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“But 'tisn't only of thik new Mayor that my grand-darter talks to I of; 'tis of sad, wicked, fleshly doings wThat would bring some girt folks into trouble if all were known.”

The two old heads moved closer to one another now and the two old caked and crusted briar pipes were tapped simultaneously on Abel Twig's wood-chopping stump.

“Be they the fleshly doings of they that be Mayors, or of they that baint Mayors?” enquired Number One evasively.

“ 'Tis Sally Jones what sez so, Aby, not us, thee knows,” murmured Number Two, casting a wary eye up the road and down the road, “but she tells I that thik little gal what plays with our Jackie be an Illegit of Mr. Crow up to Elms. She do say there were hintings and blinkings in the Gazette, about thik little job. 'Twere in last Wednesday's number or thereabouts, she said, and she herself reckons 'twas Red Robinson what put 'un there.”

Two matches were simultaneously held to two charred and blackened orifices; and two thick clouds of blue smoke erupted &;om beneath a bird-like nose and a dog-like nose.

"Our Midsummer Day Fair, partner, be making this Nation ring and ting, so I hears/' said Abel Twig.

“So it be, brother, so it be,” said the other. “For me wone part, IVe never been one for they roundabouts and they May-pole junketings and they Aunt Sally throws and they spotted men and pink-headed women. I were born over-modest, the Head-Doctor at hospital told Nurse Robinson, which were a way of saying that me stummick be easy turned. Thik Head-Doctor be all for they spick and span inventions, 'sknow, and I do seem to be an old-fangled man what were better in grave.”

“Don't 'ee say such words, brother Bart,” protested Mr. Twig hurriedly, “don't ?ee say 'em! Ye'U be stretching thee's legs in me woodshed, this pretty Spring-time, come seven years away, when Head-Doctor be turned to midden-dust.”

“But 'tisn't only of cock-shys and merry-go-rounds and fat men and cannibals that Mayor Geard be thinking]” went on the other; “Thik young John Crow, what he brought over from France, be teaching all the lads and gals of our town to act in a Play what'll show God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, walking and talking like common men! Tis bloody Blasphemy most folk says. Others say 'tis True Religion brought back to earth! I do shiver and shake sometimes o' nights in hospital, Aby, when I do think of what be in the air, and what be in the future, for this wold town, and for me'and thee's wold bones.”

“Ye've allus been a nervous man of your heart, Bart,” said Abel Twig consolingly, laying his scrawny fist upon the neat Sunday trousers of his friend, from which emanated the extremely musty smell of a ready-made man's counter, of the days of Mr. Wollop's father, “but there be nothing in thik Midsummer Fair to worry we.”

Number Two shook his head. He assumed the haughty and melancholy air of a famous pathological case, about whose bed's head the greatest doctors in Europe had disputed for years in vain.

“I be afeared of what the future will bring to our wold town, Aby,” he said. "There do come to I, of nights, the shaky-shivers, as ye might say, when, as I lies awake in thik girt white ward, where thro' they cold windies be blowin' every draught of Heaven; and I do hear they ghosties come out of Ue-, Ruinss, brother, and go whush. whush, whush over all the roofs, and I feel, for sure, thai some girt change be coming o\er this Lown.v

'Thee's talk be silly talk, brother,“ said Mr. Twig. ”What do 'ee mean by a girt change?7'

“I do mean what the planks a^d the stones of this town do feel in their wet innards, when night be over they, and all be sleeping! I do mean the shivery-shaky of they wold posties and windies and chimbleys and rafties, when dark be on ”un. Say what ye will, brother Aby, say what ye will, 'tis the nature of stones and timber to know when changes be coming upon the earth. 'Tis the same with they dumb beasties afore a storm. Thee knows, for thee be a farmer, how it be with they slugs and snails when rain be coming. And yet mortal man, brother, sees naught of it! 'Tis hid from 'un; and 'tis hid from his women too:— tho' sometimes “'tis true that one o' they will talk terrible wise, if so be as a man had the patience to listen.”

Abel Twig shifted his position a little to ease himself from the hardness of the wood-bench he sat upon, for being a man of singularly lean flanks his bones were unprotected.

