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But Paul Trent had leapt up from the ground and with his arms behind him was surveying the autumnal contest that was going on between the fitful sun-bursts and the swallowing clouds. He seemed to be staring at this scene in order to associate it forever with the idea of a Glastonbury commune.

“Goodness gracious!” he cried, "what a place this is for mists! A commune . . . Yes I I would damned well like to see a commune!'9

It was quaint to hear the mild feminine expletive of “goodness gracious!” followed by so revolutionary an aspiration.

“Mr. Trent,” cried Dave, his cheeks red with nervousness and his blue eyes blinking, “you're not by any chance a Communist, are you?”

The voluptuous mouth, with its heavy underlip, broke into an amused smile. He shook his head vigorously and, as he did so, resumed his seat on the bracken.

“No, Mr. Spear,” he cried, laughing lightly, “I'm an anarchist! My commune is just the opposite of yours! It's a voluntary association altogether. But part of its natural habit would be to pool its resources for the common benefit; voluntarily of course; not by compulsion; but it would pool them, Mr. Spear!”

The flush upon Dave's cheeks died away; and the gleam faded from his blue eyes. He gave vent to the familiar little sigh which everyone who knew him was so used to, the sigh of an honest man forced by the logic of action in a world of expediency to act against his nature.

“Well,” he said, repeating this sigh, “we can work together over this, anyway. In the Paris Commune there were Communists and Anarchists; so why not in the Glastonbury one?”

“I won't be 'arf glad to see a guillotine set up in this 'ere bloody 'ole,” threw in Red Robinson pensively.

“You're confusing your dates, my good man,” chuckled the Phoenician-looking stranger.

“What price dites if I 'ave the bloody 'ead of P. Crow hesquire?”

“You're vindictive, Mr. Robinson,” said Paul Trent, turning his warm brown eyes upon this savage Jacobin.

“Hif you'd 'ad the hinsults high've 'ad, you'd be the sime, Mister,” rejoined the Cockney touchily.

“I take the liberty to doubt it, Sir,” laughed the other. “Goodness gracious! What's the point of getting spiteful? Besides personally I don't like the knife and I dont like to. see blood.” He gave a little shudder and made a grimace.

“You prefers bombs, I suppose,” said Red sulkilv. “If I hain't smart with me dites, and if I be 'spiteful/ as you call it, high'd never lower myself by throwing them dirty things!”

“Have you never heard of a philosophical anarchist, Mr. Robinson, or of Kropotkin or Tolstoy or Thoreau or Wait Whitman?”

“High'm a workin' man, high ham,” said Red bitterly. “They don't teach hus them 'igh-class continental writers in the Old Kent Road!”

“Come, come, you two,” cried Dave Spear. “This is far too important a meeting to be wasted in discussion. We've got to establish our Glastonbury commune, before we begin quarrelling how to govern it! Shall I tell Mr. Paul Trent all we've thought of, Red?”

“Has you please, Mister; but I won't 'ave none of that dirty foreign bomb-throwing where high be. 'It the bewger 'ard is what high says; but don't go blowin' up a lot of gals and kiddies!”

And once more, under what he felt to be the contemptuous hostility of both these men, Red recoiled with a delicious slide of his imagination into the soft admiring arms of Sally Jones. He too looked at the sun-smitten vapours on Gwyn-ap-Nud's hill, and allowed his body—the body of an unwearied, neatly dressed foreman—to mix with the elements; registering a vow that the very next afternoon he had a chance he would coax Sally to come up here with him.

“Well, Mr. Trent,” said Dave, “it's like this. It appears that the whole of the land on which Glasto-nbury's built belongs to Lord P. And it appears that on the first of January all the leases of it come to an end. For the last twenty years, as far as I can make out, old Mr. Beere has collected these rents and renewed these leases; but this year, Persephone tells me, the old man is getting very shaky and peculiar. Angela tells Persephone that he thinks of nothing nowadays but his meals. Lord P. of course has no idea of what's happening. But the truth is his agent is in his dotage.”

While Dave was speaking, Paul Trent's whole nature was leaping for joy. He was one of those people whose sculs do not extend, as some souls do, outside the limits of the body. The soul of this man from the Scilly Islands penetrated his resilient, sensitive flesh and blood as tie eddying water in a rock-pool might penetrate a sea-sponge.

