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The inrush of this hurly-burly of excited children delayed for a moment Red Robinson's departure. Sis and Nelly were both favourites of Ins; and there was a general hullabaloo in that peaceful kitchen while he “ 'unted,” as he said, “ 'igh and low” for a bag of sweets he had secreted somewhere. Mrs. Robinson had even to move to another place her pile of mending from the stately black-oak hall-chair, which came from the Bishop's Palace and which served her as a work-table. She had to disarrange, too, her reproduction of Constable's “Hay-Wagon”—another relic of the Bishop's Palace—which was balanced on the top of her dresser. All was joyous confusion; with Bert, like some ideal prize boy, surveying life from Sally's knees, his plump legs hanging down, his plump fists clutching together some bits of blue glass he had picked up, and his grave eyes taking in the Platonic Essence of the whole unique scene.

As for Jackie, a slender, fragile-looking but passionately intense little boy, with chestnut-brown hair and hazel eyes, he had begun a dramatic story to his sister Sal, the points of which he had continually to emphasise, when Sally's attention wandered, by tugging at the locket round her neck. Long experience had taught him that the threat of a broken locket was the most attention-provoking of all gestures on the part of a younger brother. “I seed she over Tor and over Wirral. I seed she again over Chalice and over Stonedown. 'Twere a girt big 'un she were; and 'un flew low, like 'twere goin' to turn topsy. 'Twere the biggest flyer ever made, out of Ameriky; and Nelly says she knows for sure 'tis Mr. Tom Barter what be steerin' of 'er. 'Tis Mr. Crow's airplane, Nelly says, and Mr. Barter be pilot on she.”

''Didn't I tell you, Mother?“ broke in Red Robinson, who had been listening intently to all this. ”Thafs what he's doing with the money he takes out of the labouring man's sweat! You're main right, Nelly, you're main right! Barter is the pilot. And that means that he's letting the office down. And that means that the whole business will be a washout. I'll tell 'em at the Quarterly tonight what you've seen, Jackie. You w^ait, Mr. Crow! You wait! You'll find Red Robinson isn't a fellow to spit upon, little though you may think of his dependableness!“ This wTord referred to a personal quarrel which Red had had, just a year before, with Philip Crow. Philip had dismissed him without proper warning and when angrily challenged by the man had coldly told him that he did not find him ”dependable.“ The truth is that Red Robinson —although politically a Communist—was temperamentally a Jacobin. A rankling personal hatred of Philip Crow had grown by degrees to be the dominant passion of his life, stronger even than his devotion to Crummie Geard. That ”not dependable" had become a kind of vicious quartering on the great, heraldic blazon of Mr. Robinson's revolutionary faith.

Automatically replacing his mother's basket of mending for the church upon the stately hall-chair, which bore upon its back the episcopal arms of Bath and Wells—God knows how the ex-housekeeper had got hold of it!—Red Robinson picked up for the second time his cap and scarf and let himself out into the little dark street. On his way to the small upper room in Old Jones' Antiquity Shop, which had for years been the Comrades' meeting-place, Robinson found it necessary to pass quite close to a low stone wall, over which—at a single field's distance—he could not escape from seeing in the starlight the richly carved ruin of that oldest and most sacred building in Glastonbury, the Church of St. Mary, usually known as Saint Joseph's Chapel. On this spot stood the original Wattle Church built by Joseph of Ari-mathea. Here was the stone church erected much later by Saint David of Wales; and here too was discovered, in comparatively modern times, the carefully preserved Well, into which a blood-red stream of magical water once trickled down from the very slope of Chalice Hill. It was to the monkish guardians of this mystical spot, doubtless carrying in its enchanted soil, fed by the bones of untold centuries, the psychic chemistry of religious cults far older than Christianity, far older than the Druids, that King

Ina9s charter was given, the charter which still exists, an actual piece of material parchment, inscribed by an unknown human hand in the year seven hundred and twenty-five. One of the most familiar of the constellations—was it Cassiopeia?—Red Robinson was weak on the subject of the stars—hung suspended just above this famous fragment of antiquity. Red surveyed this stellar sign with approbation. It was useful; it afforded light—though in a primitive form and not very freely—to the delegate who was to address the Comrades that evening. There was no nonsense about it. Those twinkling celestial orbs might have been electric bulbs, inaugurated by some disillusioned Lenin of the Ether. Thus did Red Robinson set the seal of his revolutionary approval upon the stellar system. But the shadowy Norman arches of St. Mary's Chapel, as he surveyed them now, filled him with anger and contempt. He went so far as to spit over the low wall in the direction of that Bastille of Superstition. That his spittle only fell on the back of a small snail that was travelling across a dockleaf by the light of those same stars was an incident of small importance. He had expressed his disgust with Saint Joseph, Saint David, Saint Patrick, Saint Dunstan, Saint Indractus, Saint Gildas, Saint Be-nignus. He had expressed his disapproval of King Edgar the Peace-Maker, of two King Edmunds, and of more Abbots than he could possibly name! As to King Arthur—but he swallowed his wrath now and moved on.

