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Curiously enough it was the eastern-European visitors—or pilgrims, 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 remote 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 belonging 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 thoroughly accepted scientific law. The human soul”—so Mr. Geard in his sublime ignorance of modern phraseology hesitated not to declare—“possesses levels of power and possibilities of experience 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 discourse^—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 submerging 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 several 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 prolonged 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 indications 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 family 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 disaster as was Red Robinson in his little new house in Bove 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 impassable; 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 Dorchester.

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 indeed 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-constructed 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 cant 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 bankruptcy.”

“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 spectacle.

“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 careful. 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 difference between Capitalism and Communism to such a tragic neutrality. 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 certain 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, indeed 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 confused 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?”