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Dave Spear was so hustled by all these people that he was driven backward across the room till he was standing close to the table at which Mr. Evans and Finn Toller were seated. He opened his mouth with a gasp of astonishment at seeing Mr. Evans and was on the point of addressing him when a plumber who lived in a little house by the edge of the river and suffered from asthma seized him roughly by the wrist.

“Us be going to keep 'ee wi' us, now us has got 'ee, Mr. Spear,” muttered this man, in a hoarse, unpleasant voice—he had evidently been drinking heavily and had reached the quarrelsome stage.

“Let me go! What do you mean by touching me?” cried the indignant Dave. “You don't know what you are talking about. None of you do. No, no; none of you do. You are all thinking only of yourselves. You're all thinking only of getting more money for yourselves—you're all just as bad as Philip Crow.”

Things began to look nasty after this bold defiance.

“Knock him on the head!” cried one voice. “Tie 'im up and gie 'em summat to remember us by!” cried a second. “Where be you come from, thee wone self?” yelled a voice from the back of the room, “that's what us wants to know! You baint a Glas-tonbury man, and us 'ud like to know what you 6e!” So it had come at last. He who had no thought in his mind but to lift up humanity, now saw humanity as it is and was hated, spurned, rejected by it.

He was standing close to the round table by the wall where Evans and Codfin were drowsing over their empty glasses. Here he swung round with his hands deep in his pockets.

“Comrades!” he began in a clear voice.

The uproar stopped, as such turbulence will sometimes, under the spell of a professional speech.

“I don't think you realise, Comrades, how difficult it is to give you back what your bourgeois slave-drivers have stolen from you. You can't get it back for yourselves, because you are disorganised and they are organised, because you are without leaders and they have trained leaders. The only way things can be changed from top to bottom is by a dictatorship that represents you. Mr. Geard your Mayor------” he was interrupted by shouts

at this point: “He's all right. Bloody Johnny's no bleedin' politician. Three cheers for good old Johnny Geard!”—but he went steadily and quietly on: “Mr. Geard, your Mayor—and I'm glad you do justice to him—was elected by your town council; and it is Mr. Geard who has appointed Comrade Robinson and Comrade Trent and myself to act with him in obtaining for you by legal means—for the council has bought up the leases that belong to Lord P.—what Mr. Crow and his shareholders have been keeping from------” here again he was interrupted. Loud shouts arose, “We know all about Lord P. Lord P. be feared to show his ugly phyz in Glast'n! Lord P. can't sell what isn't his'n to sell! Go back to Lord P. thee own self, and tell the old blighter we'll knock his bleedin' head off and thee's too!”—but once more Dave struggled to go on quietly with his speech.

“By legal means it is, Comrades, that we, your representatives in this town, are now trying, with your assistance and by your help, to start an experiment that has never yet been------”

“Shut yer bleedin' jaw! Who be you, we'd like to know, that you should rule over us?”

Violent hands were now laid upon him and .clenched hands were raised to strike him. The uproar rose again from every part of the room. Something leapt up within Dave then and he lost all his calm self-possession. His ruddy cheeks went white. He struggled with the men. He flung off the hands that had begun clutching at him in the midst of that smoke-obscured confusion. ¦ • Like* a normal waking-sound caught through the anguish of an insane dream he heard the feeble voice of Mrs. Cantle calling for her husband. “Dickery! Dickery!” Like a sardonic drum the refrain beat upon his ears:

“Dickery, dickery, dock—/ The mouse ran up the clock!”

He pulled out an empty chair from under the little round table at which Mr. Evans and Mr. Toller sat and scrambled up upon it. From this position he cried aloud in a tone so vibrant and so commanding that it brought the room once more to a dead hush.

“Silence!”

“Dickery! Dickery!” echoed the voice of Mrs. Cantle, now reaching that room from some remote place in the rear of the house.

