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“Yer ain't fit to talk to the Missus nor to her friends!” reiterated Solly, “Yer ain't fit for naught but workus, and to workus ye'll come, yer old rum-drinker, yer old deck-swabbler!”

“Stand straight and answer me at once, Finn Toller,” exclaimed the angry landlady. “What were you doing in our yard? Come, come, now. No nonsense! I say, what were you doing there, Finn Toller? Speak up! Can't you understand plain English?” -

“I dunno what to say to 'ee, Missus,” muttered the helpless ruffian, "but I do know well in me mind that 'tis Mr. Robinson here what I've 'a come for to see ... for ... to see . . . for . . . to . . .w At this point, so potent was the Bristol rum to which Solly Lew had been rashly treating this fish from the bottom of the Glastonbury Pond, that, disregarding the landlady's indignation the wretch actually began murmuring a lewd catch that had been formerly popular in Bove Town and Beckery.

" 'I've a whisper for you, in your mare's-tail-ear*; Pillicock crowed to Kate, 'I've a whisper for you, me Coney dear,

Your man be away over Hornblotton Mere And I be at your gate.'"

Mr. Finn Toller in his natural condition was no engaging sight. In his present state he was a revolting object. He was a sandy-haired individual with a loose, straggly, pale-coloured beard. He gave the impression of being completely devoid of both eyebrows and eyelashes, so bleached and whitish in his case were these normal appendages to the human countenance. His mouth was always open and always slobbering, but although his whole expression was furtive and dodging, his teeth were large and strong and wolfish. Mr. Toller looked, in fact, like a man weak to the verge of imbecility who had been ironically endowed with the teeth of a strong beast of prey.

Red Robinson did not at all relish the look of tilings as this repulsive hang-dog creature shuffled now towards him and fixed upon him a look of revolting1 confederacy, a look that seemed to say: “Here I am, Mr. Robinson! You've called me up and here I am!5' The truth was that at the end of one of his most eloquent revolutionary speeches to the Glastonbury Comrades, Mr. Toller had sneaked up to Red and compelled him to write his name down, in the book they kept, as available for any activities required—”and the dirtier the better!“ Mr. Toller had added, as he slobbered over the table. Red had got into trouble with the other Comrades for allowing the man to write his name down in their book. They told him that it was enough for him if the filthiest beggar swore he-would spit in the road when Mr. Crow passed by! ”That's enough to haul him into the party, eh?" they said. Nor was their sarcasm unjustified. Red took no interest at all in keeping up the quality or integrity of the Comrades. What he was after, as Finn Toller with his wolfish instinct had very quickly detected, were recruits, not to Marxianism, but to 'ate.

“My husband will be back in a minute,” said the landlady sternly, “and you remember how he got rid of you the other night when you were hanging about so late!”

“What I've got ... to say, Missus, be for Mr. Robinson's ear alone. Please allow me, Missus, for all that us poor folks have got left”—he stopped and threw a very sinister leer at Red— “be what be put in our minds by they as be book-larned and glib of tongue, like this clever Mister here, who is foreman of his Worship's. Us poor dogs hasn't got anything left in the world, us hasn't, except they nice, little thoughties, they pretty thougkties, what clever ones, like Mister here, do put into we.” It was clear that the threat of the landlord^ return had sobered “Codfin,” as his neighbors called him, quite a good deal. He seemed able to walk by himself now, for he shook away Solly Lew's supporting arm. His pale, lidless, blue eyes began peering about, like the eyes of a maggot dislodged from its native habitation and seeking a refuge. “If Mr. Robinson will come in here with me,” he said now, moving towards the pleasant parlour where Red and Sally had been enjoying themselves, “I won't make no trouble for no one; but if Mister here, what be so clever and so book-larned, won't let I speak to he, I'll raise such a trouble that you'll have to call for the police.”

“What impudence is this?” cried the landlady. “You wTait till my husband comes back. He'll show you whether he has to call for the police to give you the-------” But to the good woman's complete amazement Red himself intervened at this point.

“High'd better 'ear what 'ee 'as to sigh,” he said. “ Tis no good disturbing the plice when 'ee says 'ee'll go quiet as a lamb of 'is own self, if I tike 'im in there for a jiffy. That's so, ain't it, Codfin?”

