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All this the ash tree noted; but its vegetative comment thereon would only have sounded in human ears like the gibberish: wuther-quotle-glug.

The afternoon had by now advanced far. Long, orange-coloured rays of light fell horizontally across the flat meadow. The shadow of the ash tree grew dark and cool as a stone-covered spring. From the ditch where their boat was moored came the sunset melody of a blackbird, full, as that bird's song at that hour always is, of some withheld secret in nature beyond human sorrow and human joy. Sadly they gathered up the remains of their feast and retraced their steps to the boat.

Their row back to Alder Dyke against the current was, as they had anticipated, no light task. Armed with the boat-hook, Mary at first stood upright in the stern and punted with all her strength while John stubbornly rowed; but as time went on she became conscious that they were advancing so slowly that something else would have to be done.

“Let me sit by your side, John,” she said at last, “and both of us row.”

She came over from the prow of the boat and sat down by him, taking possession of the oar upon his left. In this position, each pulling at a separate oar, but with elbows and shoulders touching and their four feet pressing against the same stretcher they rowed home.

“What is my address, John?” she said, letting the blade of her oar rest flat upon the water when they reached Alder Dyke.

“Care of Miss Drew, the Abbey House, Glastonbury, Somerset” Thus came his answer quietly and grimly enough; but the girl had a shrewd and bitter knowledge that, if only their hands had not at that moment been clutching those heavy oar-handles, he could easily—when once this simple lesson had been properly repeated—have let his twitching cheek sink against her small cold breasts and burst into a fit of convulsive, childish, unreasonable sobbing.

STONEHENGE

AS HE PLODDED ALONG THE HEDGELESS WHITE ROAD OVER SALisbury Plain John Crow became acquainted with aspects of bodily and mental suffering till that epoch totally unrevealed to him. He felt very tired and although he had been lucky, during the whole of his tramp, with regard to rain, he had been unlucky with regard to cold. He had indeed endured eight days of exceptionally cold weather and now as he moved forward with the idea of reaching Stonehenge before dark the thought of having to sleep again, as he had done ever since he left Didcot, in some sort of draughty cattle-shed or behind an exposed haystack made him shiver through every bone of his exhausted body. A warm bed ran in his mind, a bed like the one to which he had treated himself at Maidenhead, which had one of its brass knobs missing; and an excellent supper ran in his mind of potatoes and cabbage such as he had enjoyed in that Maidenhead tavern before sleeping. His overcoat was heavy, his bag was heavy, and what was worse, one of his heels had got blistered, so that for the last twelve hours, ever since he had left Andover at dawn, walking had been a misery to him. He had only eightpence left. This had to last him till he reached Glastonbury; so bed and supper tonight were quite out of the question. He had got a pot of tea and a roll and butter at Salisbury and he had still a couple of Social biscuits and a piece of cheese wrapped up in his pocket He also possessed unopened a packet of Navy Cut cigarettes. “I wonder what these Workhouses are like?” he thought. "I suppose the officials are bullies; I suppose a person's always in danger of getting lice. No, I must find a shed or something; but I'm going to see Stonehenge first. *^

