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But before Nancy could do more than return an embarrassed smile to his exaggerated deference, none other than Mr. Geard himself appeared quietly among them, as if materialising out of the air. The Mayor nodded kindly at Nancy, winked at John, and offered his plump hand to Philip. His appearance was so sudden that it was* like the appearance of Teiresias at that Cimmerian scene which John had already called up.

John stepped back a little and regarded with concentrated attention the Protagonist and Antagonist of this memorable occasion. Never had the contrast between the two- men been more marked.

Philip was dressed in a fawn-coloured overcoat and light soft grey hat. He wore spats beneath his blue-serge trousers and in his hand he carried a cane with a round jasper knob that Persephone had given him. He had a red camellia in his buttonhole and his whole demeanour was composed, debonair, alert.

Bloody Johnny, on the contrary, was really scandalously attired. He had dodged, as his custom was, on public occasions, all attempts of his family to groom him. He was not even picturesquely untidy. He looked like a deboshed verger who had turned billiard-marker in some fifth-rate club.

“He's been drinking,” thought John, “and that's why he's so late.”

John was not in error. From a very early hour that morning, Mr. Geard, on this supreme occasion of his life, had been sipping brandy with that old crony and convertite of his, the ostler at the Pilgrims'.

John now approached a step nearer to these two Glastonbury magnates. He forgot all about his dizziness, in his anxiety to hear what they could possibly be saying to each other on this day of all days. But as often happens when two formidable personalities meet, they each seemed desirous of avoiding any real contact with the other.

Nancy also moved up close to Mr. Geard's side. She seemed to have an obscure feminine instinct that it would be fatal for her Prophet to have a serious encounter with this enemy at this juncture.

The murmurs that rose from the crowd at Philip's appearance now changed into shouts and yells when the two men were clearly observed talking together.

“Begin! Begin! Begin! Leave your chattering and begin!”

Such was the burden of a storm of confused cries, not only in English but in every European tongue, that now rose like a howl of demons from the crowded slope of Chalice Hill.

“We are being chaffed by the populace,” said Philip with a bitter smile. “The chap's half-seas-over,” he thought. “Tilly was right to tell me to come. He's going to make an absolute zany of himself. This is my chance, if I can keep cool. I wonder if my voice can carry as far as the road. I'll let these foreigners know that this sham commune and this mountebank Mayor are not the only representatives of Glastonbury.”

Thus did Philip Crow gather his wits together; but what were Mr. Geard's thoughts at this crisis? He had none at all; none, that is to say, beyond a lively interest in the camellia in Philip's buttonhole! He was as empty of abstract considerations or even rational considerations as ex-Mayor Wollop himself. But let no one suppose that this physical placidity meant that Mr. Geard was hors-de-combat. It only meant that he was in such peace with himself that his whole being moved in harmony to the least stray thought that came into his head. It is true he was drunk. But Philip was a fool to regard that condition as a handicap to Geard of Glastonbury. Not even John—who knew him so much better than Philip—realised the power that resided in the man's complete freedom from self-consciousness.

All that his tipsiness did was to make him five times more his natural self than in normal times. And Mr. Geard's natural self was a thing of mountainous potency. It is likely enough that Nancy's Prophet of the Lord had quite deliberately repaired to the ostler's bar at the Pilgrims', so as to leave no shred of fussy vain human self-thought between his intellect and his world-deep sensations.

“Do you know where the steps are to that platform?” said Mr. Geard. “They'll be quiet enough presently. Do you mind if I sit down for a moment?”

“My chance is coming,” thought Philip, “my chance is coming.”

Mr. Geard now deliberately sat down on the grass. This performance was almost as disconcerting to John as it was to Nancy; and it was a good deal worse than disconcerting to the officials of the commune in the crowd below. John began to feel it imperative that someone should intervene; for Mr. Geard seemed to have fallen into a trance of imperturbable quiescence.

As he sat there cross-legged, with his plump fingers extended on the grass at either side of him, he looked like some neolithic beast-god, paramour perhaps of the Witch of Wookey!

