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Certainly it was with the very gesture of a Devereux now that Philip's little daughter—“Morgan Nelly” as Number One called her—offered her hand, as soon as John placed her on her feet, to help the fallen Jackie to arise. It was a whole psychological drama—a drama beyond the reach of any living European pen— when Jackie's blubbered features came in view, the knuckles of his wounded hand pressed into his mouth and his little black eyes darting furtively backward and forward between Jonn's face and Nelly's.

“Stop that, can't you?—you great baby—stop that now!” Thus did Sis, with an accompanying violent shake, vent her indignation with her successful rival upon the nearest and dearest object of her maternal affection. Bert received this shaking with his accustomed phlegm, and his sobs instantaneously ceased. His round eyes fell upon John's figure and as they surveyed that object the old insatiable gusto came back into them. Exactly as it would have been with poor ex-Mayor "Wollop, what interested Bert most about this new human apparition was that it had put its cap upon its head back to front! This accident had no doubt resulted from the shock of the sword-incident at Pomparles Bridge, but John was now7 fortunately saved from looking ridiculous when he got into the streets again.

“Bert be telling ”ee, Mister,“ said Sis eager/y, for the situation was one that exactly lent itself to her protective-corrective passion, ”that thee's cap be put on back-to-front. You mid 'scuse Bert for mentioning it, Mister, but Bert be one, Bert be, for noticing things what's topsy-turvy. He do notice when Nell or me have left our ribands at whoam or haven't got no safety pins. He do notice when his Grandma have forgot her false teeth, or when she's put she's best blue cap on when her wanted her common purple. He do notice his Teacher, Mister, so close and thorough that her do punish he for \ like as if he'd misbehaved on school-room floor. 'Tis 'markable wThat Bert do notice when people------" Her proud volubility was suddenly broken off by Morgan Nelly, who, while Sis was talking to John, had been whispering to Jackie. She addressed herself sternly to Sis now.

“Jackie says that tomorrow / be going to be the Captain of this Robber Band, and he be going to be my Court-Martial. Jackie says that you've got to be lower nor a Private, and Bert's got to be the Band's Pack-Horse.”

Sis glanced quickly at John's face as she heard this summary bulletin from the conqueror's tent. Seeing him smile a little, she planted her sturdy ankles firmly in the grass and bending down, as if they had been playing at daisy-chains rather than at bandits, she picked several of those whitish cuckoo flowers that John had already noticed and with a certain brusque sagacity, acting as she must have acted a thousand times with Jackie and Bert, handed this little nosegay, along with a spray of hedge parsley, for like all neophyte housekeepers she felt that blossoms without leaves— the leaves of cuckoo flowers being very inadequate from this particular point of view—were in some way wanting, to this stranger whose cap, caught so deplorably awry, was now pulled down, as it should be, over his amused and submissive eyebrows.

“Well! Good luck to you all, and many thanks!” cried John, making a feeble effort, almost worthy of Mr. Evans himself, to stick this collection of sap-wet stalks into his buttonhole, “I've got to get back to work. How is it you're not at school?”

It was Jackie who replied to this, taking his wounded knuckles out of his mouth, “Mr. Dekker came yesterday when Teacher were cross, and he said she ought to have more holiday; and she said she'd like to go to Yeovil where her sweetheart be and Mr. Dekker told she to shut up school till after Easter Monday and she did get red as fire when he said that and when Mr. Dekker were gone she made faces behind her hands and then she cried behind her hands; but I did see what she were doing / did.”

“And our Bert saw Teacher cry too,” threw in Sis, at this juncture, anxious that the Cole family should have its equal share of drama.

“See Teacher cry, / did!” echoed Bert himself.

The faint uprising of a remote sympathy with this unknown woman weeping for joy that she could go to Yeovil on Maundy Thursday instead of Good Friday, gave place now in John's mind to a curious sensation that he had experienced only once or twice before in his life. He saw this little group of children, outlined against that ricketty landing-stage—which must have been built in the days when there were still barges on the Brue— under a sudden illuminated aura. He saw them as a recurrence, a recurrence of a human group of vividly living bodies and minds, with cuckoo flowers and hedge-parsley and dock leaves and river-mud gathered about their forms, as if arranged there by a celebrated artist. The badness of the children, the sweetness and charm of the children, with these spring growths all about them and a solitary invisible lark quivering in the blue, seemed to carry his perturbed spirit beyond some psychic threshold, where the whole pell-mell of the mad torrent of existence took on a different appearance. “Good-bye and good luck!” he called out to them as he went off.

