It was now winter, and the dispute was still dragging on. There had been

no further fence-burning, but the Member for the constituency had been

memorialised, a joint meeting had been held in the Llanyglo schoolroom,

and he had promised to come down and see for himself how matters stood.

Until he should do so the disputants glared, so to speak, at one

another. A certain element of contempt, that looked at first like

tolerance, had even entered into the quarrel. Thus, a section of fence

on a portion of the sandhills that it would have been a positive

inconvenience to visit was allowed to stand. Llanyglo preferred to

reserve its strength. But elsewhere the stakes lay half buried in the

sand, and John Willie Garden now and then wondered what sort of a raft

they would make.

"The whole thing looks like being a damned bad spec," the Syndicate

grumbled.

That opinion seemed to be gaming strength.

There seemed to be more than a chance that Llanyglo, its heathery Trwyn

and its purple mountains, its unproductive sandhills and its non

dividend-paying sea, would be written off by Terry's Syndicate as a

total loss.

Then, all in a night, something astonishing happened at Llanyglo.

The words "all in a night" are to be understood in their very plainest

sense. Granted that it was a winter's night, and therefore a long one,

with the darkness setting in soon after four and the sun not coming up

behind the mountains again until nearly eight; none the less the fact

remained that Llanyglo went to bed as usual, and woke up to rub its

eyes, unable to believe what it so plainly saw. What had happened was

this:

With Edward Garden's house-roof still a toast-rack against the wintry

sky, and his slates just as they had been left after Eesaac Oliver's

last long-division sum, and only half the staircase yet fitted, and the

little socket John Willie had scooped out under the date-stone still

awaiting its sixpence--with all this arrested as life and growth and

motion were arrested in the Enchanted Palace, the first new house had

gone up in Llanyglo. Where had been nothing the night before, there it

now was, staring at them when the sun rose, a house, with smoke coming

out of its chimney.

* * * * *

That same friend of Squire Wynne's who repeated to the author of the

_Sixpenny Guide_ the Squire's remark about invasion _via_ the Mersey,

told him also what a Welsh "Hafod Unos" is.

"You know what the words mean," he said. "Strictly speaking, it's the

summer-house--pavilion--shelter--of a night. The essentials are that it

must be built on common land, and in a single night. Then they can't

eject you. At least that's the idea. Don't ask me how it stands in Law.

It may be a kind of squatter's right, or anything else, or it may have

no standing at all. Probably it hasn't. But that's neither here nor

there. They have their notions about it, and those at any rate are

immemorial. Look here: you're pottering about this country just now;

just count how many houses you find with the name 'Hafod Unos.' You'll

find quite a lot. There's a very big one Bangor way, that probably took

some years to build, but probably one of these places was its

foundation.... And a house 'within the meaning of the Act,' so to speak,

means that smoke must have gone up the chimney. Cook your breakfast

there, and--well, after that you're a sort of tolerated freeholder. It

might be worth putting into your Guide Book. You'd better add a

footnote, though, that the 'f' in 'hafod' is a 'v,' and 'unos' is

pronounced 'innos.' ... Not at all; you're welcome to any help I can

give you----"

* * * * *

Llanyglo, snugly in bed, had heard the sounds across the sandhills

during the night, but they had been set down to the newest development

of the fencing dispute. This development was that, a week or so before,

several cartloads of undressed stone had been shot down by the side of

the sandy gully that ran from Pritchard's gap down to the shore. And

Llanyglo had smiled. Aha! They were going to build a walled enclosure,

were they? Something that wouldn't burn, whatever? Well, well, if it

amused them to build walls on winter nights when everybody else was warm

in bed, they might. They would only lose their labour in the end. Mr.

Tudor Williams, of Ponteglwys, was going to ask a question in the House

of Commons, yes, and he was coming down to speak at the Chapel and to

see for himself. It was a cold night for building walls, whatever----

So they stayed in bed, and only the revolving Trwyn light, two reds and

a white, saw the planting of the thorn in Llanyglo's side.

The two Kerrs did not do it alone. It took four of them--"a Kerr to each

corner," as Howell Gruffydd afterwards said. The two other brothers had

been sent for from Ratchet, where one of them worked in an asbestos

factory and the other was a builder's labourer; and if these imported

ones lacked that spur of conviction that their watches had been tampered

with by tricky Welshmen, they had another and a double incentive--the

sense of family unity, and of the honour of the gradeliest county on

earth, Lancashire. No Kerr, no lad from Lancashire whomsoever, could

thole to be bested by a Welshman. Lancashire was the place for which

Johnnie Briggs played cricket, the place where the Waterloo Cup Meeting

was held. They danced in clogs there, clogs with soles of Welsh alder,

and laaked at quoits and knurr and spell, and knew a bit about homing

pigeons, not to speak of cocks, the game kind. They were lads, and

right, in Lancashire.--Wales? Wales produced nothing but alders and oats

and goats and Chapels.

The idea had been that of Ned, the eldest brother, and it was part of

the miscellaneous general information he had picked up on his

alder-prospecting through Merionethshire and Montgomery and Carnarvon

and Denbigh and Flint. He had seen a way of convicting Llanyglo out of

its own mouth. They threw down fences on the grounds that the land was

common land; very well, if it was common, as they claimed, it was a

proper site for a Hafod Unos. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander;

and merely as a poke in the eye for watch-tinkering Welshmen, and a

vindication of Lancashire's superior wit and malice, it would be worth a

night's work to see their faces in the morning.

So to work in the dark the four brothers got.

They helped themselves to a modest slice of Llanyglo earth, plotted it

out with stakes and string, and then began to dig. The night was

moonless, and they worked by the light of four lanterns. These

illumined little enough of the waste; the moving, straddling shadows

they cast hardly began before they were lost in the darkness again.

Knitting-needles of light came and went again on the polished handles of

the rising and falling spades, and faintly, regularly, and as if a

spirit passed high overhead in the night, the intermittent Trwyn beam

swung--red, red, white--red, red, white----

They had not to dig deep; there is much volcanic rock under the Llanyglo

sand; and they had not set up fences half a dozen times without having a

notion where it was.

"Here we are," Harry, the builder's labourer grunted as his spade gave a

clink and a jump in his hand. "I thowt it wadn't be far off.--Is t'

barril there, Tommy?"

Across a mound of thrown-up sand one of the lanterns cast a short

parabola of shadow. It was the shadow of a nine-gallon barrel of beer.

"Nay, we mun do a bit first," Tommy replied, spitting on his hands and

driving in his spade again.

Their house already existed, complete in their practical heads, before

ever a spade was lifted. They had seen through its entire anatomy in the

taproom of the Station Hotel, with beer to solve all difficulties.

Nothing was done twice, and brother did not get in brother's way. Even

as Howell Gruffydd said, they took a corner of their plan apiece and

dry-walled, all save Tommy, who went to and fro with a hand-cart,

fetching stone, not too much at a time, because of the dead softness of

the sand. For the general design Ned's word was law; for details, each

used his own gumption. They worked and grunted, and worked and grunted,

and worked. By the time Sirius appeared over faraway Delyn, and Orion

balanced himself on Mynedd Mawr, they had a serviceable first course

laid. Then they put on their coats again, for it was a bitter night and

they perspired, and with a single blow Tommy neatly tapped the barrel.

They drank, threw off their coats again, and set to work once more.

"Never heed that, Sam," Ned said once, seeing his brother elaborating

the stark essential plan that had been agreed upon in the taproom of the

Station Hotel. "T' corners, t' beams, and t' roof; we haven't time to

paint it and put a pot o' geraniums i' t' window."

By one o'clock the lanterns showed four irregular angles of masonry,

shoulder-high, as rough as you please, but true by plumb and level. This

might be a joke against Llanyglo, but it was a workmanlike one. Only two

of the brothers now walled, for they had only two ladders; Sam helped

Tom to lift and carry beams.

By three o'clock only two of the beams were laid, but they were the

principal ones, and Ned seemed well content.

"That's t' main o' t' work," he said, with satisfaction. "How's t'

barril going on, Tom?"

"True by t' level yet," Tom replied. "Shall we start on th' bread and

cheese?----"

"Did ye think on to bring some pickled onions?"

"Ay."

"Then we'll ha' we're nooning."

They took their nooning, with Sirius now over Mynedd Mawr, and Orion

soaring like a kite. They took it at their leisure; they were "lads from

a reight place," setting about a job as if they meant to finish it, not

Welshmen matchboarding. A mountain of sand filled the space within their

four corners, and they lay on their backs on it, smoking, and watching

the red and white spokes of the light high over their heads, twenty-mile

spokes, of a wheel that had no circumference but its sweep through the

night. Now and then Sam gave a low chuckle; but Ned smoked, spat, and

was silent, save that he said from time to time, "Did ye number and

letter them chamfers, Harry?" or some similar question. You would have

said they had a month before them. Certainly the Kerrs, when there was a

surprise to be prepared for foreigners who meddled with their watches,

were members one of another.

At half-past three they set to work again. By four Ned had climbed up

above, and was sitting astride a beam with the light of a lantern

shining up on his streaming face.

"Give us another inch, Sam," he grunted, "--a bit more--a bit

more--_whoa!_ Tom, that quoin--no, th' one wi' th' bolt--this is th'

chimney end--and get them three strutts ready, accordinglie to th'

letters.... How are ye down there, Harry?"

The mason brother was building the chimney. It was an outside one,

massive as a buttress, and Harry was building it well and truly, for it

was the essential of the house. Smoke must go up it before dawn, the

hearth-smoke of civilised man, the lowly and secular and beautiful token

that he has made himself an abiding-place on a spot of earth, and

becomes part of that spot, and it part of him, so that to deracinate him

is to thrust him back again into the bestial state and to make the land

as desert as the sea. By all prognostication, Edward Garden's smoke

should have been the first to add itself to that of the cluster of

humble dwellings between the mountains and the waves that was Llanyglo;

but of that lawn of lightsome blue that veils Llanyglo to-day the

breakfast-smoke of the Kerrs was the fore-runner. At half-past four they

were shovelling out the mountain of sand and making the hearth for it.

By six Tommy had brought in the bundle of dry twigs and faggots he had

carefully hidden away. Harry was filling in the space between the main

beam and the transom of the door; when Tom asked him for a match he

sprang down, and Ned and Sam also descended from the roof.

"What time is it?" Tom asked.

Ned gave a glance round, and smiled for the first time that night as he

drew out his watch.

"Five past six," he said, and added, with indescribable dryness,

"--unless som'b'dy's been meddling wi' my watch."

"Here goes," said Tommy, striking a match....

They exchanged glances that were near to winks as they watched the

flames. It was their equivalent of a cheer.

The night paled; the Trwyn light went out; and off the headland a seal

disported itself in the icy sea. The day stole across Delyn, but Mynedd

Mawr still remained an awful precipice of ink--the shadow of the morning

bank lay over him. Then came the first glitter on the waves, and, as if

with light all other faculties awake, folk became conscious of the

crowing of cocks and the falling of the breakers on the shore. Howell

Gruffydd got up and began to rekindle his fire. A bolt was shot back at

Pritchard's farm. Dafydd Dafis packed his breakfast in his tin and set

out for his day's work--a little reslating of the roof of the Baptist

Chapel.

But on his way across the sandhills he suddenly changed, not only his

direction, but his gait also. He advanced cautiously, skirted certain

mounds of sand that he did not remember to have seen before, and then

as suddenly drew back. Then, instead of advancing again, he returned by

a circuitous route, dropped into a sunken sandy way, and then ran as

fast as his legs would carry him down to the cottages. There he thrust

his head into Morgan's cottage and said something, and ran to the next

one--or rather to the next but two, for Edward Garden's double cottage

had been locked up since October. Then Howell Gruffydd came to his shop

door, and Dafydd called him.

Five minutes later half Llanyglo was out on the sandhills staring

through a gap at something that lay beyond.