“Have 'ee ever knowed a day, brother Bart, when these here prophesyings of rafties and chimbleys and wold church-roofs, what 'ee do hear in hospital, have brought summat to pass that a man could name, summat that newspapers and history books could mention, summat that girt noblemen like our Lord P. could lozey and dozey over, as they sips their cellar wine after their black-cock pasties?”

Number Two contorted his countenance into a hideous caricature of humanity, in the sheer effort of ransacking his memory. Then the outlines of his face relaxed and a tremulous smile curled his lip.

“So I do, Aby; so I do,” he murmured complacently. "I recollect clear as daylight now, wThen there was three bad harvests in session; yes! and whole factories closed down. They were Hyde's Dye-Works then, what now be Crow's, and many sons of bitches were nigh to starving in they days; and vittles was so scarce that even the rich tradesmen could scarce afford sauce to their meat; and these terrible starving times was prophysied, just as I be telling ye now—by creakings and groanings in the wold stones o' they Ruings! Something be coming upon our town, Aby, sure as my pore side be suffering from Head-Doctor's whimsies. 'Tis coming, brother, don't yer make no mistake! Tis coming; and all these changes of Mayors, and proclaimings of Fairs, be the outwaTd signs, as Catechism do say, of some Holy Terror. It may be Pestilence and it may be Famine, Aby. Fm not saying it ivill be shortage of bread and the burying of human skeletons; but I'm not saying it won't be they things. But something it will be; for the moanings and groanings in they Ruings be getting worse and worse. They keeps a person awake, brother. Not but what I sleeps well in hospital when I do sleep. . . . Don't 'ee let on nothing of that to Head-Doctcr, Aby, . . . but 'tis when I don't sleep that they prophesyings do bring death and judgement to me wold ears/5

The relaxed warmth of the April weather that had brought Cordelia into Number Two's shop and had brought Number Two himself into Mr. Twig's woodshed, was not devoid of its effect upon the susceptible temperament of John Crow, as he sat in his noisy little office, down by the whistling and creaking luggage trains, composing more and ever more daring advertisements in regard to his Midsummer Pageant. He had been working in this hot, dusty, little room since half-past eight that morning; and it was now five minutes after eleven.

He looked round; he flung open the door of the little office; he snuffed the air. The air tasted so delicious that he did not hesitate for a second. If his thoughts had assembled themselves in words, which they did not do on this occasion, the words would have been “Green . . . sky ... air ... cool 8 . . mud . . . grass . . . willows . . • water . . . green . . . air . . . space . . . mud.”

He snatched up his plain straw hat surrounded by a black ribbon. He snatched up his hazel-stick with its queer-shaped root-handle. The handle of this stick of John's resembled the horn of a rhinoceros; and John, with his ineradicable superstition, had already endowed it with as much identity, and perhaps a little more, as any young girl pours out from her own soul upon her sawdust-filled doll.

KING ARTHUR'S SWORD

Armed with his stick and wearing the same clothes that he had worn at his grandfather"s funeral with the band of crepe round the arm that his French friend had sewn on some seven weeks ago, he now set out, at a pace as rapid as its direction was motiveless, towards the southwest. He soon found himself following the road which led to the village of Street. The road John followed now may have been as old as the days of the Saxon King Ina, whose charter to the Benedictines of Glastonbury is still extant; but the chances are that in those early times all cautious travellers leaving Glastonbury for the south followed the Roman Road, the remains of which lie less than a stone's throw away from the one upon the surface of which John's stick was now so sharply and so motivelessly tapping.

But whether he followed a Roman or a Saxon road it is certain that before he arrived at the village of Street John found himself crossing the River Brue at Pomparles Bridge. Mentioned in a Court Roll of the second decade of the fifteenth century as Pons Periculosus, it was from this spot or near this spot, Pons Perilis, Pontparlous, Pontperlus, Pomparles, that the mysterious personage known as King Arthur threw away his sword Excalibur.

