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Here Paul Trent stopped; but only to give place to Mr. Evans who caught up the refrain; answering him with a sort of antiph-ony that seemed to their hearers still worse insanity.

“ The Head of Annwn's Cauldron, what is it like? A rim of pearls, it has around the edge; It boils not the food of a coward or perjurer* The bright sword of Llwch was lifted to it, And in the hand of Lleminawc it was left, And before the door of Hell's gate lamps were burning; Seven alone did we return from the fortress of the Perfect Ones.'”

“Did you compose all that, Owen?” enquired Cordelia.

“Certainly not!” answered Paul Trent, speaking for Mr. Evans. “It's all in the books about the authors. Neither of us invented it. Rhys, Loomis,—they all quote it. It's from a very ancient Welsh poem called 'The Harryings of Annwn' and it appears to refer------”

But Mr. Evans interrupted him.

“It obviously does refer,” he shouted, “to that ancient heathen Grail, far older than Christianity, which redeemed . . . and always will redeem . . . everyone who understands it . . . from . . , from . . . from . . . from the captivity of Gwair in Caer Sidi!”

He suddenly burst into a spasm of suppressed laughter which had an extremely disconcerting effect upon the ears of his hearers. Mr. Evans was evidently on the edge of a shameless and vociferous laughing-fit caused by some interior vision which struck his mind as a monstrous Rabelaisian jest.

It always has an unpleasant effect when a person of a very dominant physical personality falls into uncontrollable laughter. There is something indecent in the spectacle of it. This indecency seems to be mysteriously increased when there is an ignorance in the hearers—as in this case there certainly was profound ignorance—as to the cause of the explosion.

Swinging his head and his shoulders backward and forward, making the most extraordinary chucklings, growing at the same time very red in the face, he allowed these laughter-tears to run down his cheeks and to fall upon his waistcoat without attempting the least concealment of his emotion. It was as if he had suddenly been permitted by a special dispensation of Providence to catch a glimpse of the monstrous cosmic joke, abominable, heroic, megalomaniacal, into which the whole creation resolved itself!

Cordelia rose from her seat and moving to his side laid her hand on his shoulder. She felt as if her strange mate had suddenly turned into a medium for some huge, earth-cracking supernatural ribaldry, that to her was inscrutable. She looked anxiously at the others to see how this exhibition struck them. But under her touch Mr. Evans quickly recovered himself and what had so agitated her womanly nerves seemed quite a natural occurrence to the other men.

Their host's laughing-fit evidently partook of that extra-mundane humour to which all men are subject and which remains a mystery of childishness to their wives and daughters.

Cordelia, surveying the diminishing convulsions of her partner's gaunt frame with an irritable concern, became a symbol of immemorial feminine annoyance in the presence of such a masculine outburst when to a man—quite suddenly—the whole cosmos appears in the light of a monstrous joke. Women never laugh in this sort of way. Their laughter is pure naughtiness and unadulterated mischief, or it springs from physical well-being and is the airy happiness of the innocent earth-bubbles of matter or, finally, it is hysterical, as when Cordelia laughed like the neighing of a horse.

But she went quietly back to her seat now and Mr. Evans remarked gravely: “In this affair of yours, gentlemen, I confess I'm no politician, what I was going to say was . . . when a person touches”—he rolled his eyes towards Mr. Merry's nephew— “this basic Secret of Life, that our Bards expressed in poems like The Harrying of Annwn. these external arrangements of Society —capitalism or communism—seem unimportant.”

Dave Spear rose to his feet, stretched himself, sighed heavily, squared his shoulders and with his hands clasped behind his back broke into a low, intense appeal, addressed to Mr. Evans alone.

“If you could see human beings digging* as I have lately . . . up there at Wookey . . . straining their muscles and going on and on . . . and if you could realise that this same manual labour is required, all the while, to keep the machinery of our industrial system working . . . and that the people who do it * . . upon whose labour we all live ... the people who make the machines and who feed the machines ? . . are robbed by us non-workers of all but their bare living, you would not, my dear Mr. Evans, you could not, talk of communism as unimportant. You and I, with our bourgeois mentality, shrink from it as we shrink from slavery! But surely it's more righteous that we should all, quite openly, be slaves of the State, than that by an evil and crafty trick, and by our hypocritical talk of mental labour being 'harder' than manual labour, we should prolong this crime . . . this unpardonable sin?”