It was an extraordinary house they saw, and then went round to the back

to look at from another point of view. It appeared to consist of a

living-room and a scullery, with a patch under the skeleton of a sort of

penthouse at the back. It was not even on the land that had been fenced

and unfenced and fenced again. Of roof it had none--for you could hardly

call the three or four tarpaulins, that lifted as the wind got under

them and were kept down by stones, a roof. Parts of the walls were

solidly constructed; other parts had been battened up with hedgestakes,

filled in with sods and peats, stuffed up with coats, anything. It had

an old door that had been used somewhere else, and appeared to be

propped up with stones. Over one window-opening hung an old brown coat,

the other frame was empty. A bright glow shone on the rubble within, and

smoke and sparks came merrily from the chimney. The fire crackled

loudly, and there was a pleasant smell of cooking bacon. All about the

cavity in the sand lay stones big and little, timbers, stakes, loops of

rope. There was a hand-cart too, with its handle making a T in the air.

A scraping sound was heard, as of somebody cleaning out a pan, and then

came a low "Wouf" and flare of fat in the chimney. Then somebody spoke.

"Squeeze t' barril, Tom, and see if there's another cup o' tea."

"Nay, we've supped t' lot."

"Blow down t' vent-hole...."

As if those walls vanished again even more quickly than they had sprung

up, Llanyglo could see a picture vividly in its fancy--a picture of a

tilted barrel, with the cheeks of one man distended over the spigot-hole

while another caught a muddy trickle in a thick glass----

Then their vision fled, and they were staring at that unimaginable house

again----

Slowly, and without a word, they moved off through the soft sand in the

direction of the Baptist Chapel.

VI

THE FOOT IN THE DOOR

IT was a Saturday, a day on which the school did not assemble, and the

door of the schoolhouse was locked. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd was sent off

in haste for the key. They waited for him to come back, twenty of them,

men and women, with others hurrying over the sandhills to join them.

Eesaac Oliver ran panting up again, and they entered the schoolhouse.

This was a large, yellow-washed room with beams making triangles

overhead and hot-water pipes running round the walls below. A small

squad of desks stood upright behind, and a number of smaller benches

knelt, as it were, in front of them. These faced the raised desk of Miss

Nancy Pritchard, the schoolmistress. A yellow chair or two, a couple of

glass-fronted cupboards, a row of hooks for caps and cloaks at the back,

and a harmonium, completed the furniture. A short covered way near Miss

Pritchard's desk gave access to the adjoining Chapel. A door at the side

of this led to the little stone outhouse where the water for the pipes

both of school and Chapel was heated.

Their astonished exclamations had broken out now. As something legendary

and dear and native to their land, it was in their hearts to defend the

Hafod Unos; but for a stranger to set one up!

"Look you, it can-not be legal!" exclaimed Hugh Morgan, a little tubby

man with semicircular brows and a round bald forehead. "It iss not even

finiss; there iss holes in the walls so-a big I put my head through

them! And that iss not a roof--it iss only rick-covers----"

"It is wonderful how they did it, whatever!" said little restless-eyed

Mrs. Gruffydd. Those predatory eyes in Blodwen Gruffydd's pale face

could see a sixpence a mile away, and, having seen it, would not leave

it again until it had been safely dropped through the slot of the

money-box into which the savings for Eesaac Oliver's education went.

Eesaac Oliver was not to serve packets of tea and pennyworths of

bicarbonate of soda over a grocer's counter. He was to go to Aberystwith

College, and to become a preacher, and wear a black chip straw hat.

Howell Gruffydd, who had been as thunderstruck as the rest of them, now

affected to take a jocular view of the matter.

"De-ar me, first Mr. Garden's house, and now Ty Kerr! Well, it make

trade. Indeed, I need a bigger s'op presently--I think I start a Limited

Company----"

But big consumptive John Pritchard spoke in deep tones. More vividly

than any of them, John had seen, as if in a camera obscura, that vision

of a Kerr blowing into the vent-hole of a barrel, while another Kerr

anxiously watched the tap.--"We need a bigger public-house, I think," he

said grimly.

"Indeed you are right, John Pritchard," Hugh Morgan struck eagerly in,

the curves of his brows all marred with anxiety. "They sit in the

Sta-tion Hotel Porth Neigr, and do noth-thing but drinking all day--it

set a s'ock-king example, whatever."

"And they call it 'ano-ther cup of tea,'" said a third.

"They very smart ones----"

Again John Pritchard's deep voice came in.--"They're very deep ones."

Little Hugh Morgan spoke excitedly.

"Indeed you are right again, John Pritchard! John Williams Porth Neigr,

he say to me it would not surprise him if that Ned Kerr speak Welss so

well as nobody if he wiss!"

A shocked "_Aw-w-w!_" broke out. "And he say in the Court, 'No Welss!'"

"Tut-tut-tut--de-ar me!"

They were silent for a moment, contemplating this duplicity.

"And there iss four of them now," one resumed. "They send into England

for two more."

"We soon have large population," said Howell Gruffydd again....

John Pritchard had sat down on one of the yellow chairs with his knees a

yard apart. His brows seemed knitted.

"But there is noth-thing for them to do here," he said. "No work, no

wages--only building fences."

"Perhaps they have lot of money. Their bacon smell very good, whatever."

"They finiss their breakfast--I heard them wipe the frying-pan out as

plain as if I see it with my eyes!"

Again John Pritchard's heavy voice: "Finiss their breakfast indeed! They

finiss a whole barrel of beer!"

"And it is right what Hugh Morgan says," another struck in. "That Ned

Kerr, he know Wales as well as I know my two hands! I have let-ter from

my cousin Thomas Thomas in Towyn, and he say they buy lot-t of alders up

the Dysynni two years ago of Mr. Llewelyn Jones of Abergynolwyn, and set

up a hut in the 'ood, and make their clog soles, and pay six-pence a

foot for the trees."

"He set up more than a hut at Llanyglo, whatever!"

"Indeed they do no such thing! The Hafod Unos belong to the old days.

There iss no new Hafod Unos I don't know this how many years!"

"All the old things was new things once, Hugh Morgan."

Then, as if all at once they saw anew that house so magically sprung up

out of the sand, there fell a silence. Howell Gruffydd might make his

jests about taking a larger shop and forming a Limited Company, but the

hard fact remained, that aliens had squatted down at Llanyglo while they

had slept, and, by force or process of law, might be difficult to turn

out again. Howell's jocosity subsided; among the children's forms and

benches they took counsel together; and when, at half-past ten, John

Pritchard's eldest lad came in with the news that one of the Kerrs had

departed along the Porth Neigr road, while the other three kept guard

over what they had won, they drew closer together still, and spoke in

low tones of boycott.

Then suddenly somebody asked what Mr. Tudor Williams of Ponteglwys would

say, and the quick little outburst of "Yes, indeed," "Well said," "Mr.

Tudor Williams have some-thing to say," showed how pertinent the

observation was considered. For Mr. Tudor Williams, the Member, would be

able to tell them, if anybody could, whether the Hafod Unos was

countenanced by the Law, and whether the intruders could be served with

notice to quit. His promised visit now took on an added urgency.

"It is a pit-ty Mr. Williams fall out with Squire Wynne," Hugh Morgan

remarked. "It will be the Squire who will have to give them notice,

whatever."

"They quarrel one day outside the Court at Porth Neigr."

"But indeed, Howell Gruffydd, Mr. Tudor Williams wass in the right--it

was about the Tithes, and the Tithe iss a wick-ked system----"

"Aw-w-w, but the Welss Members they alter all that very soon!"

"But the Squire and the Bis-sop of St. Asaph is great friends----"

"Indeed that Bis-sop of St. Asaph he look at a Chap-pil like as if it

wass not worth his eyesight!"

Dafydd Dafis, who sat on a child's bench, looking moodily at the floor,

had not spoken yet. He gave a quick glance up, and then looked down

again.

"The Church iss a great robber," he muttered within his moustache....

They discussed questions of ecclesiastical polity....

"It iss a great robber," said Dafydd Dafis, again resuming his former

attitude.

Then Howell Gruffydd rose, and one or two others followed his example.

There was the day's work to be done. Soon all moved to the door, but

before going about their businesses they went to take another look at

that astonishing house.

But they looked only from a distance. If they had assumed that the

Kerrs, having worked all night, would now be sleeping, they were wrong.

They could see them, three of them, still busily walling, filling,

shovelling out sand.

"They try to finiss before Sunday," Hugh Morgan said.

But big John Pritchard glared sternly at him.

"They care noth-thing for Sunday, those ones," he said. "That other one

will have gone for more beer." And he added, in solemn tones, "It iss a

den of li-ons!"

The fencing dispute had now sunk into insignificance.

It quickly appeared, even as John Pritchard had said, that the Kerrs

cared nothing for Sunday. At a quarter to ten on the morning of that

day, Howell Gruffydd, in his tight black frock-coat and bowler hat,

passing up the sandy gully on his way to the Methodist Chapel, heard

sounds of carousing. He turned aside to look. The door of the Hafod

stood open, and a second barrel of beer, together with provisions and

some sticks of furniture, had been fetched during the night. Tommy, the

youngest of the Kerrs, was already drunk and singing. The eldest of

them, seeing Howell Gruffydd, gave him an insolently familiar nod, as if

he had as much right to be there as anybody else.

"Cold mornin'," he said. "Are ye coming in to hev' a tot?"

Howell turned away.

After service, Howell encountered John Pritchard. John, too, had heard

that godless levity from afar. Others gathered round them by the gap in

the thymy earth-wall, and John raised his voice on high. It shook with

bitter zeal.

"We hear them in the Chap-pil, in the mid-dle of prayers, singing!" he

cried. "On a Sunday morning they sing; they sing '_Thomas, make Room for

your Uncle_!' I said it was a den of li-ons, but indeed no li-ons ever

behave so s'ock-kingly! They sing '_Thomas, make Room for your Uncle_,'

in the mid-dle of prayers, like if it was out of the belly of hell!"

Dafydd Dafis, whose head for a day and a half had drooped like a wet

head of corn, gave a quick gleaming glance.

"They not build it any more quick than it can be pulled down again," he

said quickly. "They come out of the house sometime to work, I think.

They not gentry with lot of money, whatever."

And that was true. The Kerrs could hardly earn their living by drinking

beer and having continually to mount guard over the house they had made.

"There will be no peace in Llanyglo now till Mr. Tudor Williams has

been."

Dafydd Dafis's head drooped again.

"Indeed we do not need Mr. Tudor Williams for this," he muttered under

his breath.

And the Kerrs themselves? Did they suppose they could plant themselves

thus in the enemy's midst and not meet with hostile entertainment?

For this we may perhaps go once more to the gentleman without whose

friendly help the _Llanyglo Guide_ would have been done quite as well as

it needed to be, and in half the time.

"It's difficult to say, for two reasons," this gentleman said. "In the

first place, the humour of some of these Lancashire fellows is such an

incalculable thing; you never know how far they will carry it, nor how

soon it will end in black eyes and bloody noses. And in the second

place, there was that humanitarian scatterbrain, Armfield. I believe

myself that probably Armfield had already told Ned Kerr that there

_would_ be work presently....

"Of course, you've heard what Armfield's scheme was. The Syndicate had

decided not to rectify any more errors of Providence about the

disposition of coal and manganese; they only wanted to clear out

altogether, leaving somebody else 'holding the baby'--I believe that's

the expression. Their idea was simplicity itself: to buy land at a

shilling and sell it again at ten; but they didn't express it quite so

nakedly. That was where Terry Armfield came in--to dress the enterprise

up and make it attractive. As long as he enabled them to cut their loss

they didn't care what he did with Llanyglo.

"And there was nothing really wrong with the scheme, except that Terry

was twenty years before his time, and naturally had to suffer for it. I

think he called it '_The Thelema Estate Development Company_,' and

nowadays it would be called a Garden City. And if Terry hadn't Edward

Garden's sense of the line of least resistance, you must remember that

he hadn't Edward Garden's 'inside' information either. He had nothing

but that ecstatic power of persuading people. And he did persuade them.