Mr. Toller, apparently completely sobered now, bowed to the landlady, made a grimace at Solly Lew, and followed his “clever one” into the parlour where Red shut the door. It would be difficult to explain the subtle cause of Mr. Robinson's submission to this demand of Mr. Toller to speak with, him, but undoubtedly, mingled with other things, there had sprung up, the very second these two men met, that curious psychic /ear, of which mention has already been made in regard to Lord P.'s attitude to his bastard. Glastonbury was, if the real truth were revealed, just as every small town is, crowded with queer, morbid and even humorous instances of this irrational terror of one personality for another. These fear-links can be grotesquely joined up in a spiritual mathematical and nervous pattern of psychic subordination.

Philip Crow himself had been afraid—in this particular way —of Tom Barter. Indeed these mysterious fear-links brought together—in an ascending and descending scale of fear—the great Lord P. and the gentleman called Codfin. For Lord P. was afraid of Zoyland. Zoyland was afraid of Philip. Philip— though this latter did not know it—was afraid of Barter. Barter was afraid of Red, While Red—and here we reach the convoluted secret as to why he was at this very moment so carefully closing the parlour door—was afraid of Mr. Toller.

They were an interesting and curious pair as they stood facing each other now by that parlour fireplace. Red was determined not to offer Codfin a drink or to ask him to sit down. Mr. Toller's watery blue eyes, blotched, freckly face and tow-coloured beard kept turning, with a sort of feeble insistence, like that of a great, dazed, malignant cockchafer, towards the half-empty bottle.

“What is it?” said Red. “What do you want? Tell me quickly, for he'll be back in a minute. He's only taking Miss Jones a bit of the way home.” There was no earthly reason why Red should have informed Codfin that the landlord of St. Michael's was taking Miss Jones anywhere! This excessive, hurried, eager confidence, expressed in a cross and peevish tone, was a beautiful example of psychic link-fear, working in accordance with its nature.

After shutting the door Red walked to the fireplace, leaving Finn Toller standing in the middle of tho room. Red glanced at the man hurriedly and then, quite as hurriedly, turned his face away. From the straggly beard, the watery eyes, the ragged clothes, there emanated something that Red found extremely perturbing. It was one of those moments when the pre-birth stirrings of a gbaslly idea are huddled and swaddled in an ominous silence. Certain thoughts,, that have been long nurtured in deep half-conscious brooding, manifest themselves, when they finally emerge into the light, with a horrid tangibility that is like the impact of something physically shocking. And into this warm, firelit room, full of the aura of a young feminine body that has been so assiduously courted and caressed that its sweet essence pervades the air, there now projected itself a presence that was monstrous, revolting, intolerable.

From each particular hair of Mr. Toller's beard this presence emanated. From the adam'f apple in his bare, dirty neck, from the blood-stained rims of his watery eyes, from the vellowish fluff, growing like fungus on cheese from the hack of his hands, from a certain beyond-the-pale look of his naked, shirtless wrist-bones, this presence grew and grew and grew in that closed room. It sprang from Toller; but it was distinct from Toller. It seemed to find in the fragrance of the courted body of Sally Jones an air favourable to its monstrous expansion.

Red could not reasonably, normally, have divined the nature of this horrid thought, of this newly born abortion from the broodings of Mr. Toller's brain. There must have been within him some protoplasmic response to it, created by the germinating poisons of his 'ate, of which he himself was unconscious. Violence must have called to violence, like deep calling to deep, between what was unconscious in the one and conscious in the other. Once more he glanced furtively, quickly, at the man standing by the table, and this time their eyes met.

“ 'Twas your cleverness what put it first into me head.” Had Mr. Toller uttered those words or had he thought those words himself? Red felt a peculiar and ghastly unreality stealing over him. The gin-bottle looked unreal. The carpet looked unreal. The low wicker-chair with its flowered cushions where he had so recently held Sally on his lap looked most unreal of all. “What's that you're sighing?” His own words seemed unreal now as soon as they left his mouth.

UA bloated capitalist, like 'im, what do hexploit us poor dawgs, ought to lickidated.“ It was Mr. Toller undoubtedly who was saying that; and Red recognized his own oratorical expression, ”liquidated," the meaning of which, for the word had reached him from Bristol, had always puzzled him—though this had not prevented him from using it in his orations.

“A hairy-stow-crat like he be oughter be lickidated!” repeated Mr. Toller; and Red's discomfort was augmented by the manner in which the man's mouth dribbled as the words left Ms throat.

