Yet, though the Llanyglo air might thrill with the clink-clink of

chisels on stone, and vibrate with the jolting of the builders' carts,

and resound with all the noises of the swift building, still, nobody who

now came thought it ruined. On the contrary, exactly as the Briggses and

the Laceys had predicted, it came to them with shocks of delight. For

think of it: here was no twopenny ride on a clanging tram through naked,

unshaded streets before they could reach the sea. Here was no two-miles

plod back again over the burning asphalt, slackening every nerve that

had been braced up by the bathe. Here was no Brighton nor Scarborough

nor Blackpool yet, with nettings of electric wires overhead and

perspective of rails below. No: from any part of the place, three

minutes would take you, if not in every case to the beach itself, at any

rate to an open space of thyme and harebells and hillocks of clean sand,

where, if you got on the right side of the sandhill, you might not know

that there was a crane or a scaffold within miles. And if the beach was

ploughed and harrowed and tramped and trodden until it resembled a

dirty batter-pudding, half a day and a tide, and the sands were smooth

and shining again, and the wet stretches seemed as much sky as land, and

passing birds were reflected in their depths. The sea tidied up the

shore again as the housemaids took up the crumbs from the hotel

carpets.--And there were dozens of boats now, in which you could push

out a few hundred yards and find yourself in spots that man can never

sully. Five minutes' tugging at the oars and you could rock and gaze up

at the sky, or look over the boat's side at the translucent green

reflection of its curving boards below, and past that into glassy clear

depths, and so past that again to where the water began to show you, not

its depths, but the broken mirroring of the sky again. The boating was

one of the "unrivalled attractions." By nine o'clock every morning a row

of boatmen leaned against the railings between the "Cambrian" and the

jetty, smoking, scanning the front, showing you fresh bait, and offering

boats by the hour, the morning, or the day. Foremost among them, as

likely as not, would be Tommy, the youngest of the Kerrs. He wore a blue

gausey with a diamond woven across the breast, touched the peak of his

dirty old petty-officer's cap constantly, and told folk it was "a

gradely morning for fishing." Though the youngest, he was the least

reputable of the Kerrs. Ned, the eldest, Llanyglo counted part of

itself; the two middle ones were both contractors' foremen, and

respected citizens; but Tommy had become the scandal of Llanyglo. You

were well advised to allow him double time or more if you gave him a bag

to carry anywhere and there was the temptation of beer on the way; and

you might catch him sober if you engaged him and his boat soon after

breakfast, but your chance of doing so became ever less as the day wore

on.

Who were these people who strolled among the droning bees of the

sandhills or pushed out from the shore in boats? Well, they were of more

kinds than one or two now. The charges at the "Cambrian" were still

stiffish; a week there cost as much as a fortnight at the "Cardigan," or

a month at the "Montgomery"; and so we still exhibit the social degrees.

There has even been a certain amount of "feeling" about this. Of two

Rochdale men, say, with little to choose between them in point of

income, one will be seen on the "Cambrian's" balcony in the evening

after dinner, his heart-shaped dinner-shirt one of a number of

heart-shaped dinner-shirts, the bosom and neck and head of the lady he

is chatting with rising out of her lacy corsage as a bouquet rises from

the paper frill that encloses and bedecks it. He will be seen there,

with the red-shaded lamps of the empty dining-room behind him and the

moonlight making his sunburnt face very dark. But the other's face is

sunburnt too, and at half the cost. He too could attitudinise like this

were he so minded. And he reflects that Jones or Jackson may cut a dash

among strangers, but he mustn't try it on with people who know him at

home. As for himself, he's thankful to say that he's just the same

wherever he is, at home or away on a holiday....

In fact Jones or Jackson is precisely the man Edward Garden more than

half expected--the man who can't quite afford it, but will.... But this,

it is hardly necessary to observe, is to take the "Cambrian" at less

than its average and the "Cardigan" at rather more.

The "Montgomery" is actually outclassed by the better "Private Hotels"

and one or two of the superior "Boarding Establishments." Indeed, of

these last the "Cadwallader" almost ranks with the "Cambrian" itself.

And so we come by degrees down to Ham-and-Egg Terrace.--But enough of

these _nuances_ of difference of a fortnight's duration. Who, taken

by-and-large, are these people, and where do they come from?

You have only to ask yourself, "Who else should they be?" and your

question is half answered. Remember the smallness of these Islands, and

the scores of pulsing, radiating, almost radio-active centres within

them, every one swarming with folk who intend to have a better time than

their fathers have had. Could the East Coast be pushed out beyond the

North Sea, and Lancashire be stretched until it took in Galway, St.

George's Channel and all, there might be room enough on England's shores

for every parliamentary voter to have a few acres of Trwyn foreshore of

his own and a black cow walking up and down them, seeking coolness and

food hock-deep in the glistening ebb; but, as things are, the littoral

is by much too small. True, scores and fifties of miles of it remain

practically unvisited; but no snail has snuffled out its manganese

there, and they are not within a few hours and a thirty-shilling

circular fare of the human ant-heaps of the land, where King's Ransoms

of Holiday Club money are put by. There was no wonder about the growth

of Llanyglo. Geographically situated as it was, the marvel would have

been had it not grown. With a few posters and similar devices to

advertise it, it would presently continue to advertise itself.

Therefore the folk who flocked there were of every kind, short of the

grey and overwhelming multitude itself. _Because_ it was only partly

built, _because_ it had not yet shaken down to a definite character and

physiognomy and personality, it spread its net the wider. Did you want

to dress for dinner, and to have your luggage carried by a man in a red

jacket? There was the "Cambrian." Did you want everything that the

Cambrians had, barring only the luxury of being seen lounging in one of

the wicker-chairs about its portals, and still to keep your money in

your pocket? There was the "Cardigan." Did you want to read or to idle,

to botanise or merely to forget your cares for a fortnight, to picnic up

the Trwyn or to have your meals in bed? They asked no questions at the

"Montgomery." From Philip Lacey's piece of Floral Geometry to the nooks

on the farther side of the Trwyn where you could spend a whole morning

undisturbed, there was something for every taste. And they actually had

to turn people away who had been so ill-advised as to come with their

luggage without having first secured their lodging.

And now it had come to this: that while these came to Llanyglo for a

change of air, John Willie Garden, who spent his days among lime and

mortar and wheeling-planks and newly dressed stone, frequently turned

his back on Llanyglo for precisely the same reason. Once a week or so he

was seen to drive past Pritchard's Corner in a light yellow trap at nine

o'clock in the morning. He was off to see to another of his father's

interests--that "catchment area" far away up in the mountains. He drove

eight miles, put up at an inn past which a trout-stream brawled (hardly

yet settled from its precipitous plunging cataracts), and then set out

on foot up a road that rose one-in-five under a whispering wood, to see

the skyline of which you had to throw your head back. It took him an

hour of walking to get to his destination--a solitary wooden cabin

where the agent lived. The agent had on the whole an easy time of it,

for hardly a hundred yards from his cabin door, above the woods now, lay

Llyn Delyn, pure looking-glass in the mile long crook of the mountain.

An old boat was moored among the sedges at one end, the launching of

which on the unbroken surface of that lovely water always seemed to

invoke vague judgments, penalties perhaps forborne, but none the less

incurred. Here the agent, whose name was Sharpe, fished. John Willie

fished with him. Fishing was a good enough way of passing the time, for

they were not really doing anything up there. They were merely

waiting--waiting for more people to come to Llanyglo, for the Town Hall

to rise, for the seat of local administration to be shifted from Porth

Neigr, and then for the Waterworks Scheme. They had the water as fast as

prevision and Law could make it. They would not drive too hard a bargain

with the town. In the meantime they fished, speaking little, noting

whether it was the gnat or the cochybondhu that killed, casting so

lightly that the boat scarcely rocked. Sometimes, when the amber evening

light was clear behind them, so impeccable was the profound mirror below

that, while their tweed-clad forms could hardly be distinguished from

the hues of the mountain behind, the upside-down shapes beneath them

were sharp and dark as the silhouettes in your grandmother's little oval

frames.