"Oh, brothers, my brothers, you must hear me, even though you kill me afterward. You ask who I am? I'll tell you who I am! I am the voice of the Future. I am the voice of what is to come when we are all dead. You talk of your rights; the rights of Glastonbury? Brothers, my brothers! In that Future there'll be no more rights. In that Future there'll be no more Glaston-burys against Rome, or English against Russia, or West against East. In that Future there'll be only the human race, sprung from the earth, returning to the earth, loving the earth. In the Future none of us, none, I say none, will want to possess this or possess that! We shall struggle then for one thing alone, fight for one advantage alone, the right to labour for a victory of life over want, over disease, over cruelty, over malice, over wicked, stupid ignorance. Brothers, brothers! Don't let these Christians say that we who break up their altars and close their churches only do it for greed. We do it for the Future. We are killing God, the old God, we are turning from magic and miracles, those old, outworn, selfish things, but it is for more Life we're doing it. Oh, can't you feel it, brothers? We all have the same heart, below our greeds and our angers and our envies; the same heart, the same heart. We're all equal before the great spirit of life. Oh, look into your deep hearts, brothers, and feel it. It is the Truth! At this moment, here in this place, we are all one. I am you and you are me! We're all the same, old and young, men and women, it's .one heart we have in us. Here! you can take me. I'll come down in a minute and you can tear me to bits; but you'll be only tearing yourselves! There's something in-us that's the same, that belongs to us all; and I'll tell you what it is. It's the Future being born in us—It's the Future tearing us, breaking us, bruising us so that it may be born. Brothers, brothers! Even while you kill me I'll be the same as you are; no different! The same heart I'll be. For I am Life and you are Life. Life is our child, our precious child, that we're all perishing for, that we are being torn to bits for. But in the Future it will know what we did. In the Future it will say: 'They took their happiness and tore it to bits for me. They were the tortured Creators; and I,—I am their offspring.' The same heart in us all, brothers, and this heart cries, 'Drop all this furious fighting for your own hands! Slip aside from it, escape from it, give it up, let it go, melt into the calm, cool, universal air!' Brothers! Don't 'ee go on with this eternal, *I # . . I ... I ... I!' Let the heart in you speak, let it be felt; for it is always therel Slip oat of this hard, tight knot, this old evil knot, this old grasping, greedy knot, slip out of it-and be free..

“The Life in us, in them, in Glastonbury, in Rome, in Jerusalem, in India, in America, in' China, is the same heart! Brothers!' Can't you feel it? Let it melt that stone, that old, hard, wicked stone, that stone which is Christ's grave. Let it melt it,kbe it Arthur's or Caesar's, so that we can all flow into one, one Sea, one Flood, one great calm . . .

He did really burst now into a flood of weeping. The tears— big, child's tears—poured down his face. They poured down his face while his face under their stream remained unmoved, the mouth quiet and stern, the features fixed and rigid, the weeping eyes fixed upon some remote spot in space.

For a moment, while he stood there like that, crying in dead silence, crying as if his round boy's head were made of marble and were a figure in a fountain, Mr. Evans slowly lifted up his bowed forehead, with its great hooked nose, and stared at Dave's muddy trouser-bottoms. What Mr. Evans felt now was, “I must go through with this, though I get no pleasure from it.” The curious thing, in the mind of this slave of the iron bar, was that it was the iron bar itself that now excited in him this relentless, pleasureless necessity to go on. What it was that sank down under the iron bar, a man, an ox, a sheep, a pig, mattered little to Mr. Evans. That it was his old acquaintance John, picked up at Stonehenge, who was the destined victim, hardly reached his intelligence. Nor did he think of the victim as even destined to be killed. It was not that at all! Oh, it was something very different from that. It was an anonymous action too. That was the whole point! “The Unpardonable Sin,” like all other extreme forms of vice, was totally impersonal. It was motiveless—except for its own single urge—and it was surrounded by a vacuum of anonymity.

