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“I agree with you! I agree with you!” cried John. “The only tiling is that the opposite of what you say is true too. No, no! There's a great deal in your Christian method, there's everything in your Christian method; but it must be applied for heathen ends! That's the great doctrine of the Tao, which no one understands—except me!” A positively diabolic light gleamed in John's glaucous eyes and his sinuous, feeble form seemed actually to curve in tiny ripples of magnetic coils, like the coils of smoke which followed his cigarette.

“You're too subtle for me,” growled Sam, extending his grey-stockinged legs and looking down at his enormous dirty boots and at the bright rug, chosen so carefully by Mary at Mayor Wollop's shop.

“I'm only subtle because I'm simple,” replied the other. “Listen, Dekker,” he went on, “you mustn't think I'm meddling with your private affairs if I give you a piece of advice.”

A spasm of annoyance crossed Sam's face and the muscles of his chin contracted. For a second of time the two men regarded each other, like animals of a different species, who have met by accident in a forest glade. The twitch in John's left cheek made its silent signal to Sam's wrinkled chin very much as the quiver of a rat's whiskers might answer the sniff of a badger's snout.

“Lord-a-lord!” ejaculated Sam, beginning to stride up and down his host's room with his hands in his pocket. “So it's come to it, then? Come to what I always feared—that everybody in Glastonbury would know about my troubles. Lord! how I do loathe and hate the human race! That's the 'advice' I'd like you to give me, Crow. I'd like you to say 'escape from it all, Sam, you blundering dizzard, escape from it all and try and imitate those old mediaeval saints!5”

John Crow looked away. It was one of his peculiarities to be able to stare into people's eyes with a shameless, unsympathetic scrutiny; but Sam's emotion gave him a peculiar feeling of shame. To look at Sam's agitated face any longer at that moment seemed like eavesdropping at a confessional-box. So he glanced at the now faintly observable ridge of the Poldens and thought to himself, "There's something in spiritual excitement that makes me uncomfortable. I must have the heart of a stone!1'

“My advice would be, Dekker,” he said, in an obstinate low voice, still staring out of the window, “my advice would be to do what hares do when they catch sight of something dangerous— that's to say, freeze. You know that word? Turn, pro tern., into the inanimate . . . turn into a stump, a post, a clod of clay. Then, after a while, when things have worked themselves out, you can scamper back to your feeding-place!”

He got up from his chair-arm and stood hovering at the window. As Sam paused in his sentry's march and threw a glance at him out of his screwed-up bear-eyes, his figure at the window seemed made of something less solid than flesh and blood, seemed as if it would need very little to turn it into one of those drifting vapours that floated over the ditches.

“It's like this, Crow,” he began; but he felt so much as if that trampish figure at the window, even as he addressed it, might decompose, dissolve, disintegrate, that he couldn't go on. The chemistry of human bodies, even apart from their shape, is an extraverted manifestation of the souls that animate them, and doubtless in all Glastonbury there couldn't have been found souls more different than John's and Sam's.

When he began saying—“It's like this, Crow,” Sam could feel his own lanky, lumbering frame gather itself together, to express his new-grown purpose. But to set the seal of his solemn intention upon this feeble and fluid apparition at the window was as hard as if he were to shoot an arrow into a bundle of feathers or write a “credo” upon flowing water! Nevertheless he made one more attempt. “It's like this, Crow. For me the whole thing is dualism. It's a perpetual war between good and evil. Whichever side you take you get inspiration from outside the visible world. But inspiration from the outside evil means in the long run anguish and insanity, while inspiration from the outside good means an ecstasy that grows and grows! To possess is evil. The whole idea of private property is evil. It comes from the devil. What made those mediasval saints so happy was that they always said to themselves 'Let the beautiful girl go free!'”

“What's that? What's that your saints say?”

It was as if a mild mist-phantom had been transformed into a mocking goblin. Crow slid back into the room, lurched towards the fire, crouched down on a stool by the grate, and leaning forward towards it, as he crouched, struck a match for his cigarette against the bars.

Sam watched him gloomily. The man seemed to be worshipping fire. Sam took his great fist from the mantelpiece and stepped back a pace or two. Damn the fellow! That it had been such a hot, dusty sort of nondescript, unpleasant day made the fact of there being a fire at all in that room a grotesque thing. The chap had seemed to be melting into the twilight outside the window; and now he seemed to be on the point of diving into the flame!