III

THE BLANK CHEQUE

Death took a hand that winter in Llanyglo's making. They were getting

well up with the Town Hall, in what is now Gardd Street; still the flag

floated at the polehead, in token that they had got thus far without

serious mishap; and then it had to be run down to the half-mast. It was

a common scaffold accident. Harry Kerr, on one of the upper stages,

stepped back upon empty air; Sam sprang forward to save him; and they

picked them both up from among the debris below. A few remembered the

launching of that open boat on that wild night seven years before, and

said that it seemed out of nature that these comparatively young men

should go off before ancient Mrs. Pritchard; and Mrs. Pritchard herself

baa-ed, and said that there would be more room now in the Hafod Unos

whatever. But most of the residents were new-comers now, who knew more

of Tommy Kerr's present delinquencies than of the history of his

brothers, and they could hardly be expected to grieve. They buried them

both at Sarn, under the shadow of that pepper-caster of a

fifteenth-century church tower, and the problem of however the Hafod had

held them all became a thing of the past.

The Town Hall was the outward and visible sign that Llanyglo had not

only caught up with Porth Neigr, but had outstripped it. It had special

conveniences for a centre of administration, which it forthwith became;

and at the election that Autumn Howell Gruffydd was made a Councillor.

He had two branch shops now, one at Porth Neigr and the other at Sarn,

and to his newspaper counter he had added a Library of books bought at

Mudies' clearance sales. He charged fourpence a week for the loan of

each book, which was twopence more than the old stationer's library at

Porth Neigr had charged; but there was the railway-fare to take into

account if you considered the charge extortionate. Later, a good deal

later, when the picture postcard was invented, Howell did rather well

out of that too. He praised your amateur snapshot of the Trwyn or the

Promenade of the facade of the Town Hall, and made you what no doubt

seemed to him a fair offer; namely to give you a dozen prints in

exchange for your film. He then proceeded to fill a revolving stand with

other prints, which he sold at seven for sixpence, or, highly glazed, at

twopence apiece. With pennies and twopences accumulated in this and

similar ways he bought certain house-property behind Ham-and-Egg

Terrace, paying a ground-rent to Edward Garden. He had by this time

acquired a little personal habit of Mr. Tudor Williams's--the habit of

shaking hands with one hand, while the other affectionately kneaded and

patted his interlocutor's right arm from the wrist up to the shoulder.

Hitherto the developments of Llanyglo had lain in a few hands only--the

hands of Edward Garden and his shareholders, of one or two others who

had forgotten they had a holding in Terry Armfield's Thelema, but

remember it now with joy and thanksgiving, of Mr. Tudor Williams, and of

not very many more. But now a more ponderous machine began to rumble

into motion. This was the machine of which the Railway Companies and a

couple of Pleasure Packet Services were the visible active parts.

Rumours now began to fly about of developments long since planned and

now imminent, developments astounding and gigantic. These rumours began

with hotels. Hitherto the "Cambrian" had been thought to be rather more

than so-so, but of course nobody would have dreamed of comparing it with

the "Grands" and "Majesties" which "_Lancashire Hotels, Limited_"

possessed in the great centres of the North. These had half a dozen

tennis-courts in front, palm-courts and winter-gardens behind, and five

and six and seven hundred bedrooms. But now the rumour ran that, not one

of these, but two, owned by opposing Syndicates, were to be set up in

Llanyglo. The sites on which they were to be built varied according to

the version of the tale. Some said that the "Montgomery" was to be

pulled down again, some that the whole row of fishermen's cottages was

to be demolished, some that a terrace was to be dug out of the side of

the Trwyn itself and a funicular railway constructed. However it might

be, it was known that there were prolonged meetings of the Council about

it, and that at one point the whole thing, whatever it might be, seemed

likely to fall through. And that, as they now knew, would be their

death-blow. They would do anything, anything rather than that these

immense reservoirs of capital, already partly opened, should be shut up

again. They would hold out the town itself as security, a twopenny rate,

promises, accommodations, anything. It was said that Sheard, the Porth

Neigr solicitor, who had moved to new premises opposite the Llanyglo

Town Hall, sat up five nights in the week, making actuarial

calculations, estimating yields, measuring margins, and balancing all

with the possibility of the town's bankruptcy. Edward Garden was once

more at Llanyglo, and closeted frequently with Mr. Tudor Williams and

Howell Gruffydd.... Even the two projected hotels were not much more

than a detail as matters now stood; the whole town must now be given a

tremendous upward heave or collapse with a crash. Even those hotels

could go up now only on one condition--namely, that the base of the

visiting population, that foundation of which innumerable units are the

strength, should at once be immensely broadened. For every individual

who could afford to put up at a palace, they must rake in scores,

hundreds of people who could not. The real foundation of the hotels must

be row on row, acre on acre, of Ham-and-Egg Terraces. For the rest, a

place that must live through the year on the takings of three months

must be big, as those places of entertainment must be big that are full

on Saturdays only and empty during the rest of the week. Nothing smaller

would tempt the Railway Companies. (This, by the way, was not altogether

good news for Raymond Briggs. Architecture is not needed for that

broadened base. Any working master-builder can run up houses that are

good enough. The pattern of one is the pattern of all, and Raymond would

have small chance in competition with the bigger men of his profession.)

Nor would it suffice merely to house and feed the people who came. Other

watering-places were awake to the new menace now, so that the rival

announcements on the hoardings resembled a desperate grapple for the

possession of those sixpences and shillings and half-crowns that were

poured without ceasing into the coffers of the Holiday Clubs. Not one in

five hundred of those who contributed those shillings and half-crowns

stopped to think that Wales herself has no Holiday Clubs--that Wales

does not go abroad with a year's savings in her pocket of which it is

black shame to bring as much as a single penny back again. They wanted

amusement. The Resort or Spa that could provide the most amusement would

get the lion's share. Amusements were a more urgent necessity than

chairs and tables and roofs.

So it was that, between this place and that, the people who intended to

have a better time than their fathers had had were in some danger of

being pampered.

The project for the Llanyglo Big Wheel was set a-going.

The promise that Howell Gruffydd had made behind his hand to John

Pritchard had already begun to be redeemed. The Town Hall was not three

months old before a Grand Bazaar was held there in aid of the Llanyglo

Joint Chapels. On the first of the four days during which the Bazaar

lasted the proceedings were opened by Tudor Williams, Esquire, M.P. On

the second day they were opened by Edward Garden, Esquire. On the third

Mrs. Howell Gruffydd opened them, in heliotrope satin; and on the fourth

day Raymond Briggs, Esquire, who scented Chapel-building in the air,

performed the ceremony. Raymond guessed that at least three new Chapels

were certain presently to go up in the stead of those buildings of tin

and boards and sickly blue paint that had so outraged Terry Armfield's

Oxford Movement susceptibilities. As a matter of fact, five went up, and

have debts on them to this day, in spite of the long series of Bazaars,

two a season at least, at which the Saxon veins were opened.... For the

money poured in. It rained into the square collecting-sheets that were

placed at intervals along all the principal streets. It clattered into

the slots of the wooden boxes that were rattled under the nose of the

passer-by. It was minted in the Bran Tubs from which, paying your

threepence, you drew forth a penny toy. It multiplied with every flower

Miss Nancy Pritchard, with twenty other young women in Welsh national

costume, sold. It made heavy the pockets of the stall-holders, who had

never any change. It made little cylinders of silver and copper, three

and four and five inches high, on the tables folk had to pass before

they were admitted to the Concerts.... Believe it, the Chapel-goers of

Llanyglo, seeing all that money to be had for little more than the

asking, opened their eyes, and sat up, and took notice. If _this_ was

the Saxon invasion, why had they not welcomed it long ago? A few bales

of hired bunting, a few pounds for evergreens and velvet banners with

texts on them, a few paid assistants and a not unreasonable printers'

bill, and--_these_ splendid results!