He thought to himself, “Can it be true that I'm not in a dream? Can it be true that there's a real chance here—if ifs only one in a thousand—of trying the great experiment?” His mind whirled back to this and that good omen which had come to him on his journey to Glastonbury. To feel free of all compulsion ... to feel the physical caress of air and water and earth upon his life, as he earned his living, a free man among free men, the stupidity of society broken up ... if he could only know it for one year! Through every vein in his warm body rushed wave after wave of excited thought. He remembered a hideous phallic scrawl which he had seen on his way to Glastonbury in a public lavatory at Exeter, the sight of which had given him a sudden loathing for the human race. “It's restraint,” he thought, “that makes people like that. Free them, free them! Free life from every compulsion and people will be naturally kind and gentle and decent.”

Red Robinson, while Dave was speaking, had got quite deep into a dialogue with Sally Jones, as they lay side by side on this patch of bracken. Sally was now beginning to express not only admiration for his mental qualities but in her own sweet roundabout way a wish that their position on the hillside were not so exposed. “Let's go to Bulwarks Lane,” Sally was just saying with a delicious gleam in her eyes.

“The Party's idea was,” said Dave Spear, “I mean my idea was, or to be absolutely correct Persephone's idea was, that we should get the town council to offer a bigger rent for the ground where Crow's new factory is than Crow has ever paid. But it won't be only that land that we'll offer to take! We'll get the town council-------”

At this point Paul Trent's excitement^ at the chance of realising a dream about which he had thought night and day since he lost the fifth form essay on Freedom at Penzance by advocating free love, became so intense that he remembered the name of his first nurse; a name he'd forgotten for twenty years and had tried again and again to recall. The woman was called “Brockle-hurst”; and he now repeated to himself this harmless name, several times over, the name of a thirty-year-old corpse buried near Ashbury Camp in Cornwall and now serving as a Eureka of anarchistic joy upon the top of Chalice Hill.

“We'll get the town council,” went on Dave Spear, “and that really means we'll get Geard, for he does just what he likes with them, to rent from Lord P. the whole of his Glastonbury property; and we'll bribe Lord P. into this by giving him a much larger rent than he's been getting from the tradesmen. Why, all High Street belongs to him, except the Abbot's Tribunal, which goes with the Ruins! Once in the position of lease-landlord for the whole of the town, the council could get rid of all opposition and start a co-operative commune. It would have its factories. It would have its own retail shops. Though the Ruins belong to the Nation, or to the Church—I forget which—Chalice Hill, Glastonbury Tor, Wirral Hill, all belong to Lord P.'s estate; and though of course Geard couldn't buy the land, if the council got a long lease it would come to the same thing. He'd have the right, that is the council would have the right, to admit visitors, or not to admit them, as it pleased. The Ruins would remain, of course— but they'd remain as church property or national property, whichever they are, in the midst of our commune. They'd be a little island of medievalism in the most modern city-state in the world!”

Paul Trent sat straight once more upon the extreme tips of his buttocks. He rubbed back his brown hair with both his hands. ^Uncle hinted to me that Fd find things pretty interesting down here,“ he said, ”and goodness gracious! I certainly have. Mercy me! What good luck that he told me to come!"

“Of course,” said Dave, “I have not had time to get any definite word from Geard yet. It all depends on Geard. He may have to help the council with money on January first, if they can't offer Lord P. enough out of their local taxes. Yes! It all depends oi Geard; but when I talked to him about it a few days ago he seeiued interested. At least I thought he was. But I always feel awkward and uneasy with Geard. I don't know why. I feel as if I were looking down a precipice where ferns and roots and grasses protrude but where you can't see the bottom. Do you have any feeling of that sort, Red?”

The man from the Scilly Isles took this question addressed to their companion as a deliberate piece of irony; but he was totally wrong.

Red Robinson's opinion of Crummie's father, uttered in the attentive ears of his two fellow-conspirators, showed that to him at all events there was no guile in the question.

“Geard's a 'oly old 'umbug. That's what Geard is. But he's a harss hover money. No more high-deer of money 'as Bloody Johnny got than my boot-sole 'as. 'Ees strugglin' to ruin 'isself as 'ard as you or high are tryin' to better ourselves; and that's sayin' a lot!” And the foreman leered at Dave, as much as to say: “We know what a good thing you mike of being a Communist!”

