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“Alone in the house with her . . . going past her bedroom . . . alone with her . . . Sam leaving me . . . Sam going out of my house . . . Sam's place empty . . .” Being the man he was, it was natural enough that the distress caused to him by the conflicting nature of his thoughts vented itself in irrational anger.

“Sam!”

“Yes, Father?”

“You shan't sneak off like this! Do you hear me? I say you shan't! Leaving your wench . . . and your child . . • and everything. Have you no natural feeling at all? You promised me you'd let her alone until she was properly divorced and you were properly married to her . . . and what do I find? I find you turning your mother's room into a place to------” The trick had worked. The man's upper lip was once more protruding and trembling with injury and grievance—“into a place to fornicate in!”

The ugly word belched itself forth from the priest's contorted mouth like the dark wine and the gobbets of human flesh from the guts of the drunken Polyphemus. How could Sam know that the secret urge of this anger was a wild, heathen delight at being left alone, alone without a rival, with those suckling breasts upstairs? How could Sam know that it was the man's own "Pd like to, Susie! Pd like to, Dolly! I'd like to, Nelly!9' of the stone-throwing Tommy Chinnock, that was being lambasted and foul-named by this bewildered priest? Mother Legge would have been the person to have set Sam right upon this riddle of his father's wrath; though doubtless Mr. Evans, who had seen the contents of the Camel Bowl touch Nell's lips before all the rest, might have been able to instruct even the wise Mother Leggs about the maddening power of this girl's fatal passivity. A bundle she was—that was it! an aphrodisiac bundle of cloves, cinnamon and aniseed—a fever-raising, fever-allaying bundle of catnip for one, two, three, and how many more? prowling, feral carnivores!

And there was, after all,—for Sam was his father's son—a similar introversion of righteous anger on Sam's side. Why else should the word used by his father, and associated by his father with that room of the dumb clock, have made his chin work so. and a spurt of black anger almost choke him? If he hadn't forgot • everything—even that it was “the last time”—when he hugged Nell so furiously in the drawing-room this word of his father's would doubtless have gone over his head like badly aimed duck-shot.

It was certainly the word “fornication” that led Sam now, for after all he was a very young saint, to close this door, of all doors, with so resounding a repercussion throughout the whole house, that Nell, doing up the front of her dress after nursing her baby, ran quickly to the door of William-of-Orange's room, opened it, and listened in frightened concern.

It was in this manner that Sam Dekker was heard leaving the house of his birth which he had entered, through the body of the servant from Geneva, some twenty-five years ago. And what was the first thing that Mat Dekker did when he heard his son cross the hall, open the front door, and go out?

He moved slowly to the mantelpiece, removed the tumbler that Sam had placed over the little fish from Meare-Rhyne, picked it up from its place upon the surly countenance of St. Dunstan, and, raising it to his nostrils, snuffed at it with inquisitive interest!

Meanwhile Sam himself, arrived in the presence of Paul Trent in the Abbot's Tribunal, soon found that he was completely right about there being no lack of communal jobs as long as he was content with the barest living wage. And since such a wage—just enough to keep body and soul together—was exactly what suited his life-illusion just then, both parties in this transaction were speedily rendered content.

And so before that day was over both Mr. Dekker and Nell received brief notes from this quixotic young man, notes that were delivered in person, for he had no desire that Penny and Mr. Weatherwax should sauce their favorite “gorlas” with his emotional confidences, telling them of his success.

The two devoted boys, Elphin Cantle and Steve Lew, were Sam's messengers. Steve's hero-worship for Elphin had begun during the last few months to reproduce almost exactly Elphin's for Sam, and a mission of this sort being meat and drink to such romantic lads, the recipients of these missives received them privately, separately, faithfully, and in all due secrecy before night fell.

Mat Dekker's note ran:

Dearest Father,

You can always find me in case of necessity at the top of that house I spoke of. They call it the Old Malt House and it is in the middle of Manor House Lane. I'll see you, of course, before long; but for a week or two I want to collect my thoughts. Cive my love to Penny.

Your affectionate son,

Sam. P.S. I've got a good job so I am in no need of money. P.P.S. Would you mind telling Penny to give the bearer my big sponge.

