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On this tenth of December Philip returned to the north room after Tilly had gone to bed, and gave himself up to an orgy of concentrated thought. He had already brought so many new labourers and working people into Glastonbury that it had begun to be difficult to house them, and Philip—little dreaming what a deadly blow was preparing for him from that quarter—had entered into negotiations with the town council relative to his housing these newcomers in some of the newly built “council houses.” The fact that there were so many unemployed among the old-established Glastonbury people, who now saw these lively upstarts from Bristol and Cardiff occupying houses provided by their own socialistic government and built out of local taxes, was a fact that did not redound to Philip's popularity with the populace. Glastonbury's populace was—as they proved in their mobbing of Lord P.—not at all inclined to remain passive and patient when they once got a particular grievance lodged in their brain; and Philip had been surprised by the sullen looks with which he was greeted whenever he had occasion to pass through the poorer portions of the town. He had even heard derisive jeering when he recently crossed, in his little open car, one of the outskirts of Paradise. This extreme unpopularity into which he had fallen was another of these possible causes of catastrophe which Philip neglected. It was part of that element of sheer recklessness in him, to which reference has already been made, to hold public opinion in infinite contempt. Humane enough towards those immediately dependent upon him, Philip was absolutely devoid of imagination when it came to be a question of people he had never seen.

His small, hard, oblong head, very protruding at the back, and rather flat at the sides where the ears clung so closely, had that particular look about it that old-fashioned military men's skulls have. As he pulled his chair round now in front of the fire, leaving the vellum-bound notebook open on the table and sprinkled with cigarette ashes which he had not bothered to blow away, he thought to himself quite calmly: “It would be a good thing if the Glastonbury people would simply die, off; die off and leave their houses empty to make room for me to' fill the town with a different type altogether! But they seem able to live on forever, feeding on mud and mist! Die! Die! Die! Die quickly and have done with it!” It was at this moment that he saw in the red coals of the fire, a heap of dead people, dead heads and arms and legs and feet. It was a totally unreal illustration of the French Revolution, that set him upon conjuring up this romantic spectacle. It was a picture that he had seen in some silly illustration of some cheap story; and the queer thing about it was that these dead people were not disfigured in any way. They were just dead. “How these Christs and Buddhas,” he thought to himself, “ever reached the point of feeling that it was worth their while to save the human race is more than I can understand. I don't want to torture anyone”—here Philip's judgment of himself was absolutely correct, for there was less sadism in him than there was in Mr. Stilly or in Jimmy Rake or in Elphin Cantle—“but it's impossible for me to understand this 'value of human life* that some people make so much of.” Once more he stared at the coals; and once more he saw in those red recesses that curious, sentimental assembly of neatly dressed corpses with sad, peaceful, composed features, laid out in that artistic morgue. And then there flickered over his hollow eye-sockets and over his hollow cheeks, as he stared at that fire and stretched out his hands to it. a grim smile, for he thought of what Tilly would say if she could read his thoughts at this moment.

Tilly—good housekeeper as she was in her orderings of well-killed meat—could not bring herself to trap the smallest mouse. If kittens had been born in her house by the dozens, it would only have been by the craftiest deception that Emma could have got her to get rid of one of them. “What actually ivould Tilly say,” he wondered, “if she knew that if I could cut off the heads of all the poor of Glastonbury and fill their houses with a picked set of men and women who could really work I'd do it tomorrow? As a matter of fact, if by lifting up my hand now I could destroy those people and get *his new population here tonight, I'd do it! Yes, and sleep quits soundly afterwards!”

One of the most interesting things about Philip, when he indulged in mental contemplations as he was doing now was the guileless un-maliciousness of his inhumanity. Though it never occurred to him to ask himself by what right could he condemn to death, in his thoughts, a whole section of his fellow-townsmen, he derived no wicked pleasure from the idea of their death. His grey-black, closely cropped skull was as devoid of such notions as one of the mattocks of his workmen at Wookey. He experienced now, in his silent house, with his open figuring-book on the table behind him and these glowing coals in front of him, a delicious sense of soundness, compactness, integrity in solitude. “I am I,” his whole being seemed to say, “and the world is my clay and my mortar.” Leaving these ill-nourished Glastonbury incompetents safe in their neat and artistic death-pile, his thoughts now turned to what he regarded as the superstitions of the place. Yes, he would willingly, if he could, obliterate all these Gothic Ruins, lay a good solid expanse of lead-piping to drain Chalice Well, pull down that old Tower from the Tor and build a water-tank up there, dig out every twig, sprig, root and branch of this corrupting thorn bush and really set to work lo have the best tin centre in this spot that existed anywhere in the world! Here again, in the matter of superstition, Philip's destructive desires were astonishingly un-malicious.