At the words “unpardonable sin,” Mr. Evans, who had been hearing him gravely, gave a guilty start, and automatically looked sideways to the floor, to the place where, if he'd been in the shop, the staircase to the cellar would have been.

“You can't have either communism or anarchism in one little town,” he said. “It's the whole country that must go in for it, or it must be let alone. And even if you were dictator of all England, Spear, I tell you it isn't money or position in life that makes the difference between happiness and unhappiness. It's something else . . . and when I think of how unimportant all these questions are in comparison with ... I could . . • I could . . .”

His face which at this moment was a mixture of Don Quixote, the Devil, and Dean Swift, broke into certain deep wrinkles, evidences of another laughing-fit, which contorted it considerably, while he controlled and prevented the outburst Paul Trent now looked at his watch.

“Well! gentlemen,” he said, “I've decided that I want you two, after all, to come out with me to Mark Moor Court tonight. I only pray we shan't find Will Zoyland closeted with his father! I'm afraid if Will got on our track at this juncture he'd ruin the whole thing. What a blessing he's out at Wookey!”

As soon as the visitors were gone, Cordelia said hurriedly to her husband: “Better take your stroll now, hadn't you, while I do the things?”

“What did you say?” murmured Mr. Evans, giving the back of the purple chair a push to move it towards the fire.

“Better go out and get your evening stroll over, while I wash up,” repeated Cordelia.

Mr. Evans stared blankly at her. The natural movement of any couple, in their own house, when a group of visitors have departed, is to draw up to the hearth with an ebullition of relief, and begin a critical analysis of the evening. This was clearly what Mr. Evans expected; and he was a little nonplussed. He had not much to say to Cordelia about communes and commune-makers; but he had a great deal to say to her about The Harrying of Annwn.

The girl had already left him, however, and crossed the little passage into the kitchen; so he snatched up his long black overcoat from its peg and let himself out without a word.

“She's cross,” he said to himself, “because I laughed like that. She thinks I made a fool of myself.”

He followed the Old Wells Road till he reached a turn to his left, called Edmund Hill Lane, which led to the clay pits and the tile works of Edmund Hill Pottery. This pottery had played an important part in the modern life of Glastonbury, supplying the town council with those fine large brick tiles of a beautiful orange-red colour with which it had roofed all its new workmen's houses not only in Old Wells Road and Bove Town but also in Benedict Street. It was from under these bright red tiles, made of rich Somersetshire clay, that the hopes and despairs of many generations of Glastonbury people were destined to mount up and follow in its gusts, night by night, this dream-burdened westerly wind.

Mr. Evans got glimpses of a tormented half-moon in the sky, as he walked along, tossed, tumbled, rolled, buffeted by piled-up cloud racks, driven, themselves, across the rain-swept spaces- bv this same wind. Edmund Hill Lane was at that hour a lonely place to walk in, as it stretched upward toward? those isolated clay pits. Its ruts were clay; its banks were clay: it had been cut out of clay; and it led to the richest clay pit in the West Countrv. And all this clay, which in time would be moulded and hardened into roofs for the dreams of Glastonbury people: dreams that would be—so Mr. Evans told himself now as he strode along— much the same, whether under Dave Spear's commune or Philip Crow's capitalism!—called out to Mr. Evans and tugged softly at him, with wet, mute, rainy, dumbly murmuring mouths, and straining, coldly heavy, corpse-like fingers.

The glimpses he got of that wildly tossed half-moon stirred the imagination of this man in the tight-wTaisted black coat and bowler hat. The wet clay stuck more and more clingingly to his boots as he advanced up the windy hill, leaving Glastonbury and its conspirators far behind him, and his mind followed those weird, old, chthonian deities of his race, whose dim personalities, veiled under these Cymric syllables, “Pwyll, Pryderi, Llwch, Lleminawc,” called to him out of the wet earth. The very dreams of the people behind him, mounting up alongside of him from under the tiled roofs of the town, fell away from him now and sank down like a flutter of autumn leaves. That iron bar in the brain of Finn Toller, of which he had heard without hearing, sank down. The great lorries, full of hermetic tin—diabolus metallorum—of which Philip, in his house in the New Wells Road, was thinking, fell away and sank down. The Harrying of Annwn! How much more there was of the essential sorrow of things and of the essential exultation of things in that queer phrase than in all this absurd business of buying legal parchments from the Marquis of P.!

