thee do go round town,
telling tales of what he says to his Missus, when none be by!"

Nell had gone upsairs by this time to suckle little Henry;
Zookey was clearing away the tea-things in the parlour; Zoyland
and Percy were standing together by the nearest pollard willow
in the direction of that deep weir, into the waters of which, on
the occasion of Mat Dekker's first appearance here last March,
Sam had been so strongly tempted to fling his bearded rival.

Dave Spear, using Percy's little motor car for this purpose,
was occupying, himself by patiently driving, in two successive
trips, first one party and then another of the proletarian guests
to their various homes in the town. He took Mother Legge and
Tittie first. Then, on his return, he took Abel Twig, Nancy
Stickles and Sally Jones, Sally sitting on Nancy's lap. This oc-
cupied him altogether, with the inevitable lingering conversations
in doorways, nearly a whole hour; and thus it was getting on for
seven o'clock when he finally found himself turning out the
lights of his machine on that gravel patch at the back door, upon
which lay the wholesome-smelling droppings of the black horse
from Mark's Court.

Entering the kitchen by that well-oiled outer door that Doxy
Pippard had found so serviceable, he discovered Doxy's mother
laboriously coping with an enormous pile of dirty dishes. Will
had purchased at the last moment, in the china department at
Wollop's, a number of cheap tea-cups and plates that Nell had
cordially disliked, but that Zookey, hearing the altercation about
them, cast an envious eye upon, regarding them as a possible
perquisite. These new cups and plates, although not to be com-
pared for intrinsic beauty with Nell's own collection, possessed
for Zookey a far greater value than these, just because there hung
over them this vague premonitory glamour of future ownership.
Without doing it deliberately Zookey broke two of Nell's nicest
cups, treasured relics of the quiet Spear family, objects that
bore no predatory falcon upon their gilt-bordered whiteness; but
not one of these new "Wollop things" did she so much as crack,
partly because of their sturdier substance, but also because in her
acquisitive mind, they were destined for her own dresser in Bove
Town. After standing to chat for a few minutes with Mrs. Pip-
pard, a friendly gesture that was rewarded by several wickedly
barbed pieces of information ("Parson can't hang over Missus
long enough, when she have child at breast," being one of these,
and "Thee's preety lady and the Master do seem to like thik dark
river-bank" being another and "'Twere wondrous to see how
Auntie Legge's eyes did shine when gold cup were on lap" being
a third) Dave Spear pushed open the door and went into the
parlour. Here he found an aura of such forlorn emptiness and
hushed sterility that even his vigorous and phlegmatic nerves
were affected by it.

Nell--or Mat Dekker when he went up to Nell--had blown out
all the candles save one and the first thing Dave did was to light
two more. All three at his elbow on the table, he sat down to.
read and to smoke, taking both book and pipe from his own
capacious pocket. A treatise upon the Lost Atlantis it was that
Dave produced and it interested him as an imaginative picture
of an ancient communistic state.

A certain interior feeling, however, of quite another order
than any emotional reaction to wife or sister, refused to be stilled
by his reading. This feeling was that of extreme hunger. Dave
had had no lunch; and the thin bread and butter and scotch
scones of their tea had been devoured so quickly by Zoyland and
Mr. Dekker that before their economic dispute began he had had
only a nibble at them; and once launched into his argument he
had naturally forgotten such a personal thing as a craving
for food.

Most of the pathetic scenes in almost everybody's life are
scenes unnoted by anyone and totally disregarded by the person
in question. Such was this moment in Dave's life; when, with
his head full of the signing of those documents at Mark Court,
he was pondering on these legends and rumours of Atlantis in
connexion with his historic experiment in Glastonbury, and all
the time wondering against his will whether Zookey intended to
cook them any supper.

He was successful in rigidly keeping out of his mind every
image of Dekker bending over Nell in the room above, and of
Zoyland bending over Percy in the darkness outside; but as his
three candles flickered upon these legends of the drowned con-
tinent, he could not prevent his thoughts from running upon
baked potatoes and gravy.

Twice, while Dave had been reading his book on Atlantis, and
thinking against his will about potatoes and gravy, Percy came
straight up to the window outside where those brown curtains
were, and peeped in upon him. Being the man's wife, and yet
with no essential kindness for him, the girl when she saw him
there did not feel the least sense of the pathos of that short
flaxen-haired figure, with its schoolboy earnestness, turning the
pages of "Atlantis" and every now and then making a pencil-
note in the margin of the book. Thinking himself completely
alone in that candlelit room Dave gave way to a childish trick,
that his dead mother had long ago tried to cure him of--a trick
of sucking his upper lip, and pulling it as far as it would go,
into his mouth, while he licked it with the tip of his tongue. But
Percy, while she had grown so familiar with his ways as to take
them all for granted and while she had come to value his opin-
ions so as to accept them for her own, felt toward him not one
single kindly human feeling.

"There he is--reading that book!" she had said to herself the
first time she peeped in. "How his ears do stick out!" And the
second time she peeped in, it was much the same.

"There he is--still reading!" she thought. "How insensitive
his hands are!"

Will Zoyland had not yet forgiven Nell for his humiliation of
last night. He had agreed to the precipitate departure of Eu-
doxia; but there had been no reconciliation between himself and
Nell...in fact very few words of any kind had passed between
them since he had carried her bodily up the attic stairs to spare
the feelings of Miss Pippard.

Aggravated rather than appeased by his protracted dalliance
with Doxy, Zoyland's senses were irritably on edge after his long
summer of celibate virtue.

The electric response of Persephone to his careless courtship--
for, as we have discovered, to excite a man's desire to the point
of desperation was a recurrent aspect of this singular girl's per-
versity--very quickly heightened this rebellious wantonness into
leaping flame of desire. Nell's unforgivingness over the trifling
incident of Eudoxia rankled in the bastard's mind as something
extraordinarily unfair. Here was he playing the wittol for Nell's
sake and what was she doing in return? He couldn't blame her
for being absorbed in her maternity; but she might at least have
been indulgent to his natural and pardonable lapse.

As he pulled Percy away from the parlour window after her
second spying upon her husband, he glanced up at the window of
the attic and noted by the faint light there that she had only lit
one of her bedroom candles. He could hear no sound of the
Vicar's deep voice either; and he thought to himself, "The Padre
is holding her hand and rocking the cradle--a pretty family
picture! But where do I come in?"

Will's complaisance over the child was, if he had troubled to
analyse it, more for the baby's sake than its mother's. His rich
animal nature--the lavish temperament of a born outlaw--re-
sponded exuberantly to the helplessness of babyhood. He found
Henry sweet to his taste; but if a wandering gipsy-woman had
left a foundling on his doorstep he would have made the same
kind of pet of it.

The little golden christening-cup, having been handed here and
there between parlour and kitchen, and now reposing in peace at
the foot of Henry's cradle, had been an added cause of annoy-
ance between Zoyland and Nell. The girl had expressed a desire
to have the baby's name engraved on the cup, but this had
seemed to William a paltry, middle-class addition. Did not the
cup already carry the proud falcon of his race? Thus there had
been yet more bitter words between them on this head, which
added still further to the rankling score of grievance.

"Come on, sweet one," he now whispered, dragging Perse-
phone away, from the house towards the tow-path and this time
in an easterly direction. "They don't want us in there. He's plot-
ting revolution, and they're plotting sentiment! We're out of it
tonight, you and I; and we'd better make the best of being out
of it!"

Percy had always enjoyed flirting with Zoyland, but they were
both in a completely different mood tonight....They were
both in the same mood too, by some fatality; which always
means a vibration between men and women full of delicious
danger.

"Is it possible," her incorrigible spirit pondered, "that this
man is going to do what Phil and Dave couldn't do? This is a
glorious moment anyway. I wish it could last forever!"

The half-moon, looking water-logged and labouring, like a rud-
derless ship, in the mottled sky, poured down a stream of am-
biguous influence upon the swollen river. Too many feminine
nerves, of every level of organic life, were draining just then
that strange Being's vitality, so that the magic touch that fell
upon Percy's relaxed limbs as Zoyland dragged her along by the
hand, was a mere accidental overflow; casual, uncalculated. It
gave enough light however to guide their steps as they followed
the tow-path; and the whole nature of that night was such that
nothing emphatic or arresting in the elements distracted their
attention from each other.

"He willing and she willing," as Homer says, they speedily
receded out of all sight of the cottage.

The truth is that women like Nell, absorbed in their mother-
hood, and men like Dave, absorbed in their politics, will to the
end of time throw into each other's arms reckless, restless, irre-
sponsible, wandering stars, like Percy and Zoyland. It is upon
these strangely neutral nights, such as was this fifteenth of De-
cember, that the real power of darkness as opposed to daylight
gathers itself together to assert its essential identity. Complete
darkness is usually so empty of all discrimination as to be prac-
tically a negation; but darkness faintly touched by a sickly moon
has a certain positive character. The absence of high wind or
pouring rain, too, enables the mind to receive, in uninterrupted
concentration, those simpler emanations of earth-life, such as
the leap of a fish, the rustling of a rabbit, the cry of a nocturnal
bird, the bark of a farm-dog, the lowing of a cow in an isolated
barton, the faint soughing of reeds, the creaking of a bough, the
fall of a twig into a silent pond, the shy stirrings of aimless little
night-winds amid the dead bracken, which are destroyed and ob-
literated by the more startling play of the elements.

Zoyland paused only once in his predatory stride and that was
to make the girl lean on his arm in place of holding his hand.
She was indeed following him so gallantly and with such an easy
swing over the muddy ground that he felt proud of her as a com-
panion. The truth was that in a rough-and-tumble country walk,
Percy, for all her sophistication, would have beaten any woman
in Glastonbury except her cousin Mary. It was perhaps the vig-
orous Norfolk strain in their blood. But whatever it was, no
Glastonbury-born girl could have rivalled these two in this.
Further and further eastward he led her; for he knew well by
this time what he had in his mind.

What he was aiming at, and he found it without any trouble,
was a spot that had always made him think of just this very
contingency though not necessarily with his present lady! About
half a mile from Whitelake Cottage there was a reed-thatched
shed where the farmer of those fields kept his dry hay. The fields
on both sides of the stream belonged to this man just there; and
in order to convey his hay across to his cattle on the opposite
bank he kept a flat-bottomed boat tied by a rope to an iron stake,
beneath this hayshed. Zoyland had made use of this boat many
a time before, and without leave asked either, for the purpose of
shooting wild fowl; and it now entered his mind that nothing
could be more congruous with the hour and the girl than to em-
brace his present delicious companion where the waters of the
river would be flowing within an inch of their bodies.

Percy laughed aloud--a low, merry, young-girl's laugh of pure
mischief--when she found herself laid upon a mattress of
hay in this floating bed. Her mind flew to that grey strip of sub-
terranean shingle under the Witch of Wookey. Her only desire
now--and even that was a languid one--was to put off her final
yielding to the bearded man until she had enjoyed to the extreme
limit the excited tension of his craving.

"How queer it is, in my life," she thought to herself, "the way
the same situation keeps repeating itself! Is it possible that that
Bristol Wharf"--she was thinking of her early encounters with
Dave--"and Wookey Hole, and Saint Mary's Ruin,"--she was
thinking of one particular meeting with Angela Beere--"and
that room in the hospital"--she was thinking of the last of her
morbid visits to Mr. Evans--"were all rehearsals of this break-
ing of the ice with Will? When a person's life repeats itself--
from that shore of Phil's to this boat of Will's!--there's a doom
of some sort in it. He may be able to do it. He may! Will! Can't
you do it? Can't you show poor Percy where her heart is? Oh,
find it, oh, find it, darling Will! Touch it, hurt it, bruise it, break
it! So long as you show her where it is--poor Percy's lost
treacherous heart--that she can never, never, never find!"

It may well be believed, with a piratical amorist like Zoyland,
that it was not long before Persephone's body, whatever hap-
pened to her heart, belonged, as far as it could belong to anyone,
to this herculean ravisher.

In the matter of pure lust, Will did not get half the satisfact-
ion from his taking of Percy that he got from his dallying with
Eudoxia. But in every other respect--aye! how he did enjoy the
unequalled circumstances of these violent embraces!

The gurgling of the water beneath this keel-less vessel, the
rubbing of the rope against the bark of a little bush, the droop-
ing down as if in sympathy with his heathen satisfaction, of the
whole cloudy heaven, the smell of the river-mud, the glittering
slide from the high zenith of a falling star in the direction of
North Wooton and Croscombe, and most wonderful of all and
actually simultaneous with the apogee of his delight, the sudden
rising of a great, broad-winged heron and its heavy retreat over
the moonlit marshes towards Westholme and Hearne House--
all these things gave to the bastard's sensuality that sort of ro-
mantic elemental margin, which was the thing of all things that
he relished most in the world. Thus, it may be imagined in what
a mood of tender gratitude he took Percy back, holding her hand
tight, very tight, and repeatedly kissing it.

As they moved along, he thought to himself--"Girls really
ought to be allowed everything they want in this world, when
they can give a person such entrancing pleasure!"

He felt in a delicious mood now; at peace with Man and at
peace with God; and he would have got home in this mood, if it
had not been, as. he approached the house, that he caught sight
of a particular branch of a particular tree which he had noted--
it was blasted by lightning--while the Marquis was telling him of
the sale of the factories and of the leasing of the shops.

Quite irrelevantly, and not very discreetly, he burst out, upon
catching sight of this branch--"The old man brought bad news,
tonight, kid...devilish news. He's selling I don't know what
of his Glastonbury property to I don't know who; and leasing,
for an ordinary person's life-term, what he can't sell! It's old
Geard, of course, who's at the bottom of it; but it'll be terribly,
terribly serious for Philip. I ought really to let Philip know
tonight, so that he can take measures, if there are any measures
to take! He says distinctly that he's sold at least a third of the
Crow dye works. They are only the newest ones--but still! I was
perfectly flabbergasted. I knew he owned the land, of course;
but I somehow thought Philip had built all the dye works. But
of course he didn't! He only improved the old ones out by the
cemetery. And it now appears he's only had these new ones on a
lease; and this lease is now up. If these people--Geard and the
rest--don't choose to lease 'em to him again, they can kick him
out. And they will kick him out! There's no doubt about it. They
all hate him like the devil; and nothing would give 'em more
pleasure than to bring him down a few pegs."

Persephone herself was a little surprised and shocked by what
she felt in response to this. For many dark and complicated
reasons she actually felt a spasm of pleasure at hearing of this
disaster to Philip. She had been deeply piqued, for one thing, by
his obvious ability to get on perfectly well without her. For an-
other thing, she had accepted, for good and all, her husband's
views as to the injustice of the capitalist system. But there was
a much subtler reason than either of these for Percy's throb of
uncousinly pleasure at hearing this startling news. Philip's chief
hold upon her imagination had been her idea of him as a swift
raptorial man of action, competent, unscrupulous, deadly. But
this news showed him as outwitted and something of a fool; and
this development left the fortress of her heart free for Zoyland.
She was in her queer fashion watching with an intense inner in-
terest her feelings about Zoyland. She felt that she was still,
though they were far from the boat, under the spell of his por-
tentous magnetism, of his overpowering physique. After Wookey
Hole, when Philip had loosened his hold upon her, she had
very quickly become mistress of herself. She had shaken off
her contact with him as if it had been no more than a kiss. But
something surely...deeper than that...had been touched by
Zoyland's possession of her in the hay-boat. Furtively in the
darkness she allowed herself to fondle the man's muscular wrist;
and then from his wrist her long slim hand slipped down to his
great swaying hips. Here, as her fingers strayed, she found one of
the leather straps of his braces hanging loose; for when he had
been buying that set of heavy tea-cups at Wollop's, he had been
persuaded to purchase a new pair of braces for himself by the
youth who read Nietzsche and these articles his powerful fingers
found it very difficult to button. When he felt her knuckles
against his side the spontaneous intimacy of the gesture tickled
his fancy as much as her actual touch tickled his ribs; and with
a deep-drawn chuckle he stopped dead.

"Do it up, if you can, kid!" he laughed. "It's beaten me, that
bit of leather!"

She put both her hands to it and finally--though not without
an effort--she got it fastened. This was the first time in Perse-
phone's whole life that she had buttoned a man's button.

It was a quaint little incident, but in its particular kind of
intimacy it affected some nerve in her wild, perverse nature that
sent a delicious shiver through her whole frame. She felt like
some elemental creature of the night, some wandering elfish
thing, that was taking care of a primeval earth-giant. No woman
in all Glastonbury had less of the maternal in her composition
than this erratic boy-girl; but by thinking of herself as an elf-
waif and of her paramour as a fairy-tale giant, she made of this
trifling incident, as they stood there in the river-scented dark-
ness, something that was significant and even symbolical.

To their surprise--for human beings are very like animals in
their expectation of finding what they have left exactly as it was
when they left it--they found, on their re-entrance into the
parlour, Nell and Dave and Mat Dekker seated round a small cold
supper. Dave rose quickly to get them chairs, for their places
at the. table had been prepared for them; and while they sat
down, they could hear Zookey Pippard crooning and murmuring
to the baby in the room above. In the centre of the table, side by
side with the vase of small bronze-coloured chrysanthemums, Nell
had placed the little golden cup; and this small object at once
became again the topic of general conversation.

Although Mat Dekker had made a stubborn struggle with his
religious conscience not to allow his overwhelming feeling for
his son's mistress to betray itself in any overt manner, his whole
being had been so stirred by these long, sweet, lonely hours, in
semi-darkness, with heir and her child, that he flooded her, satu-
rated her, drowned her in the heady worship of his suppressed
passion. It was therefore from an atmosphere of limitless and
enfolding idolatry that Nell found herself faced, at first by the
bodily absence, and then by the absence of mind, of her husband
and her sister-in-law. She had kept Mat Dekker and Dave wait-
ing half an hour for their supper; but then, when the absent ones
had not returned, she had told Zookey to bring in "all there was
in the house."

Mat Dekker was too excited to eat very much; but half his
normal appetite was enough, with the aid of Dave, who was
ravenous for food, to dispose of the more substantial viands that
Zookey had been able to find, and there was little left for Zoyland
and Percy except sponge cake and black-currant jam.

Now, although suppressed desire is destructive of appetite,
satisfied desire is creative of extreme hunger, and happy as Zoy-
land and Percy were in their secret union they both felt a
very sharp craving for some kind of solid and substantial
nourishment.

Below the surface of the most civilised human beings, the
hunger-lust darts and snaps like a fish, snatches and rends like
a bird, growls like a wolf, snarls like a panther, buzzes like a
hornet, bleats like a sheep and stamps like a bull; and there is
nothing so aggravating to hungry stomachs as the sight of dirty
plates pushed away from satisfied rival stomachs. Mrs. Pippard
was so tired and cross after her party that Nell had not liked to
demur at anything she did; and indeed when cold ham, tinned
sardines, and scrambled eggs appeared, she knew well enough
that the resources of her larder were exhausted.

Unfortunately, nothing looks more tantalizing to hungry eyes
than bits of cold toast upon which scrambled eggs have been
served, or more offensive to the aesthetic sense of hunger--for
hunger has its aesthetic sense--than the scales and tails of sar-
dines upon oily plates.

Thus, however happy the two adulterers were in each other's
society, and whatever secrets of this curious neutral night they
brought into Whitelake Cottage with them, when they found
themselves confronted by the sponge cake, it was very difficult
to retain their high spirits.

"Percy would like a couple of boiled eggs and a cup of tea,"
cried Zoyland in a casual, airy, jaunty manner.

"I'm sorry," said Nell, "but the kettle is cold and there are no
more eggs."

"Well...anyway...let's have some cheese," Zoyland's voice had
become a good deal less airy. But Mat Dekker broke in:

"I'm so sorry--I told you how it might be--" he muttered,
looking anxiously at Nell, for he had finished every bit of her
excellent cheddar cheese before he proceeded to light his pipe.

"I'm--afraid--I ate--more than my fair share of the sar-
dines," said Dave anxiously, "but I expect there is--" and he
looked at Nell with a pathetic masculine faith in the unlimited
resources of feminine providing--"I expect there is something."

"Well, I know what I can get for Percy, anyway," cried Zoy-
land angrily, leaping up and rushing into the kitchen.

"Take off your boots, if you go up to your room," warned
Nell. "He'll be sure to hear; and Zookey has only just this min-
ute got him off to sleep."

But Zoyland took not the slightest notice of this request; and
sure enough in a short time they could all hear the creaking
sound of his heavy steps as he walked through the attic ante-
room into his smoking-room. Nell rose indignantly to her feet,
listening intently.

Persephone helped herself to a piece of thin bread and butter,
a piece that had already acquired a certain dry consistency,
which indicated that it had been left over from tea. From some-
where outside, away to the back of the house, where there was
a clump of naked larches, came the barking of a fox; but for
once Mat Dekker was oblivious to this exciting sound.

His eyes were fixed with a furious sympathy upon Nell's white
face; his long fingers were clenching themselves under the table,
their nails pressing into the palms of his hands. As for Dave he
was occupied in a vain attempt to open a ginger-beer bottle.

"You'd like some of this, wouldn't you?" he whispered across
the table to his wife. Then he added in a still lower voice, "It
won't open though."

In the silence that ensued everybody could catch the audible
lifting up of an angry infant's moan, a moan full of a self-pity
that amounted to anguish.

"He's woke up," cried Nell, biting her lip, and casting a wild
look of blind appeal upon Mat Dekker.

"Hush...listen!" whispered Persephone.

And while in the further distance the heavy tramp of Zoyland's
boots was audible, they all caught the lilt of an esoteric jumble
of West-country rhymes, chanted over the cradle.

"Oon, two, dree, vour...
Bells of Girt Sedgemoor!
Who can meake panceake
'Thout fat or vlour?

Zee-Zaw, Harry's mother,
Sold her bed and laid in clover,
Wadden she a dirty slut
Da zell her bed and lay in dirt?

'Pon my life an' honner!
Gwine to Mark's Tower,
Who should I see,
But Zookey's Babee?
'Pon my life an' honner!"

In the interior of Whitelake Cottage this singular lullaby was
very audible and not devoid of significance. But its effect upon
the infant was the reverse of soothing. Something in the sound
of the child's crying, when it burst out again now, made Mat
Dekker think of a small vivisected dog he had heard howling
once and that he could never get out of his head. Nell's face
became distorted with anger. She felt as if each step Zoyland
took, upon those creaking boards up there, was taken upon the
outstretched nerves of Sam's child! She could see the way its
funny chin, the very replica of Sam's, was wrinkling itself up
in its blind suffering!

But she clutched the back of her chair and tried to force her-
self to remain where she was. "If I go up," she thought, "I'll
say something to Will which he'll never forgive--and which I
never shall want him to forgive!"

But Will had got what he wanted now; and the creaking up
there ceased, as he came down the outside steps and entered the
kitchen.

"I'll have something really decent for you to drink in a minute,
Percy!" he shouted through the oak door, pushing it open for
a second with his hand.

Nell sank down mechanically into her chair; but some new
thought had entered her head--some desperate thought--and she
sat staring into vacancy, disregarding them all.

The child's crying grew louder and louder in the room above
--Zookey was scolding it now; but that was even less effective
than her "oon, two, dree, vour." Dave had recommenced his
attempts to loosen the ginger-beer stopper; and Persephone was
swallowing her second piece of dry bread and butter.

"I can't think how--" began Mat Dekker, half-rising from
his chair. There were beads of sweat on his forehead and his
whole face had darkened to a dusky red. Zoyland came rushing
in now from the kitchen, opening the oak door with a heavy kick
and letting it close behind him. In one hand he held the bottle;
in the other three tumblers.

"Here's something that'll make you forget whether we've
starved you in this house or not!" he shouted, pouring out a
stiff glass of the stuff for Percy. It was of Percy and Percy alone
he thought. Everybody else was non-existent. It was as though
he and Percy were still by themselves on the bottom of the
hay-boat.

"I can't think why--" stammered Mat Dekker, staring at
Nell in helpless, pitiful expectancy.

If Zoyland saw only Persephone just then. Mat Dekker all that
evening had seen nothing but Nell!

Dave relinquished the ginger-beer stopper as hopeless. He
stared at the smoke which continued to rise from Mat Dekker's
lips, in big convulsive puffs, floating away above the candle-
flames. Persephone gulped down the whiskey and held out her
glass for more.

"It's good, Will," she murmured gratefully. "It's better than
food." They exchanged a long, entranced look. He filled her
glass again; and again she emptied it in a few quick gulps. Her
brown eyes had a dazed, ensorcerised film over them as she sank
back in her chair. "I do love him. He cares nothing about any-
thing," she thought. "He's just like me." The drink kept mount-
ing and mounting to her brain.

Zoyland drank out of her glass and then refilled it for her
for the third time. He made an automatic motion of passing the
bottle to Dave, who shook his head. He had ignored Mat Dekker
completely all that evening, since they had first entered, and he
continued to ignore him. His eyes were as luminous with excite-
ment now as Percy's were languid with enchantment. They sat
opposite each other, and as they drank they stared at each other;
and more and more it seemed to both of them that they were
each other's true love. They kept drinking out of the same glass,
which might have been drugged for them by that same Dame
Brisen, who, in the days when love was all, brought Launcelot du
Lac to the bed of young Elaine.

Dave as he looked now from one to another of this distracted
company, said to himself in his heart--"And this sort of thing
is what they call a personal life! These people are thinking of
nothing else but their own personal emotions; and they are
proud of it. And while they are wasting their time like this, the
men from Crow's Dye Works, the men in Bove Town, in Ed-
mund's Hill Road, in Benedict Street, in Paradise, are sleeping
soundly and freely, without any fuss.

"If I can keep Trent from spoiling it all with his anarchism,
I'll teach these good friends of mine how to be impersonal!
These people think that their feelings are the only serious thing
in the world. Their feelings! When, at this very moment in
China, in India, in New York, in Berlin, in Vienna--Good God!
...their feelings! When, at this moment, if all the pain in the
world caused by this accursed personal life, by this accursed
individual life were to rise up in one terrific cry...it would--"
The little Henry's crying--as if to round off Dave's thoughts
--rose to a pitch that was distressing to hear. And yet Nell
did not move to go to the child. Her forehead was knitted
into an intense frown and her eyes continued to stare straight
in front of her.

"Damn that child!" cried Zoyland, jumping suddenly to his
feet. "Here! I'll give him his cup. That will stop him!" He
snatched the little cup of gold from the centre of the table,
and flinging open the staircase door, rushed upstairs.

Nell instinctively sprang to her feet too; but sat down again
immediately, her head remaining turned towards the staircase
and a queer, distorted, rather unnatural smile on her face.

Whatever Zoyland may have done when he reached the top
of the stairs, he was evidently completely successful in soothing
the child; for the listeners at that candlelit table--and none of
them spoke a word--were aware of the baby's cries suddenly
dying down. Little gurgling whimperings followed; and then a
profound hush; a hush that was broken finally by the voice of
Zookey, uttering the words: "God be on us!"--which was the
woman's favorite commentary upon the ways of Providence,
when thoroughly surprised by any curious occurrence.

Apparently satisfied that the personal manias of his trouble-
some relatives had reached some kind of temporary surcease,
and made aware by the look of their countenances that objective
conversation was for the moment suspended, Dave Spear slipped
his hand into his side pocket and brought out his book on
Atlantis. He was too polite to read in company, but the sight
of the volume, laid on the table by the side of his plate, gave
him a sort of reassurance that speculative thought upon serious
matters was not wholly impossible, even in Whitelake Cottage!

Thud...Thud...Thud..."What on earth," thought Dave, "is this
bearded drunkard doing now? "Stop! stop. Master Zoyland!"
the agitated voice of Mrs. Pippard and her shuffling scramble
in pursuit revealed the nature of the bastard's action. He
was carrying the baby downstairs! His appearance with the
child in his arms was a signal for them all, except Dave, to
rise from their seats. Nell rushed straight up to him, and
without a word spoken, snatched the infant from his hands
and set herself smoothing its rumpled clothes.

She took it to the couch under the brown curtains by the win-
dow and began rocking it on her lap, swaying her body back-
ward and forward, as she did so, and murmuring to the child
apologetic whisperings.

"She'd forgotten him...she had! She'd forgotten her baby
in her bad, bad thoughts! There...there...there...go to sleep
my precious...go to sleep...there...there...there..." Both Zoy-
land and Persephone were already under the power of what
they had drunk; but he now filled their glasses again from
the oblong flat-sided bottle he had brought down from his
room, and once more they resumed their seats opposite
each other. With each drink she took, the tall girl's entrance-
ment increased. Her dark eyes were swimming now with a
newly awakened desire for the man's embraces.

She watched every movement he made; and her whole body
as she lay back in her chair cried out to him in wordless yearn-
ing: "We are yours!" her child-breasts cried. "We are yours!"
her long relaxed limbs answered. "We are yours!" whispered
her warm neck and her glowing curls. "We are yours!" echoed
her sinuous waist and her boy-hips. Meanwhile, Mrs. Pippard
had begun to clear away the supper things.

Each time she took anything from the table she threw a dis-
approving, disgusted glance at the state Persephone was in, and
did her best to catch the deep-set sombre eyes of the Vicar of
Glastonbury. But Mat Dekker had no eyes for anyone but Nell.
The man's inmost nature was seething, fermenting, heaving, up-
heaving, beyond restraint. Of the bastard and Percy he noticed
nothing. They made part of a hateful burden of enemies, all
of whom, including even poor Dave with his Atlantis book, the
pages of which the indignant revolutionary was now permitting
himself to turn, were to his mind persecuting, outraging, tor-
menting his divinely enduring lady and her sweet child!

When the table was clear of everything except the small
golden cup, Zookey Pippard stretched out her hand to seize upon
this, so that she might fold up and carry away the tablecloth.
But Zoyland intervened.

"Christen little Harry's christening-mug!" he cried in a thick
drunken voice; and rising to his feet he snatched the thing up
and began pouring raw whiskey into it, out of the bottle. Having
achieved this much of sacrilege with his shaky hand, what must
the bearded rogue do but forget his first intention--whatever that
may have been--and hand the shining mug to Percy, who, with-
out a second's hesitation, raised it in the air, preparatory to
pressing it to her lips.

This sight was more than Nell could stand. "Zookey!" she
called out in a voice that rang through the room. The old woman,
who had been standing like a glaring Phorkyad of secular
Judgment in the doorway, hurried to her side.

"Here, take him! Hold him!"

She transferred the child to Mrs. Pippard's arms and came
forward towards the table. "Mr. Dekker!" she murmured, from
a mouth that looked like a sword-cut in a linen sheet spread over
a scarlet counterpane, "Mr. Dekker!"

It may be believed that the passionate Quantock's nature was
uppermost at that appeal and that the priest was forgotten.

"Yes, my dear?" he murmured huskily...and then, under his
breath, "Oh, my darling!"

But whatever the impulse had been that made her call out
to him, it died away now when she saw the fatal devotion
burning beneath his bushy eyebrows, and she sank down at the
end of the table and covered her face with her hands.

Persephone, who had only just touched the liquor in the gol-
den cup with her lips, pushed the thing impatiently away from
her at the sight of Nell covering her face like that. But Mat
Dekker had reached the end of his tether. The point had come,
as he stood there, while Zoyland, pushing hurriedly past him,
began talking wild nonsense to the child in Zookey's arms, when
he must either tear the priest's mask from him and cover that
bowed head with more than a religious consolation, or get away
from her...leave her...get home to his son...to his aquarium...to
his dead wife--to his God...The heavily built man stood there
panting, like a great dog whose mistress has gone down one
path and his master down another. His greenish-black trousers
remained so still above his square-toed muddy boots that to a
whimsical eye--only there was no whimsical eye just then in
Whitelake Cottage--they became objects quite distinct from
his head and shoulders; objects that hung, like a drowned man's
trousers, on a post by the wharf.

It was the way her knuckles looked, half-buried in her wavy
hair, that he couldn't endure another second. If only she would
speak to him he could choke down this feeling! He shut his
eyes and pressed his clenched hands against the flapping coat-
tails which hung down on each side of those baggy trousers.

"If I don't get out of here at once," he thought, "I shall for-
get myself completely."

Behind his closed eyes he forced himself into a mood in which
his feeling for Nell turned into anger against her enemies:
"Damn that drunken whore! She drank out of the christening
cup!" It was finally by the aid of a self-tyrannous auto-flagel-
lation which it now becomes only too clear his son had inherited
from him that he decided to leave Whitelake Cottage at once.
"Damn that tipsy bitch!" he said to himself before he made any
move; hitting out at poor Percy just as a child, suffering from
a nettle-sting, might have beaten the grass^

"Good-night, my dear Nell!"

His words sounded curiously irrelevant in that disturbed room.
Indeed, to Nell's ears they sounded as if he had uttered them
in an earthquake or a shipwreck. She could not take their mean-
ing seriously.

"You...are...not...going?" she said, raising her head and fixing upon
his face her large, tear-wet, reproachful eyes. It seemed impos-
sible to her at that moment that she was going to be deserted by
her only real friend in that whole house.

"Yes, I am, Nell dear," he answered, looking vaguely around
for his coat and hat and stick.

Dave Spear closed his book and jumped up. "I'll drive you in
a jiffy!" he said. "I've driven twice into town already tonight
...in Percy's car you know...I like driving...I like it very much."

His words aroused Persephone from the semi-comatose state
into which she had fallen and she fixed upon him a tipsy stare.

"Good Dave!" she murmured--just as if he had been a dog
--"good, kind, thoughtful Dave! \es, you fellows, yes it ? s true
--he can drive. He's quite right in saying that. He drives very
nicely. I didn't teach him. The Comrades in Bristol taught him.
They said he must learn. He didn t like it when he first heard
that! But he obeyed them--he always obeys them. He'd obey
them if they told him to kill Philip!"

There was no reason why she should have brought in Philip;
but something very deep in her nature was drowsily comparing
the various people to whom she had given herself up to be en-
joyed.

"I'll never...know...what love is!" she thought to herself. This
thought came to her with such a strong feeling of having made
a momentous discovery, that she fancied she had spoken it out
loud; and she looked round the room, in a kind of shamefaced
challenge, to justify herself for so doing.

Mat Dekker waved his hand for Dave to sit down.

He disregarded Persephone with studied discourtesy. Nell looked
at him aghast.

"You don't have to go, Mr. Dekker?" she cried, beginning
to see that he actually was collecting his things. He spoke in a
quiet voice now, but a voice that was resolute and final. "Yes,
I've got to be getting home. But I love the walk...you know
that--don't you, Nell? But I've got to be getting home; or
Penny and Sam will be coming out to look for me, among the
rhynes of Splott's Moor."

This allusion to Sam was a wise and crafty one, worthy of
any old Quantock shepherd. It brought their two dwellings near
each other and it softened his departure by involving her in his
consideration for Sam and Sam's anxiety about him. Nell rose
to her feet.

"Well, if you must, you must," she said. "I shall never forget
your goodness to me today and...and always!"

Zoyland made a mock bow to the priest as the man passed
him, carrying his surplice bag in one hand and his stick and hat
in the other.

Nell opened the door to let him out.

"Good-night, little girl!" he murmured. "God bless you. God
protect you!" he added huskily as he strode off towards the river.
She closed the door on his retreating figure and drew a miserable
sigh.

Percy still sat on in a tipsy daze. As for Will Zoyland, he
seemed unable to stop talking nonsense to the sleepy, but thor-
oughly placated infant. Little Harry's long-robed body lay con-
tentedly now in Zookey's arms. She swung him to and fro as
she leaned against the wall.

"Harry says his christening-cup hasn't been christened yet,"
cried Zoyland suddenly. With one of those impulsive, irrational
angers that sometimes seize on drunkards, he turned fiercely
upon Nell. "It's my cup. It's my father's cup," he gabbled.
"And I say the cup hasn't been christened yet, Harry's little
cup. Harry says it must be christened!" He moved with unsteady
steps to the table. Here he picked up the cup and raising it to his
mouth, tossed off its contents.

"That's...not...christening...Will...that's only...that's only...mum-
bled Persephone in a drowsy voice.

"You're right...my girl...you're always right! It's wonderful how
she's always right, isn't it, little Hal? It's my cup; it's my father's
cup. It's got our falcon on it. By God! I'll christen it in river
water!" He ran to the door carrying the cup in his hand.

Nell clung frantically to him, calling out repeatedly: "Are you
mad. Will? What are you doing, Will? It's not yours...it's Harry's.
It's Harry's, I tell you, Will! It's Harry's cup!"

But he wrenched himself loose from her and managed to get
the door open. She followed him into the garden; and a breath
of cold night air floated into that whiskey-smelling room.

Dave stood there motionless, hesitating whether to follow them
or not. How calm and impersonal looked that little book about
Atlantis lying on the table face-down and open!

"Let 'un alone, Mr. Spear," cried Zookey. " 'Twill only vex
'un worse for thee to meddle. Her can quiet him. Him won't hurt
his Lordship's golden mug."

Percy looked dreamily at her husband while her eyelids sank
down...opened again...and sank down again.

Her lulled and drugged senses had drifted back to the hay-
boat. Never had she felt like that before! Never had she given
herself up like that before! She had not known the least little
thing about "love." No wonder people made so much of it, and
priests called it "mortal sin!" "I'm sleepy," she thought--"I'd
like to go to sleep in his arms. How strong he is! I'd like to
melt away in his arms; and sleep...and sleep...and sleep . .

Meanwhile Nell was following Zoyland down the sloping lawn
towards the river.

She was wearing a tight-fitting lavender-coloured dress with
loose, beautifully cut sleeves. This particular dress she had seen
in Wollop's window and Mr. Wollop's head-seamstress had
worked hard to alter it for her, against the day when she came
out of the hospital.

She overtook him long before he reached the river bank and
clung to him desperately and they struggled together, trampling
upon her wild-flower bed and the last of her marjoram plants
that were sinking down into the wet winter mould.

In the struggle between them, for he kept holding the little
cup high up in the air and she kept dragging at his arm to
reach it, it happened that one of her sleeves got caught in some
way as they swayed together and was badly ripped, evoking as
the fabric tore, that particular sound which is, of all others,
the most agitating to a woman, when she is struggling--whether
in love or in hate--with a man. The tearing of her dress and
the ease with which Zoyland--even in his drunkenness--held the
cup out of her reach caused Nell to lose her self-control com-
pletely.

She struck at his face again and again with her clenched hand;
a proceeding which astonished him so much that he could only
murmur, without attempting to defend himself, "Do it again,
darling! Do it again, Nell!"

It is a memorable epoch in a man's life, the first time a
woman strikes him in anger. In most cases a certain subtle link
is broken between them that can never be mended. But there
are exceptions to this.

In the relations between men and women the taking of vir-
ginity is undeniably the symbolic as well as the psychic root
of all complications. This act causes pleasure to the one and
suffering to the other--therefore, when a woman strikes a man,
a deeply hidden, basic relation is broken; and broken in a
manner that, as a rule, is dangerous for both.

The Reverend Dr. Sodbury, Rector of St. Benignus', who was
Megan Geard's favourite among "God's Ministers" as the lady
put it, "in all Glaston," in an eloquent sermon preached on the
occasion when Mrs. Legge of Camelot, then in the prime of her
life, was summoned for violently striking the father of Mr.
Wollop, spoke of there being something in a woman's striking
a man that was monstrous, perverted, unnatural, forbidden,
impious, shocking, obscene and--the worthy Doctor in his orig-
inal manuscript had added the word "bestial"; but in a later
version he had modified this into:--"More proper to the insect
world than to the world of humanity."

"Do it again, darling! Do it again, Nell!"

Zoyland was debarred from making any serious attempt to
defend himself from these blows not only by gallantry but also
by his obstinate efforts--natural to the gravity of drunkenness--
to keep the cup far out of her reach.

Into her blows Nell threw all the mounting tide of her feel-
ings; feelings that had been gathering and gathering against
Zoyland ever since Sam gave up making love to her, ever since
her child's conception began. To the end of her life she remem-
bered what she felt as she hit him. It was the sight of his beard
in the moonlight, more than anything else, that made her repeat
her blows so often. And each blow--as she felt the flesh she struck
at yield under her knuckles--seemed to avenge her, and liberate
her, and heal some deep hurt in her, and fulfil some profound
necessity of her nature.

It was as If she were striking something more than Zoyland.
It was as if she was striking at that whole procession of rank,
hirsute, brutal, abominable men that she had seen that day,
when in the first recognition of her maternity she had burnt
up her brother's pamphlet--it was as if she were striking with
her schoolgirl hand, all that unfair advantage that men pos-
sessed over women in this world; their easy escapes, their light-
hearted irresponsibility, their shifting of burdens, their abysmal
conceit How she had hated that "thud...thud...thud..." of her
husband's heavy steps coming down those stairs! Well! It was
with another "thud...thud...thud," of her woman's knuckles
against his bearded face, that she had countered that!

It was not, of course that the girl had time to feel all this in
sequence; but she did feel the overpowering impetus of all this
as she struck her blows.

The tearing of her dress was the raising of the sluice and
the flood simply followed. The truth seems to be that the at-
traction between men and women lets down a drawbridge across
a fretting current of hopeless differences that has only to be
exposed to lead at once to these wild outbursts.

As long as she had not met Sam, or known that there was
a Sam in the world, there was enough sensuality in her to make
Zoyland a tolerable partner. But when Sam and Sam's child
came between them, Zoyland was thrust at once into that cate-
gory of unilluminated maleness towards which it takes a born
courtesan to be indulgent.

It was the appearance of Dave Spear's figure now--for the
impersonalist had decided to disobey Zookey--that drove the
tipsy giant to his next move.

"I said I'd christen 'ee, little cup," he roared, "and so I will!
How do 'ee like that?"

So speaking he ran down the slope of the moonlit lawn, tread-
ing carelessly on her rain-beaten patch of rosemary, and flung
the golden cup clear into the middle of the misty stream.

There was a shriek of astounded dismay from Nell and a cry:
--"What on earth--" from the bewildered Communist; and with
a much smaller splash than anyone would have expected
--in fact with hardly any splash at all--the "Doll's House
Grail" as Mr. Evans had called it when he sold it to Lord P.,
sank down to the bottom of Whitelake River!

The spasm of her anger all spent now, only a sick disgust
at his folly remained in Nell's mind. But this was enough to
give her the final push to what she had been gathering up her
courage to do all that agitated evening. She had not missed--
no woman could have missed, not even one who loved another!
---the vibrant aura of infatuation between Zoyland and Percy.

It had been her vision of their two faces as they drank that
whiskey that had tipped the scale.

"Will," she said very quietly when the two men, the one
approaching her from the house and the other from the river,
met at her side, "Will--listen!"

"I am listening; and so's brother Dave listening!" jeered Zoy-
land.

But she went on in a steady ice-cold voice.

"I...am...going...to...leave...you," she said. "I'm going to leave
you...now...tonight. Dave is going to drive baby and me to--
where I tell him--but that's not for you--and yet it is for
you--yes--I'm going to the Vicarage. Mr. Dekker will take
me in. I've had enough of this sort of thing, Will. But...but--"
she hesitated for a second---"but...I'm sorry I hit you. I
oughtn't to have done that. I don't know what came over
me."

Lord P.'s bastard drew a deep breath. The light from the drift-
ing half-moon made his great bushy beard look twice as big as
it did by day and his figure twice as formidable.

What passed through his mind like a falling star was the
thought of Percy's naked body, alone with him in that little silent
house.

"Very well, Nell," he said, as quiet and composed as a man
could be. "Very well, Nell."

"I shall leave Mrs. Pippard here," she went on, "you can keep
her or let her go, just as you like--"

"I'm listening, Nell," he repeated. "Very well, Nell."

But she turned to her brother now. "Dave," she said humbly
and gently, "Dear Dave, I'm sorry to drag you into all this
....besides I know how you...I know what we both..."

"Oh, it's all right, Nelly," Dave cried hurriedly, anxious,
above everything, to stop her from referring to Percy before
Zoyland. "We'll get off at once. Don't 'ee fret! We'll get off
at once. Dekker's a fast walker. He'll be home before we're
there. Don't 'ee fret, Nelly. The Vicarage won't hurt you for
one night anyway...and we can see later...we can all talk
...reasonably and quietly...later...and try and see things...
later...outside our own skin!"

This expression "outside our own skin" came suddenly into
Dave's head. It was his personal reaction from all this long day
spent in stroking the electric skins of so many personalised
animals!

"Don't 'ee fret, little Nell!" How many times in her earlier
life had this absent-minded half-brother uttered these words!
They brought more comfort to her now, in her distress and her
shame, than she would have thought possible if she could have
foreseen how this day was going to end. Dave put his arm
shyly and stiffly round her waist. There were no directions in
the Marxian philosophy--nor indeed in his Atlantis book--tell-
ing a reformer of society how to comfort a woman. But between
his sister's soft waist under her torn sleeve and his own arm,
just then, there seemed to be something spontaneously generated
which was outside the sphere of reason.

Not more than an hour later Mrs. William Zoyland and Master
Henry Sangamore Rollo Zoyland were safely deposited, together
with modicum of luggage, on the steps of the Vicarage front
door.

It was the Vicar himself who opened the door to let them in.

The child, disturbed by the ceasing of the movement of the car,
began to cry loudly; and in spite of her agitation his mother
could not help recalling how, when they left Whitelake Cottage
to the tune of Zookey Pippard's "oon, two, dree, vour," her hus-
band had said: "I know one person who'll miss me, Nell, in
that monastery of yours!"--and how tenderly he had brushed
the baby's face with his great yellow beard.

As for Dave Spear, he was free that night to read his Atlantis
book till the candle in Dickery Cantle's third back bedroom burnt
to the socket. But he read only three pages. It is hard to be im-
personal in a cosmos that runs to personality.



THE SAXON ARCH



CHRISTMAS CAME AND WENT IN THE USUAL IMPERCEPTIBLE
Somersetshire manner.

Mild, open weather prevailed, so that Jackie and his robber
band, exploring the Wick Woods for trapped rabbits, used fre-
quently to drag the exhausted, but still enquiring Bert, home to
his grandmother, with two or three untimely primrose buds
clutched tight in his hot little palm.

But with the appearance of the New Year the barometer fell,
and a series of sharp black frosts followed one another, con-
stricting the damp Avalon clay and killing off these premature
buddings. The lease of the bulk of his Glastonbury property to
the reorganised town council realised for Lord P. so large a sum
of ready money that he was able to establish his heavily taxed
finances on a new and more satisfactory basis, and Will Zoy-
land, with his new companion at Whitelake Cottage, got the
benefit of this change in several substantial presents of money.
The Marquis had never liked his son's wife and his sympathies
were entirely with the bastard in the estrangement from Nell.
Persephone on the contrary proved to be an adept at cajoling
the great man. As to Bloody Johnny's fortune, the inroads upon
it by these new transactions, were, thanks to the council's power
of borrowing, much less than the Mayor had anticipated; and as
the visitors from abroad, attracted by John's advertisements,
poured into the town all that winter in increasing numbers, the
new Glastonbury commune, under the dictatorship of the Mayor's
assessors, showed signs of being more than able to keep its pro-
letariat satisfied and its tradesmen active and content.

The business done in Mr. Wallop's shop alone surpassed all
the holiday seasons the ex-Mayor could remember, so that al-
though his establishment did not officially come under the new
regime, he was willing enough to hand over to the communal
purse, sooner than break with the authorities, all the percentage
they demanded of these increasing profits. The bank, the railway,
Philip's older dye works, and his Wookey Hole tin mine, were
therefore, as the early weeks of January passed, the only strong-
holds of individualism left untouched by the new order.

The official opening of Geard's Saxon arch and of a curious
building near it which was really a sort of Platonic Academia
for his new religion, but which, for want of a better name, was
hitherto styled the Rotunda, was to take place on January the
twentieth of this new year. So widely had John's clever circulars
advertised this event, that by the morning of the great day every
available lodging in the place was crowded, and those incor-
rigible capitalistic railways were running their loaded excursion
trains into the town soon after daylight began.

"Are you really off to Wookey now?" enquired Mrs. Crow of
her husband at an unusually late breakfast at The Elms. "Emma
says there won't be a stroke of work done anywhere in the neigh-
bourhood today."

Tilly was not a little disturbed, for reasons of her own, at the
lateness of the hour; but the master of the house had slept
heavily that morning.

Philip looked across the table at her with his indulgent smile.
How dear she was to him, after all, this quaint little lady for
whom he felt no more erotic attraction than if she had been his
aunt, like that Aunt Maria who had lived for the last thirty years
at Aix-les-Bains! "You wouldn't want me to sit twiddling my
thumbs at home, would you," he said, "while Geard has his
grand glorification?"

"Emma says she thinks you ought to be there!" In all the last
decade of their relations Philip's wife had never dared to speak
so decisively; but her private nervousness made things leap out
that she had not meant to say. But her words troubled him. Had
even she, then, joined the increasing circle of their neighbors
who were drifting away from his side towards that of the Mayor?
He glanced down frowningly at his plate. He began biting his
underlip beneath its grey mustache. He felt hedged round by
enemies, cornered, run to earth, like a hunted fox.

Paul Trent's coup d'etat in the matter of Lord P.'s property,
his own eviction from his new dye works, a sudden deplorable
diminishing of the expected tin ore from his Wookey Hole vein,
all these blows, coming together, had driven this grandson of
"the Devereux woman" fairly to the wall.

"Ought to be there," he thought bitterly, "ought to be there,
to help hoist this crazy charlatan, who's ruining me with Grand-
father's money, upon the final pinnacle of his folly."

His tin. was running out before either his new road or his new
bridge was ready to transport it. The old dye works which was
all that was left him of his special industry, taken over thirty
years ago, was devoid of a manager.

Bob Tankerville, entangled with one of those servants of Miss
Drew's, was not half the adventurous air-pilot he used to be. The
airplane itself had become an impossible expense in the present
state of his finances. He had come down finally in the last few
days to endure some very humiliating discussions about his bank-
loans with the Glastonbury bank-manager. Even the bank itself,
flooded with communal money from the huge inrush of visitors,
was beginning to turn against him! He had seen too with his
own eyes a row of trucks full of his tin ore shunted on a siding
to make room for the loads of clay which the council was bring-
ing in as material for their preposterous figurines. And only a
year ago, with Barter as his manager, he was in the full flush of
his success! Yes, it was the treachery of that accursed Didlington
cad that was at the bottom of his trouble! He had thought he
was going to do better without him and he had done better with-
out him at first. But that was before old Beere fell into his
dotage and let this smart rascal Trent outwit him at every point.

"Emma thinks"--began the irrepressible Tilly again, and never
had the Perfect Servant been consigned to so deep a pit as her
master consigned her to now--"that you ought to stand up to
that crowd at the opening and tell them what you feel about
these fol-de-lols."

He lifted up his face and tried to smile at his wife with his
old tender, humorous, superior smile.

"They'd howl me down," he muttered.

"Oh, no they wouldn't, Philip--Oh, no they wouldn't! Not one
of them, as Emma says, can speak as well as you do. Not one of
them can--"

But there was a look upon Philip's face that she had never
seen before, a dangerous, reckless, desperate look; and she be-
gan suddenly to feel that it was wiser, with a man who could
look like that, not to dare him to do hard things.

Tilly subsided into silence; and stretching out her arm, with
the tea-pot in her hand, re-filled her husband's cup. which he had
mechanically held out to her. She was worried by a little con-
spiracy of her own at that moment, for the success of which she
wanted Philip out of the way that morning. Completely unknown
to him, she and Emma had been visiting Jenny Morgan, or
Blackie, as Red Robinson called her.

This had been Tilly's own immediate reaction to the disclosure
Emma had at last consented to make to her, pushed on by the
chattering tongues of the servants from the Abbey House. Even
Emma--who thought she knew her mistress well--was surprised
by the spirit which the little lady showed under this communi-
cation; and thus it was proved--to the astonished interest of the
Invisible Naturalists--that the human minnow of the species
"Housewife" is liable to act heroically at a great emotional
crisis.

Tilly had indeed, in several trying and disconcerting inter-
views with her husband's ex-mistress, tried to persuade Blackie
to give up the child and allow her formally to adopt it. But so
far these attempts had proved fruitless.

Though Nelly Morgan went about during all her playtime, with
Jackie and Sis and Bert, her mother seemed obstinately un-
willing to part with a daughter she hardly ever saw. Since this
particular morning however was, by reason of the opening of the
arch, a general Glastonbury holiday, Tilly had induced the child
to come up to The Elms after breakfast and pay her a formal
visit. She had done this on the strength of an assurance from
Philip that he would be away all day at Wookey; but she herself
was begging him not to go to Wookey!

Tilly's interior nervousness grew so great at last that she felt
she must get Philip off her hands, at least as far as that nonde-
script out-of-the-way room where he kept his geological speci-
mens. But Philip had got up now from the table. He moved over
to the fireplace and sat down in one of his grandfather's chairs
and proceeded deliberately to light his pipe. Tilly pondered
How could she say to him, "I want to get rid of you so that I
can welcome your girl's child!" It was one of those ironic private
contingencies that some especially dedicated troop of imps seems
to delight to contrive on occasions devoted to important public
events.

Tilly thought to herself: "He's bound to hear the child's voice
if he stays here. How crazy I was to let her come this morning!"

She began piling the breakfast things on a tray, a task which
she delighted in--for if Tilly hadn't been a mistress she would
have been a flawless parlour-maid--when there was a bold, loud
ring at the front-door, a ring twice repeated, the ring of a child,
who enjoys pulling the bell-iron out to its furthest reach! Well!
there was nothing to be done. The fat was in the fire and the
cat out of the bag.

She went herself to the door and opened it; and Philip, quick
to catch something unusual in her manner, followed her into the
hall. The worthy Emma, primary cause of this embarrassing con-
tretemps, issued at the same second from the kitchen and ad-
vanced firmly, quietly, discreetly down the passage.

"Mummy were dead-asleep," declared Nelly in her shrill child's
voice. "So I thought I'd come in me week-day clothes. Mummy
were turble sick last night."

"Do you mean drunk?" growled Philip grossly, while Emma
carefully shut the front door and began dusting with her apron
the brass lion upon the hall-table; this last gesture being a sym-
bol of the occasion's dramatic importance.

"Drunk-sick," responded the child with a wicked gleam in her
dark eyes. "Be you wanting to have me live here," she added,
turning to her sulky and disturbed father.

"Live here, child? I didn't know--" But he turned sharp
round upon Emma, venting his discomfort upon the onlooker.
"Don't stand there like that, woman!'' he snapped. "We don't
want any help with this child."

"You can clear away, Emma," said Tilly apologetically, mak-
ing a move to take the child into the drawing-room. But Emma,
hurt to the quick, was already retreating towards the kitchen
door, when she heard by the sounds behind her (for her ears
were like the ears of a mouse in her own domain) exactly where
her mistress was going. This knowledge brought her professional
tact into play with an automatic force that overcame her injured
feelings, for the new house-maid was cleaning the drawing-room
and it would not do for her to notice things.

"Ethel is in there'm cleaning'm," she said, indicating that the
dining-room was the place for this domestic tragi-comedy.

"You shouldn't have spoken like that to Emma, Philip," said
Tilly, as soon as the faithful servant had withdrawn again.

"Damn Emma! Come in here, both of you," and he pushed his
wife and his child before him into the dining-room. "What I
want to know first of all is this," he began, when they were all
inside; and he actually turned the lock of the door to make sure
of no further invasion; "how long have you two been seeing
each other?"

Tilly who had taken her usual place at the table was begin-
ning to reply when the child cut her short. "Her's been seeing
Mummy and me since Christmas. Her brought Mummy and me
some crystal-ginger, didn't you, Marm? and some Reading bis-
cuits, and some French sardines, and some Spanish olives, and
some Turkish delight, and some tangerine oranges and some--"

"Here! hold up, kid!" cried Philip, unable to help smiling
at this long enumeration of dainties. It crossed his mind how
extraordinarily characteristic it was of Tilly to woo his mistress
and his mistress' child with objects from the grocer's.

"I went once before Christmas," said Tilly, who through this
whole episode had preserved her equanimity perfectly except
when Philip called Emma "woman." "You've forgotten to tell
him that, Nelly!"

"I always knowed," cried the child in a shrill voice, when
she interrupted herself by staring frantically at the little blue
flame under Tilly's polished hot-water urn, and finally by
stretching out a long thin arm towards this strange object, feel-
ing with extended forefinger, to see if that queer flame was hot,
"that father weren't me proper father, by mother pushing me
away when her cried for he. Be he my proper father?" and she
sidled up close to Tilly in the most coaxing and ingratiating
way, and pointed with her finger at Philip, who now stood with
his back to the fire regarding the pair with a bemused scowl,
Tilly put one hand round Nelly's waist and with the other be-
gan smoothing down the creases of her frock. "Yes, child," she
said hurriedly, "I'm afraid he is; though he hasn't been a very
good father to you, not telling me about you long before this."
She kept her eyes on the child's dress and even began putting
both hands to a place in the waistband that was held by a safety
pin that had got loose.

"How could we know, kid, how could we know," said Philip,
addressing the child, "that she would have liked little girls who
belong to robber bands and who trespass in Wick Woods and
let rabbits out of snares?"

"She likes me!" said Nelly with decision and with one of
her sudden impetuous movements she imprinted a quick, hot,
excited kiss on Tilly's shoulder.

Tilly bent low down in her efforts to close the safety pin. She
was extremely unwilling that Philip should detect that her eyes
were swimming with tears. "She likes us both," she said sharply
and emphatically, "and she likes Emma too--don't you, Nelly?"

But Nelly had burst away from her hold and had rushed to
the window. "There's a bicycle!" she cried, "and he's thrown a
paper down! Oh, may I see if it's the Gazette? Mummy always
lets me see the Gazette. It told about him and Mummy once!
Mummy said that wicked Red put it in." Without waiting for
permission she ran out and brought the paper into the room.
While she was gone Tilly and Philip exchanged a long, word-
less look, that contained an exhaustive and conclusive commen-
tary upon the whole episode.

He thought, "How ironical that both she and I were visiting
Jenny in that house. Suppose we had met one day at the door!"

"May I open it?" asked. Morgan Nelly when she was back
again.

"It'll be all over town that she's here now," thought Philip.
"That paper-boy will tell everyone."

The Gazette contained prominent headlines about the opening
of the arch. "Mayor's Speech Eagerly Awaited," Philip could
read, from where he stood by the fire. "Jackie's Sally be going
to marry Red," announced Morgan Nelly, finding no sign of
the pictures she had hoped for in this number and offering her
own quota of Glastonbury news. "Mummy says 'tis more than
he deserves."

She remained silent for a second, her brows puckered. "What
do bewger mean?" she suddenly enquired gravely of the man
by the fire. She evidently felt that The Elms' dining-room was a
source of supply for certain gaps in her knowledge of the world.
"Do bewger mean the Devil?"

But there was heard now a discreet little tap at the locked
door, and Tilly sprang to her feet. "I've got to order lunch,"
she said. "Shall we keep her here for the day?"

Philip nodded without speaking; and then as Tilly's hand was
on the door handle, "I think perhaps I will go up there pres-
ently," he said.

"To the opening?"

"Yes. That's what you said, wasn't it?" This appealing to her
for advice on so momentous an occasion, on the question of his
confronting in public his grand enemy, took the little lady's
breath away.

He seemed different in some way as she looked at him now,
standing over there; and for their mates to look different is ex-
tremely disconcerting to women. They prefer the most familiar
tempers to anything inexplicable.

"I...wouldn't...care...to...interfere...with your...plans, Phil," she
stammered nervously. "But if you do go I must tell Emma lunch
won't be till after two. The opening is announced to begin at
eleven, you know; but it won't be over till after one, I'm sure."

While this memorable encounter was taking place in The
Elms' dining-room, for it was already long past ten, an enormous
crowd had assembled at the foot of Chalice Hill, where, as the
Western Gazette had justly remarked, the Mayor's speech was
being "eagerly waited by all Wessex."

It was not only the opening of the Saxon arch and of the Ro-
tunda, but the inauguration of the new Glastonbury commune
that this twentieth of January was to see; and the possibility of
all manner of exciting clashes between those friendly to the
Mayor and those hostile to him, gave the sort of spice to the
occasion that always attracts a crowd.

Tom Barter had come across to Northload Street, puzzled as
to what he and Tossie were to do thal day with the twins, for
Toss had left Benedict Street and had taken a furnished room
of her own. Mary had made him stay and have a second break-
fast with her; for she wanted to talk to him about Tossie and
the children.

This other Mr. and Mrs. Crow were indeed as late that morn-
ing as the pair at The Elms. John lay in bed still, propped up
on his pillows. He had had a feverish night; he felt sick now in
his stomach; he was unable to eat a morsel; he declined to
smoke a cigarette; he was insatiable only for endless cups of
strong tea.

Mary was boldly sounding Tom on the delicate topic of his
marrying Tossie; and she was telling him that if they did marry,
there was an unfurnished room to be let on the floor beneath
their own in this same house.

"It would be so nice, Tom," she said, "for us all four to be
together; and I could look after the children sometimes, while
you and Toss get away for an afternoon."

"You...don't...think," muttered the cautious Tom who was on
his knees by the fire with the toasting-fork, as he glanced
furtively round at Mary, afraid of being rushed by a conjunc-
tion of feminine influence out of some precious bachelor free-
dom whose benefits he might be forgetting at this time. "You
...don't...think...that...being married would spoil it all?"

"Spoil it for you, or for her, do you mean?" asked Mary,
wondering a little, in her own mind, exactly why she was press-
ing their old friend so hard. "But he used to live so miserably,"
she thought, "so squalidly and miserably."

"For both of us!" murmured Tom. "You don't want any more
toast, do you, if he's not going to have any? For both of us!
I might feel caught; and she might get--oh, I don't know--
heavy and domestic, and stop laughing and all that!"

"She isn't so very thin, now, Tom, is she?"

"Shut up, Mary! You know what I mean--you know how girls are
when they've got settled--I couldn't bear it for Toss to change
a single bit!^

"She won't change, Tom. She won't change. I'd be ready to
bear all your reproaches, old friend, if she did; so well do I
know that she won't. And I don't think...very much...that you
will, either," she added archly; smiling down at him with her
hand on the toast she was buttering.

John turned his face away from this scene at the fire between
his wife and their friend. He was not at all sure, at the bottom
of his mind, that he wanted Tossie and Tom established in the
same house.

"What a demon I am," he thought. "I love old Tom when I've
got him to myself; but these mixings up--good Lord!"

"How do you feel now?" enquired Mary, turning to him when
she and Tom were seated at the table. He refused to meet her
eyes. "I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil!" he muttered, with-
out a thought of Barnaby Rudge's raven.

"Don't keep bothering, Mary," he groaned peevishly. "You
know what's the matter with me and so does Tom."

"You're not getting jealous, are you, old chap, because I've
got your place?" chuckled Barter.

Mary thought to herself: "How dangerously these men fool
each other! Doesn't he know that when he says a thing like that,
he makes John hate him so much that he could strike him dead?"

"I hope you realise, John," she said, "that nothing will in-
duce me to let you go to that thing this morning? You've got
nervous prostration--that's what's the matter with you; and
you're going to stay in bed."

"So that Tom can take you to the Hill, I suppose? I thought
something like that was in your mind."

Mary said to herself, "I must be more careful. Oh, these
men, these men! Our jealousies are serious or nothing. But with
them--"She had already come to the conclusion that under
a certain "cannikin-clink" brusqueness, like that of Iago, her
husband concealed black holes of malice that went down to
the nether pit.

This judgment was not quite accurate. John's fits of "miching-
mallecho" came and went, like the weather. Often when she
thought he was most affectionate, his heart had turned as cold
as ice; and again, when she fancied she detected abysses of ma-
licious aloofness, he was merely worrying because he was afraid
he was going to have dyspepsia.

"If you can't go," she said emphatically, "I shan't go. Tom
can take Tossie and leave the babies with us here. Why don't
you do that, Tom? Toss would love to see the crowds and hear
the speeches."

Barter admitted that so far they had been unable to find any-
one to leave the twins with. All Glastonbury seemed resolved to
be at Chalice Hill this morning.

They finished their meal in silence, John's feverish querulous-
ness exercising a discouraging effect upon them.

"Do you want me to come over with you, Tom, and get the
twins?" she asked, as soon as they were done. "It's after ten,
and you and Tossie should be starting if you want to get good
places."

As soon as Barter and Mary had departed on this errand, John
Crow struggled up from his bed and somewhat stiffly and weakly
stood erect upon the floor--Yes, he felt pretty wretched; but
it tickled his vagabond fancy to trick the two people he loved
best in the world; and he set himself obstinately to put on his
clothes. When he was dressed, and had his overcoat on, he went
to the sink and sponged his face with cold water. This made
him feel a little better; and moving to the table, he filled Mary's
tea-cup with milk and poured it down his throat.

"Nervous prostration," he said to himself, "what a phrase
that is! Well, I certainly have done something for old Geard
and his Saxon arch; and I'm damned if they're going to keep
me from seeing the sport."

Half an hour later he had succeeded by the exercise of both
blandishments and violence in pushing his way through the surg-
ing crowd, which already filled the road and spread up the slope
of the hill, till he was standing right against the new arch itself.

It was a fine piece of work, this Saxon arch, now it rose un-
covered to the watery sunshine of that January day, but little
as John knew about architecture he felt sure that the great archi-
tect had fooled Mr. Geard and that this massive stone edifice
was a completely new and original work no more Saxon than
Cardiff Villa was Saxon. But it was a noble erection; and John
had an inkling that in some very subtle way the architect had
actually caught something of the spirit of Mr. Geard's new
religion!

It was not easy to define to himself what he felt; but he did
feel that if he, John Crow, had had to express in solid stone what
he had come to understand of the Mayor's strange notions, it
would have been almost exactly in this way that he would have
done it. How queer that crowd of human heads looked, as it
swayed and undulated beneath him! A line from Homer's descrip-
tion of the pallid ghosts, flocking up from Erebus, came into his
mind---"The powerless heads of the dead."

He still felt curiously dizzy and feverish; so much so that
between himself and that vast undulating crowd--and how
silent and patient they were! They only swayed and moved and
eddied and drifted. They really were like ghosts from Erebus!
Why were they all so spellbound?--Yes, between him and them
there seemed to be a cold, grey, clammy, Cimmerian mist.

On the opposite side of the arch from where he was stand-
ing, and he was himself inside some sort of rope-barrier--how
had he crossed that barrier? He could remember nothing just
now--was a broad, empty platform, covered entirely with a
heavy black cloth, "God! it looks like a place of execution," he
thought; and then it came over him that it was towards this
draped platform, though there was no one there, that this vast
concourse of people were lifting their hushed, awe-struck, hypno-
tised heads--the "powerless heads of the dead."

And John began to receive a most uncanny feeling--the feeling
namely that Mr. Geard really was standing on that platform now.
Either his own brain was too dizzy to see him there, when every-
body else saw him, or there was an actual invisible presence up
there which everybody in the crowd felt without seeing anything.