John Crow would have derived a most convoluted vandal-thrill, the wanton excitement of a run-down atheistical adventurer, in obliterating all traces of the Great Legend. Red would have gratified incredible levels of “ 'ate” by so doing. Barter would have done it with the grim unction of a sullen executioner, especially if he could have shogged off afterwards with Tossie and the twins to Norfolk! Even Dave would have done it with a cer tain self-righteous doctrinaire-austerity. But Philip would have done it absolutely without a single arriere pensee. He would have done it by the pure necessity of his nature, as a dog twines himself round on a mat before lying down, or a cat scratches the dust over its excrement. He would have wiped the place clean, both of its under-nourished rebellious populace and of its morbid relics, and then set to work, as Inevitably as a beaver returns to its job after a flood, to build up" an industrial centre out of the richest tin mine and out of the most scientific dye works anywhere on earth!

It was with his head full of these thoughts—thoughts that sprouted from his hard skull like scaly lichen from a gatepost on Brandon Heath—that Philip finally switched off the electric light in the play-room and went up—carrying his patent-leather shoes in hand—to his stuffy bedroom, his cold hot-water bottle, and the invisible wraith of his well-satisfied grandmother.

All the enemies of the Great Legend happened, that night of December the tenth, to be going to sleep about the same time, Glastonbury indeed, under its windy, moonless winter sky, was like many another town that night in the turbulent history of our earth: it was subject to the psychic tearing down and building up of the most violently diverse energies. But all these Legend-Destroyers were of the same sex! That was the interesting and significant thing to note. Not one single feminine wish, from Tossie in the hospital to Mother Legge in what she called her nursery, was lifted up from the bed of sleep in hostility to the immemorial Tradition. But from the bed of Red, and the bed of Dave, and the bed of Paul Trent, and the bed of Mr. Barter, and the bed of Lawyer Beere, and the beds of bank-cashier Stilly, gardener Weatherwax and Will Zoyland and finally from the bed in Northload Street of John Crow, there rose up, along with the destructive will-power of Philip, a cumulative malediction against the Legend. There had been a time when Mary would have j'oined this gang of iconoclasts—she alone among all the feminine shapes in the town—but, since her marriage, Mary had relapsed into a veritable undersea of infinite peace so delicate in its muted dreaming that she would have no more wished to break up any of its dream-scenery, any of its deep-sea arches, its deep-sea columns, its leagues of translucent emerald-coloured floors, than she would have wished to break the heart of Euphemia Drew.

The history of any ancient town is as much the history of its inhabitants' nightly pillows as of any practical activity that they perform by day. Floating on its softly upheaving sea-surface of feminine breasts the island-city of mystery gathered itself together to resist this wedge of rational invasion. Backward and forward, for five thousand years, the great psychic pendulum has swung between belief in the Glastonbury Legend and disbelief. It is curious to think of the pertinacity of the attacks upon this thing and how, like a vapour dispersed by a wind that re-fashions itself again the moment the wind departs, the moss-grown towers and moonlit ramparts of its imperishable enchantment survive and again survive. When the king murdered the last Abbot of this place he was only doing what Philip and Barter and Red and Dave and Paul Trent and John would have liked to do to the indestructible mystery today. In the most ancient times the same fury of the forces of “reason,” must have swept across Glastonbury, only to be followed by the same eternal reaction when the forces of mystery returned. The psychic history of a place like Glastonbury is not an easy thing to write down in set terms, for not only does chance play an enormous part in it, but there are many forces at work for which human language has at present no fit terms.