He had hardly time, however, to reach a spot at the curve of the river that was near to his friend Barter's airplane landing-place^—and there, across a field or two, he could see the motionless air-vessel—when he heard a panting breath behind him and the sound of little running feet. He swung round and found Morgan Nelly at his side. The child was too breathless to speak at first, but she caught the flap of his overcoat with her hand and kept pace with him as he walked slowly on. “Going my way. Nelly?” he said. He had heard them call her “Nelly” in their quarrel; but the syllables “Morgan” had escaped him.

“They tease I terrible, Mister, in school-yard,” announced the new captain of the robber band. “They call I 'Bastie, Bastie.' They did run after I in dinner-hour yesterday, till I bit Amy Brown's wTrist so she bled awful bad.”

“They mustn't tease you, Nelly, and you mustn't bite people's hands,” murmured John helplessly, thinking to himself that if, when Bloody Johnny got on his nerves, he could bite him, “so he bled awful bad,” it would be an immense clearing of the air.

“Red Robinson made me mother go up Wells Road one time and ring at The Elms' front door. He told she to cHarx' for the bleeding son of a bitch and make 'im cough up. 'Harx'—that's the way he talks, Mister! 'Tis London language they tell I, though me mother says 'tisn't as King George do speak. Do you think King George do say 'Harx' instead of 'arst,' Mister?”

“Did your mother go?” enquired the inquisitive John, postponing the problem of King's English till he had learned more of this rich piece of scandal.

“Yes, she went, and I went with her,” explained Morgan Nelly eagerly, “and Emma Sly—that's one of the servants at The Elms —gave Mother port wine and plum cake, and she gave me lime-juice and Selective biscuits, and I did select they kind what has sugar on 'em and 'H. P.' in pink stripes. Emma told me and mother what fiH. P.' stands for. She said her Dad who be shepherd for Lord P. up Mendip way did think thik T' stood for his master's wone self. But Emma told me and Mother what folks as knows knows what it really be. Do you know what it really be, Mister? Sis Cole doesn't know, 'cos I baint 'a told she, and I baint a-going to tell she, nor Bert either, what 'H. P.' stand for. You wouldn't, would you, Mister? Ignorant, common, ordinary kids, like what they be!”

"Did your mother ask to see Mr. Crow?'5 enquired the insatiable John.

“She did say summat about it,” replied Morgan Nelly, “but she never called 'un no names, as 'bleeding son of a bitch5 and such like; and she just sat down again, by kitchen-fire and went on drinking thik wine and eating thik cake, when Emma Sly said her master had company that evening.”

“I'll talk to a cousin of mine who's in towTn over the holiday,” pronounced John, thinking in his mind of Dave Spear. “He knows this chap Robinson well, and I'll tell him to make the fellow stop worrying your mother. Did she say anything to this servant about 'coughing up' and so forth?”

“Mother were so thick with Emma Sly when we earned away5” replied Morgan Nelly, “that she hadn't the tongue—oh, there's Betsy got loose and Number One running after she!”

The diplomatic John cast his eyes over Lake Village Field towards Backwear Hut and there, sure enough, was the distracted figure of Abel Twig, looking, for all the world, like the old man in Mother Goose who had lost his crooked sixpence. Mr. Twig was frantically limping after the mischievous animal, who was tossing up her heels and leaping into the air as she evaded him, in a manner more worthy of a frolicsome heifer than a calm, mature giver of sacred milk.

“He aint got no girt dog, really and truly,” Morgan Nelly informed her new friend. “Sis thinks he have, and Bert do dream he have. But he hasn't, has he, Mister?”

All the way back to his little office John's thoughts kept hovering around that startling episode of the milk-white sword with the dark handle. “I don't care what they do; I don't care what Bigns and omens they fling down; I don't care how much I infuriate them. They stopped those old Danes at Havyatt, but by God! they shan't stop me! I'm going to blow this whole unhealthy business sky-high. And I'm going to do it through this Pageant of Geard's!”

In the depths of John's consciousness something very lonely and very cold began to congeal itself into a little, hard, round stone. “I am myself,” he thought, “I am myself alone.” His mood, as he advanced down that narrow little cobble-stone road called Dyehouse Lane, towards the station, became, for some reason more and more anti-social and more and more inhuman. Miss Drew would have said he showed himself to himself at that moment, as the lecherous, cold-blooded, slippery, heartless, treacherous reptile that he was! “Mary belongs to me,” he thought. “I'm the only man who'll ever suit her. She couldnrt let Tom touch her finger! / know her. And the feeling I get from making love to her is far beyond anything I could ever get from any other human being. But I won't let Mary think she can rule my whole life. I'm not one to stand that kind of thing. The truth is that though I like making love to her, in my own way, I'm not at all sure that I ivould like sleeping with her every night! She's an absolute necessity to me. I know that. But there's something about giving up my liberty in that room that worries me. And Tom too—I like to have Tom all to myself! What I really am is a hard, round stone defying the whole universe. And I can defy it, and get what I want out of it too! It's a lovely feeling to feel absolutely alone, watching everything from outside, uncommitted to anything. Why should I accept the common view that you have to- 'love' other people? Mary belongs to me; but sometimes I wonder whether I 'love' even Mary. I certainly don't 'love' myself! I'm a hard, round, glass ball, that is a mirror of everything, but that has a secret landscape of its own in the centre of it. 0 great Stones of Stonehenge, you are the only gods for me!”

