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If any of those invisible Watchers of human psychology in Glastonbury had been overlooking these two just now—the man in the coracle and the man in the water—a lively discussion might have risen among them as to which of the two was the stronger lover of life.

“Begin over again!” This was the cry of the man in the water, with the yellowish scum adhering to his neck and a weft of dead seaweed—the kind that has on it those slippery blown-out pustules that children love to pinch between their fingers—caught in his hair, and the wisp of green sea-gluten twisted into his mustache. And this “Begin again!” was the out-jetting of the inmost essence of his nature. As he formulated this “Begin again!” the image of a steam-tug crossing this swirling flood, with a resolute tick . , . tick . . . tick . . . of its engines, became the image of his recovery in spite of all opposition.

But Bloody Johnny's exultation as he peered into the water to see what was beneath his rivaFs cramped legs was of a very different sort.

“So this is how I shall do it!” he said to himself, with a convulsive chuckle, a chuckle that caused the pit of his stomach to Gutter up and down like sail-cloth on a beach that is held in its place by pebble-stones. “What . . . could . . . be . . . better?”

A huge dark wave of indescribable emotion rose up from a psychic reservoir within him that seemed to reduce all this business of drowning to a mere splash of rain.

“Megan . . . Crummie . . . forgive me ... my treasures! ... I won't be divided from you . . . I'll be nearer you . . . but I must drink it ... the Water ... the Water of • . .”

“Standing on anything under there?” he repeated; but again the muddied hawk-face above that brown tide only twitched wilh the intensity of its thinking and with the pain of its cramped legs.

The eyes of the man in the coracle lifted themselves away from the eyes of the man in the water. Bloody Johnny was always a person of punctilious scrupulousness when it came to eavesdropping; and to watch this face before him just now was eavesdropping of the worst sort.

“He'll change with me,” Geard thought. “But he don't altogether relish the situation!”

By the mere mental motion of having chosen death of his own free will the Mayor fancied he had acquired easily, naturally, inevitably, an advantage so great over this desperate life-clinger that he could afford to treat him like a child. Whether in the eyes of those mysterious Watchers, this fancied advantage of the death-lust over the life-lust could really establish itself as a ma-turer, wiser, superior mood, was a very different question! What is certain is that Bloody Johnny felt himself just then to be like a grown person dealing with a child. And this was something that would have certainly astonished Philip had he realised it.

“Are you standing on anything?”

“I'm astride of her wing,” said the other. “I expect I could find more of her if I cared to, only I don't want to press her down any further than she is.”

“You think of your machine as if she had a soul,” whispered Mr. Geard, slipping down over the side of his little craft into the water.

It may be believed how the coracle of this heavily built magician leapt up out of the flood when relieved of his weight! It soon sank again, however, though not as before, to within a few inches of the row-locks, when Philip, actuated now as much by a fear lest their combined weights should sink the plane as by a desire to save himself from drowning, scrambled, groaning and cursing, for his cramp was cruel, into the empty skiff.

“Don't let go!” he cried as he rowed off. “If you'll only hang on to her she'll hold up till I send someone. If I can get that motor-boat------”

As he turned the boat round a shrill cry from the child on the half-submerged hillock arrested his attention. The sight of this small figure made him think of his little daughter whose whereabouts in this disaster had been constantly in his mind during these agitating hours. “This thing would hold a child all right,” he thought. But the cramp that contracted his legs was so intense that the idea of any delay seemed more than he could bear. “They're in no danger,” he said to himself. “It's Geard who's got to be thought of.” He glanced towards the Mayor's large face and black staring eyes which were a good deal lower in the water than his own had ever been. But those black eyes had evidently not missed this moment of indecision; for they flung a look at him that was like a command. “Best take 'un while 5ee have the chance!” came his thick voice out of the water. Philip's cramp was agonising. His face was contorted with what he endured. Most men would have crumpled up, moaning and helpless. But the Norman will in the man—that will that had ruled England since the Conquest—compelled his arms, though his legs were doubled up under him, to perform the motion of rowing, and of rowing with smooth, powerful, calculated strokes. It only needed a little adroit steering to avoid the mounds that were almost submerged and that might have struck the keel of his craft, and a little hard pulling against a wind that was beginning to ruffle the wTater, to reach the big tumulus upon which were collected these living creatures. They were barely known to Philip Crow; but to many Glastonbury people they would have been absurdly well known; for they were Number One's cow, Betsy, Jackie Jones, and Number One himself.