I doubt if half a dozen of the people he sold to ever saw the place. Two

of them did, though, two brothers, in the produce line. They went down,

and came back again, and quietly sold out, keeping strictly to Terry's

representations; and I believe they warned Terry then that if he wasn't

careful he'd be getting into trouble. I asked them what they'd been

thinking of to let themselves be persuaded by a hare-brained enthusiast

like that. They told me it was all very well for me to talk _now_. They

knew perfectly well all the time that it was only one of Terry's dreams

of a better and a brighter world, but they bought for all that, and so

did crowds of others. Terry didn't admit a single difficulty. He talked

about angels and the higher life. He talked about Pugin and the soul's

need for seasons of contemplation and repose. He talked about the air

and the sea and the mountains and the Trwyn, and he made it out to be

Llanyglo's chief merit that it took a whole day to get there.... And so

on. To cut it short, they were to do their own building, but Terry, as

vendor, undertook the rest--laying out certain roads, draining and

lighting them, I believe the building of a sort of public hall, and so

forth. I don't think he said anything about the Chapels.

"And that (to get back where we started from) is probably the reason the

Kerrs stood by."

* * * * *

Whether Dafydd Dafis would have watched the Kerrs out of the Hafod, or,

failing that, whether he would have pulled it down over their heads, is

hardly worth debating; for, as it happened, that very Sunday night there

befell something that for the time being had all the effect of a

declared truce between the hamlet and its invaders. Something deeper and

more solemn than the machinations of man took a hand in the making of

Llanyglo. This was the wind. It began to get up at about three o'clock

that afternoon; all day there had been a swell; and Dafydd Dafis and

others, returning from Howell Gruffydd's house (where a second letter to

Mr. Tudor Williams Ponteglwys had been written, as urgent as Eesaac

Oliver's pen could make it), saw all four of the brothers on the roof,

trying to secure the tarpaulin in which the wind volleyed; their

roof-slates were not expected till the following Wednesday. The ground

was a blurr of flying sand; the sea resembled a tossing fleece as far as

the eye could see; and from moment to moment the waves, breaking over

the Trwyn, rose in slow, gigantic fountains, fell again, and then came

the roar. The four men clung like limpets to the roof, crouching until

the worst gusts were past and then resuming their hammering. They were

trying to nail the covering down, using pieces of wood as washers to

prevent the material from ripping.

Suddenly Dafydd Dafis, looking up under his brows, saw Ned Kerr pause

with his hammer lifted and peer out to sea. Then, without moving his

head, Ned put up his hand and appeared to be shouting something to the

others. All four looked, and so did the men of Llanyglo, but from the

ground below they could see nothing.

Then, all in a moment, Ned Kerr gave a scramble and a spring, came down

like a bundle into a mound of soft sand, and was followed tumblingwise

by the others. There was a rip and a crack, and the released tarpaulin

was a hundred yards away, flapping grotesquely over the sandhills. Ned

was up again in an instant, and as he passed Dafydd Dafis at a run he

shouted a single word in Welsh:

"_Llongddrylliad!_"

It was a wreck.

The boats by the short thumb of a jetty had not been used for a week,

and lay high up the beach. Could they have got them through that boiling

of white sea and brown sand there was a towering ridge to be seen

beyond, maned with spray, that rushed forward and burst only to show

another in the same place. No more than one at a time could be seen. The

boats were open boats, and night was coming on. Small wonder there

seemed little to do but pray.

But Ned Kerr shouted another word.--"_Bad!_"

From the top of the Hafod he had seen a ship's boat.

The next moment he and Dafydd Dafis had each a shoulder to Hugh Morgan's

boat, and William Morgan, the three remaining Kerrs, and another man,

were hauling. All save the youngest Kerr continued to tumble aboard as

the boat lifted. He tried to struggle after it, but was overturned, and

they dragged him out and turned him upside down to pour the water out of

him.

They have a lifeboat now at Llanyglo, _The Ratchet_, presented and

maintained by the town of that name; but that night the men of

Lancashire and the men of Llanyglo went out in one of the half-dozen

open boats. They put her into the brown, and a moment later the water

had slipped from under her and she sat down on the sand, with every

plank started. They got ashore again as best they could, and raced for

another boat and more oars. They put out again. They dare not use the

wooden jetty, of which only the beginning could be seen. The first boat

was already matchwood. A sea crawled up the Trwyn almost as far as the

Light. They inspected its ravage the next day. It stood as a record for

many years.

Then the boat passed the brown, and stood out to that pale wall smoking

with spray. The wall came on and broke with a crash that shook the

shore. A woman gave a shrill scream ... then they saw the boat again----

It seemed madness to think that that open boat would be safer out

beyond----

After that, though they watched, they saw nothing.

Then the Trwyn Light opened its eye, two reds and a white. All Llanyglo

was gathered on the beach, and none thought of going to Chapel. Night

fell; the sky became clear as black ice; the dim seas resembled a lair

of white bears at play. Seven o'clock passed, and eight.... Already in

folks' minds the grim thought was born; it might have been worse. They

had dragged Hugh Morgan back as the second boat had pushed off, and

none of the Llanyglo men was married. Whether the three Kerrs were

married or not nobody knew.

Nine o'clock came....

Blodwen Gruffydd saw the return first, if, indeed, that vague speck lost

in the grey combings were they. Again the wave came on, and another

hideous range lifted its grey ridge.... By a miracle, it boiled far away

to right and left, but rolled, a grey-dappled dead weight, under the

boat. Already half a dozen men with a rope were waist-deep in the

water....

Then, as the boat crawled on its oars like an insect, another crest

rose, tilted them so that man fell on man, and a man came out....

They at the rope were swept out by the backwash to meet them....

And after all, they had come back empty-handed. They had seen neither

ship nor boat.

But (and this, in this tale of Llanyglo and of those who made it and

were made by it, is the point), an hour later Dafydd Dafis, opening his

eyes for the first time since he had been hauled out of the water, said

something in Welsh to John Pritchard, who bent over him. Translated it

ran:

"I would not pull that one's house down."

Then he closed his eyes again.

As far as the Hafod Unos was concerned, Mr. Tudor Williams's visit now

seemed superfluous.

VII

THE MEMBER

Ostensibly, Mr. Tudor Williams came to Llanyglo to assist at a Sasiwn,

which is a gathering very much like the Love Feasts of other parts of

the country (indeed, if memory serves, Mr. Wesley gave these assemblies

for prayer and mutual consolation the latter name as far north in Wales

as Builth--but then Mr. Wesley did not speak Welsh). Neither the fencing

dispute nor the question of the Hafod Unos had taken nominal precedence

of this. But Mr. Tudor Williams's visit was also something more. He was

a Member returning to his own constituency--exalted, yet their servant,

familiar with the great ones of the land, yet by their favour. For that

reason they liked him to bring the evidences of his greatness back with

him.

Mr. Tudor Williams did so, and handsomely. He was a small nimble man

with black brows and a ragged silvery moustache, and a very erect and

conscious carriage of the head. He wore a silk hat, a turned-down collar

with a flat black bow, a frockcoat with voluminous lapels of watered

silk, grey trousers, and new black kid gloves. He drove from Porth Neigr

in the carriage that had been lent him by a political supporter, and

alighted at the gap opposite John Pritchard's farm. They would have run

forward to greet him, but a certain awe of his clothes and equipage

combined with their own dignity as makers and unmakers of such as he to

keep them where they stood, in a semicircle across the road.

But if they were at one and the same time a little intimidated and

filled out with pride in him, Mr. Tudor Williams knew no hesitation. He

sprang down from the carriage, grasped John Pritchard by the hand, and

then, not content with that, patted him all up the arm as far as the

shoulder and across the breast with the other hand, as if he conferred

invisible decorations on him. His eyes were moist, but glad greetings

flowed from his tongue, in an accent that would have put the most

diffident speaker of English at his ease.

"Well, John Pritchard! Well, well! Indeed you have not grown any less! A

lit-tle man like me, I hardly reach up to your shoulder! Aw-w-w, you

look splen-did! I was spik-king of you a few days ago to the Member for

Carnarvon Boroughs--but dear me, here am I neglecting the ladies--I tell

you presently--How are you, Mrs. Gruffydd? This young man is never

Eesaac Oliver! Aw-w-w, how he grows! Did you write the let-ter to me,

Eesaac Oliver? That's the style! Education, knowledge--it is a grand

thing!--Now, Dafydd Dafis! And how is the harp? You sing me _Y Gadlys_

by and by:

'_Mae cynhwrf yn y ceunant,

Ar derfyn dydd y gad_----'

--dear, dear, you have to go away before you can come home again! There

is nothing like this over there; there is not the sym-pathy; as I was

saying to the Member for Caermarthen, Mr. Hughes Caegwynion, not three,

four days ago, 'You get no sym-pathy from England and the

Englishman'--and indeed you do not.--Here comes Howell Gruffydd,

run-ning (indeed he runs like a deer, Mrs. Gruffydd!).--Now, Howell

Gruffydd, you miss the train if you don't look sharp (he's making so

much money he cannot leave the shop for a min-nit!).--Now, my old friend

William Morgan! How is the rheumatics?--How are you, Hugh?--Is this your

youngest, Mrs. Roberts? Hwhat! Another since! Aw-w-w--and you more like

an elder sister than a mother!... And there is the Trwyn, just the

same----"

He was staying the night with John Pritchard, and the two moved away to

the house, the others following a yard or two behind. Mr. Tudor Williams

advanced to ancient Mrs. Pritchard's chair, took the hand that resembled

a dead bird's foot, and shouted in her ear:

"You see I do not lose a min-nit before I come to see you, Mrs.

Pritchard!" he cried in Welsh. ("Indeed she is a wonderful old

'ooman!)--How many grandchildren have you now, Mrs. Pritchard?" (The old

woman nodded her aged head.) "Great-grandchildren! _No-o-o!_ Think of

that! But I think you all live for ever at Llanyglo. It is not like

London. If I could take bagsfull of this air back with me I make my

for-tune!--Now, Miss Pritchard, I think I must have offended you, you

are so long in spik-king to me! And how is all in school? I tell you

press-ently something straight from the Board of Ed-u-ca-tion for you to

try. You whisper a subject in the scholar's ear as he comes in at the

door, and he walk straight to the middle of the room, no time for

think-king, and speak for five minutes about it! That will make them

ready speakers, hwhat? That will accustom them to public life and

speaking in the Chapel? But I tell you later.--Now, my old friend John,

if I could wash my hands before sitting down to a cup of tea--then we

will talk----"

He was shown into the best bedroom, with the cork-framed funeral-cards

and the cardboard watch-pockets on the walls, and the sound of his

moving about and pouring out water and spluttering as he washed his face

could be heard by those who waited below. Then he descended again and

sat down.

"Well," he said by and by, from his place where he sat at the table

alone, they respectfully yet proprietorially watching him eat and drink

his tea, "now tell me about those matters in the letter you wrote.... I

mean the other matters...."

But let us, before we pass to the other matters, look at the company

that watched Mr. Tudor Williams eat.

First there was John Pritchard, sitting on the other side of the table

with his hands upon his knees, and now and then turning his body a

little aside and bowing his back to cough. There was John, stern

religionist, believing in God and Disendowment; obstinate, dull, just,

unsmiling; as ready for the Day of Judgment as if it had been the

audit-day of the accounts he kept as principal trustee of the Baptist

Chapel. For all that he was so rooted in Llanyglo that he had never

travelled farther than Porth Neigr in the whole of his life, he was as

ardent a supporter of Missionary Endeavour abroad as his voice was

powerful at the Sasiwn at home. He watched Mr. Tudor Williams's plate,

and with his thumb made signs for his daughter to replenish it.

Next, there was Howell Gruffydd, with his pale and studious son, Eesaac

Oliver. You might have been sure even then that, should Llanyglo ever

grow, Howell Gruffydd's fortune would grow with it. Howell considered a

good penny worth the putting into his pocket, and, as if his apron

(which, however, he had now left behind at the shop) had made half a

housewife of him, he cared nothing, so it brought in money, whether he

did a man's labour or washed up the dishes or black-leaded the grate. He

could not read, but if at Porth Neigr a stranger chanced to ask him the

way, he would smile and reply, "There is the signpost," allowing it to

be understood that his questioner might read as well as he himself.