But it certainly was, for John, the most extraordinary expe-
rience he had ever had, that swaying, shifting, drifting, undulat-
ing crowd--men, women, and children, young men and young
maids, foreigners and natives--all lifting up strained, tense,
hushed, white faces, as they surged slowly about, while their vast
mass moved, like a sea-flood stirred by tides that could not be
seen, here and there about the ribs of the hill.

Feeling too dizzy to stand much longer upon his feet, and
yet unwilling to sink down upon the grass, John began examin-
ing the great unhewn rock-boulders out of which the architect
had constructed this singular monument. While he did this he
began to experience the feeling that he was really entirely alone
on this hillside, and at any moment this illusion, the mirage of
these faces, might melt away. He was aroused from this sensa-
tion by a sudden spasm of recognition. Where had he seen this
particular type of stone before? The stone was inserted between
two blocks of Portland stone--for among the architect's original
effects in the Saxon arch was the use of several varieties of ma-
terial--and as John now leaned his forehead against it, for it
was on a level with his face and he had come hatless from
Northload Street, he knew well where he had seen its like be-
fore. It resembled one of those strange "foreign stones," which
Mr. Evans assured him came from South Wales, which he had
seen at Stonehenge.

The contact of his skull with this stone--and it is likely enough
it would have happened with any stone of a similar texture--put
new strength into him and cleared the mists from his brain. He
now discovered that he was not by any means alone in this
roped-off enclosure. There was in fact quite a large group of
people assembled here, though in his dizziness, and his preoccu-
pation with the vast array of faces upraised from the slope be-
low, he had felt as if he were the only person close to the arch.

"It's like the ones at Stonehenge," he remarked to his nearest
neighbour, who turned out to be the beautiful wife of Harry
Stickles, the chemist. Nancy had indeed traded shamelessly on
her unusual good looks to get inside this privileged barrier,
and it was only because all the officials were local people that
she had attained her desire.

"Where is he now?" she responded to John's remark about
the stone.

"Where is who?"

"He; Mr. Geard."

"I don't know," said John. "To tell you the truth, Mrs.
Stickles, l feel as if he were standing on that platform now! I
seem to feel him there...but of course it's empty." He ran
his fingers over the stone that interested him so much. "It's
like the ones at Stonehenge," he repeated aloud.

‘There must be more sacred stones," said Nancy, "in Glas-
tonbury than anywhere else in England. I heard people talking
just now about a stone with funny marks on it that's been found
quite lately on this Hill."

"So they've got it, have they?" he said. "It must be the one
that this new antiquary was after, not the King Edgar Chapel man,
but this new fellow who's been about here--but Mr. Geard never
told me about this stone."

"That's just what they were saying about the other one with
the marks on it," said Nancy. "They were saying he hides these
stones where no one can find them."

"Only when he thinks they've got something to do with Mer-
lin!" said John. "He knows nothing really about the Legend.
He's never read a word of Malory. It's old Evans who's put all
this Merlin business into his head."

"He's a very great man," said Nancy gravely.

"I never said he wasn't!" responded John. "They'll be making
a legend out of him soon. Geard of Glastonbury--it sounds like
history already!"

They both were silent; -and John, with his fingers still pressed
against that South Wales stone, began to feel again the strange
sensation of being quite alone up here under Geard's arch and
by the side of Geard's black-draped platform. The touch of this
foreign stone seemed to isolate him, along with all the Glaston-
bury stones. It gave him the power to feel the life of Glastonbury
with all its long historic centuries as if it were the mere motions
of beetles and earth-worms across the surface of a platform of
primordial rock, the rock of the Island of Avalon. That vast
crowd of white upturned faces, that were like ghosts from
Erebus, seemed to become real ghosts, the ghosts of all the men
and women whose little, turbulent earth-lives had disturbed the
planetary repose of this rock island in the tide-swept marshes.
Yes! He felt them rise up multitudinously about him, kluta ethnea
nekron, "the glorious tribes of the dead," and he, the wornout
Danish adventurer, privileged by a strange fate to be the one to
feel them there, with Geard's arch above him and Geard's plat-
form beside him.

He glanced up from that sea of pallid faces to the coping-
stone of the arch which had been rudely carved into a rough
resemblance of Dunstan of Baltonsborough. Baltonsborough it-
self was over there, hidden by the Tor, an abode of living people
still, and nearer him, beyond Edgarley, was Havyatt Gap, where
his own un superstitious Danes had been stopped by these mad
monks. Mad they were then; mad they were still; and old Geard
was the maddest of them all!

This stone, all these stones, how much nobler was their long-
enduring life than the follies and fevers of men! Surrounded by
the great waters had they once been, by the tossing salt waves
of that free sea, over which the Viking ships had swept. Would
that some strong new flood might come up from its ocean-bed,
and sweep over all these morbid-legended fields! How he hated
them, these lies, these frauds, these illusions, which he had been
paid to propagate! And yet there was something about old Geard,
that seemed as much on his side as on the side of these mad
monks. Was Geard himself, secretly in his deep heart, as heathen
as he was? Was that black-draped empty platform only waiting
even now, for the lifting of some huge gonfalon of defiance to all
this? Was this opening of the man's Saxon arch into these Latin-
Celtic mysteries of Glastonbury, in reality a reversal of that
stopping of the Danes at Havyatt?

How well he remembered his own first entrance into the town,
more than ten months ago, in Mr. Evans' little motor car. Well!
Evans and he were both married men now; married and settled,
and far away from Stonehenge!

"I can't think where he is!" It was the beautiful Nancy address-
ing him again.

"How do I know," John replied peevishly. "He's probably
asleep in Wookey Hole, like he was last time, when Cousin
Philip shoved himself into his place. Why! Talk of the devil--
if there's not Philip himself, coming over here now!"

Nancy turned round and sure enough there was Philip Crow,
pushing through the crowd that gave way before him, and mak-
ing straight for the platform.

Behind him, as he came, rose a low angry murmur from the
natives present. They were evidently already expectant of a sec-
ond grand anti-climax.

Philip skirted the platform steps, evidently surprised to see
no sign of Geard, and passing--a thing no one else had dared
to do--right under the arch, came up to Nancy and John.

John held out his hand. They had not met many times since
that day at Northwold Rectory.

"Come to address us in place of the Mayor?" said John, his
cheek twitching with the family twitch and his eyelids blinking
under the grip that Philip gave his fingers.

"Perhaps...it will...fall on me," responded Philip with an air
of contemptuous nonchalance. "I'm ready for the job...
if Lord P. and our good Vicar are dodging it! Has the Mayor
got no one to introduce him? How oddly all these things are
arranged!"

"Do you know Mrs. Nancy Stickles, Philip?"

Philip took off his hat and bowed. "It's just like the scamp,"
he thought, "to saddle me with some pretty pick-up at a moment
like this."

But before Nancy could do more than return an embarrassed
smile to his exaggerated deference, none other than Mr. Geard
himself appeared quietly among them, as if materialising out
of the air. The Mayor nodded kindly at Nancy, winked at John,
and offered his plump hand to Philip. His appearance was so
sudden that it was like the appearance of Teiresias at that Cim-
merian scene which John had already called up.

John stepped back a little and regarded with concentrated at-
tention the Protagonist and Antagonist of this memorable occa-
sion. Never had the contrast between the two men been more
marked.

Philip was dressed in a fawn-coloured overcoat and light soft
grey hat. He wore spats beneath his blue-serge trousers and in
his hand he carried a cane with a round jasper knob that Perse-
phone had given him. He had a red camellia in his buttonhole
and his whole demeanour was composed, debonair, alert.

Bloody Johnny, on the contrary, was really scandalously at-
tired. He had dodged, as his custom was, on public occasions, all
attempts of his family to groom him. He was not even pictur-
esquely untidy. He looked like a deboshed verger who had
turned billiard-marker in some fifth-rate club.

"He's been drinking," thought John, "and that's why he's so
late."

John was not in error. From a very early hour that morning,
Mr. Geard, on this supreme occasion of his life, had been sip-
ping brandy with that old crony and convertite of his, the ostler
at the Pilgrims'.

John now approached a step nearer to these two Glastonbury
magnates. He forgot all about his dizziness, in his anxiety to
hear what they could possibly be saying to each other on this
day of all days. But as often happens when two formidable per-
sonalities meet, they each seemed desirous of avoiding any real
contact with the other.

Nancy also moved up close to Mr. Geard's side. She seemed
to have an obscure feminine instinct that it would be fatal for
her Prophet to have a serious encounter with this enemy at this
juncture.

The murmurs that rose from the crowd at Philip's appearance
now changed into shouts and yells when the two men were
clearly observed talking together.

"Begin! Begin! Begin! Leave your chattering and begin!"

Such was the burden of a storm of confused cries, not only
in English but in every European tongue, that now rose like a
howl of demons from the crowded slope of Chalice Hill.

"We are being chaffed by the populace," said Philip with a
bitter smile. "The chap's half-seas-over," he thought. "Tilly was
right to tell me to come. He's going to make an absolute zany
of himself. This is my chance, if I can keep cool. I wonder if
my voice can carry as far as the road. I'll let these foreigners
know that this sham commune and this mountebank Mayor are
not the only representatives of Glastonbury."

Thus did Philip Crow gather his wits together; but what were
Mr. Geard's thoughts at this crisis? He had none at all; none,
that is to say, beyond a lively interest in the camellia in Philip's
buttonhole! He was as empty of abstract considerations or even
rational considerations as ex-Mayor Wollop himself. But let no
one suppose that this physical placidity meant that Mr. Geard
was hors-de-combat. It only meant that he was in such peace with
himself that his whole being moved in harmony to the least stray
thought that came into his head. It is true he was drunk. But
Philip was a fool to regard that condition as a handicap to Geard
of Glastonbury. Not even John--who knew him so much better
than Philip--realised the power that resided in the man's com-
plete freedom from self-consciousness.

All that his tipsiness did was to make him five times more
his natural self than in normal times. And Mr. Geard's natural
self was a thing of mountainous potency. It is likely enough that
Nancy's Prophet of the Lord had quite deliberately repaired to
the ostler's bar at the Pilgrims', so as to leave no shred of fussy
vain human self-thought between his intellect and his world-
deep sensations.

"Do you know where the steps are to that platform?" said Mr.
Geard. "They'll be quiet enough presently. Do you mind if I
sit down for a moment?"

"My chance is coming," thought Philip, "my chance is coming."

Mr. Geard now deliberately sat down on the grass. This per-
formance was almost as disconcerting to John as it was to Nancy;
and it was a good deal worse than disconcerting to the officials
of the commune in the crowd below. John began to feel it im-
perative that someone should intervene; for Mr. Geard seemed
to have fallen into a trance of imperturbable quiescence.

As he sat there cross-legged, with his plump fingers extended
on the grass at either side of him, he looked like some neolithic
beast-god, paramour perhaps of the Witch of Wookey!

But quick as lightning Philip accepted this grand chance of-
fered him by the fates and stepping lightly past John and Nancy
mounted the steps of the platform and presented himself before
the audience.

"You have all come here," he began, and out of mere curiosity
they let him get as far as that, "to show your interest in our
great historic town and to learn what we are trying to do to
make it not only a beautiful place, worthy of its old traditions,
but also a place where the noblest achievements of Progress can
be carried--"

But "Progress" was the last word that was audible; for at that
point he was simply shouted down. Yes, there was nothing for
Philip to do but to descend those platform steps as proudly
and contemptuously as he had mounted them. This he accom-
plished with self-control, dignity and grace. Once on the ground,
however, he gave a swift malicious glance at the grotesque per-
son squatting on the grass, over whom Nancy and John were
bending, shrugged his shoulders, replaced his hat upon his
head, waved his cane, and made his way down the hill.

But with John pulling at one arm and Nancy pulling at the
other, Bloody Johnny was now raised to his feet. This achieve-
ment, every detail of which the crowd watched from below, was
grossly and humourously cheered, the "hoch, hochs" of the Ger-
manic element and the "vivas" of the Italians being especially
vehement.

Once on his feet, Mr. Geard smilingly dispensed with Nancy's
help; but permitted John to assist him to mount the platform;
and John himself, amid the tumult of applause that greeted the
Mayor, slipped down again and took his seat on the lowest stair
of the steps, side by side with Bob Sheperd, the old policeman,
and Mr. Merry, the old museum curator.

It was at that moment of the proceedings that Miss Barbara
Fell was overheard to say that it was a pity dear Mr. Crow should
have been shouted down; while Dr. Fell was heard explaining
to his neighbors in philosophic language that Mr. Geard was
probably not very drunk and had probably staged the whole
episode, with the view of arousing in his audience "that par-
ticular psychological mood of sympathetic nervous hilarity which
can be so quickly changed by a crafty orator into passionate
receptivity."

Certainly in its whole long and turbulent history no man in
the county of Somerset has ever received an ovation comparable
with the ovation that Bloody Johnny received at this moment
before he began to speak. And when he did begin, a silence like
the silence of fishes in the sea, or of birds at midnight, fell upon
that crowd, so that angry heads were turned round when anyone
coughed or sneezed or shuffled or struck a match or even turned
up his coat collar.

From the poinl of view of oratory, there was nothing at all
remarkable in the way the Mayor's speech began. Many of his
later discourses, as they were taken down in the next two months,
were far more eloquent He thanked his hearers for allowing him
to speak at all--"under the circumstances." He said that he was
sure people would come from all parts of the world to drink
of the Grail Spring. He emphasised the historical interest of the
new experiment in government that Glastonbury was making. He
begged "those who were strange to our system of a just and
equitable division of those benefits which human brains and hu-
man labour, working in harmony with Nature, give to humanity,
to suspend their judgment till they see the thing in working
order."

He rambled off at that point into quite a childishly grave re-
cital of early Glastonbury history. He referred to the Lake Village
neolithic race. He spoke of the Ancient Britons. He alluded to
the importance of the work of the great Saxon king, Edgar.

As John watched the faces of the audience from his position
by Bob Sheperd's side he was struck by one very curious phe-
nomenon. The fact that the Mayor was blundering along in a
quite commonplace way, uttering brief and cursory remarks
that were really platitudes, made no difference at all to the ex-
traordinary impression he produced. John found it amusing
afterward to notice the various ways in which the great London
newspapers handled this striking difference; this discrepancy be-
tween the substance of the man's speech and the spellbound awe
--there was no other word for it--with which his uninspired re-
marks were received. Once more John began (or was it his dizzi-
ness returning upon him?) to feel as if all those upturned faces
were thousands and thousands of ghosts, all the nekuon ameneena
kareena, "the powerless heads of the dead," of the long Glaston-
bury history, listening to Mr. Geard.

It was not long, however, before John's ears heard the phrase:
"I therefore declare this arch to the Grail Spring of our dear
town, open, free of charge, to all persons who, who, who care
to come!" and he became aware that, in the same droning and
uninspired manner, Mr. Geard had begun to allude to various
familiar aspects of the Grail story; aspects such as the simplest
schoolchild in the place had been acquainted with since infancy.

This preposterous narrating and countenancing, in solemn
seriousness, of what John felt to be a mass of fantastic and grue-
some fairy-tales, made something stark and dangerous rise up
within his East-Anglian soul. He turned his eyes away from these
hypnotised ghosts and fixed them upon that stone in the new
arch which had made him think of Stonehenge. And it was borne
in upon his mind with a frozen certitude that however phantas-
mal matter might be in its interior essence there was something
about it when it hardened into stone that reduced all organic
flesh into the transient, the impermanent, the perishable. He saw
the birth and the death of the generations--men and beasts and
birds and fishes--their tremulous loves, their wretched tribula-
tions, their vain hopes, their importunate passions, and all swept
away by wind and water from the enduring majesty of these
stones, that themselves changed not, save by cosmic catastrophe.

"If I could destroy," he thought, "in one overwhelming stroke
all this whole maze of delusion; if I could bring the free sea in
upon it, and the north wind down upon it, if I could burn it
with fire and cleanse it with water, if I could purify the air of
it and purge the earth of it, how calm and clean the world-floor
would be!"

"And thus," boomed on above him the monotonous voice of
Bloody Johnny, "the Grail-worship at Glastonbury has be-
come--"

An impulse of anger too great to be resisted took hold upon
John Crow. Leaping to his feet he turned his back to the crowd
and looking up at Mr. Geard who was near enough now to the
edge of the platform to see his convulsed face, he uttered in a
low hissing tone and so that Mr. Geard alone could hear him,
the words--"Lies! Lies! Lies!"

His effort had been so great that his dizziness came back upon
him with a rush. So blindingly it came, that everything swam
before his eyes and he began swaying to and fro at the foot of
the platform, groping at the air with his hands and gurgling in
his throat. As he swayed like this, all began to grow dark before
him, and he had just time to think to himself, "What have I done?
Have I ruined his speech?" when he fell prone on the ground in
a dead faint.

The speaker had drawn back a little towards the centre of
the platform, so that when old Bob Sheperd and Mr. Merry, with
the help of two other younger men, lifted John up and carried
him towards the Rotunda, all that crossed Geard's mind was,
"Someone has fainted," and it never occurred to him to asso-
ciate this incident with that convulsed face and the word, "Lies!"

One of the officials produced the key of the Rotunda and here
they laid John; but it was not till the Mayor's speech was over
and the crowd had dispersed that he really awoke to full con-
sciousness.

"People say these things are lies," shouted Mr. Geard, after
a pause, in a voice that rolled away over that hypnotised assem-
bly with such thunderous force that it reached the ears of Mad
Bet, as kneeling at her window on the other side of the road she
thought of Codfin's iron bar. "People say we must have the
naked Truth in place of these lies. Now what the Spirit and the
Blood command me to tell you is this--"

An inspiration was reaching him at last from the dark recesses
of his being. It seemed to tear itself through him and force its
way out, like a dragon escaping from a thunder-split cavern.
And Mr. Geard felt himself in full command of this inspiration.
Unlike Faust, with his earth-spirit, Mr. Geard held the bridle of
this demonic winged creature. This was proved by the dramatic
pause he made at this point, quietly taking his breath and, as
he did so, glancing towards the Rotunda where they had taken
that person who had fainted.

Then, as if he were releasing, in absolute aplomb, this wind-
dragon of the abyss, he lifted up his voice again::--"Any lie,"
he shouted, "I tell you, any lie as long as a multitude of souls
believes it and presses that belief to the cracking point, creates
new life, while the slavery of what is called truth drags us down
to death and to the dead! Lies, magic, illusion--these are names
we give to the ripples on the water of our experience when the
Spirit of Life blows upon it. I have myself"--here he made an-
other of his dramatic pauses--"I have myself cured a woman of
cancer in that spring ." He stretched out his arm towards the
Grail Fount. "Miracles are lies; and yet they are happening.
Immortality is a lie; and yet we are attaining it. Christ is a lie;
and yet I am living in Him. It...is...given...unto...me...to tell you
that if any man brought a dead body before me...in the power
of what people call a 'lie' I would, even now, here and before
you all, restore that dead one to life!"

His voice died away in a silence so profound that Nancy
Stickles, whose face was distorted with emotion, told Tossie later
that she could hear the tinkle of the far-away sheep-bell, on the
throat of Tupper, the old fence-breaking ram, in the Edgar ley
Great Field.

Heavily and awkwardly and all hunched up, his broad back
stooping as if a weight beyond what he could bear had been
laid upon it, Mr. Geard now began shambling down from the
platform. Having reached the ground he stood for a time with
his whole massive body bent forward, and his eyes tightly shut.
At last, waving his hand every now and then to keep away any-
one who approached him, he moved slowly down the slope to-
wards the road.

There were so many conflicting accounts of what now hap-
pened, that a compilation of them all, and a comparison of them
with one another, would leave upon the mind a feeling that cer-
tain great human events do not occur in a direct, clear-cut abso-
lute manner; but include a wavering margin of actuality which
changes in accordance with the human medium through which
it passes.

As he came down the hill, the bulk of the people remained
perfectly motionless, save for an attempt to pursue him with
their eyes. He seemed protected, isolated, defended from intru-
sion by some interior power.

It was not long, however, before a little group of devotees
who were now pushing their way towards him made a kind of
half-circle round him; but even these did not dare to speak to
him or approach him closely. There had been a great many refer-
ences in European newspapers of late, to the Mayor's desire to
make of Glastonbury a sort of, English Lourdes, where an at-
mosphere of miraculous healing is charged with the electricity
of Faith, and everyone present felt that something momentous
was in the air. But it was not only sick people who were now
awaiting this man in the road below.

There always had lingered among the natives of Glastonbury,
an obstinate notion that their Grail Spring possessed healing
qualities; and no doubt Ned Athling's writings in the Wayfarer
had played upon this obscure belief and stirred it up. At any rate
it is certain that there had spread through Paradise and Bove
Town a rumour that the Mayor wanted all the Glastonbury sick
people, who could possibly be moved, to come to the Grail
Fount that day; and along with these sick people Something Else
had been carried to the foot of Chalice Hill, Something that now-
awaited him there.

Moving straight towards this small dead form, carried upon a
stretcher, while the sick people--none of whom was seriously ill
--forgot their own condition as they watched him, Mr. Geard
followed the example of the prophet in the Old Testament and
stretched himself upon the wooden bier, covering the dead child's
body with his own. The man's disciples while he did this kept
the child's relatives from approaching, all except the mother,
whose hands as she knelt pressed the child's feet to her
breast...

What sceptics said afterwards was that no doctor had seen the
child since he died; and what the parents had mistaken for death
was in reality a death-like trance, from which the exceptional
animal-magnetism of the Mayor's heavy form naturally aroused
him. This was the view taken of the incident by Dr. Fell, who
came upon the scene soon after the child revived. Meanwhile--
inside the Rotunda--John Crow was coming to his senses. When
he did so he found his friend Tom bending over him, and Tom's
overcoat spread out across his legs.

"You're shivering, Tom!" he whispered.

Barter made a wry face at him. "You haven't seen what I've
just seen, or you wouldn't be surprised if my teeth were
chattering."

John sighed. He made a weak motion with his hand. "What's
up? What's he doing now?"

Barter realised that he was talking about Geard; and with-
out delay he poured out his extraordinary story.

"It's that little boy who died this morning. They brought him
on a stretcher. I saw the kid once myself. His mother's a drunken
bitch, who lived in my house. I knew who it was the moment I
heard the woman's voice. Two terrible old trots, Betsy Burt and
Mrs. Carey, were with her when I saw the child then; and they
were with her just now. They all lived in my house. I fetched
the doctor once for this child myself. Dr. Fell said it was a sort
of epilepsy."

"Did he know they'd brought him, before he made his speech?"

Barter cast a hurried glance round the edifice in which they
were holding this intense and strange conversation. In his mind
there was the dim thought that there is something monstrous and
horrible about bringing the dead to life; something that inter-
feres with Nature and has an obscure and shocking profanity in
it. He stared at what was around them in this queer building. It
was crowded with litter and scaffolding, for it was but half fin-
ished; but there was a peculiar personal quality in the work-
manship and in the materials, that separated it from all the newly
erected buildings that he had ever seen.

"It might be something erected to Geard," he thought, "rather
than by Geard!"

"Did he know they'd brought him, Tom?"

"How do I know what he knew? You know him better than!"

"I don't believe he knew," whispered John.

They were both silent then and something very peculiar passed
between them. There are certain topics which resemble certain
substances in the world, such as blood and semen and the lique-
faction of decomposition, in that they trouble some unique nerve
in human mortality and produce, even in the naming, a peculiar
frisson. Such a frisson they experienced now, and as they gazed
m each other s faces in this dim, littered, empty place; these two
cynical East-Anglians felt like dogs who had met an absolutely
new smell; dogs, let us say, who are sniffing at a new-fallen
meteorite!

"Dead? White and stiff and with that look, was he? And did
old Geard "

Barter nodded like a China-mandarin. "Yes, old cock, yes, my
sweet cod, Geard did it "

"Brought it to life?"

"Yes, old top-knot! To life, old white-face!"

"Where's Tossie?"

"She's with Miss Crow and Lady Rachel."

They were both silent then for a while; and during their silence
the uttermost mystery of the world, that unspeakable cold-
ness, stiffness, stillness of an organism that has lived and
breathed, and now has been changed into something else held
them by the throat.

"This child," they both thought, "has been behind life, and if
it could only remember what that Something Else--"

"Where are those two who were here?"

"Sheperd and Mr. Merry?"

"Were they here?"

"They've gone to look at the child."

"They'll kill it again, crowding round it."

"Do you know what I think, John? I think the whole thing
has been--"

Barter was going to say "planned," but once more that shiver-
ing took him; and in his mind he saw that ghastly rigor mortis
which holds the secret of the universe.

John made a desperate struggle to get up. "I'd like to see
that child," he murmured, rising on his elbow, "I'd like to see
someone who has really been dead."

"Dead, old cock; but not buried! Cataleptic, old man!"

"I can't breathe properly," groaned John. "I feel as weak as
a baby. I wish you'd get him to come to me."

"Shut up, you fool! You'll be all right in a jiffy-"

"Water," moaned John. "If I don't have a drop of water, I'll
go off again."

"The child was sitting up on the stretcher. They were feed-
ing it!"

"Water," moaned John, "water."

Barter gave one more hurried glance at the strange interior
around them. Then he went out quickly into the air. Hurrying
under the Saxon arch--the irony of fate thus brought it about
that the first two persons to use that new entrance were Philip
and his ex-manager--he filled one of the little cups that were
Kept there and brought it to his friend.

"Chalybeate," he said with a leer, as John satisfied his crav-
ing and showed signs of recovery, "or Christ's Precious Blood;
you can toss up which it is!"

The prostrate man jerked himself up on his elbow, and stared
at the Rotunda door which Tom had left open.

"I'd like to know," he muttered, "what dreams that child had!"

Barter gave vent to a quick welcoming shout and ran again to
the door.

What's up now?" sighed John, subsiding into his former
position. "Is he coming?"

"He? He's in the town by now. It's Toss, I tell you. Hullo!
Hullo! Here he is! Here we are!"

But John Crow was not the only unbeliever in Glastonbury to
be confronted with the inexplicable that eventful twentieth of
January. The Marquis of P., making his way to the snug little
lodging above the offices of the Wayfarer, where Ned Athling
had his rooms, wondered to himself as he went along whether
after all he was well advised to pay a surprise visit, at ten o'clock
at night, to his daughter's lover. He had dined at the Pilgrims',
where Sergeant Blimp had put up as usual the famous green-
wheeled dog-cart, and warmed by a bottle of first-rate port,
sipped in company with his old servant in the quiet room he
always occupied, he had resolved to make a frontal attack upon
this troubler of the Zoyland pride.

"If they're not married, I don't care," he said to himself. "Sis-
ter will have to swallow it. I'm not going to quarrel with the
girl for Betsy's sake."

It was easier to find the place at that hour of the night than
to discover how to get into Athling's room when he had found it.
What a shabby down-and-out location for the Mayor's official
newspaper!

But one of the battered doors opened easily to his hand, though
there was no bell or knocker. Groping about inside a dark pas-
sage Lord P. began to feel more like a nervous burglar than like
an indignant peer of the realm pursuing his daughter's seducer.

"Athling! Athling P he called out in a voice a good deal less
authoritative and formidable than he would have liked it to be.

There was no response; and, since he had shut the street door,
there was not even light enough to see whether he had to ascend
a staircase, or rap at some chamber, in this musty passage.

"Damn the young idiot!" muttered the Marquis. "Why the devil
don't he keep a light in this place?"

Annoyance increased the power of his voice.

"Athling! Athling!"

A door did open now, at the top of a straight flight of broad,
bare, old-fashioned steps. A bright ray of light, from inside a
warm, mellow, glowing room, streamed down the staircase. A
girlish figure, obviously in a night-dress and dressing-gown,
stood in the entrance of the room.

"Why it's Dad!" cried Lady Rachel in a low, soft, rich voice.
"It's Dad, Ned!" she repeated, turning half-round as the amazed
peer with an indrawn gasp of his breath and a muttered, "Well,
I'll be damned!" gravely ascended the staircase.

"How sweet of you to come and see us!" she cried, in the
same low, rich-laughing, self-composed manner.

The Marquis bowed to the young man who in a rough tweed
suit had clearly just risen up from beside a table covered with
sheets of manuscript. The room was lighted by a dim rose-shaded
lamp. A pleasant fire burned in the grate; and an open door,
leading out of the back of the room, revealed a double-bed, with
the white sheets turned down, and a second cheerful fire, in a
sort of alcove.

"Sit down, Dad," said Lady Rachel, offering her speechless
parent a low wicker chair close to the hearth.

"Get some of that cherry brandy for my father, Ned."

Athling, whose hands were trembling with nervousness, lifted
down from a shelf a beautiful little decanter made of fine cut-
glass of a greenish tint. He spilled quite a lot of the gleaming
cordial as he poured it and it was running down the edge of the
tiny glass over his own fingers as he handed it to the Marquis.

Lord P. declined it with a wave of his hand. "Just had a bottle
of wine," he said. "Blimp ferreted it out for me. I'll have a
cigarette though, if you've got one anywhere."

As he spoke he allowed his eyes to roam over the walls of
the room. They were adorned with nothing but a great number
of striking water-colour sketches, all of them painted in a very
peculiar and extremely unusual manner.

Lord P. was something of a virtuoso in this kind; and in spite
of the dumbfounded condition of his nerves he mechanically
got up and approached some of the more remarkable of these
pictures.

"Damned good!" he muttered. "Which of you children did
these things?"

"They're all Ned's!" cried the girl eagerly. "They're lovely,
aren't they?"

"I should...say...they are." He went solemnly round the room,
carefully examining each one of these singular productions.
As he did so, turning his back to both of them, he thought to
himself : "Betsy needn't know anything about it. They're not
married. She's sure to get tired of him after a bit. I suppose
they understand about contraception."

And he found himself slipping into an imaginary conversa-
tion with his friend Godfrey Bent at his club.

"My daughter's picked up with an artist-chap, you know the
sort of thing, down there in the country. An old family, they
tell me, one of the oldest in the county, but not a brass farthing.
Can't you get him a show of some sort, Godfrey, next season?
They're damned good, his things. They really might make a hit
if they had half a chance!"

When he turned round and took his place again at the fire
he regarded the young man with a very much more sympathetic
eye. Lord P. was totally devoid of any poetical taste; but he
really was a competent connoisseur in painting, and it pleased
him to think that in all his encounters with this lad, the boy
had kept this astonishing talent in the background.

Rachel sat down on the arm of her father's chair enveloping
him in the warm sweetness of her glowing happiness.

"Well, Dad?" she said. "So you're not going to scold, after
ail?"

He looked whimsically at the fingers she had placed in his.
No! There was no sign of a wedding ring.

"You've not gone and got married by any chance?'' he asked.

She shook her head. "I'm not thinking of marrying for years
and years. Ned would like to. But he never teases me about it.
Do you. Ned?"

"Wiser not--to tease 'em about anything; eh, lad?" chuckled
her father, glancing slyly at the young man. "You understand
how to keep--you mustn't be cross at an old man's grossness
--from getting--into trouble, as the servants say?"

Rachel nodded mischievously, and then smiled gravely and
quietly straight into his eyes.

"And what lie do you tell to our worthy Miss Crow, Rachel?
I presume you still ostensibly live with her?"

This time the girl blushed scarlet. He had touched the sore
spot--the one spot that rankled--in her romantic adventure.

"I tell her I have to work all night in the office," she whis-
pered. "She sends me to bed for hours!" she added ruefully,
and without a smile.

He changed the conversation then, asking Ned some very
searching technical questions about his methods of painting. The
talk between the three of them flagged and wilted a little after
that and he soon rose to go.

"Did you hear old Johnny's speech today?" he asked, as he
picked up his coat and hat and gloves.

"Haven't you seen our special edition, Dad?" cried Lady
Rachel, placing in the hands of the grey, elderly man, whose
figure in that warmly lighted room--a room so full of a radiant
atmosphere of youthful happiness--seemed to dwindle at that
moment and become old and pinched and rather forlorn, a copy
of the Wayfarer with the most startling headlines that any hu-
man chronicle could conceivably carry, short of the announce-
ment of an approaching Deluge.

"What's this, eh? What's this? Gad! but he couldn't have
been really dead! Come now, come now, this is getting a bit
too thick. But...of course...if you wild children...are going...to
turn this place...into...into...this will, I suppose...be the kind of
thing--but, good God, Rachel, you don't really think...yourself...
that my old Johnny Geard could--"

The Marquis stood there in that rosy light, between the girl
in her soft night-attire looking like some enamoured nymph out
of a Welsh fairy-tale, and the sturdy young poet-painter in his
Norfolk jacket, frowning and bewildered. He kept folding up
the paper he held, as if to conceal that troublesome word
"Miracle" in those big black letters, and then unfolding it again.
What was the world coming to?

"Good-night, little one," he murmured at last, kissing her
tenderly. "You might send over a few of those sketches before
I leave Mark Court," he added gravely. "I'll take 'em up to town
with me."

He turned to her once more as she held the door open to
light him down the staircase.

"Don't 'ee do this too often, girlie," he said. "The good Miss
Crow is no fool. Besides, we don't want any confounded scandal."

He was at the bottom of the stairs now.

"Remember what long ears your Aunt Betsy has!" he called
back, as he turned to go to the street door.

Once in the dark street, buttoning his coat to face a frosty
wind, and pulling on his grey gloves, an emotion of miserable
depression took hold of him.

His little Rachel, his little Rachel! And yet how radiant the
wench had looked. But, oh, what a man had to see, and bear,
and endure, if, in these days he meant to keep a child's love
and not make her hate him!

"But they're not out for marrying," he thought, "that's one
good thing. And she's playing safe with the Crow woman, I can
see that, though she hates it like the devil! Well, who can blame
her? She'll never be young again. And the lad's a decent lad
...nothing caddish or tricky about the lad."

He was moving along now beside a dark row of wretched
houses. The pavement was uneven. The wind had got up and had
become icy cold. It moaned and whistled over the slate roofs
of this poorer portion of the town. Very old and very desolate
did Henry Zoyland, Marquis of P., feel as he walked along!
Those enchanting, unconventional retreats with his little Rachel
at Mark Court all, all over! She had been restless and distrait,
the last time he had had her with him up there; and those
Bellamys! Their quarrels with poor Blimp were becoming in-
tolerable. Yet he hadn't the heart to turn them out.

"The place is nothing without her," he thought, and he saw
himself sitting by that big, lonely hearth with the ancient stair-
case leading up and up: and then her room, and then that stone
causeway, and the Merlin room--was it during his night in that
place that old Johnny had learnt these devils tricks of putting
life into dead babies?

The man's desolation grew apace as he approached the out-
skirts of Paradise. "Old; I'm getting old," he thought. "And no
Merlin cantrips, learnt by any modern Messire Bleheris, could
make me stir when once I was knocked on the head. No, damn
it! I won't put anything in the child's way. Let her have her
fling. Zoyland women always begin with a passionate romance
in their teens; and then settle down into savage harridans at
forty! Betsy did it; and never married at all! The child's not
half as wild as Betsy was. To hell with middle-class pruderies!
The Zoylands ahvays did what they wanted; and, by gad, my
little girl shall."

Thus the old diplomatist swaggered in his mood, doing his
best to rationalise, as they call it, his doting partiality for that
glowing child in her soft night-dress. But the ice-cold wind went
shrieking over the roofs and wailing down the cobbled alley-
ways, and a feeling of bitter desolation chilled the man to the
very bone.

The touch of her warmth as she sat just now on the arm of his
chair had insinuated into his veins a craving for young blood
and feminine softness. It was for her sake he had given up
that French woman in Soho, the successor of Will's German
mother. For years he had lived like a monk for the child's
sake and this was his reward! And these curst communists turn-
ing Glastonbury into a bedlam of follies, while old Johnny was
working miracles!

He'd better get back to town at once, get hold of a good lawyer
--Beere was no use any more--and make sure that those
ungrateful sons of his couldn't touch a stiver of what he'd left
to Rachel and to Will, of all this new cash.

He was passing Mother Legge's ambiguous domain now and
as he glanced at that familiar "other house," which in younger
days he had so often entered, he saw the door furtively opened
and a man and a woman came out. He stepped into the shadow
of a wall-buttress to let them pass and he could not help recog-
nising them. One was Clarissa Smith, the pretty head-waitress
at the Pilgrims', and the other was a man he'd seen in the stables
there--none other in fact than the converted ostler with whom
the miracle-worker had been drinking that very morning.

"What does the old woman make people like that fork out?" he
wondered. "She must be hard pressed these days if those are
her clients!"

But when he emerged from his retreat he actually found him-
self hesitating for the fraction of a second and imagining him-
self ringing that Cyprian door-bell!

"I suppose Young Tewsy's there still," he thought. "Who was
it told me these communists were going to give the old boy a
job at the Grail Spring? From Camelot to Chalice Hill! Well
...that's how this world wags!"

He could still see the two figures moving along in front of
him, Clarissa clinging tenderly to her ostler's arm.

"I hope he feels the same," he said to himself. "That sort of
thing leaves the girl more loving, but the man--not always! By
gad, if that boy of Rachel's plays any games--"

But the sight of that waitress and ostler clinging together so
happily troubled the senses of this elderly gentleman as he
walked behind them. The girl had the sort of plump figure he
used to like; he could see that well enough even in this dark
street! Garment by garment he undressed the unconscious Clarissa
in that ice-cold wind. He was traversing the very pavement that
Red Robinson had traversed, that night of the party at Mother
Legge's, and precisely the same sort of soul-sick craving for a
warm fire and a warm feminine body came over him as had
devastated the angry proletarian. Had the ambitious Clarissa
only known!

But that young lady continued to cling to her ostler's arm,
whispering amid her endearments, if the truth must be con-
fessed, certain wickedly intimate strictures upon the character
of Mr. Thomas Barter. Strange that the guileless warmth of
Rachel's romance should he driving her father on now to un-
dress Clarissa Smith!

Rachel...Clarissa...oh, how cold the wind blew, and how harsh
and desolate and comfortless the world was! In the warmth of
the bodies of women, in their ways, in their laughter in their
clinging, yes! even in their anger and their mockery there is
the only real refuge, he thought.

"Let em scold and rave. However cruel their words, their limbs
are still satiny to our touch, their souls still free of our curst
laws and labours and fuss and fume."

He slackened his pace, for Clarissa's arm was now round her
companion's neck. He actually stopped again while his heart,
as he imagined himself returning on his steps and ringing that
door-bell began to beat within him in the way it used to do,
twenty, thirty years ago! But the Sergeant would be sitting up
for him. Besides, what was he thinking of? That "other house"
wasnt a brothel. Toung Tewsy would expect--damn it! He was
just a fool. The figures in front of him had turned the corner
now; and he walked rapidly on.

Tommy Chinnock's "I'd like to, Clarissa," ebbed quickly the
life-weary pulses of the Marquis of P. When he reached the
lighted lamps of the High Street, a bare-footed boy came
rushing past him calling out a late edition of a Yeovil paper.

Mir-acle at Glaston-bury!" the hoy shouted. Lord P. smiled
a bitter, man-of-the-world's smile.

"There's only one miracle in this world," he muttered aloud,
that can make old men young and that's not for old men who've
outlived their time!"



THE GRAlL



AS MAY BE EASILY IMAGINED THE SITUATION IN GLASTONBURY
Vicarage as the winter passed, with Nell and her child under the
same roof as her former lover, although it was not strained to
the limit of human endurance, was sufficiently uncomfortable to
all the three persons concerned. It was obvious, too, that the little
boy, though his expressions of it were obscure, missed the rol-
licking caresses of his mother's husband.

Mrs. Pippard who took upon herself all through December
the role of ambassador--though hardly of peacemaker--between
Nell's new sanctuary and her old home, kept them pretty closely
informed of what was going on in Whitelake Cottage.

The trend of events seemed to be that Will Zoyland and Perse-
phone were living out there in an irresponsible trance of amor-
ous happiness, completely self-absorbed and self-contained, and
prepared to await any deluge that fate might send, with the reck-
less defiance of their new-found delight in each other.

It struck Nell that it was totally unlike all she had ever known
of Will, this ensorcerised interim of moonstruck quiescence. As
week followed week at the Vicarage--each week bringing new
agitations between the father and the son, and between herself
and each of the two men,--she was constantly expecting Zoyland
to appear in person, having quarrelled with Percy, and full of
angry and despotic demands that his wife and her child should
return home. But the New Year came and nothing of the kind
happened!

In the end the cantankerous Mrs. Pippard, having played the
part of eavesdropper to the infatuated pair at Whitelake till
Zoyland nearly threw her out, and having clung desperately to
the little Master Henry in the Vicarage, till Penny Pitches ac-
tually did throw her out, retired from domestic labours altogether
and took up her abode with the mother of Red Robinson's bride,
as a partner-assistant in the tea-shop business.

Hearing that Sally was leaving Cardiff Villa in order to be
married to Red, Mrs. Pippard offered herself as the girl's sue-
cessor in tlie Mayor's household; but Mrs. Geard, glad enough
to return to her old freedom from any servants, very brusquely
declined this honour; and thus it was left for the patient visitors
to the town to endure the ministrations and be subjected to the
all-seeing eye of Eudoxia's diplomatic parent.

The astounding nature of the scandals which many of these
innocent pilgrims carried home, along with Mr. Barter's and
Lady Rachel's Arthurian figurines, concerning the more intimate
life of Glastonbury, can thus be accounted for; but it is hardlv
necessary in this modest chronicle to state that Zoyland did not
beat his wife black and blue, and that Nell did not live with
three men at the same time.

But although the wild tales related by Mrs. Pippard were far
from the truth, the two weeks that followed the arrival of Nell
under the roof of her child's father and her child's grandfather
were charged with explosive electricity.

Sam's attitude was the same as it had always been, since he
had decided to trample down and to kill all natural sex pleasure.
He didn't avoid her. On the contrary he snatched every moment
he could, when his father was out of sight, to enjoy her society.
He helped her with the child, though not proving as skilful as
Zoyland in quieting him and distracting him. He kept Penny
from intruding into the spare-room, for they had given Nell the
William-of-Orange bed to sleep in. He tried to coax her to give
up her awkward and timid habit of retreating into the never-used
drawing-room, a room that smelt, not of dust and mustiness for
it was the only room in the house where Penny was allowed to
scrub and tidy up without let or hindrance, but of the Dead Time
itself, like a palpable ghost brooding there inside that locked
door, brooding over the heavy, magenta coloured tassels that hung
down above the front of the mantelpiece, brooding over the green
plush sofa, brooding over the massive marble clock that never
ticked, brooding over the footstool, trimmed with tarnished gold
thread, brooding over the upstanding wool basket of Sam's
mother that had never been touched since that young woman
died.

It was a shock to Sam when one morning, a few days after
the opening of the arch, he found Nell sitting in this drawing-
room with her sewing--which he knew she was shy of his catch-
ing her with--on that gold-threaded footstool, over a wretched
newly lit fire.

"Good Lord!" he cried, "does Father know you're in the
drawing-room? One second--I'll be back in one second!"

Nell smiled and bending her head down drew her needle rap-
idly and nervously through the small, white garment she was
making for her son. There was already descending upon her
that resigned, effortless passivity, patient, docile, unresisting in
which, because of some hereditary pliability in her ancestors, or
at any rate in the women among her ancestors, though Dave
had something of it too, it was easy for her to sink. She was
surprised herself at the drowsy weight of this curious passivity.
It had come over her the very first morning she had awaked
in William-of-Orange's bed. She had cried herself passionately
to sleep the night before; but that had been rather because, in
a briefly snatched talk she had had alone with Sam, he had
nervously disengaged her warm arms from his neck, than because
of any culminating wave of self-pity. Yes! not a tear of all
those tears of that first night could Zoyland claim to have evoked,
nor the treacherous Percy either! It was Sam alone; Sam not
pressing her to his heart, Sam not treating her as his love, Sam
not crying out, "Let's take our child and go away from here,
away from all of them!" that had broken her down. But she had
experienced when she woke up at dawn, a feeling towards Sam
that was like the feeling which those sweet persecuted lemans
in the old ballads, kept, through weal and woe, for their cruel
lords!

Yes, she had been astonished herself, as day followed day
and it became clearer and clearer that Sam's whole nature was
set upon this inexorable quest of his, at the apathy with which
she accepted it. She came near to accusing herself of having al-
lowed her heart to die within her, so numb, so paralysed, so
atrophied did her emotions--after that first night of wild sob-
bing--seem to have grown. Even a strangely detached amuse-
ment had in these last weeks been rising up in her heart; an
amusement that was rather schoolgirlish mischief than a ma-
ternal humor, at the thought of all those great hulking, blunder-
ing men following so crudelv the prickings of their desire.

Under the pressure of this mood she had even begun to feel
friendly again to Zoyland. Persephone was a totally different
matter; and she kept telling herself several malevolent stories
of imaginary encounters with Persephone, during which she
brought down that young woman very wholesomely to her knees!
But to her yellow-bearded Will she did begin to feel indulgent
again; especially when she noted the contorted tricks and ar-
bitrary devices which religion compels its votaries to undergo,
if they are to love and to refrain from loving, as the two Dek-
kers were now trying to do at one and the same time!

Yes, she was wondering to herself now at this very minute,
as she glanced up at the marble clock which had stopped at
twenty minutes past two--perhaps the very hour in the night at
which Sam's mother had died!--what her Sam, and her Sam's
father, in their preposterous attempts not to quarrel savagely
over her, would feel if they could read this queer humorous
turn that her thoughts had taken of late! What had begun to
strike her as specially quaint was the way they seemed to
assume that whatever treaty or truce or peace they patched up
between themselves about her, she would accede to without
any question!

She was like a sack of exciting oats placed in a manger
between two champing steeds. Well! she wasn't so sure that she
would submit to being a sack of oats! As this thought came
upon her once again this morning, the corners of her mouth
quivered in the second silent smile in which she had indulged
since Sam told her to "wait a second"; and her eyes moved
from the marble clock to the green plush sofa.

"What's come over me?" she said to herself. "Am I growing
cynical? Am I getting like Percy?"

A slight puckering of her forehead followed this mental ques-
tion; and as if in proof that her new detachment was a girlish,
rather than a maternal emotion, she found herself hoping that
her little son--it was about eleven o'clock in the morning---
would sleep sound till noon, and allow her to leave him alone
for another hour, in his cradle by the big bed.

Mercy! but she did miss her own house! That at least was
certain. It teased her to think of Percy messing about with her
cups and saucers, and forgetting to put the bread in the cake-
box and the rolls in the biscuit-tin.

"I'm sure she doesn't wash out the, sugar-basin," she thought
to herself, "and I know she doesn't keep the cheese on a shelf
by itself!"

And as she stared at the green plush sofa the incorrigible im-
morality of her woman's mind sighed just a little for the free,
careless swing of the Zoyland attitude to life, compared with the
impassioned pieties of this monastic establishment.

"What I really am now," she thought, "in place of being the
mistress of a wicked baron, is the petted bone of contention in a
hermitage!"

The door which had been left ajar was now kicked open and
Sam came in with a coal-scuttle full of coal in one hand and a
pile of large bits of wood in the other.

"I've told Penny to make you up a good fire," he said, "next
time you want to sit in here; but why you don't stay in the
museum, where Father likes to see you sewing in that chair
while he's writing his sermon, I can't think!"

He spoke irritably; but he knew in his heart it was because
of his own bad humour, when he found her ensconced with his
father, that she had invaded this closed-up shrine of the past.

"Sit down, Sam, my dear," she said, when he had made the
fire blaze, "I want to talk to you."

He obeyed her. But it was not at her side, but upon the plush
sofa that he took his seat.

"You know, my dearest one," she said gravely, folding up
her son's night-shirt upon her lap, "that if you can stand the
way we're living, I can't! Now stop, my dear; stop! Don't inter-
rupt, till you've heard what I'm going to say! I'm not going
to beg you to do anything you don't want to; so you needn't
glower at me as if I were a wicked girl trying to tempt you.
It's only this, dear. I was talking to Dave last week and he says
that Percy refuses to take a penny of his money. He says that
he can't make her take it; but nothing will induce him to keep
it himself. He says if I won't take it he'll just throw it into the
town council fund. I've been thinking about this, Sam dear;
and I've decided that I will take it. Even if Philip chucks Will
out because of Percy they'll be all right. Lord P. won't let them
come to grief. He's always been offering to help Will: and with
all this money he's getting for this great sale--No! They'll be
all right. I'm not going to bother my head about them."

Sam turned and stretched out his heavy hands over his knees,
extending all his fingers. It was as if his hands were yawning with
an amorous relaxation unpermitted to the rest of his frame. His
shirt-sleeves disappeared under the frayed edges of his coat-
cuffs and his wrists showed hairy and red.

"But Nell? What then?" he murmured. "You're not going to
leave Father and me, are you?"

She rubbed one of her ankles automatically with the warm,
shapeless, schoolgirl palms of her soft hands. Then she turned
her head and surveyed Sam upon the sofa. She surveyed, too, an
ironwork stand behind Sam's head, containing several hart's
tongue ferns, kept alive for years by Penny, for whom this room
represented an everlasting Seventh Day of drowsy and futile
piety. A big wastepaper basket with ornamented handles stood
at the end of the sofa, into which nothing had been put--except
Penny's broom--for twenty-five years. By the side of this basket,
resting upon the faded green carpet, lay a large, oblong pebble-
stone from Chesil Beach, upon which the short-lived Mrs. Dekker
had painted, during her confinement, a brightly coloured picture
of her native Swiss lake.

From all these things Nell's nostrils inhaled the same curious
smell, the smell of inanimate objects left in status quo for a
quarter of a century. Why, if she were in such an old ballad
mood of patient docility, had she ever started this disturbing con-
versation, worrying Sam about Dave's money, and protesting
that she, for her part, could not go on as they were? The truth
was she happened to be under the moon that particular day, and
if another woman had asked her why she was behaving like this,
she would have replied that she was "nervous."

As a matter of fact--though what did the simpleton on the
sofa, with the hairy red wrists, know about such things?--the
blind creative energy within her was in the vein for troubling,
for disturbing, for agitating, for darkening all the unruffled
waters it could approach.

"You don't suppose, Sam, do you, that any girl with any
spirit could go on like this?"

Sam pulled in his outstretched arms and thrust them deep into
his pockets.

"I don't see why not, Nell. I don't see why not!"

Her eyes, that had dark shadows beneath them, narrowed sud-
denly into little gentian-blue shuttles of darting anger.

"No, I suppose you don't see!" she cried. "I suppose you and
your father could go on with your precious aquarium and your
precious Holy Grail, till the crack of doom, while a girl ate her
heart out in a place like this!"

"Nell--little Nell!" he murmured reproachfully. The gentle-
ness of his tone disconcerted her.

At that moment what her nerves would have liked above every-
thing else was for him to have risen to his feet and roundly
scolded her; told her that she was his, that she was his chattel,
his possession, his slave, his whore, that her child was his child,
her body his body, her will his will.

"Oh, I don't know!" she breathed wearily, expanding her
breasts and clasping her hands behind the back of her head. "I
don't know what I'm saying, Sam. But I know everything is
all wrong."

But his forehead was corrugated now in a heavy frown and
his freckled chin was wrinkling itself downwards into his neck.

"Your Holy Grail?" he thought to himself, "0 Christ, my
Christ, if you would but once, just once, for one minute, give me
a sign, only the smallest faintest sign that you are really there,
behind it all; then I could go on, without aching to have her, to
hold her, night and day!"

Because of his heavy unimaginative nature, because of his
preference for minnows and stickle-backs and loach over myth-
ical abstractions, Sam had never given much thought to the
legend of the Grail. The Christ whose deadly, cruel imperative
had come between him and his love had been as much of a Person
as Nell herself. Was He a Person still?

How different was Sam's Christ from Mr. Geard's! Mr. Geard'a
Christ was a Power to be exploited. In his weird gnostic dia-
logues with his Master, the Mayor of Glastonbury addressed
Him like a friend, almost like an equal. He was the Mayor's
great magician, his super-Merlin, by whose strength and support
he became strong. Never once had it crossed the threshold of
Mr. Geard's consciousness that it was his duty to live a life of
self-sacrifice.

"I live as I like to live," he would have retorted to any ascetic
protest, "and my Master lives as He likes to live. His Blood is
the Water of Life!"

"Christ in His Grail," repeated Sam to himself, "and Father
in his aquarium and Nell in my mother's room!"

She had turned her face away from him now. She was bending
over the fire, prodding it pensively with the poker. As he watched
her doing this, the feeling came over him that just behind the
physical drama that was going on at the minute, another, a cor-
responding drama, was going on in the Invisible.

"Aquarium-Grail...Grail-aquarium," he muttered; and his
ichthyological mind visioned a Fish that was a real fish and yet
something more than a fish shedding a mystic light out of an
enchanted vessel.

Sam lowered his eyes and let his head sink deeper and deeper
into his chest, while his hands, that were in his pockets, clenched
their fists. He thought of a particular spot on the banks of the
Brue where he had often fished with his father as a boy. It was
at a turn of the river and it was several fields westward from the
wooden bridge where Young Tewsy had caught his recent sur-
prising catch, to the delight of Mother Legge.

"Aquarium-Grail," he repeated, in the dark trans-lunar cave
of his consciousness, "Grail-aquarium"; and it came over him,
just as if his tormented and tormenting God had whispered it
into his ear, that the sacrifice which was laid upon him now was
to leave the Vicarage himself.

"If she can't stand Father and me together," he thought, "and
I expect we have made it too much for her, it's not she that must
go...that's unthinkable...how would she get on alone...alone with
our child?...it's myself that must go...it's you, Sam, that must go."

He had reached a point in his asceticism when he often felt
his imperative soul to be standing over against his reluctant body
like an austere slave-driver. Indeed he had come to think of his
soul as in some way external to his body. There was not much
pleasure about this; but there was just the faintest flicker of a
strange satisfaction in it. At any rate it gave him a sense that his
soul was totally independent of his body and was the proud
master of his body. He pulled up his legs with a jerk and re-
moved his hands from his pockets.

"It's you, Sam, that must go!" he repeated grimly in his heart.

Thus what had begun as a pure wanton troubling of the wat-
ers, because Nell felt nervous, had become another tragic turning
point in the girl's life. Something in her was vaguely aware of
this as Sam rose up from the green sofa.

Impulsively, with a movement that was entirely self-forgetful,
she leapt to her feet and ran towards him; while he--just be-
cause he had given his body its implacable orders and because
this was perhaps a moment that would never come back again--
pressed her so tightly to his heart that she could hardly breathe.
She had just time to think: "This is how I'd like to die...
crushed to death by Sam," when the door opened and Mat Dek-
ker came in. They were so tightly clasped that they were like
two trees that have grown together, each with its bark eroded
by the pressure of the other, each with the same ivy or vine im-
prisoning its limbs, and when they broke apart and turned to
the man at the door it was as if each of them, as they swung into
independent life, carried away something of the living texture of
the other.

"I thought...I understood...began Mat Dekker, and he turned
with a portentous and passionate solemnity to the door by which
he had entered, opening it, looking out into the passage, closing
it again, and finally locking it. He seemed prepared to behave to-
wards this door, the drawing-room door of Glastonbury Vicarage,
as Diogenes behaved to his tub, venting upon its unfeeling wood
emotions excited by the aberrations of human passion.

The truth was that Mat Dekker was seized at that moment with
a murderous fury against his son; and it was only by concern
trating on the door--was it locked? was Penny listening behind
it?--that his better nature was able to steal a moment's breath-
ing space wherein to gather up its self-control.

The door carried above its handle a decorative panel of prettily
flowered porcelain, to protect it from sticky fingers, and over
this cool china surface Mat Dekker now passed his thumb as if
to see whether those hundred-years-old roses would come off.
All this took a very brief time, but it was long enough to restore
to him a modicum of his self-control; and turning now towards
the two of them, he addressed Nell with a slightly forward-
moving inclination of his massive grey head.

"I've been hearing the child crying for quite a few" minutes,"
he remarked. "I came to tell you."

His own words gave him an opportunity to return once more
to the redoubtable door, and he tugged at the handle to open
it--for he assumed she would rush upstairs at once--forgetting
that in his agitation he had turned its key. He unlocked it and
held the door open.

The voice of an extremely impatient infant was now quite
audible from upstairs. But Nell at first drew back.

"It isn't good for him to be taken up the first minute he cries,"
she said.

She knew by instinct that Mat Dekker was anxious to avenge
himself upon his son for what he had just seen. But the glare of
concentrated command that shot out at her from under those
bushy eyebrows, as she lingered, was too formidable to be dis-
obeyed. She flung a hurried, tender, guilty, accomplice's look at
her ambiguous lover; but Sam seemed to be lost in some deep
thought of his own, for he was staring fixedly at the marble clock
with its hands pointing to twenty minutes after two.

"You'll make me spoil him," she cried. "You are all on his
side, however naughty he is."

With these words and giving Mat Dekker a smile that had
something supplicating about it, she passed by him and went
out. Evidently a sense that she had been treated more like a little
girl than a grown woman irritated her as soon as she was in the
hall, for she called back, in quite a defiant voice, "Will was just
the same! You'd all spoil him if you could!" But she ran upstairs
now, and with the closing of the door behind her the child's
angry cries were shut out.

Mat Dekker walked over to where his son stood.

"This sort of thing must stop, my boy."

It was with a palpable effort to restrain his feelings that he
added the two syllables, "my boy."

"As I've been telling you all the time," he went on, "there are
only two things a gentleman--"--he emphasised the word--"could
do in your situation. He could either make her get a divorce from
her husband and marry her, or...or...or he could--"

Sam interrupted his father, looking him straight in the eyes:
"Or he could clear off himself? Is that what you were going
to say?"

The blood had rushed to Sam's head as he uttered this retort;
but in a second he had recovered his equanimity.

"Come along, Father," he said quietly, "let's go into the
museum. It seems unnatural to talk here. I can't talk here."

It was Sam's turn now to open the door with the rose-painted
china panel. It was Sam's turn, too, by the very power of his
calmness, to compel the grizzled, ruddy-faced man with the quiv-
ering upper lip to go out into the hall. Down the passage they
walked together and together they entered the museum. Here in
the presence of the familiar aquarium, the familiar iron candle-
sticks, the familiar daguerreotypes, the father and son faced each
other. Neither of them sat down, and there was indeed little at-
traction about the few fading coals in the grate--Mat Dekker
had evidently been too absorbed in his thoughts to keep his fire
up--to lure them to sit down, but the father on the right of the
fireplace with his hand on the mantelpiece, and the son on the
left with his hand on the mantelpiece, confronted each other like
two duellists.

"Grail-aquarium...aquarium-Grail," ran like a refrain through
Sam's head; and he began suddenly to feel again that queer
sensation he had felt in the drawing-room, a sensation like
that of the presence of a double world, every motion and gesture
in the first being a symbol of something that was taking place in
the second. The sensation was accompanied by an absolute con-
viction of the boundless importance of every thought that a
human being had.

It was also accompanied--strange though it may seem at this
tragic moment--by a faint thrill of mysterious happiness--the
first authentic leap of spontaneous happiness in him that poor
Sam had known for many a month.

He glanced round at the aquarium, as his father began speak-
ing, and Nell's sarcastic cry "your precious aquarium" trans-
muted itself into a spasm of sweetness that was like a prolonga-
tion of what he had felt just now when he pressed her to his
heart.

"It's against all I've believed--this damned business of di-
vorce," burst out Mat Dekker fiercely, "but the church has al-
ways retained the right to deal with special conditions in special
ways; and with that brute, over there, behaving as he is--"

The man's formidable upper lip began quivering again, and
Sam noticed that there was a blood-stain upon the white clerical
tie that in the old-fashioned evangelical manner this eccentric
high-churchman wore round his muscular neck.

"His hand must have shaken when he was shaving," thought
Sam. "Jesus give me strength not to get angry!"

"With that brute like he is, and doing it openly--turning her
out in fact--I can make short work of him. I shall go and see
John Beere this afternoon. It's not a thing"--he made an auto-
matic humorous grimace of disgust--"that I like doing. All
lawyers are rogues. But it's what I'm going to do; and I'm going
to do it willy-nilly as far as she's concerned. She shan't be wor-
ried with it till I've got the thing well under way!"

He looked so pathetically proud of himself in this display of
worldly sagacity before his simple and blundering son, that Sam
felt a stab of remorse at having broken up their life and brought
all these things down on that grey head.

"I wouldn't do that, Father," he cried. "I wouldn't tell Beere,
or anyone else, a word about it unless she asks you to. How do
you know that she wants to divorce him? Women are funny in
these things. Oh, I know, I know she wouldn't like it for you to
do that, without telling her! Besides, Father, I don't believe that
Mr. Beere would even discuss it unless she came herself. They
always have to go themselves. That's how it is in the newspapers.
They have to go to court. That's why they hate it. They can't bear
to go to court."

Mr. Dekker began striding up and down the floor of the
museum. He seemed irritated by his clerical dress at this crisis in
his life. What he would really have liked to do was to go out to
Whitelake and challenge Zoyland to a bout of fisticuffs, then
have it out with his son--he could not quite have explained what
form this scene would have taken--and then--And it was
this "and then" that was the whole crux of the situation.

In his passion and in his professional and religious restric-
tions, this sturdy son of the Quantocks looked like a caged wild
animal as he paced back and forth. His feelings were expressed
in the way he hitched up his long broadcloth coat-tails so as to
thrust his hands into his pockets and the way he let these tails
hang, one over each wrist, as he walked up and down.

To ruffle his priest's attire was a small gesture; but it belonged
to the same category of gestures as his ordering the girl to go up
to her baby and Iris telling Sam about his resolve to visit Lawyer
Beere.

"The best thing you can do then," he brought out now, stand-
ing still by the edge of the aquarium, into which even as he spoke
he could not help giving a sidelong glance, "the best thing you
can do is to take her to see Beere yourself. You'll have to be--
what's their word--co-respondent, of course; that is, if he brings
a counter-suit on his side, as I have no doubt the beggar will."

Once more Sam was aware of a pathetic note of self-compla-
cency in his father's tone.

"The old man," he thought to himself, "is proud of his worldly
knowledge. He thinks I've never heard the words co-respondent
or counter-suit. Christ, don't let me get angry with him!"

The moment had come when he had to tell his father what was
in his mind; but it was a fearful wrench to utter the words and
it would be a worse thing for his father when he heard them.
Aye! he had come to it. He never thought he would; but he had.
He had to tell his father that he was going to leave him. Sam
knew much better than did this grey-haired man, hunching up
his coat-tails, what it would mean to both of them, this separa-
tion. "Of course,' he thought, "I shall be still in Glastonbury,
But it'll be the end of our real life together. It'll be the end of
our long evenings in this room. It'll be the end of our mornings
in the potato garden."

"You know more about the law than I do. Father/' he re-
marked. But he said it only to gain time. "And I certainly should
not draw back from helping her in any way I could."

His father's hands came out of his pockets now and one of
them was thrust into the aquarium! He had caught sight of
something there that Sam, at any rate, had never seen in the
aquarium; no! not since as a small child, he had watched his
father changing its water and its weeds.

There were now three kinds of weeds in the aquarium, two of
them river-weeds, and one of them a pond- weed; and it was in
an entanglement of this pond-weed that Mat Dekker had found
what was such a shock to him and what, at any other time, would
have been an event of the first importance in Glastonbury Vicar-
age. He had found a dead fish.

"Dead! One of the Meare-Rhyne ones!" muttered Mat Dekker
now, holding out the tiny little corpse for Sam to see.

It looked very small indeed in the priest's great browm palm--
very small and silvery--like an "animula, vagula, blandula" in
the hand of God.

"That's what it is--one of the Meare-Rhyne ones!" echoed
Sam.

"We didn't change the water yesterday," said his father.

"Nor the green weed last week," added Sam.

"And we left that duck-week," said his father, "when we knew
it ought to come out."

"And we never got that fresh gravel from Keinton Mande-
ville," sighed Sam.

"Or a trowel-full of that sand we saw at Athelney," groaned
his father.

"It's our own fault that this minnow's dead," said Sam.

"We've killed it," echoed the Vicar of Glastonbury, "as surely
and certainly as if we'd fished it out and thrown it into the fire."

"Put it here," said Sam, hurriedly bringing from the chimney-
piece a little copper plaque with the head of St. Dunstan en-
graved on it.

Mr. Dekker tipped the little fish from his hand into the centre
of this plate where it lay across the sullen brow of the despotic
ecclesiastic.

"Let's see what happens to it now," murmured Sam, tossing
some drops of water out of a tumbler and covering up the fish.

"What'll happen to all of us, my boy!" sighed his father, sink-
ing into one of the creaking wicker chairs, while Sam took pos-
session of the other.

'They surveyed each other in silence; and a moment passed
during which they knew--those two heavily breathing, staring
men--that it would take more than the maddening breasts of that
sweet creature upstairs, suckling her child, really to separate
them, the one from the other.

But Sam pulled himself together. It was not for the sake of
peace with his father that he had to go. It was not even because
Nell had said:--"If you can stand the way we're living, I can't!"
It was because, without question, or doubt, or any compromise,
his "external soul" had commanded him to leave this house.

He drew in his breath several times before he spoke, inhaling
with it that old familiar smell of his father's workroom that
seemed as much composed of some wholesome emanation from
the priest's massive animal-frame as from the fumes of his pipe
and the musty odour of the leather bindings of Dr. Simeon's
Sermons.

"I've got something to tell you, Father," he said.

"Eh, boy--speak up; out with it!"

The tone was identical with the tone which Sam had heard
from him when, on leaving Cambridge, he had announced that
he could not be ordained; but somehow, hearing it now, it put
him ' back into the Eton collar of his first term of the Sher-
borne Prep.

"Don't interrupt me then, Father, please, and I'll tell you."

Oh, these deadly pauses, these creakings of chairs, these swal-
lowings of saliva, when the outer coat of the human stomach
seems to be inflating and deflating itself like the belly of a frog!

"I've decided to leave this house. Father, and take lodgings
for myself in the--" His words came pattering out...tit-tot
...tit-tat...tit-tut...like the tread of the Greylands Cadet Corps
when commanded to advance at quick time--"in the town,
somewhere, and earn my own living. I want to earn it as a
working-man, and I'm pretty sure I can get a job that wouldn't
take me much time to learn at this new municipal factory. I un-
derstand that--no! don't interrupt me, Father!--that there are
several places unfilled there, because they can't find enough peo-
ple to take such poor wages. This won't mean my becoming a
Socialist, or anything like that! They're ready to take anyone;
and they know I'm not interested in politics. I'm going round
to the Tribunal this afternoon to talk to this new lawyer they've
got, this nephew of old Merry's, and when I've got my job, can
'ee guess where I'm going to live, Father? No! Stop! Let me tell
you! I'm going to live in the attic of that old warehouse, with
the Gothic door, that we've so often noticed when we've started
on our walks towards Meare. You spoke of it yourself...don't
you remember?...that day we took our lunch and got as faT
as Bawdrip?"

He stopped breathlessly. Well! it was done now! He had
crossed his Rubicon. He had severed that animal-male link,
stronger in some ways even than the umbilical cord itself, which
had bound him so long, hirsute flesh against hirsute flesh, to his
begetter. He didn't dare to look at his father now. He raised his
head and stared at the aquarium. It was Nell's chance-word that
had suddenly made his path so clear; just as it had been Crum-
mie's chance-word, reported to him by Red Robinson, that had
started the whole thing.