The note to Nell, which it was Steve's task to deliver—Sam had tact enough to make this quite clear—ran as follows:

Nell, my little Nell,

You must forgive me if I hide away from both you and Father for a week or two. I am all right. I am not unhappy. If I've made you unhappy, please, please try and forgive me. I needn't tell you any more about my religion and my new life; but I have to tell you this, once and for all, that I love you more than I ever did! Now you may smile, in the way you do; but what I say is true; and we both realised it this morning. Father knows where I am living.

Your Sam, spite of all, for ever and always. P.S. Give Henry a lot of kisses from me.

Sam's job at the municipal factory proved the simplest, as it was the heaviest that the whole business offered. The new types of legendary figurines were largely constructed of a certain kind of clay that was brought in trucks from the neighbourhood and Sam's job, which was shared by some of the roughest labouring-men in the town, consisted in emptying trucks of this clay into hand-carts, and these carts again into receptacles outside the factory.

Thus he was kept very busy, and felt, during the first week or so, extremely tired; but his day ended at five o'clock, when he was free to do what he pleased, and these first free evenings in spite of his extreme exhaustion were times of more peace and quiet than he had known for a long while. The heavy physical labour saved him from morbid broodings and made each night an orgy of delicious dreamless sleep; while as his muscles began slowly to adapt themselves to his work—and it must be remembered that Sam was endowed with super-vigorous health—this nightly weariness grew less and less. What was a torture to him was the treatment he received, though only at first, from his fellow-labourers. Intrinsically they were men of no exceptional brutality. Among themselves they were friendly enough. But everything about Sam, the fact that he was an educated man, the fact that his father was a priest, and above all the fact that h? was trying to live like a saint, excited their bitter hostility. If Sam had not come to this job of clay-hauling and truck-emptying with the direct purpose of sharing the sufferings of his persecuted god he would have been reduced to abject and sullen misery by these men.

“Holy Sam” became his nickname almost at once; and the pleasure with which they tormented him was abominable. It would be erroneous to say that all good and valuable things spring from the individual, and all evil things from the crowd; for everyone is aware on various occasions of a crude and raw warmth, a radiating glow, a lively enthusiasm, that emanates from any group or mass of people. And there springs up from the crowd, too, under certain conditions, a formidable power of magnetic faith. But this faith which is the most striking thing the crowd engenders cannot for one second be compared with the creative faith of the individual. It is by the faith of the individual upon which the crowd feeds like an oil-devouring flame that the latter is able to move mountains, to tear down Bastilles, to destroy inquisitions, to inaugurate revolutions.

Among his fellow-workmen in this clay-hauling job Sam was an individual pitted against a crowd. He was not against them. They were against him. He was no Coriolanus. He was no aristocrat, answering hate with contempt. It was enough that he lacked their humour, that he did not chew their tobacco, that he could not fling back their particular kind of badinage. In a situation of ihis kind an upper middle-class recluse like Sam was at a much worse disadvantage than Will Zoyland would have been. Zoyland's dog-and-gun slang, his Rabelaisian obscenities and roaring guffaws would have won these people's respect. He would have browbeaten the more aggressive and cajoled the others. He would have speedily become a sort of bandit chief among them.

But Sam they totally despised. They regarded him as a softy, as a preacher, as a spy, as a blackleg, as a dark horse up to some tricky game, as a ne'er-do-well with a screw loose, as the idiot son of a canting parson. They amused themselves with him. They mimicked his mannerisms, they hustled him, they put the heaviest work upon him. He was their sport, their quarry, their lawful prey. The fact that he was no weakling gave an added spice to their bullying. It was like bear-baiting; and all day long they worried him, like dogs worrying a great patient beast

But all this was only for a time. It did not last. Little by little the clumsy sweetness of Sam's nature won its way with them. What actually was at first, it may be, a tinge of priggishness in his attitude towards them, wore off. He came to forget that he was Sam Dekker, the son of Mat Dekker. He became a labouring-man among other labouring-men. And the psychic awareness that he really was ceasing to separate himself from them affected them without their realising it. The manner in which he received their derision changed insensibly too. He began to cease regarding it as directed especially and maliciously towards himself, and he ceased to encourage it and stir it up for his own masochistic satisfaction. Thus the telepathic message from his subconscious self to their self-conscious selves which had formerly called out, “I am different from you. It hurts here. Hit me harder here!” began to sing another tune and to call out, '“We're all in the same mill. To hell with differences! All souls at the bottom are equal.'”

