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And to what end? To the end of observing how an iron bar, if given a modicum of propulsion from the thin arms of Codfin, would obey the law of gravitation!

The pale blue eyes of Codfin opened now just a little. They were blinking and confused and a moisture trickled from their lids. “Eh? what's that, pard? Meet ye, did ye say?”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” cried the cresting worm through the lips of Mr. Evans. “When shall I meet you up there?”

About five hours later, Mr. Evans was seated on one of the iron seats on the slope of Wirral Hill, watching the little boys play rounders. Now rounders might be defined as the innocent childhood of baseball, of which it is obviously the original source, and it is a game of the simplest and most primitive hit-and-run nature. And Mr. Evans became extremely interested in rounders that afternoon.

Every time one of the boys hit the ball, Mr. Evans could see the lean stooping figure; not of the John he knew, but of an abstract victim whose name was called John, and of a victim so completely dehumanised and depersonalised that all question of “saving” him disappeared. The only thing to do was to stop the horror. As Mad Bet had screamed to Mr. Evans at Mother Legge's party on Easter Monday, the only thing to do was to “stop” and then to wash the sand clean in the mind's fatal Colosseum.

But Mr. Evans could not “stop.” He watched this hit-and-run game with peculiar and special interest because it was exactly what he was going to do himself. He was going to hit and run or rather to watch, but Christ would say it was the same thing, someone else hit and run.

Was Mr. Evans mad? Not unless all sexual desire, from the satisfaction of which other sentiencies suffer unnecessary suffering, is mad.

If any stranger had approached Mr. Evans on that afternoon, as he sat watching this game of rounders on Wirral Hill, and induced him to enter into conversation, it is extremely unlikely that the faintest notion of the man's being mad would have crossed such a stranger's intelligence. He had, it is true, been totally unable to eat a morsel of anything since breakfast. But he had been drinking again. He had gone into a little nameless beer-house on the way ta Wirral Hill and had drunk glass after glass of beer. “I must drink,” he had thought grimly to himself as he tossed off the heel-taps of each separate glass. “I must drink to 'render myself stupid'; as Pascal said about believing the Christian faith.” But he had not rendered himself stupid. He had, on the contrary, given himself a racking headache; but otherwise nothing could be clearer than Mr. Evans' mind. He was to “go up there” at sunset and wait inside the tower to see—actually in his flesh to see—what he had been telling himself stories about all his life long-Let no one think that the obedient rex mortuus or deus mortuus that was Mr. Evans' soul, did not weigh the possible consequences, down to every smallest detail of what he was going to do, making himself, by thus knowing about it beforehand and doing nothing to stop it, an accomplice in a murder. “Undoubtedly, I shall land in jail,” he thought. “It's possible enough that it will be worse than that. Why in God's name then, don't I walk straight back to* the shop, or home to Cordy, and shake off this monstrous weight? The police? To go to the police? No, no, no, no! The thing to do is”—at this point the invisible worm itself began whispering a subtle self-deception, a cunning compromise^—“go up there and get hold of the iron bar myself— yes! yes! yes! That's the thing to do, from, every point of view— to go up there presently—it's too early yet—and, as soon as Toller appears, just take the thing from him and pack him off; and then tell Crow, or not tell Crow, as I consider best at the time—get hold of that thing from Toller lirst anyway, and pack him off and perhaps it would be better never to tell Crow, or any other living soul, about it— yes, yes, never tell anyone about it— but would Toller try it again? It's some madness of that bald-headed woman—the Grail Messenger—I couldn't follow it when he was telling me—madness of some kind—damn\”

His mind called up the image of Mad Bet as she had seemed to him that night when she had made him kiss her naked skull. A wry smile twisted his lips as he thought of that night and he clutched the iron bar—another and a different one—that made the elbow of his present resting place!

A sardonic and tormented chuckle, a veritable damned soul's chuckle, broke from his twisted mouth.