It was certainly an exciting experience for Jackie Jones when with his slender figure reposing between the cramped feet of Mr. Crow he saw himself being rowed rapidly toward the town, “I'll come back for you,” Philip had explained hurriedly to Abel Twig.

“One of they girt barges, Mister, be the thing I wants,” had been the reply of Number One, “what'U take me wold cow in 'un!”

“Have you seen Nelly Morgan, Jackie?” enquired that young lady's father with a hesitating shyness as well as an acute anxiety, when they were approaching safety.

“Her were out with her Mummy, Mister, picking up Treasure from where it be washed up.”

“Treasure?”

“They things what be washed up, Mister! Us calls 'un Treasure by reason of us being Pirates and Smugglers.”

Mr. Geard, low down in the water now, observed his late coracle flying over the flood propelled by Philip's vigorous strokes. Between two sheds in the outskirts of Paradise it was just possible for the submerged man to catch sight of the top of Glas-tonbury Tor. He had very quickly found that the body of the airplane kept sinking deeper and deeper in the water under his heavy weight. He could just rest on it now with his feet, and that was all. Clenching his teeth he gave it a violent kick. It sank immediately out of his reach. He was now propped up solely upon the wing of the machine; but since he was floating in the water and divested of coat and trousers, a very little support was enough to keep him up. “Well,” he said to himself, “I be the same Johnny Geard as used to see West Drive and Drive Gates and Batemoor and Scotch Firs and Yeovil Road. I can see 'em now as clear as I can see this machine wing in this water I And I be the same what used to follow Father up Park Cover and over to Pitt, and back by Woodhouse Lane. I be the same what Mother used to take to Zunday School, longside o' King's Arms.” He fumbled with his hands along the surface of the wing that supported him.

“Thee be a-drowning, thee be, Johnny Geard, and airplane be a-drowning, s'know! Thee's rung Montacute Bells in thee's time, and airplane have been up so high as a'seed Glaston no bigger nor a waspy's nest.”

The plane's wing that supported him now began to sink still lower in the flood. It sank so low that Mr. Geard's chin was on a level with the water. He gulped down a mouthful; and this mouthful tasted like the cold salt sweat of a corpse. This mouthful gave him the first pang of physical shrinking from what he was doing that he had yet known. This mouthful struck him as not only a forerunner of choking suffocation, but as carrying with it a sensation of atrocious strangeness, of ghastly unnatural-ness, of perfidy, of tJie unallowed-forl He gulped down his second mouthful now; and with the outrage to his whole body that this gulping of salt death brought, the spasm of strangeness shivered through him and hummed in his ears and drummed at his heart. Yes, this was the end.

Bloody Johnny lost. All dark. The bed is deep . . . Where is Megan's head? Gulp—gulp—gulp------He was drinking it fast now; and it was going up his nose too. Yes, it was getting into some cavity between his nose and his mouth and doing something there that had the effect of making him gurgle and gargle and choke and spit. If only this deadly coldness hadn't smelt so vilely I It smelt of vinegar. And this vinegar was getting into his lungs. Not to breathe—when you had to breathe! Not to breathe, but to sink gurgling down; and to see and to touch and to smell and to taste and to become something that gurgled and gargled and gulped!

Sinking, that was what he was doing now, gulping and sinking. That wing had yielded. He had leaned on it with his full weight and it had gone clear down. Nothing to lean upon. Nothing but brown darkness that sank under him and sucked and sucked. He came up to the top now and gasped at the air with heaving in-drawing spasms. Physical necessity had him by the throat like the dripping mouth of a dog, of an enormous brown dog. It was the turn for his face to carry now those blotches of scum and tidal slime upon it! His black eyes were opened preternaturally wide, staring across the water. What he stared at now was Glas-tonbury Tor; and on the top of the Tor was the tower; and the tower was like the handle of an enormous cloudy goblet that grew larger and larger and larger------

But down he went again—Geard of Glastonbury—dying his chosen death by drowning. Yes, it was all at his own volition; but when the final beating and lashing and threshing with the arms began, and the final gurgling and gulping in the throat began, it seemed as if the man's condemned body ran amok and revolted. Bloody Johnny's body danced, in fact, its own private death-dance, in brute defiance of the spirit that had brought it to this pass.

