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They were the voices of a man and a boy; and they were amusing themselves by hooting like screech-owls. Apparently some real nocturnal bird of the species they were imitating was following them in the darkness; for Mr. Evans could hear at intervals a cry that was like an echo of the noises that these pedestrians were making, following them at no considerable distance.

He got up hurriedly from his damp seat and threw the turnip away. In its fall the insect feeding upon its surface was brushed off; which meant the death that very night of that microscopic parasite. The First Cause alone continued its unspeakable contemplation; that motion of evil in the ultimate abyss, against which all the good that is in mankind is forever struggling.

Mr. Evans advanced up the lane to meet the newcomers. This he did because he had the peculiarity of always having a nervous dread of people overtaking* him in the dark; and yet he felt reluctant to hurry off home! He found himself even now possessed of a morbid fear of their stumbling upon him unwarned; so,—although with something of an effort—he forced himself to cry out “Hullo there!” in an almost menacing voice.

“Good evening, Mr. Evans!” came the reply out of the darkness; and he found himself shaking hands with Sam Dekker.

“Do you know Elphin Cantle?” said Sam.

And the boy, coming sulkily forward, shook hands too.

“I had an idea we'd meet someone we knew if we came back this way,” Sam went on. “Elphin and I have been putting up wild ducks at Decoy Pool and Meare Pool; and we came back by Crannel Moor instead of by the Godney Road. We had our supper at Upper Godney. They gave us half a small pike that Mr. Merry had caught yesterday, when he was over there; in that pond at Lower Crannel. It tasted good, didn't it, Elphin, served with fried parsnips and parsley?”

Mr. Evans peered through the darkness into the boy's face. The name Elphin made him think of Gwydion-Garanhir and of Taliessin.

“I'd have liked to ask you in,” he remarked, “but Mrs. Evans may be in bed. What do you make the time, Mr. Dekker?”

Sam looked at his watch and announced that it was after nine.

“You brought back that Saint Augustine I lent you in the spring so faithfully, that you're always welcome to any books you wrant to take from the shop.”

Sam thanked him and then became silent. The two men stood awkwardly side by side; while Elphin, moving to the edge of the fence, set up his owl cry again.

“Fll walk back with you, if I may. as far as my house,'” said Mr. Evans.

But for some reason—perhaps because the boy Elphin was so occupied with the owls—they neither of them made any move to start forward.

“Your voice sounded just now as if it were bothered by something, Mr. Evans,” said Sam at last after an embarrassing pause.

It was in his instinctive recognition of all animals" moods ihat this patient naturalist, transformed now into the latest Glaston-bury saint, exploited his shrewdest wisdom.

“Have you a cigarette, Dekker?” asked Mr. Evans.

Sam gave him one and struck a match. This ancient Promethean act brought the two men together as nothing else could have done just then. On a dark, rainy night even the flicker of a match-flame has a magical power; and the little circle of light extending outward from Sam's concave fingers illuminated not only Mr. Evans' hooked nose, as he bent towards it, not only Sam's own retreating chin, but the frayed edges of a small duodecimo that the latter carried in his rough tweed-smelling jacket pocket.

“What's your book?” enquired the antiquary with professional curiosity.

“Only a St. John's Gospel,” answered Sam nervously, shoving the volume down further into its place, and pulling his pocket-flap over it, to hide it.

“The Mayor's favourite book,” remarked Mr. Evans. “He says it's the whole Bible of his new religion.”

“Too-whit! Too-who! Too-whit! Too-who!” cried Elphin Gantle from the fence. “Listen, Evans!”

Sam blurted out the words hurriedly; and it was with a trembling hand that he lit a cigarette for himself now from the one which the other was smoking.

“I've been thinking lately, Evans, that our Glastonbury Christ is like Osiris. They've cut him into fragments; and out of each fragment they've made a different Person. I don't care much for this Fourth Gospel. That's why I read it.”

Mr. Evans nodded his complete and entire understanding of such a motive.

“My Christ's utterly different from Geard's,” Sam said, "and different from my father's. My Christ's like Lucifer—only he's not evil ... at least not what I call evil. But He's the enemy of God. That is, He's the enemy of Creation! He's always struggling against Life, as we know it . . . this curst, cruel self-assertion . . . this pricking up of fins, this prodding with horns . . . this opening of mouths . . . this clutching, this ravishing, this snatching, this possessing'9

“Too-whil! Too-who! Too-whit! Too-who!” came Elphin's voice. The lad was on the other side of the fence now.