And this new mood in Sam was no conscious part of his struggle after a holy life. It arose from the innate heathen goodness of his nature, emitting its sweet odour like thyme or mint that has been heavily trodden upon. And so by degrees it came about that the heathen virtue in Holy Sam was responded to by the heathen virtue in these other Glastonbury aboriginals, and the feeling:—“We are all of one blood”—gave to the clay-hauling upon which Mr. Barter's business depended a certain autochthonous solidity.

For Tom Barter with Red Robinson as his foreman and Lady Rachel as his adviser, was beginning to display his mettle as a manager; and the figurines, statuettes, plaster-of-paris busts, hand-painted vases, plates, crocks and jars, which they were now manufacturing showed signs of spreading Glastonbury wares— with the help of the visitors and pilgrims—all over Europe. Both in the designing and executing portions of his business Barter's personal limitations in matters of art were an advantage Jo him. He came upon one young person after another, girls as well as men, who possessed unusual artistic feeling; and encouraged by Lady Rachel, he left these young Glastonbury natives a completely free hand.

The result of this was that there began to spring up—out of the void as it almost seemed—a very exciting and most original school of Glastonbury design, genuinely indigenous and wherein the roughnesses and crudities of drawing, colouring and perspective, and their variations too under so many different hands, possessed the imaginative freshness and childlike appeal of ah authentically primitive art, an art which the whole western world seemed especially to thirst for, an art which embodied in it not only the communal spirit of the town's socialistic rulers but something—a nuance, a tinge, a suspicion—of the new religion of Glastonbury's Mayor! Their earliest output had been confined to toys and souvenirs; but as soon as Lady Rachel became intimate with Barter—and she had an active ally in Tossie —the little clay figurines of the legendary personages of the town's history, from Morgan-le-Fay to St. Joseph, ousted everything else; and the council's timely contract with certain clay-haulers of the neighbourhood changed the whole trend of the business, so that toys were forgotten and a real movement of imaginative art, at once modern and mystical, swept everything before it.

At the end of a week Sam paid a hurried visit to his father and Nell; but so distressing and agitating to all three of them did this visit prove that he did not attempt to repeat it, but henceforth gave himself up completely to the raptures and torments of his Imitatio Christi.

It would have been a different story altogether if his labours had been inside the municipal factory. There he would have been under Barter's eye, there he would have met Lady Rachel. But except for the first afternoon of his hiring he saw nothing of the art-work of the place. All he saw, all he handled, was truck-loads of this particular clay.

Sam's nature, always rather earthbound and earthdrawn, sank into this clay as into the tomb of his Christ. He washed away his thoughts about Nell and her child in this clay. In this clay he soaked up the subterranean sorrow, scarcely less hurting than what he felt for Nell, of his separation from his father. He was at once bruised along with his God, by his wrestlings with his fellow-workmen, and buried along with his God, in this heavy Somersetshire clay.

What made the task of winning over his companions so slow was the fact that the men around him were always changing. Their pay was so poor and their work so heavy that few of them could stand it for more than a brief time. Then others came— all of them out of the poorest districts of Bove Town and Paradise—and in their turn were tempted to make sport of Sam. None of them had the toughness or the stamina that he had. They were lean and lanky men, descendants by centuries of inbreeding of those heathen aboriginals of the Isle of Glastonbury who resisted St. Joseph, St. David, St. Indractus, St. -Gildas, St. Patrick, St. Dunstan, St. Benignus and St. Bridget, in their attempts to spiritualise them, who were forever revolting against both church and state, who seemed inspired in their rebellions by the old chlho-nian divinities of Tor Hill, whose re-awakened malignity on the day of the Pageant nearly destroyed Lord P. and whom nobody but Bloody Johnny seemed able to manage.