As big as John Pritchard himself said, putting on his spectacles to see

whether the astonishing total could really be true, "They must be very

rit-ss, whatever!"

But the Bazaars had not this golden harvest to themselves. They found

competition, which they a little resented. Secular amusements more than

held their own. Gigantic castings had begun to arrive for the Big Wheel;

under the booth-awnings of Gardd Street (recently christened) penny

articles could be had for a penny; and a long row of automatic

machines--Wheels of Fortune, little iron men who kicked footballs,

Sibyls of Fate and Try-your-Grip machines--had sprung up along the

railings of the sea-front. A few stage-gipsies with green parrakeets had

made the town their summer home. There was a rifle-range on the farther

sandhills--you could hear the "plunk" of the bullets on the iron

targets. Near it was a travelling Merry-go-Round. Photographers had

their "pitches" on the sands, with humourous canvas flats with oval

holes in them, through which you put your face, so that you could have

your portrait taken as "_He Won't be Happy till He Gets It_" or in the

act of embracing a two-dimensional young woman, whichever was to your

liking. And there were niggers. These danced and sang and played the

banjo on a raised platform, dressed in wide turned-down schoolboy

collars and pink striped trousers; the concentric rings of green chairs

about them resembled the spread of a large symmetrical thistle plant;

and outside this ring one or other of the troupe constantly moved,

shaking a sort of jellybag under your nose (as the Chapel-goers had

shaken the collecting-boxes) and blinking the pink lids in his

burnt-cork face. A little farther on was the men's bathing-place. They

had wooden machines now, into which youths entered four at a time--no

more the trim and private striped tents of the Laceys and the Raymond

Briggses. The ladies' bathing-place was farther on still--a boat stood

off between the two lest the sexes should not keep their distance. And a

hundred yards past that, beyond a great scabrous groyne of loose stone,

clay-coloured at the shore end but slimy with green as it ran down to

the sea, with red flags and notice-boards along the top and a moveable

rope-barrier at its base where two men walked on sentry-go, they were at

work upon the Pier.

By this time there was one question which, more than others, was

beginning to disturb Llanyglo. This was the question of drink. In the

old days, when the old brown horse who had walked as carefully as if he

had had a spirit-level inside him had first brought the Gardens and

their luggage so softly over the sandhills, there had been no inn nearer

than Porth Neigr. Save on market-days, scarce a drop of alcohol passed

a Llanyglo man's lips from year's end to year's end. If John Pritchard

had preached occasionally against drunkenness, it had been

conventionally only, with little more bearing on Llanyglo's own habits

than if he had preached against cannibalism. Then Railhead had crawled

across the land; Howell Gruffydd had found it necessary to warn the

young against contamination; and with the building of the "Cambrian" had

come Llanyglo's first licence.

But for long enough after that there had been no public-houses. The

travelling army of labourers had had their own canteens, and even when a

necessary beer-licence or two had been applied for at Sessions, the

applications had been granted as it were behind the hand, and the affair

had been got over as quickly as possible. No: Tommy Kerr's unconscious

soft carolling of _Glan Meddwdod Mwyn_ as he had crossed the sandhills

on that torrid Sunday afternoon had held no real personal reproach for

Llanyglo. For Porth Neigr, perhaps yes; for other places, yes; but not

for Llanyglo.

But since then things had changed. Things had changed since they had

been able to tell themselves that what went on in the "Cambrian" lounge

was no concern of theirs. They had begun to change when Llanyglo had

been no longer able to shut its eyes to the beer-drinking of the navvies

and bricklayers and the brothers Kerr. Then for a time a convenient

connection had been established between drunkenness and rough trousers

tied about the knees with string. For cases such as these, the little

Station at the extreme end of Gardd Street, with "Police" over the door

and geraniums in the windows, had ample powers. The half-dozen

constables must exercise discretion, that was all.

But it became a not uncommon sight to see a tipsy reveller singing

himself unsteadily home on one side of the street, while the officer,

watching him from the other side, stood questioning his discretion until

the delinquent had passed out of sight. For a time Tommy Kerr, who had

been twice run in, had served as a scapegoat, but that was little

permanent help. It began to be seen that the real problem was, that if

they would get folk with money to spend into the town, they must accept

these folk, within reason, as they were, tipplers and teetotalers alike.

For some reason or other, convivial drinking also seemed to come under

the head of amusements. Blackpool provided liquor; Douglas was in an

exceptional position for the provision of liquor; and more and more it

appeared that Llanyglo must open the Bazaar doors with one hand and the

doors of inns and taverns with the other.

Meanwhile, the "Lancashire Rose," on one side of Gardd Street, and the

"Trafford" on the other, were quickly becoming notorious. These were

both fully licenced houses, with Tap and Saloon entrances, and it was

idle to pretend to think that all the scandal originated in the humbler

compartments. Heady young men with full pockets, respectable fathers of

families, and others whom they could by no means lock up as they could

lock up Tommy Kerr, went into these places in broad daylight, sometimes

coming out again obviously affected: and it was almost certain that not

all their stomachs were so innocent and unaccustomed that a single glass

of the poison had produced this result. Dolefully they wished that a

sober Lancashire would come to Llanyglo; but--a Lancashire of some sort

they _must_ have. Why else were they doing all they could to win its

favour? What else was their Big Wheel for, of which four mammoth

standards of plate and lattice-girder had already risen thirty feet

above the sandhills, where they were stepped and anchored into the

oldest rocks of earth? Why else were they toiling day and night at their

Pier, and at the building, section by section, of the sea-wall? Why else

were they setting up gasometers beyond Pritchard's, and discussing a

Sewage Scheme, and--most urgent of all--gnawing their fingers anxiously

until some arrangement should be come to with Edward Garden's lawyers

about that water far away up Delyn? The supply was becoming terrifyingly

insufficient. For want of mere water the growth of the town might come

to a stop as plants shrivel and fall again in an arid bed.... And, save

to get Lancashire folk there, drunk or sober, why did they solemnly

discuss this inanity of an amusement or that--Big Wheels and

Switchbacks, Scenic Railways, Toboggan Slides, Panoramas, Fat Women,

Dancing Halls, Floral Valleys and Concerts and Town Bands? There was no

going back now. They had spent money that they would never, never see

again if they persisted in being visionaries in business and

irreconcilables on mere minor points of demeanour....

"They spend more when they are ... like that," said Howell Gruffydd one

day to the Council assembled. He said it a little shamefacedly, his

fingers fiddling with the green cloth of the Council-table.

Nobody spoke.

"I--saw--a--man," Howell continued, "a respectable man, with good

clothes on his back and a new hat, all spoiled--it was a pity to see

it--I saw him knock over row of bot-tles at John Parry's in Gardd

Street, just for amusement, and he laugh, and say 'How mut-ss?' like it

wass noth-thing, he was so-a drunk----"

"It is a pit-ty they make such a noise sometimes," somebody said, in a

curiously aggrieved voice....

Evan Pugh, the landlord of the "Trafford," was of precisely the same

opinion.

They escaped their dilemma by means of a noteworthy bit of government by

minority. There was a small section of the Council, easily outvotable at

ordinary times, which urged that, after all, things were _as_ they were,

that you must live and let live in this world, and that even good things

could be pushed to extremes when they became no longer good. And, as

these began to speak, one stern bazaar-promoter after another began to

look at his watch and to mutter "Dear me--I had no idea it wass so

late--indeed I not catss him if I not go now----"

They left.

This, or else a tactful absenteeism, became their custom whenever

licencing matters came up to be discussed.

But cases of conscience are cases of conscience all the world over.