Howell had his inner dream. It was of a shop with two large windows, and

a bell inside the door, and brightly varnished showcards, and pyramids

of tinned salmon, and peas within the window that should suggest the

noses of children flattened against the pane, and handbills distributed

in the streets, and two assistants, and a son at College, who should

read for two, and perhaps--who knew?--sit while his constituents watched

him eat his tea--Mr. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd, M.P.

Then, with his cap in his hands and his feet shifting nervously, there

was Dafydd Dafis, next to Eesaac Oliver, on the sofa. Should purchases

and rumoured purchases of land prove to be a portent, Dafydd had all to

lose and nothing to gain by change. With that soft cruelty of his of

which the hard and more profoundly sentimental Englishman knows nothing,

Dafydd was at least disinterested. The Kerrs he had forborne to harm,

but he only hated them the more on that account. He himself would not

have killed one of the blue and primrose butterflies that in the summer

hovered over the Llanyglo buffets of wild thyme, and he could not

understand a country that said it was fond of animals and yet, like

these Lancashire men, hunted rats with terriers and coursed hares with

dogs. Alone of that nation he had for a time loved delicate little

Minetta Garden, and had told her stories of fairies and had sung _Serch

Hudol_ and _Mentra Gwen_ to her; but Minetta had gone. All the things

for which Dafydd Dafis cared had gone, or were going, and Dafydd was

lonely. He told his harp so, with those warped and stealing fingers, and

the harp made music of his pain. All that Dafydd would gain by change

would be memories that became ever the more poignant the more they were

attenuated, and the less the world cared for him and his unprofitable

life.

Passing constantly between Mr. Tudor Williams and the saucepan where the

eggs boiled, or the plate in the fender where the lightcakes kept hot,

was Miss Nancy (_nee_ Nansi) Pritchard, schoolmistress and virtual

custodian of the Post Office. The development of Llanyglo, did that ever

come to pass, would be a good thing for Nancy, for otherwise there was

none in Llanyglo to marry her, and to domestic service elsewhere she

could not have stooped. She was tall and plump and ruddy, with black

hair and black-lashed blue eyes, and in her conversation she gave the

preference to the longer words. She had been to school in Bangor, wore

the longest skirts in Llanyglo, and between her and her father's guest

was the bond of their common superiority to everybody else there. She

was a _partie_, for John Pritchard was well-to-do; but for whom?

Apparently for nobody whom Llanyglo had yet seen.

The remaining spectators, with the exception of old Mrs. Pritchard, who

resembled a mummy rather than a spectator, partook in varying degrees of

these same characteristics; and there at the table sat Mr. Tudor

Williams, M.P., of Ponteglwys, one of his eyes aflow with tears of

sensibility while the other was glued to the main chance; Baptist,

nationalist, and arguer by metaphor and analogy; an elocutionist, and a

maker of elocutionists by that process of education that consists of

giving a scholar a subject and bidding him straightway speak for five

minutes upon it; and, above all, ever and again suggesting, by slight

gesture or quick glance, that his secret thought was that there, in cap

or corduroys, but for the Grace of God, went Mr. Tudor Williams of

Ponteglwys....

At last he put up his hand, refusing to eat more.

"No more, no more indeed! It is the best bread and but-ter I have tasted

since I was here before, but I should be ill in my stomach.--Dear me,

John Pritchard, the happy hours I have spent in this room! '_Mid

Pleas-sures and Palaces_'--indeed there is tears in my eyes when I see

the dres-ser with the plates on it, and the jugs, and Mrs. Prit-chard's

Bible in the window, just the same as when I was a boy!--Well, I have

had a splen-did tea at all events, and if you will excuse me a min-nit I

will return thanks for it.... Now, my friends!----"

Five minutes later, Mr. Tudor Williams, not so near to the Kerrs' Hafod

that he had the appearance of specially watching it, nor yet so far from

it but that he could see Ned Kerr and his brother Sam setting a rough

window-sash into position, was once more shaking hands and patting

shoulders and exchanging greetings with such of the men and women and

children of Llanyglo as he had not yet seen.

And now that they had got him there they hardly knew what they wanted of

him. That building exploit of the Kerrs having thrust the Inclosures

Dispute a good deal into the background, and Dafydd Dafis's honourable

if sullen refusal to injure men who had risked their lives with him

having given that exploit itself a kind of condonation, it seemed as if

their Member had merely come to a Sasiwn after all. But land had changed

hands: they had a vague sense of impending change and of the discomfort

of change; and, as they answered their Member's questions, the very

presence in their midst of this man who moved behind the scenes of the

drama of large events accentuated this feeling.

"What is he like, this one?" Mr. Tudor Williams asked, gently yet

absent-mindedly patting big John Pritchard's back as he stooped to

cough. They had been speaking of Terry Armfield.

They described Terry as he had appeared to them in the Court at Porth

Neigr.

"Is he taking over any other land?" ...

You would not have supposed, from the way in which Mr. Tudor Williams,

M.P., asked the question that he merely sought to know how much _they_

knew. And it had not occurred to Llanyglo that these transfers of land

might be, not an end, but only a beginning. Yet Mr. Tudor Williams had

good, if private reasons, for knowing that this very land might soon be

more than merely worth acquiring.... He was not deceiving them. It

pleased them to think that their Member was the repository of weighty

secrets, and he was merely indulging this simple and legitimate liking.

But already he intended to go to Liverpool in order to find out what

this Syndicate's plans really were. He wanted to know whether the

Syndicate, in its turn, was aware of something else, something still

very secret indeed, so secret that five minutes at certain keyholes

might have been worth many thousands of pounds....

"And this Hafod Unos--on whose land is it erected?" he next asked.

He made a little grimace when they told him, on Squire Wynne's.

"Then perhaps he will let it stand; he is cracked in his head about old

customs, and antiquities, and suchlike foolishness, when there is great

work wait-ing to be done. It is not our business if he likes to let

these people squat upon his land."

But here John Pritchard interposed heavily.

"But it is our business if they sing '_Thomas, make Room for your

Uncle_' in the middle of prayers," he said.

"No-o-o!" exclaimed Mr. Tudor Williams, shocked. Perhaps also he wished

to gain a little time; he had no wish to call upon Squire Wynne, either

about this or anything else. "Don't tell me they did that!" he added.

"Indeed, they did," said John quickly.

"Aw-w-w!--But it is a Liberal maxim, John, and Radical, too, that force

is no remedy. In my opinion our friend Dafydd here----" he put his arm

affectionately about Dafydd Dafis's waist, "--was a lit-tle headstrong

about burning the fences."

"I will not burn their house," said Dafydd sullenly. (By the way, had

the case been altered, it is doubtful whether the Kerrs would have done

as much for him.)

"Well--we can always take what the doc-tor told the man who wanted

information for noth-thing to take--advice," said Mr. Tudor Williams.

"It would be better to see Mr. Wynne first," said John Pritchard. "If

one comes others may come, and indeed I never saw such behaviour, no,

not in a den of li-ons!"

They continued to discuss the matter, while, before their eyes, the

Kerrs fitted their window-sash.

Yet it was curious to note how, within the bond of their passionate, if

loquacious nationalism, each man was jealously for himself. It was not

that their democracy was more conspicuously lacking in democrats than

are other democracies; perhaps it was rather that the Welshman

recognises two ties and two ties only--the tie of unity against the

foreigner, and the private claim of his strong family affections.

Between these two things is his void and vulnerable place. He has not

set up for himself the Englishman's stiff and serviceable and

systematised falsity of Compromise, that has no justification save that

it works. He has his age-long tradition, but no daily rule that can (and

indeed must) be applied without question. Each of his acts is his first

act, and so a retail act. Because his hypocrisy lacks the magnificent

scope of that of the Saxon, he bears the odium of a personal

stealthiness. Thus, perhaps, it comes about that while too strict an

adherence to the letter is the Englishman's ever-present danger, for his

brother Celt the spirit slayeth. Noble dreams, petty acts; and here, if

a little obscurely, may be hidden the reason why, when he seeks his

fortune in London, his greatest successes are the minor successes of

drapery and milk....

"Well," said Mr. Tudor Williams at last, "Wynne is a man of no ideas. He

is only a pettifogging country Squire, whose views on the Land Question

are ob-solete in _tot-to_. But if he harbours men that are a nuisance,

as John Pritchard says, perhaps it would be better if I went to see

him----"

Nevertheless, he had no intention whatever of doing so. The truth was

that the Squire's views on the Land Question were too obsolete

altogether. They were so obsolete that he had sold when (as first Edward

Garden had known, and now Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., knew) he ought to

have held; and it was for Mr. Tudor Williams to profit by his error if

he could, rather than to call his attention to it. He was very far from

being a wealthy man.

VIII

THELEMA

Because Terry Armfield, believing in his idea, would not have abated one

jot of it for all the money in Liverpool, therefore he got all the money

he wanted. This--alas!--is not optimism, nor a hardy belief that merit

infallibly meets with its deserts in this world; it merely means that a

number of businessmen with rudimentary consciences were willing to pay a

kind of hedging-premium on the off-chance of being, after all, on the

side of Terry and the angels. It is astonishing how often your visionary

can get money out of your man of affairs when another man of affairs

would fail.

And, even as the man who chatted to the author of the _Sixpenny Guide_

said, Terry was only a few years before his time. The things he dreamed

of have not come to pass yet, but they are confidently promised

to-morrow. As happy as the day was long, he was merely setting up the

City that is not built with hands, and lighting it with the Light that

never was. And if the "_Thelema Estate Development Company_" had done

nothing else, it did, at any rate, put an end to that dispute that had

begun when Dafydd Dafis had pulled down fences and burned them in his

beautiful Red Dragon of a bonfire.

But, over and above that, it did leave its little mark on Llanyglo--a

fleeting mark, laughable, bathetic, sad, hauntingly vacant, and lunatic

(as Mr. Tudor Williams would have said) "_in tot-to_." Come to that

little office near St. George's Hall, Liverpool, and see Terry Armfield

in the closing stages of his minding of Llanyglo.

He not only conceived his Thelema; he drew the plans of it as well. He

drew them on drawing-paper, on tracing-paper, on note-paper and

bill-heads and the backs of envelopes. A paper-weight, with a knob in

the shape of a clenched fist grasping a short staff, kept half a hundred

of his hasty drafts from flying off again into the air that gave them

birth. And he added to them day by day, almost hour by hour.... Forty or

forty-five or fifty houses, say, each with its little plot for private

meditation and repose, yet sharing in common among them a spacious

pleasaunce where friend should meet friend and none but friends should

come--that was the idea. A fair wide Way, with the mountains looking

down its perspective to where gentle steps led down to the tawny

sand--that was the idea. A wall all about it, or a ha-ha perhaps, not as

against trespass, but as a symbol that here was an Isle that the tides

of the care and of the trouble of the world did not invade--a shining

and galleried chamber where light and happy laughter should rise to the

groining of the roof (dim blue with gilt stars), and should echo and

linger there as if the fane itself whispered--that was the idea. None of

it existed, none of it was ever likely to exist; but without some such

dreaming our life on earth is little worth. The people who put up the

real money for it laughed at it, and laughed at Terry when he had gone,

but humoured him while he was there as a nuisance, but a gentle one. If

they lost their money there would, at any rate, be a good many of them

in company, the land was exceedingly cheap, and they need not begin to

build upon it till they pleased. Besides, by taking shares in his

Thelema they had bought Terry off. When he came with his other wild and

beautiful schemes they could say, "No, no, Terry, we'll see how Thelema

turns out first," and pass him on to somebody else. That alone was worth

the money.