If these were Mr. Evans' thoughts as the young Communist closed his appeal by this fit of passionate tears, the thoughts of the crowd who had listened to him were totally submerged in a spellbound fit of stupefied bewilderment. The room remained absolutely hushed, no one lifted a finger to meddle with what he chose to do now.

He stepped down slowly from the chair to the floor. He was in a trance. That is how it felt to himself and that is how it looked to the crowd in the room—a trance and a complete for-getfulness of where he was.

Vaguely and with short shuffling steps, more like those of a convalescent than a somnambulist, he went to the street door, opened it, and just as he was, with an overcoat on, but without hat or stick, walked off towards Street Road. He felt at that moment a strong desire to look into the sympathetic and yet non-human eyes of the head of the Glastonbury commune. He felt purged, relaxed, reduced to an almost feminine softness, and he longed for the sympathy of Mr. Geard as a young girl might have done.

When Mr. Evans awoke from the drowsiness caused by Our Special he no longer perceived in front of him, mounted upon a chair, a pair of grey, ready-made trousers, and in his sudden awakening he leaned towards his nodding companion.

“When had I better meet you up there?” he said.

Finn Toller only let his straggling beard sink still lower over the table- Mr. Evans grew irritable and shook him violently, gripping the lean man's shambly shoulder unnecessarily hard with his bony fingers. Not so very many people in Glastonbury had fallen gently upon sleep that forenoon,—upon sleep softer than the mosses of Maidencroft Lane, tenderer than the blue vapours of Wick Wood—but among these fortunate ones there were certainly only two, Mr. Toller and Owen Evans, whose thoughts, as they gave way to slumber, had run upon murder.

“When . . . had I . . . better . . . meet you . . . up there?” It was not Mr. Evans who spoke these words. It was a little forked-tongued worm-snake. This worm-snake was jerking and curving and cresting and lifting a head that kept changing colour like a salamander; and it was doing all this inside a human automaton—dead as a corpse—the carcass of what used to be Mr. Evans! Whatever this worm-snake—which kept emitting a poisonous froth, like a snail that has been wounded—ordered this corpse-man, this homo mortuus, to do, the corpse-man obeyed. To the excited worm-snake it was a swooning, gasping, fainting ecstasy to think of that iron bar. There was a quivering, dissolving melting sweetness connected with it. The iron bar and the life it was going to blot out were altogether detached from ordinary experience. It was not John Crow who was going to perish. It was simply the man under the bar. The corpselike executioner who obeyed the worm was the galvanized body of the pedantic and highly strung Mr. Evans, who, under normal conditions, could not hurt a daddy-long-legs. Once, when he was very young and seized by a sadistic frenzy—and it is quite possible that the whole thing started from his father's forcing his mother to let him enjoy her long after the child's conception had begun—he had killed something with a piece of iron. After that the little Owen would frantically turn over the pages of all his children's books to find pictures of creatures being killed, especially killed by heavily crushing instruments. It had to be a thing of iron and it had to come crashing down, smashing everything, smashing skull and vertebrae together, or the performance, demanded with such a swooning, trembling, fainting orgasm by the worm-snake, would not be a master one! Mr. Evans' tone as he said, “Meet you up there” was like the tone of some Asmo-deus whispering to some Baphomet.

“Meet you up there,” echoed the sticky surface of their table. “Meet you up there,” echoed the dregs of Our Special. “Meet you up there,” echoed a little bit of dried-up dog's dung which had been detached from one of the thick-soled boots of Dave Spear and left behind on the chair.

1 To the worm-snake inside what was once Mr. Evans this harmless sentence “Meet you up there” partook of the nature of an overpowering sexual temptation. The actual sound of the brief syllables . . . “meet . . . up . . . there” was like an arotic provocation of a kind thai none could bear and not yield. The fangs of the worm-snake dripped with a frothy milk. In mounted and erected expectancy, in blunt-nosed expectancy, in forked-tongucd expectancy, it danced a lust-dance of delirious joy when it found that it could make this slave-corpse, this dead soul, this rex mortuas, that had been a human being, utter these simple words!