He raised his hand to his chin. “He said she said I had the look of a saint,” he thought to himself. And then there came over him the realisation that tonight Zoyland was really o2—piloted by Barter or some London crony of Barter's—to Wookey Hcle. Everybody in Glastonbury knew it! Everybody in Glastonburv knew that Nell was all alone on Queen's Sedgemoor. “I could bear it,” he thought, “if she'd never leant against me with her breasts. Who could bear that and not want to 'possess'; and not have to 'possess'?”

The wild idea came surging into his head that he would wait till his father and Penny were asleep; and then let himself out of the house, and hurry over there; even if it were the middle of the night, even if he didn't get there till dawn!

“Well, Crow, I've got to be off,” he said. “I'm late as it is. Thanks awfully for the Lea. God knows how I'll be able to drink any more. We'll go on with this another time.”

The demon by the fire leapt to its feet and became once more the drooping, feeble, nervous beneficiary of the bounty of Mr. Geard.

“Good-bye,” he said, “and don't forget to tell your father that I want to see him about the Midsummer Fair. The only person who won't like our Fair will be my precious cousin. And I can promise him we're going to give him a reason for not liking it. We're going to larn' him, as we say in Norfolk, to turn Glastonbury into a factory-town! We're going to shake up his capitalistic complacency—you'll see! Well, good-bye, Dekker, and don't forget to 'freeze' like a hare and let chance and destiny fight it out for themselves!”

While father and son were slowly gravitating back to Silver Street, snug in the Vicarage kitchen sat Penny Pitches and Mr. Weatherwax. If Penny was all body, and a very square body too, Weatherwax was all face. He was like one of those absurd political caricatures that represent some familiar physiognomy enlarged to monstrous size and unnaturally balanced upon a manikin's frame. The face of Isaac Weatherwax was a large, flat, sunburnt expanse, like an ancient map of some 'Terra Incognita.“ Airanged at traditional distances in this expanse were eyes and nose and mouth. There were also various excrescences of a less usual kind, ”mountains,“* one might say, in this sun-scorched moon, to which Mr, Weatherwax was wont sometimes to refer, as ”these here bugg-uncles what do grow out of me cheeks." All the preparations for the Vicarage high tea were awaiting the return of the old and the young master; but meanwhile the two ancient gossips, as if a Square were entertaining a Circle, were enjoying themselves well enough, independent of the tea-pot. Mr. Weatherwax was tasting in advance a bottle of cognac, so that whenever the Abbey House sideboard should be debtor again to the Vicarage cellar, there should be no abrupt or disconcerting change in the nature of the loan!

“So us be going to have a new Mayor, come election-day, among they councilmen,'5 remarked Mr. Weatherwax dreamily, ”all of we work-folks be requested by some as we do know to nudge they councilmen and stir 'em up. Tis said by some as we do know that Mr. WTollop and Mr. Crow be out to turn our quiet town into a girt city Borough by increasing the population. But whatever they says, my gal, I holds by authority. I holds by Mr. Crow. Tis said this here Geard, a man no different from I, a man what can pray high and drink deep like any common man, will be for letting visitors in and keeping hindustry out; but I holds with Mr. Crow and his hindustries. Do 'ee want to know, my gal, why I holds wi' he?'5

“Will 'ee have a taste of me 'gorlas,' Isaac?” interrupted Penny. “ 'Tis better than usual today.”

Mr. Weatherwax permitted a faint sign of affirmation to flicker across his political gravity while Penny rose from her chair. She proceeded to make some rapid changes in the relative position of pots and the lids of pots upon her great stove while her visitor finished the brandy. This flat expanse of rusty iron surface with its many round-lidded apertures, was Penny's Colosseum of Encounters with Brute Matter. It wTas an older stove than that used by Emma Sly up at The Elms and it was handled in a more primitive manner. The Elnfs stove was always kept well blacked. Like Louie's stove a4* The Abbey House it possessed polished knobs and shining ornamentations, whereas the Vicarage stove might have been the stove of a tribe of gipsies. All sorts of things would be spilt on it. Penny didn't care. Penny was as sylvan in her ways as if she had been the Salvage Man of The Faery Queen fresh from some primordial Arcadia.

At the back of her stove there rested a large simmering cauldron that she used for making a particular kind of broth. This cauldron was literally never empty. It was like the cauldron of “the Head of Hades” in the poetry of Taliessin. Penny had a name of her own for this perennial brew of hers. She called it “gorlas.*' Whether this extraordinary word had come down to her in some very old Glastonbury tradition and was really a corruption of the word ”gorlasser,“ which seems to have meant a dark-blue, livid color, and was used to describe a mysterious ”corpse-God“ or ”Rex Semi-mortuus" in the old Cymric mythology, is a question that Penny, less lucky in her introductions to learned men than Abel Twig, had never had a chance of referring to the Curator of the Museum.

