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Fo>r today it was Mr. Evans and Mrs. Geard and Blackie Morgan, 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 expanded under her black shawl in response to that wind, “”KTiat a thing sleep is—to be in the world!"

It was only upon those happy heads that did not dream, however, that the true mystery of sleep, carrying those carefree foreheads deep down under the sacred waters of yr Echwyd, really descended. Such was the privilege, that night, of both Lady Rachel and Miss Elizabeth Crow. Such was the privilege of Mi'. 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 contest 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 indifference 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 mQlee of warring dreams, tossing and heaving, with the gonfalon 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. Michael's where Solly Lew slept his tipsy sleep—was forced, that tenth of December, to mingle his own private dream with this great nocturnal 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 starlings 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 growing 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 towards this tree and lifting up their hands begin chanting something to it. What they chanted was pure gibberish, but Persephone, 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 childish 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 doubtless were words added to it in her dream that could hardly have been present in the original version, and which were certainly 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 ambiguous 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 disturbing. 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 ^irl, that until tonight, even in his dreams, he had resisted 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, paralyse 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 concerned, 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 expressive 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 impersonal 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.** lie kept muttering, when, as dictator of his commune, he gave orders for the Abbey Ruins to be destroyed and the Mayor's new buildings 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 futureI” 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 of his fellow-conspirator, Red Robinson, who was awake and drinking and making love, in complete imperviousness to this mystical 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 landlord 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 midnight, 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,'3 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 half 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 employment 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 Robinsons 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 savs “a must speak in private to Mr. Robinson.”

“In . . . private ... so I said,” repeated the drunken derelict, staggering 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.