"Girls' words, tossed out without thought--they've changed
my whole life," he said to himself. "I said good-bye to her
in Mother's room and now "

He jumped to his feet, lurched forward and clutching his
father's forehead in both his hands, bent down over it and kissed
it. "And now," he added, in his deepest heart, "I've said good-
bye to him in our room."

After kissing his father's bent head--for Mat Dekker, as if
under the blinding glare of his enemy the sun, had lowered his
face and closed his eyes--Sam walked to the door. As he put out
his hand to its handle he seemed to see the whole of his life as
nothing but doors--study doors, drawing-room doors, church
doors, privy doors, kitchen doors, bedroom doors...

"Sam!" His father was on his feet, straightening his shoul-
ders, tightening his lips, fumbling blindly with his heavy gold
watch-chain.

The priest's thoughts and feelings at that moment were inco-
herent to a point of physical distress. They were like a whirl-
pool, tossing up opposite things, drowned bodies, ravening
sharks, shimmering mother-of-pearl, cowry shells, dogfish, from
the bottom of the mind's deep sea.

"Alone in the house with her...going past her bedroom...alone
with her...Sam leaving me...Sam going out of my house...Sam's
place empty...." Being the man he was, it was natural enough
that the distress caused to him by the conflicting nature of his
thoughts vented itself in irrational anger.

"Sam!"

"Yes, Father?"

"You shan't sneak off like this! Do you hear me? I say you
shan't! Leaving your wench...and your child...and everything.
Have you no natural feeling at all? You promised me you'd
let her alone until she was properly divorced and you
were properly married to her...and what do I find? I find
you turning your mother's room into a place to--" The trick
had worked. The man's upper lip was once more protruding and
trembling with injury and grievance--"into a place to forni-
cate in!"

The ugly word belched itself forth from the priest's contorted
mouth like the dark wine and the gobbets of human flesh from
the guts of the drunken Polyphemus. How could Sam know that
the secret urge of this anger was a wild, heathen delight at being
left alone, alone without a rival, with those suckling breasts
upstairs? How could Sam know that it was the man's own "I'd
like to, Susie! I'd like to, Dolly! I'd like to, Nelly!" of the
stone-throwing Tommy Chinnock, that was being lambasted and
foul-named by this bewildered priest? Mother Legge would have
been the person to have set Sam right upon this riddle of his
father's wrath; though doubtless Mr. Evans, who had seen the
contents of the Camel Bowl touch Nell's lips before all the rest,
might have been able to instruct even the wise Mother Legge
about the maddening power of this girl's fatal passivity. A
bundle she was--that was it! an aphrodisiac bundle of cloves,
cinnamon and aniseed--a fever-raising, fever-allaying bundle of
catnip for one, two, three, and how many more? prowling, feral
carnivores!

And there was, after all,--for Sam was his father's son--a
similar introversion of righteous anger on Sam's side. Why else
should the word used by his father, and associated by his father
with that room of the dumb clock, have made his chin work so,
and a spurt of black anger almost choke him? If he hadn't
forgot--everything--even that it was "the last time"--when he
hugged Nell so furiously in the drawing-room this word of his
father's would doubtless have gone over his head like badly
aimed duck-shot.

It was certainly the word "fornication" that led Sam now, for
after all he was a very young saint, to close this door, of all
doors, with so resounding a repercussion throughout the whole
house, that Nell, doing up the front of her dress after nursing
her baby, ran quickly to the door of William-of-Orange's room,
opened it, and listened in frightened concern.

It was in this manner that Sam Dekker was heard leaving the
house of his birth which he had entered, through the body of the
servant from Geneva, some twenty-five years ago. And what was
the first thing that Mat Dekker did when he heard his son cross
the hall, open the front door, and go out?

He moved slowly to the mantelpiece, removed the tumbler that
Sam had placed over the little fish from Meare-Rhyne, picked it
up from its place upon the surly countenance of St. Dunstan,
and, raising it to his nostrils, snuffed at it with inquisitive
interest!

Meanwhile Sam himself, arrived in the presence of Paul Trent
in the Abbot's Tribunal, soon found that he was completely right
about there being no lack of communal jobs as long as he was
content with the barest living wage. And since such a wage--just
enough to keep body and soul together--was exactly what suited
his life-illusion just then, both parties in this transaction were
speedily rendered content.

And so before that day was over both Mr. Dekker and Nell re-
ceived brief notes from this quixotic young man, notes that were
delivered in person, for he had no desire that Penny and Mr.
Weatherwax should sauce their favorite "gorlas" with his emo-
tional confidences, telling them of his success.

The two devoted boys, Elphin Cantle and Steve Lew, were
Sam's messengers. Steve's hero-worship for Elphin had begun
during the last few months to reproduce almost exactly Elphin's
for Sam, and a mission of this sort being meat and drink to such
romantic lads, the recipients of these missives received them pri-
vately, separately, faithfully, and in all due secrecy before
night fell.

Mat Dekker 's note ran:


Dearest Father,

You can always find me in case of necessity at the top of that
house I spoke of. They call it the Old Malt House and it is in the
middle of Manor House Lane. I'll see you, of course, before
long; but for a week or two I want to collect my thoughts.

Cive my love to Penny.

Your affectionate son,

Sam.

P.S. I've got a good job so I am in no need of money.

P.P.S. Would you mind telling Penny to give the bearer my big
sponge.


The note to Nell, which it was Steve's task to deliver--Sam
had tact enough to make this quite clear--ran as follows:


Nell, my little Nell,

You must forgive me if I hide away from both you and Father
for a week or two. I am all right. I am not unhappy. If I've made
you unhappy, please, please try and forgive me. I needn't tell
you any more about my religion and my new life; but I have
to tell you this, once and for all, that I love you more than I
ever did! Now you may smile, in the way you do; but what I say
is true; and we both realised it this morning. Father knows where
I am living.

Your Sam, spite of all, for ever and always.

P.S. Give Henry a lot of kisses from me.

Sam's job at the municipal factory proved the simplest, as it
was the heaviest that the whole business offered. The new types
of legendary figurines were largely constructed of a certain kind
of clay that was brought in trucks from the neighbourhood and
Sam's job, which was shared by some of the roughest labouring-
men in the town, consisted in emptying trucks of this clay into
hand-carts, and these carts again into receptacles outside the
factory.

Thus he was kept very busy, and felt, during the first week or
so, extremely tired; but his day ended at five o'clock, when he
was free to do what he pleased, and these first free evenings in
spite of his extreme exhaustion were times of more peace and
quiet than he had known for a long while. The heavy physical
labour saved him from morbid broodings and made each night
an orgy of delicious dreamless sleep; while as his muscles began
slowly to adapt themselves to his work--and it must be remem-
bered that Sam was endowed with super-vigorous health--this
nightly weariness grew less and less. What was a torture to him
was the treatment he received, though only at first, from his
fellow-labourers. Intrinsically they were men of no exceptional
brutality. Among themselves they were friendly enough. But
everything about Sam, the fact that he was an educated man, the
fact that his father was a priest, and above all the fact that he
was trying to live like a saint, excited their bitter hostility. If
Sam had not come to this job of clay-hauling and truck-emptying
with the direct purpose of sharing the sufferings of his perse-
cuted god he would have been reduced to abject and sullen
misery by these men.

"Holy Sam " became his nickname almost at once; and the
pleasure with which they tormented him was abominable. It
would be erroneous to say that all good and valuable things
spring from the individual, and all evil things from the crowd;
for everyone is aware on various occasions of a crude and raw
warmth, a radiating glow, a lively enthusiasm, that emanates
from any group or mass of people. And there springs up from
the crowd, too, under certain conditions, a formidable power of
magnetic faith. But this faith which is the most striking thing
the crowd engenders cannot for one second be compared with
the creative faith of the individual. It is by the faith of the indi-
vidual upon which the crowd feeds like an oil-devouring flame
that the latter is able to move mountains, to tear down Bastilles,
to destroy inquisitions, to inaugurate revolutions.

Among his fellow-workmen in this clay-hauling job Sam was
an individual pitted against a crowd. He was not against them.
They were against him. He was no Coriolanus. He was no aris-
tocrat, answering hate with contempt. It was enough that he
lacked their humour, that he did not chew their tobacco, that he
could not fling back their particular kind of badinage. In a situa-
tion of this kind an upper middle-class recluse like Sam was at
a much worse disadvantage than Will Zoyland would have been.
Zoyland's dog-and-gun slang, his Rabelaisian obscenities and
roaring guffaws would have won these people's respect. He would
have browbeaten the more aggressive and cajoled the others. He
would have speedily become a sort of bandit chief among them.

But Sam they totally despised. They regarded him as a softy,
as a preacher, as a spy, as a blackleg, as a dark horse up to some
tricky game, as a ne'er-do-well with a screw loose, as the idiot
son of a canting parson. They amused themselves with him. They
mimicked his mannerisms, they hustled him, they put the heaviest
work upon him. He was their sport, their quarry, their lawful
prey. The fact that he was no weakling gave an added spice to
their bullying. It was like bear-baiting; and all day long they
worried him, like dogs worrying a great patient beast.

But all this was only for a time. It did not last. Little by little
the clumsy sweetness of Sam's nature won its way with them.
What actually was at first, it may be, a tinge of priggishness in
his attitude towards them, wore off. He came to forget that he
was Sam Dekker, the son of Mat Dekker. He became a labouring-
man among other labouring-men. And the psychic awareness that
he really was ceasing to separate himself from them affected
them without their realising it. The manner in which he received
their derision changed insensibly too. He began to cease regard-
ing it as directed especially and maliciously towards himself,
and he ceased to encourage it and stir it up for his own maso-
chistic satisfaction. Thus the telepathic message from his sub-
conscious self to their self-conscious selves which had formerly
called out, "I am different from you. It hurts here. Hit me harder
here!" began to sing another tune and to call out, "'We're all in
the same mill. To hell with differences! All souls at the bottom
are equal."

And this new mood in Sam was no conscious part of his strug-
gle after a holy life. It arose from the innate heathen goodness
of his nature, emitting its sweet odour like thyme or mint that has
been heavily trodden upon. And so by degrees it came about that
the heathen virtue in Holy Sam was responded to by the heathen
virtue in these other Glastonbury aboriginals, and the feel-
ing:--"We are all of one blood"--gave to the clay-hauling upon
which Mr. Barter's business depended a certain autochthonous
solidity.

For Tom Barter with Red Robinson as his foreman and Lady
Rachel as his adviser, was beginning to display his mettle as a
manager; and the figurines, statuettes, plaster-of-paris busts,
hand-painted vases, plates, crocks and jars, which they were now
manufacturing showed signs of spreading Glastonbury wares--
with the help of the visitors and pilgrims--all over Europe.
Both in the designing and executing portions of his business
Barter's personal limitations in matters of art were an advantage
to him. He came upon one young person after another, girls as
well as men, who possessed unusual artistic feeling; and en-
couraged by Lady Rachel, he left these young Glastonbury na-
tives a completely free hand.

The result of this was that there began to spring up--out of
the void as it almost seemed--a very exciting and most original
school of Glastonbury design, genuinely indigenous and wherein
the roughnesses and crudities of drawing, colouring and perspec-
tive, and their variations too under so many different hands,
possessed the imaginative freshness and childlike appeal of an
authentically primitive art, an art which the whole western
world seemed especially to thirst for, an art which embodied in
it not only the communal spirit of the town's socialistic rulers
but something--a nuance, a tinge, a suspicion--of the new re-
ligion of Glastonbury's Mayor! Their earliest output had been
confined to toys and souvenirs; but as soon as Lady Rachel be-
came intimate with Barter--and she had an active ally in Tossie
--the little clay figurines of the legendary personages of the
town's history, from Morgan-le-Fay to St. Joseph, ousted every-
thing else; and the council's timely contract with certain clay-
haulers of the neighbourhood changed the whole trend of the
business, so that toys were forgotten and a real movement of
imaginative art, at once modern and mystical, swept everything
before it.

At the end of a week Sam paid a hurried visit to his father and
Nell; but so distressing and agitating to all three of them did
this visit prove that he did not attempt to repeat it, but hence-
forth gave himself up completely to the raptures and torments of
his Imitatio Christi.

It would have been a different story altogether if his labours
had been inside the municipal factory. There he would have been
under Bartel's eye, there he would have met Lady Rachel. But
except for the first afternoon of his hiring he saw nothing of the
art-work of the place. All he saw, all he handled, was truck-
loads of this particular clay.

Sam's nature, always rather earthbound and earthdrawn, sank
into this clay as into the tomb of his Christ. He washed away his
thoughts about Nell and her child in this clay. In this clay he
soaked up the subterranean sorrow, scarcely less hurting than
what he felt for Nell, of his separation from his father. He was
at once bruised along with his God, by his wrestlings with his
fellow-workmen, and buried along with his God, in this heavy
Somersetshire clay.

What made the task of winning over his companions so slow
was the fact that the men around him were always changing.
Their pay was so poor and their work so heavy that few of them
could stand it for more than a brief time. Then others came--
all of them out of the poorest districts of Bove Town and Para-
dise--and in their turn were tempted to make sport of Sam. None
of them had the toughness or the stamina that he had. They were
lean and lanky men, descendants by centuries of inbreeding of
those heathen aboriginals of the Isle of Glastonbury who resisted
St. Joseph, St. David, St. Indractus, St. Gildas, St. Patrick, St.
Dunstan, St. Benignus and St. Bridget, in their attempts to spirit-
ualise them, who were forever revolting against both church and
state, who seemed inspired in their rebellions by the old chtho-
nian divinities of Tor Hill, whose re-awakened malignity on the
day of the Pageant nearly destroyed Lord P. and whom no-
body but Bloody Johnny seemed able to manage.

What did give Sam a real thrill of natural pleasure was the
scrubbing and the whitewashing of his loft floor at the top of the
Old Malt House. He had no furniture here at all except a small
camp-bed, a kitchen chair, a three-legged table and a white thick
water-jug and basin. When he had whitewashed the walls and
ceiling, he scrubbed the big bare beams of the oak floor till they
were as clean as the cleanest floor-expanse in the town, that is to
say, Emma Sly's kitchen at The Elms.

As day followed day in Sam's new life, finding him working
from seven to five at clay-hauling and then associating, when his
work was over, with the most destitute of his neighbours, the full
implication of his abandonment of the normal human desires
began to unfold. He was so strong, and his health was so sound,
that he very quickly found his day's labour no more exhausting
to him than if he had spent the time walking about the fields.

This growing freedom from physical weariness made it pos-
sible for him, after he had washed himself and changed his
clothes and had his tea, to explore many of the poorer districts
of the town of which he already knew a little. He would leave
Manor House Road about half-past six and make his way through
a small alley, by the side of the house where John and Mary
lived, into a section of Paradise that abutted upon the Burnham
and Evercreech Railway and stretched as far to the north as the
four crossways, where the roads to Meare and Godney met North-
load Street and Dye House Lane.

That Holy Sam, as even the children of this quarter already
began to call him, had an equanimity of temper beyond what
many holy men have had, was proved by the way he let himself
be interrupted upon at least three week-days out of his six, as he
sat down to his well-earned tea in his white-washed attic loft.
This interruption came from Jimmy Bagge, a semi-imbecile beg-
gar, a little older than Sam, who lived with his father and mother
in a one-storied stone house, black with age and smoke, that
leaned against the bank of the Evercreech Railway. Sam had
found Jimmy scraping and groping in a filthy refuse-heap be-
hind the Northload houses and he had brought him home with
him to Manor House Lane and given him. a supper of hot tea and
bread and treacle. After this Jimmy Bagge soon found out how
long Sam worked and the exact hour of his return home; and he
used to sit in the malt-yard, hidden behind a row of ancient
barrels between which he constantly peeped out.

He was too wise to present himself ere Sam had washed,
changed his clothes and made tea; but he had timed these pro-
ceedings to such a nicety that it was pretty well almost always
just as Sam was lifting his first cup to his lips thaL Jimmy
knocked at his door. Sam accepted the situation as if it were his
destiny to spend his life with Jimmy, as indeed perhaps it was,
but he displayed one small weakness on all these occasions,
which betrayed the difference between an Anglo-Saxon "holy
man" and one of Latin or Oriental blood; for he gave up his
one chair to his visitor, and himself sat down on his camp-bed;
not, it must be confessed out of politeness, but with an irrepressi-
ble awareness of the verminous condition of the beggar's filthy
clothes.

It was on the occasion of the fifth visit of Jimmy Bagge to the
Malt House loft floor that the obstinate imbecile suggested, after
many wavering circumlocutions, that Sam should accompany him
to his home beneath the Ever creech railway bank. It was a lovely
evening when the two men set out together with this purpose in
view, and Sam could not help thinking, as he walked along by
his new friend's side, of a certain curious change that had taken
place in his recent responses to the visible world.

The back gardens of Northload Street sloped down into a
region of desolate and forlorn litter where those warm and mel-
low brick tiles for which Glastonbury is famous gave place to
an older style of roofing, of dull grey, moss-patched slate. As he
glanced about him he felt a slight touch again of this new sen-
sation he had been receiving lately. What he felt was a strange
and singular reciprocity between his soul and every little frag-
ment of masonry, of stony ground, of mossy ground, of wood-
work, of trodden mud, of clumps of last year's dusty nettles, of
withered dock leaves or of mildewed palings.

It is true that to the intellectual eyes of oriental spirituality,
or of Latin devotion, Sam's attempts at living the ideal life
would have seemed like those of an ascetic schoolmaster or a
priggish boy scout, childish, and lacking in maturity, dignity,
subtlety, and intellectual passion. Sam's whole system of moral
values--his puritanical stress upon sexual restraint, his fidgetty
preoccupation with isolated acts of benevolence--would have
seemed to a Celtic or Latin nature a form of tiresome and Phari-
saic fussiness, more akin to the pragmatic virtue of some mod-
ern lay-brother than to the sublime heroism of real mediaeval
sanctity. Nevertheless, to the Invisible Observers of the magic-
charged atmosphere of Glastonbury this resolute and sturdy de-
scendant of Somersetshire yeomen displayed a certain humble
simplicity and a certain stolid good-humoured piety that rendered
many more picturesque struggles to live the saintly life appear
trickily theatrical and even self-deceiving in comparison!

And certainly on this particular evening as he adapted his
pace to the shuffling and shambling gait of Jimmy Bagge, Sam
began to be aware that some subtle barrier between his inmost
being and certain particular objects in Nature had begun to give
way. The truth was that without being in the least conscious of
the importance for humanity of the psychic law he had blundered
upon or of its rarity in the world, Sam had found out that when
a person is liberated from possessiveness, from ambition, from
the exigencies of desire, from domestic claims, from every sort
of authority over others, he can enjoy sideways and incidentally,
as he follows any sort of labour or quest the most exquisite trances
of absorption into the mysterious essence of any patch of earth-
mould, or any fragment of gravel, or any slab of paving-stone, or
any tangle of weeds, or any lump of turf that he may come upon
as he goes along.

There is always a peculiar pleasure in arriving suddenly through
a narrow aperture between masses of masonry at some wide-
open expanse; and this is especially the case in the evening
twilight and when such an expanse opens out towards the west.
The misty glow, filtering through the smouldering ditch-vapours
of this open ground, as Sam saw it tonight, lifted into a grandiose
and dusky importance every pigsty, every stickhouse, every
pigeon-tower, every hovel-roof; and under a stone arch where
the muddy path they followed dived beneath the railway Sam
could see, as they approached the dwelling of Jimmy's aged
parents, a great red semi-cirque, like a huge blood-stained mush-
room, which was the setting sun !

His father's arch-enemy was too close upon his own dissolu-
tion over the rim of the planet to throw out any magnetic power,
whether good or bad; but to see him like this at all, as Sam de-
scending from the ramparted greyness of that gap in Northload
Street saw that crimson half-circle, was as if a person saw the
sinking head of some titanic invader retreating from a threat-
ened city.

Such is the human mind--or at least such is the mind of a son
of Somersetshire clay fumbling towards a holy life--that Sam's
consciousness gave a momentary harbourage to the unsanctified
thought that he was glad that his present companion's rags had
not touched his camp-bed; but, like a black fly that lodges for
a second upon the shaft of a moving wagon, this thought was
quickly lost in the outstretched solemnity of that evening scene.

"Fayther be a turble stark man for a bed-rid," remarked
Jimmy Bagge, "'a do eat and drink, Fayther do, all there be,
when there be any! Mum be a thinned-out ghosty compared
wi' he."

The imbecile paused for a moment and looked at the crimson
half-sun as it went down under the moss-wet stone arch, the walls
of which seemed to drip with a moisture that was neither rain
nor dew, but rather some malady-sweat of its own private
enduring.

"Mum do sarve he for nothink and it be a pity to see such
sarvice. He do lie and eat; and her do wear 'erself to bone feed-
ing he! I be afeared of he just as Mum be; but Finn Toller, what
be Mum's nephy, baint afeared of he. Mum do send I to fetch
Finn Toller and when Fayther do zee 'un cooming oop path
through chink o' windy, 'a do beller and holler, awful vor to
hear. 'A do zay, ‘thik Codfin be come to murder I,' and 'a do
hide 'isself under blanket."

"Does your mother let Mr. Toller come in?" asked Sam.

Jimmy's countenance, which was as a rule as empty of intelli-
gence as a washed-out signboard, emitted at that point a pallid
ray of cunning, as if the wind-blown reflection of a streak of
moonlight, caught in a rain tub, had been tossed upward upon
that board.

"Mum do alius zay the seame. She do zay:--Thee‘s pore uncle
be starvin', Codfln. Have 'ee got a bite o' summat for'n today?"

"And what does Mr. Toller do then?"

"'A do empty his wallet on Fayther's bed and sometimes
there be a girt hunk o' sweet Cheddar in 'un; but 'a never sits
down for more'n a minute. 'I must be movin' on, Auntie,' 'a
zays, and then 'a zays to Mum, lookin' at Fayther, wot's head be
hid under blanket--I've 'a jest coom from settlin' woon account
an' I be ponderin' in me mind about settlin' another. I be a grand
settler of accounts, Auntie,' he says, and 'a looks, wi' 'is weepy
eyes, at Fayther's blanket, till bed do creak, Fayther do shake so."

Once seated in that forlorn stone edifice, built long ago under
the railway bank, it came over Sam with a weight like that of the
first shovelful of earth thrown into an open grave, what kind of
mental aura is projected in a given locality by experience of
sheer physical want. Preparations had evidently been made for
what in the Bagge menage passed for supper, for every object in
that miserable room--the walls of bare stone, where patches of
soot and grease and indecipherable and nameless stains alter-
nated with greenish mould and oozing damp, the small smoky
wood-fire under a great iron pot where steamed the most watery
concoction ever wrung from the twice-boiled bones of a skinny
rabbit, bare wooden chairs with their seats full of holes, a broken
water-jug on the smoke-darkened chimney-piece,--seemed to
group themselves round a piece of newspaper laid flat upon the
table on which rested the half of a loaf and two small salted
herrings.

A strong, bony face, angular as the face of a half-starved, over-
worked horse, did Mrs. Bagge turn towards the visitor while she
settled herself on a wooden stool by the hearth and watched his
movements as a hungry fieldfare, that bird of wintry bane, might
sit with ruffled feathers watching an absent-minded tramp in the
road-hedge. Her identity too, like that of the damp walls and the
ricketty chairs and the innutritious liquid in the black pot, and
the broken jug on the chimney-piece, seemed, even while she
gazed at Sam, to yearn towards the half loaf and the two small
fishes upon the outstretched newspaper.

And as for the figure in the bed under a patched blanket--the
figure of the bed-ridden Thomas Bagge--its woebegone rapacious
eyes seemed to point at these objects with the irreversible neces-
sity of a compass needle pointing to the north.

Sam couldn't bear to think he was keeping them from this
wretched meal, such as it was, but he, too, seemed to succumb to
the hypnotic influence of that half loaf on the table. For nearly a
quarter of an hour he murmured various broken comments upon
the new Glastonbury government and the chances it offered of
monetary advantage to the destitute.

The woman's interruptions were however entirely irrelevant to
what he was saying. They seemed more like the feeble echoes of
the mechanical chatter of a gipsy at a fair, and they kept refer-
ring to him as "the sweet lovely gentleman what be minded to
make our Jimmy's fortune." Once she jumped up from her stool
and with a billet of wood snatched from the floor killed a large
bug upon the sooty wall. But the piece of wood as she threw it
down, and her stool as she took her seat again, and another bug
observed by Sam that had escaped her gesture, all these things
seemed to his mind to be focussed upon that half loaf and those
wretched herrings.

Gazing at Mrs. Bagge's hollow cheeks, scoriated neck, cavern-
ous eye-sockets, Sam began to feel as if his attempts to under-
stand the sufferings of a Promethean demi-god had hardly
scratched the surface of the sufferings of his own human race;
and he seemed to hear his "exterior soul" whispering in his ears
that his tortured God was nothing less than a tortured humanity.

As he contemplated the damp stones so sooty and greasy and
stained with nameless stains, above the woman's head, and as he
looked at the bread upon the table, the two fundamental con-
cepts--bread and stone--seemed to associate themselves with the
concept suffering, as forming a sort of ultimate Trinity of Expe-
rience towards which he was being conducted. Thankless labour,
eternal hunger, the deadening throb of a pain that refused to
cease, if these things lived on and on in this room under the
Evercreech Railway bank, why should he have been permitted
to eat sweet treacle and to look out of his window from the top
of the Old Malt House?

From the hollow eye-sockets of this woman his mind reverted
to similar eye-sockets, and far worse ones than hers, that were
at this very second in other parts of the world opening and con-
tracting under the pressure of the cruelty of the First Cause.

Why didn't suffering carried to a certain point, why didn't
pain carried to a certain point, simply kill their victims? And
since they didn't, to what point must a person go, in sympathy
for these things, who had, by pure accident, been spared their
worst scrapings and scoopings?

As he went on mumbling about what the Glastonbury council
would soon be doing for its poor, Sam's under-mind came to
the conclusion that the most serious question of all questions
was at what point, if life was to go on with any degree of endur-
ance, is it necessary to harden our hearts and cease to think of
the pain of others? Mathematicians talked of invisible "points,"
of formal "points," that were the pivots of all the vast spirals of
reality. Here, in this question--how far must we share suffering?
--had he touched the "point of points" round which all sensitised
consciences revolved?

The vital common sense in Sam stirred up an interior honesty
that told him he must draw back somewhere or the natural
selfishness in him would rise like Enceladus and throw off all
restraint. Did St. Francis stop in the midst of composing his
Hymn to the Sun, to ponder on the problem of how far he
ought, in place of giving himself up to such magical ecstasy, to
visualise the fate of the tortured in that neighbouring stone tower
and to ponder on what man at that point of time, was doing to
man, in Algiers, in London, in Seville, in Trebizond, in Paris,
and even in Assisi?

Sam's sluggish nature had been receiving so many jolts of late
and he had been reducing his physical nourishment to so meagre
a point of late that his nerves were much more sensitised these
days than was usual with him. That is perhaps why he stared so
fixedly on that bug on the wall.

"Every locality," he thought, "has its own midges, its own
gnats, its own beetles, its own lice, its own bugs. They may re-
semble the others of their tribe; but they must be affected--few
will dispute this--by the particular climatic conditions which
exist around them. This bug was a Glastonbury bug. Had it any
message for him, a Glastonbury man? Can't you throw light
on this?" he thought, addressing the bug on the wall. But the
bug was so extreme an individualist that it regarded the gibberish
which reached it from this man's brain as the same sort of tele-
pathic nonsense that it was accustomed to hear when in her heart
Mrs. Bagge cried out:--"How long, 0 Lordy, 0 Lordy, how long,
how long?" and it proceeded upon its tortuous way with less
curiosity--not to speak of sympathy--than even ex-May or Wol-
Jop would have felt.

Sam, however, while he exchanged a few words now with his
friend Jimmy who continued to stand at the foot of his father's
bed,--Mr. Bagge himself seemed to be awaiting events in gloomy
taciturnity--wrestled stubbornly in the depths of his mind with
this problem.

"A limit there must be," thought Sam, "to the sympathy one
soul can give to other souls--or all would perish. Absolute sym-
pathy with suffering would mean death. If Christ had sympa-
thised to the limit with the pain of the world it would have been
hard for him to have lived until the day of his Crucifixion. But
what does that mean? Does it mean drawing back from the hell
we stare at? Does it mean that every soul has a right to forget if
it can forget? Sympathy with pain kills happiness. There comes
a point when to live at all we must forget!"

His conclusion left him with a feeling of unutterable weakness,
cowardice, contemptibleness. Submerged in sickening humility he
groaned aloud. He had taken the precaution before starting, in
anticipation of the penury of his friend's domicile, to put in his
pocket several thick slices of bread and treacle and these,
wrapped up in paper, he now took out and handed to his hostess.
It was then that the truth of Jimmy's words about his parents
became most painfully apparent; for his mother, after swallow-
ing two or three hasty bites of one of these sandwiches, presented
the rest of them just as they were to the silent man in the bed,
who when once they were in his hands neither spoke nor looked
up until there was not one crumb left upon the sticky paper in
which they had been wrapped.

He was not an ill-looking man either, Sam thought, as those
sallow jaws masticated the food and his Adam's apple rose and
fell as he swallowed it; but there was something repulsive to the
mind--and even a vague sense of something tragic and ghastly--
in the way the sunken black eyes of Mrs. Bagge followed every
morsel as it disappeared.

"Town council do see us don't starve," said the woman pres-
ently, "but they gives us no food, only money; and Mr. Bagge
feels money be too precious to be throwed away on victuals: so
he puts it where't be safe."

Mr. Bagge's puffy white face--not an unhandsome face--rising
out of his filthy open shirt, lit up complacently on hearing this
and his expression struck Sam as being the meanest human ex-
pression he had ever seen.

"Too precious to be throwed away," he repeated with unc-
tuous satisfaction, "on wittles...so us puts it where't be safe."

Sam was still wondering at the back of his mind what could
be done to a bedridden miser who was starving his wife, when
Mrs. Bagge, who looked positively transparent from lack of nu-
trition, though she was a large-framed bony woman, lifted up
her voice from where she sat on the stool by the fire, with her
discoloured skirts hanging so loosely between her gaunt knees that
it looked as though they had been thrown across the handles of
a plough, and remarked to Jimmy:

"Did yer arst yer friend, the sweet lovely gen'l'man, whether
he could bless this house with half of a silver shilling?"

The wheedling gipsy-like tone of her voice--which yet was
not the voice of a real gipsy--grated unpleasantly upon Sam's
ears. He felt inclined to cry out, "I'll give you a whole shilling
if you'll turn it into food and let me see you eat it!" He men-
tally decided that he would come here on the following day
with some pork-pies that he had seen in the window of a little
shop in Manor House Lane and give one to each member of the
Bagge family and insist upon their eating them before his face

But the voice of the master of the house became audible now
Mr. Bagge was apparently addressing the smoke-darkened, greasy
ceiling.

"When I over'ears folk mention shillinses I zays to meself--
‘put 'un where 'un be safe. Too precious be they shillinses to be
squandered on wittles!"

Sam rose to his feet. "I've got no money on me," he said; and
then, after a pause, "Well, I'll say good-night now, and go down
to the river for a bit, to get a breath of air. I always sleep better
after a breath of air. Don't get up, Mrs. Bagge."

Jimmy followed him wistfully with his eyes as he moved to
the door. The imbecile's face had a certain blank handsomeness,
like the puffy good looks of the man under the blanket, but his
expression was submissive and docile, like his mother's. Sam
was alarmed lest his own conscience, that merciless and authori-
tative voice that nowadays always stood by his side, would insist
on his allowing Jimmy to accompany him. It was therefore with
a certain relief--for which he blamed himself as soon as he was
out of the house--that he heard Mrs. Bagge say:--

"Ye'll get some wood for I, Jim, won't 'ee, afore 'ee do go to
Pilgrims' to arst for coppers? Jim be a good lad, Mister," the
woman called after Sam as he went out. "If it 'tweren't for Jim,
Mr. Bagge and me would be separated from each other and put
in thik Wells wukkus."

"If you're not separated from Mr. Bagge," thought Sam, "you'll
certainly get into the Wells Road Cemetery."

But standing in the doorway he threw back a warm and enthu-
siastic commendation of Jimmy.

"I knew he was a good son," he said, "as soon as he began
talking about you both. Well! I hope he'll have good luck tonight
at the Pilgrims'."

"Not for to squander!" shouted the handsome, puffy-faced
man from his bed, "but for being kept where't be safe!"

And as he went off Sam couldn't help giving vent to a wicked
wish that nephew Codfin would discover this "safe" hiding-
place!

It was nearly dark when having threaded his way past many
scattered hovels and desolate out-houses he finally reached the
bank of the Brue. He was in an excited frame of mind, to which
his anger at the behaviour of the man in the bed contributed not
a little.

As he stood staring at the dark flow of the water he could see
that Adam's apple moving up and down as Mr. Bagge swallowed.
But Sam nodded his head like one making a resolution that must
wait its fulfillment, and began following the bank of the river
in a southerly direction. He was now about midway between the
wooden Northload Bridge and the stone Pomparles Bridge and
in the obscurity of the twilight he could see rising out of the
mud the scaffolding of Philip Crow's unfinished iron bridge.

As has been hinted, for several weeks Sam had begun to notice
with a puzzled wonder that certain unpromising and unlikely
objects gave him, as he glanced casually at them, thrilling spasms
of a quivering happiness. It was only as these sudden seizures
or shocks of unaccountable ecstasy increased upon him that he
came to give them any particular attention. He was not of an
analytic turn of mind; nor was he in any sense what is called
"psychic." It might even be maintained that Sam's temperament
was rather below than above the normal level of what the world
has agreed to name "spiritual." Mystical he certainly was not.
There was more mysticism in John Crow's little finger--for all
his sceptical perversity--than in Sam's whole body. But he would
have been worse than unimaginative; he would have been "duller
than the fat weed on Lethe's wharf" not to have noted these recur-
rences of unaccountable transport in which his whole being
seemed caught up and transfigured. What made this phenomenon
harder to understand was the fact that the objects that served to
evoke this ecstasy were so varied and in themselves so insignifi-
cant. Not one of them was important enough to afford any satis-
factory clue to the nature of the meaning of these thrilling
sensations. It was almost as if some mysterious centre of mag-
netic force had been actually moving for some while through the
thick darkness of the chemical constitution of that Glastonbury
mud and those Glastonbury stones towards Sam's sluggish recep-
tivity; seeking in that receptivity a pre-ordained objective.

He came suddenly at this moment, as he stumbled along the
river bank under the moonless and cloudy sky, upon yet another
of these chance-sent mediums of unaccountable feeling. This was
an aged post, with an iron ring attached to it, used formerly for
the purpose of mooring the small barges that in old days brought
corn up the Brue. The post was but an obscure landmark by the
flow of that dark tide; but Sam knew its exact position and he
knew every detail of the landscape from this particular spot. He
couldn't really see the iron ring upon the post; but he knew so
well that it was there that he saw it without seeing it. But for
some reason the mere sight of this post filled him with the most
releasing, liberating and exultant of all his recent transports.
His mind was so occupied with the idea of pain that he quite
consciously began opposing this thrilling sensation with the
opacity of pain. It was as if he took up great spadefuls of pain
and flung them into the pathway of the delicious current that
flowed through him; and in proportion as the current increased,
so he threw more spadefuls of pain in front of it. But it swept
them away as it flowed on, drank them up, swallowed them all
into itself! And yet it would not be true to say that they became
identical with the rushing flood of this ecstatic feeling. They were
not absorbed as a natural sustenance. They nourished this flood;
but the flood existed independently of them and did not depend
upon them for its origin or its issue.

Sam found himself on his knees by this old post, so thrilled
was he by the transport that poured through him; and, in his
exultation, he pressed his forehead against it and ran his fingers
up and down its damp sides. And he did begin, quite desperately
now, to solve the mystery of all these experiences. He began to
realise that the soul of the inanimate, the indwelling breath of
life in all these ancient lifeless tilings, whereof the town was so
full, was really moving towards him.

The emotion he experienced now was a good deal stronger
than what had been produced in him until tonight by stones, and
gates, and paving slabs, and patches of moss, and fragments of
old walls, and carved mouldings and dead tree stumps, and
ploughed-up furrows, and wayside puddles and gutters; but it
was the same kind of mood.

Something in the atomic nature of the inorganic substance of
these things must have answered to an inarticulate craving of
Sam's, until Matter itself, the old obstinate Protean mystery,
moved and stirred to meet him. He could actually feel a magnetic
power pouring forth into his fingers from this post against which
he leaned.

Sam had been born in Glastonbury. Glastonbury sights and
sounds and smells, the psychic eidola that radiate forth from the
surface of ancient inanimate substances, had surrounded him
from his birth. Having concentrated his sluggish, earthy nature
so steadily and so long upon birds and beasts and fishes, he must
have accumulated an enormous mass of casually imprinted mem-
ories concerning his contact with the inorganic surroundings of
these living creatures. By day and by night he must have touched
--going up and down the fields, lanes, hillsides, valleys, fen-
lands, tow-paths, spinneys, rhynes--innumerable gates, weirs,
walls, marsh tussocks, mole hills, pond rails, heaps of stones,
fallen trees, moss-grown ruins, and all these touches and casual
contacts must have established between his inmost being and the
mystery of matter in these things, deep correspondencies which
were ready to rush forth at any summons.

Where lay the difference between the curious feeling he got as
his fingers ran up and down the surface of this old barge post
and the other recent sensation of the same nature? The difference
was that the feeling he had now associated itself suddenly and
strangely with that little dead fish that his father had taken out
of the aquarium! The secret of matter had suddenly assumed a
definite shape; and this shape was of a living kind--no longer
inanimate but electric with animation. "Ichthus, the World-
Fish,"--where had he picked up this singular expression? Not
from any book he could think of in his father's shelves; not from
the Sermons of Mr. Simeon! That the mystery of matter which
had of late shivered through him in so many accidental contacts,
should resolve itself in its primal leap, in its slippery quiver, in
its up-rising from the pools of silence, into the actual form of a
fish would have been an insane fancy for anyone else, but for
Sam, with his up-bringing and environment, it bore an organic
naturalness. Did he actually see in his mind s eye, then, the red
fins, the greenish markings, the black stripes, the silvery tail, of
any real fish? No! it was more subtle than this. But he did feel
as if the solid matter all round him had become porous, so that
some essence of life could move swiftly through it. In the mute
balancing of this finny life-essence, passing through the primeval
watery element that existed in all things, lay the inexplicable clue.

As he knelt in the damp mud of the tow-path beside this post,
while the darkness deepened over him and the river flowed be-
neath him, he was driven forward once more by the honesty of
his soul to face the ultimate dilemma. He became vividly con-
scious of himself as one entity among all the rest, carried along
upon the night journey of the voyaging planet, and he seemed
able to catch upon the breathing wind, mingled with the gurg-
lings and suckings of the water, the cries of pain which at
that second, all over the world, were rising up. There must be a
limit to pity or the life-stream would stop; all would grow stag-
nant, and "Ichthus, the World-Fish," would float dead upon its
back!

The first motive of every living creature must be to realise its
own identity--to fight for itself against the cruelty of life, while
the second motive of all conscious souls turned about towards
the others.

One-two...One-two...went the heartbeat of the world!
Was there a third pulse there that no one could yet hear? Why
was it that Sam suddenly leapt up in great excitement to his
feet? His fingers had encountered in the darkness at the foot of
the post, an iron chain! This chain was not fastened to the ring,
else he would have detected it before. It was fastened round the
bottom of the post, so that it lay hidden in the grass. Sam crawled
forward on his hands and knees following the course of the chain
and he soon became aware of something floating on the water to
which it was attached. From what he could discern, down there
in the dark flow, it was a small black coal-barge. This accounted
for the constant gurglings and suckings that he had been aware
of for some time, and by which his ear, trained to the river
sounds as it was, had been obscurely fretted.

Hastily he rose to his feet and scrambling down the bank
stepped into the barge. Yes! It still had some coal in it; and
Sam could detect from the sharp turpentine smell that it had
been newly tarred. There was a half-empty coal sack at one end;
and groping with his fingers he turned this over on its side and
sat down upon it, with his back against the barge's stern. The
tarry smell was overpowered as he rested here by the smell of
the river, and soon the flapping-up of some biggish bird--it
wasn't a moor-hen, he knew that, but it wasn't large enough for
a heron--gave him a desire to think out in his mind exactly what
his geographical position was; for this would be a help to es-
tablishing the identity of that bird.

It was a habit natural to Sam and strengthened by long asso-
ciation with his father to take his bearings, as he called it: but
at this juncture it did not seem as easy as usual to grasp the lay
of the land as he sat in this barge. But he got it at last to his
satisfaction. He was about half a mile northeast of Cradle Bridge
Farm and about half a mile southwest of Cold Harbour Bridge
where Young Tewsy had showed him that fish. If that bird, which
may have been a stray wild duck, had flown due west from where
he sat, it would have passed over the roofs of the villages of Cat-
cott and Chilton-upon-Polden, and hit the swampy estuaries of
the Parrett, somewhere about the centre of Horsey Level where
the great Sedgemoor Drain flows into them.

All these places lay behind him as he sat in that barge on the
Brue, for his face was turned directly towards the three
eminences of the Isle of Glastonbury, Wirral Hill, Chalice Hill,
and the Tor. Thus rested Sam Dekker; and then--without a sec-
ond's warning--the earth and the water and the darkness cracked.
...Whence it came, whether it came of its own volition and
whether it was that same transformation of matter, which had
been affecting him so of late, carried one degree further, Sam
never knew; but he knew what was happening to him, and he
knew it without the least doubt or question.

What he saw was at first accompanied by a crashing pain. That
was the word Sam himself thought of to express it--the word
crashing. But as the vision clarified before him and grew distinct
this pain died away. But it was dazzling, hurting, blinding, at
first, and it was associated in his mind with the sense of a sharp,
long-shaped thing piercing his guts. His sensation was indeed
strangely definite. The pain was so overwhelming that it was as
if the whole of Sam's consciousness became the hidden darkness
of his inmost organism; and when this darkness was split, and
the whole atmosphere split, and the earth and the air split, what
he felt to be a gigantic spear was struck into his bowels and
struck from below.

He had ceased to be a man sitting on a coal sack at the stern of
a barge. He had become a bleeding mass of darkness. His con-
sciousness was a dark surface of water; and up through this
water, tearing it, rending it, dividing it, turning it into blood,
shivered this crashing stroke, this stroke that was delivered from
abysses of the earth, far deeper than the bottom of the Brue.

Whatever this "spear" was that struck him, to his whole ani-
mal nature quivering under it, it was as much the shock of
something totally unknown, something new to human experience,
outrageous in its strangeness, that tore so at his vitals, as the
crashing pain that it brought with it.

But when the vision appeared, and it came sailing into the
midst of this bleeding darkness that was Sam's consciousness,
healing everything, changing everything, each detail of what he
saw he saw with a clearness that branded it forever upon his
brain. He saw a globular chalice that had two circular handles.
The substance it was made of was clearer than crystal; and
within it there was dark water streaked with blood, and within
the water was a shining fish.

Sam's first thought was: "This is the Grail! This is the Grail!
It has come back to Glastonbury!" His second thought was: "I
must tell Father and Nell about this." His third thought was
more realistic; and it was one so congruous with his deepest
being that the mere fact that he had had it--when he remembered
the whole thing--put the seal of authenticity upon his vision. He
thought in his heart: "What is that fish? It is a Tench. Surely it
is a Tench!"

So anxious did he become to ascertain, before it vanished
away, that this Ichthus out of the Absolute was what he thought
it was, that Sam actually struggled up to his feet and cried the
question aloud--"Christ!" he groaned in a harsh, queer voice
that resembled the voice of a priest speaking from a scaffold.
"Is it a Tench?"

He had been deriving such transports of late from rubble and
mud and stones, that to see Christ in the form of a Tench seemed
at that moment perfectly natural. He had read nothing of the
Grail legends; so that it was no half-consciousness that all the
successful Grail-seers cried out some crucial question, that tore
from him these words.

Whole-hearted was Sam's groan to the Mystery, carried south-
ward against the flowing waters of the Brue and westward across
its mud-banks, towards Cradle Bridge Farm. It rose from his
pity; it rose from his new insight into pain; it rose from that
blood-stained umbel-cord across the gulf between his own ec-
stasies and the anguish he had glimpsed. It rose from the quick
of his being, where life itself was strangling pity lest pity stran-
gle life in the ultimate contest. It was the final desperate cry
of humanity to the crushing, torturing universe that had given
it birth.

Is it a Tench? Is there a fish of healing, one chance against
all chances, at the bottom of the world-tank? Is it a Tench?
Is cruelty always triumphant, or is there a hope beyond hope, a
Something somewhere hid perhaps in the twisted heart of the
cruel First Cause itself and able to break in from outside and
smash to atoms this torturing chain of Cause and Effect?

The crystal goblet with the two curved handles was quite close
to him now. He could see the darkness in the throat of the shin-
ing fish balanced motionless in its centre, but because of its
position he could not see the Creature's eyes.

"Is it a Tench?" And then all at once it began to fade away.
He felt sure afterwards that it was not his leaping to his feet or
his raising his voice as he did, that made it vanish and he stood
there in crushed humility like a man who says to himself: "It
cannot be I who have seen this! It is a mistake; it was surely
meant for another!"

But after he had remained, pondering upon what he had seen,
for the space of five or six minutes, he clambered up out of the
barge and with one final glance backward at the waters of the
Brue, which looked exactly as they had looked before, he made
his way slowly back to Manor House Road and to his room at
the top of the Old Malt House.

It was a Saturday when Sam had his vision of the Grail and
his first instinct was to take what he had seen and to plunge back
with it into the ordinary routine of his new life. He must, how-
ever, tell his father and Nell about it. "I'll go to the Vicarage"
he thought, "tomorrow night, when Father's mind will be free
from his work and ready to listen." And then he thought: "I
must tell everyone about it. It was a pure chance that it appeared
to me. It has come back to Glastonbury. Many will see it now!"

He remembered that he had promised to go to Backwear Hut
in the course of the next day and help old Abel Twig doctor him-
self. He had been over there several times of late and had found
the old man so grievously afflicted with constipation that he
wanted help with an enema. "I'll do that first," he thought, "and
then we'll see! It's lucky tomorrow's Sunday."

Too excited to go to bed he spent half that night washing and
scrubbing; and completely exhausted, when the work was over,
sank down on his camp-bed under the window" and slept till the
bells of St. John's roused him in the morning. His window
opened due west, and over the roofs of several barns and pigsties
he could see the willows of the Brue bordering upon Lake Vil-
lage Field. He could also see the telegraph posts of the Burnham
and Evercreech Railway, and the white, winding road leading
to Meare.

He noticed as soon as he was awake by the way St. John's bells
were answered by St. Benignus' bells, and these again by many
chapel bells from outlying districts, that it was for the regular
morning service that they were ringing. It was half-past ten
then! He had indeed slept long and deep. He gathered his pillow
into a tight lump and sat propped up in bed, staring out of the
window into a windless atmosphere of delicate haze, where a
vague diffusion of sunlight floated upon the undispersed ditch-
vapours and a sweet, rather sickly smell of mud came up from
the meadows.

It was the sort of Sunday morning he had known so well all
his life--the typical Glastonbury Sunday. He could hear the
shuffling of the feet of the passers-by, some of them going to
church, some of them strolling out to enjoy themselves, many
of them just drifting round to some favourite bridge, or low stone
wall, or tavern-side bench, where they might meet a crony or
two and discuss life.

The absence of the ordinary sounds of week-day work was
something much more than a negation. It was a positive essence.
It wrapt itself around Sam, soothing, drowsing, lulling him. One
after another as he lay there, came memory pictures out of his
past.

But full as he was of quite other intentions than the recalling
of mere memory pictures, he soon broke the spell and jumped
out of bed. Washing himself on his knees by his basin (for he had
no washing stand) he made his preparations for breakfast. Over
his tea package, his half loaf, his sugar, his butter, his tin of
golden syrup, Sam had placed upside-down, a large earthen-
ware bowl. Milk, though he had previously always drunk it with
his tea, he had decided to give up altogether; and this resolution
simplified his housekeeping a great deal. A small tin receptacle
he now placed over a tiny methylated stove and filling it with
water from his jug, for he had no water-bottle, he lit the flame
beneath it. Then rising from his knees he spread out bread,
butter, sugar, tea upon the three-legged table, picking up these
objects from the scrubbed floor where they had been covered by
the earthenware bowl. From the broad window-sill he now took
his knife, his spoon, his cup, his saucer, and his plate, and ar-
ranged them with the utmost nicety upon the three-legged table.

No prayer did Sam utter, whether ecclesiastical or traditional,
but having made his tea he sat down on his kitchen chair and
began pulling his loaf to pieces, crust and crumb, in great untidy
lumps, and with a hungry and simple satisfaction; dabbing the
butter upon these pieces with his knife and the treacle with his
teaspoon.

As he ate, Sam's thoughts concentrated themselves upon what
he had resolved to do now that he had seen the Grail. He had
resolved to obey that "externalised soul" of his in every least
detail, and just see where it led him! If it led him to more and
more suffering, well and good. If it led him to some secret reve-
lation of blinding happiness, all the better! But for weal or for
woe it was the command of his soul that he intended to follow.

As he went on chewing the sticky, buttery morsels and licking
the tips of his fingers, and obscurely wishing that methylated
stoves held a little more hot water, he thought about the change
that had come over his conception of his tortured God since he
had begun his new life on that day he took Mad Bet home from
Wirral Hill.

"In those days," he thought, "He was a tangible Person, a
Person living in Space and Time, a Person conscious of my iden-
tity. But now He is different. I don't quite know what He is now.
But I have seen the Grail and I shall find out what He is!"

Rising impatiently from the table, feeling still thirsty, and
anxious to wash the sweetness of treacle out of his gullet, he
filled his minute tin kettle with cold water from his jug and
poured it down his throat. Then he opened a fresh packet of
Player's Navy Cut cigarettes--for he was troubled with no
ascetic scruples about smoking--and striking a match, which he
was careful to .throw out of the window rather than upon his
newly scrubbed floor, he flung himself down upon his ricketty
little couch and continued his meditations.

"I've got to face it," he said to himself. "I've seen the Grail,
and I've got to face it. He's been dead and buried for two thou-
sand years."

Two thousand years? But even as he shaped this thought there
rose up and stood in the frame of his closed door, as if it were
open, the Figure of the personality he denied. Piercing the ice-
cold, frozen darkness of more death-levels than a universe of
dead suns, this Figure--harder to visualise than Time or Eternity
for it contains the essence of both--gazed upon the man on the bed.

"Have it as thou wilt, my child!"

Sam listened to the bells for a moment. "But of course that's
not putting it right," he thought "What He has become is a
power in ourselves that sets itself up contra mundum crudelem,
against the whole bloody world! Everybody feels it, and now
that I've seen the Grail, it's got me by the throat! Man buried
Him and Man has brought Him out of his Tomb. That's what
the Grail means!"

He stared out at the vague, misty, translucent landscape, shot
with fluctuating sun-streaks and sun-patches. His thoughts kept
contradicting each other. "Christ is in the Stones and in the
Water; it is Jesus who is dead and buried. There's something in
Nature that has turned against Nature and is escaping from
Nature. There's a Christ in matter that is nearer the Grail than
the Christ of the Church."

He heaved up from the creaking little bed, his body alert and
at attention. His arbitrary soul, standing over his body, told it
that it had been enjoying itself long enough at that pleasant
window.

"You know perfectly well what you've got to do this morn-
ing, Monsieur!" his soul said to his body. "You've got to go
over to Backwear Hut and give old Twig his enema."

His body agreed at once to obey this mandate but it craftily
intimated that since it was already so late it would be better to
start at once upon this excursion rather than make the bed and
tidy the room and wash up the breakfast things. But Sam Dekker,
although a very youthful "holy man" had not been a priest's as-
sistant so long without knowing something about the cunning
devices of what St. Francis calls "my brother the ass."

Chuckling to himself at his desire to escape doing his house-
work, he was soon re-lighting his methylated lamp and running
downstairs to refill his jug at the pump in the yard. Even with
this delay he was so fast a walker that he reached Backwear Hut
not long after Number One had put his pot of onions, potatoes
and chicken bones upon his kitchen-stove.

Poor old Abel had been suffering of late from two most vex-
ing physical maladies, either of which would have rendered him
miserable, but which together broke down his spirit. One was
his villainous constipation, and the other a still worse attack of
piles. With the utmost difficulty, under the encouragement of his
faithful crony Number Two, the old man had been persuaded
to go to the hospital clinic; but the slap-dash methods of the
internes, and an interview, in an ether-smelling corridor, with
the competent Aunt Laura, had sent him home trembling with
nervous indignation, and resolute to confine himself henceforward
to his own private remedies--Beecham's Pills for the first trouble
and copious vaseline for the second.

When he reached Backwear Hut, Old Twig ("and small blame
for him," thought Sam) was all for putting off the enema for a
few minutes. There, however, it was--the kind where you have
to pinch an India-rubber ball in order to squirt the water--re-
posing, unused, in its cardboard box, just as Number One had
bought it at the establishment of Harry Stickles.

Mr. Twig, with the proper delicacy of an elderly gentleman
buying medical aid, had peeped through the window of the lit-
tle chemist's shop, till he made sure that the beautiful Nancy
was safe upstairs; and it may be taken for granted that the
avaricious husband of Nancy made him pay heavily for this
engaging shyness! But at this moment the good old man, with
the enema lying safe in its box on the table, cajoled his visitor
into sitting down for a few minutes in his front room. It was
mild enough to have the door open; and as Sam stretched out
his Penny-patched knickerbockers and his Penny-darned stock-
ings by the side of the old man's Sunday trousers, and listened
to his talk as the fowls clucked and scratched on the threshold,
a delicious sensation of calm flowed through him.

Motor cars were few at that hour upon the Godney Road; and
from the distant town there came uninterrupted a murmur, a
rumour of drowsy life, of a life that was not the life of man or
of beast, but of Glastonbury herself, murmuring softly in her
long historic trance of the past, of the present and of the future.

Sam thought to himself: "This Christ that is hidden in matter
and contradicts all cruelty, can He possibly come from Nature?"

"What I'd-ur-zay consarnin' this here commoon," Mr. Twig
was now observing, "is that it be a play-acting of the eddicated.
For such as understands them things, 'tis no doubt a very good
commoon. But I baint a book-larned man. Conservative be a
plain word to I and so be Liberal, in a manner of speaking,
though not so plain; but I reckon a man must be pretty far
along wi' his book-larnin' afore he gets the hang of a commoon."

"Well, Mr. Twig," said Sam sententiously, "my father's got a
lot of books in his study; but I remember quite well when the
first number of the Wayfarer came out and there was a long ar-
ticle about Communism in it by Mr. Athling, he said very much
what you're saying now."

"Me wold pard, Bart Jones, do zay," went on Mr. Twig, "that
it be they noises what he heered in orspital, they rumblings and
blearings from they ruings, what have brought such things to
pass. But if 'ee 'arst me, Mister, what have called down these
wonders to earth, I'd-ud-zay ‘tis thik young man from they Silly
Isles."

"How are your nieces at Miss Brew's?" enquired Sam.

The old man leaned forward, his hands on his knees and his
finger on his lips.

"Lily did tell I, last time they was here, that Louie be keepin'
company with young Tankerville, what be Mr. Crow's new pilot.
Lily says it be tender-'eartedness in dear Louie, seein' Air. Tank-
erville be a lone man with a wife in cemetery."

Sam was not enough of a psychologist to catch the full flavour
of this "wife in cemetery," in relation to Lily's interest in her
sister's good fortune, although there did rise up on the utmost
verge of his consciousness like a beautiful apparition at a
seance, the pure cold melancholy of the parlour-maid's face.

"And what about Lily herself? Hasn't she got a young man
yet?"

Number One gave him the queerest look of mischievous grav-
ity, a look that seemed to say: "Lily of course is our Lily--but
if any outsider considered her wilfulnesses from the point of
view of real common sense, he would be flabbergasted."

"Lily hasn't no young man," Abel Twig replied. "Louie thinks
she've aspired, in her tender 'eart, higher than the state of life
to which it has pleased God to call her. Louie thinks she be
anglin' for Mr. Barter."

The old man leaned back in his chair and surveyed Sam with
quizzical gravity.

"What they gals can say of one another to a wold relative
passes comprehension."

"What do you say to them, Mr. Twig?"

"I listens. I chucks 'em under chin. I tells 'em how pretty their
ribbings be. I waggles my head."

Sam could hear the great pot boiling on the kitchen stove and
the kettle lid rising and falling beside it.

"Well, Mr. Twig," he said, "we'd better be getting to business.
If I thought that you could hold yourself in, between your bed-
room and the end of your garden, I'd say--but I don't believe
you could! Which being so, I fancy it would be wiser to use your
chamber-pot."

Poor Uncle Abel was on his feet now, his knees knocking
together, his face pale.

"When...operation...be over," he stammered, "do 'ee mean that
'ee be going to leave I, alone with me burstin' backside?"

Sam hesitated. In his anticipations of this scene he had visua-
lised every detail of the giving of the enema; but once given, he
had imagined himself saying good-bye. To learn that he had to
wait upon the old man's subsequent discomfort--a process which
might easily take half an hour--was a shock of some magni-
tude. But his soul, like a stern corporal, rose up tall and metallic
and commanded his body to obey orders.

"All right," he said aloud. "Don't you be afraid, Mr. Twig. I'll see
you through to the bitter end."

Having uttered these words Sam picked up the cardboard box
from the table and surveyed its contents.

"I shall want some hot water and some soap," he said.

The melting of the soap, the conveyance of the hot and cold
water upstairs, took a few more minutes; but the wheels of time,
as with people condemned to die, moved remorselessly on, and
the moment arrived when Sam was following the old man up-
stairs to get the thing done.

As he went up behind Abel Twig he thought to himself, "It
would be a much easier thing if it wasn't for the piles." These
piles, as he entered the bedroom and glanced at all his careful
preparations, presented themselves to his mind as a shocking
obstacle.

"Those people would probably hurt you much less in the hos-
pital," his body weakly murmured.

Poor old Abel with his teeth chattering and his braces and
shirt hanging loose, turned upon his man-nurse eyes of such
wild terror, eyes so much like that of a bullock before a
slaughterer, that Sam hurriedly apologised for mentioning the
word hospital. But his cowardly body was still trying to escape.
There was a double-edged treachery in the words he uttered
now.

"It's how you take the whole thing," he said, "that makes the
difference. Well, I don't know what to think. Mr. Twig. It can't
be good to feel--perhaps it might, after all. be better to get
the doc--"

But at the merest suggestion of that unlucky word. Mr. Twig
looked as if he would willingly let Sam cut off his leg.

"Go ahead, Sir," he said. "If I hollers you must be patient
wi' I. I be a dodderin' old man, nigh four-score years old. I
baint as strong as I were once and they pains do make I call
out. They bloody piles be a worse tribulation than any girt zisty.
...Oh, me humpty, me humpty! But I be fearful bad. Be ee
tender of I, Mister; be 'ee tender of I! A man's backside be a
turble squeamy pleace."

Sam was not, it must be confessed, a born nurse; but he was
a born naturalist and an unfastidious countryman. As he strug-
gled with his task, bending over the old gentleman's rear, the
tension of his spirit brought back with a rush the miraculous
power of the vision he had seen. The two extremes of his expe-
rience, the anus of an aged man and the wavering shaft of an
Absolute, piercing his own earthly body, mingled and fused
together in his consciousness. Holy Sam felt, as he went on with
the business, a strange second sight, an inkling, as to some in-
credible secret, whereby the whole massed weight of the world's
tormented flesh was labouring towards some release.

As he kept pinching that rubber tube, for which Number One
had been so scurvily cheated by the unworthy Mr. Stickles,
there came over him a singular clairvoyance about the whole
nature of the world. In the silence around him, unbroken save
when the old man cried out his queer expletive: "Me humpty!
Me humpty!" he seemed conscious of their two figures, cowering
there beneath eternity, towards whom he felt directed, in magnetic
waves, the influence of the sun, and the influence of the great
mysterious ether beyond the sun! He felt as if they were sur-
rounded, there in Backwear Hut, by hosts upon hosts of conscious
personalities, some greater, some less, than themselves. A sharp
pang took him when--in this extremity of clairvoyance--he
realised that his living tortured Christ was now changed to some-
thing else. But whatever Sam's priggishness may have been, it
was mercilessly honest, and he said to himself: "If Christ be
dead, I still have seen the Grail."

The anguish he was compelled to give the old man because of
the piles, made the process a delicate and difficult one. Beads
of perspiration stood out on Sam's forehead before it was over.
When it was over--and, as he had foreseen, it took more than
half an hour--poor Number One was completely prostrate. Pal-
lid and groaning, when at last Sam helped him up from his seat
of purgation, he lay helplessly on his bed. It was all Sam could
do to persuade him to get under the bed-clothes.

"Four-score years old I be, four-score years, come Whitsun,"
he groaned, "and I be a wambly carcass; not fit for a gentleman
to op'rate on. I be a burden to king and country, turble weak
in me stummick and turble sore in me backside."

Through the open window, there came now a shrill chattering
of sparrows.

"Them birds be different nor us be," murmured Abel Twig.
"Them birds can scatter, even as them do fly, and all be sweet
as clover."

In his weakness and helplessness and in the physical relief
he was then experiencing two or three big tears rolled down his
cheeks. In some mysterious way the idea of the droppings of
sparrows being so clean a thing filled Number One just then
with a melting tenderness.

"I'll carry this away," said Sam, "and then I'll bring you up
a glass of something hot. I suppose you're not quite equal to
your pipe yet?"

"Oh, you prig! Oh, you asinine prig!" Nell's husband would
have roared at this point. "Equal to it? No, not quite equal
to it yet! Not quite equal! But presently perhaps "

"I be all right without 'un for a bit, Mister," replied the old
man. "I be...thinking...of me chicks and me wold cow;
and how glad I'll be to see all they again, after me operation."

Sam said no more, but taking up the chamber-pot he opened
the door and carried it downstairs. Stepping gingerly along the
stone slabs across the little garden he emptied the thing in the
privy, and carrying it back to the house rinsed it out at Num-
ber One's out-door tap. Then he went into the kitchen and surveyed
the polished sauce-pan wherein the old man had prepared his
Sunday stew.

It appeared to him that the contents of this capacious recep-
tacle, judging by the steam which emerged from under its lid.
was cooked enough to provide at least a fairly savoury soup: so
he took it off the fire, and finding a strainer among Uncle Abel's
utensils he filled a small howl with the onion-smelling liquid
and carried it upstairs.

He found Number One nearly asleep, and instead of being
pleased at the sight of this refreshment the old gentleman seemed
vexed with him for meddling with his culinary arrangements.

Do you want me to pour this back again, then?" said Sam.

Abel Twig nodded faintly and closed his eyes.

"Me and me baccy be best for I," he murmured.

Sam once more assumed the tone that Zoyland would have howled
with contempt to hear.

"A man likes his own tobacco," he said, "or I'd offer you a
pipe of my father's. This is what he smokes."

And he displayed before the eyes of the somnolent invalid a
tobacco-pouch which he had been keeping in his pocket since
he left the Vicarage.

"I be minded to have a wink o' sleep," was Abel Twig's sole
comment upon this proceeding.

To Sam's astonishment, when having descended the stairs and
having poured hack the half-cooked stew into the sauce-pan he
returned to the front room of the house, he found himself con-
fronted by a little girl in the doorway, panting and sobbing.
Floods of tears were streaming down her cheeks and her voice
was hardly audible. Sam knew who she was, though he had had
little to do with her.

"What is the matter...Nelly? You are Nelly, aren't you?"

It gave him a very odd feeling to say the word Nelly at this
hour and in this place.

"I...knows...who you...be!" gasped the child, struggling for breath
and wiping her wet cheeks with the back of her hand, "You be
Holy Sam!"

"I see we know each other, Nelly," he said; "but what's the
matter? Has Jackie Jones been hitting you again?"

Her tears had not yet ceased pouring down, but, at this word.
her eyes flashed so fiercely that it was as if a dark lantern had
suddenly been turned upon him out of a torrent of rain.

"I hit Jackie. I hit he into ditch! 'A said 'twas sport to see
thik poor...dog...stand on...hind-legs...when that wicked...wicked...
wicked man beat at he with beat...at he...."

Her tears fell so desperately, as the image of what she had
beheld came over her, that it seemed to Sam as if her thin little
form would melt away before him. He had never seen a human
countenance so dissolved, so literally melted in pitiful crying.

"Where? What? Who?" he cried. "Tell me, Nelly, tell me quick!"

"Will 'ee come and knock that wicked, wicked--"

Again the floods of tears broke her utterance. Sam pulled the
child into the house and set her down upon a chair.

"Now stop crying, Nelly, and tell me quick where this man is
who's hurting this dog."

"Will 'ee...come wi' I...Holy Sam...and kill thik wicked...wicked...
wicked--"

"Where is he? Where is it?" cried Sam again.

And then the child explained to him, clearly enough now,
through her streaming tears, that it was in that portion of the
town between Paradise and the river--a district known as
Beckery--that this was going on. As far as Sam could gather
from what she said the owner of the dog belonged to a group of
small circus people who had been running a solitary merry-go-
round in one of those outlying Beckery fields that are called
"brides," a name that reverts to the vanished chapel of Mary
Magdalene founded by St. Bridget. The child kept referring to
Beckery Mill; and Sam knew that there was a sort of common
with a right of way through it near that place. Beckery Mill in
fact gave him the clue; and he visualised with instantaneous
vividness the spot she referred to; and this time it was quite
unnecessary for his despotic soul to issue any categorical
commands.

"I'll go at once, Nelly," he cried excitedly, "only listen, child!
I'll only go on one condition; and it's a fair exchange! You stay
here to look after Mr. Twig; and I'll go to Beckery. Yes, he's ill,
upstairs! I've had to put him to bed; but he's asleep now. I wouldn't
go upstairs if I were you till you hear him stirring, or till you
hear him calling. Do you understand, Nelly dear? He's ill in bed;
but he's not very ill: only a little ill."

A few minutes later Sam was making his way with resolute
haste towards the quarter of the town the child had indicated.
Yes! Nelly Morgan was right. Near Beckery Mill he soon found
the crowd of nondescript loiterers; and there was the dog, a little
black cocker spaniel, in the midst of them! When Sam came up
to the outskirts of the crowd he could catch at once by the pe-
culiar timbre of these young ruffians' voices that they were still
engaged in their cruel sport.

The dog was evidently beginning now to refuse to perform
any further tricks and to turn on his tormentors; nor was there
any sign of the circus people. They must have gone to their
dinner leaving the animal to the mercy of these lads.

"Let that dog alone! What are you doing to him? Who does
he belong to?"