John Crow had never in his life known a road more bleak and unfrequented than the one he was now traversing over Salisbury Plain. He knew that the sun had just sunk below the horizon though its actual shape was invisible. It had been totally obscured by clouds for an hour at least before it sank; but soon after its disappearance the north wind which had been his fellow-traveller ever since he left Salisbury dispersed some of these clouds and swept the sky a little clearer. It was clearer, but it was still grey with a greyness that was positively ashen. The difference between the pallor of the road, which was sad with a recognised human sadness and this ashen grey sky overhead was in some way disturbing to his mind. He kept staring at the sky as he dragged his blistered foot forward. Every step he took caused him pain and if the sadness of the road was congenial to this pain, the appearance of the sky was intimately adjusted to it. The north wind which had followed him from Salisbury and had kept on whistling between his cap and his coat collar was not hateful to him. He had almost got attached to its company. Once or twice when he rested, sitting, under walls or under hedges, he found himself missing its sullen monotone. Why the juxtaposition of this particular cap and this particular coat collar should cause the wind to hum and drone and sometimes almost to scream in his ear was a puzzle to him. But this north wind travelling with him over Salisbury Plain had many strange peculiarities and although it was surly it did not strike him as in the least malignant. Perhaps since he came from the North, from the rough North Sea region, where this wind had its own habitation, it was busy giving him warnings about Glastonbury. Perhaps it was giving him warnings against believing anything that this ashen sky was putting into his head. What the sky made him think of were fleeing hosts of wounded men with broken spears and torn banners and trails of blood and neighing horses. The sky itself carried no token of such far-off events upon its corpse-cold vast-ness, but such ruinous disasters seemed to rush along beneath it in their viewless essences, wild-tossed fragments of forgotten flights, catastrophic overthrow.,, huge migrations of defeated peoples. And upon all these things that sky looked down with a ghastly complicity. Two small motor cars, one dog cart, and a queer-looking lorry with soldiers in it, were the only tangible vehicles that passed him that evening as he went along; but the road seemed full of human memories. There was not a signpost or a milestone on that wayside but had gathered to itself some piteous encounter of heart-struck lovers, some long and woeful farewell, some imperishable remorse! Through ancient and twisted thorn trees, whose faint green buds were growing as indistinct in the after-sunset as specks of green weed on the sides of old ships on a darkened tide, that north wind whistled and shrieked. Once as he rested his bad foot on the fallen stones of a ruined sheepfold and stared across the chalky uplands in front of him he caught sight of an embanked circle of turf with broken-down wooden railings on the top. The look of this object so excited his curiosity that he limped over towards it and wearily climbed its side. It was a circular pond full almost to the brim of bluish-grey water from the middle of whose silent depths rose a few water plants but whose edges were quite clear and transparent. All the light that there was in that fatal-brooding sky seemed concentrated on the surface of this water. “I know what this is,” thought John Crow to himself. “This is one of those ponds they call a dew-pond.” He advanced cautiously down the slope, leaving his bag on the top of the bank, and supporting himself upon his stick.

Arrived at the edge of the water, he stirred it a little with his stick's end. But in a second He hurriedly drew his stick away. There in that blue-grey, motionless transparency hung suspended a dark object. “A newt!” In his boyhood in Norfolk he had loved these minute saurians more than all living things; and to catch sight of one of these, on this day of all days, filled him with an almost sacred reassurance. “All is going to be all right,” he said to himself, "I'm going to get to Glastonbury and to MaryP'

He watched the newt with interest. Disturbed by his stick it had sunk down a short distance below the surface; but there it floated at rest, its four feet stretched out, absolutely immobile. Even as he watched it, it gave the faintest flicker to its tail and with its four feet still immoveably extended it sank slowly out of sight into the depths of the water.

John Crow scrambled up the bank, picked up his bag, and limped back to the road For the next mile his mood was a good deal happier. He was pleased by the way every milestone he passed recorded the distance to Stonehenge, just as if it were a habitation of living men, instead of what it was.

“Two miles to Stonehenge,” said the particular one he now reached, just as the after-sunset nebulosity began to turn into twilight. He sat on the ground with his back against this milestone. His blistered foot hurt him abominably. “It looks as if I should have to sleep among those Great Stones,” he thought. “I shall be at the end of my tether when I get there.”

A drowsiness fell upon him now, in spite of the pain in his foot, and his head began to nod over his clasped hands and his tightly hugged knees. Three things, the image of the bed at Maidenhead with one of its brass knobs missing, the image of the Great Stones as he had long ago seen them in pictures, and the image of the newt sinking down into the dew-pond, dominated his mind. He struggled frantically with this obsessing desire to sleep. The wind seemed to have dropped a little. “Perhaps if I see a warm shed,” he thought, “I'll leave Stonehenge till tomorrow.”