But quick as lightning Philip accepted this grand chance offered him by the fates and stepping lightly past John and Nancy mounted the steps of the platform and presented himself before the audience.

“You have all come here,” he began, and out of mere curiosity they let him get as far as that, “to show your interest in our great historic town and to learn what we are trying to do to make it not only a beautiful place, worthy of its old traditions, but also a place where the noblest achievements of Progress can be carried------”

But “Progress” was the last word that was audible; for at that point he was simply shouted down. Yes, there was nothing for Philip to do but to descend those platform steps as proudly and contemptuously as he had mounted them. This he accomplished with self-control, dignity and grace. Once on the ground, however, he gave a swift malicious glance at the grotesque person squatting on the grass, over whom Nancy and John were bending, shrugged his shoulders, replaced his hat upon his head, waved his cane, and made his way down the hill.

But with John pulling at one arm and Nancy pulling at the other, Bloody Johnny was now raised to his feet. This achievement, every detail of which the crowd watched from below, was grossly and humourously cheered, the “hoch, hochs” of the Germanic element and the “vivas” of the Italians being especially vehement.

Once on his feet, Mr. Geard smilingly dispensed with Nancy's help; but permitted John to assist him to mount the platform; and John himself, amid the tumult of applause that greeted the Mayor, slipped down again and took his seat on the lowest stair of the steps, side by side with Bob Sheperd, the old policeman, and Mr. Merry, the old museum curator.

It was at that moment of the proceedings that Miss Barbara Fell was overheard to say that it was a pity dear Mr. Crow should have been shouted down; while Dr. Fell was heard explaining to his neighbors in philosophic language that Mr. Geard was probably not very drunk and had probably staged the whole episode, with the view of arousing in his audience “that particular psychological mood of sympathetic nervous hilarity which can be so quickly changed by a crafty orator into passionate receptivity.”

Certainly in its whole long and turbulent history no man in the county of Somerset has ever received an ovation comparable with the ovation that Bloody Johnny received at this moment before he began to speak. And when he did begin, a silence like the silence of fishes in the sea, or of birds at midnight, fell upon that crowd, so that angry heads were turned round when anyone coughed or sneezed or shuffled or struck a match or even turned up his coat collar.

From the poinl of view of oratory, there was nothing at all remarkable in the way the Mayor's speech began. Many of his later discourses, as they were taken down in the next two months, were far more eloquent He thanked his hearers for allowing him to speak at all—“under the circumstances/' He said that he was sure people would come from all parts of the world to drink of the Grail Spring. He emphasised the historical interest of the new experiment in government that Glastonbury was making. He begged ”those who were strange to our system of a just and equitable division of those benefits which human brains and human labour, working in harmony with Nature, give to humanity, to suspend their judgment till they see the thing in working order."

He rambled off at that point into quite a childishly grave recital of early Glastonbury history. He referred to the Lake Village neolithic race. He spoke of the Ancient Britons. He alluded to the importance of the work of the great Saxon king, Edgar.

As John watched the faces of the audience from his position by Bob Sheperd's side he was struck by one very curious phenomenon. The fact that the Mayor was blundering along in a quite commonplace way, uttering brief and cursory remarks that were really platitudes, made no difference at all to the extraordinary impression he produced. John found it amusing afterward to notice the various ways in which the great London newspapers handled this striking difference; this discrepancy between the substance of the man's speech and the spellbound awe —there was no other word for it—with which his uninspired remarks were received. Once more John began (or was it his dizziness returning upon him?) to feel as if all those upturned faces were thousands and thousands of ghosts, all the nehuon ameneena kareena, “the powerless heads of the dead,” of the long Glastonbury history, listening to Mr. Geard.

It was not long, however, before John's ears heard the phrase: “I therefore declare this arch to the Grail Spring of our dear town, open, free of charge, to all persons who, who, who care to come!” and he became aware that, in the same droning and uninspired manner, Mr. Geard had begun to allude to various familiar aspects of the Grail story; aspects such as the simplest schoolchild in the place had been acquainted with since infancy.