“Hee! Hee! Hee! My Grail Messenger! It's all mixed up with Crow. It was Crow who asked me, that night, if I could embrace a woman who was perfectly hideous, and I told him then about the Grail Messenger. Hee! Hee! Malory, you old devil! There's life still in your Norman book! Yes, yes! you understand these little things. Life's not changed. It all comes round—round and back again.” What had happened now, as the man sat there clutching the iron elbow of that cold seat, while the little boys kept hitting and running in front of him, was that his first nature—the antiquarian one—was all stirred up into a writhing weft of self-protective fantasy. And this had come about in a very subtle manner; for by saying to himself that what he must do anyway was to go up there, even if he snatched the iron bar from the bewitched assassin and confessed everything to John Crow, he had covered with a sort of adhesive plaster the gaping hole of his tormented conscience; and this covering up of the dark, sweet, irresistible twitching of the snake-worm, left his normal upper-consciousness free to deceive him to the limit with accumulated plausibilities; while all the time the worm licked its devouring fangs in the darkness below!

What the worm said to itself was: “Let us only once go up there, and the swooning, drowning, dissolving ecstasy of the Dolorous Blow will soon sweep away all these conscientious hesitations!” Calmed and eased a great deal by this crafty compromise with his conscience which rendered his rendezvous with the iron bar a necessity if he were to save John Crow as well as a possibility of playing the ecstatic voyeur at a murder orgy if he decided against saving John Crow, his eyes now fell upon the figure of an elderly woman walking heavily and stumblingly up the slope of the hill below the level where he was sitting and the boys were playing.

There was an iron seat, like the one he himself was occupying, a little below the boys and a little above the woman; and it was towards this seat that she was evidently advancing.

She was well dressed and she was using her umbrella as a stick to lean upon; and as he followed her with his eyes, stumbling and exhausted, moving up the slope of the hill, he decided that he knew who she was, and that she was none other than Miss Crow. Miss Crow indeed it was, and a Miss Crow on the verge of a fainting-fit from her bad heart. There were several people passing both ways, both to the north and to the south, along the gravel path below the place where the lady with "the umbrella was tottering; but it was a group of complete strangers—strangers to her as well as to him, for they were visitors to Glaston-bury from the northeast of Germany—who, when she fell, as he saw her do now, rushed up the slope to her aid. There certainly was a peculiar atmospheric effect abroad, this February day. A soft, light mist, filmy and gossamery as a wet sea-vapour, hung over the town; while the sun, shining between heavy banks of clouds, touched with a curious opalescence, pearly and tender, the portion of the hill upon which he was now seated.

The boys ceased at once playing their game, when they observed the disturbance made by the lady's fall, and calling to each other in shrill, excited cries scrambled down the slope and huddled, as children will, pushing, whispering, jostling to get the clearest view between the burly figures of the Germans. These latter were now talking in vociferous and guttural tones across the body of the prostrate woman. One of them was actually on his knees beside her, loosening the throat of her dress and trying to pull off her gloves.

When Mr. Evans joined the group he was accepted at once as a native of the place and everyone appealed to him as an authority upon what ought to be done with a lady of distinction and refinement who apparently had had a fit.

He was aghast at the spectacle of the poor lady's face as he bent over it. In unqualified concern and pity he surveyed the unnatural redness of her skin, the drops of white froth issuing from her open mouth, and the family twitch, palpitating still, though she was quite unconscious, in her flaccid cheeks. She had been acting recklessly and unwisely all that day after her morning visit to the doctor. She had stopped at Wollop's longer than she should; she had kept her appointment to lunch at the Pilgrims' with Rachel and Alhling; and as soon as she could escape from these young people she had made her way, slowly but obstinately, to Wirral Hill, being seized with a passionate desire to rest upon the particular iron seat where, thirty years before, she was accustomed to meet Mat Dekker. As Mr. Evans now surveyed her unconscious form he found that he was not so devoid of natural philosophy as not to be grimly aware of the irony of the fact that he, the insane pervert, was now contemplating with lively concern the blow which heart trouble, that gentlest of all wiclders of iron bars, had brought down on this warm mass of corpulent femininity.

It was clear that the players at rounders, as they inserted their small perspiring bodies between the anxious foreigners, thought that Miss Crow was dead: and the words “She has it got, my Cod!”“ and ”Death her has taken, God in Heaven 1“ in the thick intonation of the great Mid-European plain, showed that the foreigners laboured under the same delusion. ”The woman something to say wishes!“ cried the man suddenly who was bending over her on his knees. ”To fetch the Herr Doctor it better were!“ replied another; and a third—an extremely sturdy little man, planted upon his heels so firmly, as if nothing could ever bowl him out—uttered the expressive, the impenetrable, the massively undying word, consonant to all occasions, reassuring under all invasions of disorder, the word ”Police"! How fast the mind works and how self-centred the human ego is!