His interference was greeted with howls of derision and mock-
ing cries of "Holy Sam! Holy Sam!"

Some of them were throwing stones at the dog who kept run-
ning from side to side within their circle seeking refuge but find-
ing none.

"Who does it belong to?" shouted Sam. "Where is its master?"

"He've a-gived he to I," cried one of the boys, whom Sam
recognised at once as the stone-thrower of Terre Gastee, the
originator of the phrase "I'd like to--"

"He did bite he bad and 'a did give 'un to I," repeated young
Chinnock, making a clutch at the dog's collar which was received
with a frightened snarl.

"Tom be feared o' touching he," cried one of the other lads.

"Tom did try to pick he up," explained a third, "but 'a bit
his hand. He be a nasty varmint, thik black dog,...he be a bit-
ing dog!"

All this while the wretched little creature, which had a coal-
black glossy coat, long flapping ears, feathery legs and a clipped
tail held tightly in its frantic fear against its rump, kept making
desperate and insane rushes here and there. It seemed to have
been hunted and harried quite beyond the stage of barking, and
had grown beside itself with terror.

Sam strode forward into the middle of this circle of young
demons and uttering various assuaging murmurs endeavoured to
catch the black dog. Tom Chinnock who was nearly as tall as
Sam barged against him with his shoulders as if in a game of
football.

"His master gave 'un to I ," he cried. "You ain't got no right
to 'un!"

"Holy Sam! Holy Sam!" shrieked the excited crowd.

"Don't 'ee let 'un have 'un, lads," cried an evil-looking man
who now appeared from the back of the circle.

"Tony Quart gave 'un to Tom Chinnock! 'Tis Tony Quart's
dog. 'Tisn't your'n!"

"Holy Sam! Holy Sam!"

"Take that, ye biting cur!" shouted young Chinnock.

These last words were accompanied by a vicious kick. Sam
threw the lad aside and pursuing the dog, till it crouched snar-
ling on the ground, bent down and picked it up, clutching its
growling form from which emanated a hot, sweet, dog-flesh odour,
against his chest. Blindly the panic-stricken spaniel fixed its teeth
in one of Sam's wrists as he strove to prevent its jumping down.
Impeded though he was by the struggling creature whose feathery
paws scraped furiously against his body as it tried to free itself,
Sam managed to fling Tom Chinnock back when he tried to drag
the dog away. But the lad came at him again, and this time in
such a fury that he hit Sam a nasty blow on the chin.

Sam's right hand, which was quite free at that minute, in-
stinctively clenched itself to strike back; and he was within an
ace of giving the boy a blow that would have bowled him over.
But that portion of his consciousness which had come to feel to
him like an "external soul" issued, in a flash, one of its most
imperative mandates.

"Don't be a bloody fool!" he said sternly, dropping his arm.

Chinnock gave him one glance of wide-eyed wonder and
cringed away.

"Hit 'un with stones!" he shouted as soon as he was safe back
amongst the rest. "Hit 'un with stones! Stones 'ull make he give
up thik dog! Did yer see the girt clip I give 'un?"

His advice was seconded by the grown man in the rear of the
boys; but having encouraged them to go on with the fray, this
individual now began to shog off. evidently feeling that Sam was
a ticklish customer and that there are moments in life when the
satisfaction of cruelty must yield to the dictates of prudence.

Sam looked about him, his mind moving sluggishly as he
hugged the black dog against his stomach. He was surrounded
now by a half-circle of stone-throwers,

"It's silly to stay here and make an Aunt Sally of myself,"
he thought. "The best thing I can do is to break through them
and clear off."

He had scarcely formulated this thought when a stone hit the
spaniel in his arms, causing it to utter a shrill yelp of pain.
This decided him and he made a fierce rush forward, heading
straight for young Chinnock. Although so energetic a collector
of sharp stones, the nephew of Mad Bet had not been endowed
by Providence with the gift of fortitude. At the sight of Sam
clutching the growling dog against his ribs and running straight
towards him, he took ignominiously to his heels.

"You know where to find me," shouted Sam after him.

The flight of Tom Chinnock quelled the belligerency of the
whole crowd and not a single stone was thrown after Sam and
his struggling captive.

Now Beckery Mill lies on the outskirts of a certain municipal
enclosure known as Wirral Park which borders on the lower
slope of Wirral Hill. Sam sank exhausted upon the first public
seat he came to in Wirral Park. Placing the black spaniel on
the ground but retaining his hold upon it, he began searching
his pockets for his handkerchief, till he remembered that he had
left it in Number One's bedroom. After a second's hesitation he
then took off his necktie, and using this as an extemporary leash
he tied it to the dog's collar.

By some curious psychological process no sooner was the dog
secured by Sam's tie than it accepted Sam as the liege-lord of
its destiny; and in quite a symbolic manner, like a feudal servant
of some cruel baron transferring his allegiance to a cockle-shell
pilgrim, he rose up on his hind legs and licked Sam's bleeding
wrist. Having tasted his new master's blood, so desperately shed
by himself, nothing could exceed the animal's intense contentment.

He stretched himself out on the ground at Sam's feet, not
lying as most dogs do, but with his feathery legs stretched
straight out behind him.

Sam had not been long seated on his bench, when a tremulously
vibrant feeling, that could only be described as a shiver of
exultant ecstasy, flowed through him. "I have seen it! I have seen
it!" the heart within him cried; and in a vague, delicious, dreamy
reverie he became aware of an important psychic change in his
inmost self-consciousness. This change was nothing less than a
coming together of his body and soul. Although his soul still felt
independent of his body, and free of his body, it no longer felt
contemptuous of his body. It had ceased to utter its mandates in
the tone of a slave-driver. Its mere presence within his body at
this moment seemed to make Sam's flesh feel porous and trans-
parent, as if large, cool, undulating waves were sweeping through
it.

Presently, towards the seat where he rested, came a solitary
girlish figure; which, as it approached him, assumed the unmis-
takable form of Miss Angela Beere. What this strange girl was
doing in that place, on the edge of Wirral Park, at half -past two
on Sunday afternoon, Sam was not inquisitive enough to ask
her; but it was clear that even Angela's virginal placidity was a
little startled and ruffled by seeing a dishevelled man rise up
from the side of a black dog, a dog whom he held fast by
means of a bright blue necktie!

"What a beautiful little dog!" was however this imperturbable
young lady's greeting, as if it were the most natural thing in
the world to encounter the son of Mat Dekker between Wirral
Hill and Beckery Mill on a quiet Sunday. "Oh, what a darling
little spaniel!"

Sam felt so abysmally happy at that moment that in his con-
fused rapture he raised the small gloved fingers she held out to
him to his lips and made way for her to sit down by his side.

The little black dog who had already shown signs of intense
nervousness at the approach of this composed figure in her cos-
tume of fastidious delicacy, and had even uttered three short
barks, became panic-striken at this. He tugged frantically at
the blue tie, lowering his belly almost to the ground and extend-
ing his four feathery paws in a wide-straddled flurry of panic.
Finding that the blue tie did not yield, and hearing from the tone
of the human invader that she was not at present ill-using his
new master or belabouring him with sticks and stones, the dog
rose to a natural standing position and remained there stationary.
But, although his body was motionless, his short tail pressed
down in quivering terror over the round black rump, uttered
the words, as clear as language could utter them: "Nothing, I say
nothing could persuade me to look round at the terrifying transac-
tions that are now taking place behind me."

"I'm so glad I've met you," Angela Beere observed, rubbing
nonchalantly at a tiny red stain that had appeared on her white
glove, and glancing coyly round at the stiff back of the little
dog, "for I wanted to ask you whether Mrs. Zoyland would like
me to call upon her at the Vicarage. Do you think she would?
I keep hearing"--here her pale lips displayed her white teeth
in a proud smile--" such silly gossip about you all! But Father
always says, 'Believe nothing that you hear, and only half of
what you see!'"

Sam turned his face full upon her. "If I," he said, believed
only half of what I've just seen, I'd be the happiest person ever
born in Glastonbury!"

The girl's arched eyebrows lifted a little upon her smooth
white forehead.

"Did what you saw hurt your wrist?" she said; and then, in
a really charming access of compunction, that brought a rose-
petal flush to her white cheeks, "Let me tie it up for you, Mr.
Dekker!"

She produced a little lace-edged handkerchief; and as she
bandaged his hurt, the softening influence of medical tenderness
that had made Number One weep to think of the innocuousness
of sparrow dung, brought tears to Sam's eyes.

"Will he let me pat him, do you think?" she said, and lean-
ing across Sam's knees she gave a jerk at the straining blue tie.
This movement had the result of causing the dog to sink down
instantly on his belly, straddle his legs wide apart to gain the
necessary purchase, and then tug at his leash with the energy
of a frightened alligator.

"All right--don't 'ee mind!" cried Sam to his new pet.

But the girl drew back with flushed cheeks, evidently a little
hurt.

"Don't you mind!" he repeated, turning from the dog, who
now stood erect, although still shivering with terror, to his dis-
appointed companion, "he's a rather nervous little beast."

"Rather nervous!" laughed Angela Beere. "He's like I'd feel
if I came to see your Nell and she didn't want to see me!"

This "your Nell" ought to have given the stupid Sam an ink-
ling as to how he was regarded by the richer gossips of the town.
He very clearly was anything but Holy Sam in the upper circles
of Glastonbury! But he answered guilelessly:

"Nell would be overjoyed to see you, I know"

"You'd better go home, Mr. Dekker," she said, "and get that
Penny of yours to attend to your wrist."

But when he took not the slightest notice of this, "What,"
she enquired, "did you say just now that you saw?"

The man was far too happy to be squeamish about telling
her everything. He would have liked to have stopped every soul
in the streets of the town and told them everything. He was in
the mood to shout everything to everyone from the top of the
Tor.

"But how can you go on saying, Mr. Dekker," protested Angela
after an interval of silence, when he had talked about it to her
for nearly a quarter of an hour, "as you did just now, that
there's no God, and no life after death, and no Personal Christ.
You couldn't have seen the Grail if there wasn't a God; certainly
not if there wasn't a Christ. Come now, Mr. Dekker! You know
you couldn't! I'm afraid it's a man's pride in you that makes
you talk like this."

"Listen, Angela Beere! Until a few months ago, though I didn't
believe in God or in Immortality, I believed in Christ. I believed
in Him as the tortured Enemy of God, as the friend of all the
oppressed in the world! And I still believe in Him--but not in
the same way--do you understand? No! I suppose you don't!--
not in the same way, but far more than before!'"

He stopped and stared at her; and there was a wild light in
his little, greenish-coloured, animal eyes that made the calm young
lady say to herself: "I must talk to Dr. Fell about him. I believe
he's had some terrible mental shock."

"Do you think, Angela Beere," he went on, while the muscles
of his chin worked frantically, and without knowing what he did
he tugged so hard at the blue tie that he made the dog rear up
like a rearing horse, "do you think a person could give up the
sweetest happiness in his life--not just one great thing, but the
thing, the only thing, if he weren't drawn on by some Reality?"

"You poor darling!" thought Angela to herself. "Don't you
know that people have been driven on by the Unreal--by lies,
and illusions, and fables, and pure madness--to the point of
killing the only thing they've ever loved!"

"I can see you think I've gone dotty, my dear," he added with
an indulgent smile, laying his bare hand on her gloved ones as
they lay clasped in her lap. "And I've no doubt you and your
friends think I've been a devil incarnate to leave Nell. Well,
never mind that! What I'd like to know, if you wouldn't mind
telling me--for I know what a friend you are of Percy's and
that--"

His voice broke when he marked the flood of colour that rushed
to Angela's pale cheeks. Never had Sam beheld such a scarlet
blush. It literally flooded her under her black hat. It flowed
down her white neck. Her very ears seemed to yield themselves
to it. Up went both her gloved hands to her face and the fact
that she had to make this gesture increased her shyness. She
looked to Sam as if she might be going to rise from the bench
and run away.

"I didn't mean--" stammered Sam.

The girl struggled with herself and dropped her hands, star-
ing at him with round blue eyes, while her underlip quivered.
Slowly her colour receded, and her face became paler even than
its wont.

"You seem to know all about us--about our friendship--
Mr. Dekker, or you wouldn't ask me. So...so I may as well
...tell you. All Glastonbury will know in a day or two...Yes,
I've heard from her. I haven't seen her...but I've heard
from her. She's gone to Russia!"

Sam was flabbergasted. He knew so little of the great world
outside Glastonbury that there sounded to him a shock of startling
finality in this. It was a second before he realised the import
of this news in his own life. Zoyland was alone again then!

He looked at the girl by his side. Angela was searching in
the same little handbag from which had come the handkerchief
that now bound his wrist. She brought out a letter in an envelope
now, and snapping the clasp of her bag with an impatient jerk,
threw the letter upon Sam's knee.

"You can read what she says if you like!" she cried.

There was a French stamp upon the envelope and Sam com-
mented upon this.

"Read it! Read it!" she murmured.

The letter was certainly not difficult to read. Written in Perse-
phone's bold boy-like hand it was brief and to the point.

"Darling Angel," it ran, "long before you get this I shall be
in Paris, waiting to catch the express to Warsaw, en route for
Russia. I couldn't stand it a day longer. I couldn't stand any-
thing in our damned country. I must have a complete change or
kill myself. I've gone back to politics, my dear, now that I've
found love a fizzle. I believe Russia will suit me to a T. When
I'm settled I may send for you to join me! if you like me still,
that's to say! Tell Mr. Beere that the meals on French trains are
adorable. Don't be cross now, for it had to be...your hope-
less Percy."

Sam handed the letter back to her while the words "He's alone
at Whitelake again," formed themselves in his mind.

"I'm sorry you've lost your friend, Miss Beere," he said
gravely. "But, as she says, perhaps one day you'll go too--to
Russia."

He uttered these last words as if they referred to some region
so remote--as indeed they did--from his present world, that
it was as if he'd said: "To the Isles of the Blest."

The girl lowered her fair head, in its black hat, over her hand-
bag and replaced the letter with slow deliberation. She seemed
to be pondering deeply; for she remained motionless for a min-
ute, her fingers on the envelope within the little silk-lined recep-
tacle. Then she rose slowly to her feet and shook the front of
her skirt and passed her fingers quickly over the back of it.

"Well," she said, holding out her hand with a smile. "I've got
to prepare my school lesson now, so I won't ask you which way
you're going. But if I were you, Mr. Dekker, I'd go and see your
Penny at once about your wrist!"

Two hours later, in fact just as St. John's clock was chiming
half-past four, Sam left his loft chamber, with the black dog
comfortably asleep under his camp-bed, and sallied forth into
the street. His face was washed and clean. His step was light.
Angela's handkerchief was still round his wrist just as she had
tied it. He came out that afternoon impatient to tell all the
world what he had seen.

"I'll go to Nell and Father tonight," he thought, "but not till
after the evening service."

He was so dazed with his new happiness that he gave no
heed at all to the direction in which he was walking. He moved
along like a somnambulist. Now and again he talked to himself
in low mutterings. For normal persons to talk to themselves is
either a sign of great happiness or of great unhappiness or a
sign that they know themselves to be surrounded by absolute
physical loneliness.

"Is it a Tench?" he kept muttering quite audibly. What he
was always reverting to in his thoughts was the necessity he was
under to tell everybody in Glastonbury that he had seen the
Grail; and several times he stopped various errand boys and
tradesmen's wives, whom he knew by sight, and began to tell
them, or began to gather himself up to tell them, but by some
queer psychological law they seemed inevitably to slip away
from him before he had forced them to listen to him. He came by
degrees to have that queer sensation that we have sometimes in
dreams, that everything we touch eludes us and slides away. He
even got the feeling that the pavements were soft under his feet
and that the people he passed were like ghosts who moved with-
out moving their legs.

At last he found himself walking in the immediate rear of ex-
Mayor Wollop whose corporeality did seem to strike him as
more emphatic, and Sam, hurrying to overtake him, entered into
conversation as they walked side by side. It seemed much easier
to tell Mr. Wollop about his Vision than in these other cases.
This was no doubt due to the fact that it was something seen;
and not something felt, or thought, or imagined, or supposed,
that Sam had to relate.

The great haberdasher took him in tow at once, even going so
far as to rest two of his plump fingers upon the visionary's arm.
Sam's heart so warmed to the man's kind tone that as he talked
to him he felt for the second lime that day the sensation of tears
mounting to his eyes.

Mr. Wollop told him that it was his father's birthday and that
in honour of this anniversary he was on his way to take tea with
Mrs. Legge.

"You know the house," he said, "it is called Camelot," and
he invited Sam to follow him to this auspicious domicile.

"She'll be overjoyed to see you, Sir," he asseverated again
and again. "Overjoyed she'll be! And there'll be nobody there
but we two. Three's company', you know, Sir, ‘and two's im-
morality,' as my old Dad used to say. She'll be ravaged with what
you saw, Sir,...just as I am...ravaged." .

By degrees, under the redoubtable companionship of the
friendly draper, Sam's wits began to grow a little less ensorcer-
ised, and by the time they reached the aged procuress' house his
pulses were beating to a rhythm that was nearly normal.

Behold him now, therefore, this girl-betrayer and child-de-
serter, this--to quote Zoyland's subsequent comments upon Sam's
behaviour--"this double-dyed idiot and arch-prig," seated at
Mother Legge's mahogany table, under the staring eyes of the
smug Recorders, drinking tea--with a touch of Bridgewater
punch super-added--and eating buttered scones! He was raven-
ously hungry; for the black spaniel, refusing to touch the only
raw meat he could procure for it, had swallowed with gusto every
scrap of bread and treacle he had prepared for himself.

And as he ate and drank, and as the strong and delicately doc-
tored tea warmed his blood, his tongue became unloosened as
it had rarely been unloosened in his life before. The rapturous
happiness that thrilled him was not, at least not all of it, directly
due to his sight of the Holy Grail. It was undoubtedly partly due
--but this itself was an indirect result of the vision--to some
new adjustment of his soul and his body. For his soul was no
longer an "external" soul! Yes! It no longer stood apart, by the
side of his flesh, issuing categorical mandates; and indeed he felt
now as if Mother Legge's very tea--Bridgewater punch and all
--was nourishing both his soul and his body.

As his words flowed on--describing every detail of his great
experience--he was surprised to find himself using words and
phrases that he had made use of on that occasion on the top of
the Tor, when he had defended the Incarnation against the
Manichsean doctrines of Mr. Evans. He could even feel under his
fingers the grass roots that he had plucked up that morning,
nearly a year ago, in that sudden outburst of inspiration. His con-
ception of the thing was very different now--for his Personal
Christ had vanished--but with that curious pride in consistency
that even "holy men" feel, he began glossing over this difference;
as if a gardener, when a viola cornutus came up, where he had
planted pansies, were to insist, "It is the same"; and use. his
ancient rigmarole on the beauty of pansies for this totally new
growth!

But there may have entered into his eloquence at this point
some slight stammering and hesitation which gave the aged pro-
curess her cue.

"What worrits a simple old bitch like me," protested Mother
Legge, "is how an atheist, like you say you are, Holy Sam, could
see the Blood o' the Blessed One, when there ain't, and never 'as
been, no Blessed One to bleed!"

Mr. Wollop glanced cautiously round the big apartment and
looked with some nervousness at the heavy black curtains.

"What a man do see," he remarked sententiously, "be one thing.
What a man do think he sees be another. But what a man do say
he sees be a proper knock-out! The mistress 'ere 'ave seed me
poor old Dad--rest his merry soul!--raised up and a-wishing
'er for no good purpose in 'er beauty sleep. But that don't mean
that the old gent really comes out from's grave; do it, Marm?"

He kept his eyes on those black curtains of the late Kitty
Camel's reception-room, as if he greatly preferred that the eldei
Mr. Wollop should remain quiescent where he had been laid in
the Wells Road graveyard.

"Were it like my silver bowl when 5 ee seed it, Holy Sam?"
enquired the old lady, settling her portentous frame more com-
fortably in her tall straight-backed chair and raising her tea-cup
to her lips.

Sam's little green eyes shone radiantly. "It wasn't like any-
thing on earth," he cried. "And the moment I saw it I knew
what it was. Everything will be different from now on, with the
Grail come back to Glastonbury! It was a pure accident that I
was the one who saw it first; but I'm going all round town
today, telling everybody about it; and I expect hundreds of
people will see it. I expect even the visitors will see it."

"Will that 'andsome young man in me shop what I 'as such
trouble with; the one what reads Neetsky to 'arden 'is 'eart
when he gets the gals into trouble, see the 'Oly Grail?"

It would be difficult to believe that Mr. Wollop was not being
facetious, unless you were seated opposite him and saw the
guileless stare in his round eyes. The old procuress was much
less guileless. Indeed she was positively clairvoyant in the subtle
penetration of her next question.

"Have the Vision what you've been privileged with, Holy
Sam, made 'ee forget they torments what the Saviour did bear
for we pore sinners?"

This question of the aged woman--and it may well be that in
the course of her long life as the purveyor of the sweets of sin
she had acquired a diabolical insight--did assuredly hit Sam
between the joints of his armour. But the cresting wave of excite-
ment on which he rode was so great that he answered without a
second's hesitation.

"If you, or our friend here," he said, "had gone through
unspeakable pains for anyone you loved, and these pains had
been turned into heavenly wine and heavenly bread, wouldn't
you feel it ungrateful in that person not to take and eat, not to
take and drink and be filled with gratitude to you?"

It was natural enough, when Sam left the hospitable domain of
Mother Legge, that he should find himself inevitably drifting
towards the Vicarage. But he restrained himself from entering:
and, in place of that, went on a sudden impulse up the drive of
the Abbey House. It can be imagined what a shock it was to him
when, having rung at the front door, he was informed by Lily
that Miss Drew was "not at home."

"But--Lily, my good girl! Where is she if she isn't at home?
She's always at home on Sunday afternoons! She's been at home
on Sunday afternoons, reading the Guardian before tea and
looking at the Illustrated London News after tea, from days
before you and I were born! Come now, Lily, what is it? What's
up? Is she sick? Is she lying down? I've got something to tell
her--something very important--something that would interest
you and Louie too!"

Pestered in this way by a gentleman she had familiarly known
as Mr. Sam" since the days when she wore even shorter frocks
than were the present fashion, Lily broke down, and with tears
in her eyes confessed the sorrowful truth; the truth namely that
Miss Drew had decided in the interests of public virtue never
to have him in her home again.

"She's been to see Mr. Dekker too," Lily went on, after a
glance over her shoulder to make certain that the drawing-room
door was closed, "and Mr. Weatherwax says he heard her,
through the study window, storming at your Dad, Mr. Sam, like
she was St. Dunstan scolding Satan. Mr. Weatherwax says he
heard her tell your Dad that she'd write to the Lord Bishop, in
his Palace at Wells, and tell him that Glastonbury Vicarage
were become an Asylum for Fallen Women."

Sam hardly listened to the latter part of this revelation. He
was thinking to himself: "Such news as I've got for the people
of Glastonbury oughtn't to be confined to masters and mistresses.
Lily is a good girl, a romantic girl, and she'll be thrilled to hear
my news. I've always thought there was a dreamy expression in
her eyes that showed she was--"

"I've had a great experience, Lily," he began, "and that was
what I came to talk to Miss Drew about. It was yesterday it
happened. I may as well tell you if Miss Drew won't see me. I
was down by the river, Lily, and I saw distinctly--"

But Lily interrupted him.

"Another time, Mr. Sam, another time, if you please! I'm sure
you saw something very nice--but I've got to shut the door now.
Louie wants to go to the Methodist Chapel tonight and she's
going to dress now and I've got to lay the supper. Missus have
asked Miss Crummie to supper--so please excuse me."

She gave him one of her most dim, beguiling, and tender smiles;
a smile that seemed to say, "Life is more full of romance than
a simple gentleman like you can possibly know! Even Louie,
when she goes to the Methodist Chapel with Bob Tankerville--"
but at this point she firmly closed the door.

Although Sam was quite in the dark about Miss Drew's new
interest in Crummie, the truth was that as Mary slipped away
from her, the lonely woman had begun to find not a little con-
solation in the spell that the beauty of Mr. Geard's daughter had
already cast over her. Sam couldn't help smiling as he mentally
envisaged the beautiful Crummie seated opposite her entertainer
and listening sweetly to her well-chosen words across the silver
candlesticks; but this piece of news set him off in Crummie's
direction.

"I'll be with Nell and Father tonight," he thought, "but I'll
go to the Geards' now. I'll catch her easily before she starts, if
I hurry up."

He retraced his steps down Silver Street and soon reached the
High Street near St. John's Church. A small group of people
were just coming out from an afternoon's christening, and the
first person Sam encountered was Mrs. Philip Crow, who, under
the advice of Emma, who assured her that "Mr. Dekker be more
'isself when he be preaching to godfathers and godmothers than
when 'tis the common crowd," had attended this brief and
pleasant service.

Tilly shook hands with him cordially; for the gossip retailed
by Emma was of a much more detailed and much more authentic
kind than that conveyed to Miss Drew's ears by Mr. Weatherwax;
and it excited Tilly's particular type of sympathy to think of
this quiet young man living by himself in the Old Malt House.

"He's made a mistake and he's sorry for it," she thought, and
vaguely in her mind she dreamed that it would be nice one day
if she and Emma could clean up that top fioor for this well-
meaning youth who had no wife and no servant.

"You must have heard good news, Mr. Dekker," Tilly said,
"for your eyes are shining. They shone like that when you were
a boy and Philip and I were giving our first party at The Elms. I
recall it clearly, because it was when Emma had just come to us,
and I thought she did so well when the dog we had then--we've
never had a dog since, Mr. Dekker; but I was weak then and
silly about Philip, and Philip was fond of dogs and what was I
saying?--made a sad mess in the dining-room."

"Mrs. Crow," said Sam, staring at the lavender fringe of the
book-marker which dangled from the large prayer book she
carried, and then letting his gaze move to their two shadows,
which the declining sun caused to extend clean across the street
and which resembled a child's drawing of two fantastic dolls,
"Mrs. Crow, I have something to tell you that will interest you."

"Oh dear!" she cried, "don't look so wild! And don't tell me
any of your secrets. I've never said one word to anyone about
you and Mrs. Zoyland, and I'd rather not hear anything."

There came over Sam just then a desire to laugh aloud. That
no one in this town could be brought even to listen to what he
had seen seemed like a crazy dream. He felt as if he were liv-
ing in two worlds at the same time, and one of them, by far the
less real and by far the more absurd, was trying to convince
him that the other was a fantasy.

"Mrs. Crow," he repeated with a certain irritation in his
voice, "what has happened to me has nothing to do with Mrs.
Zoyland. It's a vision--yes! it's the great vision we've all been
waiting for! I've...seen...the Holy Grail...Mrs. Crow."

Sam felt so light-headed just then that he longed to laugh, or
cry, or shout. It would have seemed perfectly natural to him if
Tilly Crow had fallen on her knees, there and then, upon the
pavement, and offered thanks to God. But the little lady only
gave vent to a deep sigh.

"Emma always said," she remarked, looking at him with grave
concern, "that if that woman didn't manage better for you and
your dear father there would be no telling--"

She had said enough. Sam quickly saw that she regarded him
as a well-meaning victim of protracted undernourishment. He
lifted his hat to take his leave; and as he did so his chin twitched
a little and there was a pucker on his brow. His eyes began to
roam up and down the street as if he sought for someone whose
shadow was less doll-like than Tilly's.

Tilly saw that she had hurt his feelings in some way and she
held out her hand to him. When he took it she detained him,
as she often detained Philip when she had misunderstood him.

"I'm sure with so good a father," she murmured hurriedly,
"you could see anything, even angels, Mr. Dekker," and when
Sam smiled at this, she added eagerly, giving to him of her best,
"Your floors up there are all oak, aren't they? Aunt Tappity,
you know, who was Euphemia Drew s great-aunt, used to have
them beeswaxed. Euphemia never likes to talk of that branch
of our family, because of the malt business. But we all have a
drop of bad blood somewhere, haven't we? But Euphemia can
remember sliding on those floors when she was little, so slippery
they were!"

When Sam had left her and was wandering down the High
Street he felt his spirits a little dashed. "I thought," he said to
himself, "that they'd all cry: It's impossible! It's too good to
be true!' Instead of which they seemed ready to accept it as per-
fectly true, but in some way--unimportant!"

He had not got very far down High Street, for it was in his
mind to reach Street Road, where Cardiff Villa was, by way of
Magdalene Street, when he overtook old Bartholomew Jones
shuffling slowly along with the aid of a stick. In spite of its
being Sunday, Number Two was all agog to attend to something
in his shop, probably to attend to his accounts, for he was a
great miser, and the financial problems of his partnership with
Mr. Evans seemed, sometimes, well-nigh insoluble.

The old man greeted Sam with effusiveness. He had known
him from his childhood, and Sam had sold to him many of his
Cambridge books. He now took the opportunity of informing
Number Two of the feeble state in which he had left Number
One that morning.

"I've a-allus told he," said Mr. Jones, "that the 'orspital was
the place for we old folk when our innards turn foul on us.
Look at my girt zisty! If it weren't for that clever head-doctor,
who studied me case with all them European engines, where
would I be now? Abe Twig, he be a fool when it conies to
taking care of 'isself. He do say trust nature; whereas I do sav,
'tis nature what did the damage. Us must go farther afield for
the cure of thik damage. Us must go to Science."

While he was thus speaking, Mr. Jones was staring in sor-
rowful wonder at his interlocutor's bound-up wrist.

"Seems to me. Sir," he remarked, "you'd do no harm to go
to 'orspital, your own self. That wrist o' your'n he bieedin' into
bandage."

Sam instinctively touched Angela's handkerchief with the tip
of one of his fingers.

"I'm too excited today to think of hospitals, Mr. Jones," he
said. "Do you know what's happened to me, my friend?"

He lowered his voice to an intense and concentrated whisper.

"You ain't gone and murdered Mr. Zoyland, have 'ee?" cried
Number Two, retreating a pace or so from the proximity of this
excited adulterer.

"No, no, my good man, Mr. Zoyland and I have never even
had a fight and certainly are not likely to now."

As Sam spoke, the thought came into his head--"Alone at
Whitelake; alone at Whitelake "

But Mr. Jones looked up the street and down the street. Then
he remarked: "I've still got that grand edition of Saint Augus-
tine. I suppose you don't feel inclined to "

But Sam interrupted him. "Do you know what my fellow-
workers call me these days, Mr. Jones?"

"A darned ninny!" was what leapt up in Number Two's mind;
but he responded soothingly, as if addressing a candidate for the
county asylum: "I've a-heered, Sir, that down in Paradise they
name 'ee Holy Sam."

Sam nodded his head, and then began working the muscles
of his chin so violently that the old man longed, as he after-
wards explained to Mr. Evans, "to catch hold of that monkey-
face and quiet 'un "

"I want to tell everyone in the town," cried Sam, "what has
happened. For the most important thing has happened that could
happen; and I have seen it."

The tone in which he said this and the gleaming light in his
eyes alarmed Mr. Jones but it occurred to him that it was just
in states of mind of this kind that young gentlemen were liable
to buy expensive theological books.

"It's the best Saint Augustine on the market," he said.

"I saw Eternity this morning," remarked Sam. Whether in
the long history of Glastonbury, anyone had uttered these sim-
ple words before, no one knows, but if anyone had done so, the
chances are that the remark was received in the same manner
then as now.

"It's a Baskerville edition," insisted Bartholomew Jones.

Sam bade him good afternoon, and strode off quicker than
the old man could follow. He had fully expected to be ridiculed
or scoffed at for his revelation; but it had never entered his head
that his great difficulty would be to arouse any interest in it. He
began to wonder if he were, after all, the only person who had
seen the Grail since the ancient days. Perhaps the Grail had ap-
peared to a great many people and not one of these people had
been able to persuade anyone even to attend to what they had
to say about it! Perhaps life in Glastonbury was full of such
miracles; and yet those who reported them always found their
excitement falling on deaf ears.

He soon reached the curiosity shop itself. At the door he met
Red Robinson, who was about to attend a meeting of the Com-
rades in their old meeting-place at the top of the house. Mr.
Robinson looked a good deal sprucer and more neatly dressed
than when he had accosted Sam last Spring at the gate of St.
John's churchyard. He had a white collar on now; but he still
wore the same old, brown cloth cap, pulled down rather rakishly
over his forehead and tilted a little to one side. This cap, what-
ever else he wore, brought into the Glastonbury High Street an
indescribable air of Whitechapel and the Old Kent Road.

It came over Sam with a rush of emotion how it had been
Robinson's speech, reporting Crummie's words, that had started
him upon this whole new psychic pilgrimage.

"'Ee 'as the fice of a sighnt," had been the man's rendering
of Crummie's fatal sentence; and it all came back to Sam now,
together with Nell's words across the empty tomb of St. Joseph,
breaking the news of her return to Zoyland's bed.

"Hullo, Robinson! Are you speaking up there tonight?" said
Sam with the affable though rather forced geniality of the par-
son's son addressing a working-man.

Red gave him a furtive, challenging look, and yet a quizzical
look--the sort of look that a terrier caught in the mouth of a
rabbit hole would give a setter, as it passed gravely by, on the
trail of a covey of partridges.

"We'll be doing something better than speak soon," retorted
the man. "There'll be a fine stir in Glastonbury soon--and some
that I knows on--some bewgers what doesn't know what's coming
to 'em will 'ave to tike notice!"

"I hear that you and young Trent and Mr. Spear have been
appointed our new aldermen," said Sam politely.

"Aldermen, do yer call it?" snorted Red contemptuously.
"We'll be more than aldermen shortly. Mister; just as Bloody
Johnny's more than a Mayor to-die!"

"Yes, I've heard something about this," said Sam. "It's a kind
of independent Commune, they tell me, that you're setting up.
Well, I wish you good luck, Robinson! I've nothing against any
arrangement that brings more meat into the larders of our
poor people."

But in his inevitable desire to take exception to anything that
a Vicar's son might say, Red now veered round.

"But it's a bleedin' farce, hall the sime! That's what I'm
going to tell 'em in a minute. Commune? 'Ell! This 'ere stunt
'as its pint, in miking some bewgers we know cough up a bit,
but there'll be no Commune in this 'ere bleedin' 'ole till w^e've
got 'old of the bank and the rileway."

"Well," repeated Sam, "I'm for you, Robinson. But I wish you
could persuade some of the labouring men of this town to be a
little less savage when a person works along side of them."

Red eyed him with malevolent glee.

"So yer finds it haint all 'unny, does yer, doing the jobs you
blighters have put on us for hall these years? You're beginning
to know, are yer, what it tighsts like to eat 'umble pie?"

"But if the working-man has been ill-used, as no doubt he
has, why should he take It out on those who wish him well?"

"Tike it out, do yer sigh?" cried Red Robinson indignantly.
"That's just like you virtuous gentlemen. What's got on our
nerves is that very sime tone of yours. It's your why of tiking
things! Is a man a foot-stool, Mister? Is a man a piece of bleedin'
junk, that a bloke should sigh to you: ‘ 'ow kind yer are, Mr.
Dekker, Hesquire' "--Red's whole frame quivered with sarcasm
-- " 'ow kind yer are to work side by side with us and to use
yer own fine 'ands along of us!'"

He paused for a second and then spoke with such a rush of
formidable emotion that Sam, with all his preoccupied excite-
ment, was considerably impressed.

"Don't yer see...will you hupper-classes never see...that you've
been just sitting, 'eavy and sife, on the top of us workers? When
a man's been lying on 'is fiee, hunder the harse of a great bewger
all 'is life long, 'tisn't heasy when he's thrown the bewger off to
talk sweet to 'im. 'Tisn't heasy to sigh, ‘Poor rich man, did I 'urt
yer when I threw yer bleedin' harse off of myfice?"'

Sam was silent. For the first time that day he felt that he
couldn't bring himself to speak of his Vision. And yet what a
thing that he couldn't. Had human beings maltreated one an-
other to such a tune that it was a sort of mockery even to
mention that the Holy Grail had come back to earth?

Without breathing a word of what he had seen to this man,
he could hear him say: "It's because you've 'ad your leisure
from our sweat that you've got any spunk left to fuss with the
'Oly Grile. We be too dog-gone done-in of a Sunday morning to
do anything but sleep in our bleedin' beds!"

Thus it happened that in spite of his having declared to Mother
Legge and Mr. Wollop that he was going to tell everyone he
met, he found, when he went on down Magdalene Street, along
the southern wall of the Abbey meadow, that not only had he not
told Robinson, but that when he met Harry Stickles, the chemist,
bustling home to his tea, and his beautiful Nancy, he made no
attempt, although he had bought his Windsor soap of him a day
or two ago, to interrupt a busy citizen of Ms kidney, with news
of such a bagatelle!

While Sam was approaching the turn to Street Road, Crum-
mie, left quite alone in Cardiff Villa to prepare for her supper
with Miss Drew, for the Mayor and the Mayoress had gone for
the evening to the city of Wells, was sitting, as she often was
these days, by herself in her childhood's bedroom, where all
the pictures on the wall, the little childish sketch entitled "Crum-
mie by Crummie," and the eloquent, if not artistic, Series of the
Seasons, jabbered and gibbered at her, languished and lisped at
her, with memories of the married Cordelia.

As usual the younger daughter of Geard of Glastonbury sat
on the edge of her maiden bed admiring her legs. If it had not
been that Crummie's heart, independently of her legs altogether,
had fallen in love with Sam, the chances are that from sheer
good-nature she would long ago have married one of her in-
numerable admirers in the town. But if the truth about the girl
must be told, Crummie, in reality, was not attracted to men. This
is a paradox which poor Cordelia--who was strongly attracted
to men and was now living a life of intoxicated eroticism with
Mr. Evans--would have laughed at, considering how the sight of
Crummie's admirers had troubled her. But such was the exact
truth! What Crummie was attracted to, was not her men--their
personalities, their looks, their ways--but the reflection of her-
self, and particularly of her incomparable legs, in the mirror of
her men's eyes.

It is the greatest mistake in the world to assume that the sort
of narcissism in which Crummie indulged was selfish or ungen-
erous. It is true she derived an exquisite and indescribably volup-
tuous pleasure from admiring herself, from caressing herself,
as she was doing at this moment; but it was a pleasure she longed
to share with as many people as possible--women quite as much
as men! Nor was she fastidious. Naturally not, considering that
what primarily stirred her was not these alien personalities in
their intrinsic qualities but the degree of their excitement in the
presence of her own charms.

On the other hand the girl was so essentially humble and so
free from malice or spitefulness, that a very small measure of
this excitement was enough to satisfy her. But in Sam's case e-
very, thing was different. Her feeling for Sam was a most deli-
cate, vibrant and totally self-forgetful feeling. Nor would she
have been at all anxious for Sam to enter at this moment and see
her beautiful bare legs. Sam was the only person in the world
before whom Crummie was bashful, shamefaced, super-modest.
She would have felt like sinking into the ground with shame--
that is how she would have expressed it to herself--if Sam had
burst in now and beheld the satiny whiteness of her limbs; soft
and tantalising and of maddening loveliness. What she wanted
Sam to admire in her was her intellect, her searching intelligence,
her ideal sentiment, her religious soul; and the pathetic thing
was that Providence had not only refrained from endowing
Crummie with these gifts but had not even given her a limited
success in the art of pretending to possess them.

Crummie's unique gift from Nature, the most exquisite thighs
that had been seen in Glastonbury since those of Merlin's perfidi-
ous Nineue, and which to herself, in her orgies of narcissism,
were so pleasure-yielding, were, as far as Sam was concerned,
something almost to be ashamed of. She would have preferred
to appear before Sam in a heavy nun's garment descending to
the ground and with her fair hair covered up by a black hood.
How could she have possibly known that it was Sam before
whom she was now destined, to appear, when, hearing the door-
bell ring, she hurriedly put on her skirt, wrapt herself in an
old woolen dressing-gown, and with her fair hair loose and her
bare feet in little tattered slippers ran downstairs.

Her feelings when she saw him standing there were so over-
whelming that for a second she swayed in the doorway and
nearly fainted away. Had she done so it would have been pre-
cisely in the manner of those tender impossible heroines in the
only works of art she had ever honestly enjoyed! What she felt
was something that no consecutive human language, trying to
convey a clear-edged impression, could possibly express. Sam's
figure suddenly appearing before her at her own doorstep evoked
that bewildering, staggering sense of the very nature of things
shifting, altering, transforming, which the Magdalene must have
had when the apparent gardener at the Arimathean tomb mur-
mured the magic word "Mary!"

It was not so much a living man she saw, as her whole secret
life, all the gathered up and accumulated longings, reserves,
broodings, dreams of the last twelve months. He was r.ot a thing
of palpable outline at all, of definite contour or ox solid sub-
stance. He was a cloud of filmy essences, vague yearnings, prec-
ious dreams, dear hopes, wild idolatries. It was a shivering an-
guish as well as a wild ecstasy to see him embodied there, in an
ordinary human form, familiar and natural.

So un-selfconscious did this adorer of her own sweet flesh
become in her rapture of seeing him, hearing him, touching him,
that when she had taken his coat and hat and brought him into
the musty drawing-room and put him in her father s chair with
the bear rug at his feet, she sank down before the fire without a
thought of stirring its dying embers, or of lighting more than
one solitary candle with a spill thrust deep into those flickering
coals. Across her bare feet, before she realised the necessity of
hiding them under her robe, fluttered the rosy fire gleams. Down
upon her loosened hair fell the yellow rays of that solitary' candle,
while from the un-shuttered window, open at the top as her
mother had left it, the cool evening air circled round them
both, full of the dewy smells of the damp meadows at the road's
end.

Even our poor vision-wrought Holy Sam was not so dehu-
manised as not to feel that there was something about this mo-
ment that was charged with portentous issues, something fatal,
something totally unforeseen, something that held the future m
its quivering crucible.

Crummie was in such a mood of unutterable awe and pent-up
ecstasy at having her idol, her more than earthly lover, alone in
the house with her, that she found difficulty in uttering a word,
and when she did speak it was in a solemn, breathless whisper.
So potent however is the concentrated love of the feminine heart,
that although this man, sitting there above her,, had just beheld
--actually in the flesh-- that elusive Mystery which was the cause
of Glastonbury's being Glastonbury, it was the girl and not the
man who dominated that moment, her exultation, and not his,
that held the thunder-flash of that charged air.

"I never...thought," she whispered with intense emotion,
not presuming to raise her eyes above the muddy soles of Sams
boots, "that I'd ever...have you...here alone."

"Dear Crummie!" and he made a timid movement of his hand
towards her head, but quelled by the intensity of her feeling let
his wrist fall back on his knee, where it lay limp, with Angela's
handkerchief round it.

"I've got...so much...to say to you...that it's...hard to begin."

She made an effort to lift up her face and smile at him; but
down her fair head sank again, as if she had been rehearsing
once more her Pageant-part of the Lady of Shalott.

"Dear Crummie!" he repeated in a scarcely more audible
voice than her own.

But then, gathering up the happiness within him as if it were
a crystal cup that he stretched out to her, "I've had an experi-
ence today, Crummie," he said, "that has unsettled ail my ideas;
that's made me feel as if I'd never lived till today. I told Nell
once, Crummie, that I thought I had a dead nerve in me. Well!
Well! You don't "want to hear about that...but it was true...but--"

"I can understand you," the girl murmured. "You needn't stop
telling me for any reason--no! Not for any reason!"

"It wasn't a fancy; it wasn't a madness," he went on, "Crum-
mie dear, I saw it! Yes, I saw the Grail Itself."

Now that he had told her, instead of his happiness being less,
it became greater. Her long, slow, grave, childish look of abso-
lute faith made him feel that this was the first time he had spoken
of it to anyone. To those other people he must have been speak-
ing of something else!

"And the effect it's had on me, Crummie, is to make me feel
that I've seen Eternity. So that now I needn't worry myself any
more about so many things! Behind the tortured Christ, behind
that other Christ, behind the people we love and the people we've
hurt...behind everything that's sacred to us...is Eternity. Do you
know what I mean, little Crummie? I feel now"--there was a
poignant tenderness, not so much an affectionate or even
human tenderness, as it was something resembling the feeling her
father would have shown for a wounded loach, about the tone
in which he spoke to her; and it seemed in a sense to be a gro-
tesque tone for that superbly beautiful creature crouching be-
tween the candle flame and the dying coals--"I feel now that my
life has really finished itself, accomplished itself somehow: and
what I want to do now is just to take it as it is and to give it
to anyone, to anything, to whatever comes along, following chance
and accident, and not bothering very much--do you see what I
mean, Crummie?--taking everything as it happens--since I've
seen Eternity!"

He needn't have asked her if she understood him. She had been
following every word with the absorbed attention with which a
prisoner hears his sentence or a gambler watches his throw of
the dice. When he had finished she moved away from him a lit-
tle, and bending down before the high bronze fender pressed
her forehead against its top bar, while with her hands she
clutched its shining knobs.

It was clear, even to the bemused and bewildered Sam that
she was struggling with herself and making some momentous
decision. Her decision, whatever it was, was made very quickly.
She lifted her head from the fender and rose to her feet, clutch-
ing her robe tightly round her and gazing down upon him, where
he still lay back at ease in her father's big arm-chair.

"I've got something to tell you, Mr. Sam," she said. All his
father's parishioners called him Mr. Sam. Never in her life had
she called him Sam.

He gave her at once his full attention. He sat straight up on
the extreme edge of the arm-chair; his hands on his elbows,
his heels beneath it, his head raised. He looked like a boy whose
pockets are full of apples and pears giving polite attention to
the conversation of an elder sister.

"There are very few men," she began, "who can live alone as
you do, Mr. Sam. But I know you are doing wrong in doing it.
Mrs. Zoyland belongs to you; she has given herself completely
to you; she has had a child; and I know that I am telling you
what's right when I tell you that you two ought not to live sepa-
rated any more. There are things that a girl knows more about
than any man and this is--"

She stopped abruptly. From a portion of her powerful nature--
for after all she was Mr. Geard's daughter--that had never been
roused by Sam, she suddenly felt a wave of irrational anger
against him. Once when she was a little girl and had been
caressing a rag doll, for which she nourished, just as she did
for Sam, a devoted, idealising love, she caught a look on its
face that seemed so unresponsive that, filled with wrath against
it, she snatched it up and dashed it upon the floor.

In the midst of her present speech--it was when she reached
the words "she has had a child"--she gesticulated with her hands,
forgetting to hold the folds of her long dressing-gown. Released
from her fingers her robe fell apart, revealing the fact that be-
neath her skirt her legs and feet were bare.

It was then that she imagined she beheld, mingling with the
dazed, indulgent, stupid courtesy of Sam's attention to her that
particular look upon his face that women are so' quick to catch;
the look, namely, of displeasure rather than pleasure at some
intimate and revealing gesture they have made. That such a look
should have appeared on her idolised Sam's face, on this night
of all nights, hurt her to the quick.

It was a swift blinking of the eyelids, a scarcely perceptible
twitch of the chin; but she received the impression that the sight
of her bare ankles had affected him as something disconcerting.
She knew well that normal men have two distinct reactions to a
girl's bare legs--the first one of provoked desire, with all its
glamour and mystery, and the second, one of fastidious shrink-
ing; and although towards her idealised love she was humble
as a child about her beauty, she was also as shy and touchy as a
child about any personal exposure.

The fact, therefore, that she had caught, or fancied she had
caught, for in reality Sam was not thinking of her legs at all,
that particular look upon his face, made her anger leap up furi-
ously against them both; against herself for forgetting to conceal
her ankles, and against him for that unconscious flicker of cold-
blooded awareness that caused her to feel conscious of them.
Her anger with Holy Sam, like her anger against her old idealised
doll, made her totally forget that this dazed well-meaning man
sitting up in such an absurd posture of forced attention, ^ith
his heels under the chair and his nead raised, was her romantic
idol, and in one swift ungovernable impulse she seized him by
the hair of his head, and shook his skull with all her force back-
ward and forward repeating those interrupted words: "More about
than any man...more about than any man..." over and over again.

Sam in his unimaginative simplicity thought the snrl was
doing this for fun, or at least in amiable irritation. He was so
full of her startling words about Nell that to have his hair seized
upon and his skull shaken was an interlude of small moment.
But when she let him go and flung herself down sobbing upon
the bear rug, he realised that it was anything but fun. He realised
then that he knew no more about the ways of women than he
knew about the philosophy of "Neetsky" in dealing with them.
He crouched down by her side on the hear rug and did his best
to console her, not daring to snatch her arm away from her
eyes, but petting and coaxing her in every way he could think
of, and talking endearingly and tenderly to her. But she seemed
to come to herself quite independently of his blundering conso-
lation. All at once she scrambled swiftly to her feet. A curious
notion had suddenly come into her head.

"Get me your coat," she said. "I want to put on your coat"

He obeyed her. He fetched his great coat. He held it for her,
while she slipped into it. Very gently, as he stood behind her,
he extricated her curls and let them hang free over the collar.
She took him by the hand and led him to the sofa. It satisfied
something very deep in her to feel that old overcoat she knew so
well wrapped about her. It was like covering herself with the
finer essence of her love. She was completely mistress of herself
now, and of Holy Sam too, as this latter felt in the very marrow
of his bones!

Every woman--the most abject as well as the most beautiful--
has certain moments in her life when the whole feminine prin-
ciple in the universe seems to pour through her, and when men,
when every man obeys her in helpless enthrallment as if she held
the wand of Circe. This was the great hour of Crummie's life,
nor was she ignorant of the nature of the magic that now flowed
through her veins.

"Mr. Sam," she said when they were seated side by side upon
the sofa, "you must go back to Mrs. Zoyland; back to her and
to your child--no, stop! I've not finished--I don't mean go back
to the Vicarage! You're perfectly right in leaving your father.
You couldn't live out your new ideas freely without being inde-
pendent. And, as I say, those are some things women know more
about than men; and one is that people who love each other ought
to live alone together--never with a third one! When you left
your Nell, you did it because you thought kissing her and loving
her in that way was wrong. She never thought it was wrong!
And now, Mr. Sam, you must live with her again; for I tell you
those things are not wrong. But not at the Vicarage. She ought
never to have gone there! That's the one thing I cannot under-
stand in Mrs. Zoyland, that she ever agreed to stay under the
same roof with two men like you and your father." She paused
upon this, giving Sam a flash of something more dangerous from
her soft grey-blue eyes than he had ever received. She looked so
incredibly lovely in the dim light of that solitary candle, with
her bright loose curls flowing over his own coat collar that Sam
stared at her in humble admiration.

He was not in a mood to take exception to anything she said;
and once having broken the ice and having got control of herself,
she seemed prepared to say a great deal.

"You are both...very good men," she went on gravely, "but Mr.
Dekker cares nothing what people think. He doesn't seem to
realise what scandal-makers that old man and that old woman
are! You ought at once to take Mrs. Zoyland away. Then you
and she will be the ones to get into trouble--if there is any
trouble, and not your father. We're in the middle of great changes
here in Glastonbury. Mrs. Zoyland and you, if you're brave e-
nough to despise the Miss Drews and Miss Fells of the town, will
have the support of her brother Mr. Spear, and of course of my
father and Mr. Trent. I don't know what furniture you've got in
your attic in that Old Malt House--you see I know all about you,
Mr. Sam!--but if you haven't got enough up there to make a
woman and child comfortable you ought to take furnished rooms.
Why don t you go to Dickery Canties, Mr. Sam? They're not
fussy or squeamish there. Besides Mr. Spear lives there now, and
he's her brother. He'd help you with your expenses. He nets a
good salary since my father s made him one of the big men in
Glastonbury."

Sam's whole nature was in a turmoil. As the girls rapid,
practical words followed one another, thev carried a shameful
conviction with them. Yes, he had been unforgivably selfish in
all he had done! Little thought had he given to the passionate
torment of his father, tantalized by Nell's sweet presence, and
bearing the whole weight of that ambiguous situation. Little had
he thought of what Nell might be enduring. He had thought
solely of himself, solely of his own soul in relation to his mar-
tyred God; and meanwhile he had been cruel to his girl, and if
not cruel to his father, at least completely irresponsible, com-
pletely careless of his peace of mind. With a lover's instinct com-
bined with the instinct of a son he knew exactly what his father
would suffer if he took Nell away; but he knew also--who bet-
ter?--the deep relief with which the older man left to himself,
and free from this daily tantalisation of his darker mood, would
revert to his simple, traditional, unquestioning faith. Besides,
Nell would go and see him. She could go often and see him. He
wouldn't be separating those two. By removing her from the
Vicarage he wouldn't be taking her out of his father's life.

Thus as he watched that white face in the dimness, framed
in its wavy curls, he gave himself reason upon reason for obey-
ing the competent advice which came so impressively from its
lips. But, as he listened, the image of his sweet love's form, the
caressing sound of her voice, the whole aura of her personality,
rose up in the very heart of his being. It was perhaps an ironic
thing, but the truth was that the mood he had been thrown into
by his vision of the great Glastonbury Mystery had abolished
all his ascetic scruples about making love to Nell. Such scruples
seemed to him now like a tight, irrelevant, self-inflicted con-
trariety!

There is no doubt that if ever Sam came to talk of the secret
things of his life--which was not very likely-- with Mr. Evans,
that incorrigible biographer of Merlin would have found this
particular effect of the Grail Vision a proof that the thing was
a thing of magic, and not of religion ; and likely enough--like the
Mwys of Gwydion-Garanhir--was an actual symbol of fertility!

"Well, Mr. Sam, I've got to have supper with Miss Drew to-
night; and it's now five minutes to the hour she expects me!"

Even as she spoke he was making his great decision.

"I'll take you to her door, little Crummie," he said. "You've
been more than a crumb of the loaf to me tonight; and if I do
manage to establish myself at Dickery Cantle's, I'll pray to you
every day as if you were a god."

So he spoke, recalling a passage in one of the old poignant
Homeric scenes, which he had had to read when he was in the
sixth form at Greylands School,

"Will you?" she exclaimed, leaping to her feet and rushing to
the chimney-piece where their only candle was guttering down.
"Will you?" she repeated, occupied with the struggle to light a
second flame from the one that was drowning in its own melted
wax.

And then he became aware from the heaving of her shoulders
under his heavy coat that Crummie was crying--not audibly,
as she had done after shaking him, but silently. Having lit that
second candle, she seemed to be seized with a mania for lighting
candles, and went round the room doing it everywhere, but
keeping her face hid from him. She might just as well have
spared herself this illumination of her tragedy, for the tears were
still running down her cheeks when she turned round.

"I don't know why I'm doing this," she said. "It must be thank-
fulness because you're going to do what I've told you to do."
As she spoke she made an heroic effort to smile. For the beat
of a swallow's wing she could not compass it. Then she did;
and the smile which wavered up, lovely and tender, from the very
bottom of her soul, made her face, under the up-mounting flames
of all her candles, more beautiful than any face that Holy Sam
had ever seen.

On their way to Miss Drew's--and they traversed Magdalene
Street to its end and then followed Bere Lane to the Tithe Barn,
thus avoiding the town--Crummie talked to him unreservedly
about her father. "He is fonder of me," she said in a low voice,
when they reached the great mediaeval barn and paused con-
fronting it, than Mother thinks he ought to be. Mother never
has liked it. But I think nothing of it! I think it's silly to have
those ideas about it. I suppose I'm queer in things like that:
and so is Father, except when it worries Mother. I don't mind--
why should I mind?--his loving me so."

"The last time I talked to him," said Sam. "I thought he was
rather restless; but that may have been these communistic
ways of running the town."

"I've never told this to a living soul," said Crununie, "but
sometimes Father frightens me. Not with his petting and so on:
for I don't care tuppence about that. But once or twice lately
he's talked of death with such an extraordinary look on his
face! Almost always he talks of death when he's been petting
me, or has seemed especially fond of me, but not unhappily,
mind you! It's rather as if--it's so hard to put it, Mr. Sam!--as
if there were another me, someone like me, only of course much
more exciting, down there in Hades. I've seen his eyes, Mr. Sam
--and you know how dark they are!--shine like funnels of black
fire when he's been talking of death and holding me on his knee."

"Were you surprised that I should see the Holy Grail?" asked
Sam irrelevantly.

"I've thought you were seeing it all the time!" said Crummie
quickly.

He was looking at the strange apocalyptic creatures on the
barn now, and he thought to himself that there was something
about them that reminded him of Mr. Geard. In fact it was easy
for him to imagine that Mr. Geard's architect, after the Mayor
was dead, might carve a fifth evangelistic symbol for this new
Gospel. Sam even began to think of his own "Ichthus--the World-
Fish."

He left Crummie at Miss Drew's drive gate, and waited there
till he heard, by the sound of the opening and closing door, that
she was safely in the house. In the confused waves of the exul-
tant happiness which she, the "Crumb of the Loaf," as he had
called her, had given him, soaking up for him and interpreting
in practical terms the meaning of his Vision, Holy Sam had blun-
dered again more grossly, more unpardonably, than he had ever
done in his life. He had made a clumsy and awkward attempt to
kiss Crummie. The girl had turned her head away and he had
only brushed her cheek, but the contact of her flesh, at the en-
trance to that damp and dark shrubbery of the Abbey House,
chilled him to the bone, as if he had touched that other, that
Cimmerian Crummie, in the realms of Death, of whom her father
was so enamoured!

As he turned away and crossed the road to enter his father's
drive gate Sam had the wit to realize that he had acted grossly
in trying to kiss her. He had made the gesture in simple and
spontaneous gratitude. She knew that as well as he did. Why
then had she turned her head away? She turned it away so that
the great Love of her life, the secret Ideal of her girlhood, should
not kiss her on the lips before he went in to her rival. Would
she then have let him kiss her if there had been no question of
Nell; but only the fact between them that he did not love her?
Oh, still less so. Oh, far less so! For it might easily have been
that this matter of rivalry would have led her to snatch fiercely,
wickedly, maliciously, at his proferred kiss; but nothing would
have induced her to let him kiss her on the lips--she loving him
and he not loving her--if that malice of rivalry hadn't entered.
Crummie being what she was, it had not entered, and her lips
remained virginal. And yet she had been kissed full upon the
mouth, again and again, by many of the men who had been wont
to caress her.

Oh, deep beyond understanding is this curious secret! The
whole Being of the coldest, plainest, ugliest girl in the world re-
sembles a sensitive plant whereof her reluctant lips are the leaves.
Organised for receptivity by the whole structure, substance and
nerve-responses of her identity, the electric yieldingness of a
girl's body vibrates to the least pressure upon her mouth. Only
the craftiest and subtlest of lovers know the preciousness, the
tragic, unique, perilous preciousness, of that moment when, under
the pressure of a kiss, her lips are parted.

The two greatest Realists that have ever lived, those super-
human delvers into the crook of a knee, or the dimple of a
cheek, or the furrow of a brow, or the hollow of an eye-socket,
Dante and Leonardo da Vinci, were at one in finding in women's
lips the entelecheia of all Nature s sec retest designs. A man's
laugh--what a simple, nondescript "haw! haw! ho! ho!" that
sound is, half a lion's roar and half an ass's bray, compared
with the subtle waxing or waning, the broken ripple of the
moon's reflection upon flowing water, of a woman's smile! To
Dante a maid's smile meant the latitude of the least little span
of a thin eyelash between inexorable Acheron and the mystical
circles of the Empyrean; and to Leonardo the wavering begin-
ning of a girl's smile carried, folded within its calyx, the blue
veins of her thighs, the wild-rose tips of her nipples, the arch
of her instep, the silkiness of her flanks, the unfathomable reces-
sions of her final yielding to the pressure of desire.

Some shamefaced and scattered inkling of all this hovered
about Holy Sam's mind as he entered the familiar driveway of
his father's home. Oh, he had been brutally selfish in all this
whole business of his relations with the people of his life! But
he would change it all now. He would take this new happiness
of his and lavish it among them!

Sam hurriedly opened the front door of the Vicarage and
plunged at once, as a dog into the odour of a familiar kennel,
into the well-known smell of his birthplace. He heard the voices
of Penny and Mr. Weatherwax raised loudly in the kitchen and
he felt glad that some lively interest of their own had prevented
them from hearing his entrance. For a second he stood listening
and hesitating, "this way and that dividing the swift mind,"
unable to decide whether to go in to his father first, or run up
to Nell.

But it was to his girl and his child that he must betake himself
now; now and for the rest of his days! That was the mandate
of the Grail. That was the dictate of her, whose word, "'ee 'as
the fice of a sighnt," had started him on his quest. As lightly as
he could--'but he was a heavy man and the stairs creaked woe-
fully--he rushed to the upper landing. He found himself actually
forming upon his lips his cry to his Love, "I have come back
to you; back to you forever!" and, as people do, outside a door
that will reveal, in a second, a dear and familiar form, he
hugged her to his heart in his mind with the very cling of reality.
He knocked lightly twice--two little sharp, excited raps with
his knuckles--and then without waiting for a reply flung open
the door.

All was darkness. Faintly between the dark undrawn curtains
he could see the dim shapes of the trees outside, outlined against
a few pale stars. Empty was the great four-posted bed of the
Prince of Orange; cold and desolate in the deserted room.

"Nell, little Nell!" His voice came back to him like the voice
of someone who speaks in a place of the dead. With the first
sickening catch of his heart he thought to himself: "She's taken
him down to supper with Father!" Leaving the door of the big
empty room wide open, he rushed out upon the landing and
ran down the stairs. He opened the dining-room door. Pallid in
the darkness shone the white tablecloth, laid for their evening
meal. It made him think of a cloth upon an altar when they have
put out the candles.

Instinctively delaying--because of something ice-cold gather-
ing about his heart--his plunge into the museum, he opened the
drawing-room door. Doors, doors, doors, always doors--and only
emptiness within! With the musty smell of the fireless drawing-
room--that room where he had held Nell to his heart on the
morning he'd decided to go away--there smote upon his strung-
up consciousness a sharp quick death-odour, the sense of the dy-
ing-woman's body from which Dr. Fell had torn him into this
bitter life, twenty-six years ago!

Well! He must make the plunge. Hearing still tne voices of
Penny and the gardener from the rear of the house and the noise
of chairs being pushed violently about--"They're both drunk,"
he thought--he opened the museum door and went in. The lamp
was untrimmed and smoking. The place seemed foul with lamp-
soot; but this room at any rate was not empty! In his accus-
tomed wicker chair sat his father. But to the son's surprise, for
Sam had never known him do such a thing before. Mat Dekker
had pulled his chair close up to the fire; and he was in the act,
apparently, of making the brightest blaze he could; for his
big hands were fumbling at the grate, and the flames were rising
high from the wood he had been piling on, and it looked as if,
now that his great solar enemy had done his worst to him, he
were making a lonely, sullen, Promethean gesture in defiance of
all these cruel gods.

Sam closed the door behind him. For the first time in his life
he did not give even a glance at the aquarium. "What is it,
Father? Where is she? What has happened?" But even while
he was asking these questions his heart knew perfectly well; for
he remembered what Angela had told him and he recalled that
letter with the foreign stamp.

Mat Dekker raised his head from the flames which were throw-
ing all the indents and wrinkles and corrugations of his ruddy
face into startling prominence. He spoke no word however. All
he did was to make a gesture with his hand towards the table.

Sam went to the table and turned down the smoking lamp.
There, between the lamp and the aquarium, lay a folded scrap
of paper, with "For Sam" written on it in pencil. He read it,
standing by the lamp, while his father went on selecting the most
inflammable bits of wood from the wood-box, at each increase
in the heat of the blaze giving his chair a jerk still nearer. The
pencilled scrawl was of some length, but it was evidently traced
in a great hurry. Nell's hand, however, was so schoolgirlish that
Sam had no difficulty in making out the words:

Sam, my darling Sam, I shall always love you best of all.
Whatever happens to me, whatever anyone says or does, you'll
always be my one Great Love. But he came and made me go back
with him. She's been gone a long time--gone to Russia, he says.
He doesn't like her any more. Will and I spoke freely of every-
thing before I would let him take me away. He says he always
knew the child was yours, but he says he loves it for my sake
and always will. This is true, Sam; and I think baby loves him
more than either his father or mother! Will has no anger against
you and I've forgiven him about her. Oh, Sam, never, never,
never will I forget you. Later [she had crossed out the word
"later" and written "soon"] we must see each other again.
We've got used to seeing each other in your way, haven't we?
But Will was so unhappy, Sam. He said he'd go to Africa if I
didn't come back. I was sad and your father was making himself
miserable about us; so I know it's the best thing. You'll come
back now, Sam, won't you, now that I'm gone, and live with him
again? My arms are tight round my Sam's neck and always
will be.

Your Nell.

P.S. I hadn't time to tidy up my room. Oh, Sam I can't help it.
But I love you, I love you!

He folded the letter up and stood motionless for a while, star-
ing at the aquarium, but seeing nothing except Nell's face. Then
he moved across to his father and laid his hand on his shoulder.

The older man turned round fiercely upon him, and Sam never
forgot the gleam of anger--blind, bewildered, tragic anger--in
his deep-set grey eyes. "Go!" he cried hoarsely. "Get out of here!
Go back to your clay-hauling. When I want your pity, I'll send
for you!" It was clear that the man's whole mind was completely
obsessed at present by his own frustrated passion. His emotions
had smouldered and smouldered till they had become like a lump
of darkly burning peat, self-scorched, self-fed, self-consumed.

Sam sighed heavily and went to the door. He still held Nell's
letter tightly crumpled up in his hand. "Don't set the chimney
on fire, Father!" he called back as he went out. He walked down
the long dark passage and went into the kitchen. Here there
were many signs of some recent riotous scene but the two old
cronies were at peace again, facing each other by the stove, each
with a bowl of the famous "gorlas" on their knees. They were
too fuddled to rise from their chairs at Sam's entrance.

"Why, Penny," he said, "I thought you never drank with Mr.
Weatherwax."

"Her baint drinking wi' I. Her be hearing I zing me zongs,"
and the enormous countenance of the gardener, radiant with
tipsy contentment, burst into his favorite ditty:

"The Miller, the Malster, the Devil and I
Had a heifer, had a filly, had a Ding-Dong,
But now in a grassy green glade she do lie.
Pass along, boys! Pass along!"

But Penny Pitches looked dreamily from one to the other.
"Best for 'un to zing," she muttered brokenly. "Let 'un zing,
Master Sam, let us all zing and ding! I'd 'a never drunk wi'
he if thik bare-faced baggage hadn't called I names to me
veace when I gave she a piece o' me mind. Yes. you may work
your chin at me as much as thee likes, me lad! Herve gone back
where her hasn't to sleep single no more. They baggages be all
the seame! Master Zoyland had only to ring bell and call "Nell,"
and up she picks her baby, and pop goes the weasel! I did me
best for to hold she for 'ee, Mr. Sam; but her only called I
names, and Master Zoyland curst I for a wold bitch.