He caught sight of a little round, light-coloured pebble at that moment half-embedded in the rough cement wall of an old shed that abutted upon the narrow footpath of Dyehouse Lane. He stopped and ran the tips of his fingers over this little object. It had once evidently been a unit, a portion, of some anonymous heap of pebbles taken from a sea-bank, to be used, as it was used here—for there were others like it embedded not far off—with mortar and gravel in building inexpensive walls. It was, however, very unusual to find such pebbles used in this way in Glaston-bury, and this was the first in the town that John had set eyes upon. The afternoon sun shone bright and warm upon the shed wall, as John touched this small, round stone, and in a yard behind the building some unseen tame pigeons began making a low, sweet, unctuous cooing full of sensual contentment. But the touch of the pebble carried John's mind far away from this peaceful spot. A dark, wild, atavistic sea-spirit stirred within him, a spirit that reinforced and nourished afresh all the pride of his inmost being. “This morbid religion of renouncement, of penance, of occult purgations and transformations”—so his reckless thoughts ran on—“I'll never yield to this betrayal of life! If I am weak and nervous and timid, I'll win by cunning. And I won't compete either! I'll steer my life in a region of values totally unknown to any of them! I wo-n't fight them on their terms. But I'll conquer them all the same! I'll become air, water, fire. I'll flow through their souls. I'll flow into their inmost being. I'll possess them without being possessed by them!” He scrutinised the pebble still more closely. It was not exactly round; it was hard to tell its precise shape, because it was so firmly embedded in the mortar. It was of a dull pinkish colour. Where did it come from? From Chesil Beach? John had never seen either of the two coastlines nearest to Glastonbury, but he knew vaguely that the southern coast was steep and rocky, while the shores of the Bristol Channel were flat expanses of tidal mud. That was all he knew. But never mind where it came from! As he stared at this hard opaque object an indescribable rush of nervous maliciousness and vehement destructiveness coursed through his veins. Oh, it would please him, oh, it would satisfy him, if a great wild salt wave coming out of the dark heathen sea, were to sweep over this whole morbid place and wash the earth clean of all these phantasms!

He had now reached the railroad crossing, but he found the gates closed. An interminable luggage train had to jerk, and thud, and rattle, and groan itself by, before those gates would open. He allowed his eyes to wander with a sudden penetrating attention—an almost savage attention—over each one of these Jumbering goods trucks as they clattered and clanged past him.

uReai!“ he muttered viciously. ”That's what you think you are! —Real and true . . . the only undoubted fact A luggage train. taking Philip's dyes down to Exeter. In old days it would have been a Roman convoy taking tin to the coast from the Mendips, 1 expect that damned Sword was really made o£ tin . . . tin swords! Tin shields! Tin souls!*' Clutching one of the bars of the railroad gate and shaking it, he now relinquished all restraint and burst into a childish doggerel:—“In my Midsummer Pageant I'll mock the Grail; mock the Grail; mock the Grail; in my Midsummer Pageant I'll mock the Grail; for Arthur's sword is tin!” When the train had passed at last and the gates were opened he walked very slowly over the dusty, sunny tracks, thinking, thinking, thinking. John's character had altered considerably, and he had begun to realise it himself during these weeks of working with Mr. Geard. A certain chaotic tendency to drift In him—the drifting of the congenital tramp and the recklessness of the antisocial adventurer—had tightened and hardened Into a kind of psychic intensity of revolt, of revolt against all the gregarious traditions of the human crowd. “There must be destruction,” he said to himself, as he entered the Great Western station-yard, “before any fresh wind from the gods can put new life Into- a place like this!” So he said to himself in the fierce strength which the pebble from Chesil Beach had poured into his heart; but when he put his hand on the handle of his little office door there came filtering up to the surface of his mind the old chilly sediment of sceptical contempt. “Let these things of gilded vapour,” he thought, “these things of tinsel and tin have their day! Let the savage opposites of them have their day too. They are all dreams, all dreams within dreams, and the underlying reality beneath them is something completely different from them all.”