He was soon entering the little shop of Old Jones. Old Jones was still in hospital. The little cyst, referred to by Penny Pitches, had been successfully cut out of Old Jones' withered frame; but the shock of the operation delayed his recovery. Mr. Evans was still, therefore, playing the role of his representative. It was in a bare room, filled with school-forms, and a little school-platform—for it served on Sunday as a meeting-place for a handful of Plymouth Brethren—that the quarterly gathering of Comrades was held. This room was on the third floor and was just above the bedroom occupied by Mr. Evans.

The Welshman was now seated at his open window finishing for exactly the twenty-fifth time, the “Morte d'Arthur” of Sir Thomas Malory. The indescribable sadness of those final pages was wrapping him round in a delicate melancholy, when he became aware of the bustle and the clatter of the meeting above his head. He tried to render himself oblivious to these intrusive sounds. He even placed his pair of guttering candles upon the broad window-sill and the book between them. But to no avail! The voices of the Comrades, the scraping of their feet, the vigorous clapping of their hands, entered his window, descended his chimney, and came down through the cracks between the creaking boards of his ceiling. The voice of Red Robinson raised in indignant denunciation, lowered in Machiavellian persuasion, clear and incisive in practical suggestion, presently drove the sorrowful piety of the repentant Lancelot completely off the field.

The unfortunate thing was—but such was Mr. Evans9 psychic constitution—that he no sooner lost his sacred and sweet melancholy under this downpour of communistic reasoning than his old fatal temptation began to trouble his mind. It attacked him vaguely, mistily, atmospherically, with a sort of deadly diffused sweetness of indescribable poison. And what was the worst thing about the way it attacked him was the fact that it made the project of being married to Cordelia Geard an expectation of such withering dullness that it made him groan to think of it. And yet he did genuinely love Cordelia. Not with any kind of physical love. That was impossible. But with a feeling of pity that shook the foundations of his nature. He had never pitied anyone as he had come to pity Cordelia. His pity for her had grown step by step with his admiration for her mental and spiritual qualities. Why then this intolerable sense of dullness—oh^ much worse than dullness!—this sense that the very leap of life in his deepest fibres would perish of sapless sterility if he were to live forever by her side, day and night, night and day by her side! How could he have permitted this corrosive poison so to soak, with its fatal fungus-juice, every nerve of his being? Struggling with this vague temptation now, he began to dally with the ghastly idea that apart from some element of sadistic feeling it would be impossible for him not to shrink away with infinite loathing from any physical contact with Cordelia. He had thought at first, on finding how fond he was getting of Cordelia, that here—in this one single point—he had the advantage over normally amorous people. Since with him the natural urge towards feminine beauty as feminine beauty was less than nothing, surely he might be permitted to indulge his pity—this pity, that was the magnetism of his love—to the limit, without fear of feeling repulsion? If, without the sadistic shiver, if, without this infernal Nightshade juice, all flesh was literally grass, why couldn't he “make hay” in human pastures from which normal people would shrink in sick aversion? But the ghastly doubt began assailing him now; suppose he had so drained away every drop of magnetic attraction to natural human flesh that the daily presence of another person would strew his life wTith the dust of the ultimate boredom to such a degree that everything he felt, everything he saw, everything he tasted, everything he heard, would exude a withering dry-rot?

He began inadvertently to listen to what Red Robinson was saying in the room above. He had been hearing him, it seemed, for hours; but he began to listen to him now. He blew out one of his candles and moved the other one, and the volume of Malory with it, back into the room. Sitting at his table, with the candle and book in front of him, he set himself to listen attentively. But it was hard to listen attentively. Oh, it all seemed so unimportant —this problem of what became of mankind in general—compared with what he was feeling in his own solitary being! Well! Anyway that perilous quiver upon the air was drifting away now! What brought it at some moments so much more strongly than at others? Were there really powers of good and evil moving about in the ether and touching us all at their own will, not at ours, and at the strangest moments? He closed the book and pushed the candle further from him. Through the open window came the sound of a single, old, cracked bell. He couldn't imagine where that bell hung. In some little neighbouring nonconformist chapel, he supposed!

