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Two human beings, one a woman and one a boy, found themselves too restless to sleep that night in this city of sorceries. These were Nancy Stickles in her attic room on the High Street and Elphin Gantle in his father's hostelry, the Old Tavern, which stood on the edge of the Cattle Market. Both these persons, this young married woman and this boy, left their beds between one and two that December night and pulling chairs to their windows, looked out upon those flying clouds. Elphin's room, which was far away from both Persephone's and Dave's, in the rambling, faded, old public house, looked out from a sort of stucco tower, added to the main building in the reign of William the Fourth. His window was a large one composed of many small panes and when Elphin in the dead of night threw this open and sat leaning his elbows upon the window-sill he could not only see a high garden wall covered with mossy coping-stones, but he could see a bare larch tree swaying mournfully in the wind, and, beyond this a little tributary of the Brue, irrigating a piece of municipal ground that had been parcelled out into allotment-gardens, and crossed, although its waters were not deep, by several plank bridges. There was a clump of dead stone-crop upon this mossy wall, and near the stone-crop a single faded wall-flower which bowed and swayed in the wind and seemed to emit, as it swayed, at least so Elphin Cantle fancied, a faint dirge-like sighing. The boy spread out his arms upon his window-sill and stared at the pallid waters of the Brue tributary and at the tossing larch-tree top and at the sighing flower-stalks on the wall. His window was unusually large, as often happens with that particular sort of stucco tower, so that there was a dizzy sensation as. well as a very chilly one as he looked out upon the night. But Elphin was much more in the night, much more mingled with its vague scents and its morbidly distinct sounds than he would have been in any other room in Glastonbury. His mother had decided to let him sleep in the tower room “till a guest asked for it.” Now, as it was unlikely that a guest would even know of the existence of the tower room, Elphin was pretty safe.

He thrust his right arm out of the great window and stroked the stucco wall with his fingers. Something about a stucco wall always fascinated Elphin, and now with this wind wailing in his ears, whistling through the larch tree, moaning across the plank bridges of this Brue ditch, the touch of this material helped him to think. But he was in a blasphemous and a wicked mood that night, for his idol Sam had broken his promise to take him out there, beyond Charlton Mackrell, to the weir at Cary Fitzpaine, on the River Cary, where several tench had been caught this autumn, that queer fish gifted with the gift of healing! Sam had given him no better excuse for the breaking of this promise than that Mrs. Zoyland was all alone, that afternoon, up at the hospital, a state of affairs that by no means seemed to justify such treatment of a friend. Elphin's restless excitement, therefore, in that wet-blowing wind and his queer pleasure in rubbing his hand against that old weather-stained tower wall were mingled with a bitter anger against both women and religion. He associated them together, which was unfair with that particular kind of philosophical unfairness, touched with perverted eroticism, that many famous writers have indulged in. Women were, it is true, now at this very moment, all over this silent city, nourishing the Grail in their sleep, but the great religions of the world were not founded by women. The soul of Elphin Cantle, nevertheless, as, on this tenth of December he leaned out upon the night air, rushed forth to join the souls of Philip and John in their murderous night hunt of the Grail, just as if on this night of the west wind's wild rush through the sky, .there really had been a sort of Wizard's Sabbath.

This joining of Philip and John in their orgy of Grail-killing meant no more than that if anyone could have looked down that night upon the mental arena of Glastonbury he would have seen a powerful group of masculine consciousnesses bent upon completing the work of the bestial King Henry, and destroying, once and for all, all traces of this Cymric superstition.

Elphin's heart yearned for Sam, and his nerves throbbed for Sam. His feverish pillow, left over there alone in the darkness now, as he sat at this huge window, could have told a pretty tale of nightly desperations, as the lad tossed and turned and quivered in his perverted passion, while week followed week, and there seemed no satisfaction for him in sight. And so his fury turned upon Sam's religion, and this the boy mixed up, wildly and blindly, in his crazy unfairness, with the existence of all the feminine persons that Sam was in the habit of meeting these days, but especially with Mrs. Zoyland. “May the curse be on her!” cried Elphin now to the flying clouds. “May the curse be on her!” he cried to the tossing wall-flower, to the bending larch, to the rippled streamlet, and to all the wet, hollow, dark spaces, like the wind-swept corridors of a madhouse, that extended between Chalice Hill and Tor Hill, and between Tor Hill and Wir-ral Hill. “May the curse be on her, and may she be sorry to death that she ever met him!”