John leaned against the parapet and surveyed the trickling water of the Brue. There was much mud there, and several extraneous objects carrying little association with Excalibur, rested half-buried in this mud, while a pathetically small stream of tawny-coloured water struggled with weakened impetus to deliver itself of such degrading obstacles. John's eyes, roaming in search of anything that might recover the ambiguous romance that hung about the spot, fell eventually upon a dead cat whose distended belly, almost devoid of fur, presented itself, together with two paws and a shapeless head that was one desperate grin of despair, to the mockery of the sunshine. >

Still suffering from a violent reaction against all his mystical praise of Glastonbury, and suffering also from a too vivid memory of a dangerous quarrel he had had with Mary the last time they were together, this encounter with the distorted face and up-blown belly of this poor corpse caused him a diabolical twinge of mental and even physical misery. A strange vibration of malignant revolt against the whole panorama of earth-life took possession of him. What he felt was this—"I would be content to endure a good deal if I could convey to the conscious intelligence of any sort of Deity my contempt for the terms upon which our life has been offered to us.*'

John's scepticism as to the dogmas of pseudo-scientific materialism was abysmal but he had gone so far in his role as a circus-manager retailing all the Glastonbury myths with a twist of his own, that his mood now was one virulent atheistical fury. He pressed his lean stomach against the parapet in a bitter sympathy with that hairless belly in the mud; and he replied to the despairing grin of that scarcely recognisable head with a grin of his own that was not less unredeemed.

Thus across the Bridge Perilous of the old romances a stare of desperation out of Somersetshire mud met a stare of malice out of a Norfolk skull. In the super-consciousness of the blazing sun, now almost at its zenith for that day, the whirling and thundering, the crackling and growling and blasting and exploding of that orbit-revolving body of flame was accompanied by no consciousness of the existence of John Crow. And with the Earth it was the same! Below the mud of the Brue there was a bed of clay; below the clay, the original granite of the planet's skeleton; below the granite an ocean of liquid rock upon which the granite floated; below this again, black gulfs of hollow emptiness full of smouldering gases, and down below these—as the plummet of John's mind dived and sank—this “down” became an “up,” and the liquid rock-basis of the “antipodes” of Glastonbury, like the root-sea of Dante's Purgatorial Mount, fumed and seethed and bubbled.

But neither in her granite bones, nor in her fiery entrails; neither in her soft, wet, rank vegetation, nor in her burning sands; neither inwards nor outwards, from centre to circumference, as her diffused super-consciousness accompanied the pulses of her material envelope, and followed the wind of her material revolution, did the mind of the Earth grow aware of the existence of John Crow. Nor finally was there potency enough in the cold fury of the man's mephistophelian malice, as he answered the mindless despair in that decomposed cat-head in the filthy Bruemud, to draw the least, remotest Sicker of awareness from the double-natured, ultimate First Cause of the world!

On this particular noon-day not one of these great Elemental Powers became aware, for the flicker of a single second, of the existence by Pomparles Bridge, between the town of Glastonbury and the village of Street, of the entity known as John Crow. But the Great Powers among the natural forces possessed of consciousness no more exhaust or fulfil the innumerable categories of the supernatural than the Great Powers among the nations of the earth exhaust or fulfil the categories of humanity. There are countless supernumerary beings—all sons and daughters of the First Cause—whose meddlings and interferences with the affairs of earth have not received the philosophical attention they deserve.

It must have been by some mental movement of which he was totally unconscious that John Crow, in his present sullen and cynical mood, brought down upon his head a supernatural visitation from one of these lesser potencies in the midst of that warm noon-day sunshine. Yes, it must have been by some unconscious mental gesture; or else it was brought upon him by the whole trend of his activities for the last month!

There undoubtedly appear in every generation certain portentous human beings to whose personalities some mysterious destiny gives abnormal power, abnormal capacity for emotion and finally an abnormal closeness to the secret processes of nature. Such an one must that personage have been whose ghostly figure, gathering to itsolf so many kinds of occult significance, so many kinds of vital life-sap, as the centuries rise up and fall away about it, passes still, among such as have the least interest in such things, by the familiar name of King Arthur.

In all the old books about these matters it is recorded that from some bridge across the Brue at this spot—some Bridge Perilous corresponding to the Castle Perilous where Merlin concealed that heathen prototype, whatever it may have been, of the Grail, this Arthur of the histories threw away his sword. This particular action of this singular Person must have been one that was accompanied by some intense convulsion of human feeling in his own mind parallel with the shock in Caesar's mind when he crossed the Rubicon, in Alexander's mind when he slew his friend Clytus, in Our Lord's mind when He was in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is doubtless these violent storms of intense feeling in great magnetic human personalities that are responsible for many of the supernatural occurrences vouched for by history and so crudely questioned by scoffing historians.