Seeing that there was nothing better than this to be got tonight
out of his foster-mother; and too sick at the heart to be able to
endure another stave of "Ding-Dong," Sam wearily went on his
way. Slowly, very slowly, as he returned through the crowded
Sunday-night streets to Manor House Road, past the calm, fa-
miliar tower of St. John's, the influence of his Vision came back
a little; and he had regained enough acquiescence in the decree
of destiny by the time he reached his top floor, to receive a cer-
tain homely comfort from the wild extravagant pleasure with
which the black spaniel, emerging from beneath his bed, leaped
up to lick his hands.

His conscious mind was sad, even to the verge of a sort of
inert despair, from this loss of Nell at the very moment when he
was ready to live with her; but, below his conscious mind, stir-
ring still in the depths of his being, was the feeling: "I can
endure whatever fate can do to me, for I have seen the Grail!



THE IRON BAR



It was now the end of February. The newspapers all over
England had contained startling headlines for the last week
about the Glastonbury commune, most of them calling upon the
government to put a stop--by some drastic action--to this scan-
dalous interference with the rights of private property. Nothing,
however, was done except what was done by Philip Crow to pro-
tect the building of his new cement road leading down from
Wookey Hole and his new steel bridge over the Brue on the south
side of Lake Village Field; and Philip's action was confined to
the introduction of police protection.

There had been so many disputes that year all over the country
between town councils and local land-owners that it was difficult
for Philip to make the authorities realise that this sudden trans-
forming of Glastonbury into one single co-operative polity was
anything more than what the chief of the Taunton police called
"another of them sky-larking council tricks."

The government probably would have interfered all the same
--for unemployment in all the big neighbouring towns, such as
Bristol and Cardiff, was acute just then, and there was a danger-
ous restlessness throughout the country--if it had not been that
the really important fortress of private property, namely the
Glastonbury bank, remained untouched by this socialistic
experiment.

On the twenty-third of February Mr. Evans came down to his
shop in the High Street, in exceptional good spirits. The day was
one of unusually delicate atmospheric effects. Grey upon grey
abounded, with occasional fragments of what looked almost like
mother-of-pearl as the ditch-mists were blown here and there over
walled courts and mossy lawns while the sun struggled with the
clouds.

"I have got an exciting bit of news for you when you come
back, Owen," Cordelia had said to him at the door of their little
house as he set off, "but I'll keep it for tea! Only be sure and
don't be later than five, will you?"

"No, no, I'll be back by five, si fractus inlabatur orbis! I'll be
back, Cordy, I swear it," he had replied.

As he hurried down the long, sloping road, flanked by work-
men's houses, the black tails of his tight-waisted overcoat flap-
ping like the feathers of an excited jackdaw heading against the
wind, he wondered to himself what Cordy 's news was. "Some-
thing to do with her father," he thought to himself, "Perhaps he's
found he's richer than he supposed, after counting up his ex-
penses." When he got to the town he met Finn Toller slouching
into Dickery Cantle's tavern. Several encounters of late had Mr.
Evans had with Codfin since a certain momentous meeting, a few
days after the sheepfold incident, when he had actually chal-
lenged the man about his singular encounter with Mad Bet.

Codfin from the start had detected with that extraordinary
clairvoyance which imbeciles share with children, that Mr. Evans
had a morbid interest in physical violence; not even excluding
murder. He felt too that he was absolutely free from any danger
that the "curiosity man"--as he called him to his colleagues--
would ever betray him to the authorities. "He be a funny one, his
wone self," he would say to his friends in the tap-room at Can-
tie's where all the poorest and shabbiest of Glastonbury's dere-
licts were wont to gather.

"I...be...going...to do it...tonight...Mister," Codfin whispered to him
now, with his hand on the tavern door-handle. The blinds of the
place were down. By the law of England it was closed. By the
connivance of the Mayor of Glastonbury people could enter and
be served all the morning from the best cellar in Wessex.

"I can't hear you, man. I'm deaf this morning, deaf as an iron
bar," said Mr. Evans, giving him a look like that of a malevolent
executioner. "If you do anything--anything really, you know,
I'll come and stop it! You understand that I suppose? I'll come,
wherever you are, for I can always find you, and put a stop to it.

He spoke in a threatening tone and laid his hand with a vicious
grip upon Finn Toller's left arm just above the elbow. Codfin,
whose right hand was still on the handle of the tap-room, showed
not the slightest sign of nervousness.

"Tonight will be the time, Mister, then," he said slowly, "for thee
to come and put a stop to it; and I'll be here all morning, 'sknow,
if thee wants to come and hear where thee'd best come to stop
it; and maybe hear too when thee'd best come to stop it. There's
nothink like being in the know, pard; for then a fellow can please
his own self. If so be as thee does drop in ere the mornin's over,
maybe thee'll have a sip of beer wi' I, to christen this pretty day,
'sknow? afore thee comes up hill to see what must be stopped."

The man's straw-coloured beard wagged as he spoke and his
pale eyes swam with an unholy amusement. Every word he uttered
seemed to carry a double meaning, seemed loaded with hints that
his leering eyes completed and confirmed. His weak subhuman
intelligence seemed to wriggle into the interstices of Mr. Evans'
wickedest and secretest thoughts and snuggle and nuzzle and
nestle there, as if Mr. Evans' thoughts were the nipples of the
many-breasted Diana of the Ephesians.

This encounter between the two men was indeed the culmina-
tion of several furtive meetings, in all of which there had been,
below the surface of what audibly passed between them, a word-
less conspiracy of understanding, mounting higher and higher;
just as if their under-consciousness--the worm-snakes within them
-- had learned the art of an obscene intertwining. Codfin had
quickly discovered that his own homicidal instinct, in which the
mental image of the iron bar played so lively a part, was re-
sponded to by something darker and far more evil, as it was far
less simple, in Mr. Evans' nature.

Once he had touched the fringe of this dark knowledge, the
tramp was led on--for all his imbecility--to play most subtly
upon this obscure chord, recognising that the accident of the
sheepfold had helped him to acquire a definite power over this
queer "curiosity gent" who took such an interest in talking to
him. A potential murderer, going about among supposedly nor-
mal people, acts as a perambulating magnet, drawing to himself
a cloud of curious tokens; such an one's recklessness in regard to
the upshot--the police, the jail, the judge, the gibbet--endows
him with the same sort of power over less desperate minds that
an Alpine guide, immune to dizziness, acquires over the would-be
summit climbers whose faltering steps he supports with his rope.

Codfin had already tasted--in his crafty imbecile manner--
this sharp, delicious arctic breath of unexpected power, in his
talk with Red Robinson in Mrs. Chinnoek's parlor. Robinson,
however, had escaped him completely; thereby indicating that
emotional 'ate as an urge to crime, cannot compete with the
worm-snake of the sexual nerve.

"Well! I've got to get on now," said Mr. Evans. "Good-dav to
'ee. Toller! We mustn't carry our joking too far."

"Joking?" thought the tramp as he went in. "That's just the
way you would talk, my fine gent!" He sighed heavily as he
shambled up to the bar counter behind which young Elphin was
standing. "If you'd a-heard Mad Bet tell I last night what she'd
do to I, if I didn't kill her beau quick, you wouldna' talk about
joking!"

As soon as Mr. Evans turned the corner by the Cattle Market,
he saw before him, about three hundred yards away, the familiar
figure of Miss Elizabeth Crow, seated on a wooden bench just
outside a seldom-used cattlepen.

Over the empty enclosures behind her, where the animals
formerly were tethered, over the wooden posts and the asphalt
paving, over bits of stray nondescript paper blown in there be-
tween the iron railings of the bench where she was sitting, the
flickering misty sunlight fell with the same caressing benediction
as it would have carried had it fallen upon the dancing waves of
Weymouth Bay or upon the mossy stones of Mark Court.

Miss Crow was holding a closed umbrella in her hand, with
the ferule of which she was scrawling vague meaningless marks
in the trodden mud at her feet. She was pondering upon an
interview she had had that morning, as soon as his clinic opened,
with Dr. Fell, and wondering why it was that doctors never come
right out with what they know of their patient's case. "Why
didn't he say in plain words," she thought, "'your heart is dan-
gerously affected? Those symptoms you have are an indelible
sign that you might go off at any moment. The best thing you
can do will be to go to bed as soon as you get home and stay
there.' " She had indeed known herself for the last three months
that her heart was getting worse and this morning's interview,
though Fell had been so cautious, was the convincing blow. She
had read the good man's conclusions, shrewd old woman as she
was, like a book; and if he had said to her, "You've only three
weeks more to live," she could not have received her sentence
more definitely than she did from his evasive humming and
hawing.

The chief effect upon Elizabeth's mind was to render her en-
joyment of the air and the wind of this day more vivid and in-
tense than she could have believed possible. It was as if this
verdict condemning her to death had taken away a thin screen
between herself and life.

There was a little leafless poplar tree not far from her bench
with the bark rubbed off its northern side, the side facing the
cattlepens and some dried dogs' excrement fouling its roots on
the side facing the street. In the bare branches of this tree chat-
tered and wrangled half a dozen sparrows and upon its trunk,
out of reach of cattle or dogs, some tall wastrel had cut with a
knife the initials of himself and his girl.

The way the broken misty light fell upon this little tree gave
it that special quality of magic that familiar objects often receive,
whether there is any human eye to see it or not, under certain
effects of the atmosphere.

Elizabeth Crow's feelings were ebbing and flowing just then
between a faint, cold, shuddering recoil from the shock of death
--it was when she felt this recoil that she made those meaningless
marks in the mud with her umbrella--and an intense, lingering,
melting, weeping delight in the smallest familiar earth-objects.
It was the sight of this poplar tree with its rubbed and disfigured
bark and with certain enchanting and almost mystical shadows on
some of its branches, as they wavered in the light breeze, which
transported her then and thrilled her through and through with
a tearful rapture at being still alive.

Mr. Evans took only about two minutes to reach her from the
moment when he first came round the corner; but during those
two minutes Miss Crow had experienced the eternal alternations,
the great antipodal feelings of human experience, the shudder of
death and "the pleasure which there is in life itself!" And she
was a woman to miss little, though she kept her own counsel of
these experiences!

She thought to herself: ‘There's that man Evans coming! I'll
get him to send me that St. Augustine Sam talked about; and I'll
give it to Mat. I can afford that now!'' How fast the mind moves
from margin to margin of these opposite feelings! Mr. Evans was
rapidly coming to a point within hearing; and if she wanted to
speak to him about St. Augustine she would have to stop him;
and yet behind Mr. Evans' approaching figure and behind the
image of that expensive book, and even behind the image of Mat
Dekker's pleasure in the book, that cold, shuddering recoil still
possessed her, and that magical light flickering on the poplar
tree still possessed her.

The invisible watchers--those scientific collectors of interest-
ing human experiences in this ancient town--communicated to
one another the conclusion that certain essences and revelations
are caught and appropriated by an old maiden lady, like Miss
Crow, which are never touched by turbulent, tormented lives like
those of Mr. Evans and Codfin.

How could Mr. Evans, now lifting his hat to greet this digni-
fied figure of voluminous skirts and flounced bosom, become a
medium for these calm platonic essences? What could Codfin,
who was risking the hangman's rope for the sake of the mania of
a madwoman, know of the deep natural shrinking of a normal
heart in the presence of death, or of its rapturous awareness of
the enchantment of what it is leaving?

Miss Crow had arranged to meet Lady Rachel and Athling for
lunch at the Pilgrims' that day. She was a little nervous in her
heart of hearts about this encounter, because in her growing dis-
approval--shared it may well be imagined by the girl's father--
of the intimacy in which the lovers now seemed to be living, she
had of late avoided seeing Ned Athling. Rachel still officially
lived with her; but there had been whole nights when the girl
had remained working, so she declared, in the offices of the
Wayfarer; and gossip had already begun to speak on the pro-
longed visits she paid to the bachelor attic which the young editor
had furnished for himself above these offices.

Lord P. had had recently several grave and diplomatic talks
with Miss Crow as to what measures they could take to stop the
outbreak of a serious scandal; but neither she nor he had yet
dared to risk any drastic ultimatum to the wilful girl for fear of
precipitating the very disaster they dreaded.

"I shan't stay long after lunch," Miss Crow thought, as she
responded to the salute of Mr. Evans, "and I won't go to their
printing-place with them today. I'll get them to leave me free for
the afternoon; and I'll go to Wirral Hill, if I'm not too exhausted,
and sit on that seat where Mat and I used to sit thirty years ago."

She beckoned now to Mr. Evans and he came up to where she
was and stood in front of her. There was something about Miss
Crow--her Devereux mother perhaps--that commanded more
respect from the Glastonbury tradesmen than any other person
in the town.

Mr. Evans, though certainly not a tradesman, was not insensi-
ble to this quality, and he stood awkwardly now, but quite defer-
entially, waiting what she had to say.

"You've got rather an expensive edition of St. Augustine
among your books, haven't you, Mr. Evans?" she said quietly.

"Yes, Mam," admitted Number Two's partner, "the best on
the market."

It is an old and bitter experience of the human race that when
once a gulf-stream of a particular evil has got started, it is always
being whipped forward by some new little breeze, or enlarged by
some new little stream emptying itself into it. A magnetic power,
it seems, in such a gulf-stream of evil, attracts these casual and
accidental encouragements.

Why, of all things, should Mr. Evans have been reminded of
their collection of books at that juncture, and why, of all their
books, of the particular one that was neighbour to "The Unpar-
donable Sin"?

"I think, if your partner has not sold it yet," said Miss Crow,
"I'd like to have that book."

"I'll put it aside for you, Mam," murmured Mr. Evans. "It is
expensive, I'm afraid, but if--"

"I'll be extravagant for once," cried the lady with a smile. "So
I think you can send it today if you've got anyone to send. You
know my number in Benedict Street?"

Mr. Evans bowed. Everyone knew Miss Crow's number. Hadn't
it been the chief topic of the town when she left her nephew's
establishment and went to live in a workman's cottage?

"I hope Mrs. Evans is well?" enquired the lady.

This simple question caused the brain of the hook-nosed
man, bending towards her, to whirl up in an angry revolt against
the smoothed-out pigeonhole of public propriety in which a mar-
ried tradesman lived. It rose to the tip of his tongue, in his
nervous state, to ask this quiet embodiment of conventional dig-
nity some outrageous question in return; such as "How does your
Tossie feel, married to Mr. Barter?" or "How will you manage
about the way Lady Rachel is carrying on with young Athling?"

"Very well, Mam, thank you," he replied. And then he even
took upon himself to add, "We've got a house that's quite easy
for her to look after."

Miss Crow smiled. "I'm glad to hear that. It's a mistake for
young married women to be overworked." She made a little
movement then with the handle of her umbrella to signify that
she had no further need for Mr. Evans' society.

The Welshman straightened his back, bowed to her in a man-
ner that even Mrs. Geard could not have felt disgraced the House
of Rhys, and went off, settling his hat upon his head as he went
in little angry jerks and vowing that he would not remove it
again till he reached his destination.

He was hardly gone--for Miss Crow had selected a very public
place for her matutinal rest--than Comrade Trent, as the
populace in their mocking rustic humour always called him, came
softly and airily by. Miss Elizabeth only just knew Paul Trent
"to speak to," as they say, and she was cordially prejudiced
against the man. She had long ago put down, in her heart, this
whole wretched business of the new regime to this alien from the
Scilly Isles.

It was clearly he who had devised the scheme of buying the
leases and the ground-rents from the lord of the manor and
doling out, in this pauperising manner, all that the visitors
brought in among the town's poor. Neither honest Dave, nor that
hot-headed agitator Robinson, and certainly not Mr. Geard with
his fancies, would have had the wit to plot such a daring move.
Miss Elizabeth had scant admiration for her nephew Philip, but
she felt sorry for him and even sympathetic with him, when she
beheld this affected, sly, young lawyer prancing about the town
as if he were the master of all. In the relations between human
beings it is always natural to attribute the grossest selfish mo-
tives to the people we instinctively dislike.

Of the real Paul Trent, who inherited from his mother an
idealism passionate as that of the poet Shelley, and who would
have perished willingly on a barricade if he could have started
an anarchistic revolution, Miss Crow knew absolutely nothing.

"Good morning, Miss Crow," said Paul Trent, "enjoying this
beautiful weather?"

"Au contraire, Mr. Trent, I'm doing my accounts! Before
plunging into Wollop's, you know, a woman has to think out
what she can afford without ruining herself. I always slip off, in
the middle of my shopping day, to do a little solitary thinking."

This allusion to Wollop's was a covert feminine taunt at this
arrogant young man; for it was well known in the town that Mr.
Wollop owned his shop and the ground it stood on in fee simple.
Wollop's, like the Glastonbury bank, remained an obstinate is-
land of capitalism in a socialistic lake.

"What a treasure your Mr. Wollop is!" murmured Paul Trent;
and taking advantage of this faint crack in the ice--like a cat
rubbing itself against the knees of someone who hates cats--he
proceeded to slip down into the seat at her side. "How do you
like our new Glastonbury constitution?" he asked her in an
airy tone.

"I don't meddle with politics, Sir," she replied; and the way
she moved away from him as she spoke seemed to add: "And
I can't abide politicians!"

"I agree with you entirely," he said; and then, to Miss Crow's
horror, he pulled up one of his soft neatly socked legs upon the
seat between them and slipped his arm along the back of the
bench.

"I'll get up the minute my heart stops thumping," the lady
thought. "What does this objectionable young man want with
me?"

"A woman like you, Miss Crow," he went on, with what she
thought was pure impertinence, "can understand better what I
am doing in Glastonbury than the most intelligent man could."

Miss Crow tapped the ground with her umbrella. Then she
produced a clicking noise between her tongue and her teeth; and
having expressed with these physical movements her disapproval
of Paul Trent, she made her mock-modest retort to his ambiguous
compliment by uttering the syllables "Tut- tut-tut!" But her in-
sidious invader only pulled his rounded feminine knee and his
neatly trousered calf a little further along the seat of the bench
and slid his delicately moulded hand an inch nearer along its
back, till the scrupulously clean nail of his little finger was
within the length of a sparrow's beak of Miss Crow's jacket col-
lar. These outward gestures, which gave his companion a tickling
sensation down her spine, were methods of approach inherited
from his father, a Cornishman who had the suavity of some old
Phoenician trader; but below all this there stirred in Paul Trent
an intense idealistic longing, inherited from his mother, to con-
vert Miss Crow to his revolutionary ideas.

"I'm very serious, lady," he said. "You mustn't get cross with
me. There really aren't so many women one can talk to in Glas-
tonbury. Most of my thoughts are entirely wasted on these
people."

"This nice, unusual day seems to make you moralise, Mr.
Trent, just as it makes me sit in the sun and wonder about
my bills."

"What I've found out is," he went on eagerly, quite oblivious
of this snub, "that none of these people, that you quite properly
call politicians, Miss Crow, know what liberty is. The capitalists
take liberty away from us in the name of liberty, which, under
them, means liberty to work like a slave, or, to starve. But your
relative Mr. Spear isn't much better! He takes liberty away from
the individual in the name of the community. So there you are,
you see! I am probably the only man in Glastonbury who fights
for real liberty---which means, of course, a voluntary association
of free spirits to enjoy the ideal life--but women understand
these things much better. It was my mother who--"

Miss Crow looked at him with surprise. There had stolen into
his affectedly genteel intonation a vibration of such authentic
emotion that it startled her. She didn't repeat that clicking of her
tongue. She allowed her umbrella to lie still, its handle between
her knees. She forgot the sinister palpitations of her heart.

"Your mother who?"

"Who taught me what liberty really meant. Who made me an
anarchist, lady!"

"But you don't mean to say--"

"Stop, Miss Crow! I know what's coming! You're going to
talk about throwing bombs and killing innocent people. No, no.
My mother didn't teach me how to throw bombs. What she taught
me was--what every woman knows in her heart!--that all these
man-made institutions only get in the way of real life and have
nothing to do with it. It's the policeman in our minds. Miss Crow,
that stops us all from being ourselves and letting other people
be themselves."

He stopped to take breath and found that he was gesticulating
furiously with his free hand right in front of Miss Crow's face,
and that Miss Crow had shut her eyes tight, as if she were in the
process of being shampooed, and that in his eagerness he actually
had emitted a small globule of white sputum which now adhered
to the black frill of Miss Crow's maternal but maidenly bosom.

Around this anarchistic spittle, a minute yellowish fly, at-
tracted by the smell of humanity and dreaming perhaps that one
of the old-fcshioned Glastonbury markets was about to com-
mence, hovered with pulsing and heaving desire.

Paul Trent drew out his elegant pocket-handkerchief from his
breast-pocket, and therewith wiped his forehead. Then he hesi-
tated for a minute. He would dearly have liked to have wiped
away that little bubble from his too voluble mouth which still
adhered in annoying prominence to the lady's bosom, but he
simply had not the courage to attempt such a deed. It is easier to
defy society than to outrage a small propriety; and the man
from what Malory calls the country of the Surluse, and what Sir
John Rhys calls the Sorlingues, or Les Isles Lolntaines, replaced
his dainty handkerchief in his breast-pocket and sank back in his
place, with an inward sigh and an outward smile. No good!" he
thought to himself, and a wave of bitter futility swept over him.

During the last four or five weeks he had come to feel as hos-
tile to Glastonbury as any one of the Crows had ever felt. He
would have hated the town as much as Tom Barter did, if it had
not been for this unique chance of giving an anarchical twist to
the policies of the tiny commune. But he had encountered dis-
illusionment after disillusionment.

Simple and direct as Dave Spear's methods were compared
with his, the young Communist defeated him every time their
ideas clashed. The cause of this was obvious. Dave had a clear-
cut set of adamantine principles, which he combined with a prac-
tical and even unscrupulous opportunism that was a perpetual
surprise to everyone.

Thus when the dictators of this microscopic slate came to log-
gerheads, it was always the Anarchist whose principles were
vague and his practice unbending, who was forced to yield;
while the Communist, whose principles were crystal-clear and
his practice malleable and flexible, carried the point. Had Paul
TrenL been more sympathetic to the Mayor's mysticism he might
have won Mr. Ceard over to his view. Had he been more personal
in his destructiveness, he might have propitiated the emotional
Red and plotted with his help some catastrophic blow to Philip's
dye works, or tin mine, or bridge, or road, these wedges of cap-
italism in this co-operative community; but the truth was that
Paul Trent, like the poet Shelley, was far too ideal in his in-
stincts for his instincts to prevail; and in a world where liberty
and independence and sweet reasonableness are forced to yield
to fanaticism and dominating faith, his curious double nature,
wherein his mother's masculine soul concealed in his father's
effeminate body, divided his energy and confused his purpose, it
was easier for him to outwit the Marquis of P. than to turn Glas-
tonbury into a voluntary association of free philosophers. As he
now jumped up from Miss Crow's side, made his courtly Cartha-
ginian obeisance and cleared off, directing his steps towards the
central offices of the commune, which were in the upper floors of
the Abbot's Tribunal, he said to himself that his real difficulty
was with the wayward and emotional nature of the Glastonbury
natives themselves. "And it's the same," he thought, "with Spear
and old Geard; yes! and even with the double-dyed fool
Robinson.

"Our little society can deal easily enough with these pilgrims
and visitors. We can grow rich upon them; and we can make
them obey our rules or keep them out by our requisitions. It's the
natives who'll break this thing up, when it is broken up; and
I don't give it more than a couple of years, at the best! Yes, it's
the natives who'll ruin the whole thing!"

Thus he pondered ; and to the same tune and to the same moan
had Avallach and Arthur, Alfred and Edmund, Dunstan and
Edgar, Whiting and Monmouth, yes, and Mr. Recorder King! all
pondered in their day and in their hour.

He paused for a moment at the gate of the Tribunal, just as
Mary Crow had once done and gazed with a sad, disenchanted
eye upon that beautiful late-gothic facade.

"Does it need a brute like Judge Jeffreys," he thought, "or does
it need a saint like St. Joseph, or like this crazy Sam Dekker,
to deal with these Glastonbury autochthones? Old Geard can
handle them when he wants to; but he never seems to want to.
God knows where that old charlatan's mind is carrying him now.
Not to the building up of any possible community that I can
visualise ! "

His hand was upon the handle of the Tribunal's main entrance
when two little girls--one of them carrying a sturdy child in her
arms--passed close by him.

"Bert can say 'Glastonbury be a commune,' Bert can; just like
teacher tells we to," said the little girl who was carrying the
child.

"C...0...M...com--U...N...E...oon...commoon!" murmured Bert
proudly, from the arms of a still prouder Sis.

But Morgan Nelly, as usual, dashed this simple glory into a
thousand melancholy pieces, to be carried away on an obscure
wind. "Glaston baint no such thing," she cried in her shrill,
mocking elf-voice. "Glaston be a person, like I be, and persons
can't be spelt by no teacher, nor taught by no teacher. 'Twere
Mad Bet who told I that Glaston were a person and I arst Holy
Sam if such 'un were, and 'a said, ‘Sure-lie, girlie, sure-lie. Glas-
ton be the 'Ooman of Sorrows what holds Christ in lap!' The
children passed on, out of the gloomy triumvir's hearing; but,
though anything save superstitious, the young lawyer from Les
Isles Lointaines found it hard not to regard Morgan Nelly's curi-
ous remark as a significant omen. He gazed down the street at
the massive, pinnacled tower of St. John's. It was certainly a
peculiar day for lights and shadows! A soft, elusive, fluctuating
radiance that seemed contained within a delicate sub-aqueous
vapour, at once faintly rose-tinged and faintly greenish, hovered
like the submerged lamp of a drowned ship, over the roofs and
masonry of the ancient town.

Glastonbury a person? Well, perhaps, after all, that was the
solution of their troubles! These old, obstinate, irrational indi-
genes of the place understood this wayward and mysterious Per-
sonality better than any philosophical triumvirate could do, and
had expressed their feeling through the mouth of this wild-
eyed child!

But if this was the solution, was not he, the man from Malory s
Surluse, nearer to the secret than the rest? Or was it, after all,
a mistake to make even the wilfulness and the irrationality of
Persons into a principle and a doctrine? Was old Geard, in the
long run, the one who was the wisest of them all; he for whom
all these exciting events were only half-real, the dreams of an
absent-minded Wayfarer, "drunk upon the milk" of an unseen
Paradise?

The young Anarchist found it difficult to break up this inde-
finable spell into which Morgan Nelly's casual words had flung
him.

He knew so well the trim, prim, fussily orderly look of the
communal offices above his head where the depersonalised mind
of his colleague Dave dominated the very typing macmnes and
the very postage stamps; making everything seem like those scis-
sored patterns in paper, from which patient seamstresses cut
their garments! Why was it that the real reality of life always
struck a person sideways and incidentally, and seemed just the
very thing that no one allowed for?

What Paul Trent felt just then was a dim suspicion that if
everybody in Glastonbury--these difficult natives as well as these
easy visitors--were only to stop doing anything at all, just stop
and listen, just stop and grow porous, something far more im-
portant than a "Voluntary Association of Free Spirits" would
reveal itself!

A feeling stole over him as if all the way down its long history
Glastonbury, the Feminine Person, like Mary at the feet of the
Master, had been waiting for the fuss to cease, for the voices to
subside, for the dust to sink down.

As when a boy catches upon the face of a girl, as when a man
catches upon the face of a woman, that unique feminine look
which forever is waiting, watching, listening, dreaming, in a
trance of mindless passivity for something that never quite
comes, so Paul Trent felt himself now to be watching the Glas-
tonbury atmosphere, on this day of such strange lights and
shadows.

Could it be possible that the secret of ecstatic human happiness
only arrived, when all outward machinery of life was suspended,
all practical activity held in abeyance? Man must live, of course,
and children must be born of women; but was there not some-
thing else, something more important than any conceivable or-
ganisation for these great necessary ends?

A doubt came into Paul Trent's mind, different from any he
had ever felt, as to whether his inmost ideal--this thing that cor-
responded to the word liberty--was enough to live by. Wasn't it
only the gap, the space, the vacuum, the hollow and empty no-
man's land, into which the fleeting nameless essence could flow
and abide? He felt as if he were on the edge of some thrilling
secret, as this thought, this doubt, touched him with its breath.
It was as if all the moments of dark, cool, lovely, quiet empti-
ness that had come to the generations of men living in Glaston-
bury, had incarnated themselves in this Feminine Emanation of
the place, which now seemed brushing him with its overshadow-
ing wings.

Comrade Spear wanted to "liquidate" the Grail Quest on be-
half of Communism, Red Robinson wanted to destroy it because
of the treacheries and oppressions it had condoned. He himself
had wanted to shake it off, as a morbid, mediaeval superstition,
hurtful to free spirits, like a clammy miasma! And all this while
Old Geard was working his miracles by its aid; but casually,
carelessly, almost indifferently; as if he had discovered that the
whole Grail Quest were a mere by-product of some vast planet-
ary reservoir of an unknown force.

Oh, dear! His thoughts had become too analytical, too con-
crete; and his good moment was gone. With a shrug of his shoul-
ders he turned the handle, entered the Tribunal, and ran upstairs
to the orderly rooms from which Glastonbury was now ruled.


When Mr. Evans arrived at his shop after his interview with
Miss Crow by the railings of the Cattle Market he found his part-
ner, Mr. Jones, extremely excited by the quantity of foreigners
there were that day in the town, and bent upon devoting the
whole day to a lively concentration upon their business.

"I know better than thee can know what these Continentals re-
quire, seeing as I've lived in Glaston afore thee was born," per-
sisted the old man, "and the best thing thee can do is to bring up
a pile of they books out of basement and put 'em in windy. Them
Germans and Rooshians be more for books than they be for
bricky-brack."

Mr. Evans struggled out of his tight overcoat, making porten-
tous grimaces as he pulled at its sleeves, hung it up on a nail at
the back of the shop and rubbing his face with both his hands,
prepared to do what his partner bade him. He had taken good
care since his marriage to avoid that descent into his Avernus but
the human mind is so constructed that when he received this
point-blank push from his business confederate, a hundred rea-
sons sprang up like a hundred sly lawyers, each of them full
of subtle arguments why he should do what the old man bade
him to do. This was the third little breeze that had helped for-
ward that day his gulf-stream of evil!

His high spirits that morning had been largely due to the fact
that he had just arrived, in his Life of Merlin, at the beginning of
the final scene where the Magician passes into that state of
Being hinted at in the mysterious word Esplumeoir.

Mr. Evans had been writing, of late, every evening in their
small sitting-room in the Edmund's Hill district above Bove
Town. He would sit on a little chair that creaked under his bony
figure in front of a flimsy table, covered wilh publications of
various antiquarian and folklore societies, and as he stared at
a cheap coloured print in a variegated frame, of a river and a
boat and a woman reading--a print that took the heart out of all
rivers and all boats and all women!--he would give himself up
lo the exquisite and sweet pain of weighing every word he was
writing, changing it, re-setting it, substituting another, replacing
the first, till the particular sort of rhythm he aimed at had at last
been caught.

A boat...a river...a woman reading...this incredibly feeble production,
in which the blotchy frame and the sentimental picture seemed
to melt into each other till they became a weak blur of meaning-
less twists and curves, had grown to be so dear, so sweet, so
familiar to Mr. Evans, whose aesthetic taste was nil, that it not
only reminded him of a picture in his parents' farm but it also as-
sociated itself with the word Esplumeoir. It was under the spell
of this entirely worthless, but to him almost sacred object that
Mr. Evans was now considering and weighing in his mind two sim-
ple sentences: "And so in the wet vapour that hung in woeful
water-drops upon his beard he bowed himself down and stooped
right low over the rain-soaked earth where yesterday had been
the drawbridge of Caer Sidi. The Dolorous Blow had fallen: the
Spear of Longinus had done its work; where was he now to hide
his forehead and cover his eyelids, who knew too well the causes
of all these happenings; their echoes, their ripples, their waxing
and waning moons?"

Pleased with the way these paragraphs sounded in his mind
and finding in his broodings over the word Esplumeoir a strange
vibration of peace, Mr. Evans had emerged from his threshold
that morning,--but now all was different. As he traversed that
little dark staircase from shop to cellar and from cellar to shop,
carrying many enormous armfuls of books, he found his mood
of dreamy self-satisfaction changed into something else. Number
Two was scrupulously honest in his handling of their diurnal
gains, which, with the increase of foreign visitors, began to grow
very considerably. He kept two large collecting-boxes, one of
them with the letters "G.C."--Glastonbury Commune--written in
pencil on it, and he divided all their increment into two portions
and then sub-divided their own share.

During the time that Mr. Evans was bringing up these books,
the shop was crowded with people; and old Jones had all he
could do to deal with the pushing and jostling that was tak-
ing place.

But he was right about the books. Not a German, not a Rus-
sian entered, but he began turning over the pages of these books;
while not a Frenchman came in, but he wanted to see all the
china ornaments that the establishment boasted.

This learned interest in their stock of books--most of which
were old parchment folios--kept Mr. Evans at his job; but his
mood had completely changed. And in a most subtle way it had
changed; for while his broodings were still upon his mystical
interpretation of the word Esplumeoir there slipped into his
thoughts certain episodes in the earlier life of his magician which
led insensibly to his subterranean temptation.

He recalled, for instance, that occasion when Merlin came
rushing down in a howling storm from the forest hills driving
before him a herd of stags, himself riding upon the back of the
hindmost, and rending off one of its great horns, flung this wild
weapon at the daring chieftain who was stealing the magician's
wife.

The dark and bloody violence of this scene disturbed the cur-
rent of Mr. Evans' mind. Something in the sinister action of
tearing out that branched horn by its roots reminded him of
a deadly, a most perilous passage in "The Unpardonable Sin.
The evil tide was indeed full upon him now. With trembling
knees he put down his candle--for little daylight could enter that
cellar--and snatching the book from its place by St. Augus-
tine, he began feverishly turning its pages till he found that
abominable and terrible passage.

His hands shook so much and his knees knocked together so
violently, as he gloated over this dreadful scene, that anyone
beholding him would have supposed him to be the victim of St
Vitus' dance. The man's bones seemed to melt within him as he
read on and on now, passing from this passage to another and
from that to another, till all sense of place or time was com-
pletely lost. The long winter months in which he had lived so
happily with Cordelia fell away from him like a cinematograph
picture passing across an artificial screen.

Nothing in the world seemed to matter, nothing in the world
seemed of the least importance, compared with the overpowering
mania that re-possessed him now. It returned upon him with all
the more irresistible power because of his long suppression of it.
Had anyone been down there watching his face they would have
seen that he was biting his lower lip so violently--sucking it
indeed into his mouth as well as biting it--that his whole coun-
tenance was transfigured. His nostrils kept twitching, opening
and shutting like those of a savage stallion, and his eyes burned
with so insane a light that one could fancy that they would
actually cause the paper upon which these atrocious things were
written to smoulder and shrivel like leaves held into a con-
suming flame.

The man's absorption in his frenzied vice was so horribly com-
plete that when the door at the top of the staircase opened and
Number Two's voice called upon him to come up into the shop
it was no more than if he had heard a moth beating against the
wall. But a moment came--for even in the throes of a cerebral
excitement driven to a pitch like this a human being grows aware
of that calling horizon that we name the future, those beckoning
fluctuating cross-roads, those bridges--Perilous, Pomparles
Bridge, Eel Bridge, Sword Bridge, Water Bridge, that make a
person feel that wicked thoughts are not enough--a moment
came when Mr. Evans resolved to do something. It was no vague
thing that he resolved to do; for his imaginative projection was
as concrete and palpable as the worst of these silhouettes of
horror engraved in the holy excess of sadistic satisfaction, by
Dante's rationalized dementia.

He now closed the leaves of the book, letting the page that had
overpowered him fall down upon its neighbour as delicately as a
person might cover up a wound with its own eroded skin.

He rose to his full height and possessed himself of the candle.
His knees ceased to knock together, his pulses ceased their fran-
tic tattoo, the beads of sweat on his forehead began to dry. It was
the curious phase in the pitiful evolution of temptation when the
insane desire sinks down and sinks in, and the practical resolu-
tion of what we are going to do hardens and crystallises in all
the veins and fibres.

There is no longer now any localised sensual stir in the per-
son's being. All is diffused, all is spread out through body, soul
and spirit. The man does not only want to do this abominable
thing with his wrought-up sex-nerve, he wants to do it with his
whole nature. That sex-nerve is still at the bottom of it. But that
nerve of imaginative evil, now so quietly coiled up--only its
little radium-burning eye, of glacier-livid tint, crossed by flicker-
ing red levin, remaining alert, only its forked tongue quivering
like a compass needle--has projected its dynamic energy through
the whole organism, has converted the whole organism into its
obedient slave, so that its immediate functioning can lie latent.

And the most dangerous aspect of this diffused energy, which
now fills the man's whole nature, so that his intellect is inspired
by it and his soul is inspired by it and his spirit is inspired by it,
is its deadly cunning.

That little coiled-up nerve-snake, now suddenly grown so inno-
cently quiescent that if Mr. Evans were to strip himself naked
there would have been nothing indecent in the exposure, gathered
the dynamic energy which it spread through his whole being di-
rectly from the First Cause.

In the nature of the First Cause there are two windows of mani-
festation corresponding most precisely to the eyes of such crea-
tures as have no more than two eyes. From one of these slits into
the Infinite pours forth good; from the other evil.

When Spinoza taught 'that the will of God was limited by the
nature of God, he was not deducing such doctrine from his in-
timate experience but from his mathematical reason. Intimate
experience of reality--whether it be the experience of the First
Cause or of any one of its innumerable creatures--is always
reporting "magic, mystery, and miracle" and, along with these,
an unbounded faith in tbe power of the will to change the nature
of the organism. The whole stream of what is called Evolution
depends on this autocreativeness of living things. Nor is there any
creature that does not share with the First Cause the power of
being good or being evil at its own intrinsic will.

It is the created, not the creator, who so constantly produce
good out of evil; and this they do of their absolute free-will.
Certain created souls have indeed willed the good rather than
the evil so habitually--and these souls are not confined to the
human race--that they have rendered themselves impervious to
the evil Eye of the First Cause and porous only to the Eye of
infinite compassion. The Mr. Evans who now issued forth from
Number Two's basement and blew out his candle at the top of
those narrow stairs was a Mr. Evans whose will, for that crisis
in his life, was entirely evil and whose cunning craftiness in the
achievement of his outrageous intention, was supernatural in its
flexibility.

"I forget if I told you, Mr. Jones," he said, pulling on his
tight black overcoat with twenty times the ease with which he
had pulled it off, for no overcoats, no fur-tipped jackets either,
slip on so quickly as the ones that are destined for a wicked
quest, that I ve got an appointment this morning with Father
Paleologue?"

"Aye? What's that? Do you mean you're going, Sir?"

"Father Paleologue. You will remember him if you think a
little! He brought a collection of icons to. sell for his monastery.
A Greek monk he is. Catholic monks are discouraged from com-
ing here--their authorities know, by a secret tradition of scho-
lastic warning, what the Twilight, 'Yr Echwyd,' really means,
to which the Grail leads."

Number Two stared at him. "Pardon me, Marm," he murmured
to the lady he was waiting upon.

"I've had very few o' they High Cones in me shop," he went
on speaking quietly and earnestly to Mr. Evans. "Do 'ee think
there'll be a big enough demand for such things as they, to
make it worth our--"

But Mf. Evans was already taking down his bowler hat from
the peg where it always rested.

"I'll bring you back a couple in my pocket to show you, Mr.
Jones, and I'm sure you'll agree--"

The truth was that Number Two, although no bad judge of
a portrait of John Locke, when he saw one, had never seen
an icon and had not the faintest notion what such a thing looked
like.

Bui Mr. Evans had opened the street door and was gone;
while Old Jones, turning to his customer with an air of confiding
all the eccentricities of his partner to her intelligent ear, said
something about the study of High Cones being one of those
branches of his profession that he'd never aspired to. "Do you
happen to have picked up a few on 'em, in your travels, Marm?"

While the lady stared at this curious purveyer of rarities.
Number Two's partner was some distance down the street, walk-
ing very fast towards the Cattle Market. When he reached the
entrance toi Dickery Cantle's tavern, he opened the door marked
"Tap" a little way and peeped in. The tap-room was full of
beer drinkers and the air was thick with smoke.

Mrs. Cantle, a pale, worn-out woman, was serving at the bar,
assisted by her son Elphin.

Mr. Evans opened the door a little further and remained hesi-
tating.

The small place was so crowded, for it was a favourite resort
among those of the Glastonbury unemployed who could lay
hands on a penny or two, that neither Mrs. Cantle nor Elphin
--nor indeed anyone in the room--noticed that hooked nose, and
those gleaming eyes under the bowler hat, snuffing and peering
in the entrance like the Devil at Auerbach's Cellar.

Backward and forward went the thin white arm of Mrs. Cantle
above the counter; to and fro went the thin, frail figure of
Elphin among the little tables in front of the wooden seats. It
must have been a scene that with certain trifling differences in
cut of costume and tone of voice went back to the time when
Glastonbury was a mediaeval town of no small importance.

There was not a man here this morning among those drinking
who had not come to forget his troubles and there was not a
man among all these men who had not already realised that
purpose in the thick smoke-filled air with its strong smell of
beer and cheese and masculine sweat.

The present dictators of Glastonbury--that is to say, Dave
Spear, Paul Trent and Red Robinson--would of a surety never
have dared officially to interfere with the national regulations
about the closing hours of public houses, but when once the
local police-force, represented in this case by Bob Sheperd, had
received a hint in favour of greater laxity from the mayor of
the town, it became easy for the smaller taverns, like St.
Michael's on Chilkwell Street, and Dickery's at the Cattle Mar-
ket, to admit a group of habitual customers, while keeping their
blinds down and their shutters closed. Such a group this morn-
ing then, at a time when the public bar at the Pilgrims' was
authentically shut, was enjoying itself after the fashion of their
ancestors and talking loudly about the new commune. No one
took the least notice of the gaunt bowler-hatted individual hesi-
tating in the doorway and searching the room with an eye of
wild expectancy. Apparently he found what he wanted for he
gave vent to a sudden sound between a laugh and a groan. His
hesitation came at once to an end now. Closing the door very
softly behind him he moved through the smoke and the noisy
crowd, past the little tables and the wooden benches, till he
reached the counter. Here he stood in complete silence till he
caught the landlady's eye.

"Good morning, Mr. Heavings," said Mrs. Cantle in a faint
voice. "Have 'ee come about what Dickery do owe Old Jones,
for thik second-'and bed and they 'arf a dozen bedroom chairs?"

"Certainly not, Mam," muttered Mr. Evans. "I've come...I've come
for...I've come to...have a drink and look round a bit."

"What are ye taking, Mr. Heavings? Straight Scotch, or a peg
of Our Special?"

Since neither she nor her husband ever touched a drop of what
they sold this latter alternative was understood by everyone in
the room to refer to a brand of liquour, more potent even than
Mother Legge's Bridgewater punch, which had mellowed for
generations in a great butt in the famous Cantle cellar.

The truth was that Our Special was a species of old sack that
the years had converted into a liquid gold that was heady and
heartening to a degree unparalleled save perhaps by the contents
of one of the great historic casks at Bremen. Only the boldest
visitors paid their half-a-crowns for a sip of this ancestral fire-
water; and a spot of colour came into the hollow cheeks of the
thin lady when Mr. Evans, ignorant of the formality of this offer,
murmured his preference for the select beverage.

"Us can't afford to treat 'ee to 'un, Mr. Heavings. Thee dost
know that, don't 'ee?"

As a reply to this the tall Welshman put his hand into his
pocket and produced a big handful of loose silver. "Will that
pay for a double glass, Mam?" he enquired.

She gave him one of those quick nervous looks that women of
all classes are in the habit of giving when in the presence of
some striking evidence of masculine extravagance. "'Twould pay
for a three times over," she said.

"Give me just that, please, Mrs. Cantle--a ‘three times over.' "

"I baint responsible, Mr. Heavings, if a three times of Our
Special sends thee's stumick into thee's head!"

The smile, if it could be called a smile, with which the unfor-
tunate man replied to this warning, awed the woman into obedi-
ence. "'Twill cost 'ee the best of ten shillingses," she said
solemnly as she turned to give the order to Elphin. Elphin had
been gazing in mute wonder for some while at this unusual
customer.

" Twill be a full tumbler, Mother," he whispered. "Will Dad
be angry?"

"Do as I'm telling 'ee, Elph! The gentleman knows what it be.
'Tisn't for we to say naught if he pours a sovereign's worth
down's throat!"

While Elphin was away on this mission and his mother was
once more serving her more normal customers with beer, Mr.
Evans moved slowly to a wooden bench at the back of the room
where the person was seated for whose presence in that place he
had been hoping against hope. This person was none other than
Finn Toller. The sandy-haired Codfin was sitting alone with an
empty flagon in front of him, gazing vacantly into the smoke-
filled atmosphere. Watery as usual were his staring, blue eyes
within their red circles, and the pale hairs of his eyelashes
showed round those rims like the while bristles of a young pig;
while his under lip hung down like the lobe of a monstrous
purple snapdragon.

"A grey day, Codfin!" remarked Mr. Evans.

"So it be, Mister, I were just thinking there might be rain
afore night; but I hopes not. I've a deal to do today one way
and the other."

"Do you feel when you have anything to do, Codfin, that
everything's unreal, the people and everything, till you've got
it done?"

The man gave him a sudden quick look; for the tone of his
voice was queer.

"Some people be afraid to sit by I, Mister, but you baint
skeered o' little old Coddie, be 'ee?"

"Perhaps you've given them reason to be afraid of you."

Again the queer tone! Mr. Toller experienced the uncomfort-
able sensation that he got sometimes when he woke up at two
o'clock in the night. "Red Robinson be death-sick with fear when
he do see I coming. Tother day 'a turned clean round and showed
'is bleedin' arse sooner than for we to meet."

"How do you account for his doing that, Codfin?" said Mr.
Evans with burning eye.

"Dunno. I've done nothink to 'un!"

"Oh, yes, you have, Codfin--Oh, yes, you have. As I was tell-
ing you in this place before, you and I are linked together in the
movements of the stars and when you come to do what you want
to do I'll do what I want to do!"

Toller's gaze drew itself away from vacancy and became the
expression of a rabbit contemplating a weasel.

"What do you know about I, Mister?"

"A great deal, Codfin, more than you guess! And that's be-
cause we're in the same boat."

"You be laughing at a poor working-man, Mr. Evans."

"Not at all, Codfin. Do you want my hand on, it? There...
there...good luck to you. In the same boat...that's where
we are, Finn Toller, my friend!"

Elph Cantle's eyes nearly started out of his head, when ap-
proaching the little table in front of the two men, with the tum-
bler of pallid gold in his hand, he saw them shaking hands.

"Mother sez 'tis ten shillingses, Sir, if you please," he whis-
pered, as he put Our Special down. It was Mr. Toller's turn to
look surprised when he saw the great handful of silver emerge
from his companion's trouser-pocket.

"Bring us another glass, my lad," said Owen Evans gravely.

Young Cantle went off with the money and returned with the
glass. He was too hypnotised by what he saw to turn away till
Mr. Evans had poured half the drink into this empty receptacle
and pushed it towards the tramp.

"Off with you, lad! This isn't ginger pop, or I'd treat you to
some too."

When Elphin's figure was swallowed up in the smoke-obscured
crowd of labourers, Mr. Evans lifted his glass and nodded to his
companion to do the same. It was not often that what he quaffed
made Mr. Codfin choke; but the man gasped and spluttered like
a woman in his attempt to despatch Our Special at one gulp. As
for Mr. Evans he kept murmuring some queer Welsh syllables of
carnal approval as he sipped and sipped and sipped at this an-
cient sack.

"In...the same...boat...Codfin," he repeated, allowing his eyes, with
a terrible gleam in them, to rest upon the other's, over the rim of
his glass.

There is a danger-instinct in trampish murderers, imbecile
thieves, and rural degenerates, which holds out antennae of
warning more responsive than the petal-edges of sensitive plants.
Had there been the faintest smell of the official, of the normal-
respectable, of the moralistic, of the legal, about Mr. Evans, Cod-
fin would have drawn in his horns and been dumb as a deep-sea
fish. There was the devil's own luck too about this encounter in
that the noisy buzz of talk around them and the fact that their
fellow-topers were all the simplest and roughest type of labouring-
men rendered their intercourse as safe and private as if it had
been held inside Gwyn-ap-Nud's Stone Tower, on the top of the
Tor. It was of this tower that the tramp began soon to murmur,
as his wits seethed up into savage confidence under the fumes of
the Drink Perilous.

Mr. Evans had already spoken of the iron bar; and the drunken
man seemed to have got it lodged in his imbecile brain that this
hook-nosed personage with the blazing eyes had been his con-
federate from the start.

"Her had been better pleased if it had been she rayther nor
he, that I were to hit with me bar. But I never struck a 'ooman
in me life and never will...no! not for Mad Bet herself."

Mr. Evans listened to his words with the blood boiling in his
veins and his wrist-pulses beating so hard that he felt he must
press them against the cold hard edge of the table. The passage
in the book that had driven him forth that day had to do with an
iron bar; and as often happens with the symbolic images of crime,
this eidolon of violence, which had been floating in the back of
his mind ever since that evening at the sheep-fold, drew to itself
like a magnet all the other mental pictures in the book and
absorbed them into itself.

"You're certain, Codfin--absolutely certain--that they're
going up the hill today?"

"Sartin, Mister! In the twilight. That's what Frenchy Crow--
us working-chaps calls he Frenchy--said himself when I were
listening. Tossie--that's the maidie Boss Barter's gone and mar-
ried, since her kids were born--have never been up Tor Hill of
a night-time. And as they all jabbered there and I listed to un,
they said as they was minded--the whole three on 'em--to meet
up there ‘in the twilight' so's to show thik gal what a dark night
be when it do fall on Hill. "Only, us must see it fall!" Frenchy
Crow kept saying. Tisn't naught unless us sees it fall."

"Could...I...be...hid...inside...the tower...with you, and watch
while you...while you...do it?"

"Sartinly you can be inside tower. There be a chink in thik
door; for I've used it many a times to watch for Mad Bet com-
ing and going; and you can see me bring iron bar down on him,
snug and pretty--I'se warrant--from inside thik little pussy-
crack!"

Mr. Evans in his agitation now began humming a mid-Victorian
sentimental catch, that contained the words "In the gloaming,
oh, my darling, ere the night begins to fall," and Mr. Toller
with Our Special mounting to his head, caught the spirit of this.
just as though some ghastly phosphorescence of unholy glee in
the contemplation of murder had bubbled up from both their
brains, and began to troll a similar stave: "Once I...loved ...a-
maiden-fair...and...she did...de-ceive me!"

A few labourers glanced towards that sequestered bench, when
amid the general confusion of voices these cracked tunes rose up
like the wind in a couple of broken potsherds, and Elph Cantle
pulled at his mother's sleeve; but the outburst was followed by
a lowering and pregnant silence.

"To see, to see, to see--through that crack--up-down, up-
down, the iron bar, up-down, up-down, the iron bar, and the
man, up, up, and then down, the iron bar down."

From the livid evil Eye of the First Cause, that evil eye that
crieth throughout eternity, "Up-down, up-down, the iron bar and
the man!" there shivered through Mr. Evans' frame a concen-
trated essence of all the knee-shaking and pulse-beating passages
in his Book of Books.

His hooked nose hung low over his empty glass, low over his
two clenched hands upon the wooden table; his bowler hat--for
he had not removed it--was pushed far back upon his head; and
behold! along the rim of it walked, upon its own purpose bent,
a small black fly.

As Mr. Evans' thoughts drove him on, this hat-walker, like a
complacent acrobat upon a dizzy ledge, paused in his perform-
ance and proceeded to clean his front legs by meticulously rub-
bing them together.

It has long since been noted how Mr. Evans possessed, in addi-
tion to his deeper vision, a furiously precise vein of foreground
pedantry.

He now envisaged with infernal exactitude the minutest details
of the scene to which his whole body and soul--magnetised by
that coiled-up snake-nerve--were rushing forward. And he en-
visaged too--for instead of being dulled or drugged, his intelli-
gence was quickened and heightened--the issue, the issue of
it all.

He felt in advance the sucked-out, scooped-out, blood-rusted
hollowness of the gap--the eye-tooth of the world wrenched from
its nether-place--that would sink down, that rusty-brown gaping
hole that was himself, his very life, down to the deepest abyss.
This deadly clear envisaging of the issue of today's business
would it were done and over with now!--drained up every drop
of pleasure from the doing of it.

What drove him on to it then? What drove him on to this
pleasure-divested horror? The coiled snake-nerve of sex! And the
strange thing is that the insane will to the satisfaction of this ter-
rible sex-nerve does not demand pleasure. Pleasure? Little do
the moralists know! A perverted criminal is called a pleasure-
seeker. Great Horns of God! Why, one little tiny drop of the
deadly nightshade Mr. Evans was now draining--let it follow the
burning path of Our Special down his Cymric gullet!--laid on
the tongue of those who talk of pleasure would teach them how
feel the sucking lips of the undying Wriggler. No, no, that was
the curious thing. Mr. Evans was compelled to contemplate
with cold-blooded precision the state of being to which this up-
and-down iron bar--whatever it did to its victim--would con-
duct himself.

Pity of Jesus! he was there, even now, as he stared at the tiny
golden bubbles in the bottom of his tumbler. He was there and
looking back at the iron bar, at the blood, at the murdered man.
It is a strange fact and a pretty proof of how deep the double
nature of the First Cause sinks, that a person could go marching
on like this towards the iron bar, and derive not one single half
drop of pleasure out of it. Or of satisfaction either!--though it
is the will to satisfaction that drives it forward.

If Mr. Evans' thoughts, in spite of Our Special, were far from be-
ing frolicsome, the thoughts of Codfin were no less accurst and
no less full of "minute particulars."

"I'll have to let this gent see it done," he thought, "for he's so
crazy-bent on't that, if I dunna let 'un he'll go and give I up to
Tarntan Jail. That's where I'll end anyway; and 'twould be Gib-
bet Hill, only they hangs 'em behind walls now, so us pore bug-
gers can't wave to our aunties. I wouldna' mind Gibbet Hill one
arf what I minds behind walls. Behind walls makes a person feel
like a damned abortion, the kind of nothing-no-more what Dr.
Fell sticks in back garden between pig-house and privy. I never
have liked behind walls and I never will." What force was it that
drove Codfin on to the iron bar; that object which he had already
so carefully concealed inside Gwyn-ap-Nud's Tower? It was cer-
tainly not any sex-nerve. It was purely and solely his sense of
honour. Codfin was honourably committed to do the bidding of
Mad Bet, and it had never, for one second, since their talk in the
sheepfold, presented itself to his mind as a possibility that he
could get out of doing it. All this expectation of ending "behind
walls" had been accepted by Codfin at the very start as a Jesuit
accepts his superior's command or a revolutionary assassin his
sealed orders.

While the two heads of these bewitched slaves of the iron bar.
drooped thus low over their empty glasses, there was a sudden
disturbance in that smoke-filled room to which they both re-
mained totally oblivious. This disturbance was caused by the
sudden entrance from the interior of the tavern of Dave Spear.

Dave had quite perceptibly changed since he had become one
of the dictators of Glastonbury. His youthful bloom had faded.
His pleasant good nature had dried up. His out-going impulsive
spontaneity had been replaced by a certain strained reserve, and
his honest simplicity had given place to a worried, self-conscious
caution. The many-sided struggles he was now engaged upon, his
attempt to outwit the incorrigible anarchism of one of his fellow-
dictators, to give a rational Marxist turn to the destructive
Jacobinism of the other, his constant effort to guide into orthodox
Communist channels, the mystic religiosity of their erratic chief,
caused a stiff, troubled, harassed look to descend upon his boyish
countenance, hardening its disarming contours into something
anxious, wistful, and at the same time austere.

His appearance was greeted by a clamour of voices and a rush
towards him of a group of puzzled, excited, acquisitive labouring-
men, who were all dissatisfied with the arrangements of the new
Glastonbury exchequer.

" 'Tisn't the money what worries I, Mister," explained a ca-
daverous shoemaker from Butts Close, "'tis seeing these chaps
what wouldn't work, if they had the chanst, getting the same as
I, who've worked meself into a bloody consumpty."

"What I wants to know," cried a, burly street-cleaner, pushing
himself forward, "is why a man with seven children, same as
I've got, only gets five bob more than them as has got two!"

"Listen here. Mister," cried a chimney sweep from the Beckery
district, "Didn't us read in Johnny Geard's paper last week that
Glaston belong to Glaston folk and none else i' the world? What
I'd like to know, and there's many of us working-chaps who want
to know the same, who 'twere that elected these 'ere Trents and
Robinsons to be bosses over we and who 'twere that gave these
'ere bosses their girt pay? I've got a wife in the family way, four
big-grown hungry kids; whereas this Robinson has got only his
Sail; and I dunno what Trent's got; not one I reckon! And
Trent's not even a Zoomerset man. They tell I 'ee do come from
the Scilly Isles. I wish to hell 'ee'd stayed in the Scilly Isles."
("Hear! Hear!" cried a lot of excited voices.)

"Zoomerset money," went on the chimney sweep, "ought to go
into Zoomerset pockets; and so 'twould if Bloody Johnny had his
zay. Who made this here Trent from Scilly Isles and this here
Robinson from London bosses over we Glaston folk? Us selected
Johnny Geard, 'cause us knows he; and he be a good drinking
man and a good praying man. But us knows naught of this 'ere
Trent and this 'ere Robinson. They may be Rooshians, for all
us do know!"

Dave Spear was so hustled by all these people that he was
driven backward across the room till he was standing close to the
table at which Mr. Evans and Finn Toller were seated. He opened
his mouth with a gasp of astonishment at seeing Mr. Evans and
was on the point of addressing him when a plumber who lived in
a little house by the edge of the river and suffered from asthma
seized him roughly by the wrist.

"Us be going to keep 'ee wi' us, now us has got 'ee, Mr. Spear,"
muttered this man, in a hoarse, unpleasant voice--he had
evidently been drinking heavily and had reached the quarrel-
some stage.

"Let me go! What do you mean by touching me?" cried the
indignant Dave. "You don't know what you are talking about.
None of you do. No, no; none of you do. You are all thinking
only of yourselves. You're all thinking only of getting more
money for yourselves--you're all just as bad as Philip Crow."

Things began to look nasty after this bold defiance.

"‘Knock him on the head!" cried one voice. "Tie 'im up and
gie 'em summat to remember us by!" cried a second. "Where be
you come from, thee wone self?" yelled a voice from the back
of the room, "that's what us wants to know! You baint a Glas-
tonbury man, and us 'ud like to know what you be!" So it had
come at last. He who had no thought in his mind but to lift up
humanity, now saw humanity as it is and was hated, spurned,
rejected by it.

He was standing close to the round table by the wall where
Evans and Codfin were drowsing over their empty glasses. Here
he swung round with his hands deep in his pockets.

"Comrades!" he began in a clear voice.

The uproar stopped, as such turbulence will sometimes, under
the spell of a professional speech.

"I don't think you realise, Comrades, how difficult it is to give
you back what your bourgeois slave-drivers have stolen from
you. You can't get it back for yourselves, because you are dis-
organised and they are organised, because you are without lead-
ers and they have trained leaders. The only way things can be
changed from top to bottom is by a dictatorship that represents
you. Mr. Geard your Mayor--" he was interrupted by shouts
at this point: "He's all right. Bloody Johnny's no bleedin' poli-
tician. Three cheers for good old Johnny Geard!"-- but he went
steadily and quietly on: "Mr. Geard, your Mayor--and I'm glad
you do justice to him--was elected by your town council; and it
is Mr. Geard who has appointed Comrade Robinson and Com-
rade Trent and myself to act with him in obtaining for you by
legal means--for the council has bought up the leases that belong
to Lord P.--what Mr. Crow and his shareholders have been
keeping from " here again he was interrupted. Loud shouts
arose, "We know all about Lord P. Lord P. be feared to show his
ugly phyz in Glast'n! Lord P. can't sell what isn't his'n to sell
Go back to Lord P. thee own self, and tell the old blighter well
knock his bleedin' head off and thee's too!"-but once more
Dave struggled to go on quietly with his speech.

"By legal means it is, Comrades, that we, your representatives
in this town, are now trying, with your assistance and by your
help, to start an experiment that has never yet been--"

"Shut yer bleedin' jaw! Who be you, we'd like to know, that you
should rule over us?"

Violent hands were now laid upon him and .clenched hands
were raised to strike him. The uproar rose again from every part
of the room. Something leapt up within Dave then and he lost all
his calm self-possession. His ruddy cheeks went white. He strug-
gled with the men. He flung off the hands that had begun clutch-
ing at him in the midst of that smoke-obscured confusion.

Like a normal waking-sound caught through the anguish of an
insane dream he heard the feeble voice of Mrs. Cantle calling for
her husband. "Dickery! Dickery!" Like a sardonic drum the re-
frain beat upon his ears:

"Dickery, dickery , dock--!
The mouse ran up the clock!"

He pulled out an empty chair from under the little round table
at which Mr. Evans and Mr. Toller sat and scrambled up upon it.
From this position he cried aloud in a tone so vibrant and so
commanding that it brought the room once more to a dead hush.

"Silence!"

"Dickery! Dickery!" echoed the voice of Mrs. Cantle, now
reaching that room from some remote place in the rear of the
house.

"Oh, brothers, my brothers, you must hear me, even though
you kill me afterward. You ask who I am? I'll tell you who I
am! I am the voice of the Future. I am the voice of what is to
come when we are all dead. You talk of your rights; the rights
of Glastonbury? Brothers, my brothers! In that Future there'll
be no more rights. In that Future there'll be no more Glaston-
burys against Rome, or English against Russia, or West against
East. In that Future there'll be only the human race, sprung
from the earth, returning to the earth, loving the earth. In the
Future none of us, none, I say none, will want to possess this or
possess that! We shall struggle then for one thing alone, fight
for one advantage alone, the right to labour for a victory of life
over want, over disease, over cruelty, over malice, over wicked.
stupid ignorance. Brothers, brothers! Don't let these Christians
say that we who break up their altars and close their churches
only do it for greed. We do it for the Future. We are killing God,
the old God, we are turning from magic and miracles, those old,
outworn, selfish things, but it is for more Life we're doing it.
Oh, can't you feel it, brothers? We all have the same heart, below
our greeds and our angers and our envies; the same heart, the
same heart. We're all equal before the great spirit of life. Oh,
look into your deep hearts, brothers, and feel it. It is the Truth!
At this moment, here in this place, we are all one. I am you and
you are me! We're all the same, old and young, men and women,
it's. one heart we have in us. Here! you can take me. I'll come
down in a minute and you can tear me to bits; but you'll be only
tearing yourselves! There's something in us that's the same, that
belongs to us all; and I'll tell you what it is. It's the Future
being born in us--It's the Future tearing us, breaking us, bruis-
ing us so that it may be born. Brothers, brothers! Even while you
kill me I'll be the same as you are; no different! The same heart
I'll be. For I am Life and you are Life. Life is our child, our
precious child, that we're all perishing for, that we are being torn
to bits for. But in the Future it will know what we did. In the
Future it will say: ‘They took their happiness and tore it to bits
for me. They were the tortured Creators; and I,--I am their
offspring.' The same heart in us all, brothers, and this heart cries,
‘Drop all this furious fighting for your own hands! Slip aside
from it, escape from it, give it up, let it go, melt into the calm,
cool, universal air!' Brothers! Don't 'ee go on with this eternal,
‘I ... I ... I ... I!' Let the heart in you speak, let it be felt; for it
is always there! Slip out of this hard, tight knot, this old evil
knot, this old grasping, greedy knot, slip out of it and be free. .

"The Life in us, in them, in Glastonbury, in Rome, in Jerusa-
lem, in India, in America, in China, is the same heart! Brothers!-
Can't you feel it? Let it melt that stone, that old, hard, wicked
stone, that stone which is Christ's grave. Let it melt it, be it
Arthur's or Caesar's, so that we can all flow into one, one Sea,
one Flood, one great calm...and quiet....and peace. Brothers, you
can take me now and tear me to .pieces. You cannot; kill this
heart in me, this heart that they have buried in Glastonbury,
in Rome, in Jerusalem. You cannot kill it because it's in the
killer as well as in the killed. It needs nothing, it wants no-
thing, it asks nothing. It always gives. It never takes. What
can it take, when it is Life, God, the universe, the future? Broth-
ers, my brothers, don't 'ee feel it? It is melting in me to you
now, and in you to me! It isn't the self any more. It isn't the
Stone against other stones anymore. You ask me who I am. You
say I'm not a Glastonbury man. I say to you, ‘None of ye are
Glastonbury men!' I say to you, ‘Ye are the passing of the pres-
ent into the future, ye are the motion of life into fuller life--the
heart in you melts in tears, in tears, in tears towards me and
mine...melts...in...tears...towards you. Who am I, brothers? I am
the voice of the Future out of the heart of the present; and
that is why...that is...why ... I must be...why I am...a trouble to
you...a thing that you would like...would like..."

He did really burst now into a flood of weeping. The tears--
big, child's tears--poured down his face. They poured down his
face while his face under their stream remained unmoved, the
mouth quiet and stern, the features fixed and rigid, the weeping
eyes fixed upon some remote spot in space.

For a moment, while he stood there like that, crying in dead
silence, crying as if his round boy's head were made of marble
and were a figure in a fountain, Mr. Evans slowly lifted up his
bowed forehead, with its great hooked nose, and stared at Dave's
muddy trouser-bottoms. What Mr. Evans felt now was, "I must
go through with this, though I get no pleasure from it." The
curious thing, in the mind of this slave of the iron bar, was that
it was the iron bar itself that now excited in him this relentless,
pleasureless necessity to go on. What it was that sank down
under the iron bar, a man, an ox, a sheep, a pig, mattered little
to Mr. Evans. That it was his old acquaintance John, picked up
at Stonehenge, who was the destined victim, hardly reached his
intelligence. Nor did he think of the victim as even destined to be
killed. It was not that at all! Oh, it was something very different
from that. It was an anonymous action too. That was the whole
point! "The Unpardonable Sin," like all other extreme forms of
vice, was totally impersonal. It was motiveless--except for its
own single urge--and it was surrounded by a vacuum of
anonymity.

If these were Mr. Evans' thoughts as the young Communist
closed his appeal by this fit of passionate tears, the thoughts of
the crowd who had listened to him were totally submerged in a
spellbound fit of stupefied bewilderment. The room remained
absolutely hushed, no one lifted a finger to meddle with what he
chose to do now.

He stepped down slowly from the chair to the floor. He was
in a trance. That is how it felt to himself and that is how it
looked to the crowd in the room--a trance and a complete for-
getfulness of where he was.

Vaguely and with short shuffling steps, more like those of a
convalescent than a somnambulist, he went to the street door,
opened it, and just as he was, with an overcoat on, but without
hat or stick, walked off towards Street Road. He felt at that
moment a strong desire to look into the sympathetic and yet
non-human eyes of the head of the Glastonbury commune. He
felt purged, relaxed, reduced to an almost feminine softness, and
he longed for the sympathy of Mr. Geard as a young girl might
have done.

When Mr. Evans awoke from the drowsiness caused by Our
Special he no longer perceived in front of him, mounted upon
a chair, a pair of grey, ready-made trousers, and in his sudden
awakening he leaned towards his nodding companion.