This malediction was a much more singular and significant one than poor Nell would have understood. It was in reality— if the full secret purport of Elphin's thoughts had been revealed —directed quite as much against the Grail as against Nell. For the curious thing was that when presently he began again—whispering the words aloud with intense solemnity—to curse the woman whom his hero was so constantly visiting in the hospital, he extended his curse, as his outstretched fingers fumbled at the chilly stucco wall beneath his tower window, to that consecrated Cup in the hands of his friend's father from which Sam was always receiving the Sacrament. His boy's thoughts were all confused, and not having been yet confirmed by the Bishop of Wells he had only the vaguest notion of the meaning of the Mass. The Cup containing the Wine at those “early services,” which, like a faithful dog watching his master, he was wont to gaze upon from the back of St. Patrick's Chapel, was the same to him as this mystic Grail, lost or buried in Chalice Hill, of which he heard his parents talk. Elphin's love for Sam was too passionate to be vicious, but it was also far too intense to be innocent, and with a lover's clairvoyant instinct he was fully -aware that Sam's worship of Christ absorbed many feelings in the man which if released would turn to human love. What Elphin did not realise was that it was this very love of Christ coining between Sam and his mistress that had given him his place, such as it was, in Sam's life. Had this accursed Grail, or this sacramental Cup that the boy confused with the Grail, become nothing to Sam it would certainly not have been to the love of Elphin Cantle that he would have turned! Thus, as so often happens in the coil of human drama, the very power against which, in his blind passion, the unhappy lad was now pouring out his imprecations, was the one thing that kept him in his idol's life! Sam's pity for this lonely child was part of the grand tour de force of his life of a saint. To be interested in boys at all was totally against the grain with him.

While Elphin was at the tower window of the Old Tavern, Nancy, having slipped from the unconscious arms of the heavily breathing Harry Stickles, was at her attic window looking on the back gardens of High Street. This west wind, blowing from the Bristol Channel, blowing from the hills of Pembrokeshire, blowing from that Isle of Gresholm off the western shores, where round the Head of Bran the Blessed fluttered that song of the Birds of Rhiannon which brought death to the living and life to the dead, this west wind was more than an ordinary wind that night to Nancy Stickles. It was her sense of this west wind that had drawn her out of her bed. The feeling of it had reached her in her dreams before she awoke. Sitting on her hard bedroom chair at the window which she had managed to open wide without disturbing Harry, she now gave herself up to the power and the rush of it as it swept past her house. In the other houses everyone was asleep. Not a sound reached her from the street in front. There she was, exposed to the far-stretching sky with its whistling cloud-leaves, to the wide, wet hollows of darkness that covered the earth, and above all to that rushing wind! About a quarter of a mile separated her from Elphin at his open window. The boy had put on his overcoat which had been covering him in his bed. The girl wore her rough, thick dressing-gown and also a black woollen shawl. Neither of them had the remotest notion of the presence of the other, although the identity of each, the son of Mr. Cantle of the Old Tavern, and the wife of Mr. Stickles, the chemist, was well-known to each. It was a palpable example of the way in which the desperate wishes of living creatures flung out at random upon the air counter and cancel each other's magnetic force! The boy cursed the religion of Glastonbury and the girl blessed it Yes, she blessed it, as she gave herself to this wild wind that had been calling to her through her dreams for the last five hours.