Did any one of these three conspirators to establish a Glaston-bury commune realize their deep psychic luck in having let their idea escape upon the air, for the first time, on the summit of Chalice Hill?

Not one of them! And yet to the invisible naturalists of Glas-tonbury, commenting curiously upon the strange history of the place, it must have been apparent that they were led to select this spot for the inauguration of their wild scheme by some kind of instinct.

It was at any rate in a voice full of solemn intensity that Paul Trent now enquired point-blank of his two companions whether they wanted him to be their intermediary with the great Glaston-bury landowner, and Dave and Mr. Robinson delayed not to make it clear to him that this was precisely what they did want him to do.

“As a lawyer,” Dave said to him, “you'll realise better than we do what arguments to use. But everyone knows how badly Lord P. is in need of money these days; and of course the council has the power to raise the local taxes; and of course the Mayor—in so important a matter—would be prepared to advance a good big sum on the Council's security. We ought to be able to offer him at least half as much again as Philip Crow can afford. The man must agree. He can't help agreeing when it*s a question of so much money! It may just tide him over these difficult days.5”

“It mikes a pretty enough tile, Misters,” said Red sarcastically, “but high think, if you harsts me, that when Christmas comes we shall be sitting 'ere on our bloody harses just the sime has now, and that blasted Crow—you must excuse a workingman's feel-in's, Mr. Spear—siling ”is airplines just the sime! 'TahTt as heasy, as you misters seem to think, to 'umble these 'ere capitalists. They wants lead put in “em—that's what they want—a few hounces of lead in their tin-digging bellies. Th-at's what would settle 'em! Set 'em up against a wall and pump some good lead into 'em!”

“Still feeling spiteful, Mr. Robinson?” said the man from the Scilly Isles. “Well! I'll do my best, Mr. Spear, with this landowner of yours. When do you want me to see him? Does he live about here? When will you have a definite offer, ready in writing, for me to show him? And when had I better talk to Geard? Shall I go round to his house after dinner tonight?”

Dave nodded eagerly, his blue eyes radiant. “Yes, yes!” he whispered, as if they were already in the ante-room of Lord P., “by all means go round to Geard's tonight. I don't think I'll go myself. He doesn't like a lot of people fussing about him. Better be quite frank with him about your being an anarchist and so on, and about the Comrades in Bristol being so keen. Better tell him, though, that it wasn't their idea. Tell him it was my wife's. He's a great feminist, Geard is!” And Dave grinned like a schoolboy.

While this conspiracy against him was going on on the summit of Chalice Hill Philip Crow, with the Taunton road-contractor and a land-surveyor from Evercreech at his side, was standing between Lake Village Field and the rain-swollen river.

The childish robber band from Red's alley and from Paul Trent's back room had left their friend Number One's garden-fence and had advanced in loose formation, across the big airplane meadow, to see what was going on. While the Evercreech surveyor made his measurements and while the Taunton contractor with notebook and pencil, lost himself in his calculations Philip was left alone with his own thoughts. He was leaning upon one of those many walking-sticks of The Elms' umbrella-stand that lived under the matriarchal rule of Tilly's umbrella. He was following with his eyes the building of the bridge—at present more imaginary than the Eel Bridge or the Sword Bridge of the legend, which was to take his tin across the Brue.

From where he stood he could see dimly through the sun-smitten mists the vague outlines of Pomparles Bridge on the road to Street, where John had had his vision of the falling sword of the British king. The mist-enveloped sun was luminous enough to cover all the meadows around him with a rich glow. This glow became pure yellow light when Philip, hearing the voices of the children approaching him, turned away from the two men and looked westward. A small lombardy poplar stood up, darkly outlined in the midst of yellow luminousness, and Philip could see a dark bird of some kind—it was really a six months' old rook—• perched on a swaying twig on the top of this little tree. The rook was heavy and the twig kept bending under its weight; so that in order to retain its balance it was compelled to flutter with its great wings every now and then. It was Philip's long motion-lessness that alone had allowed it to settle so near a human being.

It was at the moment when Philip saw the rook fly off with a terrific flapping of its wings and with an angry caw, that he observed three children, a little boy, and a little girl holding a small child by the hand, standing about three hundred yards away and watching intently the curious movements of another little girl who was apparently approaching him by the furtive method of running from tree to tree.