Then there came to Terry one day a man who not only did not laugh at

him, but grasped him by the hand, patted him all up the arm and across

the breast as if he conferred invisible decorations upon him, gave

Thelema his blessing, and said, in moved tones, "Indeed it is

splen-did--splen-did--without vis-ion the people perish-eth." He told

Terry that his name was Tudor Williams, and that he was the

parliamentary representative of the constituency a portion of which

Terry and the gods on high were developing. He did not ask outright for

anything. He told Terry that, while he himself was a good Radical,

believing that God made the land for the people, nevertheless, in this

imperfect world things had to be done a lit-tle at a time, and his

principal objection to the (temporary) private ownership of land was

that it was too often in the wrong hands. If it could be put into the

right hands much of the ini-quit-ty would disappear, whatever. Then,

when he came to inform Terry that in his opinion he could be of great

use to the Estate, he told him also that he was far from being a wealthy

man, and that his usefulness must be set off as against the cost of any

interest Terry might think fit to confer upon him....

"Look you," he said, "the conditions of labour are peculiar, and things

that would be easy for me you might find a lit-tle diff-fi-cult. I do

not say you would, and indeed I am a good democrat, and do not believe

in one law for the ritss and another for the poor; but nowadays, when

every man has his rights and his vote ... well, without a word here and

a word there it might be a lit-tle diff-fi-cult...."

And Terry, who was quite acute enough to see this, asked Mr. Tudor

Williams to come again.

When Mr. Tudor Williams came to see Terry for the third time, Terry

pressed him to accept a seat on the Board. But Mr. Tudor Williams put up

a deprecating hand.

"Aw-w-w, no!" he said. "Indeed it is very good of you, and I am very

pleased you show so much confidence in me, but it would not do. There is

my public position to consider. Indeed I would rather have a nominee. It

is hard to make people understand a proper motive. If the time was ripe

for it I would nationalise all land, yes indeed I would, but if it must

be privately owned for a lit-tle while longer it is better that it

should be in the trust of men like you and me for the public good. There

is as many different kinds of landowning as there is of landowners. That

pet-ti-fog-ging country squire, Wynne, he is repre-sen-ta-tive of all

that is worst in a vic-ious sys-tem; he has no more vis-ion than that

chair you sit on now; but we are not like that. I have not often found a

sym-pathy like yours; indeed there has been tears in my eyes while you

have talked.... But I will have a nominee. It will be better. And I will

see you get your labour. There is John Jones, Contractor, Porth Neigr.

He may even be willing to pay a lit-tle commission. We shall not quarrel

about that.--But I am bet-ter off the Board."

Very curiously, he was not the only one who seemed a little shy about

being put on the Board. Others displayed an equal bashfulness. This

puzzled Terry. But it never puzzled him for long at a time. Always a

fresh inspiration sent him off into his cloudland again. It was about

that time that he acquired his second slice of Llanyglo, a tract

adjoining the first and running down to that shore that Copley Fielding

depicted with such accomplishment, elegance, and taste. And he took with

that second piece of land a responsibility greater than that he had

assumed when he had merely cajoled money out of the pockets of men who

had known his tea-clipping father and whose fathers had known his

privateering great-grandfather. Briefly, by enlarging his enterprise,

Terry threw away the immediate advantage of his personal idealism and

charm. The thing went to allotment shorn of his peculiar magnetism. He

received money that would not, merely on the score that they liked him,

be indulgently written off by those who would see that money no more.

His Prospectus is extant. Edward Garden's unfinished house came into it,

and an affiliated interest, "_Porth Neigr Omnibuses, Ltd._," about which

Mr. Tudor Williams knew something. There were great swathes about the

natural beauties of the situation, and lesser ones (the Syndicate pruned

them down behind Terry's back) about the Thelema Idea. And there were a

number of other things that are impossible, yet facts in the amazing

History of Flotation. It is no good saying these things cannot happen

when they happen daily. Had you or I bought shares in the "_Thelema

Estate Development Company, Limited_," we should merely have bought, you

and I, shares in that moonshine that poor, gentle, rapturous, cat's-paw

Terry Armfield drew with freehand and French curves on his bits of paper

and presently spread out in such a lunatic fashion over the sandhills of

Llanyglo. Come, before we leave this dim chapter of the twilight of

Llanyglo's forebeing, and see what Terry did.

Starting at right angles from the Porth Neigr road, a couple of hundred

yards short of John Pritchard's farm, there runs straight down to the

shore a street of rather more than a quarter of a mile in length.

Crossing this street in the middle runs another street, not so long, but

unfinished. These two streets intersect in an open space or circus

perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. The first street is called Delyn

Avenue, because of the mountain that commands it. The second one is

called Trwyn Way. The central circus is called by the names of the four

Crescents it comprises. Farther back from the intersecting points are

other streets. They also are named.

But do not suppose that these streets and Crescents and Avenues and Ways

are streets in any ordinary sense. They are twenty-two and thirty-five

foot roads, metalled, crowned, drained, and with a good stone kerb

running parallel on either side. But there are no houses. There is not

even a pavement, no, not a vestige of one, flagged, macadamed, cobbled,

nor of any other description. There are no standards for gas or electric

light; there are no standards even for the names of the

thoroughfares--for you can hardly call those things standards--those low

wooden boards, rather like the "_Please Keep off the Grass_" notices in

a public park, that inform you that this is Delyn Avenue or that that is

Trwyn Way. Exactly as it was all drawn on Terry Armfield's tracing-paper

and envelopes and memo-heads, so it is now drawn on the Llanyglo

sandhills, with strips of stone kerbing for pencil lines and the

wind-blown sand where his india-rubber has passed. Lie down on the

sandhills with your eyes at the level of the kerbs, and, save for those

eighteen-inch-high street name-boards, all disappears. Or if you care to

climb the Trwyn you can see it all rather well from there....

There you are. Just a little patch of strapwork in the middle of the

waste. Or like a rather large gridiron somebody has thrown away. And, if

you are capable of seeing what Terry saw, namely all the things that are

not there and that never will be there, then that little grid of

laid-down and abandoned streets has a curiously mocking effect. You

imagine the ghosts of Terry's Thelemites moving noiselessly there,

passing to and from their non-existent habitations. They are going,

friendly ghost taking friendly ghost by the hand, to that groined and

lofty chamber of Terry's dream, where the faint echoes of laughter

linger in the roof of dim blue with gilt stars. They are going to walk

in Terry's closes and courts and arbours, happy in that the sorrows and

pains and substantialities of the world touch them not in their retreat.

They are going down Delyn Avenue, to where the broad and gentle steps

descend to the yellow shore. And all about them, but only to be seen if

you can see what Terry saw (otherwise you will see only the sand and the

wild thyme and the sulphur butterflies and the blue), are Calaer and

Anatole, Criere and Hesperia, Mesembrine and Arctic, which are the six

towers of that Place with the great gate where bigots and hypocrites and

defrauded and whining shareholders enter not, nor the violent Huns of

the world of business nor the cruel Ostrogoths of commerce, but only the

spruce and noble devotees of the Best, the Terrys before their time.

But when the wind gets up, then the sand blows over it all, and John

Pritchard or somebody else, catching his foot against the unseen kerb,

comes down his length into the middle of Terry's lovely and desired

Place. But the men and women of Llanyglo are beginning to know their

way about this phantom town, and none other, save the Gardens (whose

house is now finished), and a friend or so of the Gardens' in the

summer, ever comes there. The Kerrs, however, still have their Hafod,

which they inhabit together when they are not away buying and cutting

alders and shaping them into clog-soles with the free-hinged knife in

the little canvas hut. And among the businessmen of Liverpool the whole

thing is still a rich joke.--"Well, have you started building that house

of yours in Wales yet?" a man who has not bought will ask a man who did;

and this one will reply, "Oh, I'm thinking about it," or, "You must come

down there and stop with me," or some other put-off. And it was rich in

the extreme when, one day, the man at whose expense the joke was made

took the jester by the button, smiled, and whispered something

confidential.... "What!" gasped the jester. "You've _sold_!... Wherever

did you find him? In Manchester? Ha, ha, ha! Splendid! That's a dig in

the ribs for Manchester!--I should like to see his face when he sees

it!... A pity about poor Armfield, though--he'll catch snuff----"

For Terry had been refused bail.

PART TWO

I

RAILHEAD

But something was coming to Llanyglo.

As Edward Garden might have said, looking at this something under his

glasses and over his glasses as it crept slowly up out of the east--as

Edward Garden might have said, looking at it again and yet again, and

then gazing mildly and mistrustfully through the glasses at you, it

appeared to be a railway.

At any rate, if it was not coming to Llanyglo it was coming within three

miles of it.

As if a snail should leave behind it a track, not of slime, but of new

iron, grey at first, then red with rust, but soon to be bright again, so

it came on; and in other respects also it resembled a snail. It carried,

for example, its lodging with it. And it put forward sensitive and

intelligent antennae as it sought its food thirty miles away down the

coast--manganese. It left the junction half a mile beyond Porth Neigr,

and it was going to Abercelyn.

The lodging that the snail carried with it was called Railhead. Seen

from a distance of a couple of miles it resembled a small excoriation on

the face of the land; seen nearer it resolved itself into a town of wood

and corrugated iron, with stockades of creosoted sleepers and trenches

of earth and ramparts of ballast and metal for the laying of the

permanent way. There were superintendents' offices and the sheds of

clerks of works; there were forges and stables and strings of waggons

and a telegraph cabin; there were huts and pumping-stations and cranes,

stationary and travelling, and a gas-plant; and there were watchmen's

boxes and the temporary dwellings of hundreds of men. By day these could

be seen, spread out on the level or clustering about the embankments as

the flies clustered about the treacled strings and fly-papers Howell

Gruffydd hung up in his shop in Llanyglo; at night the oncoming snail

seemed phosphorescent, its phosphorescence the flares and fires and

lamps in cabin-windows and red eyes for danger that appeared when the

other shift took over the work from the men of the day. Whistle of

construction-engine and roar of dynamite cartridge; hiss of steam and

clang of hammers as they fished the joints; rattle of road-metal as it

was shot from the carts, and thud of the paviors' rammers; clank of

couplings and agonised scream of a circular saw; purr of telephone-bells

and the "Hallo!" as the clerk took down the receiver; sough of pumps and

bubbling of cauldrons of tar; cries to horses, slish and slap of mortar

and the clinking of the trowels; spitting of dinners cooking over the

firebaskets, sounds of singing at night; with these and a hundred other

noises the snail crept on with a spirit-level inside him--the level that

kept him true to the line that had been laid down by staff and chain and

theodolite a couple of years before.

And in some respects that something that looked so very much like a

railway resembled not so much a snail as a snake. Did you ever see the

great python that died lately at the Zoo climb his ragged staff of a

tree? Not a joint or section of him but seemed to have that separate

life of each of Dafydd Dafis's fingers when he mourned over his harp. A

yard, two yards of the gorgeous waist-thick creature would ripple and

flow and roll upwards to the crutch of the stump; another yard would

follow, piling ever up and up; and you would wait for the toppling over

of the great golden reticulated cable. And then all motion in that

portion of the great fake would suddenly cease. Beyond the stump you

would become aware that another glittering section was a-crawl,

balancing, making fast, ever continuing the ascent.... Even so, before

and behind Railhead, the work progressed. At a point the

construction-engine stopped, the regiment of red and blue shirts and

wondrous forearms and corduroy would move off, and presently all the

life of the line would be five miles ahead, where they dug and built and

drained and by and by passed back the word that all was well. So they

moved, between the finished and tested line at one point and the warning

bell and the dynamite stick at the other; and there was an end of much

gorse and heath and of many banks of flowering campion and hassocks of

wild thyme.

And, for all this snail with its iron slime was not passing within three

miles of Llanyglo, it was bringing the hamlet's appointed destiny with

it. It was bringing (though, to be sure, not for some years yet) a

passenger-junction where yet only irises and bog-cotton grew and frogs

boomed out over the marsh at night. It was bringing sidings where John

Pritchard's farthest field of oats now rippled silver-green in the wind.