“Do 'ee know, Penny,” said Mr. Weatherwax, as he partook of his friend's brew, “what be the pivot of life upon earth?”

Penny smiled the smile of all women at all philosophy, but she shook her head obediently.

“Well, me good soul,” Mr. Weatherwax continued, “I be the one what be tellin' thee what thik thing be. Thik thing be Authority. WTien I sees true livin' Authority I knows vegetables grow, and hens lay, and cattle breed, and poor folk be fed and clothed.” His voice sank into a low, confidential wThisper—“There be only one true, livin' Authority in our town and that Authority be Mr. Crow. If so be as your silly women and your fly-by-night preachers do turn our town from serving Mr. Crow to serving idols, then I says, 'Look well to it! The end of all things be at hand.'” His voice ceased. He lifted up the bowl of gorlas to his capacious mouth and leered tipsily over its brim.

“Folks be queerer than ye wold bachelors do mindy,” retorted Penny enigmatically. “Folks 'ud rayther brew their own broth theyselves than be fed wi' all the Milk o' Paradise.”

When Sam returned to his father's house it had grown quite dark. He heard old Weatherwax muttering tipsily as he shuffled down the back drive, and he himself, to avoid the gardener, moved on to the front-drive gate. He felt so disturbed in his thoughts that when he laid his hand on the handle of the great iron gate it came over him that it was almost impossible to face his father. Heavily and slowly he drifted on a little way further up the road. He soon came to the end of Silver Street, and wavering there a moment finally turned to his right and followed the outside eastern wall of the Abbey grounds down the ancient road leading to the Tor that bears the historic, but confused, name of Chilkwell Street. When he reached the turning into Bere Lane he saw before him the vast Gothic shape rising rich and dim in the darkness, of the greatest Abbey Barn in England. This edifice is still used as an ordinary farm barn, but Sam knew every lineament of its fagade so well that through the darkness, as he now approached it, the four mystic creatures of the Evangelists that protect its ramparts seemed to murmur at him and signal to him. Sam scowled gloomily back at these Apocalyptic Beings. They had watched so many huge wTagonloads of hay, of straw, of oats, of wheat, of barley, so many litters of pigs, so many cartloads of turnips and mangels, being carried under that Gothic archway, that they seemed to call upon Sam also to bring them something, to bring them anything! But Sam haa only one offering in his heart just then, and that offering he felt he could not offer! Sullenly and heavily he dragged himself a little further along Chilkwell Street, till on his left hand he *aw the stone walls of Chalice House—at that time completely unoccupied—and on his right the lighted windows of St. Michael's Inn. Both these buildings were still many hundreds of yards away and the paved footpath he was following was raised about six feet above the level of the road. There were a few small stone houses here abutting upon this footpath and, behind these, several small garden-paths. These paths, ascending between low mossy walls, led up to the lower slopes of Chalice Hill. Sam was unfamiliar with that far-rumoured version of the Grail story which places the enchanted Castle of Carbonek, where the Mystery was guarded, upon the summit of Chalice Hill; and he now turned his abstracted gaze, as one by one these dark ascents between the shadowy lines of masonry came into his scope, upon the Hill's higher reaches as if it had been any ordinary upIakpL -At the base of one of these ascents, however, he was suddenly*'“.,,, arrested by the sight of a dusky figure leaning against a low wall. The manner in which the outlines of the figure resolved themselves into what surrounded it, into the soil, into the stone? into the stone-crop, into the darkness, enabled Sam. though he had the eye neither of a Rembrandt nor a Hardy, lo recognize it for that of a woman. His poor head was so full of one particular woman that it was natural enough that his first thought was: ”She has come to me\" But he soon realised that the figure was that of a lean, ungainly person, as totally unlike his Xell as a raven is unlike a dove. It then came vaguely over him that he had seen this person before and not very long ago either. Who the devil did she make him think of? He stared sullenly and gloomily at this solitary, motionless form till at last it began to strike his mind that whoever it was it was someone who had no wish to be watched. Then he knew in a flash who it was. It was Cordelia Geard! Simultaneously with this knowledge it came over him that Cordelia had been seated by the side of that queer-looking devil from Old Jones' shop when he met her in that funny Geard room. So that was it! She was waiting for that fellow now. They were keeping company; and he'd left her for a minute for some reason; probably to relieve nature. They were no doubt prowling round the environs of Chalice House. Her father had very likely been buying up these little cottages. The shock of seeing Cordelia when he so little expected it pulled his wits together with a jerk.