He dragged his body into motion again and limped on. A motor car passed him at top speed, sounding its horn savagely. While it went by his one fear was lest it should stop and offer him a lift. Its vicious look, its ugly noise, its mechanical speed, its villainous stench, the hurried glimpse he got of the smart people in it, all combined to make it seem worse to have any contact with such a thing than to die upon the road.

His foot hurt him most evilly. He knew it was not serious. He had not sprained his ankle or even twisted it. It was only a blister. But the blister throbbed and burned, pulsed and ached as if his heel had been struck with a poisoned arrow.

The grey sky had changed a little in character now. It was dimly interspersed with twinkling points of pale luminosity. Most of these points were so blurred and indistinct that it would have been hard to catch them again at a second glance in the same position in the vast ether. They were like nothing on earth; and to nothing on earth could they be compared. They were the stars, not of the night but of the twilight. The sky around those points of light was neither grey nor black. It was a colour for which there is no name among artists' pigments. BuL the man limping across Salisbury Plain gave this colour a name. He named it Pain. Where it reached the climax of appropriateness was in the west towards which the road was leading him. Here there was one fragment of sky, exactly where the sun had vanished, that to the neutrality of the rest added an obscure tinge—just the faintest dying tinge—of rusty brown. This low-lying wisp of rusty brown was like the throbbing pulse from the pressure of whose living centre pain spread through the firmament. Walking towards the West Country was like walking towards some mysterious celestial Fount wherein pain was transmuted into an unknown element. First one leg; then the other leg. He had reached the point now of being conscious of the actual physical automatism of walking. That form of peculiar self-consciousness which as an infant had made the art of walking a triumph of self-assertion now returned upon him to make it a necessity of self-preservation. John Crow felt that he was nearing the end of his power over the very simple achievement of putting one leg in front of the other. He struggled forward for about half a mile. Then he stood still. “I must find a place to lie down in,” he thought. “I can't go on.” The Maidenhead bed, with the one gilt knob missing, had retreated now beyond the horizon of opportunity. The image of cattle-scented straw floated before him.

A dull, beating thud was proceeding from some portion of his body and travelling away from it into the darkness. He felt like a run-down clock which could not be hindered from a meaningless striking. Whether this thudding came from his heel, his heart, or his head he could not tell. It might, for all he knew, come from that rusty-brown place in the western sky.

“I can't go on,” he repeated aloud. And then, quite as naturally as he had before grown conscious, in that infantile fashion, of the triumph of walking, he grew conscious now of the necessity of praying.

And John Crow prayed, calmly, fervently, simply, to the spirit of his mother.

His mother had died when he was six years old and his devotion to her personality had been, ever since that day, not in the least different from the extreme of superstitious idolatry. The childish weakness of his character was just the sort of thing that would endear an only son, as John was, to the protective maternal instinct. The woman had died in a convulsive spasm of tragic tenderness for the child she had to leave; nor is it difficult to conceive how, even on the most material plane, some formidable magnetic vibration, issuing from that grave in the Yaxham churchyard, might linger upon the chemical substratum of the ether, and prove of genuine supernatural value to Lhe child of her womb, when in his weakness he was most in need of her. Thus it happened that when he had finished praying John found he could move forward again, although with very slow steps.

His pace indeed was the pace now of an extremely old man who used his stick as a crutch; and anyone listening to his approach might have taken him for a lame man or a blind man. The heavy tap, tap of his stick upon the road was a sound that travelled further than his footsteps.

At last he came in sight of the faint whiteness of another milestone. This ought to carry the token “One mile to Stonehenge.” But this time the roadway opposite the milestone was not empty. Under the nebulousness of that rusty-brown horizon-tinge stood a small dark motor car. It had a red spot at the back but no headlights. It obstructed the road, but it did not impinge upon the scene with the crude violence of the car that had recently passed him by.

As John Crow limped up to it a figure that he had not distinguished from the hedge advanced into the road to intercept him.

“You must let me take you on a bit/* said a tall, gaunt, ungainly man wearing a dark bowler hat. ”You are too lame to be walking like this. I want to stop presently—a mile from here— but only for a minute or two. I am going to Glastonbury."