The sum that Edward Garden proposed as a fair price for that

catchment-area up Delyn was two hundred thousand pounds--this for about

two thousand acres; and on the day when his lawyers named the figure it

was a wonder that the whole Council did not take in a body to their

beds. Two hundred thousand pounds! They could not believe their ears.

Nor could they believe their eyes either when they got it in writing,

words first, and the figures in brackets afterwards. If they had written

the single word "_Fancy!_" across that document and sent it straightway

back to the lawyers they would no doubt have followed their first

impulse; but somebody, less hard hit in the wind than the rest, managed

to gasp out the proposal that they should sleep on it, and sleep on it

they did. But the night did not alter it. In the morning it was still

two hundred thousand pounds (L200,000).

News of the rapacity of the demand had leaked out almost immediately.

Ordinarily, anybody who had stopped Howell Gruffydd in the street and

had asked him a Council secret would have been met with the smiling

facer he deserved, but this was extraordinary altogether. On the morning

after they had slept on it, William Morgan saw Howell on the Promenade,

came up to him, and, making no bones about it whatever, asked him

whether it was true.

"Who told you, William Morgan?" Howell began ... but he really had not

the heart to go on. He took off his hat, wiped the lining of it with his

handkerchief, and the bright sunlight showed his brows lined with

anxiety and sick fear, crumpled and embossed like one of his own pats of

butter. He replaced his hat and blew his nose violently.

"Is it true?" demanded William Morgan again.

Howell became grim.--"It was an e-vil day for this town when that man

came here," he said, forgetting how little town there had been when that

old brown horse had first brought the Gardens softly jolting across the

sandhills.

"Then it is true?" said William Morgan once again.

"It is true that a man sometimes asks one thing, and finiss by getting

something very diff-ferent from what he ask," Howell replied, and walked

abruptly away.

He crossed the Promenade and turned into Pontnewydd Street. There he

stood, irresolutely plucking his lip and gazing into a stationer's

window. Dafydd Dafis's voice in his ear caused him to start almost

violently.

"H-what is this, Howell Gruffydd?" Dafydd demanded without preface, his

eyes burningly and truculently on the Chairman's face. He wore his

everyday corduroys, but his air was that of a monarch in banishment.

Howell turned.

"Ah, how are you, Dafydd? Indeed you look well! They do say the smell of

road-tar is a very healthy smell----"

"H-what is this we hear, Howell Gruffydd?" Dafydd repeated.

Howell tried to smile.--"Indeed, how can I answer a question like that,

'What is this we hear?'----"

"H-what is this about Delyn and the Water?"

There was a dangerous quickness in Dafydd's voice. Involuntarily Howell

gave a little hiccough of emotion, which answered Dafydd sufficiently.

His eyes were like the windows of a burning house.

"He sell us two thousand acres, of our own land, for how mut-ss?"

"Two--hundred--thou-sand--pounds," sobbed Howell.

"Of our own mountains--Delyn, that belong to us--he sell us Delyn, this

Saxon?----"

"Indeed, indeed, Dafydd, do not excite yourself--it will have to go to

arbi-tra-tion----"

"It will go to Hell, with his soul!" Dafydd replied fiercely. "He sell

us Delyn--he sell us Delyn water--he sell us our own moun-tains!--It iss

not for this we make you Chairman of the Council, Howell Gruffydd!"

Howell trembled, but put up a soothing hand.

"Aw-w-w, you wait and see, Dafydd Dafis! A prof-fit is a prof-fit, but

this is wick-ed, and preposterous, and out of all reason! You wait and

see! We have a meeting this morning, and p'rapss we show Mister Edward

Garden he is not so clever as he think he is! He think he put his Saxon

pistol to our heads like this? Indeed he make a great mistake! You wait

and see, Dafydd. There iss a saying, 'He laughs best who laughs

last'--you wait and see!" He patted Dafydd's shoulder and arm

reassuringly, and perhaps felt heartened by his own words. "You wait and

see!" he said once more, almost cheerily now. "We not pay it--never

fear! I see you later----"

And he hurried away, leaving Dafydd standing on the pavement.

But the Council Meeting that morning settled nothing, and neither did

the next Meeting nor the next after that. They wrote to Mr. Tudor

Williams, but it almost looked as if Mr. Tudor Williams was taking a

leaf out of their own book: if they had pressing private affairs when

questions of ales and wines and spirits appeared on the agenda, so Mr.

Tudor Williams pleaded a multiplicity of urgent engagements now that it

was a question of water. The meeting adjourned, reassembled, adjourned

again, and met again. Days passed, weeks passed. Legal opinions were

taken, but no action. They fetched Mr. Tudor Williams down almost by

force, and he proffered his good offices, but deprecated the serving of

notices of compulsory arbitration. He advised an amicable settlement if

one could possibly be arrived at. Llanyglo's anger died away, and blank

despair began to take its place.

Then one day Edward Garden's lawyers hinted that in the event of an

arrangement being come to within a given time they were in a position

to enter into certain pledges on behalf of the Railway Companies. They

hinted also that they were equally in a position to do the other thing.

Surely, they said, Llanyglo saw that this was a matter of its life or

its death; and surely, they added, it was plain that it would not really

be _they_ who were paying! Nothing of the sort! Lancashire would pay.

Yorkshire would pay. The Midlands would help to pay, and perhaps also

the West and South. Whoever footed his bill at hotel or

boarding-establishment would be contributing--they must see that he did

contribute--his portion. What though visitors grumbled and talked about

extortion? They forgot all about it the next day. What though residents

groaned under the burden of the rates? They must submit to conditions,

like everybody else. Llanyglo must pay, and pass it on.

In short, all the people who intended to have a better time than their

fathers had had were to be shaven and shorn exactly as their fathers had

been.

Llanyglo saw it, sighed, and acquiesced. There was nothing else to do.

And if Parry, of the "Lancashire Rose," or Pugh, of the "Trafford,"

reaped too rich a harvest by making people drunk, they must be assessed

higher and higher still, and still higher, that was all.

IV

PAWB

This question of assessment had already raised another question, which

at first seemed a small one, but swelled afterwards into ominous

proportions. When the rumours of those two towering new hotels had first

begun to circulate, it had been a gentle and stimulating mental exercise

to place, in fancy, these palaces on this spot or that. Among other

suggestions, the vacant plot of land adjacent to the Kerrs' Hafod Unos

had been mentioned as a fitting site for one of them. Hereupon folk had

begun to ask one another: What about the Kerrs' title?

Hitherto they had not thought of this. The four brothers had planted

themselves there when all about had been a waste of sand, had since

taken firm root, and there two of them still remained. But between such

a squatting eight or nine years ago, and a sitting tight now that

everything had gone up a hundredfold in value, was an immense

difference. To this difference, moreover, was now added the evil repute

in which Tommy Kerr lived. Ned, the alder-cutter, they would have

accepted; they could live with Ned; but his brother, besides being in

his unpleasant person a public nuisance, was beginning to appear a

setter-back of the fingers of History's clock, a mongrel in their fine

new manger, a thorn in the side of that lusty young Welsh Giantess whose

figure was now one of the familiar sights on a thousand hoardings in

the North. The invisible odour of stale beer-fumes in which he moved

poisoned the air of the Promenade, and, though he certainly did his best

to remedy this as far as the staleness was concerned (invariably

beginning the day with pints and ending it with quarts), that did not

improve matters in the long run.

As long as Tommy Kerr was merely locked up once in a while for

drunkenness, he himself paid no heed to the whispers that had begun to

gather about him. He could sleep as heavily and happily in a cell as in

his own Hafod. Nor were his eyes at once opened even when an inspector

appeared at the Hafod and began to ask questions about its

sanitation--which, by the way, was of a low order. But his brother Ned

began to "study," as he called it, and the result of his studying was

that he said one day to Tommy, "They'll be wanting to be shut o' you and

me, Tommy."

Tommy was in the act of wiping out a greasy frying-pan with a piece of

old newspaper. He stopped suddenly. After a pause, "Eh?" he said....

