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“Could you hear what he said?” asked Tilly anxiously, just as she would have asked Emma if she could hear what the groceryman was saying at the kitchen door.

“Something about Epicurus,” replied the curator in a complacent voice, keeping a shrewd eye upon the libretto in his hand. “That roll he's reading is the Logoi of Epicurus, Mrs. Crow.”

Tilly was silent. She made a mental note that she would enquire of Emma, later on, what sort of a mariner Epicurus was, that his log-book must needs be dragged in at the Trial of Jesus.

A beautiful Greek slave now appeared upon the scene carrying a silver ewer full of water. “There it is!” cried Mother Legge. “'There's Miss Kilty's punch bowl! Now I know what Mr. Crow borrowed it for. Don't 'ee drop it now, you long-haired baggage! Don't 'ee get thinking so much about your bare legs that you go and drop me silver bowl!”

Sis Cole, who had been till now wrapped in a cloud of beatified wonder at all sht saw, spoke up when she observed this glittering silver object being carried so carefully towards the pensive Procurator. “Be he feeling sick, Jackie, that King with a coronet on, and all they gold jingle-jangles? Be she bringing he a basin to be sick in?”

Jackie was as proud of his knowledge of the history of the world as the curator had been, as he now replied in his shrill voice just behind that gentleman's back—“ 'Tis Pontius Pilate a-washing of his hands! There's a picture in school that they must have took it from. Only 'tis a man in picture, not a gal, what holds the soap and water for'n.”

“Be it Pear's soap, Jackie? I don't see thik soap, Jackie.”

“I wants to pee!” interposed Bert at this grave juncture.

The curator's head twisted round, and a look of fury was launched at the shameless infant. Tilly turned too. “Take him into the field, girl. Take him into the field at once,” she said sternly.

Sis looked helplessly round. There was a deep hush over that whole vast audience while the Procurator of Judea dipped his fingers in Mother Legge's silver bowl. “You've gone and done it,” murmured Sis after an awkward pause, but she was too honest a little girl to scold the child when from her heart she thanked all the Powers that it was no longer incumbent upon her to obey this great lady who sat so close to them.

The Curator ostentatiously lit an Egyptian cigarette. “They oughtn't bring children to a thing that lasts so long/' remarked Tilly. ”They can't contain themselves like older people," and the good lady gave Sis, behind the curator's indignant back, a reassuring feminine nod. This nod—the symbol of that secret freemasonry of unfastidious realism that binds all women together—comforted Sis amazingly.

Bert continued his rapturous envisaging of the visible world. The stiff back and protuberant skull of the learned man in front of him was as much a portion of the great general Pageant as was the dragging of our Saviour—for Athling and the Dub-liners had altered the details of chronology without the least scruple—before Caiaphas the High Priest. The laws of perspective as well as the facts of chronology had been interfered with by these daring stage-directors until the Passion Play on the terrace of Gwyn-ap-Nud's Hill looked as if it had been designed from various primitive pictures and from pieces of very old tapestry.

It need hardly be said that there was reached through Mr. Wollop's round little pig's eyes no dissimilar vision of ecstasy. All that there was in sight was wonderfully comforting and thrilling to him. The persons in front of him, the deep blue of the sky, the green grass, a tiny little red spider that was now crawling across his own plump hand, were of equal interest to him with Peter denying his Master. For, as in certain primitive pictures, where a great number of memorable scenes are enacted close together, these scenes in the Pageant followed each other in such quick succession and in such close proximity that they produced, or almost produced, a pictorial unity.

Thus, in immediate juxtaposition with Pilate's prolonged soliloquy and also with the pantomimic fooling of Capporelli, as the clown moved from group to group, Christ was led before Caiaphas, and Peter denied Christ. The part of the cock was introduced. This was a too dangerous experiment even for the two Dubliners. They maintained that there was such a deep and primordial poetry about the crowing of cocks, drenched in the dews of ten thousand tragic dawns of human suffering, full of such equivocal, treacherous, and yet Homeric braggadoccio, carrying memories of women in travail, of dying soldiers, of millions of tortured, imprisoned and executed victims of Society, memories of insomnia, memories of madness, memories of love— that it would be vulgar, sacrilegious, a blasphemy against the dignity of the human spirit, impious, gross, offensive, ridiculous to introduce a pantomimic cock upon the stage. Besides—the two Dubliners had argued—no human eye ever actually sees the cock that makes its eyelids open. The crowing of the cock brings with it the passionate revolt of all the desperate lovers who like Romeo and Juliet would fain, if they could, hold back the coming of the dawn! It has become—so the Dubliners protested—one of the eternal symbols of the human race, recognized from Ultima Thule to Thibet, from Greenland to the Cape of Good Hope; and to introduce a visual mockery of such a thing in any performance would not be merely Aristophanic. It would be diabolic.