For the last time he came up to the surface. Again his black eyes opened; opened so wide that anyone would have thought their sockets must crack. He was staring frantically at Glastonbury Tor, but what he was seeing up there now will never be known.

The books say that Arthur saw the Grail in five different shapes; and that what the fifth shape was has never been revealed. Perhaps it was this fifth shape now that caused the black demonic eyes of Bloody Johnny to start out of his head. The feet treading water where there was now nothing for them to rest upon; the big white cheeks sinking down, while the water lapped around them, in the same way as it would have lapped round a log that was sinking; the sensual mouth opening wide, using just the same muscles as it did when he was preaching or yawning; the thick lips with the same abandoned relaxation dividing them, as it did when he used to kiss Crummie; the heavy shoulders, the great belly under its soaked flannel shirt, all engulfed, all going down, all with nothing to rest upon.

The little bubbles of brown water that swam so persistently round that open mouth and round those staring eyes, behaved just as they would have done if it had been a waterlogged chamber-pot rather than a living man full of thoughts “that wandered through eternity.” They were in such a hurry, those bubbles, to float over the empty space where his head had been. They could not wait to float freely over that particular space on the surface of the water. There! They had their will now. Nothing remained now but broken brown bubbles going slowly round and round in reduced circles; and in an incredible silence!

But great creative Nature, working her vast death-magic, beyond the magic of any Merlin, brought it about, in her fathomless inhuman compassion, that all suffering, all struggling, all beating with the arms, all frog-action with the legs, subsided, collapsed, ceased, fell upon an unbelievably delicious calm. Nor was Bloody Johnny's mind clouded any more. His body had made its automatic protest. It was now docile- It was now obedient, Geard of Glastonbury's will to die enjoyed at last its premeditated satisfaction*

In calm, inviolable peace Mr. Geard saw his life, saw his death, and saw also that nameless Object, that fragment of the Absolute, about which all his days he had been murmuring. He was now totally free from remorse about Megan and Crummie. The ruthless element in his leaving them, purely for his own satisfaction, seemed to him justified in these last moments. He was at peace, too, about what should happen in the future to his new Religion. It was as if he had ceased to belong to our world of looking-glass pantomime wherein we are driven to worship we know not what; and had slipped down among the gods and taken his place among those who cast their own mysterious reflections in the Glastonbury of our bewilderment.

The brown flood that drowned him—bitter and cold from the Arctic tides of the far Atlantic—stirred up in his consciousness at the last all those buried layers in his nature that were so much greater than his speech, than his theories, than his achievements. In his dying moments, Geard of Glastonbury did actually pass, consciously and peacefully, into those natural, elements that he had always treated with a certain careless and unaesthetic aplomb.

He had never been an artistic man. He had never been a fastidious man. He had got pleasure from smelling at dung-hills, from making water in his wife's garden, from snufiing up the sweet sweat of those he loved. He had no cruelty, no culture, no ambition, no breeding, no refinement, no curiosity, no conceit. He believed that there was a borderland of the miraculous round everything that existed and that "everything that lived wTas holy/' Such was the Mr. Geard who was now drowning Is. the exact space of water that covered the spot where the ancient Lake Villagers had their temple to the neolithic goddess of fertility. He would be dead and past reviving by any charm—charmed they never so wisely—in a few minutes.

For an eternity of time there had been no Mr. Geard of Glastonbury. For -an eternity of time there would be no Mr. Geard of Glastonbury, though there might well be some mysterious conscious Being in the orbit of whose vast memory that particular Avatar was concealed. This moment, however, along with many infinitesimal animalculss, the Mayor of Glastonbury lived tf?ll, though he did not breathe, above Philip's airplane, below those revolving air-bubbles.