"When had I better meet you up there?" he said.

Finn Toller only let his straggling beard sink still lower over
the table. Mr. Evans grew irritable and shook him violently,
gripping the lean man's shambly shoulder unnecessarily hard
with his bony fingers. Not so very many people in Glastonbury
had fallen gently upon sleep that forenoon,--upon sleep softer
than the mosses of Maidencroft Lane, tenderer than the blue
vapours of Wick Wood--but among these fortunate ones there
were certainly only two, Mr. Toller and Owen Evans, whose
thoughts, as they gave way to slumber, had run upon murder.

"When...had I...? better...meet you...up there.

It was not Mr. Evans who spoke these words. It was a little
forked-tongued worm-snake. This worm-snake was jerking and
curving and cresting and lifting a head that kept changing colour
like a salamander; and it was doing all this inside a human
automaton--dead as a corpse--the carcass of what used to be
Mr. Evans! Whatever this worm-snake--which kept emitting a
poisonous froth, like a snail that has been wounded--ordered
this corpse-man, this homo mortuus, to do, the corpse-man
obeyed. To the excited worm-snake it was a swooning, gasping,
fainting ecstasy to think of that iron bar. There was a quivering,
dissolving melting sweetness connected with it. The iron bar and
the life it was going to blot out were altogether detached from
ordinary experience. It was not John Crow who was going to
perish. It was simply the man under the bar. The corpselike
executioner who obeyed the worm was the galvanized body of the
pedantic and highly strung Mr. Evans, who, under normal con-
ditions, could not hurt a daddy-long-legs. Once, when he was
very young and seized by a sadistic frenzy--and it is quite possi-
ble that the whole thing started from his father's forcing his
mother to let him enjoy her long after the child's conception had
begun--he had killed something with a piece of iron. After that
the little Owen would frantically turn over the pages of all his
children's books to find pictures of creatures being killed, espe-
cially killed by heavily crushing instruments. It had to be a thing
of iron and it had to come crashing down, smashing everything,
smashing skull and vertebrae together, or the performance, de-
manded with such a swooning, trembling, fainting orgasm by
the worm-snake, would not be a master one! Mr. Evans' tone as
he said, "Meet you up there" was like the tone of some Asmo-
deus whispering to some Baphomet.

"Meet you up there," echoed the sticky surface of their table.
"Meet you up there," echoed the dregs of Our Special. "Meet
you up there," echoed a little bit of dried-up dog's dung which
had been detached from one of the thick-soled boots of Dave
Spear and left behind on the chair.

To the worm-snake inside what was once Mr. Evans this harm-
less sentence "Meet you up there" partook of the nature of an
overpowering sexual temptation. The actual sound of the brief
syllables..."meet...up...there" was like an erotic provocation of
a kind that none could bear and not yield. The fangs of the
worm-snake dripped with a frothy milk. In mounted and erected
expectancy, in blunt-nosed expectancy, in forked-tongued ex-
pectancy, it danced a lust-dance of delirious joy when it found
that it could make this slave-corpse, this dead soul, this rex
mortuus, that had been a human being, utter these simple
words!

And to what end? To the end of observing how an iron bar,
if given a modicum of propulsion from the thin arms of Codfin,
would obey the law of gravitation!

The pale blue eyes of Codfin opened now just a little. They
were blinking and confused and a moisture trickled from their
lids. "Eh? what's that, pard? Meet ye, did ye say?"

"Yes, yes, yes, yes," cried the cresting worm through the lips
of Mr. Evans. "When shall I meet you up there?"

About five hours later, Mr. Evans was seated on one of the iron
seats on the slope of Wirral Hill, watching the little boys play
rounders. Now rounders might be defined as the innocent child-
hood of baseball, of which it is obviously the original source,
and it is a game of the simplest and most primitive hit-and-run
nature. And Mr. Evans became extremely interested in rounders
that afternoon.

Every time one of the boys hit the ball, Mr. Evans could see
the lean stooping figure; not of the John he knew, but of an
abstract victim whose name was called John, and of a victim so
completely dehumanised and depersonalised that all question of
"saving" him disappeared. The only thing to do was to stop the
horror. As Mad Bet had screamed to Mr. Evans at Mother Legge's
party on Easier Monday, the only thing to do was to "stop" and
then to wash the sand clean in the mind s fatal Colosseum.

But Mr. Evans could not "stop." He watched this hit-and-run
game with peculiar and special interest because it was exactly
what he was going to do himself. He was going to hit and run or
rather to watch, but Christ would say it was the same thing,
someone else hit and run.

Was Mr. Evans mad? Not unless all sexual desire, from the sat-
isfaction of which other sentiencies suffer unnecessary suffer-
ing, is mad.

If any stranger had approached Mr. Evans on that afternoon,
as he sat watching this game of rounders on Wirral Hill, and
induced him to enter into conversation, it is extremely unlikely
that the faintest notion of the man's being mad would have
crossed such a stranger's intelligence. He had, it is true, been
totally unable to eat a morsel of anything since breakfast. But
he had been drinking again. He had gone into a little nameless
beer-house on the way to Wirral Hill and had drunk glass after
glass of beer. "I must drink," he had thought grimly to himself
as he tossed off the heel-taps of each separate glass. "I must drink
to "render myself stupid'; as Pascal said about believing the
Christian faith." But he had not rendered himself stupid. He had,
on the contrary, given himself a racking headache; but otherwise
nothing could be clearer than Mr. Evans' mind. He was to "go up
there" at sunset and wait inside the tower to see--actually in his
flesh to see--what he had been telling himself stories about all
his life long.

Let no one think that the obedient rex mortuus or deus mortuus
that was Mr. Evans' soul, did not weigh the possible consequences,
down to every smallest detail of what he was going to do, making
himself, by thus knowing about it beforehand and doing nothing
to stop it, an accomplice in a murder. "Undoubtedly, I shall land
in jail," he thought. "It's possible enough that it will be worse
than that. Why in God's name then, don't I walk straight back to
the shop, or home to Cordy, and shake off this monstrous weight?
The police? To go to the police? No, no, no, no! The thing to do
is"--at this point the invisible worm itself began whispering a
subtle self-deception, a cunning compromise--"go up there and
get hold of the iron bar myself--yes! yes! yes! That's the thing
to do, from every point of view--to go up there presently--it's
too early yet--and, as soon as Toller appears, just take the thing
from him and pack him off; and then tell Crow, or not tell Crow,
as I consider best at the time--get hold of that thing from Toller
first anyway, and pack him off and perhaps it would be better ne-
ver to tell Crow, or any other living soul, about it--yes, yes, ne-
ver tell anyone about it--but would Toller try it again? It's some
madness of that bald-headed woman--the Grail Messenger--I
couldn't follow it when he was telling me--madness of some kind
--damn!"

His mind called up the image of Mad Bet as she had seemed
to him that night when she had made him kiss her naked skull.
A wry smile twisted his lips as he thought of that night and he
clutched the iron bar--another and a different one--that made
the elbow of his present resting place!

A sardonic and tormented chuckle, a veritable damned soul's
chuckle, broke from his twisted mouth.

"Hee! Hee! Hee! My Grail Messenger! It's all mixed up with
Crow. It was Crow who asked me, that night, if I could embrace
a woman who was perfectly hideous, and I told him then about
the Grail Messenger. Hee! Hee! Malory, you old devil! There's
life still in your Norman book! Yes, yes! you understand these
little things. Life's not changed. It all comes round--round and
back again." What had happened now, as the man sat there
clutching the iron elbow of that cold seat, while the little boys
kept hitting and running in front of him, was that his first na-
ture--the antiquarian one--was all stirred up into a writhing
weft of self-protective fantasy. And this had come about in a
very subtle manner; for by saying to himself that what he must
do anyway was to go up there, even if he snatched the iron bar
from the bewitched assassin and confessed everything to John
Crow, he had covered with a sort of adhesive plaster the gaping
hole of his tormented conscience; and this covering up of the
dark, sweet, irresistible twitching of the snake-worm, left his
normal upper-consciousness free to deceive him to the limit with
accumulated plausibilities; while all the time the worm licked its
devouring fangs in the darkness below!

What the worm said to itself was: "Let us only once go up
there, and the swooning, drowning, dissolving ecstasy of the
Dolorous Blow will soon sweep away all these conscientious
hesitations!" Calmed and eased a great deal by this crafty com-
promise with his conscience which rendered his rendezvous
with the iron bar a necessity it he were to save John Crow as
well as a possibility of playing the ecstatic voyeur at a murder
orgy if he decided against saving John Crow, his eyes now fell
upon the figure of an elderly woman walking heavily and stum-
blingly up the slope of the hill below the level where he was
sitting and the boys were playing.

There was an iron seat, like the one he himself was occupying,
a little below the boys and a little above the woman; and it was
towards this seat that she was evidently advancing.

She was well dressed and she was using her umbrella as a
stick to lean upon; and as he followed her with his eyes, stum-
bling and exhausted, moving up the slope of the hill, he decided
that he knew who she was, and that she was none other than Miss
Crow. Miss Crow indeed it was, and a Miss Crow on the verge
of a fainting-fit from her bad heart. There were several people
passing both ways, both to the north and to the south, along
the gravel path below the place where the lady with the umbrella
was tottering; but it was a group of complete strangers--stran-
gers to her as well as to him, for they were visitors to Glaston-
bury from the northeast of Germany--who, when she fell, as he
saw her do now, rushed up the slope to her aid. There certainly
was a peculiar atmospheric effect abroad, this February day. A
soft, light mist, filmy and gossamery as a wet sea-vapour, hung
over the town; while the sun, shining between heavy banks of
clouds, touched with a curious opalescence, pearly and tender,
the portion of the hill upon which he was now seated.

The boys ceased at once playing their game, when they ob-
served the disturbance made by the lady's fall, and calling to
each other in shrill, excited cries scrambled down the slope and
huddled, as children will, pushing, whispering, jostling to get the
clearest view between the burly figures of the Germans. These
latter were now talking in vociferous and guttural tones across
the body of the prostrate woman. One of them was actually on
his knees beside her, loosening the throat of her dress and trying
to pull off her gloves.

When Mr. Evans joined the group he was accepted at once as
a native of the place and everyone appealed to him as an au-
thority upon what ought to be done with a lady of distinction
and refinement who apparently had had a fit.

He was aghast at the spectacle of the poor lady's face as he
bent over it. In unqualified concern and pity he surveyed the
unnatural redness of her skin, the drops of white froth issuing
from her open mouth, and the family twitch, palpitating still,
though she was quite unconscious, in her flaccid cheeks. She had
been acting recklessly and unwisely all that day after her morn-
ing visit to the doctor. She had stopped at Wollop's longer than
she should; she had kept her appointment to lunch at the Pil-
grims' with Rachel and Athling; and as soon as she could escape
from these young people she had made her way, slowly but ob-
stinately, to Wirral Hill, being seized with a passionate desire
to rest upon the particular iron seat where, thirty years before,
she was accustomed to meet Mat Dekker. As Mr. Evans now
surveyed her unconscious form he found that he was not so de-
void of natural philosophy as not to he grimly aware of the irony
of the fact that he, the insane pervert, was now contemplating
with lively concern the blow which heart trouble, that gentlest
of all wielders of iron bars, had brought down on this warm
mass of corpulent femininity.

It was clear that the players at rounders, as they inserted their
small perspiring bodies between the anxious foreigners, thought
that Miss Crow was dead: and the words "She has it got, my
God!" and "Death her has taken, God in Heaven!" in the thick
intonation of the great Mid-European plain, showed that the for-
eigners laboured under the same delusion. "The woman something
to say wishes!" cried the man suddenly who was bending over
her on his knees. "To fetch the Herr Doctor it better were!"
replied another; and a third--an extremely sturdy little man,
planted upon his heels so firmly, as if nothing could ever bowl
him out--uttered the expressive, the impenetrable, the massively
undying word, consonant to all occasions, reassuring under all
invasions of disorder, the word Police! How fast the mind
works and how self-centred the human ego is!

Even as he came forward and knelt down by Miss Crow's side,
even as he lowered his ears to Miss Crow's murmuring lips, the
Welshman was thinking to himself: "Who's to know--if Codfin
doesn't speak when they arrest him--that I wasn't in the tower
by chance? No...no...no! I shall never in all my life have another
chance of seeing, of drinking up with my very eyes, what I've
been telling my pillow about night after night since I first knew
what...what I was!"

She was murmuring intelligible words now. She was taking
Mr. Evans for someone else, for a different tall bony man. But,
as he listened to her and smelt upon her grey hair, from which
the hat had been torn, a faint scent of eau de cologne, he remem-
bered how more than once he had dressed up that pillow of his
in his own vest and shirt and had pounded it with the poker from
the fender while an orgasm of terrible ecstasy dissolved his
very soul.

"I can't let this chance go...no! not if I'm hanged for it....I can't
...I can't!" But nothing seemed able to keep away from him--
as he heard the sturdy little man, whose feet were so firm in
the grass and so wide apart, repeat the word "Police"--a thin
ice-cold bodkin-point of ice-cold terror--the police...the police
...the police...the police...This is a crime I'm going up there to
see...different from any secret vice, however shameful...this is
a crime...the worst of crimes...and when I've had that ecstasy...
to the end of my days all will be exposed...Owen Evans the per-
vert...Owen Evans the malefactor...Owen Evans the murderer.
They'll have me in Madame Tussaud's moulded in wax ....my nose,
that everyone laughs at so...in wax..."Have you been down to the
Chamber of Horrors yet, and seen Owen Evans? Anyone would
know from his face what he was ....the human carnivore!"

Meanwhile from the contorted mouth of the unconscious
woman, whose eyelids kept flickering but did not open, the
breathing grew louder and less human, and between the great
animal gasps, like the flapping of a bellows, broken, incoherent
words forced out their way.

The German upon his knees by her side seemed to be dimly
acquainted with the sort of attack she was suffering from, for he
lifted up her head and began pouring down her throat something
from a small flask that he produced. But instead of recovering
her from her fit this treatment only had the effect of stopping
her attempts at speech and of throwing her back again into com-
plete immobility.

For a moment Mr. Evans thought she was really dead now; but
the German with his hand on her heart muttered emphatically;
"Life she still has, the poor woman! Life she still has!"

"Has anybody sent for the--police?" Mr. Evans whispered to
the German with the flask. He had meant to say--"for the
doctor."

The kneeling man rose to his feet now, shrugged his shoulders .
and addressed some question to his companions. It appeared
from what they said that nobody had gone for anybody. The soul
of the obsessed Welshman now made a hurried rush down the
corridors of his consciousness, closing the door to the iron bar
chamber down there, and opening more normal vestibules of
awareness. "I...go...get...Herr Doctor!" he announced, sur-
veying these simple guardians of the unconscious lady. Thus
speaking, he raised his bowler hat with a grandiose gesture,
both to the woman on the ground and to the strangers round
her and made off at a great pace down the gravel path that
led to the town.

In the confusion of his wits, however, it was not to Dr. Fell's
house but to his own house that he directed his way; a secret
urge within him driving him now, as in all practical crises, to
go at once to Cordelia. But if a beneficent chance moved him
to this self-preservative action, a malefic chance willed it that
when at last, panting and breathless, he entered his little house
in Old Wells Road he found Cordelia deep in conversation in
her parlour with her mother, Mrs. Geard.

Mrs. Geard had been confiding to Cordelia her growing worry
about the girl's father; how he persisted in spending the bulk
of his time over at Chalice Hill, and how he had been several
times of late upon some mysterious errands to the Glastonbury
bank. "'Tisn't that he be changed, Cordy, you understand. 'Tis
that he be more his own self than I've a ever known him. Crum
sees it too. 'Tis as if this commune silliness has wrought on him
to let himself go. He talks more about the Blood and the Master
and the Water of Life than I've ever known him. He talks every
night, Cordy, on and on, after us have put out the gas. I wish
he would tell me what he goes to the bank for! Mr. Trent brings
him his pay for being Mayor regular enough. There s no reason
why he should go to the bank. I don't like, nor I never have
liked, that young man Robert Stilly. What do you think he goes
to the bank for, Cordy?"

If Mr. Evans had caught a glimpse of Mrs. Geard through the
window he would have shot off again, but fortunately the two
women were seated out of sight of the window, so that it wasn't
till he opened the parlour door that he knew she was there. Cor-
delia recognised at once that something was very wrong with
him; for he stood in the doorway muttering about Dr. Fell,
Bob Sheperd, Germans, rounders, Miss Elizabeth Crow fainting
on Wirral Hill, and his having an appointment at sunset that
night...a very important appointment...at sunset...with Father
Paleologue...at sunset...about some icons.

The mother and daughter were both of them on their feet,
looking at him with an uneasy stare, Cordy with a passionate
and frightened stare, Mrs. Geard with a worried and anxious
stare. "I hope he has not been going to the bank," the latter
thought to herself; and in her heart she began wondering
whether icons were some species of familiar spirits, like her own
Pembrokeshire fairies, that this Mr. Paleologue claimed he could
conjure up.

"I only came in to tell you, Cordelia," said Mr. Evans now
in a clearer, more intelligible manner, "that I've got to send
Dr. Fell to Wirral Hill, where Miss Crow lies unconscious.
After I've been there, I've got this engagement at...at sunset.
Did I say sunset? Yes, at sunset. I hope you are feeling very
well, Cousin Megan?"

At this actual moment, towards this man in a disordered state
of mind--an iron bar tapping on the inside door of his locked-up
intention--and towards two women staring at this man in be-
wildered uneasiness, the First Cause poured forth its double
magnetic streams of white and black vibrations. Out of Nothing,
out of pre-existing vortices of energy that themselves issued from
Nothing by the creative will of this Being, Mr. Evans, his wife,
and his wife's mother had been created. In them the First Cause
reproduced itself, the Macrocosm in these three microcosms; and,
like the First Cause, these three persons, Mr. Evans standing
in the doorway, Cordelia standing by her husband's writing desk,
and Mrs. Geard standing by the purple chair, had the power of
giving themselves up to the good in their nature or to the evil.

For Mr. Evans could at that very moment, even as he gazed
at that picture of the river, the woman and the boat, which he
associated with the word Esplumeoir, have transformed himself
into a saint as devoted, as spiritual, as tenderly considerate as
Sam Dekker, who in his normal state was a good deal less like
a saint than Mr. Evans was! This he might have done, even as
he stood there, after telling these plain-faced women, while the
mother-of-pearl sunlight flickered into the room, those lies about
Father Paleologue; and in doing so have rendered himself mor-
ally superior to the First Cause, if it had not been that from
the word Esplumeoir his mind reverted to Merlin's early life
and to that incident of the horn of the stag. "So good-bye, Cordy.
So good-bye, Cousin Megan. I must get hold of Dr. Fell and I
must meet Father Paleologue."

This moment was a moment of such a fatal parting of the
ways, that the Invisible Watchers who were standing at the brink
of the deep Glastonbury Aquarium, watching the motions of its
obsessed animalculae, had never crowded more eagerly around
their microscope to learn what the issue would be. It all de-
pended upon which of the two vibrations proceeding from the
First Cause Cordelia would welcome and which she would reject.
The destructive vibration, at this important crisis, willed her to
be cold, chaste, inert, irresponsible, absorbed in her own per-
sonal condition, which had never been more interesting to her!

The creative vibration, on the contrary, willed her to be warm,
alluring, unchaste, and self-forgetful, thinking only of her love
for the unhappy man before her! In her earlier relations with
Mr. Evans, Cordy had frequently been stupid and remiss; but
the "sweet usage" to which her ungainly form had been sub-
jected, and the caresses by which her cold nerves had been
quickened, had changed, all this. It was not that she had come to
understand the nature of his perversion; but she had come to
understand, to a nicety, the place in his consciousness where that
closed chamber was, and to be an adept in the art of keeping
it closed. She had discovered that by certain devices--devices
into which it is not necessary just now to follow her--it was
possible to give Mr. Evans so much erotic excitement, of an
abnormal, but perfectly harmless kind, that his soul could go
up and down past that locked-up chamber without a thought of
the temptations it contained.

It was lucky for Mr. Evans that at this crisis Cordelia was
fully aware that to be inert and irresponsible would have been
a devilish sin. The vibration of eternal creative energy which
poured down into her nerves from that remote double-natured
Force at the root of all life was now deliberately welcomed by
the spirited girl and the opposite vibration heroically rejected.
She moved up hurriedly to Mr. Evans, got behind him, drew
him forward by the sleeve till she got him to the hearth; and
then, linking her arm in his, turned emphatically and impera-
tively to Mrs. Geard.

"Mother!"

"Yes, Cordy."

"I want you to call at Dr. Fell's. It won't take you so very
far out of your way if you go by the allotment gardens and
that alley I showed you the other day. And just tell him, or
Miss Barbara, if he's out, what Owen has said about Miss Crow
having fainted--by those seats, wasn't it, Owen?--on Wirral
Hill, and those Germans looking after her. I expect she's all
right by this time; or someone else has gone for the doctor;
but in any case do go quick, Mother, please, because I can see
Owen's very worried about it."

There were no doubt some quick private glances between
mother and daughter after this, in which ihe mother said:
"What's up, my dear? Has he been drinking?" and the daughter
said: "Don't ask me now, but just go! I'll tell you everything
another time"--but the upshot was that Mrs. Geard hurried off.

The good lady's lilac-coloured bonnet rose up like a flag of on-
set from her grey head as she walked down Wells Old Hoad, and
her old-fashioned velvet-sided boots delivered short quick taps
to the brick pavement under the railings of those red-tiled houses,
and every now and then she automatically unclicked and clicked-
up the metal fastening of her purse, as if she were rejecting all
assistance from Mr. Robert Stilly in the management of her
affairs. "I cannot think why John keeps going to the bank,"
she kept saying to herself as she crossed the allotments.

Mr. Evans was now alone with Cordelia; and the first thing
the girl did was something that at once provoked a faint flicker
of natural erotic excitement in the man's perverted nerves. She
began pulling down the parlour's brown blinds upon that sunset
period of the day. Woman-like, she had absolutely no notion of
the explosives she was handling, of the volcano-fires under the
crater-surface she was stirring up. But woman-like, too, she,
who had been virgin so long, was a cunninger adept than a
thousand Thaises in the primeval arts of provocation. Daughter
of Bloody Johnny as she was, her own erotic nature, now that it
had been once excited was inexhaustible in its amorous devices;
and since her moods and her lures were forever changing, Mr.
Evans was in the position of the fortunate possessor of a whole
harem of ardent play-fellows. In none of her Cyprian disguises
could poor Cordy be called pretty; but wanton and freshly
blooming she certainly could be called; such is the magical
power of Eros.

She had a surprise for her man now. Pulling down the blinds
of their tiny parlour on the general principle announced so often
by Mother Legge, that she "could not abide onlookers," and
throwing her hat and cloak on their big arm-chair she went up
to the fireplace where a newly lit flame was making the wood
crackle, and leaning against the edge of the mantelpiece, she
began a rapid flow of excited words. She was going, she told
him, without any doubt, to have a child. She had already gone
two months with it. She had been yesterday to see Dr. Fell about
it It would be born sometime in September.

Mr Evans dropped his bowler hat on the floor and sank down
exhausted in his black overcoat on the big purple chair. Half
of her jacket and the rim of her hat were squeezed under him
as he sank down, for she had just come in when her mother
arrived; but he did not make the least move to extricate them
Nor indeed did she! Watching him with swimming eyes she
waited in silence for what she hoped and prayed would prove
to be a rush of natural emotion at what she had told him. And
drawn towards them by the intensity of their feeling, towards
this embryo grandchild of Geard of Glastonbury, there came
floating into that room through the pulled-down blinds a flock
of obscure, half-material presences, the sort of etherealised
thought-projections that are liable to hover over certain crises
in human lives. Like invisible birds these presences gathered,
sweeping into the room out of the aqueous mists of that unusual
day, gibbering and chittering to one another and circling about
Cordelia.

Neither the man nor the woman, he in the purple chair whose
tasselled valances swept the floor, and she leaning against the
flimsy mantelpiece, could have been conscious at that moment
that this embryo in the room with them was beginning to assert
itself as an entity with its own contact with the life-mysteries.
What they both felt just then as these thought-elementals flut-
tered round the new life in Cordelia's womb, as blow-flies are
attracted to carrion, or as humming-bird moths to the hearts
of carnations, was something very different from these ethereal
visitors. What they were aware of was the dumb, numb, cold,
heavy downward drag of the vast undersea forces that are sub-
human; chemical forces, that belong to that formless world of
the half-created and the half-organic whereof bodies of lower
dimensions than ours are composed and which has a mysterious
weight that draws down, a pull, a tug, a centripetal gravitation,
against which the soul within us struggles and upon the surface
of which it swims, and over which, when the process of de-
composition commences, it spreads its contemptuous wings.

This down-dragging sensation in their nerves neutralized and
counter-balanced these half-embodied air-presences, the elemen-
tal projections of old magical minds upon that sensitised Glas-
tonbury air, floating like a cloud of disturbed river gnats through
those lowered brownish-coloured afternoon blinds, out again into
that subaqueous mist, out again into the wide water-meadows.

No philosopher has yet appeared who has realised as it should
be realised, the creative power of the human mind. Behind these
brownish-coloured, pulled-down blinds on the way to St. Ed-
mund's pottery, where all those little town-council houses car-
ried their red-tiled roofs so trim, there emerged from Cordelia's
mind as she stood with her staring, swimming, dazed eyes fixed
on her mate and her awkward elbow propped on that ridiculous
mantelpiece, such an intensity of feeling that it had the power
to draw out of the air, although she knew it not, these wander-
ing half-lives. Any clairvoyant sense could have seen them there
hovering about her body, and making their weak, chittering sig-
nals to the subhuman progeny of her womb, whose embryo con-
sciousness must have been on a level with their own half-created
fumblings. But why did this thick, dumb, numb, down-dragging
pull of cosmic entropy, this dark gravitation- weight, sinking into
decomposition and dissolution, tug at those two just then, at
the man in the purple chair, with the tasselled valances trailing
upon the floor, and at the woman who had just told him he was
a begetter? Was it because--with that iron bar hammering to
get out from its locked-up prison--Mr, Evans' fungus-grown
mind groped amid after-births and abortions and corpses dead
in their travail?

Whatever the cause may have been of what happened to those
two behind those drawn blinds, both visitations came and went
in no more than a hundred tickings of the watch in the man's
pocket. Phenomena that pass so quickly--thought-elementals
floating in and floating out, and this death-cold touch of the
draught of decomposition--surely they are beneath notice, be-
neath analysis, beneath explanation? On the contrary, the very
essence of life is revealed in such fleeting impressions; and in
experiences such as these Eternity itself can be heard moaning
and weeping, as its Cimmerian waters advance and recede around
the lamplit promontories of Time.

"What shall we call him if he's a boy, Owen?" Her voice just
then was more than he could bear. Nothing makes human nerves
dance with such blind fury as a voice piercing the hollow of the
ear at the moment when the will is stretched out like a piece of
India rubber on the rack of indecision.

"Torture!" he shouted, sitting up in the purple chair and
clutching its elbows furiously, while the rim of her hat was
now completely crushed beneath him. "We'll call him Torture;
and if she's a girl we'll call her Finis, the End. For she'll be
the end. And all is the end."

Cordy's face went white, white as the surface of the little
china pussy-cat which Crummie had given her, and which now
fell over sideways as she jerked her arm from the mantelpiece.
But she wasn't the daughter of Geard of Glastonbury for nothing.
Incontinently she rushed straight to his side.

"You're unhappy, Owen; you're ill; you're hurt. Something
horrible's troubling you."

He pushed her arms away. He lurched to his feet. He bent
down and picked up his bowler hat which was lying on its
smooth crown, its dirty interior uppermost. "It's nearly sunset,"
he muttered. "If I don't go now I'll never go."

"Where are you going, Owen?"

He looked at her wildly. "Well! he must be stopped, mustn't
he? It's one thing or the other, isn't it?"

"What are you talking about, Owen? Are you crazy?"

"Oh, nothing...nothing...nothing...nothing!" he muttered.
"You don't want to see me in the dock, do you? In
the dock, woman!" These last words came from him with a
wild shout.

Cordy glanced at the brown blinds which were bulging a little.
There was a wind blowing up. She went to the door leading
into the passage, locked it, and placed her back against it.
"You don't leave this room, Owen," she gasped.

He was now buttoning up his black overcoat. His hat was on
his head, pressed down so low over his eyes that his eyebrows
were invisible. This produced a most curious effect as he glared
at her from under its shadow. But an unexpected change of mood
came upon him. He began wheedling and coaxing and imploring.

"It's only a little way...just up the hill...it's necessary too...nec-
essary...very necessary...Please move, Cordy, and let me go....
You'll be sorry if you don't....You won't forgive yourself after-
wards...if you don't." He almost wept as he beseeched her. In
his own mind just then to stop a murder and to taste an appall-
ing sweetness were motives both lost in the wild necessity he
was in to get out of this room!

But she kept her eyes upon him all the time and she now
noticed that he had begun casting a furtive, hurried, crafty look
at the window. Nothing indeed would have been easier for him
than to lift up that bulging blind and get out of that window!

"I must do something to keep him here," she thought, "and I
mustn't struggle with him...because of the child. Besides,
he'd hit me. He'd hit me savagely." A wild strange thought came
to her then; came to her from seeing the look of that lowered
blind. Very often in the evening she had undressed for his pleas-
ure, with the blind pulled down like that, and the door locked.

She began feverishly stripping off her clothes. He followed
every movement of her hands with those burning eyes, under the
shadow of that bowler. His coat was buttoned up tight under his
chin. He looked like a man ready to rush out upon pikes or
bayonets. Crossing her arms over her chest she pulled her dress
over her head and then her slip. Then she unloosed her petticoat
and drawers. Stamping with her feet she extricated herself from
these objects, letting her stockings and shoes remain. Backing
against the door, she bent down and pulled off her vest, dragging
it over her head. This final movement, when her head was bent
low, and when her face was hidden, and when the garment,
dragged forward by her eager hands was caught for a second
on one of her hairpins, did stir some deep chord of excited
desire in the man with the burning eyes.

He snatched off his hat and flung it in the purple chair. But
she rose up to her full height now, her back still to the door,
her long arms hanging limp by her sides, her chin lifted high,
her head thrown back. Mr. Evans came slowly towards her. Poor
Cordy's figure was anything but classical. She resembled a nude
of Cranach. But there was such an heroic abandonment about
her pose, and her eyes shone with such a lustrous appeal, that
something happened within that other locked room, the room
containing the iron bar. Not for nothing was this brave girl the
child of Geard of Glastonbury. Roused to the uttermost her
soul suddenly became a psychic force, a magnet of destruction,
an annihilating ray, and the murderous instrument, summoning
up page seventy-seven of that fatal book, crumbled into a pinch
of dust.

Grotesque and Cranach-like though poor Cordy's naked body
was, it was the body of a woman still, it was the ultimate sym-
bol, the uttermost "Gleichnis," of life's wild experiment. Gro-
tesque it might be, as nakedness went, but combined with the
look she managed to fling, like a passion of immortal wine over
the dark flame of his obsession, it overcame, it triumphed....

One hour later Mr. Evans and Cordelia might both have been
seen jumping with frantic haste out of Solly Lew's taxi, and to
the astonishment of that not easily surprised conveyor of mortal
men, racing with desperate impatience up the slope of Gwyn-
ap-Nud's hill. "They're there, Cordy! They're there! I see them!"
panted Mr. Evans, trying in vain to out-distance Mr. Geard's
daughter.

It had been with some reluctance that Tossie Stickles--now
for some heavenly months Tossie Barter--had been persuaded to
leave her babies and accompany her husband and John Crow
on this fanciful excursion to see the night fall upon Glastonbury
from the summit of the Tor. Barter himself had been followed
by one good piece of luck after another ever since they had
been married. He had hired spacious and airy rooms in the
same house in Northload Street where John and Mary lived,
and between the two menages there had been unruffled and unin-
terrupted harmony. With the establishment of the new regime
in Glastonbury he had been entirely freed from the annoying
presence of Red Robinson at the Factory. Robinson had now
become what might be called the third triumvir among the mag-
nates who, under Mr. Geard, dictatorially administered the af-
fairs of the small community; and Barter was at liberty to
manage the making of souvenirs entirely at his own discretion.

The one topic of conversation in these days that Barter in-
dulged in and upon which he expatiated at inordinate length to
Mary when they were alone was, what had been the psychological
reason for the miserable way in which he had lived before he
met Tossie. Into Mary's private thoughts--and they were subtle
and ironical enough--as she listened to these discourses, it is
not necessary to go; but what she said to Barter was, that all
unattached men are curiously ignorant of "what things a girl
can do"--such was Mary's expression--to make life pleasant.

Meanwhile, so happy was Tom Barter these days, that in a
brief two months his whole expression changed and the whole
cast of his countenance was altered. He positively looked fatter,
too; and his manner of speech was different. He spoke in a
tone much more easy, much more assured. It was their Rabe-
laisian sense of humour that was one of the greatest links be-
tween Tom and Tossie; and morning and night--with the twins
sometimes included and sometimes not--their fits of giggling and
chuckling and unrestrained laughter, going on and on and on,
made the second storey of that gloomy old house sound as if a
party of hilarious schoolboys was staying the night with a party
of hilarious schoolgirls.

The mention of school is relevant enough in this connection;
for what this vita nuova of Tom Barter really meant was that
Tossie had picked up what might be called the man's lost flesh-
and-blood pride just where he had dropped it in his youth under
his unlucky experiences at Gladman's House at Greylands. Some-
thing in him, some psychic organ full of a delicious, animal
gusto for simple things, and an invincible desire to giggle at
everything in existence, had been restored to him by his contact
with Tossie and not only this: for it soon became apparent, even
to John and Mary, that Barter was no longer afraid to "stand
up," as Toss would put it, to "they bloomin' gentry." This aspect
of what the girl had done for him had been brought especially
into evidence of late by reason of his association with Lady
Rachel, who--still unmarried to young Athling but still con-
stantly at his side--found herself asking Barter, in place of any-
body else, to meet her father whenever he came to the Pilgrims'.

Lord P. was constantly coming to the Pilgrims' now; not be-
cause he loved a communistic Glastonbury, for he was still
excessively nervous of the mob that had attacked him; but be-
cause he had become seriously worried about Rachel s relations
with her Ned; and the queer thing was that with his Norfolk
youthfulness restored to him, and the Gladman House years
erased from his life, by these perpetual giggling fits with Tossie,
Barter proved much more a match for the elderly nobleman and
a much more agreeable table-companion to him than anyone
else that Rachel could have picked up.

Lady Rachel's own genius, too, for these little souvenir figures
that his factory was now turning out by the thousands and send-
ing all over the world, had by this time really got Barter in-
terested in his job. The souvenir factory was doing by far the
most flourishing business in Glastonbury. More money was being
made by it than either by the new dye works that the municipality
had communized or by the old dye works that Philip was still
running, and far more than by the Crow tin mine at Wookey,
which now began to show signs of having exhausted its vein of
the precious metal; and Barter's professional pride, as the head
of so flourishing a business, being mingled with his new psycho-
logical self-respect and his new freedom from the wearisome hunt
for erotic novelty, made him just now the happiest and best-
balanced male animal in the town; although in the intoxication
of a pure zest for life in its essence he was probably surpassed
not only by his own radiant Tossie but also by Tossie's relative
by marriage, the beautiful and mystical Nancy.

"'Tis a shame," Tossie remarked to Mary as she poured out
tea for her and John while awaiting Barter's return from the
factory, " 'tis a shame for you to stay and look after the kids.
They'd really stay^ asleep just as they be and no one would dis-
turb 'em if I just locked up the place."

"I wouldn't think of it, Toss dear," said Mary emphatically,
"so don't speak of it again. Tom'll be back soon, John; so don't
finish the tea-cakes!"

"I wasn't thinking of finishing them," protested John indig-
nantly, "but to make sure, I'll put 'em on the stove, if I may,
Toss?" He rose, as he spoke, and replaced the dish in question
near the big smoking tea-kettle. As he surveyed the scene at
the table, Mary's dark head and Tossie's fair one, both bent
towards the cradle at its side, and a bowl of snowdrops, their
stems protruding from green moss, resting near its edge with
a baby's milk-bottle propped against it, John got a sudden de-
licious feeling of the continuity of these domestic vignettes, as
they gather themselves together and take varied patterns all the
way down the centuries! He paused for a second, his hand on the
dresser shelf above the stove where Tossie kept her pepper-pot
and salt-bowl, and the fanciful idea seized him that groups of
this sort--the two girls' heads, the cottage-loaf on the rough
linen tablecloth, the two babies' heads in the cradle on the floor
--were all answering and responding as they reappeared down
the ages, from the dawn of lime, to some invisible pattern of
pre-ordained harmony which was forever being struggled after
by Nature and forever being just missed, or lost as soon as it
came together.

As he stood there watching those four feminine heads, the
grown ones and the others, grouped about that cottage-loaf and
that bowl of snowdrops, the scene wavered and fluctuated be-
fore him, melted, dissolved and changed. Through that Glaston-
bury room, as he gave himself up to his waking-trance, flowed
the big river at Northwold, rose the span of Foulden Bridge,
whitish and narrow, deepened and darkened the dim pools of
Dye's Hole, under their ancient willow roots! Why should he
wait for old Tom's return, why should he wait till he and Mary
were alone together, to tell her the thrilling news with which
his mind was brimming over that afternoon? He had come to
this tea-party at Tossie's to find Mary already there; and except
for what his wife could read in his excited face--and he knew
she had read something already!--he had had no chance even
to whisper to her by herself. Where had John come from on this
twenty-fifth of February, this day of such unusual atmospheric
effects ?

He had found a little note from the Mayor when he reached
his office-shanty down by the railway after lunching with Mary
at his favourite Othery Dairy in Street Road; and hack again to
Street Road he had immediately dragged himself, not a little
peevish at having to retrace his steps across the whole width of
the town. But once inside Cardiff Villa, once ensconced in Mrs.
Geard's chair, with the well-known knitted antimacassar of
bright coloured wools behind his head, and old Geard nodding his
great white face opposite him, he had known, by one of his swift
vagabond instincts, that, as far as he was concerned, this day
of strange under-water lights was a bringer of incredible, un-
dreamed-of luck. To the end of his days would John Crow re-
member that interview with his master. The first thing he had
noticed--for he had seen little of Mr. Geard since the man had
become so much more than the Mayor of Glastonbury--was that
Bloody Johnny had got older. Yes, his hair was greyer, his face
was whiter, his plump hands were more wrinkled and the stomach
over which they were folded was more capacious.

"And that's why, lad," Mr. Geard said, "I can talk to 'ee about
things I can't speak of to anyone else. 'Twould make Crummie
unhappy, and the sweet lass is unhappy enough over Holy Sam,
and 'twould make Cordy nervous; and as for my dear wife.

The truth is, lad, I've been telling He, ever since our opening
of the arch, that His work for me here be about done. At first
He wouldn't give ear to what I said. He thought 'twas laziness,
or the Devil in me bosom. But when I went on telling He how
'twere, He came little by little to give heed. Tweren't that He
were deaf, even afore, ye must understand, sonny; but 'twere that
I be such a queer one, and that I had summat in me--yes, laddie,
that's the solemn truth--what He couldn't get the hang of!"

John looked at the diabolical black eyes--now gleaming like
two fuliginous mine shafts out of some Tartarean tin mine--
and he thought to himself: "I don't wonder that Christ finds it
hard to understand him. The truth is the old chap's never been
more than half a Christian."

"You are not easy to understand, Mr. Geard," he murmured
aloud.

The remark seemed to displease the Mayor of Glastonbury.
"That's because I'm too simple for 'ee. I be too simple for any-
thing in this clever town. I be a Montagu man, I be."

"I don't call you simple, Mr. Geard!" John was growing ex-
cessively bold in this interview with his master. Was it that his
drifting tramp's mind had gathered up an inkling that this was
the very last time, upon this earth, that he would talk to Mr.
Geard face to face? It is not often given to human beings to be
able to treat a fragment of time that can never return again
with the intense and ritualistic concentration appropriate to a
moment irretrievably slipping away into an everlasting impos-
sibility of repetition.

But on this February afternoon John Crow did touch exactly
and precisely such an intense concentration. He attained it--and
again and again, after it was all over, he thanked his stars he had
attained it--partly because of his childish and greedy high
spirits under the pressure of his instinct about some incredible
good fortune and partly because, beneath the semi-hypnotism that
Geard's black eyes exercised over him, there was a direct trans-
ference of thought between them.

But was it really possible that Christ Himself found it hard
to understand in this singular Servant of His, what he, John
Crow, the eternal heathen, the Stone-worshipper, the forehead-
tapper upon Stones, understood quite easily? What he did see
was, or at least, what he imagined he saw was that Geard of
Glastonbury, having built his Saxon arch, having worked his
Miracle, having inaugurated his new, mystical, Johannine and
anti-Pauline cult, had decided that it was an appropriate time--
although there was no hurry about it and it was necessary to
avoid any unpleasant shocks--to leave this misty, rainy, sub-
aqueous atmosphere of Glastonbury and pay an exploring visit to
the Isles of the Dead.

"I believe you are so little of a simple person. Sir," John had
the gall to say to him now, "that you are meditating what many
people would bluntly call suicide, although there might be, I
am ready to admit, other and prettier names for it."

Bloody Johnny lifted his left eyebrow at this, a sign with him
that he acknowledged the receipt of a palpable hit. He shuffled
in his chair, leaned forward a little and smiled. "But I've hardly
begun my talks to these foreigners," he said.

"If you'll excuse my saying so, Sir," said John, who now
seemed driven on by some demon within him to try and frighten
away his good luck even at the moment when it was on the
point of falling into his lap, "I think you express your ideas
more effectively by just being what you are and talking casually
to your friends. Leave it to Athling and Lady Rachel, in your
Wayfarer, Sir, to make your thoughts reasonable and logical.
Christ, if I may be allowed to refer to Him, left it to His fol-
lowers to round off His ideas."

Mr. Geard leaned back again in his chair. With half-shut eyes
and with the tips of his fingers held together in the way old
family lawyers hold them, he looked dreamily and a little quiz-
zically at John.

"I...would...rather like...to ask you a question, young man," he
said slowly.

"Say on, dear my Lord," quoth John.

"Could you conceive anyone, could you, in fact, for there's
no need to beat about the bush, conceive me, committing sui-
cide out of love of life, instead of out of weariness of it or out
of hatred for it?"

"Love of life?" questioned John.

He pulled up his legs under him in Megan's chair and lean-
ing forward with his hands on its elbows allowed his lank frame
to relax with a certain voluptuousness and then grow rigid with
an eager, intense, magnetic curiosity. "Death and what's beyond
death," went on Mr. Geard, "are only what ye might call the
unknown aspects of life. What I want to ask you is, do you sup-
pose anyone's ever committed suicide out of an excess of life,
simply to enjoy the last experience in full consciousness?" John's
eyes were now shining with lively curiosity. He had forgotten
all about his premonition of his master's benevolence. His whole
being quivered with a hyena-like lust for spiritual blood. Curi-
ously enough, it was exactly at that same hour, in this afternoon
of sub-aquatic lights and shadows, that Paul Trent pulled up his
legs, on to the bench by the Cattle Market railings, to reveal his
secret feelings to the death-doomed Miss Elizabeth.

It was the privilege of that stricken lady to listen to the con-
fession of a feline idealist. It was the privilege--or the trial--
of Mr. Geard to be inquisitioned by a prowling sceptic. In a
town of so many "heavy-weather" somnambulists, these light-
footed jungle cats and jackals seemed lured, by a necessity in
their nature, to rub themselves with excited tails or with panting
nostrils against the most formidable characters, in their vicinity.

"But, Sir," John protested now. "Don't you think that whatever
the minds or spirits of people want to do, their bodies, or the
central vital nerve in their bodies must always hold them back
at the last? Don't you think, Sir, that though our minds can
desire death for many reasons it's a different story when we
come actually to try killing ourselves? Don't you think that
something automatically leaps up then, that loathes death, and
must fight against death, do what you can, until the bitter end?"

Hearing these words from the figure in his wife's chair, Mr.
Geard emitted a sound that might be rendered by the syllables
"rumti-dum-ti-dum."

"But if this quick-spring-nerve or this jumping-jack-nerve in
us, boy," he said, "gets in the way of what we yearn for, can't
we pinch its throat, or give its fretful pulse a little tap?"

John sighed and the light died out of his face. He uncurled
his long legs and straightened them out. He ceased to be the
eager intellectual jackal, and became the helpless, slouching,
sunshine-loving tramp. There had suddenly come over him as he
looked into the eyes of this man a chilly sense of something so
monstrously different from anything he had ever met, that it
frightened him. The tone in which Mr. Geard had said "pinch
its throat" sounded like the shuddering heave of all the ground
underneath all the things that were warm, familiar, natural.
What were the huge antennae of Bloody Johnny's soul fumbling
towards, out of the depths in which it stirred and moved?

"I shouldn't wonder," thought John, "if the old man's not
got bored to extinction by all this Grail business and miracle
business and new religion business. I shouldn't wonder if what
he really wants is that delicious death-to-boredom that I get when
I make love to Mary. The old girl upstairs couldn't give him
any thrill of that kind and he's been snubbing Rachel lately. I
know that; for I've seen 'em together; and he cares nothing for
boys. I believe he's turned against the whole caboodle of this
Glastonbury stunt. Sick to death of it he is; and I don't blame
him, the poor old beggar! What he wants is a plump little
Abishag to cuddle. He's a warm-blooded old rogue and he's gone
cold i' the vitals."

Thus did John struggle, by the use of the most cynical consid-
erations from his heathen Stone-worshipping nature, to cover
up the primordial ice-crack, the glacier-crevasse among his sunlit
earth-rocks, which the problem of Mr. Geard perhaps quite er-
roneously--had uncovered before his pessimistic imagination.
To an earth-loving vicious East-Anglian it was impossible even
to conceive the idea that Geard of Glastonbury might deliberately
kill himself in order to gain more life. He could do it to escape
from life; that was easily imaginable; but not this other.

"No, no," thought John. "There never has been, and there
never will be, among all the millions and millions and millions
of suicides, since the beginning of the world, one single one like
this. It's as impossible as for a man to get out of his own skin.
Life itself would fight against it with tooth and nail. The old
chap is just fooling himself. What he really wants is a sweet
young doxy to his bed...but, heigh-ho! The fellow would
never hurt his old woman to that tune...so there we are...
I wonder if he is going to pension me off?"

It was at this point in this memorable interview--the last that
John was ever destined to have with his grandfather's friend--
that Mr. Geard did turn to practical matters,

He laid before his secretary the whole array of the startling
things he had already--though strongly against the advice of
Mr. Robert Stilly--arranged with the bank to have done.

It was a sad witness to the difficulty of starting a real inde-
pendent commune in the midst of an old kingdom like England
that the Glastonbury bank remained absolutely untouched by the
new regime, save in so far as the large sums of money piled up
by the town passed into its hands.

Mr. Geard had bought small annuities for his wife, for Cor-
delia, and for Crummie. He had also--John was perfectly right
in his instinct there--purchased for John himself an annuity of
one hundred and fifty pounds a year.

He had, in these arrangements, entirely exhausted the whole
forty thousand pounds' legacy left by Canon Crow.

And so John was wondering as he stood by Tossie's dresser
watching those four feminine heads, whether to wait till tonight
to tell Mary, or whether to tell her at once, and obtain her reac-
tion--and Tossie's too--to the exciting news before Tom came in.
He recalled exactly how Mr. Geard had looked, as he let him out
of his front door only an hour ago, and how the man had abrupt-
ly cut short his almost tearful gratitude by the curious words:
"'Tis His Blood-money, lad. 'Tis His Blood-money. And ye must
never forget that, none o' ye, when Easter comes round and ye
eat and drink the Life in the Death!"

John found himself, when later in that spring twilight they
were walking past the Vicarage gate together, sorry he had not
waited till he got Mary alone to tell her about it, instead of
blurting it all out as he had done, and making her jump up from
the table with her grey eyes big as saucers.

It was the way Tom had taken it, when he came in, that
troubled him now. They hadn't been very considerate of Tom's
feelings, chattering together, he and Mary, about how they would
clear off to Northwold at once and hunt for a cottage on the
Didlington Road.

It was Toss, of course, who had been the one--not he or Mary
at all--to notice how Tom was hit. The girl had begun hur-
riedly talking at once about how Tom and she would have to
save up and come and join them in a few years when the twins
were bigger.

"But Toss," Mary had murmured at that point, "you'd never
bear to leave Glastonbury, would you?" and the words had
hung suspended in the air, full of subtle reproach for them both.
It was then that he had for the first time caught the grim bitter-
ness of what Tom was feeling and his aching longing for his
native soil and his craving to show Tossie the wide waters of
Didlington Lake full of pike and perch and waterlilies.

They caught sight of the shirtsleeves of Mr. Weatherwax as
they passed the Vicarage gate. The old rogue was pulling up
weeds underneath some rhododendron bushes at the edge of the
shrubbery; and as he laboured he sang: "The Brewer, the Miller,
the Malster and I lost a heifer, lost a filly, lost a Ding-Dong;
When DafEadowndillies look up at the sky; Pass along boys!
Pass along! The Brewer, the Miller, the Malster and I Left a
heifer, left a filly, left a Ding-Dong; Down in a grassy green
grave for to lie; Pass along boys! Pass along!"

The gardener's back was turned to them and he did not rise
from his stooping position as they passed. Something, however,
about the sound of his thick bass voice, muffled and muted by
his bending position, was so gross, so earthy, so suggestive of
rank-smelling roots, tossed up lob-worms, slug-slime on a pronged
fork, and bitter-sweet human sweat, that when Barter, who al-
ways relished talking in Rabelaisian fashion to Tossie in front
of the fastidious though not exactly squeamish John, made some
coarse joke about the fellow's enormous rump, John got a sud-
den, quick, spontaneous revulsion from his old friend* which
was not lessened when Tossie started off on one of her ringing
peals of Benedict Street laughter.

"Oh, how glad I'll he," he thought to himself, "when I'm safe
back in that boat on the Wissey! By God! I know what I'll do.
I'll hire that boat in Alder Dyke from that fellow, so that we'll
have it when we want it."

It suddenly occurred to him that it was in connection with
the smell of alders and with the look of their dark sturdy foliage
that he had thought of Tom that day he was with Mary and he
set himself to recall the boyish figure of his childish memories.

As they debouched into Chilkwell Street and were passing the
old Tithe Barn, John heard Tossie, Glastonbury girl as she was,
say something about one of the evangelistic creatures. It must
have been a remark of more surprising lewdness and more amus-
ing originality than John could quite follow, and it did not win
much favour in his ears.

"The truth is," he thought, "I'm not suited for a sociable life,
or to make merry with my friends. When once I've got Mary to
myself in Northwold, I swear I won't see a single soul; and I
won't invite a single soul. We'll live absolutely alone, Mary and
I; absolutely alone and to ourselves! This girl's a decent girl,
and her kids are nice kids; but I couldn't have stood living in
the same house and having everything a quatre much longer.
This hundred and fifty from the old man is a heavenly escape.
It's a windfall out of the air; it's a benediction. Tonnerre de
Dieu! It's as much one of his miracles as his curing any of
those people. Christ! I'd soon be converted to the worship of
Geard the Saviour if the old chap did kick the bucket. I hope
he saw how grateful I was. I did kiss his hand. I'm damned glad
I did that; for I think it pleased him. Perhaps in his whole life,
the life I daresay of one of the greatest men who've ever lived,
I'm the only person who's ever kissed his hand! And think of the
number of ridiculous society-whores whose hands are kissed
every day. Oh, damn and blast this human breed!"

They were passing all Mr. Geard's improvements on Chalice
Hill now. In the green twilight, in spite of the litter and the
presence of many unsightly shanties, the Mayor's Saxon arch
stood out nobly and impressively. Beyond the Grail Fount, too,
they could see the newly erected Rotunda and this also had a
dignity of its own at this hour. It was indeed a sort of heretical
temple Brat Bloody Johnny's architect was building. John sur-
veyed it with infinite disgust.

"The dear old chap," he thought, "ought never to be betrayed
into playing the mountebank. If he's anything, he's the founder,
not the expounder. He'll spoil it all if he goes on trying to
explain."

"Who were them Saxons, Tom?" enquired Tossie as they
passed these various erections. "Were 'un savages, them Early
Christians? Did 'un worship King Arthur?"

Her question seemed to tickle Barter hugely and he at once
began chaffing her about her ignorance of history. But John
thought to himself, "Evans would say that the real cause of
old Ceard's getting on the rocks and talking of suicide is his
disregard of Arthur and his Welsh Demons. I wonder if it's pos-
sible that--" and his mind went back to that inexplicable
event that had happened to himself at Pomparles Bridge. John's
hatred of Glastonbury and its traditions was betrayed to the end
by his incorrigible interest in psychic problems. Mr. Geard's
mysticism had always influenced him more than he was willing
to admit; and in any case he was a temperamental heathen
rather than a materialist. He was quite as sceptical of materialistic
explanations as he was of the occult occurrences that gave rise
to them.

The fancy came into his. head now that in his daily visits to
Chalice Hill and his constant disturbance of that dangerous earth
Mr. Geard might have come under some deliberately evil spell
prepared long ago by these old Celtic magicians.

"Evans ought to have stopped him," he said to himself as they
passed St. Michael's Inn, "from fooling those Welsh fairies by
resuscitating a great thundering Saint like Dunstan!"

"Mad Bet's window be shut," said Tossie, "and shes curtain
drawn. I be afeared thik means her's peeping out at we and
making faces at we."

"Bosh!" muttered Barter crossly.

For some reason this particular fuss that all the Glastonbury
girls made about Mad Bet irritated the man's Norfolk stolidity.

"Bosh, Toss! What a baby you are! The window's shut because
it's a chilly night. The woman's probably in bed."

"No more in bed than thee be, Tom!" replied his wife with
spirit. "Tom don't like I talking about Mad Bet," she added,
"He be more afraid of she than I be!"

"I tell you," grumbled Barter, more vehemently than the
occasion seemed to demand, "that woman is in bed; or else
she's strolling harmlessly up Tor Hill, just as we are, in the cool
of the evening. You Somerset people make too much of an old
trot's eccentricity. Your Betsy, or whatever you call her, wouldn't
excite any attention at all if she lived in Norfolk. You've pam-
pered her down here and petted her till she thinks she's a regular
Mother Shipton."

So spoke Tom Barter; and his temper about such a trifle
might be considered as a premonitory sign that he was not com-
pletely impervious to the distant hum of the catastrophic
avalanche.

At that very moment as the three of them reached the gate into
Tor Field, the obedient and respectful Codfin was helping Betsy
Chinnock to ascend a complicated system of precipitous work-
men's ladders which now connected the interior floor of St.
Michael's Tower with its ruined belfry, and this again with its
airy summit. Here, once more, the Mayor's tireless architect from
London had been at work; for the communal council had de-
cided that if a light circular wooden staircase were erected in-
side from bottom to top, it would be possible to charge a shilling's
admission to this magnificent watch-tower, which would greatly
increase their weekly revenue. Alone among the council's recent
expenditures this invasion of St. Michael's Tower interested the
Vicar of Glastonbury, who regarded it as the beginning of that
rebuilding of the old church of which he had been talking so
long.

Mr. Dekker had indeed several times of late, before even Penny
Pitches was down in her kitchen, slipped out of his lonely house
and ascended the hill and climbed all these ladders in order
to challenge the sunrise and to think about Nell and about his
son. They were not difficult ladders to climb; and being inside
so narrow a space, a climber was not so liable to dizziness as
would have been the case if they had been propped up on the
outside.

Not a soul in Glastonbury, if we rule out the infuriated spirit
of Gwyn-ap-Nud as too insubstantial a presence to be called a
soul--had beheld the Quantocks man's dark figure, standing
erect up there at dawn, defying his ancient enemy as it rose
like an enormous red balloon out of Bridgewater Bay, and pray-
ing there for his son and for his son's lost girl.

It was not the first time that Codfin had attended Mr. Evans'
Grail Messenger upon a climbing adventure, and if overpower-
ing sexual passion had not made the woman's knees shake, very
much as Mr. Evans' own knees did when he opened "The Un-
pardonable Sin," Codfin would have got her to the top very
easily.

To the top he did eventually get her, after a long rest at the
black worm-eaten Jacobean oak-beams that were all that was
left of the ancient belfry; and if Gwyn-ap-Nud had been more
than an insubstantial presence he would surely have taken these
two for a real witch being helped to her pulpit of far-flung
curses by her attendant demon. Once at the top and leaning
over the edge like two mediaeval gargoyles, Codfin snuffed the
pure twilight with aesthetic rapture. The fact that he was, in less
than half an hour, going to commit murder, rather enhanced
than otherwise this natural ecstasy. How could Codfin contem-
plate so calmly, as he surveyed this aerial landscape, the idea of
putting to death a person who had never done him any harm,
simply because he was moved to this maniacal issue by this
crazy woman? How could Codfin, when he himself enjoyed in
so intense a fashion the physical thrill of breathing this fragrant
twilight, deliberately condemn another man to eternal uncon-
sciousness, and himself to an almost certain death in a prison
courtyard?

The feelings of hired assassins, and such really was Codfin--
though what hired him was religious awe for his witch-queen--
must be of a different nature from those of all other murderers.

Completely devoid of any previous personal attitude to their
allotted victim they take upon themselves to establish between
them the most personal of all attitudes. But how could Codfin
risk the gallows for the sake of the frenzy of Mad Bet? Ask the
fanatic devotee of some outraged idol how he can risk death
to avenge his deity!

Mad Bet had become Codfin's deity. To obey Mad Bet had
become Codfin's religion. Between two unpleasant experiences--
the hangman's rope which he had never felt, and the look of
reproach in Mad Bet's eyes which he had felt--he selected, with-
out giving the alternative so much as a second thought, the one
that shocked his imagination the less. Compared with the prob-
lem of Codfin, however, how easy, how natural, was that of
Mad Bet! Mad Bet was actuated, just as Mr. Evans had been,
till the nakedness of Mr. Geard's daughter exorcised it, by the
nerve-worm of sex.

To be middle-aged, to be of a personal hideousness that was
revolting, to be threatened by the county asylum, to be the
laughing-stock of the children of several streets, to have a skull
under your hat bald as an egg, all these things weigh in the
balances as nothing when that little nerve-worm begins to heave
and froth and spit.

"There 'un be! Do 'ee see 'un, Missus?" cried Codfin sud-
denly, lowering his head below the level of the battlements and
pressing his companion's shoulder to force her to crouch down.

"Thee be sure 'twon't make 'un suffer, Finn Toller?" she
said, as their four eyes watched the three figures entering Tor
Field.

Codfin emitted a faint chuckle at this. "Didn't 'ee see thik
bar?" he whispered. "Thik bar did make me poor arm ache wi'
carrying 'un. Thik bar be enough to stunny a elaphint."

"Oh, me king, oh, me love, oh, me sweet marrow!" cried the
madwoman from the bottom of her worm-driven heart.

"Don't 'ee let they see thee's head over edge of Tower," re-
marked the other calmly. "I be going down now. And don't 'ee
scream nor cry out anythink when I do it, and don't 'ee holler
if thik Barter catches hold of I. Just 'ee stay where 'ee be till
all be quiet; and don't 'ee say nothink either to no one when
tomorrow be come and they've a put poor Coddy in canary-
cage!"

As Finn Toller scrambled quickly down the long ladders to
the belfry and then down the others to the floor, he said to him-
self: "I knewed Mr. Curiosity wouldn't come after all his talk.
They scholards what reads of fornications wouldn't fuggle a fly,
nor them as reads of stiff uns wouldn't drown a cat. But 'a won't
tell tales of Coddy neither, for fear of 's own skin!"

With these sagacious comments upon human psychology Mr.
Toller went calmly to the place where he had propped up his
murderous weapon. Chance or fate--or the air-squadrons of
Gwyn-ap-Nud-- seemed resolved to make Mr. Toller's task as easy
as possible that night.

When the three friends reached the top they turned round and
stood panting and out of breath on a ledge of grass a yard or so
below the threshold stone of the tower.

Tossie quickly turned their attention to the vast, sad, greenish-
coloured plain stretched out before them; and even before they
had got their breath she entangled them in the absorbing and
piquant subject as to exactly at what spot in this airy map their
own Northload house was situated. This was where Chance--or
the spirit of Gwyn-ap-Nud--was so favourable to Codfin; for
unless the girl had started some especially beguiling topic the
second they paused, John would, almost certainly, have gone
straight to the tower, following the natural human instinct of
attaining an objective, and also obeying a personal fondness for
touching cold stones with his hand, and thus made it impossible
for the assassin to steal forth from that door with the monstrous
piece of iron on his shoulder.

This is however exactly what the murderer was permitted now
to do. Step by step, as the girl pointed towards one spot and
John pointed towards another and Barter protested that both
were too far to the south, Finn Toller came softly and quietly,
down the slope behind them, with the iron bar now lifted up in
both his hands.

Nature the great healer is also the great destroyer; and the
tendency to giggle at the same things and at the same second
which had wiped out all memories of Gladman's House for
Barter now wiped out for him all memories of every kind. For
a remark that John now made started off the pair of them utter-
ing such ungovernable peals of laughter that Barter was forced
to shift his position a little.

In that shifting of his position he saw in a flash the figure of
Codfin standing behind John and he realised in the twinkling of
an eyelid that the hideous instrument in the tramp's hands was
already trembling in the air.

The inevitable material laws of balance, of rhythm, of gravi-
tation, of dynamics, had already decided that the iron bar was
going to descend on John's head. What they had not counted
on, or taken into their mechanical consideration, was the auto-
matic swiftness, swifter than the descent of death itself, with
which the instinct of a Norfolk gentleman could express itself
in action at a deadly crisis.

To ward off this blow, to arrest this descent of the iron bar,
Barter now plunged forward, with the natural result that, in
place of the thing descending on his friend's head, it descended
on his own, cracking his skull full above the forehead and kill-
ing him instantaneously.

Just as twenty-five years ago the young Tom had come so
often to John's rescue when their boat got entangled in the weeds
of the Wissey, so the grown-up Tom, father of twins, and husband
of Tossie Stickles, now gave up his life for the same friend on
this Somersetshire hill. He was killed instantaneously, the front
of his skull being bashed in so completely, that bits of bone
covered with bloody hair surrounded the deep dent which the
iron made. His consciousness, the "I am I" of Tom Barter, shot
up into the ether above them like a released fountain-jet and
quivering there pulsed forth a spasm of feeling, in which outrage,
ecstasy, indignation, recognition, pride, touched a dimension of
Being more quick with cosmic life than Tom had ever reached
before in his thirty-seven years of conscious existence. This
heightened--nay! this quadrupled--awareness dissolved in a
few seconds, after its escape from the broken cranium, but
whether it passed, with its personal identity intact, into that
invisible envelope of rarefied matter which surrounds our as-
tronomic sphere or whether it perished irrecoverably, the pres-
ent chronicler knows not.

Tossie flung herself on Barter's body with a piercing scream
that rang out over the whole valley. Scream after scream tore
itself from that soft mass of clinging female loss till her fair
hair was dabbled with Tom's blood and actually entangled with
broken bits of hair-covered bone that had been Tom's hard
skull.

Some said they heard her screams as far down the valley as
Tithe Barn. Lily Rogers maintained she heard them as she picked
parsley for Miss Drew's dinner in the Abbey House garden.

John made an instinctive movement to pursue the murderer;
but the tramp, hearing wild cries from the slope of the hill, and
seeing Mr. Evans and Cordelia rushing up the ascent towards
him, dashed back into the tower and clambered, swift as a
monkey, up the tall ladders inside. For quite the space of a
couple of minutes, after his first motion of pursuit, John stood
stock-still, his face so contorted with horror that it assumed the
appearance of a wooden puppet, listening in spellbound, frozen
apathy to the girl's heart-rending screams.

A semi-cirque of flying rooks, just seven in number, flapped
with creaking wings across the top of the tower, making their
way northwest towards Mark Moor. Little did they reck of the
cracking of the skull of a man upon a patch of grass! As for a
tiny earth beetle that was foraging for its insect prey just there,
it scurried away from Tom's blood as if it had been a lake of
brimstone.

In addition to this, a panic-stricken hare, fleeing in wild
terror from the man and woman who were rushing up the hill,
came with its long desperate leaps almost up to John's feet,
and then, remaining motionless there for a second, rushed past
the tower and away down the slope towards Havyatt Gap. The
appearance of this hare aroused John from his paralysis. He ran
to the door of the tower and pulled it wide open. The couple
of minutes' delay, however, had enabled Finn Toller to ascend,
for he climbed like an animal rather than a man, to the top of
the last ladder; but here he was met by Mad Bet, in a cold
paroxysm of frenzied remorse. Without giving her unfortunate
devotee time to reach the stone platform where she knelt to
receive him, the woman seized the thin bare wrists that Codfin
extended towards her and flung him off the ladder. Finn Toller
fell backwards, head downwards; and John, stepping hurriedly
from the door at the man's death cry, saw his body crash to the
ground in a cloud of dust and heard the ghastly thud upon the
ground with which his neck was broken.

Like a great bald-headed vulture that has been shot through
the wing, Mad Bet, on the stone summit of the tower, crouched
with convulsive shudderings against the parapet. Here she lay,
without thought or purpose, moaning in a low voice to herself,
and covering the cold slab against which she pressed her face
with piteous tears and murmuring endearments, as though it
were the mangled body of the man who had roused that terrible
nerve-worm that devours hearts. Mad Bet had not seen what
had really occurred down there. To her disturbed and tragic con-
sciousness, it was John who lay dead at the foot of the tower
with his skull smashed in.

There is that about an uttermost sorrow which levels all
distinctions; and not Deianeira for Heracles, not Iseult for Tris-
tram, moaned and murmured to her lost love with more abso-
luteness of pitiful grief than did this bald-headed creature on
the top of the tower to her supposedly dead idol. Round about
her crouching form a couple of great swifts, those pointed-
winged demons of the high air, flew in narrowing circles, uttering
their short shrill cries, and these sharp sounds were answered
by the melancholy and more familiar wailings of the peewits
in the lower levels of Tor Field, disturbed by Tossie's screams
and calling out warnings to one another.

Broken under that bar, Mad Bet envisaged the sweet head of
her dear love; while the wild screams of Tossie over Tom's body
joined the age-old chorus: "Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
tam cari capitis?"

The green twilight was being sucked down now by undula-
tions of the green earth. The invisible dews were falling. A gusty
night-wind was rising up from beyond Queen's Sedgemoor. The
first cold stars were coming out over the three horizons. Where
the sun had gone down in the west, there lingered only a faint
dying trace of the livid before-night whiteness. At this actual
moment of the earth revolution, although under very different
atmospheric conditions, in China, in India, on the banks of the
Danube, by the Black Sea and in the tents of the Sahara, in
battle, murder, pestilence and shipwreck, in bolted doom sudden
death was rushing on the hairy scalps of men.