But the young poet from Middlezoy countered these arguments by saying that it was the Betrayal of the Christ by Peter that was the outrage upon the primordial mystery of the Cock's Crow, and that by representing the Cock in visual form, this Betrayal was pilloried as it deserved; and that so, and only so, was its full tragical sordidness, baseness, weakness, cowardice, emphasised and felt, as it was meet it should be.

Grandmother Cole it was, who, sitting next to Mrs. Robinson, had a sagacious word to say upon this matter. When she saw appearing suddenly, as if out of the side of the hill, perched upon the steps of Pilate's wooden rostrum, an admirably designed and powerfully conventionalized Cock, the old vestment-cleaner remarked to the ex-servant of the Bishop's Palace— “Thik red-combed bird be come to put all chicken-hearted men to shame. Me old man used allus to say to I when 'a did hear thik noisy bird—6Ye wiming-folk be all broody hens. It takes a man-bird to call up the bleeding sun!' But I did tell he 'twere all a vaunt and a vanity, for though cock might crow ever so, the sun only rose when it chose to rise of its wone self.”

But the only remark that Red's mother made when she heard this and beheld the feathered apparition, was as follows: “ 'Tisn't only to-die that little Ben 'Awker 'as crowed. High've 'a 'eared 'im in our street long afore they pliced all them feathers on 'is pore little 'ead!”

Grandmother Cole expressed astonishment. As a Somerset-born woman, a native of Gwlad yr Hav, she had much more power of accepting illusion than this daughter of the East End. That feathered object, four feet high, with a huge red comb, was to her as real as the tower on the top of the Tor. It disturbed her mind to think of it as concealing little Ben Hawker of her friend's alley. “Be thik bird little Ben then?” she murmured. “What things be coming on the world when little Ben whose birth I do mind, and /a cost his mother a sore time, should be a-crowing like a cock and making thik bearded man holler and run!”

Saint Peter's remorse of mind did indeed seem so extreme that it almost looked as if he were going to seek refuge from his shame in the arms of Lady Rachel, so far down the hill was he now flying! The Dubliners had told him to run towards the audience and utter his tragic soliloquy so that every wTord could be heard. Ned Athling had composed one of his best poetical rhapsodies for this Rock of the Apostolic Church, but he had not expected the ringing tones with which—only a few paces from the astonished Lord P.—St. Peter howled out his lines. But Father Paleologue, Mary was relieved to note, seemed well pleased by this episode.

“It's as it used to be in the old Miracle Plays,” he whispered, leaning forward with flashing eyes. “I wouldn't have missed this for the Patriarchate! And look at Christ watching him over His shoulder! There's been genius in the invention of this! I wish my Greeks could see it.”

The retreat of the errant Saint when he realised how far he had run was even a greater masterpiece of shame. His back, as he slunk off to one of the Arthurian pavilions, was the back of all the deniers of their love since the world began.

“And it's only Billy Bates, the Pilgrims' boot-black!” thought Mary; and she began to tell herself that this triumph of her John was worth all her sacrifices.

And now, according to this strange and primitive Gothic picture that Mr. Geard had caused to be painted upon the slopes of Turris Vitrea like a veritable enchantment of his favourite Merlin, the moment came for the binding of Mr. Evans upon that great cross of wood. It had been the fidgetty persistence of the man himself that had got them at last—or rather got Mr. Johnson of the Great Western station timber-yard—to make that cross out of oak. Nothing but oak, and oak too from one of the spinneys of Wick Wood, would satisfy this lover of the Druids.

“Don't 'e%e look, girlie! Don't 'ee look!” whispered Sally Jpnes to Tossie Stickles. “ 'Twill upset 'ee to see they cruel soldiers torment thik poor man.”

“But 'tis only Mr. Evans,” protested the imperturbable Tossie. “And they be only tying of he. They baint nailing of he, nor nothing!”

“Don't 'ee look, girlie!” repeated her friend. “Just shut your eyes tight and I'll report to 'ee how things be with the man, and how he do bear up under being crucified.”

“They're lifting of him now! Oh, looksee! looksee. They're hauling of him up!”

“Shut your eyes, Toss! Mercy on us, shut your eyes!”