''You're drunk . . . that's what you are . . . too drunk to know your own nime . . . and if I weren't hunwillin' to disturb this quiet 'ouse------"

“Lickidated be to tap on's bloody head, I tell ”e** . . . tap on's head, till's bloody brains be out!"

It was not the words alone, it was a certain galvanic twitch that accompanied them in Mr. Toller's hands, that made Red begin now to feel sick in the pit of his stomach. He suddenly found himself becoming fascinated by Mr. Toller's hands. As he looked at these hands he noticed that they were not only short and stubby hands, but—and this was quite unlike most stubby hands—they were hands that tapered at the fingertips and could bend backwards. How patient, harmless, reassuring, most human hands are! But Red realised now that Mr. Toller's hands were much more disturbing than any expression in the features of his face.

In all minds there are abominable -thoughts. We are all potential murderers. But something—some feeling, some motion of the will, some scruple, some principle—intervenes, and we cannot act what we think! But there was a look about Mr. Toller's hands that seemed like 'the cry of murder in the night, like the underside of bridges, like shrubberies in public parks, like tin-roofed sheds near madhouses, like gasworks beside foul canals, something that unravelled the skein, that broke up the fundamental necessity and substituted a monstrous terrifying chaos . . . deep, black holes . . . dangling ropes . . . the desperate dilemma of the indestructible corpse . . . the horror of the secret held by one alone . . .

R,ed now began to see those hands of Codfin at the throat of life, at the throat of that life which meant the sweet body of Sally Jones, the carved bishop's chair in his mother's kitchen, the liver-and-baco-n in his mother's frying-pan not to speak of his nice, new foreman's clothes! It was part of life that there should be persons like Codfin going harmlessly about . . . persons that a workingman foreman could pass by, but that the gentry—like that John Crow who had the office in the station yard—were bound in honour to treat to drinks. And those hands were now to be raised against life . . . the life of a living man! Those hands were tools of “liquidation.” No more liver-and-bacon, no more bottles of gin, no more girls on laps, when those hands were lifted up. Unreal! That's what this moment was, and unreal in the way that makes a person feel sick. That straggly beard and slobbering mouth were talking of “lickidation”; but they were thinking of murder. The blood began to leave Red's cheeks. Poor people might be hungry, sick people might be sick, weak peQple might have to carry burdens—but they were all alivel And even death, when it came in the natural course of things, had a secret inevitable comfortableness about it! You could talk of such death with a girl on your lap. But murder— that was a different thing . . .

“I couldn't do it with a knife, Mister.” The words sank down into the fireplace at which Red was now staring. Red allowed them to sink, like eight black marbles thrown by a wicked child into a particularly red hole.

“I don't know what you're talking about, Toller,” he whispered in a low voice.

But the other went on: “Nor with a bullet, Mister, for I be feared o' they little pop-guns.” Sharply, after the other eight marbles, went these thirteen simple words, all of them into the same red hole. “One of they iron bars 'ud do to do't with, what his workmen do leave about, up alongside o' Wookey.” As he spoke, the man made a feeble and fluctuating movement of his whole person towards the table, on which stood the half-empty bottle of gin, a decanter of water, and a plate of gingerbreads.

Red, as his eyes followed him, remembered with miserable vividness how Sally and he had played a merry London board-school game with those gingerbreads, having a racing match together to see how many they could swallow while the little minute hand of his watch went round the circle.

“Toller!” he rapped out. “What, in 'oly 'ell, are you talking about?”

The individual known as Codfin patted the stopper of the bottle with the palm of one of his hands. Then he threw a long, silent, sidelong glance at Red out of his lidless and lachrymose blue eyes. He said slowly: “Don't 'ee go and get crusty wi' I, Mister. I baint a clever one like you be, but I can look up wondrous long words in dick-shone-ary, I can. They do know I well in public library. A person don't have to write no slip o' paper for to take dick-shone-ary down from shelf!”

“Toller!” snapped Red again. “What in 'old 'arry's name are yer mumbling about?”

“Tirry-aniseed be the word you spoke up, so free and strong, when you made thik girt speech about lickidation, Mister. And 'twere wondrous to I, when I did see thik same girt word writ down in dick-shone-ary! Tirry-aniseed were thik long word, and it do mean a sweet and savoury killing of he that lives on poor men's sweat.”