Did Tossie feel her grief worse than any of those who mourned?
Or were the moans of some old Chinese wife on the banks of
the Yellow River yet more heart-broken, the terrible silence of
some despairing Malay in a Singapore hovel yet more crushing?

As for John, the worst moment of the whole unspeakable
nightmare was when he lifted that plump bundle of wild hysteria
from off the body of his friend and laying her on the grass
dabbed with his handkerchief at her brow and cheeks and ac-
tually removed with his finger and thumb a fragment of Tom's
smashed skull from her sticky hair. She rolled over--and he
was glad she did, for her face was shocking to him--and began
smothering her convulsions in the green grass, her fingers pluck-
ing and clutching at its cold earthy roots.

It was then, just before Evans and Cordelia reached them, that
he snatched off his overcoat and covered Tom's head and shoul-
ders with it.

"Oh, what has happened? What has happened?" panted Cor-
delia, "Has that man gone? Has he hurt you? Who is hurt? Is
Mr. Barter hurt? Has. he killed Mr. Barter? Where is he? Have
you let him go?"

Mr. Evans spoke not a single word. He did two things. And
these he did with the punctual, mechanical precision of a con-
summate actor performing a long-ago perfectly rehearsed part.
He stared round him till he caught sight of the iron bar lying
on the ground; and stooping down he lifted up the bloodied
end from the earth and deliberately wiped it with a handful of
grass. Then he went over to where the body was lying. Hesi-
tating for the flicker of a second, he fell on his knees and re-
moving John's coat from Barter's crushed head, gazed at what
was revealed.

The sight had an immediate physical effect upon him. He re-
placed the coat calmly enough; but rising to his feet and turning
his back to the corpse, he began vomiting with cataclysmic heav-
ings of his tall frame. Was the sexual nerve in Mr. Evans, that
sadism-drunk Worm of the Pit, stirred to abominable excitement
as he went through these motions? Mercy of Jesus forbid! That
nerve-worm lay, stretched out in the man's vitals as he vomited
there, cold and constricted, limp as the sloughed off skin of a
summer snake.

Cordelia, who had showed signs of being more concerned over
Mr. Evans as he swayed and retched, and retched and swayed,
than over the murder itself, now sat down on the grass by Tos-
sie's side and took her head in her lap. The first time she did
this the distracted girl beat her off with her hands and tried to
get up and rush over to Barter's body; but the sight of that coat
hiding the crushed head brought so sickening a sense of her
loss that she hid her face between Cordelia's knees and broke
into piteous wailings. These wailings carried no longer, however,
that terrifying note in them that her first shrill screams had had,
and by degrees they sank down from sheer exhaustion into low
moans; till at last the unhappy girl lay quite silent and still.

Mr. Evans, whose paroxysm of vomiting had ceased now,
obeyed John with humble docility, as the latter demanded his
help in dragging forth the body of the murderer from the tower.
This quiet but by no means stupid docility became a fixed habit
with Mr. Evans from now on. It was not that the man's sanity
was affected by the accumulating shocks of this day. What it
seemed to be was a substitution of a definite sense of guilt over
Barter's death for the less tangible but far more deadly remorse
over his sadistic dreams and fantasies. This new guilt of his the
man took calmly, and in a certain sense sanely; but it had a
much more disastrous effect upon him from an external and
practical point of view than the other. When the twenty-sixth of
February dawned poor Cordy was startled to discover that her
Owen's hair had turned white. He had indeed become visibly
and palpably and in every physical respect, if not an old man,
certainly an elderly man.

It was lucky for Cordelia that the tiny annuity, so carefully
purchased for her by Mr. Geard, was enough for their bare needs
in that little house above Bove Town, on the hill leading up to
St. Edmund's Brick Yard; for after this crisis in his days, Mr.
Evans found himself quite incapable of going on with his work
in Number Two's shop. That really elderly and indeed extremely
aged gentleman did not feel it incumbent upon him to regard
his now sleeping partner as in any way entitled to share
ensuing increment from their more than ever lucrative business;
nor, in spite of Cordelia's indignation, could she induce Mr.
Evans to make any claims.

Slowly and laboriously--sometimes writing no more than a
few pages a day--did Mr. Evans continue working at his life's
task, the monumental "Vitus Merlini Ambrosiani"; but luckily
for him Cordelia did not extend to the intellectual interests of
her husband that impatient contempt which she always felt for
her father's religious doctrines.

That culminating scene when she had exorcised, by her heroic
gesture behind the brown blinds, the nerve-devil in Mr. Evans,
had endeared the man to her in the way mothers are endeared to
a deformed or an idiot child; and when her real child perished
later after a premature birth she lavished upon its helpless
parent all the savage maternal protectiveness that the infant
would have claimed if it had lived.

Visitors to Glastonbury can still see, when a little weary per-
haps of romantic antiquities they wander up Wells Old Road
towards Edmund Hill Lane, with a view of inspecting those
famous tile works that have given the town its mellow roofs, a
slow-moving, absent-minded, white-haired gentleman, reading a
blue-covered book as he walks along or as he leans upon the
fence that leads into those suburban fields between Wells Old
Road and Maidencroft Lane.

This book, if any passer-by were bold enough to peruse its
title, would turn out to be Malory's "Morte D'Arthur," but such
a stranger would not be able to guess that what Mr. Evans is
searching for there is something not to be found in Malory at
a ll--nor indeed in any Grail Book, since the time of the great
Welshman Bleheris--namely the real meaning of the mystical
word Esplumeoir.


It was not, as the devoted Codfin had warned her it had best
not be, till all was dark and deserted upon Glastonbury Tor that
Mad Bet climbed down those long ladders and made her way
home to St. Michael's Inn. So great was the hubbub of voices,
all relating various and contradictory versions of that evenings
tragedy, and so crowded were bar-room, parlour and kitchen, that
it was easy for the demented woman to slip back into her unlit
room unobserved by old John Chinnock or by his wife. It was
indeed Tom Chinnock, her nephew, who found her outstretched
on her bed when he came long after closing-time to bring her
her supper. She was still alive and perfectly conscious; but she
had hurt her heart in some way in climbing alone down those
steep ladders, and she never left her bed again.

Not a word did she breathe as to her share in Barter s death.
Not a sign did she make that she wanted to see her "Dilly
darling gent," her "sweet moon's marrow" again before she
died; but Tommy Chinnock reported later (for the Terre Gastee
stone-thrower was her best friend at the last, though Solly Lew
used to come up and sit by her bed of an evening) that the day
before she died, which happened on the first of March, she had '
asked him to go for Mr. Geard.

No one, save Tommy, till his aunt was safe in the Wells Road
Cemetery knew that the woman herself had sent for the Mayor;
though they all knew that the Mayor had gone up to her room--
after having a stiff glass of ale with old John--and had stayed
there for nearly half an hour; but no one at all ever learned
from the Mayor what passed between them.

Dr. Fell had been summoned to hurry to Wirral Hill long
before Mrs. Geard reached Manor House Road, and he had
found Miss Crow already in full possession of her consciousness.
He thanked the Germans heartily, especially the one with the
flask; and then in spite of her weak state, he took the opportunity
of scolding Miss Crow very earnestly and roundly for her fool-
hardy behavior that day.

"A woman like you," he said as he carried her home in Solly
Lew's taxi, "ought to know better than to act like this! What
you've really done, Miss Crow, is to try and commit suicide."

Elizabeth was too weak to defend herself. It did strike her as
ironical however, that this doctor, who she knew was in the
habit of defending the right of self-killing, and whose death by
his own hand Tossie's Mr. Barter was always predicting, should
lapse into this mode of speech.

Dr. Fell had the wit to read what lay behind the smile she
gave him.

"The wrong of it lies," he said, growing rather red in the
face and displaying signs of peevishness at being caught by his
old friend in so conventional a vein, "the wrong of it lies in
the example that a happy person like you, with so lucky a tem-
perament ought to give to us poor dogs."

She was clever enough to take this chance, when she had dis-
turbed his professional aplomb, of asking him point-blank how
long he supposed she had to live.

"Five would astonish me," he said. "Three would surprise me.
From my personal experience, such as it is, I'd give you about
two."

"Years, Dr. Fell?"

"Years, years, years!" he answered querulously. "What else
do you think I meant? Love-affairs?"

She peered out of the taxi window at the tower of St. Benignus'.
She thought of the thousands of times she had looked up at that
solid mass of masonry that shared with St John's and the high
Tor the distinction of giving its visual character to the town of
Glastonbury from all the quarters.

"Is that a shock to you?" he said in a more kindly tone. I oughtn't
to have told you that, I expect."

She still continued to look out of the window without reply-
ing. Miss Crow's thoughts, just then, were indeed those wordless
thoughts of the Vital Principle itself, when the days of the years
of its brief life have had their term set by constituted authority.

"You're not upset, I hope?"

The simplicity of this question, addressed to her when she might
easily, it was clear, have been lying dead on Wirral Hill, tickled
Miss Crow's fancy.

"So upset, Doctor dear," she replied, "that I hereby invite you
to have tea with me in Benedict Street this day three years

The twenty-fourth, isn't it?"

Dr. Fell corrected her. "The twenty-fifth, he said.

"Well? Will you come? And if I'm dead you must come to my
grave in the cemetery. Is that a promise, Doctor.

He lifted her hand courteously to his lips. Both of them turned
after that to the dirty windows of Solly Lew's taxi; but not to
the same window.

The problem that arose immediately after Barter's death, that
arose in both John's and Mary's minds before his body was
taken to the police station, was the problem of Tossie and her
twins. It was Mary--as she and John lay awake in their room
on the floor above, after Dr. Fell had given the stricken girl a
sleeping-draught, and Nancy Stickles had been called in to spend
the night with her--who first broached the startling suggestion.

"Why don't we take Toss and the children with us to North-
wold? Toss could easily get charwork, or laundry-work, or
something like that, to do; and I could look after the babies
while she was out. Old Tom will be happy in his grave if he
knows his children are back again in Norfolk. Nothing would
please him more than the thought of our taking them with us
on the big river."

"The thought of your taking them!" said John.

"Hush! How can you? You know perfectly well," she retorted,
"which of us it was that he really cared for."

"I do know," he doggedly repeated. "It was you."

"John!" she cried indignantly, pulling her arm from under
his head and sitting up in bed. "You've no right to say such a
thing. It's you, first and last, that Tom loved! He came to me
when he was in trouble and sad; just as I went to him when I
was unhappy; but in his heart of hearts it was always you."

So she spoke; but neither of them realised how that ill-fated
prayer from the boat on the Wissey had been neutralised by
Tom, any more than they thought of those silvery fish and those
green weeds as things that the dead man would never see again.

"What I cannot for the life of me understand," said John, for
he was too cautious and selfish to commit himself in a hurry
to her plan of taking Tossie, "is what motive that man had for
murdering him. Old Sheperd said he'd had his eye on him for a
long time, and that he suspected him of several burglaries; but
what possible grudge could he have against Tom?"

"Why, didn't you hear what Toss was talking about in her
hysterics, when Fell gave her that drug?"

"No, I can't say I did. I wasn't listening. I was talking to the
policeman and to Mr. Bishop. I didn't come in till you got her
quiet again."

Mary stretched out her hand to the little table which was
upon John's side ol their bed. She stretched it out above John's
face, and he caught at it with his hand and playfully, and yet
not without malice, bit it sharply.

"What are you doing? You hurt me!" she cried with asperity.
He chuckled to himself as the taste of her flesh, that taste he
loved so well, hung about him, while she busied herself with
matchbox and candle.

When the little yellow flame was mounting up and her red rug
and red curtains were coming by leaps and starts into view,
she drew back and resumed her own place. But she balanced
both her pillows between her shoulders and the head of the
bed and sat straight up.

"I've been meaning to tell you this ever since we came up-
stairs," she said, "but I kept putting it off." As she spoke she
remembered another occasion when she had kept putting off--
an agitating topic; and that was when she had had to tell him
about her friendship with Tom, in that boat on the Wissey.

"To tell me what? Something that Toss cried in her fever?
God, Mary! She might have cried out practically anything. You
saw what a state she was in? But let's have it. Let's hear the
great revelation!"

"Toss spoke as if she'd seen that tramp aiming his iron thing
at you; and Tom rushing in to take the blow."

John certainly got a queer sensation as he heard this. The
odd thing was, however, that while he accepted what Tossie had
said without questioning it, he did not feel a rush of tender,
melting gratitude to his dead friend! The truth was he had so
Iong played the feminine role with Barter, so long leaned upon
him" and relied upon his strength that he only felt now as if
they had been in some desperate melee together, where Tom as
he always did, had taken the lead; and for that reason had got
hurt...had...got...in fact...killed; but when it came to making Tom's
tragic death a sublime act of sacrifice and of sacrifice for him,
John dodged that tremendous conclusion with shamefully blink-
ing eyelids.

"But what on earth could the fellow have got against me?"
said John, "Or do you suppose he meant to kill us both and
ravish Tossie?"

He had such a very quaint expression, at once cringing and
quizzical, panicky and humorous, as he sat up in bed, his flannel
pyjamas, with their pierrot-like black-and-white stripes, showing
so fantastical in the candlelight, that Mary could not suppress a
smile. She thought, in her heart: "How queer men are! Here he
is with his best friend--his boyhood friend--dead to save him;
and all he can do is to try and scare himself like a child!"
She sighed heavily when her smile died away. "It is in these
matters of life and death," she thought, "that men and women
are especially different. Women want to suck up to the last dregs
every drop of the awful things that happen. They want to soak
themselves in their feelings, to swim in them, to float on them,
to drown in them, whereas John is squeezing all the love he
really feels for Tom into a tight little juggler's ball and throw-
ing it from hand to hand!"

She turned her head towards him from its white pillows. From
each side of her cold clear forehead the brown hair was drawn
smoothly back; and she had pulled the coil of it from off the
nape of her neck and allowed it to fall over her left shoulder in
a long single plait. She did not know that John had thought to
himself, as in his heart-felt bewilderment he had done what he
had never done before in his life, put on his pyjama-trousers
over his drawers: "How queer girls are! Mary is looking in the
mirror to see whether she has plaited her hair properly. I sup-
pose she'll loosen it with her fingers, over her ears, just in that
same careful way, when I'm lying in my coffin as cold as
poor Tom!"

"Give me a cigarette, will you?" was what she had apparently
turned her head towards him to say. It was his turn now to fum-
ble among the objects on the little table at his side; but they
were soon, both of them, smoking in pensive peace.

"What's the time, John dearest?"

He pulled out his watch from under his pillow. "A quarter past
three," he told her.

"You don't think that drug's stopped acting, and she's awake
again, do you?"

John was silent; trying to catch every least sound in Number
Fifteen, Northload Street.

"Could you bear it, dearest, to have Toss and the children
with us out there?"

It would have been as impossible for John to have said "no"
to this speech as it would have been for him to have got up and
gone down to the room below.

"Of course, if you could!" he said.

Mary sighed. "Well, that's settled then. And the sooner we
get away, the better for Toss. We could all stay in that North-
wold Inn, couldn't we, till we get our place and get these things
out there?"

"Tom must have left...a fair sum...in the...bank," murmured John
in a ruminating voice.

"Now, you stop that!" cried Mary. "Tom's money must be
kept for those little girls. These people here...Spear and
Trent and Robinson...will have to get us all out there! It's
the least they can do, with all Tom has done for their factory."

John relapsed into silence again. It was impossible for him to
refrain from thinking how his delectable plan for being left
absolutely alone with Mary out there was now smashed to bits.
"Do you hate Glastonbury as much as you ever did?"

Mary was surprised at herself for asking this question. It
seemed to have come into her head and rushed to her lips inde-
pendently of her conscious will.

"No," said John laconically.

"Why not?" pressed the girl.

"Oh, damn it all!" cried John. "A person never knows why
he feels these things. It's old Geard, I think! I've got fond of
that old rascal in some odd sort of way." He bent over the little
table and extinguished his cigarette.

"I'll miss Geard like the devil!" he muttered hoarsely.

Mary was conscious of a funny sensation, like the impact of a
piece of ice against her bare bosom. Had this queer being to
whom she now belonged, body and soul, transferred his dis-
turbing and perverse sexuality from Tom to the Mayor of Glas-
tonbury? To conceal what she felt, "It's Geard, then," she said,
"not his Grail or his new religion, that interests you?"

"I don't know, Mary, and that's the truth," sighed John. And
then, as if continuing some line of thought that he had not re-
vealed, "I wish, my dear, we could all stop on our way at
Salisbury and see Stonehenge."

"Well, we can't do that, John, dearest, so it's no use your talk-
ing about it. We've got to take Tom with us, you know!"

John turned round upon her with a startled swing of his pier-
rot-like white-and-black figure

"Take Tom?" he echoed.

"Of course! you don't think Toss is going to leave Tom in
Glastonbury, do you? If she did, I wouldn't."

"No, I suppose not," he murmured; and it was his turn to
feel a funny sensation go shivering through him. He had always
been careful to avoid any probing of his feeling about the rela-
tions between his wife and his friend.

"Bury him in the Northwold churchyard, eh? Where Grand-
father is, and his people? Yes, I suppose that is the thing
to do!"

They both were silent for a while after that; and into that
rosy-coloured room, where their two shadows hovered so waver-
ingly and ambiguously over Mr. Wollop's simple furniture, there
came the etherealised essence of that road across Brandon Heath
where they had met nearly a year ago; came the phantom-faint
image of Harrod's mill-pool, of the spacious drawing-room with
its low windows opening upon that grey twilit lawn, of their
boat carried so fast on the glittering tide above the weeds and the
darting fish of the Wissey, and of the great ash tree in that
open field, where they said their farewells to their native pas-
tures. Well! they were going back to those pastures again; going
back to them to live the life they had dreamed of then but had
not dared to hope for, going back to bury her friend and his
friend, where that old man lay--his curly hair still fresh and
white as the Head in the Apocalypse--who had been the friend
of Geard of Glastonbury! Why was it then, that they both felt a
curious and irresistible sadness as they thought of their return?
Had they been captured in spite of themselves, by the terrible
magic of this spot? Was John’s clinging to his strange master a
sign that something would be gone forever from each of their
lives, when they went away, something that their dearest love for
each other could only replace in a measure, in a fluctuating
substitution? Did Mary recall the dawn of St. John’s Day?

“Come back to us, Tom! Come back to us!” the big river
and the little river were both calling; and it was with Tom that
they were going back to the place where they would be; but
they were carrying a corpse with them; not only the corpse of
Tom Barter but the corpse of their stillborn never-returning op-
portunity of touching the Eternal in the enchanted soil where
the Eternal once sank down into time!



THE FLOOD



The great waves of the far Atlantic, rising from the
surface of unusual spring tides, were drawn, during the first
two weeks of that particular March, by a moon more magnetic
and potent as she approached her luminous rondure than any
moon that had been seen on that coast for many a long year.
Up the sands and shoals and mudflats, up the inlets and estu-
aries and backwaters of that channel-shore raced steadily, higher
and higher as day followed day, these irresistible hosts of invad-
ing waters. Across the far-stretching flats of Bridgewater Bay
these moon-drawn death-bringers gathered, stealing, shoaling,
rippling, tossing, waves and ground-swells together, cresting bil-
lows and unruffled curves of slippery water, rolling in with a
volume that increased its momentum with every tide that ad-
vanced, till it covered sand-wastes and sand-dunes, grassy shelves
and sea-banks, that had not felt the sea for centuries. Out of
the misty western horizon they came, rocking, heaving, rising,
sinking, and beneath them were shoals of unusual fish and above
them were flocks of unusual gulls. There was a strange colour
upon them, too, these far-travelled deep-sea waves, and a strange
smell rose up from them, a smell that came from the far-off
mid-Atlantic for many days. They were like the death mounds
of some huge wasteful battlefield carried along by an earthquake
and tossed up into millions of hill summits and dragged down
into millions of valley hollows as the whole earth heaved. They
were not churned into flying spray, these swelling spring tides;
they were not lashed into tossing spindrift. Each one of them
rolled forward, over the sand and the mud, converting these
expanses from a familiar tract of yellow-grey silence into a vast
plain of hummings and murmurings that went on all night.
Wide, wet reaches of sand, over which for years fishermen had
walked in the dawn with wavering lanterns and whispering
voices, and where decrepit posts, eaten by centuries of sea-worms
and hung with festoons of grass-green seaweed, leaned to the left
or leaned to the right, as chance willed it, were now changed
into a waste of grey water. Ancient sand-sunk boat skeletons,
their very names forgotten, that had caught for years the blood-
reflections of sunset in the pools of dead memories and lost,
disasters, were now totally submerged. Many of these incoming
deep-sea waves had curving crest-heads that were smooth and
slippery as the purest marble, heads that seemed to grow steadily
darker and darker, as they gathered towards the land, till they
added something menacing to every dawn and to every twilight.

And as these tides came in, over the brown desolate mudflats,
they awoke strange legends and wild half-forgotten memories
along that coast. Ancient prophecies seemed to awake and flicker
again, prophecies that had perished long ago, like blown-out
candles in gusty windows, cold as the torch-flames by which they
were chanted and the extinct fires by which they were conceived.

Between the imaginations of men, especially such as are stirred
up and made tense by wrestlings with the Unknown, and the
geographical pattern of the earth’s surface, are subtle correspond-
encies that may survive many sunken torch flares and many lost
harp notes once heard across the capes and promontories. And
the western coast that Spring seemed almost to welcome this
sea invasion. Liberated from the frost and ice of winter, a
thousand unfrequented backwaters, bordered by dead, wind-swept
rushes, clammy with salt-smelling marsh-lichens and thick-stalked
glaucous-grey weeds, seemed actually calling out to the sea to
come and cover their brackish pools. Salt amphibious growths,
weeds of the terraqueous marshes, they seemed to be yearning,
these neutral children of the margin, for the real salt sea to
rush over them and ravish them. Little did they dream how soon
this ravishment would take place, how soon they would be
drowned and with how deep a drowning!

Amid the forlorn and untraversed mudflats in that singular
region various patches of cultivated ground appear and inhab-
ited buildings, some of stone, some of wattles and lath-and-
plaster cement. It is about these outlying farms and hamlets--in
this strange region of sluices and weirs and dams and rhynes--
that so many curious Celtic syllables still cling, like the appella-
tive Gore, for instance, syllables full of old mythological asso-
ciations.

It was from these isolated farm-houses, situated among sandy
reaches where such old magical names lingered intact, that the
first rumours began to spread of a serious sea invasion. These
rumours, once started among these outposts of human habitation,
excited anxious alarm; and well they might, for that whole
district is a very peculiar one. On one side of it lies the great
Western Channel of those moon-drawn tides, and on the other so
many brackish ditches and inland meres that the dams and
dykes, if they once yield to the mounting-up of the waters, are
liable to give way in vast numbers. In the memory of the older
dwellers in those regions--a queer amphibious race, descended
from Norse invaders and from Celticised aboriginals--was a
vivid image of the last time the sea-banks had broken and the
land had been flooded, an image of drowned cattle and ruined
pastures and hurried and tumultuous human flights and escapes.
On that occasion the waters of the sea had swept so far inland,
mingling with the waters of the land, that the configuration of
the country had completely changed. Overtopping the banks,
breaking the sluices, turning rivers into huge floods and tiny
streams into rushing rivers, the sea had come so far that the
land -- in many cases always lower than sea-level -- had reverted
to the sea and become part of the sea. With the waning of the
moon, on that occasion, the waters retreated, but not before they
had left their tribute. Many infinitesimal sea creatures, tiny
sea animalcule and microscopic salt-water beings must have
been carried over the land where these unnatural tides pushed
their w-ay, and it is likely enough that many of these marine
invaders, when the waters receded, were deposited in the rich loam
of the Isle of Glastonbury. An island indeed did Glastonbury
become in those strange days! Mr. Sheperd, the Glastonbury
policeman, and Mr. Merry, the Glastonbury curator, would fre-
quently speak of that epoch with bated breath.

Well! if some of the rumours that ran along those sandy flats
and leapt, like living messengers of disaster, from bog-tussock to
bog-tussock, were not without cause, there was likely to be this
year, ere March ended, an inundation even more serious than
that land had known since very ancient days. For these dark-
green waves, smooth and slippery, without spray, without spin-
drift, and smelling so strangely of the mid-Atlantic, brought
memories of far-off mysterious disasters. Intimations, they
brought, of lost islands and submerged sea-reefs, where, if
Plutarch is to be trusted, Demetrius the Traveller, a hundred
years before Christ heard tales of superhuman personalities
living remote and sea-encircled.

Yes, even before the fifteenth of March these terrific ocean
waves had disturbed the cormorants at St. Audrie’s Bay and
scattered the gulls at Black Rock, at Blue Ben, and at Quantock s
Head. The dwellers at Kilve Chantry had grown uneasy: and
from Benhole to Wick Moor, and from Stert Flats to the mouth
of the River Parrett, and over Bridgewater Bar to Gore Sand
there were wild gusts of ragged wings and shrieking sea cries
and vague sobbings and lappings and murmurs in the night; and
all this under a moon that continued growing larger and larger,
until it reached a size that seemed pregnant with terrifying
events. The mouths of the Parrett and the Brue are not far from
each other, opposite Stert Island, and the whole seven miles from
Otterhampton to Mark’s Causeway, across Pawlett Level and
Huntspill Level, inland from Highbridge and Burnham, are in-
tersected with dams and sluices and weirs, holding back the sea
floods. From Huntspill Level to Glastonbury cannot be much
more than eight miles’ distance, as the crow flies, and it is across
these eight miles that the waters of the Channel would flow for
it is all beneath sea-level--if those dykes, as they had done at
least once in the memory of living men, should yield to the
rising of the tides.

Of all mortal senses the sense of smell carries the human soul
back the farthest in its long psychic pilgrimage; and by these
far-drawn channel airs and remote sea odours the inmost souls of
many dwellers in northwest Somerset must have been roused, dur-
ing those weeks of March. It is the old recurrent struggle with
the elements, as the sense of these things reaches the spirit 'by the
sharp sudden poignance of smell, that brings one age of human
life into contact with another. There is a comfort in these con-
tinuities and a feeling of mysterious elation, but strange forebod-
ings, too, and uneasy warnings. That hidden wanderer, incarnate
in our temporary flesh and blood, that so many times before--
centuries and aeons before--has smelt deep-sea seaweed and sun-
bleached driftwood and the ice-cold chills of Arctic seas, sinks
down upon such far-off memories, as upon the stern of a voyag-
ing ship, and sees, as if in a dream, the harbours and the islands
of its old experience.

Thus as these unnatural tides under this unusual moon gath-
ered and rose out of the Western Channel, feelings that had not
come to the population of those places for many a long year
caught them unawares, as they went to and fro about their busi-
ness, and disturbed them with thoughts "beyond the reaches of
their souls."

But the people of Glastonbury that year--especially the ones
with whom the reader has most to do in this present narration--
were so preoccupied with the exciting public events of that epoch
that they gave little heed to these "airy syllables.” The humbler
people, especially, continued to buy and sell, as the new fashion
dictated, much as their fathers had done before in their fashion,
without paying any attention to these fleeting intimations drawn
forth from the recesses of their beings by these ocean smells,
smells so soul-piercing and so mysterious, following the waxing
of this portentous moon.

Meanwhile the strangely constituted Glastonbury commune--
a little microcosmic state within the historic kingdom of England
--continued to function in its own queer, unprecedented manner.
The London newspapers had grown recently a little weary of
this nine days’ wonder and the various protracted lawsuits, evoked
by the small commune’s interferences with private property, ex-
cited much less attention than they had done a couple of months
before, when the thing began.

Philip Crow no longer required the protection of the Taunton
police for his non-union labourers, brought into Wookey from
Bristol and Birmingham; and all the various legal actions that
he had initiated against this new tiny state--this microscopic
imperium in imperio--were dragging on in the London courts
without doing anything to change the curious status quo at Glas-
tonbury. Both his new road, however, proudly skirting Mr. Twig’s
fields, and his great new bridge, proudly disregarding the an-
cient Bridge Perilous, were growing towards completion. Of solid
cement the new road was, and the new bridge was of solid steel,
and the chief troubles that still spasmodically arose were wordy
battles--mounting sometimes to fisticuffs and the throwing of #
stones--between the Glastonbury mob and the men hired by
Philip’s Taunton contractor.

The surveyor from Shepton Mallet--whose father-in-law, with
demonic longevity, still continued to milk his Jersey cattle--ap-
peared and disappeared at intervals in that debatable ground,
replacing his stakes and strings along the edge of the Lake Vil-
lage Mounds, tokens of private possession which, although
watched imperturbably by Number One’s inquisitive Betsy, were
always being carried off by invaders from Bove Town and Para-
dise, invaders not unaided, you may be sure, by a familiar
robber band.

It was surprising how the new co-operative or collective sys-
tem of retail trade introduced among the various shops that had
been included in the new lease from the lord of the manor, pro-
ceeded, running much more smoothly than anyone would have
supposed possible. This, however, was largely due to a some-
what extraneous cause, namely the overwhelming influx of re-
ligious pilgrims into the little commune from every portion of
the inhabited globe.

Not quite three months had passed since the Mayor’s notorious
opening of his Saxon arch and doubtless there were places in
Africa, India and China where pilgrims were only then just set-
ting out for Glastonbury; but the world was so unsettled and
there was such a spirit of restlessness abroad, that this new out-
burst of magic and miracle in a spot so easy of access, had been
responded to in a wave of excitement from every country upon
the earth. And as all these pilgrims had to be fed, and as all
these visitors wanted souvenirs to carry back to their homes, the
town began to grow rich. Thus when the Glastonbury council-
men--now promoted to be bureaucrats in an independent com-
munity--came to divide, as they did on the first day of each
week, the profits of the new commune, these profits were found
to be so considerable and so far beyond anything that the worthy
tradesmen had ever earned for themselves under normal condi-
tions, that their tendency was to make hay while the sun shone
and allow the methods and sources of this new increment to pass
unquestioned.

They were of course unaware, these good men, for Providence
had not endowed many of them with the acquisitive wit of Harry
Stickles, how large a portion of what came to the town from the
feeding of pilgrims and from the selling of curiosities, both to
the religious and to the profane, was divided among the real
proletariat of the place; but since this proletariat, in its turn
not accustomed to such wealth, hurried to spend it in these very
shops, there was--as can easily be believed--a sort of revival of
those fortunate mediaeval times, when the whole of Glastonbury
throve and grew fat upon the Saint Joseph’s Pence of religious
Christendom.

Mr. Geard himself, in these, lucky days, grew more and more
indifferent to the practical and economic aspects of his great de-
sign. Having, as we have seen, taken measures to get rid of every
penny of Canon Crow’s large fortune, the Mayor accepted what-
ever salary, as head of the commune, was set apart for him each
week by the energetic assessors and bothered his brains no more
about the matter. Had he been "Head of Hades," or Lord of that
"Annwn" of which Mr. Evans had so obstinately murmured; had
he been a reincarnation of that old Celtic divinity mentioned in
the Mabinogi as Bendigeitvran, or Bran the Blessed, he could not
have worried less about these mundane affairs.

What he was now doing all this time was receiving religious
disciples, or, if it is too early in the history of the new Glaston-
bury Religion to call them by that name, followers, learners,
pupils, neophytes. These he received, not in Cardiff Villa--indeed
he was seldom to be found in Cardiff Villa now; and Megan had
required all her dignified Rhys blood to be reserved and patient
over this--but in that solid erection, something between a farm-
barn and a collegiate chapel, which his London architect had
built for him near his Saxon arch within sound of the trickling
of his Fountain of Life and that had come to be called "The
Rotunda."

It was with a positive genius for what might be named the
psychic nuances of building, that this great adept in stone had con-
structed out of timber, bought in the same woodyard of the worthy
Mr. Johnson where Mr. Evans’ Cross had been purchased, a sort
of Platonic lecture hall. Like the Saxon arch which now rose tri-
umphantly over the Grail Fount, this wooden erection, when Geard
first spoke of it, sounded as if it would be something in unbe-
lievably bad taste. But the very reverse of this was what devel-
oped. By an extensive use of carving--for many of the heavy
cross-beams of this edifice were terminated by massive heads of
the old Saxon Kings, while a colossal image of Saint Dunstan
looked down from above the entrance--this secular hall was made
to correspond with the mystical arch which covered the path to
the Grail Spring.

The ritual, or, if the reader prefers it, "the procedure," that
came to establish itself in this singular hall, originated in so
spontaneous and natural a manner as to excite in the architect
--who refused to leave the place till he had satisfied himself
with what he did--a desire to supply an organic outward form
for such a repetition of spontaneous religious gestures.

Mr. Geard--growing more and more obsessed by his ideas as
he was given a fuller chance to express them--had caused a mys-
terious altar to be constructed and placed in the centre of this
wooden building, an altar dedicated to the worship of his hereti-
cal Christ. The bulk of this altar was made of oak, in harmony
with the finely chiselled wainscotting that the architect had de-
signed for the lower portion of the walls, but on the top of this
wooden base--placed there suddenly in the night, none but Mr.
Geard himself knowing its origin--appeared a square slab of
about five inches thick, of a substance, colour, texture and polish
completely different from any stone that had, until that day, been
found in Glastonbury.

Mr. Merry the curator shook his head very knowingly, after
he had spent some time examining this stone, which he declared
was much older than the one in St. Patrick's chapel, and in
private conversations with his nephew, Paul Trent, he main-
tained the daring opinion that it was an altar stone of the Bronze
Age, "probably used in the invocation of some god of fertility."
How Mr. Merry deduced this opinion, or what evidence he found
for it in his examination of the stone has not become common
knowledge; for the curator held the view that there were enough
mischief-makers already in the town; and far too much talk
about subjects which, in wiser times, were restricted to the learned
alone. Our architect from London, however, by no means confined
himself to the erection of this altar upon which Bloody Johnny’s
younger daughter had placed in little vases of clear glass the
season’s earliest primroses. He also caused to be constructed,
in the same solid oak, a hieratic seat for the founder of the new
western religion. Few things about this "Hall of Marvels," as
John Crow called it, interested the Mayor less than this pontifical
throne. Its extreme discomfort was, nevertheless, modified by
Megan Geard, as soon as she saw it. She unceremoniously threw
over it the familiar threadbare bearskin snatched up from the
floor on the Cardiff Villa drawing-room. The architect did make
a somewhat wry face when he saw what she had done; but he
uttered no overt protest; and from his place in this singular
chair of office Mr. Geard continued to expound, day by day--it
seemed to be the dominant purpose of his life now, and he pur-
sued it with massive concentration--the doctrines of his new
mystical faith.

The strange man never lacked an audience for these uninter-
rupted discourses. Sometimes indeed that circular hall was packed
tightly wdth people. But whether there were many there, or the
merest handful, the Mayor would always be ready to carry fur-
ther and further his mystical doctrines about the Blood of his
Glastonbury Christ. Megan and Crummie brought him his meals
once or twice out there; but this soon became unnecessary, be-
cause Mrs. Jones, Sally’s mother, who through Red Robinson,
her son-in-law, possessed an advantage over the other tea-shops of
the town, started a refreshment booth just inside the entrance to
Chalice Hall.

This ramshackle edifice, run up over-night by some artisan-
relative of Mrs. Jones, ruined entirely, from a purely aesthetic
point of view, the whole beauty of what the architect had done.
But the architect only laughed when this was pointed out to him,
declaring that the reason why the gaudy tinsel ornaments in a
Roman Church were less irreligious than the collegiate dignity
of a London church, was that they were the expression of the
inherent barbarism and crudity of rank human nature with
which any genuine Religion--to he really organic--must keep
in close touch. "Our communal refreshment-booth," he said to
Paul Trent, whose taste was offended by this circus-looking
shanty, "is like the crowds of beggars outside St. Peter’s, or the
guides outside the Mosque of Omar. If Glastonbury is destined
to become--as with all these foreigners it looks as if she were--
a mystical rival to Rome and Jerusalem, you must expect worse
things than a few catch-penny cook-shops!"

And indeed with this concession of the architect--for the man
had come to exercise the dominant influence over what was go-
ing on in Chalice Hill--Mrs. Jones’ initiative was followed by a
rush of enterprising pedlars who set up far more unsightly stalls
than hers. They had to turn over their gains to the assessors every
evening, but as their bookkeeping was very casual and as private
property, in spite of Dave Spear, still existed in Glastonbury, it
was an extremely approximate sum that was thus poured daily
into the community’s exchequer.

But the heart of Glastonbury was still the Fountain on Chalice
Hill. To this Fountain, passing to and fro under the Saxon arch,
came a constant influx of visitors. Mr. Geard had insisted upon
one restriction alone, namely, that there should be no sacer-
dotalism. Women were allowed to come bareheaded. Men were
allowed to bring their hats and sticks. Children were allowed to
drift in and out at will. At the Fountain itself, dressed in cordu-
roys like a gamekeeper, stood, in the morning, none other than
our friend, Young Tewsy, while in the afternoon, when the
crowds were much greater, a strapping youth from the upper
Mendips who had been "converted" by Bloody Johnny in his
street-preaching days and who was too simple in his wits to
notice the difference between what the man taught now and what
he had taught then, kept the crowd in order. This powerfully
built lad had been dismissed for poaching by one of Lord P.’s
tenant-farmers, and he had turned up in Glastonbury in his old-
fashioned shepherd’s smock with an eye to communal flocks and
herds. It had been Paul Trent--the only one of the town’s rulers
who had the faintest artistic feeling-- who had advised Geard to
let the lad wear this primitive garment when he was about the
business of guarding the Grail Spring; and the Mayor, who re-
membered a highly-coloured picture in his native national school
of Our Lord Himself, clothed in a costume resembling that of
old Bill Chant, Farmer Manley’s head-shepherd, had jumped
at this proposal.

Curiously enough it was the eastern-Europcan visitors--or pil-
grims, if you will--and indeed there were many of both types,
who seemed most impressed by these discourses of the head of
the new commune; and among these none were more affected
than certain monastic wayfarers from the slopes of Mount Athos.
There was no lack of scribes taking serious and copious notes
of all the man said; and although the London papers had
grown weary of him, "Geard of Glastonbury" was already a
legendary figure in Bulgaria, in Bessarabia, and in many a re-
mote religious retreat upon the Black Sea. The main drift of
Geard’s singular Gospel was that an actual new Revelation had
been made in Glastonbury.

The crucial thing for Western humanity at this moment was to
concentrate a magnetic flood of desperate faith upon this magic
casement, now pushed a little open. "Scientists," explained Mr.
Geard, only he used homelier and less abstract language, "are
continually finding new cosmic vibrations, totally unknown or
only suspected before; and why should not a new element be-
longing to the Unknown Dimension in which our present dream-
life floats, be discovered by psychic, in place of physiological
experiment? It is all a matter of experience. The miraculous is as
much a portion of the experience of our race as is the most thor-
oughly accepted scientific law. The human soul"--so Mr. Geard
in his sublime ignorance of modem phraseology hesitated not
to declare--"possesses levels of power and possibilities of expe-
rience that have hitherto been tapped only at rare epochs in the
world’s history. These powers we who live in Glastonbury must
now claim as our own; and not only enjoy them for ourselves,
but fling them abroad throughout the whole earth."

It was on the fifteenth of March that Mr. Geard’s morning dis-
course--for he was often found in his Heathen Pantheon, as Miss
Drew called it, as early as eight o’clock--was interrupted in the
startling and dramatic manner that has now become part of Glas-
tonbury’s history. There had been disturbing news for the past
three days from Burnham and Highbridge. On the twelfth of
the month information had come to the town of the flooding of
the Parrett Valley as far as Bridgewater and of the complete sub-
merging of such low-lying districts as Horsey Level, Puriton
Level, and Pawlett Hams. On the thirteenth the long-stretching
clay banks that defended the month of the Brue were reported
to be down and the Burnham and Evercreech line under water.
By the afternoon of the fourteenth there was definite news that
a great flood was advancing rapidly, hour by hour, between
Tadham Moor and Catcott Burtle; and that the flats from Moore
Pool to Decoy Rhyne, and from Decoy Rhyne to Mudgley, were
already one unbroken lake. On the night before the fifteenth
many old residents of Glastonbury who realised the danger much
better than the younger generation refused to go to bed. In sev-
eral of the workmen’s cottages down by the river on the way to
Street and in others in the district called Beckery people carried
their more precious belongings into their upper rooms before
they dared to sleep; and in not a few of the smaller beer-houses
certain among the habitual topers refused to go home that night.

It was not only the pusillanimous among the dwellers along
the banks of the Brue and along its tributaries who trembled a
little as they pulled up their blinds on that morning of March
the fifteenth. The more weather-wise among the inhabitants of
these cottages were too restless to await that delayed dawn.
For the night seemed as if it would never come to an end; and
seldom above the Glastonbury hills had so grey a twilight pro-
longed itself to so late an hour. Cold and steel-like, when it did
come at last, was that dawn; livid and menacing as the stricken
light that falls upon a lost battlefield. There were many indica-
tions that a heavy rain would shortly add a new burden of
waters to the already accumulated volume; but until eight
o’clock, the hour when Mr. Geard, with the tattered bear rug
pulled over his knees for warmth, usually began his prophetic
monologue, no actual rain had fallen.

From the windows of Cardiff Villa itself no view was available
of the surrounding country extensive enough to enable the fam-
ily to get any idea of what was occurring; so that at four o’clock,
which was the hour when the last of the neighbouring dams broke
and the flood of waters began sweeping through the streets of
the town, the Geards were as ignorant of the extent of the dis-
aster as was Red Robinson in his little new house in Rove Town.
This ignorance of the authorities of the new commune as to the
extent of the flood in the early hours of the fifteenth was brought
against them afterwards in the general public criticism of these
events; but as a matter of fact both Dave Spear and Paul Trent
were up and out of their rooms by half-past four that morning.

It was about six o’clock that the railway lines became impass-
able; but before that hour the early luggage trains that left the
town brought news of the coming disaster to Taunton, to Bristol,
to Yeovil, to Wareham, to Bournemouth, to Greylands, to Dor-
chester.

Dave Spear and Paul Trent were doing their utmost to convey
warnings to the threatened houses and to get the people out of
them; but when officials from Taunton began interfering with
them they relinquished their authority and handed over the
whole management of affairs to Lord Brent, a cousin of Lord P.,
who at that time was the High Sheriff of Somersetshire. This
energetic gentleman who had a house not far from Middlezoy,
had been rendered sleepless by the fact that his own dwelling was
on low-lying ground. Lord Brent had kept in close touch with
both police and military all through that agitating night and
was on the spot at a very early hour. It was he who, before the
little commune’s authorities had thought it necessary to make
such an appeal, had stirred up the local air-force commanders
and caused military aircraft carrying tents and provisions to
land at Wirral Hill and establish an emergency camp up there.
Thus before the Mayor of Glastonbury had the least idea that
the water was pouring down the High Street and standing at least
a foot deep amid the Abbey Ruins, airmen with searchlights
and soldiers with lanterns and spades were already established
upon the summit of Wirral Hill.

It was from this point of observation, while he rested from
his labours of directing rescue-parties, that Dave Spear surveyed
the ghastly dawn of that fifteenth of March. By his side as he
stood up there was none other than Philip Crow. Philip, like
Lord Brent, and for the same reason, had kept his clothes on all
that night. The water was already three feet deep in Wells Road,
and drowning deep in the Lake Village Great Field, He had soon
realised that there was no chance of using his airplane, and in-
deed he felt he would be very lucky if it were not utterly ruined.
But what worried him, as he stood by Dave’s side now, was not
his airplane. It was not his wife, either. Hours ago Tilly and
Emma had been driven away by Bob Tankerville, safe to Wells.
No; what was worrying Philip as he surveyed through his field-
glass that rising expanse of waters was the peril to his half-con-
structed steel bridge over the river. He felt nervous, too, about his
new cement road, leading down from Wookey Hole, though he
kept telling himself that a few days’ labour would clear away the
mud and the silt when the flood sank down. But the half-finished
bridge? He had already felt some qualms as he turned his glass
upon those cement bases, those wooden scaffolds, those jagged
steel uprights; and now, as he gazed at them, it seemed to him
that part of the scaffolding had been already washed away.

In his anxiety he handed his glasses to Dave. "Doesn’t it seem
to you that some of my bridge supports are gone?" he said.

Dave obediently surveyed the objects in question. "The whole
thing. Cousin Philip, I’m afraid," murmured the Communist
grimly as he returned the glasses. "The whole business will go
in a minute or two. The tide’s terrifically strong just there!"

"Damn it, man. But it can't wash those things away! I saw
them put in; and they were--"

"You’d better come over to us , Cousin Phil, before you’re
ruined! We’d give you the biggest salary of all; and you’d have
no more worry or fuss over anything, for the rest of your life!"

But Philip was in no mood even to chuckle over this. "If my
bridge goes," he said, "it’s more money washed away than I
would dare to tell anyone! It’ll knock me out. It’ll mean bank-
ruptcy."

"Haven’t you paid for it then?"

"Paid for it!" The contempt with which the manufacturer
rebuked Spear’s ignorance of high finance was an edifying spec-
tacle.

"Well, you’d better say your prayers. Cousin, and prepare for
a quiet life; for there won’t be much of your bridge left in a
few minutes." Dave spoke without bitterness, for he felt none.
He had been thinking several times that morning: "I hope those
people at Whitelake haven’t slept too long and too sound. But
probably they’re safe in Wells by now. They’d never try to get
across Splott’s Moor."

"Well, Cousin Phil, I must be off to the boats again. I wish
you’d tell that Colonel What’s-his-name, up there, to stop those
women from shrieking so. They’ll start a panic, if he’s not care-
ful. Good-bye! Looks to me as if old Pomparles was standing
up to it pretty well."

Philip bit his lip. It was hard to believe that the innocent Dave
hadn’t meant that remark, at least, as a nasty dig at the modern
bridge-builder. Damn! It would be just like the devilish irony
of things for that old stone bridge to survive, while his new steel
bridge was washed away! He lifted his glasses again. What a sight
it was!

The sun had risen now, and though its red orb was hidden
by lowering grey clouds, the ghastly expanse of water spread
away before him under a light that displayed the full extent of
this overwhelming "Act of God," which had reduced the differ-
ence between Capitalism and Communism to such a tragic neu-
trality. By the aid of his glasses Philip could see some very
curious details of this appalling panorama of a drowned world.
He could see certain birds, for instance, that were obviously
blackbirds or thrushes, collected in sheer panic-terror upon a line
of telegraph wires that followed the railway and that had not
yet been swamped. He could see the bodies of several drowned
animals--he could not make out whether they were cows or
horses--floating rapidly along the tide of the river, which was
differentiated from the mass of waters both by the colour of its
waves and the speed of their flow. He could see huddled human
figures on the roofs of several houses in the Paradise slums and
still more of them along the outlying quarter of the town known
as Beckery. He could see the boats of the rescuers moving about
among the semi-detached houses and villas in Wells Road, and,
as far as he could make out, there was a large crowd of people
on the roof of Dickery Cantle’s tavern near the Cattle Market.

But it was the livid tint of the waters where there were no streets
that was so particularly ghastly.

Philip, as we know, was the extreme reverse of an imaginative
person; but even he was struck by the lurid effect produced by cer-
tain isolated houses, near the sinister rush of the main current of
the Brue. The water positively foamed, as it swirled and eddied
about these luckless edifices, which hardly looked like houses at
all now, but rather resembled ugly and shapeless islands of dark
rock, against which the tops of the wretched garden trees were
swaying and tossing, as if they were masses of green seaweed. One
especial thing that struck his pragmatic and literal mind was the
extraordinary difference between this murderous-looking flood-
water and all other bodies of water he had ever seen or known.
The brownish-grey expanse before him was not like the sea; nor
was it like a lake. It was a thing different from every other
natural phenomenon. A breath of abominable and shivering
chilliness rose up from this moving plain of waters, a chilliness
that was more than material, a chilliness that carried with it a
wafture of mental horror. It was as if some ultimate cosmogonic
catastrophe implying the final extinction of all planetary life had
commenced. A wind of death rose from that mounting flood that
carried a feeling of water-soaked disfigured corpses!

Philip knew that the actual victims could only at the worst
amount to a few score; but that death-look upon those livid
waters suggested a disaster that could not be estimated in
physical numbers. That hard, narrow cranium beneath its grey
cloth cap was not stunned or numbed, was not distracted or
crazed, was not even bewildered by what it confronted. This might
prove the final Waterloo to this furious strategist; but it left his
limited, concentrated, fighting intelligence quite unclouded, in-
deed strung-up and abnormally alert. As far as his emotional
response to it was concerned, it was the response of the most
average and thick-skinned person; and for that very reason it
caught the spectacle of what lay before it in what might be called
its primeval animal-skin shiver. "Glastonbury is in peril, is
what Ned Athling would have felt; but apart from the fate of
his bridge and his road, what. Philip was aware of was simply
the threat of a down-swallowing, in-sucking enemy.

Let it be noted, here and now, that no living human being
who passed through the appalling hours of that fifteenth of
March was less frightened--in the ordinary sense of that word
than was Philip Crow. It had always been--secretly, exultantly,
proudly--with the natural elements, rather than with men and
women, that Philip had felt himself contending. Such a skin-to-
skin, belly-to-belly contest with Nature was his notion of the
whole meaning of existence; so that unlike other minds, who had
to see torn away an elaborate psychic complication of social
feelings, before they came down to the bedrock issue, he was con-
fused by no marginal qualms.

Its eccentric Mayor was not the only magnate of the little
Glastonbury commune who awoke that day to a somewhat belated
knowledge of the approaching catastrophe. Red Robinson and
his easy-natured bride were so enamoured of each other and so
busy in preparing breakfast in their small dwelling on the slope
above Bove Town, that they discounted for quite a long while
the agitated bustlings to and fro of their less self-centred
neighbors.

"There go the people from the end house!" Sally cried out as
she left their table and rushed to the little window. "There go them
others, Reddy, and they be carrying their pots and pans! Flood
be come, me darlin’. But us baint going to run away, carrying no
sauce-pans nor no teapots, be us?"

Red put down his knife and fork and joined his wife at the
window, pushing aside the muslin curtains and leaning across
the girl’s big sewing machine. There certainly was an unusual
stir abroad and startling shouts and cries upon the wind! And
yet Red could see the three yellow crocuses and the two purple
crocuses in their patch of garden that had been there yesterday
and the green paint that he had put on their little gate in the
afternoon.

"High’d give ten pounds for this ’ere bloomin’ flood to ’it the
bewger’s bloody bridge and soak the cligh till the bewger’s
bleedin’ new road falls in! But it’ll be pore men what’ll suffer,
girlie; not rich ones like ’im, if these ’ere waters rise hup and
hover."

Sally put her plump arm affectionately round his neck. "You
never loved Miss Crummie like you. love me, did you, Red?" she
whispered coaxingly.

"Garn!" cried Red.

They were both silent then, Sally thinking to herself, "Shall
I ever dare to ask him about Jenny Morgan? And what should
I do if Jenny Morgan came to see Mother?" and Red thinking
to himself, "High wouldn’t care a wriggle what ’appened to this
bastard commune, has long has the bewger got it in ’is bleedin’
neck!"

This passive trance of Red and Sally at their window was
interrupted by the inrush through Red’s green gate of a couple
of excited neighbours: "Jenny Morgan be drowned in flood,"
they cried, "and little Nelly be clinging, fit to perish, to her
mother’s corpsy."

Sally Robinson turned quickly to her husband. "We must go
down there, Red," she said.

Red sighed heavily, but he did not gainsay her words.

Long before the flood had reached the point at which Red and
Sally were called upon to confront it, the Mayor of Glastonbury
was making his way dry-shod to his morning lecture at Chalice
Hill. Before his wife and Crummie were out of bed and before
any sign of the incoming water had reached the end of Street
Road, Bloody Johnny was hurrying in blind excitement, with his
head bent and his hands clasped behind his back, to his beloved
Rotunda. His own word for all the buildings on Chalice Hill was
simply Town’s End--an old Montacute name which helped to
make him feel at home there. "I’m off to Town’s End, my pre-
cious," he would say to Mrs. Geard; or "I’ll be back from Town s
End, my sweet, by tea-time today, never fear!"

On this historical morning the Mayor’s head was so full of a
new inspiration which he had received, or dreamed he had re-
ceived, from his Master that night, that he had not even paused
in his kitchen to make himself a cup of tea before setting out.
It would be a mistake to assume, as some afterwards did, that
Bloody Johnny was oblivious of the perils of the waters that
just then threatened Glastonbury. The man was like some des-
perate mediaeval artist, some frantically inspired craftsman who,
even though the enemy is at the gates of his city, must, by an
urge that endures no withstanding, complete his unfinished
statue, his picture, his fresco, his molten cast. To enter into the
real heart of what he had been feeling during the last forty-eight
hours it would be necessary to remember that the man had for
weeks, nay, for a couple of months, dropped all active connexion
with the administration of that tiny dictatorship of which he
was the technical head. What he felt in his mind now was only
an intensified awareness of what he had been vaguely feeling
ever since that momentous opening of his Saxon Arch. "The
Lord’s going to let me take my life," he kept saying to himself,
"and I must finish my work before I go." What he thought of
as his "work" was the rounding off and completion of his Fifth
Gospel, delivered to all and sundry at Town’s End.

Had the flood been accompanied by a fire, had the flood and
the fire been accompanied by a murderous uprising of the mob,
and that again by signs and portents, by thunderings and light-
nings, in air and sky. Bloody Johnny would still have hurried
off to his heathen Academia. He had hardly slept at all that night;
and now quite heedless of the rumours of the broken dams, heed-
less of the overcrowded state of the threatened town, heedless
of any danger that might be threatening his wife and menacing
his daughter, thinking always in his heart: "My end is near and I
must finish my work before I go"--Mr. Geard arrived at Chalice
Hill. He found himself, before he knew what he was doing, help-
lessly fumbling at the closed door of Mrs. Jones’ tea-booth, which
stood not far from his Saxon arch. Mrs. Jones, however, like
most of the Glastonbury people, was far from sharing the Mayor’s
indifference to the overwhelming catastrophe that was imminent
that fatal day. It began to look as if Bloody Johnny’s craving
for tea--which his sleepless and rather feverish night had
rendered extreme--was not destined to be satisfied. By good luck,
however, young Elphin Cantle and his friend Steve Lew had slept
together that night in Solly’s loft above the St. Michael’s Garage.
Mat Dekker had shaken his head of late very gravely over what
he called "that young degenerate’s seduction of such a whole-
some lad," but without avail. Elphin was a more slippery cus-
tomer than Tommy Chinnock! Young Cantle at this moment
had the key to his father’s little booth among this assemblage of
acquisitive wooden shanties and the two boys had already got
their kettle boiling in this little shelter, and were just beginning
to enjoy their bread and jam when they heard the Mayor thump-
ing at the door of Mrs. Jones’ ramshackle storehouse.

Elphin peeped out. "It’s Master Geard!" he whispered excitedly
to his friend. "And he be all white and shivery. He’ve a heerd
summat. He’ve a heered the girt flood. He be come to tell Mother
Jones she best climb up Tor-top wi’ he!"

Steve Lew stood up with wide-open eyes. His mouth was full
of bread and jam, but he was too agitated to masticate or even
to swallow. The wild and extravagant thought rushed through
his head that perhaps Mr. Geard would condescend to share their
amateur repast. "It would...be fine, Elph, wouldn’t ’un," he
blurted out, "if Mayor drank a cup o’ tea along wi’ we?"

Elphin sighed. He had anticipated the pleasure of uninter-
rupted colloquy with his young friend when he had strengthened
his heart with raspberry jam. He wished the Mayor of Glaston-
bury at the devil! Why was fate always snatching the few' hours
of romance which he had in life away from him? It had been
like this when he was with Mr. Sam. Someone was always
interrupting!

Elphin stood hesitating in the doorway now, one agitated eye
upon the obese, bare-headed man, who was now muttering to him-
self and gazing hopelessly around, and one upon his stuttering
and excited friend. But the Mayor of Glastonbury had caught
sight of him.

"Do ’ee know where a man could get a sip of hot tea, me boy?
he enquired humbly, almost in the tone of a thirsty tramp.

Elphin scowled savagely; but his sense of honour compelled
him to report the great man’s request to the boy in the hut.
"He be asking for summat hot," he whispered.

Steve swallowed his mouthful so hurriedly that it almost
choked him, and rushed to the door. "Please come in here.
Sir!" he cried, pushing his friend unceremoniously out of the
way, "Me and Elph be having a bite, us be, and us ’ud be proud
to give ’ee all!"

Bloody Johnny responded to this invitation with alacrity and
his gratitude and good temper when he had eaten and drunk
were so winning that even the jealous heart of Elphin Cantle
was beguiled. Sounds of such lively merriment soon began to
emerge from the Cantle beer-shop that the little crowd of early
visitors who had already assembled in front of the Saxon arch
got the impression that the master--rumour soon told them where
he was--had been drinking all night in that shanty. This story,
that on the morning of the fifteenth, the day above all others
when the man’s wits should have been clearest, he was found
hopelessly drunk "in company with two degenerate slum-boys"
spread all over Somerset before the end of the week and was
mixed up in the most hopeless manner with the official accounts
of the Glastonbury flood. But Bloody Johnny thanked his young
entertainers with a pure heart and a clear head and made his way
into his Rotunda. He paused for a moment, however, to speak
with Young Tewsy whose cadaverous grin above his neat cordu-
roy suit suggested a death’s head in the attire of an operatic
forester.

"Mother Legge ’ad ’er breakfast upstairs, and her bided up-
stairs," the old man reported.

It was astonishing how full of people the Rotunda was when
Bloody Johnny finally pushed his way to his uncomfortable
throne and took up his mystical discourse where he had left it
the day before. It was a relief to him on this occasion, when he
was obsessed by the idea that he had had a special Revelation,
to notice that there were a couple of young men from his own
Wayfarer in the corner of the Rotunda armed with the most pro-
fessional-looking notebooks. "He knows his business," he thought,
"that Middlezoy lad. I’d ’a never have supposed he’d send ’em
to Town’s End when flood be rising."

Slowly he let his formidable black eyes glance over his audi-
ence. There seemed to be a predominance of Welsh people there
this morning, judging from the rising inflexion of the excited
murmurs that he caught from many parts of the crowded circle.
"I expect being mountaineers they know nothing of floods!" he
thought. "I hope they’ll all get safe home." And then he became
aware of Young Tewsy standing at his elbow.

"Flood be rushing down ’igh Street, your Wash’p! Town coun-
cil be meetin’ in Church so as to be near tower in case of acci-
dents. Town-crier save been sent round to tell the foreigners to
take to the ’ills; and they’ve a-commanded every boat there be on
river, and Mr. Trent and Mr. Spear and Mr. Dekker and the fire-
brigade men and the Boy Scout lads be taking folk from their
’ouse-windies and carrying of they to the foot of Wirral. Old Bob
Sheperd be waiting outside, your Wash’p, for to take 'ee to where
town council be."

"Tell Sheperd not to wait for me, Tewsy," whispered the
Mayor. Tell him to tell them I’ll come later, when I’ve finished
what I have got to do here. Tell him to tell them to telegraph for
boats to Taunton and Bridgewater and every town with a river;
and do it quickly--before the wires are down. Tell them to tele-
phone to Bristol if the wires aren’t down and make ’em send a
dozen airplanes with bread and wine and milk straight to Wirral
Hill; and tell ’em that they can make a landing beyond those
trees up there, though it’s rather difficult. But I know it’s possi-
ble--tell ’em--because I’ve seen poor Barter do it when he pi-
loted Crow." He paused for a moment while the whispering in
the audience rose to an agitated pitch. "Are the trains running
still, Tewsy?" he enquired.

"They wasn’t when I left ’un, your Wash’p, and th^ 0 ^ nere
waters be mountin’ up hour by hour. No trains ’ull lea'* ston
today, your Wash’p. If I were the council, meesr*^ s ^ e ' send
town-crier round to say that all foreigners whatever of any
kind leave this town at onst on pain of being shot."

The Mayor chuckled at this; and the audience looked at each
other and smiled. They were evidently thinking to themselves:
"He must have heard that the floods are going down, or he
couldn’t take things so easy."

Young Tewsy went off to convey his message, or what he could
remember of his message, to Bob Sheperd.

Bloody Johnny pulled himself up upon his feet by the carved
oaken arms of his great chair. He felt languid, indolent, weighed
down by a "whoreson lethargy." In the manner of a lazy monk,
in some perfunctory office that he has repeated so often that his
mind can think of other things while his lips utter the sacred
incantations, he turned his back to the audience and faced the
altar. Candles were burning on the altar, by the side of Crum-
mie’s primroses, and in the chilly light which floated in beneath
the majestic, drowsy, heavy-jowled Saxon Kings and Saints--for
Geard of Glastonbury had kept his word and it was the Saxon
element that predominated in the Rotunda--he shut his eyes tight
and repeated the formula: "Christ give strength to our souls, so
that we may drink up Life and defy evil. Blood of Christ give
us peace. Blood of Christ give us rest. Blood of Christ give us joy
forever!" These words Mr. Geard uttered in the mechanical tone
of one who has so much faith in the magic of the syllables that
he has no need to intellectualise them or to emotionalise them.
Some of the audience remained seated while this invocation took
place; others stood up, a very few fell upon their knees. But Mr.
Geard swung round now and sat down, pulling the bearskin over
his thighs for he suddenly felt cold.

It was the man’s extraordinary sangfroid, his heavy, languid
aplomb that many people found to be so effective. To the Welsh
element in this particular audience, itself so highstrung and ex-
citable, this unruffled phlegm of the prophet was profoundly
impressive.

"The point I had reached in my argument, my dears," he
began, had to do with the souls of microscopic insects." This
personal appeal to his hearers as "my dears" always had a very
queer effect when people heard it for the first time. The sturdy,
virile, moralistic hearers were often so shocked and felt such
deep resentment and distaste that the man lost them completely.
They became enemies for life, from the moment when the word
"dears" left his mouth; but others felt exactly the opposite, felt,
in fact, a responsive tenderness towards Mr. Geard. "You often
hear people say," he went, "that insects have no souls. Now what
Christ came and told me this very night is that every insect, down
to the smallest mite, microbe or bacillus, has an immortal soul.
It must have been about half-past two last night that the Master
told me about insects having souls. I know it was about then,
because I’d heard the Church clock strike two. And I asked him
if worms, and such things as slugs and snails had souls. ‘Every
Jack one o’ them, Sonny,’ he said, ‘every Jack one o’ them.’
All these souls, my dears, the Master explained to me, though
perishable in relation to the visible, are imperishable in relation
to the invisible. They do not...as the heathen poet says...die all.
Something in them sinks down and escapes into the under-
sea of undying Being. Bodies are only one expression of souls;
and when the bodies of worms and gnats and zoophytes, yea! of
the smallest amoebae that exist, perish in this dimension, some-
thing, perduring and indestructible, that has been the living
identity of these tiny creatures, escapes into the dream-world
whose margins overlap ours. This other world, this invisible di-
mension, is as much a dream-world as our o-wn. Into this se-
quence of dream-worlds our souls drive us forward, drinking up
Life and struggling with evil; seeking rest and peace. To ask
where can there be space, where room, for all the myriads of
consciousnesses, spawned by the life-stream since our planet
began, is to ask a babyish question! Space and time, such as we
know them, have no meaning in this other dream-world into
which the undying souls of all dead organisms pass. Chrisfs
Blood, my dears, is the life-sap that pours forth when any or-
ganism, pierced by the thorns of this troublesome dream, passes
into the one that surrounds it. Out of this deeper dream there
fell of old upon our Glastonbury Something that bewilders and
troubles us unto this day. To approach it gives us a a shock, a per-
turbation, a spasm, a shudder of the life-nerves. None can touch
it without a fit of travail-throes, an ecstasy of sweet insanity.
None can take it up wholly into themselves and live. To touch
this Thing at all is to drink up Life at its source. Such a draught
renders us strong as lions. Fortis imaginatio generat causas, as
the old Schoolman says; and with wills thus fortified we can
drink up day and night from all things in the world--from the
winds and the rains, from earth and fire and water and air--the
Blood of the Eternal! And the Master told me more than this, my
dears. Be we men or women, He said, our souls can embrace the
sweet bodies of one another till flesh and blood yield up their
essences. Only good can come, my .dears, from every embrace.
It matters not at all from what cups, or from what goblets, we
drink, so long as without being cruel, we drink up Life. The sole
meaning, purpose, intention, and secret of Christ, my dears, is
not to understand Life, or mould it, or change it, or even to love
it, but to drink of its undying essence! Drinking up Life in this
manner, we become more and more identified with that in us
which death cannot kill, with that in us which sinks down,
through dream after dream of what passes away, into...into
...into something, my dears, that is...something that is ...is...the
Blood and the Water and the...

Geard of Glastonbury stopped without finishing his sentence.
The two young reporters from the Wayfarer received the impres-
sion that he might have finished with: "and the mud and the
sand, and the sea and the land," or any other indolent and sleepy
gibberish. Stretching out his legs, however, he allowed the tat-
tered bearskin to fall away from his knees. Shamelessly then, in
front of them all, he lifted himself up a little in his chair and
broke wind. Then, with unabashed aplomb and scarcely covering
his mouth with his hand he yawned portentously.

"Any question for me, my dears?" he muttered in a voice still
half-strangled by his yawning.

An unemployed Welsh miner--tall, lean, starved, tragic--who
had worked his passage to Bristol from Fishguard and then had
tramped to Glastonbury from Bristol, and who was now subsist-
ing orn a special fund that Dave Spear had placed aside for
working-class visitors, rose up on his feet at the back of the
Rotunda, under the great, placid, comfortable head of King
Edgar, the peacemaker, and said in a low, troubled tone that
rang through that assembly like a broken harp-string: "I'd like
to know, Mr. Mayor, now that you’ve finished telling us to enjoy
ourselves like the beasts...when you think King Arthur is going
to come back!"

Instead of waiting for any reply to this question, which was
uttered in a voice trembling with indignation, the tall miner, with
a contemptuous jerk of his shoulders that expressed deep loath-
ing for the Rotunda and everything in it, pushed his way through
the crowd at the back and left the place.

But the bolt he had flung down created a violent disturbance
among the audience. High words arose. The Welsh people in the
hall began arguing fiercely among themselves, some of them sym-
pathising with the man, some of them denouncing his uncivil
outburst.

"Hush! Hush! Let Mr. Geard answer!" These words came
from the lips of Nancy Stickles, who from the very beginning of
what she called "the Mayor’s Ministry" had left her house day
after day, the moment she had got her Harry’s breakfast, and
slipped off to Chalice Hill.

The two young neophytes from Athling’s office, who had been
nudging each other nervously as they noted how ruffled and dis-
turbed the great man in the big chair seemed to be by what had
just transpired, looked at each other excitedly when they heard
Nancy’s voice. "Quite right, Mrs. Stickles!" one of them could
not help crying. "Quite right!" It was these two young men who
when their prophet was dead maintained steadily that he com-
mitted suicide from pure disappointment over the fiasco of this
final discourse. It certainly did seem that the reference to Rex
Arturus, just at the climax of what had been revealed that day,
hit Bloody Johnny some sort of incalculable blow. The inter-
ruption seemed, however, to cause huge delight to his Welsh
audience.