Still the voice of Red Robinson went on, arguing and proving and denouncing and cajoling and persuading; and it was a curious thing that in his public oratory the man largely succeeded in dropping his cockney accent. “Incorrigible heretic! Curse him with bell, book, and candle!” thought Mr. Evans. The Welshman's triadic mind dived like a plummet, then, to the sea-bottom of loathing from which he was always trying to escape. How queer that that fainting sweetness, that quivering, shivering, swooning sweetness, that was all about him in the air now, making everything not touched by itself an ash-bin of intolerable dullness, should be the thing that led him on and on and on till he incurred this undying Horror!

Owen Evans leaped up upon his feet as if Something far worse than any conceivable hell-torture had come into his head. He stood still for a second and then swung round and faced the window. And by slow degrees it came over him that what he was really seeking from Cordelia was punishment. If he punished himself enough, might not the Horror be disarmed, be repelled? “Christ!” he murmured, staring out at the darkened windows on the opposite side of the street, “if it is like that to live with her, why should not that be my punishment? Why should not that save me?” This sudden unmasking of a secret motive in his own action which had hitherto been concealed from him gave Owen Evans such a consoling sensation after his recent self-torture that he lit his second candle again and sitting down once more at his table re-opened Malory. He was careful to open the book this time not at the end, but at the beginning; and he turned over the pages till he came to a particular passage about Merlin which always stirred him profoundly. Everything that he could discover about Merlin sank into Mr. Evans' mind and took a permanent place there. Scraps and morsels and fragments, mythical, historical, natural, supernatural, as long as they had some bearing, however remote, upon the life of Merlin, filtered down into Mr. Evans' soul. He had already begun to write a life of Merlin more comprehensive than any in existence. In fact Mr. Evans' “Life of Merlin” was to include all that has been written of that greatest of enchanters in Welsh, in English, in French, and in Old French. As all Merlin's disciples well know, there is a mysterious word used in one of the Grail Books about his final disappearance. This is the word “Esplumeoir.” It is inevitable from the context to interpret this as some “Great Good Place,” some mystic Fourth Dimension, or Nirvanic apotheosis, into which the magician deliberately sank, or rose; thus committing a sort of inspired suicide, a mysterious dying in order to live more fully. As he sought for one of his favourite passages—for “Esplumeoir” does not appear in Malory—he kept murmuring that particular invocation under his breath, pondering intently on the occult escape offered by this runic clue from all the pain of the world, an escape so strangely handed down from far-off centuries in these thaumaturgic syllables.

While Mr. Evans was thus occupied, Red Robinson in the room above where the Comrades were assembled to hear his speech was thinking to himself that he must conceal one little fact about his grand message to them and the scheme he intended to lay before them. This wTas the fact that it was really none other than Persephone Spear, who, through her husband's mouth, had first broached the idea of starting a Municipal Factory in Glastonbury. It needed the wit of a woman to think of such a simple thing. But Red Robinson, like many another masculine politician, was resolved to take all the credit to himself of this flash of feminine inspiration! It was not long before the cockney's penetrating voice began to make itself again audible to the ears of Mr. Evans, lifted up to a yet shriller pitch as Red approached his main argument.

As a propagandist Mr. Robinson always aimed at a disciplined art that resembled that of a Catholic peasant-priest carefully trained in a Seminary; but it often happened that his art broke down. “We have several Comrades,” Mr. Evans heard him exclaim now, “who are on the Glastonbury Town Council. I appeal to these Comrades; I beg these Comrades, to use every means at their disposal to familiarize their colleagues with the principles of municipal ownership. These factories depend upon natural resources. The Wookey Hole one depends on the subterranean River Axe which flows from beneath the Mendips. The Glastonbury one depends on the waters of the River Brue. Does this man Crow, does this selfish, luxurious rich man, cause these rivers to flow, or create the rains and the springs that fill these rivers? We are all Comrades here; and I may talk freely here. I have come to learn that this religious fanatic we are accustomed to hear called by the name of Bloody Johnny”—here there was a terrific stamping of feet and loud hilarious laughter above Mr. Evans' head!—“is intending to use his legacy of ill-gotten bourgeois money, of which all the Comrades here have heard, to bring crowds of visitors to the town. You know, Comrades, how such bourgeois visitors dislike everything industrial. ”?ut their dislike is not shared by the man I refer to. Now this is what I propose to you, Comrades; I propose that some one among us should be delegated to approach this man Geard, who is evidently prepared to throw his money away, and try and persuade him to lend the Town Council, of which he is now a member, funds large enough to buy out this devil Crow! I propose that this delegate from the Party persuade Geard to buy for himself the factories, if he cannot induce the town to purchase them. Anything is better than leaving them in the hands of such a devilish enemy of the working-man as we know this Crow to be. And they'll go for a song, I tell you, Comrades. They'll go for a song; because a really big strike will throw the concern into bankruptcy.