Oh, how delicious it was to give herself up to it . . . to feel it take her completely, as she crouched there, with her strong, firm working-girl's fingers clasped together on the window-sill! “I wish,” thought Nancy, “that it was the wind and not men who took girls!” And she fell into a fantastic reverie in which she told herself a story about a bride who gave herself rapturously to an enamoured wind-spirit. “Oh, I am so glad I am alive!” thought Nancy, and the brave, optimistic girl, as she let the wind seek out her responsive breasts under her black shawl, began adding up in her mind all the good aspects of her life. She was always doing this. She found it an excellent antidote to all that she suffered from in her husband—that plump, placid baby with eyes of insane avarice—and it always came back to the same thing, to the one grand privilege she had, that of having been born in Glastonbury! Her employment at Miss Crow's, where she was now aided by another distant relative of Tossie's, a certain Daisy Stickles, was a constant delight to her. The walk alone, through the heart of the town and past St. Benignus' churchyard, was a solid pleasure; and there were times, especially after her work was done and she was returning in the evening, that she could have started skipping down the narrow Benedict Street pavement. She could even have snatched up a certain ragged little boy she was always meeting down there and hugged him to her heart and danced him up and down and made him cry with surprise and offended dignity, and all from a delight in life that, as it poured through her sometimes, seemed to know no bounds. Certain ways of her husband's—certain mean little physical peculiarities, and Nancy was not by nature at all fastidious —made her feel sometimes as if she could not go on living with him. But she had devised all manner of devices to deal with these nasty v:ays and she never felt hopelessly caught, because she was always telling herself stories of running away from him.

Harry Stickles certainly did possess quite a number of peculiarities which would have been nerve-racking to anv less well-constituted girl. These nasty little ways were made worse by the man's preposterous and incredible conceit. But Xanev had been given by Nature one supreme gift—wherein only one other person in Glastonbury rivalled her, and that was John Crow— the gift of forgetting. Harry could do something at one minute that offended her to the quick, something that so scraped, jarred, and raked her nerves that she could have rushed to the window and flung into the road one of those big coloured receptacles, red and green, that mark a chemist's shop; and yet, three mimites later, as she sat sewing in her parlour window, what she called her “fancies” would begin as deliciously as ever! Nancy's fancies were simply her sudden recollection of certain moments of intense realisation of life as they had occurred several years ago. They were nothing more than the look of a particular wall, of a particular tract of hedge, of a particular piece of road, of a certain hay-wagon on a certain hillside, of a particular pond with ducks swimming on it and a red cow stepping very slowly through the mud, of a load of seaweed being pulled up from the beach by struggling horses, of the stone bridge crossing the Yeo at Ilchester, of a little toll-pike at Lodmore that seemed to be made up, as she had seen it from the top of a bus beyond Weymouth once, of nothing but whitewashed stones and tarred planks and tall brackish grasses and clouds of white dust. Nancy could never tell which of her fancies would rise up next like a fish, making a circle of delicious ripples round it, from the depths of her mind, nor did she know whether these mental pictures stored up in her brain were limited in number, and whether, at a certain point, they would begin recurring all over again, or whether they were inexhaustible and need never repeat themselves.

But while Nancy and Elphin kept their vigil, what dreams there were in Glastonbury! Dreams without any beginning, as they were without any end. For who ever began a dream? People always find themselves immersed in the middle of some dream or other. The essence of sleep does not lie in dreaming; it lies in a certain dying to the surface life and sinking down into the life under the surface, where the other life—healing and refreshing—exists like an immortal tide of fresh water flowing beneath the salt water of a turbid sea. It is sufficient to remember the lovely and mysterious feeling of falling asleep compared with the crude, raw, iron spikes of the unpleasant things that happen in dreams to realise the difference. Between the process of going to sleep and the process of dreaming exists a great gulf. They seem to belong to different categories of being. But, however this may be, the fact remains that upon certain nights in the year—when the tide at Burnham begins to rise with a weird persistence—the sleep of Glastonbury is a troubled one. The sturdy northeastern invaders—the ancestors of Philip and John—beat back more than Mr. Evans5 people when they swept the Celts into South Wales. They beat back with them their thaumaturgic demigods, the Living Corpse, for instance, of Uther Pendragon, the mysterious Urien, King of yr Echwyd, the Land of Glamour and Illusion, the Land whose vapours are always livid blue, that mystic colour named by the bards gorlassar, and Arawn, King of Annwn, they beat back, together with those weird protectors of the heathen Grail, the Fisher King Petchere and the Maimed King Pelles. All these Beings, so many of whom seem to recede and vanish away even as they are named among us, like creatures of a blundered incantation, had the ancestors of Philip and John and the ancestors of Dave driven back westward. And along with Mr. Evans' people, and their dark chthonian gods, these healthy-minded invaders had driven back the very dreams of these Cymric and Brythonic tribes.