It was bringing a goods-yard and signal-bridges, and sheds and platforms

and turntables and a cabrank in front and rows of railwaymen's dwellings

behind. It was bringing a different breed of men, a breed that so far

Llanyglo knows only in the persons of the four Kerrs. More than this,

it was bringing progress, and sophistication, and wealth for some but

nothing for others, and jollity, and vice, and some knowledge that was

good and some that Llanyglo would have been no worse without, and always

loads, loads, trainloads of white-faced people from the smoky towns. And

most of all it was bringing to that vague yet unmistakable town-soul of

Llanyglo growth and experience, growth that it could not escape and

experience that it must square with those numbered days of its idyllic

nonage as best it can. Through growing-pains and wild-oats, through

revulsions of young remorse and impossible panaceas of repentance,

through shrugging worldliness and cynicism and the forgetfulness that

lies in laughter, Llanyglo must pass before it becomes--whatever it is

to be. One thing only is certain: it can never again be as it was when

Edward Garden first went there. Its wild thyme will remain only in

patches on its Trwyn, and its sandhills will be glaucous with the blue

sea-holly no more. The black cattle have not much longer in which to

pace its shore, and Terry Armfield's gridiron will be forgotten--no

_Sixpenny Guide_ will point the way down Delyn Avenue nor past his

immaterial Crescents along Trwyn Way. Railhead is creeping on. Two of

the Kerrs are already working there, the other two have just bought the

last of Squire Wynne's alders. Squire Wynne has now no land except that

occupied by the Plas and its tangled and mossy and grassy and neglected

gardens. "_Porth Neigr Omnibuses, Limited_," is already a serious

undertaking, for it will ply between Llanyglo and the nearest point of

the line. Howell Gruffydd has an option on the two original cottages

that Edward Garden had had matchboarded--he may soon be requiring a

larger shop. Compensations will be paid right and left. And there will

soon be a larger assortment of young men for Miss Nancy Pritchard to

choose a husband from....

For something is coming to Llanyglo.

* * * * *

Mr. Tudor Williams Ponteglwys had been clever enough in the matter of

the Omnibuses, Limited, nor, for the matter of that, had his cleverness

stopped there; but for astuteness he could not hold a candle to Edward

Garden. Edward Garden was not a Member of Parliament. As he musingly

said when people asked him why he was not, it was out of his line.

Therefore, he and his friends had left to others the promotion of the

Bill, its steering through Select Committees of both Houses, and the

whole conduct of the negotiations that, in their different way, were no

less complicated than that concentration of various forces by virtue of

which Railhead crept ever slowly forward. To a regiment of lawyers had

likewise been left the adjustments under the general Acts to which, on

the passing of the Bill, the enterprise had become subject. Members and

lawyers alike, those drest in a little brief obedience to the commands

of the party whips, these as often as not Members themselves, were

virtually the nominees of Edward Garden and his friends. Politics Edward

Garden's "line"?... To all outward appearances he had no "line" at all.

He merely added another emblem to that little cluster of Mercuries and

Greyhounds and Winged Orbs that formed the pendant of his watch-chain.

It was only when others, full of plans and hope and secrecy, sought

"lines" for themselves that they discovered that he had been beforehand

with them. To give an instance: When Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P.,

apparently as representing somebody else, had come forward with an offer

to take up the remnants of poor Terry's Thelema, he had found there

were no remnants to take up. To give another instance: When, by

carefully engineered good offices and intermediaries, Mr. Tudor Williams

had sought a reconciliation with Squire Wynne, and presently had gone to

see him, he had found that he had pocketed his pride for nothing--the

Squire no longer had a yard of land to sell. In a word, before ever

whispers of the Bill had begun to circulate in the lobbies of the House

of Commons, the sandhills and oat-fields of Llanyglo had been cut up

like a jigsaw puzzle, raffled, dealt in, apportioned, and owned; and,

save for his small holding in Thelema, between the Omnibuses at Porth

Neigr and manganese at Abercelyn, there were very few pickings for Mr.

Tudor Williams of Ponteglwys.

Therefore he returned with an enthusiasm more ardent than ever to his

original crusade against the private ownership of the land that God made

for the people, and took his constituents by the button-holes, and spoke

darkly of other Acts--Acts which by and by should give the Local

Authority powers of compulsory purchase.

And all this time the eye still saw nothing to purchase but bents and

blown sand, blue and lemon butterflies, nodding harebells, a few

tidemarks of black seaweed, a wooden jetty, a cluster of thatched kerb,

the three Chapels, Edward Garden's house, and Ty Kerr.

But something was coming to Llanyglo.

* * * * *

On the whole they did not talk very much about it. Each had his reason

for reticence, or brooding, or resentment, or calculation, as the case

might be. Nevertheless, with Railhead still many miles away, they began

to become accustomed to the coming and going of strangers. They came,

these strangers, to Edward Garden's house, sleeping either there or else

at the double cottage down by the beach; Edward Garden himself, with a

lantern in his hand, saw them hospitably over the sandhills to bed. They

were surveyors and architects, accountants, geologists, prospectors, men

in control of the snail that left the track of iron and grey ballast and

upturned clay across the land, lawyers, conveyancers, the directors of

the stone-quarries along the Porth Neigr road, and others at whose

business Llanyglo could only guess. And Mr. Tudor Williams also went

there, perhaps to talk about compulsory powers. These and others

wandered in groups along the straggling lines of seaweed, and up the

Trwyn, and far inland behind John Pritchard's farm, pointing, pacing,

discussing, exactly as those minions of the Liverpool Syndicate had done

that morning when work had suddenly ceased on Edward Garden's new house;

but there was no talk of fence-burning now. Even Dafydd Dafis saw the

hopelessness of it, and once more went about with his head bowed like a

head of corn heavy with rain. Already men were widening and levelling

the Porth Neigr road. One week-end in July, after an unusually large

gathering at Edward Garden's house, a new waggonette from Porth Neigr

came to take them back in a body. It had a pair of horses, and it took

the hills in style. Dafydd Dafis, whom the vehicle overtook on his ten

miles' trudge into the town, was offered a seat, but he appeared not to

hear, and the vehicle drove on, enveloping him in its dust. Half-way to

Porth Neigr he came upon a squad of men setting up a telegraph pole. One

of them spoke to him, in English. "Dim Saesneg," he muttered, and then

perhaps wondered why he had done so. It might be "Dim Cymraeg"

presently. A little farther on the waggonette passed him again, once

more hiding him in its dust. No doubt it had turned aside up the rough

road that led to the stone-quarries. Dafydd continued his trudge.

But in the household of Howell Gruffydd the grocer, a suppressed

excitement reigned. This, when Dafydd Dafis happened to be there, showed

only as resignation and a bowing to the inevitable; but at other times

it seemed to confer a more frequent glitter to Howell's teeth, a new

impulse to his jocularity, and a sparkle and sharpness to his wife's

eyes. Cases and canisters the like of which he had never handled before

were delivered at his door by the Porth Neigr carrier; these were for

the consumption of Edward Garden and his guests; and he waited in person

upon Mrs. Garden every Monday morning. He thought of having a Christmas

almanack with his own name printed upon it. Blodwen, his wife, made him,

in anticipation, a pair of linen half-sleeves that drew up over his

forearms. Eesaac Oliver was forbidden any longer to fetch the eggs from

the light-keeper's wife up the Trwyn; one of Hugh Morgan's boys might do

this. As a preparation for Aberystwith, Eesaac Oliver was packed off to

a second cousin of Blodwen's at Porth Neigr, there to attend an

excellent endowed school. With the railway passing so near it would be a

simple matter for him to spend his week-ends at Llanyglo.

And big consumptive John Pritchard rarely said a word about that

onward-creeping snail that left its double thread of permanent track

behind it, but he thought exaltedly and powerfully. Stories had already

reached him of drunkenness at Railhead, and fights, and singing at

nights, and other godless orgies, and his brow was sternly set. When he

preached at the Baptist Chapel about such as loved darkness and the evil

paths in which they walked, it was known that he was thinking of

Railhead. Men were now plotting their levels almost within sight of

Llanyglo. They turned their surveying instruments on the hamlet as if

they had been guns, and laid out their chains as if they had been

enslaving the soil itself. Then an advance gang approached, and, even

while John knew that the end was near (but not so near as all that),

that end came. Eight men marched one evening into Llanyglo, bawling a

bawdy chorus, with Sam Kerr showing the way. They had bottles and

piggins and stone jars of beer, and, slung with joined-up leather belts

between two of them, swung a barrel. They stumbled through the loose

sand towards the Hafod Unos, hiccoughing and polluting the peaceful

evening. Ned Kerr had evidently been advised of their coming; he stood

at the door of the Hafod to receive them; and the carousing began.... It

lasted half the night, and then each clay-stained navvy and tattooed

platelayer slept and snored where he fell. John Pritchard did not sleep.

Faintly he could hear their singing where he lay. The red and white of

the Trwyn light dyed the darkness overhead. John remembered his own

words: "It is a den of li-ons----"

Something had already come to Llanyglo.

II

THE CLERK OF THE WORKS

John Willie Garden was by this time at the age when he occasionally

washed himself without being told. This he probably did, not out of any

great love of cleanliness, but because by washing unbidden he acquired

the right to retort, when the order to wash came, "I have--there!" Did

one of the maids give the order he might add the word "Sucks!" This word

he withheld when the command came from his mother.

He was still at school at Pannal, but ardently longed to leave. It was

intended that sooner or later he should go into business with his

father, and during the past Christmas vacation, which the Gardens had

spent at home in Manchester, he had had the run of the offices and

spinning-sheds. His real education, as distinct from his scholastic one,

had been immensely advanced thereby. This real advance had taken place

principally after working hours. In such cases there is usually a young

clerk or market-man ready to take the son of the firm into his charge,

and a certain Jack Webster had had the bringing of John Willie out. This

he had done at football matches, in the dressing-rooms where the titans

clad themselves for the fray, and at their sing-songs and smokers

afterwards. Therefore, John Willie esteemed himself a boy of the world,

and already the day seemed far distant when he had shot the Llanyglo

rabbits with his bow and arrow, and had buried a sixpence beneath the

date-stone of his father's house.

To Llanyglo John Willie went again that summer, as the snail crept

forward yard by yard to Abercelyn and the manganese.

All things considered, you might have been pardoned had you supposed

that, without John Willie, the work at Railhead must have come to a

stop. Had you wished to know anything about that railway--its cost per

mile, its contractors' time-limits and penalties, its wages bills, its

estimated upkeep--you would have gone, not to those men who spent

week-ends at Edward Garden's house, but to John Willie. Railhead was now

to him what the building of the Llanyglo house had formerly been, and

the fence-burning, and rugby football, and many another interest of the

days when he had been a kid and immature. It was in the summer of 1884

that the snail's antennae approached within sight of Llanyglo, and, rain

or shine, permitted or forbidden, John Willie spent most of his waking

hours among the masons and smiths and navvies and plate-layers who

formed the population of that nomad town of wood and earth and sleepers

and rolling stock and escaping steam and corrugated iron. He knew half

the men by name. He joined them at dinner when the great buzzer told

half a county that it was half-past twelve. He knitted his brows over

the curling and thumb-marked plans in the foremen's cabins. He passed

this section of work or that, and gave the other his imprimatur. He

adapted his stride to the distance between sleeper and sleeper. He spat

reflectively on heaps of clay and mortar. With his hands, not in his

pockets, but thrust (in imitation of the labourers with the

"drop-front" corduroys) deep into his waist-band, and his cap on the

back of his yellow, thistle-down head, he gave off-hand nods of greeting

and warning "Steadys." He was variously known as "t' gaffer," "t'

ganger," "t' clerk o' t' works," and "t' foreman."

And his friend, Percy Briggs, of Pannal School and Roundhay (where his

father was an architect) accompanied him. Percy's father was one of

Edward Garden's week-enders. He was making the plans of a second house,

not far from where Terry Armfield's Thelemites were to have descended

the shallow, marble steps to the golden shore. There was also some talk

of an hotel.