"D'ye mean purr us out?"

"We're a bit i' t' road to my way o' thinking," Ned replied, sinking

back into his arm-chair again and closing his eyes.

He had taken badly to heart the deaths of his brothers Harry and Sam;

indeed he had not been the same man since. He frequently walked over to

Sarn churchyard, sat on a flat tombstone near his brothers' grave, and

smoked and spat; he was "studying" about a stone for them.

Intermittently he talked about carving this with his own hands, but he

delayed to do so. All the work he now did was to doze in a

street-watch-man's hut, with a two-days-old newspaper on his knee and a

firebasket in front of him set sideways on the wind. He was no longer

the beer-drinker he had been. "Think ye?" said Tommy, after another

silence. "But we donnot want to be purred out," he added resuming the

wiping of the frying-pan, though more slowly.

And as it seemed to be a condition of their remaining in their Hafod

unmolested that they should make a show of satisfying the sanitary

inspector's demands, they overhauled their drainage system and gave it

the minimum of attention it demanded.

Then one day an offer was made them, which was also an admission. It was

an offer of compensation and of another dwelling elsewhere, and the

admission apparently was that their title was a good one. Ned was for

accepting the offer, and accepted it would probably have been but for a

circumstance that Tommy discovered only in a roundabout way. He was

congratulated one morning in the "Marine" Tap on having escaped

ejectment. This was the first he had heard of ejectment. He asked a few

questions, and soon after went out for a walk.

Ejectment! Apparently they had been considering his ejectment, had found

it for some reason or other not to be feasible, and had substituted the

offer of compensation....

Then, while this offer was still neither accepted nor rejected,

something else came to Tommy Kerr's ears. This was that the sites, not

of one, but of both the new hotels, were at last decided on. As a matter

of fact, this choice was now almost a foregone conclusion. Next to Gardd

Street, which ran parallel with the shore, Pontnewydd Street, in which

lay the Hafod, was becoming the principal street of the town. It ran

from the shore to Pritchard's Corner, was prolonged past that to the

new station, and was the main thoroughfare for landaus and wagonettes

off to the mountains. The hotels were to be built one on either side of

the Hafod, not actually adjoining it, but not more than a couple of

strides away.

Already in Tommy Kerr's suspicious mind the mischief was done. Howell

Gruffydd, all blandishments to his face, had been making secret

inquiries behind his back, had he? He had been talking about

compensation and whispering with attorneys and such-like, had he? Very

well. That settled it. Tommy would go when he was purred out, and not

before. As for that snuffling Howell Gruffydd....

"So that's it, Mister Treacle-Tongue, is it?" he had muttered. "Reight.

As long as we know where we are. I'm off out to buy a ha'porth o'

thread----"

And with the ha'porth of thread he had sewn a large button on each of

his pocket-flaps, and thenceforward meeting Howell Gruffydd in the

street, had ostentatiously buttoned every pocket up before answering the

prosperous grocer's smiling "Good morning."

They began to dig the foundations of those glittering hotels.

They did so, as it happened, in the early part of that same summer that

saw Edward Garden's ingenious advertisements put into execution--the

summer of the Eisteddfod and the Brass Band Contest. Llanyglo was packed

with people. Two days before the Eisteddfod, there began to troop into

the town from all parts bards and singers, poets and harpers and

minstrels and the members of a chorus five hundred voices strong. They

came in their everyday clothes, moustached like vikings, bearded and

maned like lions, and instantly with their coming the Saxon took a back

seat. Shopkeepers left their counters, publicans clapped down the

half-filled glasses, and ran to their doors as this honoured singer or

that famous bard passed their windows. They walked with stately slow

walk and stately slow head-turnings, and happy was the Welshman who got

a motion of the hand or a benign smile from them. The Gorsedd had been

publicly proclaimed; the temporary dancing hall behind Gardd Street, big

enough for a regiment to drill in, had been made ready; the insignia in

the Town Hall were as jealously watched and guarded as are the Crown

Jewels in the Tower of London; and he was a prudent visitor who had

realised that for three whole days he was likely to get but negligent

attention from those who at other times were his humble servitors. For,

fleer as aliens would, this was the Awakening of the Red Dragon. Their

reproach that he was but a pasteboard Dragon fell to the ground. The

Dragon was what the Dragon was, and if his service was theatrical,

theatricalism is ennobled when its boards are the soil itself and each

of its actors an Antaeus, strong because his foot is upon the ground that

bred him. In England, behind his smile, the Welshman is an enigma of

reserve; but see him at his Eisteddfod, with money waiting to be taken

at his closed shop-doors....

With the ceremony of the Gorsedd on the opening day Dafydd Dafis's

spellbound and uplifted hours began. At the sounding of the trumpets his

head flew proudly up; at the Drawing of the Sword and the solemn

question, "Is there Peace in the land?" his voice joined in the reply,

like a thunder-clap, "There is Peace"--for that was before the year

when, for three whole days, the blade remained naked and bright, while

far over the seas brave Englishmen and brave Welshmen fell and died

together. It was the single victory of Dafydd's life. On ordinary days

he now drove a road-engine--Howell Gruffydd had got him the job under

the Council; but he was a Lord of Song now. He had put his name down for

the "penillion" contest; should he prove successful, not he himself

only, but Llanyglo also, the place of his birth, would be forever

famous. He sat behind the semicircle of white-robed and oak-crowned and

druid-like figures that occupied the front part of the platform, looking

down on the vast oblong of faces, Saxon and Welsh, that resembled a

packed bed of London Pride; he was in the tenor wedge of the chorus; and

as the five hundred voices pealed together you thought of the roof and

of that singer whose voice had shivered vessels of glass.... Coming out

of the hall again at the end of the first day, Dafydd was still in his

trance. As he walked along the street past the "Trafford" Tap, Tommy

Kerr, who sat within drinking, hailed him and called for a song, while

one of his boon companions crying "Nay, we don't ask nobody to sing for

nowt!" cast a couple of pennies on the ground; but Dafydd seemed neither

to see nor to hear. At the break-up after the last chorus an august hand

had been placed on Dafydd's shoulder, and an archangelic voice had

spoken to him, saying that he, he the great one, had heard of Dafydd

Dafis; and what, after that, did pot-house insults matter? He passed on,

his eyes still flashing and his face shining like the Silver Chair

itself....

Two days later he was proclaimed the victor in the "penillion" contest,

and on the day after that, still drunk with song, he drove his

road-engine again. And so passed Llanyglo's first Eisteddfod.

The Brass Band Contest five weeks later was a triumph in a different

way. The impression now was one, not of unity, but of the keen spirit of

faction. The "_Besses o' th' Barn_" were at the crest of their fame,

but the "_Black Dike_" ran them close, and not far behind came "_Wyke

Temperance_" and "_Meltham Mills_"; and had these been, not Bands, but

football teams, local rivalry could not have run higher. True,

underneath the sporting interest lay the musical. This performer's

"lipping" and the "triple-tonguing" of the other were matters of endless

debate among the expert; nuances of ensemble and attack were hotly

argued in strong Lancashire and Yorkshire accents; and the devotees were

ready to fight with their fists over the fame of the conductors of their

fancy. But, without unity, the Contest proved, for all save the

Brass-band-maniacs, a little wearisome. The ear began to revolt against

the reiterated "test-piece," and one pitied the judge hidden away in his

carefully guarded cubicle. Fewer Welsh attended the Contest than had

English the Eisteddfod, and a day was judged sufficient for it. After a

sensational replay with the "_Besses_," "_Black Dike_" took pride of

place, with "_Meltham Mills_" third. The strains of _Zampa_ and _The

Bronze Horse_ sounded once more only, when they massed the Bands in the

evening in the Floral Valley; and (the Council having sanctioned a

charge of sixpence as the fee for entrance) the sum of L115 was taken at

the temporary barriers. So passed the Brass Band Contest also.