Mr. Evans cast his eyes round him. The half-moon was dipping, diving, rearing, tumbling, toppling, under that strong, wet, westerly wind. Some of the clouds closest to it took on every now and then, a momentary yellowness, sickly and unearthly, but most of them were of the colour of cold steel. Mr. Evans snuffed the air like one of the seals of Proteus. He thought he could detect the smell of seaweed on the wind.

“The tide must be high tonight at the Burnham mud-flats,” he thought to himself. “They must be afraid of the sluices breaking over there.”

“Too-whit! Too-who! Too-whit! Too-who!” Elphin and his attendant owl were already across the sloping pasture in the direction of Maidencroft Lane.

Mr. Evans took off his bowler hat, and bending forward tapped Sam on the shoulder with it.

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?” he said. “You're the son of a priest, aren't you? Can't you say to the Demon: 'Come out of him?'”

There was a moment's pause; only broken by the little monotonous taps—like a man knocking off water-drops against a doorpost—of Mr. Evans' hat upon Sam's shoulder.

“There! I was only joking!” cried the Welshman at last. “I expect you don't believe in miracles, any more than you believe in the Fourth Gospel. You're listening to that boy . . . that's all you're doing! You're thinking of owls, as those rascals that came to my house just now were thinking of leases and communes! It makes me laugh, the way you all go on . . . while all the time . . . the Harrying of Annwn ...”

Here the man's face distorted itself, not with the coming on of that queer, planetary laughing-fit, which had seized him in the room, but with a similar feeling of isolation.

“You don't even know what Annwn is!” he murmured.

Then with a deep sigh, he replaced his hat on his head.

"Complete is the captivity of Gwair in Caer SidiT he groaned inarticulately, buttoning a loosened button of his tight-fitting overcoat.

"Elphin! Hullo, Elphin! I'm going onP Sam's voice rang out across the fields in the direction of Maidencroft Lane.

“No, I don't believe in miracles,” he said gravely, “any more than Christ did. What He did was simply to use His will to kill His will.”

“Too-whit! Too-who!” Elphin was at the fence again now and his attendant bird of the darkness had apparently left him.

Mr. Evans muttered something in Welsh. The thought that came into his heart was a thought of sick terror.

“This man's Christ is a madman like I am. His will holds the rod over His will. He's all strain and torment. It's with torment He drives out torment! I ought never to have spoken to this man.”

Elphin joined them now and they all three moved down Edmund's Hill Lane. Not a word did any of them speak till they turned into Wells Old Road; but all the while, just eluding his conscious mind, there hovered about Mr. Evans' soul the sinister impact of that dialogue he had not heard.

"Will thik iron bar what you knows of make my young man feel before he dies?'9

Even before they reached Number Five of Wells Old Road, or Old Wells Road—for both designations are in local use—Mr. Evans could see a light in Cordelia's bedroom. At his gate he hesitated whether to bid his companions good-bye or to accompany them a step further. An instinct in him difficult to analyse— perhaps a desire to test to the dregs the spiritual magic of this disciple of a non-miraculous Christ—made him decide to go on with them for a little way.

“I'll turn back in Bove Town,” he said to himself. Sam seemed surprised, and Elphin seemed definitely cross, that they had not been able to get rid of this disturbing intruder even when they passed his own gate.

Once again a dead silence fell upon all three as they turned into Bove Town and walked along the well-worn flagstones of the raised path under the stone wall leading to High Street.

Sam, it turned out, had to go into St. John's Church to make the necessary preparations, which his father usually made for himself, for the morning's Mass.

Elphin Cantle hoped against hope—indeed he actually prayed in his heart—that Mr. Evans would see fit to say good-bye to them at the entrance to the churchyard. The boy repeated under his breath, as they approached the great church tower, a sort of ritualistic incantation:

“This bloke ought to go home! Ought to go home; ought to go home! This bloke ought to go home; when St. John's clock strikes the hour!”

What was Elphin's consternation when this prayer of his was not only not answered, but the extreme opposite of it was brought to pass!

“Good-night, Elphin!” said Sam when they reached the lamp, swinging from the arch above the entrance. “We mustn't take you any further out of your way.”

The boy stared aghast, his feelings smitten through and through as if by a catapult.