As he walked* along under the sickly moon and the feverish clouds, Mr. Evans thought to himself how much more real the world of consciousness was than the world of matter.

“In any given spot on the earth's surface,” he thought, “the consciousnesses of men are flowing and floating just below the blind material surface! They have the same sun, the same moon, the same stars; but it is with the souls of these things, with their under-essences that the consciousnesses of men have dealings!”

He came to a heap of clumsily thatched turnips, by a wayside barn, that the owner had covered up for winter feed for his cattle, and upon this heap he sat down, pressing the tails of his black coat under his thin flanks against the damp of this dark mound. And sitting there alone under that turbulent sky it came over him that the lives of men upon earth were all subject to the captivity of Gwair in Caer Sidi, lured by the emissary of Pwyll and Pryderi; in other words that they were all held in bond by something alien, by something external to their true, free essence. But he got the feeling that his own deeper nature could take hold of his body, yes! and take hold of all this bodily-world around him, and drive them both, as this wind was driving these clouds, upon strange, occult purposes of its own.

Mr. Evans rested upon this thought for a second, holding himself aloof with an austere effort and grasping fate itself, as a man grasps the handle of a plough. But even while he was experiencing this masterful sensation there slid into his erotic nerve the quivering forked tongue of his unpardonable sin.

Something about what he had seen that afternoon in the sheep-fold had broken a barrier in the fortress of his sensual concentration; and through this hole there now slid, or threatened to slide, the electric-tingling body of the undying worm.

“I must make use,” he said to himself, “of what Geard is doing with that Grail Spring. The Pageant didn't kill it . . . but perhaps this water . . . these crowds . . . this white magic of old Geard . . . may kill it!”

So he spoke; but as if in mockery of “old Geard,” and all he could do, there moved, there stirred, there awoke, in the remote circles of Being beyond this wild sky, the appalling perilous stuff in the double-natured First Cause. In its primordial Evil, as with its wavering searchlight it fathomed the numberless worlds of its living victims, the First Cause struck straight down now at the responsive nerve of Mr. Evans5 vice, and as it stirred that poison it gave itself up to an orgasm of egocentric contemplation. As for Mr. Evans, he saw himself returning to his house with this madness and with this horror upon him; he saw himself mounting the narrow staits; he saw himself embracing Cordelia . . . and he felt he could not do it . . . he felt he could not ... go home . . . just then . . . with this reptile lifting up its head,

“Complete was the captivity,” he muttered to-himself. tcof Gwair in Caer Sidi!"

Without realising what he was doing he pressed his left hand under the wet thatch of the turnip heap and pulled out a turnip. This, all muddy as it was, he pressed to his face, smelling at it with his hooked nose, and finally biting it with his strong wolfish front teeth.

While the Welshman sat on that damp heap of turnips and bit, with ferocious and yet hardly conscious impulse, into the flesh of one of the rankest and most astringent turnips in the heap, spitting out each mouthful after he had chewed it and once more plunging his teeth into the sharp-smelling substance, it happened that a microscopic creature—all mouth and yet all belly—was enjoying, or suffering from precisely the same twinge of egocentric mania, as were Mr. Evans and the First Cause, as it lay coiled up upon the surface of this same vegetable.

Thus it was fated for this particular turnip heap in Edmund Hill Lane, halfway between Old Wells Road and the Brick-tile Works to be the occasion of the bringing together, at exactly three minutes to nine o'clock on the night of the twelfth of December, of three identical psychic aberrations, that of the infinitesimal, microscopic parasite, that of Mr. Owen Evans, and that of the ultimate First Cause.

Human beings are however more sensitive to interruptions from chance than are gods or insects; and it wTas Mr. Evans who was the first to be distracted from this obsession of vicious contemplation. He became aware of the approach of voices coming down Edmund Hill Lane from the direction of the brick works.