For by this time quite a number of people knew at least the name of

Llanyglo, and there is very little doubt that, had the place but had

houses, it might even then have been that within another three or four

years it actually had become--a quiet but not inaccessible resort, with

perhaps a dozen striped bathing-tents and a row or two of deck-chairs

drawn up on its beach, a couple of comfortable hydros established and a

large new hotel a-building, a few donkeys (but no niggers nor pierrots),

a place for children and for such of their elders as sought a quiet not

to be found at Blackpool nor the Isle of Man, a spot unvisited by

trippers, "select," a little on the expensive side, where an

acquaintance struck up between families might without too much risk be

improved afterwards, where the nurses would be uniformed and the luggage

would be sent on in advance, where a wealthy patron might even build a

house of his own (if he could get the land), a "nice" place, a place you

could afterwards tell _any_body you had been to, a place from which you

would go back feeling well and not in need of another holiday, a

place--in short, a place like So-and-So, or So-and-So, out of which we

try to shut history and change by being a little jealously secret about

them. Llanyglo might have been, and for a short time actually was, such

a place; and Percy Briggs's father, with others to tell him what to do

and what not to do, was even now in the act of planning how to make it

so.

In the meantime, Edward Garden's own house was a very different place

from those two cottages that Dafydd Dafis had taken his own good time

about matchboarding. That first lodging had been no more than a

temporary camping-place for the summer. Any sagging old wicker-chairs or

tables or chests of drawers from lumber-rooms had been good enough for

it, and its crockery and kitchen appointments had been of the cheapest

kind that Porth Neigr could supply. But not so with the new house.

Everything about it spoke of permanence. The large plate-box was carried

backwards and forwards at the beginning and end of the summer season,

but not the Worcester dinner-service, nor the glass that filled its

cupboards, nor the linen in its closets, nor the blankets nor the

eiderdowns set by for winter, nor the few--the rather few--books. Mrs.

Garden herself had told Howell Gruffydd that it was not likely that the

place would be locked up for the winter months again. Edward Garden

intended to spend more and more time there; indeed he must, unless by

and by he would look musingly and a little ill-favouringly through his

glasses at that sparse line of bathing-tents and that little knot of

combination-saddled donkeys and say, "This does not appear to be much of

a watering-place." Already he had made special arrangement for the

delivery of his Manchester letters; upstairs on the first floor he had

his office, with a deep window, the side bays of which looked, the one

towards the sea, the other to the mighty deltoid-shaped outline of

Mynedd Mawr; and where Edward Garden settled he liked to settle

comfortably. In that quiet and rugged and curtained room he was once

more following the line of least resistance. The chances were that he

already foresaw the direction that line was likely to take.

For Lancashire, which had been remote when folk had had to jog the ten

miles from Porth Neigr behind a somnolent old brown horse, would be near

when that snail had packed his lodging up and departed, leaving only its

iron pathway behind it; and the Kerrs in their Hafod Unos would have

been astonished to learn how much Edward Garden mused upon Lancashire

and upon just such people as themselves. He mused upon the cost of

living of such as they; and he mused upon their standard of living,

which is a related thing, but not the same thing. He mused again as he

saw the gradual change in that standard, and contrasted the things he

saw with the things he remembered in his own early days. In those days,

expressly taken holidays had been unheard-of things. Folk's excursions

had reached little farther afield than their own legs could carry them.

If John Pritchard, of Llanyglo, had never been to Porth Neigr, many and

many a Manchester man of the days of Edward Garden's boyhood had never

been to Liverpool. Many thousands had never seen the sea. It had been

holiday enough in those days to meet in the streets, to play knurr and

spell in the nearest field, to lean over walls and watch their pigs, and

to tend their gardens. Slate Clubs and Goose Clubs and Holiday Clubs had

not been invented. A shilling or half a crown a week painfully saved

would not have been squandered again for the sake of that little

superfluity that had now become the minimum itself. The mass of the

people of his day would no more have dreamed of saving money in order

that seaside lodging-house keepers should profit than they would have

dreamed of taking the Grand Tour.

But a generation seemed to have arisen, very different in some ways, yet

exactly the same in others. They were different in that they refused to

be exploited any longer according to the old familiar formulas, yet the

same in that they were as subject as their fathers had been, and as

their sons and grandsons will be, to the man who could devise a new one.

All manner of circumstances contributed to their unuttered invitation

(it was that in effect, and the only thing they did not utter) that

somebody should bring to their exploitation the spice of variety. There

were smoulderings everywhere--smoulderings at Durham and West Ham, at

Ayr and Lanark and Swansea, at Sheffield and Manchester and Liverpool

and Leeds and Hull. Over his glasses and under his glasses Edward Garden

noted them, and inferred that the sum of it all was that folk intended

to have a better time than they had been having. They were quite

unmistakably resolved to have a much better time. Their grandfathers'

idea of a Wakes Week, for example, might have been staying at home and

timing the pigeons into the cote; but they meant to improve on that.

They intended to doff their clogs and to put on their thinnest shoes, to

draw extravagant sums from the Club, to take railway-tickets, and not to

rest from their arduous relaxation as long as a penny remained

unspent.... Manganese? The moment they showed signs of coming his way,

Edward Garden was after richer returns than manganese would yield. He

granted that without manganese there would have been no Railhead coming

up out of the east, but what he had his eye on was the new generation's

deadly resolve to be amused, the crammed coffers of its Holiday Clubs,

the beginnings of those tens and scores and hundreds of thousands of

pounds that to-day a single town will get rid of in a single fortnight

by the sea.

But _only_ if it came his way. He was no Terry. It was his business to

take things as they were, not to try to make them something they were

not. He had no theories, no criticisms, no impulses, no hesitations. He

asked for nothing but uncoloured data. Therefore, and to that extent,

Llanyglo's future was not entirely in his hands. It was still free, and

always, always, save for a little rising of new stone here and there,

just the same to look at--watched over by the Light on its noble Trwyn,

guarded by the majestic mountain behind, and presenting to its diurnal

tides the same shore that Copley Fielding drew.

Now it befell towards the end of the July of that year that the Welshmen

of Llanyglo held an open-air service for the young in one of the hollows

of the sandhills. It was a blazing Sunday afternoon, with the sea like

silk and the pale mountains seeming thrice their distance away. They had

brought a small moveable platform and reading-desk from the Baptist

Chapel, and first John Pritchard, and then Howell Gruffydd had mounted

it. The sun beat on the bare heads and best bonnets and black-coated

shoulders of parents; myriads of tiny hopping insects gave the surface

of the sand the appearance of being in motion; and a buzzard sailed in

great steady circles in the sky of larkspur blue, now standing out to

sea, now a speck in the direction of Delyn or Mynedd Mawr.

Howell was teaching the twelve or fourteen urchins a new hymn-tune,

singing it now alone, now with them, now listening with little gestures

of encouragement and nods of pleasure as their voices rose. His secular

jocularity was not absent, but tempered to the occasion.

"Louder, louder and quicker--it give you an appetite for your tea," he

said, waving his arms and beating with his foot to the accelerated time.

"You will not wake Mrs. Hughes at the lighthouse--now--'_Joyful,

Joyful_----'"

And, with Eesaac Oliver leading, they went through the tune again.

That a special exhortation should be given to those of tenderer years

had been deliberately resolved upon. Since that evening when the eight

men from the line had rolled drunkenly over the sandhills to the Kerrs'

house, a fear had weighed on the chapel-goers of Llanyglo. Until then,

their children had known nothing of the wide and wicked world; but that

ignorance could not now be maintained. They must be put on their guard,

and for that job the ingratiating Howell was the man.

The tune came to an end, and he put his leaflet of printed words into

his pocket and shepherded the row of urchins into position with

movements of his hands.

"Move that way, John Roberts--I cannot see Olwen Morgan's face. Hugh

Morgan, stop poking your foot into that rabbit-hole or you fall down it

and we have to dig you out. Miss Pritchard, give Gwen Roberts her

sunbonnet, if you please, or she catss a sunstroke. Ithel, where is your

handkerchief? Your nose resem-bles a snail.... Now listen to me. If I

see a boy or girl not pay atten-sson I stop till he do pay

atten-sson----"

And he began. He told them that soon, with the coming of the railway,

there would come also all manner of pip-ple, some good pip-ple, some bad

pip-ple. He told them that at Railhead were many bad pip-ple, who swore,

and drank a great deal more than was good for them. He told them

(discreetly, since he had no wish to preach a _jehad_ against customers

so good as the Gardens) that while some boys might go to Railhead to

play, boys like some he would not mention, who had lived in large towns,

yet it would be bet-ter if they kept themselves to themselves.... He did

not go the length of asserting that all good boys were Welsh and country

boys, and that all bad ones were town-bred and English, but--but--well,

things have to be put a little starkly to the young. They shuffled their

feet in the hot loose sand as he talked. The buzzard sailed back from

the mountains. The sandhoppers danced as if the ground had been a

frying-pan. A holy peace brooded over the land. Away at Railhead men,

those sinful men who drank and swore slept in rows, stretched

face-downwards on the grass or the thrown-up banks of clay.

Then the grocer began to promise the rewards of virtue. He turned with

an interrogative smile to John Pritchard.

"And now, Mr. Pritchard, do you think I might tell them that sec-ret?

Indeed I think I get into trouble if I do! But yess, I will tell

them.--Atten-sson now. Hugh Morgan, do not scratss your head. Now!--Can

any boy or girl tell me what there iss to be in Mr. Pritchard's field

next month?"

They guessed at once, with one voice. Howell Gruffydd knew better than

to ask an audience questions it could not answer. He held up his hands

in admiring surprise.

"Indeed they guess--they are every one right, Miss Pritchard!

Astonissing! Dear me, I never saw such s'arp young men and women!--Yess,

they are right. There is to be a Treat for the Sunday School scholars!

There now! And there will be races, and prizes, and tea, and the books

will be given for those who have had the largest num-ber of attendances

and have not been late.--And now: who is giving this Treat?"

"Mr. Tudor Williams!" they cried.

"Right again--it is Mr. Tudor Williams, the Member of Parliament! And

Mr. Williams is giv-ing something else too. He is giv-ing--I have seen

them--new pictures--pictures of the construc-tion of flowers--(bot-tany

I think it is called, Miss Pritchard?)--and an-i-mals--and

fiss-sses----"

He turned up his eyes, as if to the heavens from which these rewards of

virtuous living descended. The croupy shrilling of a cock came from down

by the beach. The bees droned, and the wheeling buzzard suddenly dropped

like a plummet a hundred yards through the larkspur blue.

It was then, in that very moment, that Howell Gruffydd's face was seen

to change. He stopped, listening. Beyond the hot cuplike hollow in which

they were assembled was another sunken way, and along this way somebody

was approaching. Probably in complete unconsciousness that any hearer

was at hand, this somebody was singing softly as he came. It was Tommy,

the youngest of the Kerrs, and he was singing to himself, in very bad

Welsh, _Glan Meddwdod Mwyn_.

Now this song is one of the less reputable songs of Wales. The English

drinking song usually contents itself with extolling the mere convivial

act, drawing a decent veil over the lamentable effects of that act; but

even in its title _Glan Meddwdod Mwyn_ (which words mean _Fair, Kind

Drunkenness_) has no such reticence. It depicts ... but you can see the

difference for yourself. No wonder it froze the words on Howell

Gruffydd's lips. In the singer's complete unconsciousness that he was

not alone lay the whole sting. The malice, the intent, the hateful

Lancashire humour of the Kerrs they had had before, but not _this_

home-thrust with a weapon they themselves had provided!

Tommy might just as well have climbed the hummock and told them that,

since their language provided equally for these eventualities, they were

no better than anyone else....

An English drunkard, to grub in the lees of their own language like

this!----

And little Hugh Morgan had sniggered!----

The unseen Tommy and his (their) song passed on towards the Hafod Unos.

Then Howell bestirred himself again. "There, now!" he said; "what had he

just been tell-ing them? Indeed, that was opp-por-tune, whatever!" ...

But, though he strove to hide it, there was a hollowness now in his

exhortation. He felt as if he had been building a wall against a

contagion that crept in upon the invisible air. If Thomas Kerr knew

_Glan Meddwdod Mwyn_ he might also know viler ditties still; if little

Hugh Morgan, whom he had thought pure, had sniggered at _Glan Meddwdod_

he might guffaw outright at the baser version of _Sospan Bach_....