“But Sir!” he gasped, “but Sir . . . but Mr. Dekker! I allus helps ?ee with they rinsings and rubbings. I be especial good at it; ye said yer wone self, I were!”

“Shake hands with Mr. Evans, Elphin, and run off, there's a good lad. We've had a nice day together; and we'll have some more; but Pm busy now. Run off home to bed, there's a good kid!”

Not a motion did Elphin Cantle make to shake hands with Mr. Evans or indeed to shake hands with Sam. He turned round without a word, without a sign, and taking to his heels ran off at top speed. He dodged between the people on the pavement. He dodged between the vehicles in the street, and making for his room in his stucco tower, as a wounded animal makes for his lair, he never shed a single tear till he threw himself down— coat, cap, muddy boots, just as he was—prone upon his bed and cried like an unhappy girl.

But Mr. Evans, egocentric though he had grown to be. was not one to view a child's tragic discomfiture with equanimity. He felt angry with Sam. Did the fellow think that he couldn't have talked to him before that boy? Well, he certainly wasn't going to talk to him now! The fellow was a prig, a fool, an ass, to send that lad away ... a lad called Elphin too; and he had a curious expression under that lamplight ... a funny face . . , an interesting face!

Such were Mr. Evans' thoughts as he followed Sam into the church.

“I know you'll be pleased to see,” said Sam, “what Father has done to St. Joseph's tomb!”

He led him to the famous, empty sarcophagus—one of the most moving, if not one of the most authentic ossuaries of our planet's history—where the bones of the man who gave up his own tomb to Jesus are reported to have been laid.

Mr. Evans could not see very clearly in the dim lamplight that radiated down the isle what Sam's father had done; but it evidently was no great matter, for the tomb looked exactly as it had looked to him when he had visited it in the early Spring with the man who was now his father-in-law. But if Mr. Evans thought of his father-in-law as he stood tonight by that great scooped-out concavity, his companion had a much more poignant thought; for the image of Nell, as he had talked to her and quarrelled with her here, before the begetting of their child, came with cruel vividness upon him.

“I may never,” Sam forced himself now to say, “have such a good chance to ... to tell you, Evans, wThat I really feel about . . . all these things.”

He leant forward wearily as he spoke, for he was tired and drowsy after his long walk, and he had never felt less clearheaded and less inspired.

“What I feel is this,” he went on, pressing both his hands against the rim of the tomb and bowing his head forward above its dusky emptiness. “I feel that the whole Creation is on the wrong track ... all scrambling for happiness and the satisfaction of the senses. I feel that the only thing to do is to follow Christ in making the will kill the will.”

He lifted his ill-moulded beast-like lineaments and darted a quick nervous glance at the tall, black-coated figure standing aloof with his hands behind his back.

“How like the shirt of Nessus is this curst vice of mine!” thought Mr. Evans, when, to his loathing, he found that the mere distress of this will-killing Christ-lover had begun to cause him a lively mental shiver of a dark sort of pleasure. “The poor devil, the poor devil!” he said to himself. “I must not let myself feel like this!”

Tightly he clasped his long fingers behind his back, squeezing them angrily together so as to suppress his wicked feeling by their discomfort.

“If I let myself feel like this now,” he thought, “I'll be creating an atrocious thought-imp that'll drive him from worse to worse. Down with you! Down with you, you living leprosy! I will wash you off—if it's in my own blood!”

“Don't 'ee see, Evans,” Sam was now murmuring hoarsely, “it's the whole stream of life that's got this possessive instinct, this snatching, scrabbling, scraping, ravishing instinct. What Christ has to do is to deny the whole thing, root and branch! And it's no use saying it's for 'fuller life,' or 'more life,' that He has to do it. It's all poison. It's all one glittering, shining, seething tide of poisonous selfishness! We are all scales, scurf, scab, on the same twisting, cresting dragon of the slime. The tide of life itself is evil. That's the great secret of Christ. And what He's aiming at now—the tortured Anti-God that he is!—is the freezing up of the life stream! Christ doesn't give a damn for morality, Evans! Thais not the point with Him. He's out for something far greater and deeper. He's out for the Beyond-Life! Do you remember what I said to you on Tor Hill, Evans, about His redeeming Matter? I didn't realise then how He redeems Matter. He does it by freezing the life force in it. He knows what the life force is; and he can track it down. He can find it bubbling and seething and horning and pricking and taking and tormenting and triumphing in every direction. And then he touches it wiLh his cross and freezes it up!”