This particular night of the tenth of December was in reality one of the great turning points in the life of Glastonbury, but the issue of the struggle that went on tonight between the Enemies of the Legend and its Lovers would evade all but supernatural narration, however one might struggle to body it forth. Out of John Crow's head, after he had relaxed to sleep that night from his lascivious claspings of Mary's marbly limbs, there leapt up into the darkness the spiritual form of all the suppressed maliciousness from which he had been suffering in his service of Bloody Johnny. This spiritual form was a shape, a presence, an entity. It was, in fact, the essential soul of John Crow, for the vital consciousness of his sleeping body was but a vague, weak diffusion of electric force. What else could the soul of John Crow do when released in sleep from his life of psychic slavery, but join, with an exultant rebound, all those other wandering spirits who were engaged in killing the Grail. It was not necessary for any palpable shape to fly out of that window in Northload Street in order to join, in a sort of Warlock's Sabbath, the ill-assorted spirits of Philip Crow and Red Robinson. When I write down the wTord join, I mean a motion of John's soul that it would be impossible for any scientist to refute, a motion of his whole essential being, now his body was asleep and his diplomacy relaxed, to hill the Grail. By joining with Philip, on this night of the tenth of December, to strike this blow at a fragment of the Absolute, the* essential soul of John Crow took a considerable risk. For one thing, it was a risk to leave his sly, cautious, saurian neutrality and join his grand enemy. That he did so at all is only one more proof of how deep John's maliciousness went. In his service of Geard, in connexion with the Grail and in connexion with Chalice Well, John was steadily outraging the evasive, trampish, irresponsible essence of his nature. He was taking sides. He was siding with the Grail against its enemies, when all the while, in his heart, he longed to hill it! The “something” in Philip and John and Barter that loathed the Grail so deeply was not just simply their Norfolk blood. This fragment of the Absolute was too ticklish a thing not to divide human souls in a disturbing and disconcerting manner, setting brother against brother and friend against friend. All the way down the centuries it had done this, breaking up ordinarv normal human relations and exerting whenever it appeared, a startling, shocking, troubling effect.

It was really a monstrous thing now that John and Philip should dislike one another so heartily during the daylight hours but at night rush off together to join in killing the Grail. The Grail could not actually be “killed,” for the Thing is a morsel of the Absolute and a broken-off fragment of the First Cause. It could not of course be killed literally; not in the sense of being annihilated. But it could be struck at and outraged in a wav that was a real injury; real enough, anyhow, to stir up a very ambiguous feeling in the tramp-nerves of John Crow! After all, though there was an unknown “element” in the composition of this broken-off piece of its own substance, that the First Cause had flung down upon this spot, there was also something of the “thought-stuff” of the same ultimate Being in the personality of all its living creatures. Thus, in the psychic war that was going on above the three hills of Glastonbury, the Absolute was, in a manner of speaking, pitted against the Absolute.

On this tenth of December the wind blew directly from the west. Over Mark Moor it blew from the marshes of Highbridge and, beyond that, from the brackish mud-flats ot Burnham. The tide had been so high indeed in the Burnham estuaries that many of the more pessimistic fishermen there, whose flat-bottomed boats—as they had done since the Vikings came—explored those muddy reaches, prophesied that the dams were going to burst again, as they had burst in November, five years before, flooding the whole country. Over Bridgewater Bay it blew, and over the Bristol Channel, from the mountains of South Wales. A scattered army of little ragged clouds followed each other eastward all that night, blotting out from the vision of nocturnal wanderers, or from such as kept vigil at lonely windows, first one constellation and then another. Thus the nature of the night of that tenth of December was peculiar and unusual, for no fixed star and no planet was free from sudden, quick, hurried and erratic obscur-ings by these rags and tatters of flying vapour. Endlessly they blew across the welkin, those tattered wisps of clouds, changing their shapes as they blew into the fitful forms of men and beasts and birds and tossing vessels and whirling hulks and flying promontories, and obscuring first one great zodiacal sign in the heavens and then another. The wind that shepherded these wild flocks was full of the scent of channel seaweed and of channel mud, and as it voyaged eastward its speed kept increasing, so that these cloud-shapes, thus broken into smaller and smaller wefts, now began to fly like gigantic leaves across the Glaston-bury hills.