By the June of that year the understructure of the Pier was finished,

and the rest was advancing with the speed of paper-hanging. The

contractors were under time-penalties to be ready for the formal opening

on the forthcoming August Bank Holiday. All through the night the sounds

of the planking could be heard, and pavilion-parts, lettered and

numbered and ready gilded and painted, were rushed along in haste. At

the same time the Big Wheel began to resemble the largest circle of the

Floral Valley set up on end; it was wonderful to stand beneath it and to

gaze up through the intricacy of tie and strut and lattice at the sky.

Immense hoardings filled a large part of Pontnewydd Street; by and by

they would be taken down again, and the facades of those magnificent new

hotels would appear; but Llanyglo would scarcely turn its head to look

at them. They were getting used to this now. Besides, they had plenty

else to do. The town was so full that they were turning away money into

its nearest place of overflow--Porth Neigr.

Then, in the beginning of August, a hundred portents were fulfilled.

There began to run into the station train after train, with three or

four faces at each window. Doors opened almost before the engines had

begun to slow down, and (as if the trains had been veins and somebody

had suddenly slit them up, spilling out the life within) the platforms

were suddenly black and overrun with people. They carried bags, baskets,

hampers, parcels, stools, pillows, babies. Inside the carriages they

left crumpled newspapers, trodden sandwiches, bottles, nuts, corks, the

heads and tails of shrimps. Their tickets had been taken miles back--no

collecting-staff could have coped for a moment with the emptying of

those wheeled and windowed veins of impoverished blood. Parents carrying

babies stood prudently aside from that first mad rush to the entrance.

Many of them had been up since half-past four that morning; they had

spent seven hours in the train, twelve and thirteen and fourteen in a

carriage, standing, sitting on one another's knees, lying on the rows of

feet; and now they made straight for air. Certain trains had been told

off for week-end travellers; others were labelled "_Special_" or "_Day

Excursion Only_." Those who had come by these would have seven hours in

Llanyglo, and at the end of that time they would squeeze into the trains

again for seven, eight, ten hours more--for on the return journey they

must attend the convenience of every other wheel on the line, and a

stand of an hour or so at two o'clock in the morning would be but an

incident. During that short space in which they would breathe the

wonderful Llanyglo air they would eat the meals they had brought with

them, or else besiege the inns and eating-houses and tea-rooms and

confectioners'-shops. They were the first trippers--spinning operatives,

weavers, twisters, warp-dressers, mechanics, asbestos-hands, stokers,

clerks, shopkeepers, the grey and unnumbered multitude itself. Some

would enjoy themselves, some would vow they enjoyed themselves, and some

would declare it "a toil of a pleasure," and would drag about on hot and

swollen and weary feet, repeating at intervals, "Niver again--niver as

long as I live!" And the lagging children's arms would be almost

wrenched off at the shoulders, and some would fall asleep with the

sticky paint of the penny toys dyeing their hands, and the platforms

would begin to fill up again three hours before the time of departure of

the train, for the sake of the chances of corner seats, or indeed of

seats at all, and also because, on that horrible arduous day, the

station itself would seem almost like a home....

Yes, as the Laceys and Briggses had followed Edward Garden, and those

who could not (but would) afford it had followed the Briggses and

Laceys, and the _Utopia_ readers these, and the fortnight and ten-days'

people these, and all sorts and conditions of people for varying lengths

of time these again, so now the unnumbered rest had come.... "The first

tripper, and I'm off," the Briggses and the Laceys had said; and which

of us is not a Briggs or a Lacey in this? Which of us can say without

misgiving that he would have remained in Llanyglo? Could we have endured

the sight of our kind in this bulk--or could we have endured to think,

either, that if they were not there for that dreadful day they would

still be elsewhere? Can we, in the unshared solitude of our hearts, bear

to think of this rank and damp and steaming human undergrowth at all?

Would the Squire, seeing these, still have thought as much of his books

on Church Plate and Brasses, still have defended the integrity of

something not for all? Would Minetta Garden have looked on them with a

sort of incurious interest as so many "types"? Or would we all, Minetta,

the Squire, you, I, have felt meanly and skulkingly relieved when the

last tail-light had died away in the night again?

There is neither "Yes" nor "No" to be answered. I may rant of

brotherhood and humanity, but you--you may remember that cart jolting

without noise over the sandhills, the blue and primrose petals of those

butterflies, the amethyst-tufts of wild thyme, the milkwort, the

harebells, and then, of a sudden, that V with the sea beyond. I,

choosing to shoulder all the responsibility of a world in the making of

which I was not consulted, may moisten that human peat with my tears,

but you--you, passionate for beauty's sake, may mourn a loveliness

deflowered and a simplicity destroyed. It is no virtue in me, no

harshness in you. We both are what we are and do what we can. Llanyglo

also was what it had become and did what it could. And Llanyglo, after

all, had a solace that we lack. It was an inferior one, but better than

nothing. Their beach might be littered, their streets made pitiful;

their lodging-house keepers might put every loose jug or china dog or

ornament away, and replace them again only after these had gone; strange

accents might grate upon their ears, different and disliked minds frame

the thoughts those accents expressed; yet balm remained. There was not a

tripper, no, not the poorest of them, but spent his three, four, or five

shillings in the town.

PART FOUR

I

THE BLIND EYE

Drub-drub--drub-drub-drub--drub-drub----

It was the sound of heels on the Pier. From one end of it to the other

they walked, past the recesses and lamp-standards and the bright kiosks

where tobacco and confectionery and walking-sticks and picture-postcards

and souvenirs were sold, and then they turned and walked back. After a

time the drub-drubbing became curiously hypnotising. At moments it

conformed almost to a regular rhythm; then it broke up again into mere

confusion, out of which another metrical beat would rise for a second or

so and then become lost again. For long spaces the ear would become

accustomed and cease to hear it, and would take in instead the lighter

registers of tittering, soft laughter, the striking of matches and an

occasional scuffle and call; but the groundwork of sound would break

through again, like a muffled drum tapped by many performers at once,

monotonous, reverberating, dead----

Drub-drub-drub--drub-drub--drub-drub----

It was half-past eight of a July night. Crowded as the Pier was, it

would become still more so when the Concert Hall just within the

turnstiles, and the Pavilion at the pier-head, turned out their

audiences again. There would hardly be space to move them. The

Promenade was a sweep of brilliants; Gardd Street lay unseen behind it

under a golden haze; behind that again the lighted rosette of the Big

Wheel turned slowly high in the sky; and the great hotels of the front

were squared and mascled with window-lights. All this dance of gold and

silver made an already blue evening intensely blue, and the Pier was so

long that, even with quick walking, several minutes passed between your

losing the rattle of hand-clapping outside the Concert Hall at one end

of it, and your picking up the strains of the Pavilion orchestra at the

other.

Drub-drub-drub--drub-drub-drub--drub-drub----

There was hardly a bed to be had in Llanyglo. Visitors who had rashly

chosen to take their chance commonly passed their first night in the

waiting-rooms of the railway station. Servant-girls lay in their clothes

under kitchen tables, while their own garrets were let for half a

sovereign a night. Dozens slept on sofas, chairs, hearthrugs,

billiard-tables, on the Promenade benches, under the tarpaulins of

wagonettes and chars-a-bancs, or curled up in the boats on the shore.

They Boxed-and-coxed it as they could, and the police did not trouble to

shake the slumberers on whom they turned their bull's-eyes in the nooks

and arbours of the Floral Valley.

Drub-drub-drub--drub--drub----

And who were they now, they whose heels wore down the Pier timbers and

made the brain drowsy with their ceaseless tramp?

It was a curious and a rather arresting change. To all appearances,

Llanyglo had now got a "better class of visitor" than it had had since

the Briggses and Laceys had shaken the dust of the place from their

feet. Even in this puzzle of gold and silver light and deep mysterious

blue, it could be seen that there was not much Holiday Club money there.