This preposterous narrating and countenancing, in solemn seriousness, of what John felt to b^ a mass of fantastic and gruesome fairy-tales, made something .stark and dangerous rise up within his East-Anglian soul. He turned his eyes away from these hypnotised ghosts and fixed them upon that stone in the new arch which had made him think of Stonehenge. And it was borne in upon his mind with a frozen certitude that however phantasmal matter might be in its interior essence there was something about it when it hardened into stone that reduced all organic flesh into the transient, the impermanent, the perishable. He saw the birth and the death of the generations—men and beasts and birds and fishes—their tremulous loves, their wretched tribulations, their vain hopes, their importunate passions, and all swept away by wind and water from the enduring majesty of these stones, that themselves changed not, save by cosmic catastrophe.

“If I could destroy,” he thought, “in one overwhelming stroke all this whole maze of delusion; if I could bring the free sea in upon it, and the north wind down upon it, if I could burn it with fire and cleanse it with water, if I could purify the air of it and purge the earth of it, how calm and clean the world-floor would be!”

“And thus,” boomed on above him the monotonous voice of Bloody Johnny, “the Grail-worship at Glastonbury has become ------”

An impulse of anger too great to be resisted took hold upon John Crow. Leaping to his feet he turned his back to the crowd and looking up at Mr. Geard who was near enough now to the edge of the platform to see his convulsed face, he uttered in a low hissing tone and so that Mr. Geard alone could hear him, the words:—“Lies! Lies! Lies!”

His effort had been so great that his dizziness came back upon him with a rush. So blindingly it came, that everything swam before his eyes and he began swaying to and fro at the foot of the platform, groping at the air with his hands and gurgling in his throat. As he swayed like this, all began to grow dark before him, and he had just time to think to himself, “What have I done? Have I ruined his speech?” when he fell prone on the ground in a dead faint.

The speaker had drawn back a little towards the centre of the platform, so that when old Bob Sheperd and Mr. Merry, with the help of two other younger men, lifted John up and carried him towards the Rotunda, all that crossed Geard's mind was, “Someone has fainted,” and it never occurred to him to associate this incident with that convulsed face and the word, CwLies!"

One of the officials produced the key of the Rotunda and here they laid John; but it was not till the Mayor's speech was over and the crowd had dispersed that he really awoke to full consciousness.

“People say these things are lies,” shouted Mr. Geard, after a pause, in a voice that rolled away over that hypnotised assembly with such thunderous force that it reached the ears of Mad Bet, as kneeling at her window on the other side of the road she thought of Codfin's iron bar. “People say we must have the naked Truth in place of these lies. Now what the Spirit and the Blood command me to tell you is this------”

An inspiration was reaching him at last from the dark recesses of his being. It seemed to tear itself through him and force its way out, like a dragon escaping from a thunder-split cavern. And Mr. Geard felt himself in full command of this inspiration. Unlike Faust, with his earth-spirit, Mr. Geard held the bridle of this demonic winged creature. This was proved by the dramatic pause he made at this point, quietly taking his breath and, as he did so, glancing towards the Rotunda where they had taken that person who had fainted.

Then, as if he were releasing, in absolute aplomb, this wind-dragon of the abyss, he lifted up his voice again:—“Any lie,” he shouted, “I tell you, any lie as long as a multitude of souls believes it and presses that belief to the cracking point, creates new life, while the slavery of what is called truth drags us down to death and to the dead! Lies, magic, illusion—these are names we give to the ripples on the water of our experience when the Spirit of Life blows upon it. I have myself”—here he made another of his dramatic pauses—“I have myself cured a woman of cancer in that spring.” He stretched out his arm towards the Grail Fount. “Miracles are lies; and yet they are happening. Immortality is a lie; and yet we are attaining it. Christ is a lie; and yet I am living in Him. It . . . is . . . given . . . unto . . . me . . . to tell you that if any man brought a dead body before me ... in the power of what people call a 'lie' I would, even now, here and before you all, restore that dead one to life!”

His voice died away in a silence so profound that Nancy Stickles, whose face was distorted with emotion, told Tossie later that she could hear the tinkle of the far-away sheep-bell, on the throat of Tupper, the old fence-breaking ram, in the Edgarley Great Field.