The curiously airy and upward-tilting intonation of the Welsh
accent began to echo through the Rotunda, drowning everything
else. It seemed as if nothing but the inexhaustible complacency
of King Edgar and the two King Edmunds kept the Rotunda
from complete domination by these excited Celts. Geard of Glas-
tonbury surveyed his disturbed flock, like a bewildered shepherd
whose woolly subjects have plunged into a forbidden field. In
vain he stared at the calm lineaments of King Edgar. In vain he
turned his gaze upon the majestic gravity of Edmund Ironsides.
The best he seemed able to do, just then, was to look with a
pitiful and wistful appeal into the intent, grey eyes of Nancy
Stickles. "What...do...you think...Missis," he stammered, "about
what our brother has...

It was a supreme moment in the life of Nancy. If the truth
were known, this mystic-minded girl was playing now the historic
role of the devoted disciple who, at an unexpected crisis, sup-
ports the Master’s weakness with a faith greater than his own.
Nancy got up upon her feet. All the heads in that circular room
were turned upon her; for all could see that the man in the
carved chair was waiting anxiously for her to speak.

The Welsh controversy died down; the angry disputants were
silent. A few puzzled Germans, not having caught the miner's
words about King Arthur, cried, "Hush, hush!" in their own
tongue.

"Mr. Geard," began Nancy Stickles. The girl was in her morn-
ing print dress with an old faded jacket hanging loose from her
shoulders. She was bare-headed. Wet or fine she never stopped
to put on a hat for this morning excursion. Her big umbrella with
a black curved handle, the only one of her wedding presents that
Harry hadn’t put away as "too good to use," was propped up
against a chair by her side. "Mr. Geard...and kind friends..." She
was so sweet-looking, as she stood there, with her back to the
oak panelling of the Rotunda, that a low sigh of appreciation
rustled, like a faint breath over reed-tops, across the whole
audience.

Bloody Johnny’s discourses had often closed with questions;
and Nancy’s modest "kind friends" was a familiar opening at
many an Adult School meeting in Pembroke and Glamorgan:
"The brother from Wales, who asked your opinion, Sir, about
King Arthur’s return, seems to me like the Jews who are still
waiting for a Messiah. Most of us in Glastonbury feel that God
has been kind enough to us already, in sending us a man like
you; a man from whose mouth, as we have just heard, the Living
Water of Life flows!"

The girl stopped and searched about in her mind for some-
thing else she was obscurely anxious to say. "This terrible flood,"
she went on in a low voice, "that we must all face in a few min-
utes when we go back to the town, must have been sent as a
Sign." She paused again and then went on in a louder voice. "A
Sign that all this tin-mining and road-making and bridge-build-
ing is contrary to God’s purpose." She sat down blushing deeply
and staring at her lap.

Bloody Johnny was displeased rather than pleased by the girl’s
reference to his enemy’s activities. He sighed heavily, and,
sinking back in his carved seat, closed his eyes. He felt weary,
disappointed, dispirited. All night long he had been telling him-
self of the incredible impression that his divine Revelation--for
so he felt it to be--would make upon these people; stirred up.
excited, panic-stricken as they already were by the rising waters.
But in place of one great final outpouring of the Spirit, obliter-
ating all divisions, all quarrels, all maliciousness, and setting
him free, they were back again in the old wrangling human
arena, Celt against Saxon, Capitalist against Communist, and
every Philip against every John! Mr. Geard had come to Town’s
End that day in the mood of Elijah when he was transported to
Heaven in a chariot of fire. But now he began to feel that his
Lord had forsaken him and left him alone with the false
prophets.

"I cannot quite see," an interested watchmaker from Lland-
overy was explaining to the meeting, "why the perfectly sensible
question of the departed brother from Fishguard should have
met with the disapproval it seems to have met with in our hon-
oured chairman. It is natural enough to mix altogether"--his voice
now took on that irritating intonation which self-sufficient ma-
terialists assume when they indicate their mental superiority to
their hearers--"to mix together Arthur’s Return and Geard’s
Water of Life. Both are myths. Both are imaginary. Both belong
to that world of fantastic unrealities which--"

"They both are true!" cried one of Athling’s reporters. "We’ve
got one of them with us here now," cried the other, "and Arthur
will yet come!"

A deplorable hubbub now arose. People argued with one an-
other in every part of the room, some siding with the Llandovery
atheist, some repeating the words of Nancy, others putting for-
ward long-winded compromises of their own. Mr. Geard re-
mained quiescent in the midst of all this. He lay back in his
carved chair with his eyes half-closed. As upon that occasion
when he had been locked into Wookey Hole, he felt that sleep
was his only refuge. In this tendency to fall asleep when things
were crucial, Bloody Johnny resembled Mat Dekker; the only
difference being that Dekker’s sleep was lighter and more easily
disturbed. There was undoubtedly something in the chemical
composition of that climate, in the languorous blue vapour that
hovered over Glastonbury most of the year, and that seemed to
emanate from all those drooping, heavy-lichen'd apple boughs
and from all that green moss, which conduced to sleep, as the
grand panacea for the strong characters of the place. What hap
pened now was that in proportion as his crowd of Welsh theo-
logians got more and more absorbed in their complicated
arguments the Mayor got more and more sleepy.

Nancy could hardly bear to see him nodding so awkwardly
there, with his big head drooping, first on one side and then on
the other, while every now and then the sheer weight of that
massive skull would wake him up with an unpleasant start. But
there was nothing the girl could do; and she had already stayed
away from the shop as long as she possibly dared. "God knows,"
she thought, "what I shall find when I get back." She pushed her
way between the chairs to the entrance of the Rotunda and hur-
ried out of the door. The majestic and self-satisfied head of St.
Dunstan did not give her a glance. With abysmal and unctuous
contentment it continued to gaze into space, while it seemed to
murmur to itself--"What matter if Arthur never does return. I am
here." St. Dunstan would have been much more horrified than
Nancy herself was, and she was a little shocked, at the nature of
the thought that just then the devil put into her head; the thought,
namely, what a relief it would be, if, when she got back, she
found that her husband, Harry the chemist, had been painlessly
and peacefully drowned!

Young Tewsy had hardly turned away from following Mr. Stickles'
departure with the eye of a veteran connoisseur of ladies, when
a yet more beautiful apparition met his gaze entering the Rotun-
da. This was none other than the Mayor of Glastonbury's young-
er daughter. Crummie was not altogether surprised to find the
place in a state of noisy commotion and her father fast asleep
in his chair. "Poor darling!" she said to herself, "I expect he
didn't sleep at all last night. But he must come. He must come
straight home now." She went up to him and shook him by the
shoulder. "It's me, Father...it's all right...it's only me! But Mother
says you must come home. The water's quite deep in Magdalene
Street, and oh, they've got boats there, Father. And it's coming
up Street Road now from both ends! Mother's afraid she'll be
caught in the upper rooms if she goes upstairs. I told her not
to wait for us if anyone came by with a boat!"

"How hot and panting you are, my pretty. There, there, get your
breath! I’ll come, I’ll come." He pulled himself up from his chair
and stood by Crummie’s side for a second, regarding the quar-
relsome mystics from the principality with an amused stare. He
was still only half awake. His face was puffy with sleep, his eyes
blurred and filmy. "Let’s go, let’s go, my treasure," he murmur-
ed, dragging her to the door by the arm.

As they left the Rotunda Crummie saw him turn sideways in
a very quaint and casual way and automatically make a hurried
inclination of his head towards the altar. Nothing would have
induced Crummie to imitate him in this, for Sam’s influence was
still strong, and he had said: "God knows what sort of a Deity
your father s got down there," but it did strike her as a curious
thing that Mr. Geard should have already grown so used to this
place that he could treat his devil-worship, or whatever it was, in
that self-forgetful, careless, mechanical fashion. They had hardly
reached the road than they met Paul Trent, calm and feline as
ever, though he was drenched to the skin from the waist down,
and his teeth were chattering.

Five deaths already, Comrades," he announced grimly, drawl-
ing his beautifully curved womanish lips aw’ay from his white
chattering teeth, in a grin worthy of Young Tewsy. "Two children
out in Beckery, and a mother and two children in Dye House
Lane. But there are probably lots of others by now; for the water
keeps rising every moment! It’s sea-water, Mr. Geard; that’s
what it is; and till this moon wanes the tides will go on keeping
at this height."

"Have any boats come? Have we got enough boats?"

"I should think they have come! From every direction they’ve
been arriving. A motor-boat, if you please, has come in from
Bridgewater. But there aren’t half enough yet. It’s been rowing
and wading, rowing and punting, rowing and hauling people out
of top-windows, and pulling people off roofs, since six o’clock
this morning! My hands are blistered with rowing. We’ve missed
you sorely, Sir. I can tell you that. All the poor people in Para-
dise--" Here Crummie pushed herself between her father and
the man from the Scilly Islands and pinched his arm as hard as
she could. But Paul Trent was not to be stopped. "All the poor
people in Paradise are saying that the Mayor deserted the town
and that he left last night by the last train that ran...for Yeovil
or somewhere."

"Did you really hear that said?" Bloody Johnny’s voice was
so menacing that Crummie thrust her hand into his, and then
turning to Paul Trent cried in vibrant tones: "Stop that now!
You only say that to torment him. You knew where he was. You
could have got him any moment! You’ve always hated Father,
Mr. Trent; and now you’ve got your chance, you’re happy to hit
him! Yes, you are...you’ve always hated him."

But Mr. Geard stopped dead in the middle of the road and
caught the young lawyer by the sleeve. "Did you really hear that
said?" His voice was like the rumble of underground thunder.

Paul Trent shrugged his shoulders and looked at Crummie.
Under normal conditions the Mayor’s intensity of emotion would
have overawed him; but he had seen such sights and had had
such experiences in the last few hours that he was in a mood to
face anything. "Of course. And not only in Paradise. I was in
Butts Close and Beckery and Manor Road and Dye House Lane;
and wherever I was I heard the same thing. They don’t care much
for our commune, and I don’t blame ’em. That confounded little
ass, Spear, has ruined everything with his absurd assessors and
his meddling and fumbling with people’s lives. But if our com-
mune ain’t popular, our Mayor--no! I’m not going to stop, Miss
Geard! Why should I stop? I owe nothing to Glastonbury. I’m a
Cornishman; and I give you all to the devil, and your drowned
town too!--our Mayor is despised! Yes, your poorer fellow-
comrades, Mr. Geard, say on all sides, as the police from Bridge-
water and the soldiers from Taunton come in to help--it’s eleven
o’clock now and they say the whole Cadet-Corps from Sherborne
School will be here by noon!--that the only person no one has
seen near the water is the Mayor! I’ve been telling ’em that the
Mayor was praying for ’em; but they say the Reverend Dekker
and the Reverend Dr. Sodbury are hard at work in the boats,
and it seems funny that--" The man’s ungovernable spiteful-
ness was brought to a pause at this point by the chattering of his
teeth and by a fit of violent shivering that took possession of his
whole body.

These physical manifestations were not lost upon Mr. Geard,
and, as if an actual hand had smitten the scales from his eyes,
his awareness of these things transformed in a second the whole
cast of his feelings. "Yes, I ought to have got up earlier, much
earlier!" he said. "You are right, Trent. You are quite right. No,
no, my precious," he went on, addressing Crummie now and
speaking calmly and sadly. "We do what we can, but we are all
weak...all blind and weak. Well! come...come...come . Let us go
on and save all we can. One minute, though, my dears! " With
the familiar expression "my dears" the old dark fire resumed
its accustomed glow in Bloody Johnny's eyes. He dropped
Crummie’s hand and began searching in his pockets. Pres-
ently he brought out a brandy flask and quickly untwisted
its glass stopper. "Here, sonny," he cried, in a tone he might
have used to Elphin Cantle or Steve Lew, "take a swig of this
and finish it if you can. You’ll be feverish soon."

Abashed and uneasy, Paul Trent, instead of putting out his
hand to take the proffered liquour, addressed himself nervously
to Crummie. "You’d better not come any further, Miss Geard,"
he said. "They’ll have taken your mother off by this time. You’d
better make straight for Wirral. Depend on it you’ll find her
there now. That’s just how people come to grief, wading madly
through the water to get to their homes."

But Crummie tossed these words aside. "Drink what he gives
you, when you have the chance," she said, "and don’t be silly."

Under the weight of the combined authority of father and
daughter Paul Trent received the brandy from the Mayor and
put it to his lips. Deep and long did he drink; and when he re-
turned the flask his voice had a very different tone. "Avanti!" he
cried. "Let’s get into any boat that can carry us, and do some
more roof-climbing!"

The last few hours in the life of Paul Trent had been more
stirring and exciting than any he had ever known; and there
came now to both father and daughter one of the queerest sen-
sations they had ever known when from the raised footpath under
the great Tithe Barn they actually encountered those rushing
waters. The first sight of that brownish flood, flecked with foam
that had ceased to be foam, foam that had become a whitish
scum entangled with every sort of floating refuse, was something
that no one who saw it could forget until the day of his death,
More dramatic sights, more tragic sights might follow, and did
follow for both Bloody Johnny and his daughter that day, but it
was that first impression of the power of the waters that sank
into the girl’s mind and returned to her afterward, again and
again, to the last hour of her consciousness. The things that she
saw floating upon that turbid flood were what lodged themselves
most in Crummie’s mind. Dead puppies, dead kittens, dead chick-
ens, children’s dolls, children’s toys, bits of broken furniture,
pieces of furniture that were not broken but were upside down
and horribly disfigured--such were some of the objects she
caught sight of, as they stood on that stone-flagged curb with
the flood swirling at their feet. She saw towel-horses and laundry
baskets. She saw wicker cradles, and pitiful wooden chairs with
their legs in the air. And these were only a few of the intimate
utensils of human life that were exposed in that primeval inde-
cency to the eye of the onlooker as the eddying torrent whirled
them forward. Fire is the great devourer; but it is so swift and
deadly with its blinding flames and suffocating smoke, that it
spreads a kind of vacuum round it, a psychic vacuum, created
by the annihilating suction of that Heraclitean force which is the
beginning and the end of all life. Water, on the other hand,
except in the wildest tempests at sea, kills more calmly, paralyses
more slowly; and the terror that it creates does not shrivel up
the normal nerves of our human awareness. For this very reason
the slow ghastliness of death by water seems more natural to
humanity than the swift horror of death by fire.

It was a quaint example of the obstinate self-assertion of
human beings that now, as they were waiting there, Paul Trent
took upon himself to point out that a flood was the sort of occa-
sion when governments and states showed what frauds they were.
"There’ll be a boat this way in a minute," he said, "but it’ll be
rowed by private people, not the soldiers!" The lawyer’s teeth-
chatterings and shiverings had ceased after that deep drink from
the Mayor’s flask. "It’s like Venice. It’s like waiting for a gon-
dola," he chuckled with a leer.

Bloody Johnny’s bare head was bent forward a little as he
fronted the rushing, swirling torrent at his feet, but his eyes
were turned westward in their deep sockets, and were staring
intently at the corner of Silver Street, round which the expected
boat seemed most likely to appear. Crummie stooped down and
turned up several times the bottoms of her father's black trou-
sers, revealing his loose, bedraggled bootlaces. ‘There’s a boat!
There’s two of ’em!" cried Mr. Geard. Two boats did indeed
now appear, shooting round the corner of Silver Street with a
great deal of splashing and shouting. Both were rowed, in spite
of the anarchist’s prediction, by a soldier; but in one of them
was a large and huddled group of sobbing children, while in the
other, a much bigger boat, save for the figures of Lily and Louie
Rogers clinging tightly to each other in the stern, there was no-
body at all.

The young soldier who was rowing the large boat was evi-
dently totally unused to handling oars and it was his clumsiness,
angrily rebuked by the older man in the crowded boat, that pro-
duced the splashing and confusion. Every time his oar slipped,
or got caught between the rushing water and the wooden rowlock,
Lily would turn an appealing glance, like the gaze of a Christian
Martyr in an early Victorian print, towards the older soldier
whom the helpless oarsman seemed to be addressing as corporal.

"Tike the lidy aboard, Bill!" now commanded the corporal.
"Tike the two gents as well. Blime me! Do ’ee think yer goin’ to
do nothink but row young lidies? Do 'ee think yer in Wyemouth
Bye, of a Satur-die arternoon? Tike the three on ’em aboard at
once! Pull with yer other oar, ye bleedin’ bibe! The other one,
yer prize fool, the other one. Gawd damn yer! Yer'll brike that
oar to bits in a jiffy. Stand up, yer fool! Stand up, and pull it
out o’ the bloody water! Gawd, Almighty! was there ever such
a ninny born of man’s ’oly seed!"

The martyrised glances of Lily, lovely in her pallor, seemed
to increase the bewilderment of the hapless young soldier even
more than the abuse of his corporal. Three times the big canal-
boat from Bridgewater was carried by the flood past the place
where the three stood. At the fourth attempt, when it looked as if
the corporal, purple with rage, would soon be upsetting his own
load of now screaming children, Paul Trent, wading up to his
knees in the brown flood, clambered into the boat. What have
you done with your mistress?" he threw out hurriedly to the
sisters Rogers as he regained his balance.

"Miss Drew couldn’t leave her things, Sir," murmured Lily
faintly. Once inside the unwieldy craft--for there were other
oars under its seats--the lawyer had no difficulty in bringing it
so close to their vantage ground that both father and daughter
could clamber in without entering the water. Both Mr. Geard and
Crummie were staggered at the sight that awaited them when the
keel of their boat grounded at last in the trodden mud at the foot
of Wirral Hill.

All Glastonbury seemed to have taken refuge on this eminence
and there were terrific hummings and dronings from the air and
frantic screams from the hillside, and wild contradictory cries
from both above and below, as several private airplanes and a
couple of capacious military aircraft landed and re-started again
in a roped-off enclosure. In fact the whole of the southern por-
tion of Wirral Hill had been by that time taken over by the
authorities and it was perhaps the best distraction that the terri-
fied children of Glastonbury could possibly have had, the thrill
of watching these constant landings and departures and seeing
so many soldiers. Army tents had already been put up and sack-
cloth shelters; and the whole hillside was a tumultuous scene of
confusion. Parents with convulsed faces and distracted wits were
rushing about looking for children they had lost, and a wildly
struggling crowd kept fighting to get to the flood’s edge at the
arrival of every boatload that reached the hill from the sub-
merged portions of the town. It was the aged town clerk, strug-
gling among the crowd at the water’s edge, who was the messen-
ger sent by Mrs. Geard to bring them to the tent the officials had
set apart for her, and Crummie was so caught up out of herself
by the wild scene before her, that she kissed the old gentleman
when he turned to her from some altercation that he was having
with a small boy. "What’s that?" she asked, noticing in Mr.
Bishop’s hands a curiously bound book that looked as if it had
been floating in the flood for several hours. "A boy here picked
it up out of the water," replied the old man gravely. "It’s about
pardoning sin; but I’ve lost my glasses."

As Bloody Johnny stepped from the boat upon the slope of
Wirral Hill he first glanced back at the level expanse of brown
water and then turned and surveyed the singular scene of shock-
ing disorder and scrambling confusion which that familiar grassy
eminence offered to his view. It was indeed a unique spectacle.
Its movement and agitation carried an aura completely different
from anything he had ever seen. It was not like a fair at Yeovil.
It was not like a military field day at Dorchester. It was not like
a scene on Weymouth Beach. On the other hand it was not like a
refuge camp in war, famine, or pestilence. A certain minority of
the younger people there--especially lads between seventeen and
twenty whose relatives were in no danger--were evidently hugely
enjoying the excitement. But the queer thing was that everyone
seemed to carry some flood-mark about them. Their clothes were
wet or they were mud-stained, or some particular article of attire
was missing. They would have resembled the inhabitants of a
town escaping from a bombardment save that the fear of water ,
the flood-panic, evokes an utterly different atmosphere from the
fear of bursting shells or exploding bombs. A flood-panic is a
steady and continuous presence lacking in the expectancy of any-
thing crashing or deafening. A flood-panic is essentially a silent
thing; and in this respect has nothing of the wild distraction of a
shipwreck, or of an ocean-storm, or of a mob-riot.

"Out of the way there, please!" Two men were lifting a wom-
an’s body from a boat to the land. The Mayor recognized Dr. Fell
as one of them and he laid his hand on his arm. The doctor
greeted him; and addressed by name the man at the dead wom-
an’s feet. "Stop a bit, Dickery, it’s Mr. Geard!"

No one knew better than Dickery Cantle who it was, but he
was so dazed and stupefied that all he could do was to tighten his
hold upon the ankles of his burden, as if Mr. Geard were a
body-snatcher.

"I’ve been trying to revive her for an hour, Geard," went on
Dr. Fell, "but it’s no use. She’s out of it God! I wish I were!"

But Bloody Johnny did not hear him. If he had said "I've
decided to take those tablets tonight and end the whole thing,"
the Mayor would not have heard him. The Mayor’s attention was
rivetted upon the body in their arms which was of extraordinary
beauty, though a bloody scar from a recent fall crpssed her
forehead.

"Who is she," asked Mr. Geard. "I don’t know her. She has a
lovely face. Who is she?"

"She’s Jenny Morgan. She’s the mother of that little girl Nelly.
She’s the woman Red Robinson wrote about in the Gazette till
you stopped him. She was Mr. Crow’s girl at one time."

"Is the child drowned too?"

The doctor shook his head. "This poor creature wouldn’t have
been drowned if she hadn’t been practically dead-drunk. She was
fishing things out of the water at the end of Dye House Lane.
Her little girl was with her."

"Where’s the child now?" As he asked this question Mr. Geard
noticed that some small insect, a minute beetle or fly it was, with
tiny yellow stripes, was moving gingerly across the dead girl’s
face just as it would have done over a leaf or a stone. He flicked
it off with his finger-nail. That she couldn’t feel that small tick-
ling seemed stranger than that she couldn’t open her big eyes.

"The child’s with Comrade Robinson and his wife," replied the
doctor. "Nelly knows those two very well; better than she ever
knew this beautiful creature, I expect. Well! you died the easiest
death, my dear, that anyone could die, just as easy as--" Dr.
Fell’s mind wandered off from the calm face where the dark-
fringed eyelids were covering those eyes that had always seemed
too wide, as if they were forever seeing the things that normal
people dodge, and he was thinking in his heart: "It’s funny...
but I believe I’ve got a real idea while I’ve been holding this
girl. Why don’t I just simply leave Bibby in the house and take
lodgings with this chap Dickery? Dave Spear lives there; and
why shouldn’t I? I could keep my clinic."

As he thought of this, and imagined the triumphant way in
which he would lock up his consulting room in Manor House
Road every time he left it, he suddenly caught upon Mr. Geard’s
face the most extraordinary expression he had ever seen on the
countenance of any human being. Bloody Johnny had raised his
hand again to the dead woman, this time to re-arrange a fold of
her dress which her rescuers in their attempts to save her had
disarranged. But no sooner had his hand encountered that ice-
cold exposed bosom than he left it there, lying like a heavy horse-
mushroom on the girl’s breast. And with his hand resting there
his face took upon itself the very expression of this dead woman.
His eyes closed. His jaw fell open. His nostrils grew pinched and
thin. Certain lines disappeared from his face altogether and
certain completely new ones showed themselves.

"Are you faint? Are you ill, Mr. Geard?" The doctor could
not let go his hold upon Jenny Morgan, but the sound of his
quick, anxious voice seemed enough without anything else to
deliver the other from this curious sort of fit. His eyes flickered
and opened, his nostrils quivered and expanded, his mouth closed
tightly.

The doctor and Dickery Cantle moved off now with their
burden and Mr. Geard was left standing by the water watching
the manoeuvres of Paul Trent. But Crummie, who had carried Mr.
Bishop off to ask him about her mother and had learned that
Lord Brent had put aside one of the officers' tents for the Mayor-
ess, now returned and asked who that woman was and whether
she was dead. Her father dodged her questions about the dead
girl and told her to thank Paul Trent and say good-bye to him.
Paul Trent was still engaged in a struggle to be allowed to keep
the big Bridgewater boat, but Crummie noticed that after he'd
deposited Lily and Louie safely on the muddy grass he turned
out the young soldier too. "Take these young ladies to the top of
the hill, my lad," he commanded, "and give them something hot
to drink. Hi there! You look as if you could row! Come on in
here and let's push off!"

His words were addressed to none other than Tommy Chin-
nock. "Sure I can row, Mister Trent! Sure I can! I larned it
down to Bridport when I were wi' uncle. I can row with two oars
if I be wanted to!"

Paul Trent was considerate enough, however, to wait for the
arrival of the young soldier's superior officer before finally dis-
missing him.

"Please yourself, Sir," conceded this authority. "Please your-
self; and tike them lidies to their famblies, stright now, Thomp-
son; this ain't no bloomin' esplanade."

When they reached the tent that had been allotted to Mrs.
Geard, she certainly embraced her husband and daughter with
more emotion than she was accustomed to display. Did she feel
any premonition of what was coming? There can be no doubt
that some curious electric telepathy does sometimes link together
the present and the future. Not always, however! That mysterious
act of the human will, that resembles creation out of nothing and
that every living soul shares with its begetter, the First Cause,
has the power of breaking up and completely altering any fatal
series in the mysterious streams of causative energy. But so pow-
erful, in Bloody Johnny's case, was his desire to die, so strong
was his conviction that his Master had resolved that he should
die, that this arbitrary wilful power in his nature could naturally
be discounted in advance. This being the case, while for Mrs.
Geard and for Fred Thompson, the soldier who could not row,
and for Nancy Stickles and for Young Tewsy, the future might
be malleable, for Mr. Geard the future was decided--and decided
entirely by himself.

"Well, my chicks," he now remarked with an easy sigh. "I
can't stay all day with you up here in this elegant tent. Bugger
me black, but these officer-lads know how to make themselves
comfortable! Is this the sleeping quarters they've given us?
'Tisn't like whoam, ha?...but it's all shipshape. Well! I'm
off, my pretties. There'll only be need for one night for'ee up
here. I know that. So tomorrow you'll be back in the old bed,
Megan."

He looked queerly at his wife as he said this, weighing to him-
self what she would feel tomorrow night without her John. The
man's detachment just then was so abysmal that he could even
conjure up the way she would go about the house without him,
and how in the midst of her bewildered grief she would get com-
fort in thinking out every detail of his funeral, including the very
smallest matters, such as whether to bury him in one of his old
flannel shirts, or to use one of her best linen counterpanes. She
would wonder, too, he felt sure, whether to let Crummie wear
her new black hat, which was black, but not mourning-black, or
whether to buy her a real funeral one at Wollop's!

"Well, I'm off," he repealed, but, instead of departing, he took
his seat on a shaky camp-stool and pulled Crummie down upon
his knees. "'Tisn't every man o' my age," he murmured, using,
as he always did when he was upset, the old Montacute accent,
"has a darter as pretty as you be and unmarried, too, and a com-
fort to thee's wold parents."

"Well, if you be going to go, John, ye best go now," said
Megan crossly. She never liked it when Crummie sat on her
father's lap and she was afraid now that the soldiers could see
into the tent. She was unpacking her old black vanity-bag at that
moment, into which she had stuffed all manner of alien objects,
and the way she did this, trying to make herself at home under
these weird conditions, and glancing at herself in the little mirror
she took out, and pushing back her grey hairs with both her
hands under her lilac bonnet, struck Bloody Johnny with a sud-
den rush of overpowering tenderness.

"Don't'ee forget, my precious," he blurted out, addressing
his wife from behind Crummie's white neck, which filled his nos-
trils with a faint, sweet smell, as of new-mown hay, "don't'ee
forget to go every month now, and draw that monthly annuity
I've arranged for Bob Stilly to pay'ee. I be liable, 'tis a great
sin, but so it is with me, to get so lost in me work at Town's End
that my memory baint what it used to be."

"What are you talking about, John? There be no need for us
to go to bank, as long as these councilmen bring your salary in
a chamois-leather case like they've always done. What are you
thinking about? You ain't going to try rescuing folk, be'ee, in
one of them tipply boats?"

"No, no. That's all right, my angel. I only meant--I only
mentioned--I'm not going to get into any boat--don't'ee think
it!--only I've got things to see to. After all, I be Mayor, my
treasure; and mayors be like captains of ships; they don't sit in
cabins. They go on deck."

Crummie slipped off his knee and faced him. "I won't have
you going anywhere, Dad!" she cried with flashing eyes. Moth-
er's quite right. Your place is with us when things be as terrible
as they be today."

Bloody Johnny got up slowly and stiffly. His expression was
such that Crummie yielded at once. The voices that reached their
ears through that tent door were of a kind that he had never
thought to hear in Glastonbury. Some woman was now screaming
pitifully, someone was dragging her away. "Good-bye till to-
night, my chicks," he said in a low voice. "I suppose," he added
to Crummie, "your mother and I are to sleep in there...and
you are to sleep here? Is that how they've fixed it up? Well--
the same earth will be under all our beds, I reckon, wherever
we sleep. Don't'ee be afeared! I won't be long."

He moved aside the flap of the tent and went out. There was
no sign of the woman he had heard screaming; but he noticed, as
he emerged, that some kind of orderly had been placed at the
entrance, with the idea, evidently, of keeping less privileged
homeless persons from encroaching upon the Mayor's privacy.

"A bad business, Sir," said the man, peering past Bloody
Johnny into the interior of the tent. The psychology of refuge
camps had already begun to work, and the beauty of Crummie's
person had not been missed by this guardian of her retreat.

"All life's a funny business, lad," replied Mr. Geard; and
then, fumbling in his pocket, he produced one of the councils
half-pound notes. "Put this in your pocket, boy," he said, "and
don't let anyone frighten the ladies. I'll be back soon."

"Oh, Mother, Mother, what shall we do?" cried the girl, when
the tent-flap swung back and the two were left alone, "I don't
believe we'll ever see him again!"

Megan Geard hugged the agitated young woman to her heart,
a thing she had not done--not in this solemn way--since Crum-
mie was a small child. "We must pray for him, my pet. Don't
'ee take on so; don't 'ee, Crum! The good Lord be above all
still."

No one took the least notice of the burly bare-headed man in
his old greenish-black coat and his turned-up shiny black trou-
sers, as he hurried off down the hillside towards the surging
crowd at the flood's edge. There happened to be a very small
boat emptying itself of a lanky young labourer from Paradise
who was carrying an infant child.

"It's my boat," growled the youth sulkily, as Mr. Geard, push-
ing impetuously through the crowd, snatched up the oars.

"It was your boat," replied the Mayor; but he added more
kindly, a second after, as he pushed one of the oarblades deep
into the grass to steady the little craft while he stepped into it.

If you can find anyone to take your child, sonny, ask for the
Mayor's tent and tell Mrs. Geard that Mr. Geard said--"

His voice was lost in the arrival of a big flat barge, punted by
Sam and his father, each armed with an enormous pole. It was a
hay-barge from the Brue; and the Dekkers, after having been
twice upset out of less solid craft, had at last found a vessel
suited to both their weight and their strength. Water dripped
from their drenched clothes. Sweat poured from their tired faces.
But the impression that Mr. Geard received from them both was
that of an exultant happiness.

It is a recurrent phenomenon in the affairs of men that certain
emotional conflicts, which no normal events can affect nor any
spontaneous efforts alter, are brought to an end, reconciled, har-
monised, blotted out, by some startling elemental catastrophe. It
was not until they both had been working desperately for some
hours at rescuing marooned people that the father and son met,
but when once they had met--without a word having been spoken
between them of a personal character--it was taken for granted
by both of them that they should remain together. Once in pos-
session of this huge hay-barge they began picking up the terri-
fied and stranded people from their flooded houses in far larger
numbers than any other rescuers, except, perhaps, those who used
the motor-boat from Bridgewater.

It gave Mr. Geard, in the midst of all the conflicting emotions
that were surging through him, a feeling of puzzled satisfaction
to confront this glowing emanation of primeval life-zest. He
looked at the two big men in amused wonder. They seemed drunk
with delight at simply being together. Strong and deep love be-
tween a father and a son is not rare. But the maudlin, doting,
inebriated rapture of these two as they helped their tottering
cargo to disembark, for it had been people from the old men's
almshouse they had been rescuing, seemed the most extreme
example of such a feeling that Mr. Geard had ever encountered.

The Dekkers were both completely exhausted. It was easy to
see that. But the passionate surge of life-joy which they revealed,
hauling, dragging, heaving, lifting, balancing and wading, was
something that carried a curious and special elation to Bloody
Johnny's mind. It was no easy task to get their cargo of aged
and feeble almshousemen out of their barge and on to the land;
and some of the old people looked quite dazed and at the end of
their tether. But Mr. Geard, taking hold of one of his own oars
with both hands, was able to give the stern of the big barge a
most timely propulsion, for which Sam, who was nearest to him,
gave him a grateful nod.

"Thank you, Sir! That's just right. One more shove and you'll
get us in."

Mr. Geard repeated his effort, but being not much more skil-
ful at these manoeuvres than young Private Thompson, there was
no small danger of his falling headfront into the water between
the boat and the barge. Sam, however, caught at his oar-blade
and flung him back. He collapsed across the seat of his tiny
skiff, but the little tub righted itself, and all was well.

"Look'ee here, Mr. Mayor, what my father insisted on put-
ting in!" Taking advantage of Mat Dekker's lifting one of the old
men out and wading with him through the water, Sam stooped
down in the stern of the barge and lifted up a rabbit-hutch.
"Three lop-ears and one little black one!" he shouted above the
uproar. "The Vicarage, you know, is high and dry; and I think
Miss Drew's all right, though her servants got panicky. I saw
them perched on their drive gate calling to every boat that
passed. But I'll have to hang on to this hutch till Father goes
home. We found it in the water near Backwear Hut, where Abel
Twig lives. We couldn't see anything of the old man. We punted
far out of our way till we were quite close to his place. But noth-
ing except the chimneys could we see. It's so near the river. The
water's terribly deep there. All you can see are a few mounds--
the Ancient British mounds." All these remarks Sam shouted to
Mr. Geard as the current of the flood swept between them and
carried the latter's little boat away.

Bloody Johnny nodded farewell to him as he took his oars
firmly in his hands and set himself to row in the direction of
those Ancient British mounds. He rowed directly towards the
river which he realised he could easily follow by reason of its
swifter current, and which he knew, after it had skirted Beckery
and Paradise, would lead him near Lake Village Field. What
Sam had said about Abel Twig's rabbit-hutch and about the old
man's chimneys being all that was visible had been accepted by
Bloody Johnny as an omen sent by his Master. "Rescue Abel
wig," he muttered to himself, "Rescue Abel Twig "

He was now resolutely set upon dying, set upon dying before
night fell. He did not think of this as suicide. The thought of
suicide never once crossed even that nimbus of feeling which
connects the double horns of the mind, like the old moon within
he crescent of the new moon. Mr. Geard had the peculiarity of
believing absolutely and without question in the existence of the
next world. He also knew for certain, by the evidence of personal
experience, that a living Being, who might, or might not, be the
Christ the churches worshipped, awaited his presence in what he
called "the. next dream." Mr. Geard had been made to understand
by the mediumship of this Being, that conditions of life after the
death of the body were immeasurably superior to those now ex-
isting. He had also been promised that this Being would meet
him face to face and would satisfy to the full the accumulated
erotic desires, at once mystical and sensual, which were the
master-craving of his nature.

Not long after Mr. Geard's death, not long after the sifting
out of all these dramatic events, one of the cleverest women psy-
chologists of our time brought forward an interpretation of the
man's mood on this fatal day that deserves to be recorded. Ac-
cording to this view of his feelings during these last hours of his
life, the stress ought to be laid upon the curious pathological
necessity, under which he was known to labour, of actually shar-
ing with all his bodily nerves the physical suffering of those
around him. This authority hesitated not to point out that in the
case of Tittie, and in the case of the idiot-boy outside the Pil-
grims', and in the case of Owen Evans in the hospital, the man
had been seen to display actual physical signs of suffering ex-
actly parallel to those endured by Mrs. Petherton, and by the
boy, and by Mr. Evans as he told his stupendous story. The
amazing--but surely not impossible explanation--offered by this
penetrating woman is that a violent psychic radiation from all
the minds of the twenty-seven people, including children, who
were actually drowned during those twelve ghastly hours riddled
Mr. Geard's hyper-sensitised and super-porous sympathy with
what might be called the drowning-spasm, and produced in him
a craving for death by drowning that really amounted to a kind
of drowning-hypnosis. This brilliant writer points out further,
in regard to the mystery of the death of Geard of Glastonbury,
that his growing preoccupation with the Grail Fount on Chalice
Hill was itself a hydro-philiastic obsession. While many patho-
logical subjects, this writer maintains, seek a pre-natal peace in
death, what Mr. Geard in his planetary consciousness desired
was a return to that remote and primal element of Water, which
was literally the great maternal womb of all organic earth-life.
It was this woman's far-fetched pamphlet that with its use of
pathological technical terms had such a large share in turning
the attention of intellectual people away from the religious as-
pects of the problem.

What Bloody Johnny was really struggling with, however, as
he splashed along in his frail tub, past the outskirts of Beckery
and of Paradise till he reached the swirling current of the flood-
swamped river, was his love for Megan and Crummie. Of Cor-
delia he hardly thought at all; though it must be confessed that
a faint and clinging sweetness, like a fragrance within a fra-
grance, drew his mind now and then towards the figure of Lady
Rachel.

It was painful to him to condemn his wife and daughter--left
up there on Wirral Hill in that strange camp tent--to what he
knew well enough would be a pitiful if not a rending shock. Over
and over again he placed the alternatives before himself--to go
on with his life and spare them this blow, or to follow the de-
vouring death-lust which had gathered upon him and ruthlessly
plunge them into this human loss.

He was in the river current now, flowing westward in furious
angry eddies which the incoming sea tide forced back upon them-
selves. In spite of the roll of the great flood eastward, as soon as
he reached the centre of the river the current swept him west-'
ward, rocking his tiny skiff in the most threatening manner and
rendering it totally unnecessary for a while even to attempt to
use his oars. So he just pulled them in and let them lie across
the little boat in front of his big stomach. '

Mr. Geard's character will never be understood--or the mon-
strous inhumanity of his departure from the visible world con-
doned--until it is realised that the unruffled amiability and the
unfailing indulgence of his attitude to those near and dear to him
concealed a hidden detachment from them that had always been
an unbridged gulf.

The mass and volume of his being was composed of a weight
of cold phlegmatic substance that was always sinking down, by
a weird gravitational pull, to a species of preorganic cosmic
inertia. His great moments came when this heavy inertness, pull-
ing him down into the silt and slime of the chemical basis of
life, was roused to activity by his erotic mysticism. For the truth
is that the psychic-sensual life-lust in Mr. Geard was always
being lulled to dormant quiescence under the weight of his slug-
gish physical nature. The spirit within him needed to be roused
and stirred up, before it could feel really alive, by some super-
formidable and super-dramatic Quest. Such a Quest had been his
passion for the Grail Fount; till that Welshman's question about
Arthur had confused his mind.

But he was weary of all that now; and if his nature was not to
sink back into its heavier elements of sluggish neutral indiffer-
ence, he must get into closer contact with his invisible Master
than was possible in this "muddy vesture' of earth-life!

He was muttering to himself now as his little boat began
whirling round and round in one of these dangerous confluences
where the salt flood met the river's current. Ha! The ocean smell
was in his nostrils, and there in the water, whirling round with
his cockle-shell boat, was an authentic piece of white seaweed!
He stretched out one of his plump hands--his left hand it was--
to clutch this bit of seaweed, his mind racing back to old childish
days at Weymouth Beach. This would have been the end of him;
for the water was very deep here, and Mr. Geard had never
learned to swim; but at the moment he began this stretching ges-
ture which--carried an inch further would have upset his boat--
the river current defeated the sea flood, and swept him on, out of
the dangerous circle of that vortex, and carried him forward with
increasing rapidity towards Lake Village Great Field. He had lost
the white seaweed; but he had escaped being drowned by an ac-
cident. But what was this? Something vast and glittering swept
into view in the very midst of the river.

A portion of Philip's new bridge! Torn from its shaft holes in
the mud banks, and dragged, steel and scaffolding and crossbeams
and all, into the centre of the torrent, this towering symbol of the
power of Capital, of the power of Science, was now the sport of
what looked like a mocking, mischievous, taunting cuckoo-spit
out of Chaos itself!

Mr. Geard neither smiled, nor chuckled, nor congratulated
himself at this surprising sight. He just surveyed it with a lively,
objective, inquisitive interest, an interest worthy of Bert Cole or
of Timothy Wollop.

But the apparition of this costly piece of wreckage served to
divert the drifting of the boat that carried him, sweeping it, as
the two objects collided, across the submerged northern bank of
the Brue towards the middle of Lake Village Field.

Here the water was a little shallower; but still quite deep
enough to drown a man whose height was not over six feet, and
in special hollows on the edges of the mounds much deeper
than that.

Mr. Geard now re-claimed possession of his oars, thrusting
them into the row-locks and pulling energetically towards all he
could see of the dwelling of Abel Twig.

Yes, Sam Dekker was right. There was not much else than the
chimney of Backwear Hut, together with a small fragment of its
roof, visible across the surface of a mud-coloured lake, above
which its brickwork showed almost black. But several of the
bigger mounds of the old Lake Village were still visible, their
round tops protruding from the waste of waters like diseased
excrescences on the wrinkled surface of a vast brown leaf.

But Mr. Geard found himself confronted now by several ob-
jects more exciting to a human brain, lodged in a wooden tub on
a brown flood, than mere chimney-tops. He became aware that
upon the largest of these Lake Village mounds there were living
figures, consisting, as far as he could make out, of a man, a
child, and an animal, among whom the man and the child were
desperately summoning him to their aid. There was something
floating in the water too, with a dark object clinging to it that
was also waving to him.

So detached was the man's mind at this juncture, with his own
life and death held in the balance, that he found himself in the
coolest and calmest fashion comparing the scene before him with
an old Bible picture of the Flood which used to obsess his mind
as a little boy at Town's End in Montacute. Here, again, the dif-
ference between water and fire rose up and manifested itself !
Had the element that threatened the lives of all these living
creatures been fire, there would have been such an automatic beat
of panic fear in his pulses that such mental detachment as he now .
felt, would have been impossible.

Living spirits they were--he and these two gesticulating fig-
ures--each one of them with a whole world of clear-cut feelings,
images, memories. And now, against them, this swirling brown
mass of water, this enormous entity without consciousness, or
purpose, or feeling, or pity, was gathering itself up to obliterate
in one swallowing gulp of drowning suction, everything, every-
one--until blackness alone remained.

Blackness? But what was he thinking? It was not to gain
blackness that he was choosing to die rather than to live this day!
Or was it? Was what he fancied to be his superhuman mania for
heightened life in reality a secret longing to plunge into the dark
abyss of non-existence?

Mr. Geard now allowed his oars to rest on the water, which
was comparatively calm just here, and hoisting himself up on
the palms of his big hands endeavoured to get a clear sense of
what confronted him, before he took any action. "Why didn't
the Dekkers see those two?" he thought. "That barge of theirs
must have come from the other side of the Hut and unless they
were so occupied with their rabbit-hutch "

He could now observe that the ground beyond the Hut, on the
further side of Godney Road rose up well out of the water; and
it occurred to him that a strong swimmer, from any of these
mound-islands, could reach dry land without much difficulty.

"Bugger me black!" he muttered to himself, "if there isn't a
man on that floating thing over there!"

With distended eyes he surveyed this man astride of the out-
stretched wing of what he now recognized as the Crow airplane.
Yes, it was Philip himself! Drawn by an irresistible instinct to-
wards his steel flying machine and his steel bridge, the manu-
facturer had done exactly what Mr. Geard had been thinking
a spirited man might do, he had swum from the high ground
above Godney Road--which he had managed somehow to reach
on foot--and had got hold of the airplane. The unlucky thing
was that when he got there he found himself seized with such an
evil cramp in both his legs as rendered him totally hors-de-
combat.

Seeing the man clinging so helplessly to the wing of his sub-
merged machine, Mr. Geard naturally supposed that, like him-
self, Philip was no swimmer. Without thinking very much about
it he vaguely took it for granted that the manufacturer had tried
to land from the air in the darkness of last night, and had found
water where he had expected to find grass.

"He must have been hours in the water, poor devil!" thought
Mr. Geard. "I'll deal with him first and let the ones on the mound
go for a while." He began--after his curious fashion--to shiver
and shake just as he imagined the man in the water must be
doing, after so long an immersion! Why it was that he began to
experience, as he gazed at him, an extremely unpleasant feeling
in his legs, was more than he could explain.

He now proceeded to row straight up to the floating airplane;
a movement which evoked cries of disappointment and then a
miserable silence from the man and the boy on the mound. But
Philip received him with a smile of intense gratitude. The rival
kings of Avalon met thus at last on what was certainly a spot--
though it could scarcely be called a ground--of undeniable
neutrality.

"I don't think she's seriously injured," was Philip's charac-
teristic remark as Mr. Geard clutched at the edge of the great
protruding wing and steadied his cockle-shell craft.

"Legs hurt?" panted Mr. Geard, thinking of the man rather
than of his machine.

"The bridge is down," went on Philip, his face giving a con-
vulsive, involuntary twinge as he dragged himself a little further
out of the water. Being a Crow, this twinge, which was repeated
every time he made this least movement, took the form of the
twitching nerve in John's face. Mr. Geard thought of John as he
saw this twitching face above the water-line.

"I'm glad he's safe out of this anyway, the poor lad," he said
to himself.

"Legs hurt?" he repeated, refusing to join this builder of
bridges in his present straining effort to get a glimpse of that
steel wreck.

"I've got a devilish cramp," murmured Philip.

"You swam out here?"

The manufacturer nodded. "Only from just over there," he
said. "From just beyond the road. I've got cramp," he repeated.

"We'll deal with it," said Mr. Geard, "presently. Only first we
must change places. It's only your legs, eh? Your arms are all
right?"

Philip re-assured him about his arms with a feeble smile.

"There are people on those mounds," went on Mr. Geard.
"When we've got you safe to land, we'll cope with that trouble.
But one thing at a time is my motto--and I daresay it's yours
too. We're agreed anyway there. And I think we're agreed too,
Mr. Crow, whatever folk may say, on one other thing."

"What's that, Mr. Mayor?" enquired the twitching white face
above the airplane's wing.

Bloody Johnny noticed that the water had been washing so
long in the same place--for the man's legs hurt him at the
slightest move--that it had deposited a sort of windrow of
minute bits of scum and weed across Philip's neck. A bit of
green dyke-scum clung, too, to one corner of the man's mustache,
producing an effect that was unpleasantly grotesque. But Mr.
Geard's mind had already forgotten what it was; this second
point upon which their characters agreed!

"What we've got to do now, Mister," announced Bloody John-
ny from his seat in his coracle--and the jostling in the water
of these two vessels, the boat and the aircraft, were like the com-
ing together of two aeons of time--"is to change places! You've
got to get into my boat...and I've got to get into your airplane!"

Philip smiled a rather sickly and tantalised smile.

"You've come to mock me, Mr. Mayor! When I first saw you
coming I thought, here's someone who'll pick me up, but I see
now that your little tub couldn't possibly hold-- Well, off with
you! And if--"

"Thats just what I say," remarked Geard of Glastonbury, and
without more ado, he began divesting himself of his coat, his
trousers and his drawers.

Philip, with the green weed hanging from his mustache and
his neck surrounded by a windrow of scum, contemplated these
movements with astonishment. There was even a faint glint of
class-conscious physical distaste in his white flood-dirtied face
as he beheld, so shamelessly displayed before him, the private
parts of the tenant of Cardiff Villa.

But Mr. Geard now pulled himself close to the wing of the
airplane and peered down into the water where the other man's
cramped legs were twisted between him.

"Are you standing on anything?" he asked.

Philip did not seem to hear this question. The wrinkles of his
forehead as he hoisted himself a little out of the water showed a
swift, violent, interior conflict.

"If I take his offer," he thought, "I'll get into the town and
have him picked up much quicker than he could do it for me.
The fellow's no more good at rowing a boat than he is at spend-
ing a fortune! Damn! I suppose the noble thing to do would be
to refuse his help. But what if I get cramp in my belly? My
plane's ruined. My bridge is down. My road is sunk. Not an
ounce of tin in Wookey for the last three weeks. That Birming-
ham man thought the whole vein's exhausted. The new dye works
--all that these demons have left me--a foot deep in water!
What have I got to live for?"

But the hard, narrow, invincible back portion of his skull vis-
ualised the new start of his career as if it were a steam-tug in
this brown littered water!

"Begin again," he thought to himself; "and to Hell with mock-
heroism! Geard and I are two beasts fighting for our lives. I
know it. He doesn't know it! His soft, crazy idealisms, his I-am-
the-one-to-give-my-life-for-my-enemy, is simply his handicap in
our struggle. If the man does drown before I get back, it'll only
prove that he preferred his ideal gestures to life. I prefer nothing
to life. Oh, to the devil with these haverings!" In Philip's secret
heart was a blind confidence in the airplane as equal to this crisis.
He had so closely identified himself with this potent, yet pliable
structure, that below all practical reasoning he had a superstitious
faith in the spirit of his machine to outmatch the elements.

If any of those invisible Watchers of human psychology in
Glastonbury had been overlooking these two just now--the man
in the coracle and the man in the water--a lively discussion
might have risen among them as to which of the two was the
stronger lover of life.

"Begin over again!" This was the cry of the man in the water,
with the yellowish scum adhering to his neck and a weft of dead
seaweed--the kind that has on it those slippery blown-out pus-
tules that children love to pinch between their fingers--caught in
his hair, and the wisp of green sea-gluten twisted into his mus-
tache. And this "Begin again!" was the out-jetting of the inmost
essence of his nature. As he formulated this "Begin again!" the
image of a steam-tug crossing this swirling flood, with a resolute
tick...tick...tick...of its engines, became the image of his recovery
in spite of all opposition.

But Bloody Johnny's exultation as he peered into the water to
see what was beneath his rival's cramped legs was of a very
different sort.

"So this is how I shall do it!" he said to himself, with a con-
vulsive chuckle, a chuckle that caused the pit of his stomach to
flutter up and down like sail-cloth on a beach that is held in its
place by pebble-stones. "What...could...be...better?

A huge dark wave of indescribable emotion rose up from a
psychic reservoir within him that seemed to reduce all this busi-
ness of drowning to a mere splash of rain.

"Megan...Crummie...forgive me...my treasures!...I won't be divided
from you...I'll be nearer you...but I must drink it...the Water...the
Water of..."

"Standing on anything under there?" he repeated; but again
the muddied hawk-face above that brown tide only twitched wilh
the intensity of its thinking and with the pain of its cramped
legs.

The eyes of the man in the coracle lifted themselves away from
the eyes of the man in the water. Bloody Johnny was always a
person of punctilious scrupulousness when it came to eaves-
dropping; and to watch this face before him just now was eaves-
dropping of the worst sort.

"He'll change with me," Geard thought. "But he don't altogether
relish the situation!"

By the mere mental motion of having chosen death of his own
free will the Mayor fancied he had acquired easily, naturally,
inevitably, an advantage so great over this desperate life-clinger
that he could afford to treat him like a child. Whether in the
eyes of those mysterious Watchers, this fancied advantage of the
death-lust over the life-lust could really establish itself as a ma-
turer, wiser, superior mood, was a very different question! What
is certain is that Bloody Johnny felt himself just then to be like
a grown person dealing with a child. And this was something that
would have certainly astonished Philip had he realised it.

"Are you standing on anything?"

"I'm astride of her wing," said the other. "I expect I could
find more of her if I cared to, only I don't want to press her
down any further than she is."

"You think of your machine as if she had a soul," whispered
Mr. Geard, slipping down over the side of his little craft into
the water.

It may be believed how the coracle of this heavily built ma-
gician leapt up out of the flood when relieved of his weight! It
soon sank again, however, though not as before, to within a few
inches of the row-locks, when Philip, actuated now as much by
a fear lest their combined weights should sink the plane as by
a desire to save himself from drowning, scrambled, groaning and
cursing, for his cramp was cruel, into the empty skiff.

"Don't let go!" he cried as he rowed off. "If you'll only hang
on to her she'll hold up till I send someone. If I can get that
motor-boat--"

As he turned the boat round a shrill cry from the child on the
half-submerged hillock arrested his attention. The sight of this
small figure made him think of his little daughter whose where-
abouts in this disaster had been constantly in his mind during
these agitating hours. "This thing would hold a child all right,"
he thought. But the cramp that contracted his legs was so intense
that the idea of any delay seemed more than he could bear.
"They're in no danger," he said to himself. "It's Geard who's got
to be thought of." He glanced towards the Mayor's large face and
black staring eyes which were a good deal lower in the water
than his own had ever been. But those black eyes had evidently
not missed this moment of indecision; for they flung a look at
him that was like a command. "Best take'un while'ee have the
chance!" came his thick voice out of the water. Philip's cramp
was agonising. His face was contorted with what he endured. Most
men would have crumpled up, moaning and helpless. But the
Norman will in the man--that will that had ruled England since
the Conquest--compelled his arms, though his legs were doubled
up under him, to. perform the motion of rowing, and of rowing
with smooth, powerful, calculated strokes. It only needed a little
adroit steering to avoid the mounds that were almost submerged
and that might have struck the keel of his craft, and a little hard
pulling against a wind that was beginning to ruffle the water, to
reach the big tumulus upon which were collected these living crea-
tures. They were barely known to Philip Crow; hut to many
Glastonbury people they would have been absurdly well known;
for they were Number One's cow, Betsy, Jackie Jones, and Num-
ber One himself.

It was certainly an exciting experience for Jackie Jones when
with his slender figure reposing between the cramped feet of Mr.
Crow he saw himself being rowed rapidly toward the town. "I'll
come back for you," Philip had explained hurriedly to Abel
Twig.

"One of they girt barges, Mister, be the thing I wants," had
been the reply of Number One, "what'll take me wold cow in
'un!"

"Have you seen Nelly Morgan, Jackie?" enquired that young
lady's father with a hesitating shyness as well as an acute anx-
iety, when they were approaching safety.

"Her were out with her Mummy, Mister, picking up Treasure
from where it be washed up."

"Treasure?"

"They things what be washed up, Mister! Us calls'un Treasure
by reason of us being Pirates and Smugglers."

Mr. Geard, low down in the water now, observed his late
coracle flying over the flood propelled by Philip's vigorous
strokes. Between two sheds in the outskirts of Paradise it was just
possible for the submerged man to catch sight of the top of Glas-
tonbury Tor. He had very quickly found that the body of the
airplane kept sinking deeper and deeper in the water under his
heavy weight. He could just rest on it now with his feet, and that
was all. Clenching his teeth he gave it a violent kick. It sank
immediately out of his reach. He was now propped up solely
upon the wing of the machine; but since he was floating in the
water and divested of coat and trousers, a very little support was
enough to keep him up. "Well," he said to himself, "I be the
same Johnny Geard as used to see West Drive and Drive Gates
and Batemoor and Scotch Firs and Yeovil Road. I can see'em
now as clear as I can see this machine wing in this water! And
I be the same what used to follow Father up Park Cover and over
to Pitt, and back by Woodhouse Lane. I be the same what Mother
used to take to Zunday School, longside o' King's Arms." He
fumbled with his hands along the surface of the wing that sup-
ported him.

"Thee be a-drowning, thee be, Johnny Geard, and airplane be
a-drowning, s'know! Thee's rung Montacute Bells in thee's time,
and airplane have been up so high as a'seed Glaston no bigger
nor a waspy's nest."

The plane's wing that supported him now began to sink still
lower in the flood. It sank so low that Mr. Geard's chin was on
a level with the water. He gulped down a mouthful; and this
mouthful tasted like the cold salt sweat of a corpse. This mouth-
ful gave him the first pang of physical shrinking from what he
was doing that he had yet known. This mouthful struck him as
not only a forerunner of choking suffocation, but as carrying
with it a sensation of atrocious strangeness, of ghastly unnatural-
ness, of perfidy, of the unallowed-for! He gulped down his sec-
ond mouthful now; and with the outrage to his whole body that
this gulping of salt death brought, the spasm of strangeness
shivered through him and hummed in his ears and drummed at
his heart Yes, this was the end.

Bloody Johnny lost. All dark. The bed is deep...Where is
Megan's head? Gulp--gulp--gulp-- He was drinking it fast
now; and it was going up his nose too. Yes, it was getting into
some cavity between his nose and his mouth and doing something
there that had the effect of making him gurgle and gargle and
choke and spit. If only this deadly coldness hadn't smelt so vilely!
It smelt of vinegar. And this vinegar was getting into his lungs.
Not to breathe--when you had to breathe! Not to breathe, but to
sink gurgling down; and to see and to touch and to smell and to
taste and to become something that gurgled and gargled and
gulped!

Sinking, that was what he was doing now, gulping and sinking.
That wing had yielded. He had leaned on it with his full weight
and it had gone clear down. Nothing to lean upon. Nothing but
brown darkness that sank under him and sucked and sucked. He
came up to the top now and gasped at the air with heaving in-
drawing spasms. Physical necessity had him by the throat like
the dripping mouth of a dog, of an enormous brown dog. It was
the turn for his face to carry now those blotches of scum and
tidal slime upon it! His black eyes were opened preternaturally
wide, staring across the water. What he stared at now was Glas-
tonbury Tor; and on the top of the Tor was the tower; and the
tower was like the handle of an enormous cloudy goblet that
grew larger and larger and larger--

But down he went again--Geard of Glastonbury--dying his
chosen death by drowning. Yes, it was all at his own volition;
but when the final beating and lashing and threshing with the
arms began, and the final gurgling and gulping in the throat
began, it seemed as if the man's condemned body ran amok and
revolted. Bloody Johnny's body danced, in fact, its own private
death-dance, in brute defiance of the spirit that had brought it to
this pass.

For the last time he came up to the surface. Again his black
eyes opened; opened so wide that anyone would have thought
their sockets must crack. He was staring frantically at Glaston-
bury Tor, but what he was seeing up there now will never be
known.

The books say that Arthur saw the Grail in five different
shapes; and that what the fifth shape was has never been re-
vealed. Perhaps it was this fifth shape now that caused the black
demonic eyes of Bloody Johnny to start out of his head. The feet
treading water where there was now nothing for them to rest
upon; the big white cheeks sinking down, while the water lapped
around them, in the same way as it would have lapped round a
log that was sinking; the sensual mouth opening wide, using just
the same muscles as it did when he was preaching or yawning;
the thick lips with the same abandoned relaxation dividing them,
as it did when he used to kiss Crummie; the heavy shoulders, the
great belly under its soaked flannel shirt, all engulfed, all going
down, all with nothing to rest upon.

The little bubbles of brown water that swam so persistently
round that open mouth and round those staring eyes, behaved
just as they would have done if it had been a waterlogged
chamber-pot rather than a living man full of thoughts "that wan-
dered through eternity." They were in such a hurry, those bub-
bles, to float over the empty space where his head had been.
They could not wait to float freely over that particular space on
the surface of the water. There! They had their will now. Noth-
ing remained now but broken brown bubbles going slowly round
and round in reduced circles; and in an incredible silence!

But great creative Nature, working her vast death-magic, be-
yond the magic of any Merlin, brought it about, in her fathom-
less inhuman compassion, that all suffering, all struggling, all
beating with the arms, all frog-action with the legs, subsided,
collapsed, ceased, fell upon an unbelievably delicious calm. Nor
was Bloody Johnny's mind clouded any more. His body had
made its automatic protest. It was now docile. It was now obedi-
ent. Geard of Glastonbury's will to die enjoyed at last its pre-
meditated satisfaction.

In calm, inviolable peace Mr. Geard saw his life, saw his
death, and saw also that nameless Object, that fragment of the
Absolute, about which all his days he had been murmuring. He
was now totally free from remorse about Megan and Crummie.
The ruthless element in his leaving them, purely for his own
satisfaction, seemed to him justified in these last moments. He
was at peace, too, about what should happen in the future to his
new Religion. It was as if he had ceased to belong to our world
of looking-glass pantomime wherein we are driven to worship
we know not what; and had slipped down among the gods and
taken his place among those who cast their own mysterious re-
flections in the Glastonbury of our bewilderment.

The brown flood that drowned him--bitter and cold from the
Arctic tides of the far Atlantic--stirred up in his consciousness
at the last all those buried layers in his nature that were so much
greater than his speech, than his theories, than his achievements.
In his dying moments, Geard of Glastonbury did actually pass,
consciously and peacefully, into those natural, elements that he
had always treated with a certain careless and unaesthelic aplomb.

He had never been an artistic man. He had never been a fas-
tidious man. He had got pleasure from smelling at dung-hills,
from making water in his wife's garden, from snuffing up the
sweet sweat of those he loved. He had no cruelty, no culture, no
ambition, no breeding, no refinement, no curiosity, no conceit.
He believed that there was a borderland of the miraculous round
everything that existed and that "everything that lived was holy."
Such was the Mr. Geard who was now drowning in the exact
space of water that covered the spot where the ancient Lake
Villagers had their temple to the neolithic goddess of fertility.
He would be dead and past reviving by any charm--charmed
they never so wisely--in a few minutes.

For an eternity of time there had been no Mr. Geard of Glas-
tonbury. For an eternity of time there would be no Mr. Geard
of Glastonbury, though there might well be some mysterious con-
scious Being in the orbit of whose vast memory that particular
Avatar was concealed. This moment, however, along with many
infinitesimal animalculae, the Mayor of Glastonbury lived still,
though he did not breathe, above Philip's airplane, below those
revolving air-bubbles.

What was he thinking about now? Not of Glastonbury; nor
of Death. He was lying in the green spring grass of the Park at
Montacute; and an incarnate Sweetness that was his daughter and
yet not his daughter was running to meet him with outstretched
arms.

That it was in his power to rise up and meet .this figure and
feel as he embraced her that he was embracing the very Life of
Life was doubtless the result of what he had seen--the Grail
under its fifth shape--upon the top of Gwyn-ap-Nud's hill.

Unlike the experience of his patron and friend, the Ejector of
Northwold, the consciousness of Bloody Johnny's soul suffered
a complete suspension after his body was dead. Whether this sus-
pension outlasted his burial in the Wells Road Cemetery, which
happened immediately after the flood, and whether it will out-
last the life of this planet, and of all other such bubbles of ma-
terial substance that the torrent of Life throws up, is unknown to
the writer of this book.

It is certain however that Mr. Geard was not mistaken when
he decided that to plunge into the bitterness of death in order to
gain more life was an action that at least would destroy what he
had found so hampering to his spirit in the infirmities of his
flesh. Gone now forever, gone like his own breath, were the bub-
bles that had floated rejoicing across the place where he had
sunk.

Over the fragments of Philip's bridge, over that old Lake Vil-
lage Mound, with the figures of the crouching old man and the
frightened animal, over the great mass of swirling waters, drifted,
floated, faded, dissolved, the dying visions of the drowned man.

Above the mounting flood rose still the broken tower arch of
the ruined Abbey, rose still the tower of the Baptist, rose still
the tower of the Archangel. These remain; enduring this deluge,
as they had endured others; but the doomsday of these also must
finally come. Towers are they, like those of Rome and Jerusalem,
built to storm the Infinite, to besiege the Absolute, but subject
like those others to the shocks of time and of chance.

For the great goddess Cybele, whose forehead is crowned with
the Turrets of the Impossible, moves through the generations
from one twilight to another; and of her long journeying from
cult to cult, from shrine to shrine, from revelation to revelation,
there is no end. Mountains have rolled down upon many of her
temples. The depths of the Atlantic and Pacific have gathered
others into their dim silt and monstrous slime at the bottom of
the world. The obliterating sand storms of the desert have buried
not a few. Some are lost in the untraversed forests of the new
hemisphere. The days of the years of men's lives are like leaves
upon the wind and like ripples upon the water; but wherever the
Tower-bearing Goddess moves, journeying from one madness of
Faith to another, these pinnacles of desperation mount up again.

The builders of Stonehenge have perished; but there are those
who worship its stones still. The builders of Glastonbury have
perished; but there are people, yet living among us, whose eyes
have seen the Grail. The ribs of our ancient earth are riddled
with desperate pieties; her hollow caves are scooped out with
frantic asseverations; and the end is not yet.

The Towers of Cybele still move in the darkness from cult to
cult, from revelation to revelation. Made of a stuff more lasting
than granite, older than basalt, harder than marble, and yet as
insubstantial as the airiest mystery of thought, these Towers of
the journeying Mother still trouble the dreams of men with their
tremulous up-rising. Bowed beneath the desolation of futility,
eaten by the worm of despair, these tragic Towers still rise from
our planet's surface, still sway disconsolately in the wind of its
orbit, still gleam cold and white under its recurrent moons.

The Philip Crows of this world build their new roads and their
new bridges; but She, the ancient Tower-Bearer, neither follows
one, nor crosses the other. By different paths she moves than
those made for the engines of traffic. The ships of the air turn
aside as they approach her. The inventions of men touch her
not. About her turreted head blows the breath of what is beyond
life and beyond death; and none, but such as are covenanted
and sealed as her own, discern her goings and her comings.

The powers of reason and science gather in the strong light of
the Sun to beat her down. But evermore she rises again, moving
from the mists of dawn to the mists of twilight, passing through
the noon-day like the shadow of an eclipse and through the mid-
night like an unblown trumpet, until she finds the land that has
called her and the people whose heart she alone can fill.

For the turrets upon the head of Cybele are made of those
strange second thoughts of all the twice-born in the world; the
liberated thoughts of men as they return from their labour and
the brooding thoughts of women as they pause in the midst of
their work. The powers of reason may number the Stones of
Stonehenge and guess at the origin of the Grail of Glastonbury;
but they cannot explain the mystery of the one, nor ask the re-
quired magic question of the other.

No man has seen Our Lady of the Turrets as She moves over
the land, from twilight to twilight; but those "topless towers" of
hers are the birth-cries of occult generation, raised up in defiance
of Matter, in defiance of Fate, and in defiance of cruel knowledge
and despairing man.

Men may deride them, deny them, tear them down. They may
drive their engines through the ruins of Glastonbury and their
airplanes over the Stones of Stonehenge.

Still in the strength of the Unknown Dimension the secret of
these places is carried forward to the unborn, their oracles to
our children's children.

For She whom the ancients named Cybele is in reality that
beautiful and terrible Force by which the Lies of great creative
Nature give birth to Truth that is to be.

Out of the Timeless she came down into time. Out of the
Un-named she came down into our human symbols.

Through all the stammerings of strange tongues god mutterr-
ings of obscure invocations she still upholds her cause; the cause
of the unseen against the seen, of the weak against the strong, of
that which is not, and yet is, against that which is, and is not.

Thus she abides; her Towers forever rising, forever vanishing.
Never or Always.


THE END