In another fortnight or so those coffers would burst over the town,

drenching it with gold; but in the meantime who were these others, and

what were they doing at Llanyglo?

Let us ask the author of the _Sixpenny Guide_.

* * * * *

"When did you arrive? Only last night? And you're stopping at the

'Majestic'? Well, you've somebody there who can tell you more about it

than I can--Big Annie the head-chambermaid on the first floor. There are

a good many things about Llanyglo now that I've had to keep out of my

_Guide_, you see. But I'll tell you what I can.

"And I don't want to give you any false impression. Don't forget that

scores and hundreds of families come here and bathe, and picnic, and

dance, and go for drives, and enjoy themselves, and go away again

without a notion that everybody here isn't exactly like themselves. And

there's no harm in the Wakes people either. The worst you can say of

them is that now and then one of them gets violently or torpidly drunk,

as the case may be, and that all of them make a most hideous and

infernal noise. So don't think I'm talking disproportionately, and that

this is the only place of its kind I was ever in.

"But I do mean this: that somehow or other we've now acquired a very

peculiar kind of notoriety. You can deny it, disprove it, show that it

isn't there at all, and--there it remains all the time. For one thing,

you'll see if you look round that the place is very much less northern

in character than it was, and as it happens that's very significant. For

it might conceivably happen that a northerner--or a southerner, or

anybody else--might have his reasons for avoiding a place that was full

of other northerners, many of whom might know him (they have an

expression in the North for the kind of thing I mean; they call it

'making mucky doorstones'). So you'll find lots and lots of Londoners

here now, and midlanders, and easterners and westerners. They come here,

where nobody's ever seen them before and will never see them again

perhaps, for much the same reason that some Englishmen are said to go to

Paris.

"I don't want to make them out more in number than they are. Spread out

over the whole country they'd only be a fractional percentage, and you'd

never notice them; but when they're brought together here they're quite

enough to give the place a character. They aren't the open and reckless

kind. Furtiveness--complete disappearance if possible--is the whole

point. They're the men who arrange for somebody to post their letters

home from the place they're supposed to be really at, and the women who,

as the Bible says, eat and wipe their lips and say they haven't eaten.

They want to dodge, not only everybody else, but themselves also,

something they're perhaps afraid of in themselves, for a fortnight,

three weeks, a month. You see, they've persuaded themselves (and

Llanyglo's done too well out of them to undeceive them) that things done

here somehow 'don't count.' If you want to do something you'd never dare

to do in a place where you were known, you come to Llanyglo to do it. If

you can imagine the oasis in the desert with exactly the contrary

meaning--that's us. We're an asylum for those who've lost their moral

memories.

"And it isn't that wedding-rings are juggled off and on, and false names

entered in hotel registers, nor anything of that kind. That goes on more

or less everywhere, and we haven't become notorious merely for that.

And as usual, it's easier to say what it isn't than what it is. It isn't

the Trwyn, for example, though that does twitter so with kisses from

morning till night that you'd think it was the grasshoppers. And it

isn't the almost open displays you see at certain hours wherever you go.

It isn't any one fact, not even the worst. It's a faint attar of some

_abandonment_, some bottomlessness, that you can't name. It may be my

imagination, but I've fancied I've actually smelt it with my nostrils,

coming into it from a mile out of the town. They relinquish even

appearances. Most of us have the grace to cover up our sins with a

decent and saving hypocrisy, but these know and understand one another

so horribly well. They seem to find a comfort that they're all in the

same boat. As they say themselves, 'Heaven for climate but Hell for

company.' Give them your name on your visiting-card and they'll ask you

by and by what your _real_ name is. Until then, neither your name nor

anything else about you is their business. They haven't any business.

For a week, or a fortnight, or a month, they've turned their backs on

that tremendous common business that keeps the world going. It's the

blind eye, and Llanyglo provides the blinkers....

"But go and talk to Big Annie. She's really a rather remarkable woman.

At stated hours she sits on point duty on the landing of her floor of

eighty bedrooms, just where everybody's got to pass her, and if you look

like making--er--a mistake (and your hotel's quite an easy place to get

lost in) she sets you right without a quiver of her face. Yes, she's

rather an alarming person. There's a swiftness about her way of summing

up people from a single glance at their faces. Oh, you don't take Annie

in with a wedding-ring and a 'darling' or so--especially when the lady

asks the darling whether he takes sugar in his early morning cup of

tea....

"Yes, you go and see Annie."

* * * * *

Drub-drub--drub-drub-drub----

After a time that stupor of the ear became a stupor of the eye also.

Even when a match glowed before a face for a moment, the stage-like

lighting gave you no physiognomical information. The lamps shone on the

crowns of the passing hats, but the faces beneath them were lost; all

cats were grey. Any one of them might have been a giggling flapper with

her eyes still sealed to Life, or one of those others mentioned by the

too-curious author of the _Guide_, who would be dead to sight and

thought for a space that didn't count. Light frocks and darker hues,

bare heads and plaits and shawls and hooded dominoes, shop-girl and

high-school girl, caps and straws and panamas, pipes and cigarettes,

youths thoughtless and youths predatory--you paid your threepence at the

turnstiles and watched them pass and repass. Drub-drub-drub.... And if

you sat long enough, changes began to be perceptible. The flappers who

were evidently high-school girls began to be fewer, and others took

their places--for most of the shops of Llanyglo closed at nine or

half-past, and the released waitresses and assistants who had been on

their feet all day were still not too weary to add to the drub-drubbing.

It was difficult to say in what particular these were distinguishable.

It was not their dress--the universal attainment of a certain standard

of dressing is one of our modern miracles. You would not have had it

from their own lips--you would have been tactless in the extreme not to

have assumed that they also were visitors (as a matter of fact, they

would calmly make appointments for four o'clock of the next day,

knowing perfectly well that at that hour they would be giving change in

a cash-desk or hurrying hither and thither with piles of bread and

butter and trays awash with spilt tea). Perhaps it was the young men

they greeted and their way of greeting them. They didn't come out for

these last hours of the day to gossip with those to whom they had called

"Sign!" all the afternoon, their own foremen, companions, or the

tradesmen of the shop opposite.

Drub-drub--drub-drub----

There passed through the Season Ticket turnstile two young men. Both

wore dark suits and conventional collars and ties (as if they, at any

rate, had no need to don their coloured jackets and flannel trousers

while they could), and the attendant at the turnstile had touched his

cap as they had passed. One of them, the taller of the two, wore his

straw hat halo-wise at the back of his head, filled his pipe as he

walked, and looked cheerfully and unobservingly about him; the other's

straw was well down, and the eyes beneath its brim sought somebody or

something, and would apparently be satisfied with nothing less. The

first was Percy Briggs, and everybody in Llanyglo knew Percy

Briggs--Percy Briggs, who strolled casually into Hotel Cosies towards

midday, nodded to the more favoured ones, said to the barmaid "So and So

been in yet?" and, getting a bright "No, Mr. Briggs, not yet" for an

answer, lounged out again without having had a drink--a sufficient gage

of privilege and familiarity with the place. The other was John Willie

Garden, who knew Llanyglo, knew which faces had been there last year and

the year before, and was now looking for a face he had seen yesterday

evening for one moment only and had then lost again.

The Pier was an old, old story to him now. Between seasons, on winter

nights, the drub-drub of a few months before seemed sometimes still

faintly to echo in his ears--this when the grey skies came, and in the

hotels a few rooms only were kept open for unprofitable commercial

travellers, and the Promenade was empty, and the Pleasure Packet Service

laid up, and a walk to the end of the Pier and back seemed a long way to

feet that had covered the distance twenty times on a summer's evening,

and the colourless sea seemed to give to the red and white blink of the

Trwyn Light a sudden and nearer significance. He knew every hour of

Llanyglo's day--the hours of departure of the pleasure-boats to Rhyl and

Llandudno and round Anglesey, the bathing-hours in the morning, the

high-school parade at midday, the second bathing relay in the afternoon,

the tea-hour, the walk of parents and children to see the boats come in

again in the early evening, and then, as the evening wore on, the

successive appearances and droppings out of this kind or that, the

emptying of the Pavilions, the inflow of the shop-girls and waitresses,

the rush for the public-houses half an hour before the Pier lights went

out, the thinning numbers who beat the Promenade, the parties of the

Alsatians who sat up in one another's hotels long after every public

drinking-place had been closed. He had nothing further to learn about it

all, and it bored him. Only his search for that girl had brought him on

the Pier to-night.