But it was the sympathetic Sally, and not the prospective girl-mother, who was now the one to shut her eyes. “You tell I, then, how he be bearing it,” she murmured now.

“ 'Tis nothing to see, Sal, 'tis nothing to take on about so! 'Twere much worse when I did see a sheep killed, in old man Chinnock's shed, in this same very field.”

“It says 'un . . . were . . , like a sheep ... it says 'un were . . . and dumb like a sheep in slaughter!” The tender-hearted Sally was crying now, but Tossie, keeping the palms of her hands pressed against her bowels of compassion, continued to stare at the motionless Figure suspended on the cross.

It was left to the acute Mr. Weatherwax to remark to Penny Pitches that there were no Thieves by the Lord's side. “This be a poor Crucifixion,” he grumbled. “This be a stingy Crucifixion when they've only got one cross to set up!”

“Thee be worse nor Pontius Pilate, Isaac,” replied Penny. “It be the same to the good Lord whether he be hung in company or hung single; and since it be for we sinners anyway------”

“Old 'ooman, old 'ooman,” whispered Mr. Weatherwax, “thee don't really think, do 'ee, that the murdering of one honest man could save such beggars and bitches as we be? I baint what you might call a infidel, but there don't seem no justice nor right to my mind in me and you being let off because of people persecuting one good man—like thik poor man over there! Anyway, 'tis not by tormenting folk that good parsnips be growed and good 'taties be dug. What us wants in this here town be more men with Authority, not more o' these here play-actors.”

Father Paleologue kept drawing deep breaths of satisfaction all this time. He was interested to observe that the two bearded monks from the Caucasus seemed profoundly impressed. • The younger of the two—so he whispered in Mary's ears, but she was too much afraid of staring to corroborate his words—was weeping openly and passionately. How deeply this Byzantine scholar thanked his stars that good luck had thrown one of John's proclamations into his path! He would never forget this stupendous spectacle. Mr. Evans' figure, as it hung there between the two heraldic pavilions—they had carried away Arthur's Dragon Flag—had a dim grandeur that was really startling. The man looked majestic, a real murdered Man-God, hanging there between earth and heaven; and the intense greenness of the hill behind him with that erect, immobile tower, and the gleam of the Roman swords, and-the richness of the Hebraic garments, and all this huge gathering of the people, hushed, awestruck, solemnised, gave to that single Figure, suspended against the grassy steep, a magnitude of importance that was overpowering.

“What are those old men counting up their money for?”

“Mother, Mother!” whispered Mr. Stilly reproachfully, for it was one of his parents who uttered these words, “that's the thirty pieces of silver.”

“It's easy for you, Robert, of course,” retorted the old lady testily. “Your father and I haven't had your privileges at the bank, but to me it looks more like round bits of wood covered with gilt tinsel.”

It was not given to Mr. Stilly's parents—much as they loved a quiet game of dominoes—to catch the horrible pathos of the way Judas was now behaving.

Perhaps in that whole vast assembly only Father Paleologue and one other realised the full poignancy of the acting of Judas. That “other” was Morgan Nelly. The little girl uttered no word. She allowed Jackie to explain to Sis that it was Judas who was being repulsed by those old men with the money-bags and that he wTas now going out to hang himself. Jackie explained that these old men were now saying—“What is that to us? See thou to that!” and that Judas wTas now going to hunt for a good place to “see to it” from. But Morgan Nelly's heart leapt up in sympathy as she followed the figure of Judas wandering among some small thorn bushes and a patch of stunted hollies, looking in vain for what he wanted. In the end he disappeared behind the western pavilion, and long before he had disappeared the main interest of the Pageant had shifted from him altogether; but the little girl's heart was still with him. She knew who it was. While the public knew him as a crazy and good-for-nothing elder brother of the Nietzschean young man at Wollop's, Nelly Morgan knew him as “old Mr. Booty” who used to read Grimm's fairy tales on the cricket-field when his side was in.

The Madonna now, all dressed in dusky blood-colour save for her sky-blue robe, was clinging to the foot of the Cross, while near her the Roman soldiers were throwing dice and playing cards in stiff circles upon the green grass. Momus, perched upon the steps of the empty judgment-seat, was idly tossing up a toy-balloon into the air and catching it as it came down; and to give the scene its true character, as some old Flemish painter would have visualised it, as a tragedy, namely, that drew its poignance from the pell-mell of that human life which was so indifferent to its superhuman anguish, either the Dubliners or Athling had brought it about that Pilate and Caiaphas should .be playing chess together at a little round table in front of that western pavilion behind which Judas had withdrawn to hang himself.