It could only (Howell thought) be original sin....

It was at least a little balm to him to hear the fervour with which

Eesaac Oliver once more led the singing of _Joyful, Joyful_.

And, by the way (speaking of songs), Eesaac Oliver's choice of the

narrow and difficult path had already involved him in a persecution in

which song played a minor part. This persecution was at the hands of

John Willie Garden. For, in an unguarded moment, Eesaac Oliver had

confided to John Willie his plans for his career; and since then the

unfeeling John Willie, on his way to Railhead and debauchery, had held

over him the song that contains the lines:--

"_He wass go to Je-sus College

For to try to get some knowledge----

Wass you ever see," etc. etc._

John Willie, itching to get away from Pannal, could not understand why

anybody wanted to go to Jesus, Aberystwith, or any other College.

"_I think it would be wiser

For to stay with Sister Liza----

Wass you ever see," etc. etc._

he would hum softly and (alas) contemptuously; and, since it was part of

his chosen career to do so, Eesaac Oliver would very expressly forgive

John Willie, getting into quite a Christian heat about it.

On the day after that homily on the Llanyglo sandhills, John Willie

Garden went as usual to Railhead, and was enabled to delight his

leather-belted and corduroyed friends there with a piece of information,

hitherto secret, that he had from his father's table. This was that the

line was to be opened in the following Spring by His Royal Highness the

Duke of Snell. The announcement produced an astonishing effect. Not one

in ten of the men either knew or cared what the enterprise was all

about. They knew that the railway was a railway, but beyond that, none

of its dividends being destined for their pockets, it was merely the

job--"the" job, the job of the moment, the job not very different from

the last job, and very, very like all the other jobs to come, until

their living hands should become as stiff as the picks they plied, and

the light of their eyes be extinguished as their own lanterns were

extinguished at daybreak. But at the news that the Duke of Snell was to

do his trick when they had finished theirs, they were innocently

uplifted and delighted. _This_ would be something to tell their

grandchildren in the years to come! They would spit on their hands and

work better all the afternoon for _this_!... In the meantime they

discussed it when the great buzzer called them to their beef and bacon

sandwiches, their chops and pickles and bread and cheese.

"So it's to be t' Dewk o' Snell!" one of them admired, with as much

satisfaction as if he himself had had a tremendous leg-up in the world

thereby; he was a West Riding navvy, whom twenty years of digging up the

length and breadth of England had delocalised of everything save his

powerful accent. "Well, now, I'd figgered it out 'at it'ld happen be t'

Prince o' Wales mesen----"

Here struck in a Cardiff man, so lean that you would not have got

another pennyweight of fat off him if you had fried him in his own

frying-pan.

"Wass-n't it the Duke of Snell that mar-ried the Prin-cess Victorine?"

"Noa. That wor t' Dewk o' Flint," the Yorkshire navvy replied, with

authority. "T' Dewk o' Snell wed t' youngest, t' Princess Alix. I knaw

all t' lot on 'em; t' missis hed all their pic'ters o' biscuit-boxes;

they reached from one end o' t' chimley-piece to t'other; ye couldn't

ha' got a finger in between."

"Well, well," said the Cardiff man, an inquiring mind among many

complacent ones, "it is curious, how lit-tle diff-ference it makes to

us. The Prinss of Wales, say you? If I wait for the Prinss of Wales to

give me ano-ther piece of this ba-con I wait a long time, whatever!...

But prapss we get our in-vi-ta-tions soon," he added jocularly, taking

an enormous bite of bread. "S'all you be there, John Willie?"

John Willie answered, a little doubtfully, that he hoped to be present

at the ceremony if he could get away from school. The Cardiff man wagged

his head. There are few Welshmen who do not wag their heads at the sound

of the word school.

"Ah, school; it iss a gra-and thing," he said, still wagging. "I not be

work-king here with my shirt wet-t on my back if I go to a prop-per

school."

"Oh, be dinged to that tale!" returned the Yorkshireman bluntly, cutting

cheese on his leathery palm. "T' schools is all my backside! They learn

'em a lot o' newfangled stuff, but I remember 'at when tea wor eight

shillin' a pund, an' they kept a penny nutmeg in a wood case as if it

wor diamonds----"

"Aw-w-w, there iss that Burkie, talk-king again!" said the Cardiff man.

"It's reight, for all that----"

And presently the talk had veered round to those very changes of

standards and conditions, his careful study of which had led Edward

Garden to the conclusion that a generation had arisen that intended

thenceforward to have more of the world's good things than it had been

having or know the reason why.

As it happened, the work on the line had that day taken a new leap

forward. Again all the life of the python had rolled on ahead, and John

Willie, lunching with his friends, was doing so at a point actually

beyond Llanyglo, two miles nearer to Abercelyn. From the Abercelyn end

also the line was coming to meet them, and the two sections would meet

at a place called Sarn. Sarn means Causeway, and there the sea showed,

like a piece of bright piano-wire, across a waste of fleecy bog-cotton

and bog-myrtle, sundew and flags and rushes. A siding was to be made

there. Because of Sarn Church, a tiny little building with an odd

Fifteenth-Century circular tower, Squire Wynne loved this region, and

attended service there; but as that Service was held only once a year,

the "Hough!" of the shunting-engines and the clanking of couplings would

disturb it little. The Squire sighed to think that, among so many, many

other changes, it would be only one change the more. His sales of land

had provided him with just enough money to last his time out, and on the

whole he thought he did not want to outlive his time. Perhaps he too had

had his glimpse of that vision of Edward Garden's, though as it were in

obverse; and, looking, he shrugged his shoulders. Who, in another twenty

or thirty years, would care for the things he had cared for? Who would

waste a thought on antiquity? Who would open his County History, or his

books on Brasses or Church Plate, Memorials or Heraldry or Glass? Who

would know each tree he came upon on his walks, as a country doctor

knows his patients--its sickness, its health, its need of air, its

treatment, its amputations? Who would repair the staircase at the Plas,

and restore its magnificent ceilings, and set the merry smoke streaming

up its chimneys once more?... Mr. Tudor Williams would probably do this

last. He would no doubt convert the Plas into a Museum (as he would have

converted Sarn Church itself into a Museum), and fill it with cases of

ice-scratched pebbles, and diagrams of strata and flowers, for reluctant

and educated urchins to gape at. The Squire was entirely in sympathy

with John Willie Garden's corduroyed friend Burkie about these things.

It seemed to him that the multitude, which after all had backbone enough

to starve rather than go on the Parish, would not resist this organised

pauperisation of its mind. It was time the Squire died, since he held

that not everybody has the right to everything and no questions asked.

Otherwise not an inhumane man, there were nevertheless abstractions

which he loved more than he loved his fellow-being....

And who would drink what was left of that wondrous old port?

Well, the Squire, sighing and smiling a little wistfully both at once,

intended to see to that himself.

III

THE CURTAIN RAISER

But while the march of events drove the aborigines of Llanyglo ever more

and more closely together, as the reaping of a field of corn drives the

mice and snakes and rabbits to the narrowing square in the centre, at

the same time something of the opposite process went on. Two or three

stood aloof, Welsh when it suited them to be Welsh, less Welsh at other

times. One of these was Mr. Tudor Williams, the Member of Parliament.

Another was Howell Gruffydd, the grocer.

For thick as thieves now were Edward Garden and Tudor Williams, and to

their frequent councils was admitted also Raymond Briggs, the architect,

whose son had been John Willie's schoolfellow at Pannal.

This Raymond Briggs was a Yorkshireman, from Hunslet, but you wouldn't

have thought it to look at him. You saw at a glance that he was

superfine, but you had no idea how superfine until he opened his mouth.

He was tall, plumpish, very erect, numerously chinned and faultlessly

dressed; and, having entered into culture by one of the noblest of its

portals, architecture, it was small wonder that he wished to forget

Hunslet, with its black canal, its serried weaving-sheds, its grimy

warehouses, and its sooty brickfields. Certainly he had completely

forgotten it in his speech. Over an alien mode he had acquired a really

remarkable mastery; and had it not been for a trifling uncertainty

about his vowels, particularly his "a's," you would have set him down as

quite as much London as Leeds. And so more or less with everything else

about Raymond.--But his wife haled you north again. To her, acquirements

were like hot plates to the fingers, to be kept constantly in motion or

else dropped altogether. Her husband was probably the most humourless

man who ever came to Llanyglo; but Maud Briggs would use the homeliest

of dialect-words in the most artificial of accents, and would tell you,

even while she was mothering you with cool drinks in the most hospitable

fashion, that the piece of ice she dropped with a clink into your glass

was positively "the last piece in the hoil"--if you know your West

Riding well enough to understand the peculiar significance of the word

"hoil" as applied to a house. Her rings were dazzling, for Raymond's

invaluable lack of humour had enabled him to make his mark on the world;

the blue-and-white collapsible boat which their son Percy brought with

him to Llanyglo had cost his father a cool twenty-five pounds in London;

and it would not be for lack of money if Percy did not turn out a very

superior silk purse indeed.

So when the snail, his journey finished, rested and made the siding at

Sarn and then returned to Porth Neigr again, and Railhead was

dismantled, and grasses began to seed themselves about the upturned

soil, Edward Garden and Raymond Briggs and Tudor Williams, M.P., had

their heads frequently together; and no longer were the short days and

long nights a season of hibernation for Llanyglo. Three years out of

four the Llanyglo winters are mild; this particular winter was not so

inclement that it stopped building-operations for more than a day or two

at a time; and, with a sort of miniature Railhead strung out along the

Porth Neigr road for his labour, Raymond's second house rose steadily

course by course, and already they were draining and digging for the

first hotel. If they were mainly Porth Neigr men Raymond employed, that

did not mean that Dafydd Dafis or any other Llanyglo man who was so

minded would not be taken on; indeed they were taken on; but it did mean

that the centre of gravity of the labour-supply had shifted, and would

never shift back again. Those temporary dwellings along the Porth Neigr

road were a constant reminder that if the Llanyglo men did not like it

they might lump it; and as they did neither, but while disliking it

intensely, bore a hand and took their wages just the same, they appeared

to be sufficiently quelled.

Edward Garden, while making Llanyglo his headquarters, was again much

away. A whisper was started that he was once more treating for land,

but, as no further land appeared to be available, the rumour was derided

as idle. Howell Gruffydd was already converting the two original

matchboarded cottages to his own use. Something Departmental happened

somewhere beyond Llanyglo's ken (probably Mr. Tudor Williams knew all

about it), and the word came that the Post Office was to be transferred

from John Pritchard's to Howell's new shop; and though the Post Office

was on the whole more trouble than it was worth, for a little while

Howell seemed likely to have a quarrel on his hands.

But Howell had not definitely taken a part without knowing equally

definitely how to bear himself in that part. _He_ did not intend to be

herded into the gloomy company of a lot of beaten and sulking Welsh

nationalists! As if already a vast spud had cut about Manchester or

Liverpool, and an equally vast spade had taken either of these cities up

bodily like a square of peat and had set it down again on the Llanyglo

sandhills, so the idea of expansion had taken hold of Howell's mind. He

even went a little preposterously beyond bounds, as others did later,

when they learned that their old Welsh dressers and armchairs were a

rarity and marketable, and proceeded to put ridiculous prices upon them.

And probably Edward Garden had a use for Howell. Already it looked like

it. The answer with which Howell appeased John Pritchard in the matter

of the transference of the Post Office looked very much like it. Edward

Garden himself could not so have reconciled John to all this innovation

with a single whispered word.

For "_Bazaars_," Howell said furtively to John, behind his hand; and the

quick electric gleam in his eyes was instantly extinguished again....

You see. They had never had a bazaar at Llanyglo. There would have been

little profit in passing their own money about among themselves. But

_strangers'_ money.... That was the soul of good in things otherwise

evil that Howell whispered to John Pritchard, and later it was so

observingly distilled out for the benefit of the Baptist and other

Chapels that for a time there was actually a danger lest the mulcting

should keep folk away.