Even as he came forward and knelt down by Miss Crow's side, even as he lowered his ears to Miss Crow's murmuring lips, the Welshman was thinking to himself: “Who's to know—if Codfin doesn't speak when they arrest him—that I wasn't in the tower by chance? No ... no ... no! I shall never in all my life have another chance of seeing, of drinking up with my very eyes, what I've been telling my pillow about night after night since I first knew what . . . what I wasl”

She was murmuring intelligible words now. She was taking Mr. Evans for someone else, for a different tall bony man. But, as he listened to her and smelt upon her grey hair, from which the hat had been torn, a faint scent of eau de cologne, he remembered how more than once he had dressed up that pillow of his in his own vest and shirt and had pounded it with the poker from the fender while an orgasm of terrible ecstasy dissolved his very soul.

“I can't let this chance go ... no! not if I'm hanged for it ... I can't ... I can't!” But nothing seemed able to keep away from him—as he heard the sturdy little man, whose feet were so firm in the grass and so wide apart, repeat the word “Police”—a thin ice-cold bodkin-point of ice-cold terror—the police . . . the police . . . the police . . . the police . . . This is a crime I'm going up there to see . . . different from any secret vice, however shameful . . . this is a crime ... the worst of crimes . . . and when I've had that ecstasy ... to the end of my days all will be exposed . . . Owen Evans the pervert . . . Owen Evans the malefactor . . . Owen Evans the murderer. They'll have me in Madame Tussaud's moulded in wax . . . my nose, that everyone laughs at so ... in wax . . . “Have you been down to the Chamber of Horrors yet, and seen Owen Evans? Anyone would know from his face what he was . . . the human carnivore!”

Meanwhile from the contorted mouth of the unconscious woman, whose eyelids kept flickering but did not open, the breathing grew louder and less human, and between the great animal gasps, like the flapping of a bellows, broken, incoherent words forced out their way.

The German upon his knees by her side seemed to be dimly acquainted with the sort of attack she was suffering from, for he lifted up her head and began pouring down her throat something from a small flask that he produced. But instead of recovering her from her fit this treatment only had the effect of stopping her attempts at speech and of throwing her back again into complete immobility.

For a moment Mr. Evans thought she was really dead now; but the German with his hand on her heart muttered emphatically; “Life she still has, the poor woman! Life she still has!”

“Has anybody sent for the—police?” Mr. Evans whispered to the German with the flask. He had meant to say—“for the doctor.”

The kneeling man rose to his feet now, shrugged his shoulders and addressed some question to his companions. It appeared from what they said that nobody had gone for anybody. The soul of the obsessed Welshman now made a hurried rush down the corridors of his consciousness, closing the door to the iron bar chamber down there, and opening more normal vestibules of awareness. “I ... go ... get .. . Herr Doctor!” he announced, surveying these simple guardians of the unconscious lady. Thus speaking, he raised his bowler hat with a grandiose gesture, both to the woman on the ground and to the strangers round hera and made off at a great pace down the gravel path that led to the town.

In the confusion of his wits, however, it was not to Dr. Fell'9 house but to his own house that he directed his way; a secret urge within him driving him now, as in all practical crises, to go at once to Cordelia. But if a beneficent chance moved him to this self-preservative action, a malefic chance willed it that when at last, panting and breathless, he entered his little house in Old Wells Road he found Cordelia deep in conversation in her parlour with her mother, Mrs. Geard.

Mrs. Geard had been confiding to Cordelia her growing worry about the girl's father; how he persisted in spending the bulk of his time over at Chalice Hill, and how he had been several times of late upon some mysterious errands to the Glastonbury bank. “ 'Tisn't that he be changed, Cordy, you understand. 'Tis that he be more his own self than I've a ever known him. Crum sees it too. 'Tis as if this commune silliness has wrought on him to let himself go. He talks more about the Blood and the Master and the Water of Life than I've ever known him. He talks every night, Cordy, on and on, after us have put out the gas. I wish he would tell me what he goes to the bank for! Mr. Trent brings him his pay forcing Mayor regular enough. There's no reason why he should go to the bank. I don't like, nor I never have liked, that young man Robert Stilly. What do you think he goes to the bank for, Cordy?”