He had been almost certain he knew her, but where he had seen her face

before he could not for the life of him remember. Perhaps he did not

know her after all; indeed, when he came to think of it, no memory of a

voice seemed to go with the face, so that the probability was that if he

had seen her before he had never spoken to her. She had been standing,

in that blue twilight, clear of the throng, under the single crimson

pier-head light, looking out over the water that seemed still to reflect

a light that had faded from the sky, and for a moment John Willie had

wondered what she was looking at. The next moment he had seen--and so,

confound it, had twenty others. A yellow spot, like a riding-light, had

risen out of the sea; almost as quickly as the second-hand of a watch

moves, it had become a tip; and then the lookers-in at the glass sides

of the Pavilion had run to see the rising of the bloated,

refraction-magnified, burning yellow horn. In that little running of

people he had lost her. Twice, thrice he had walked the whole length of

the Pier, but without seeing her again. All of her that he could now

remember was the carriage of her head and her plain black dress, and he

knew that dress, in this extraordinary raising of the standard of

dressing which implies the possession by almost everybody of two dresses

at least, was an uncertain guide.

Another rattle of hand-clapping broke out as Percy Briggs and John

Willie passed the turnstiles. "Any good looking in there?" Percy asked,

nodding towards the Concert Hall, but John Willie made no reply. He was

as cross as a bear with a sore head. Twice already he had rounded on

Percy, who had proposed drinks at this place or that, and had snapped

"You go if you want--I'm not keeping you;" but Percy had replied

good-naturedly, "Oh, all right, keep your hair on."

The sounds of two more pairs of heels were added to the drub-drubbing on

the planks of the Pier.

It seemed idle to seek, but John Willie stood looking in at the glass

sides of the Pavilion at the pier-head, searching the bright and crowded

interior. His mind was as obstinately set as that of a mule. It seemed

to him idiotic that all those rows and rows of people should clap the

inanities of the young man in knee-breeched evening-dress who strutted

and made painted eyes over the top of a flattened opera-hat, or encore

Miss Sal Volatile, all spidery black silk stockings below and

cocksfeather boa and enormous black halfmoon hat above. John Willie

turned away to the low-burning crimson pier-light. He stood there for

some moments, and then began to stride back the length of the Pier

again.

"Chucking it?" said Percy, half sympathetic, half "getting at" John

Willie.

"Come on to the Kursaal," John Willie grunted.

The Kursaal lay behind the two frontages of Gardd and Pontnewydd

Streets, and it could be reached from either thoroughfare. From Gardd

Street, up another short street, the great lighted semicircle of what

was then its Main Entrance could be seen; and if the minor entrance from

Pontnewydd Street was at that time less resplendent, that was because

the Kerrs' Hafod stood in the way of opening it up. With its grounds and

theatre and vast dancing-hall, the Kursaal covered getting on for an

eighth of a square mile; but a third or more of that was still in

progress of being laid out and planted--once more by Philip Lacey.

Crossing the Promenade to the less crowded pavement beyond, John Willie

and Percy strode the half-mile to the Kursaal. There was a queue about

the turnstiles, but John Willie made a sign to an attendant, who flung

up the Exit Only barrier. They passed under trees with many-coloured

electric lights among the branches, and the slowly turning Big Wheel,

which made a quarter-arch of lights over the tower of the Central Hall,

dipped behind it again as they reached the steps that led to the

vestibule.

For size alone, apart from any other consideration, the dancing-hall of

the Llanyglo Kursaal is one of the wonders of the North. It cost a

hundred thousand pounds to build, and since it can dance a thousand

couples, to seek anybody there without going up into the balconies is

like looking for a needle in a bottle of hay. The band was not playing

at the moment when Percy and John Willie entered; but before they had

reached the top of an empty half-lighted series of staircases the

distant strains of a Barn Dance had broken out. Then, with the pushing

at a door, it burst loudly upon them. John Willie strode down the

shallow gallery steps, made for a front seat whence he could see the

whole length of the vast oblong below, spread out his elbows and set his

chin on his wrists, and, once more muttering "You go and get your drink

if you want," began to search the hall with gloomy blue eyes, very much

as a boy flashes a bit of looking-glass hither and thither in the sun.

Now when the Wakes people come to Llanyglo, and the pleasant family

parties yield place a little, and drive in the mountains more

frequently, and leave the Pier and Promenade a little earlier, and

gather more often at one another's hotels--even then that dancing-hall

is so vast that twenty different elements can be accommodated there

without mixing or encroachment. But that series of precipitations had

not yet taken place. That night all was homogeneous. Perhaps here and

there other contacts had sparsely "crossed," as it were, that fresh

blooming, as the white hawthorn takes on faintly the hue of the pink in

the spring, but that was probably rare. John Willie, had he had eyes

for it, looked down upon a wonderful sight. The hall was a creamy gold,

with bow after bow along its balcony tiers; without its other

innumerable clusters of lights, the eight arc-lamps in its high roof

would have lighted it no better than a railway station is lighted; and

the mirrors on the walls were hardly more polished than its satiny

floor. A fully appointed stage half-way down one of the sides held an

orchestra of thirty performers; walking across that wonderfully swung

floor you felt something almost alive under your feet; and four thousand

feet moved upon it that night.

It was beautiful. The band was playing, slowly, as is the

dancing-fashion of the North, that Barn Dance; and almost every girl was

in white. The whites were the whites of flowers--the greenish white of

guelder-roses, the yellow white of elder or of meadow-sweet, the pinkish

white of the faintest dog-rose, the dead white of narcissi, but little

that was not white. And because of all that soft whiteness, faces caught

by the sun were browner, and hair that the wind had blown through all

day glossier, and eyes brighter, and perhaps blushes quicker and more

readily seen. And to the whole bright spectacle was added the

impressiveness of unfaltering rhythm and simultaneousness of movement.

The Colour on the Horse Guards' Parade is not honoured with greater

precision of physical movement than these disciplined feet, these

turning bodies; the pulsing floor itself answered to the delicate dip of

the conductor's stick. For two bars ... but look at them as they pour

towards you down the left side of the room. Every face is towards you,

forty abreast, and forty following those, and more forties, columns and

squadrons of them, coming forward as grain comes down a channel, as

graded fruit pours down a shoot. You do not see where they come

from--their turn is far away under the pillars there; you do not see

where they go to--they pass away out of sight again beneath you. They do

not seem the same over and over again, but all the youths and maidens of

the world, coming on and on, and new, always new.... Then you look to

the right, and instantly your eyes are sensible of a darker ensemble.

That is because you see, not faces now, but the backs of heads; not

gaily striped shirts and bright ties, but plain shoulders only. And they

pass away as they came, all the youths and maidens of the world with

their backs to you. Not one turns for a look at you, not one nods you

farewell. It is like your own youth leaving you.... And then magically

all alters. Two more bars and, as if some strange and all-potent and

instantaneously acting element had been dropped into the setting and

returning human fluid, of a sudden it all breaks up. It effervesces.

Every couple is seen to be waltzing. Two by two they turn, and your

youth is no longer coming to you nor departing from you, but stops and

plays. It stops and plays--for two bars--and lo, the other again. Once

more they troop towards you with their faces seen, once more troop away

with faces averted. The illusion becomes a spell. Coming, going, all

different, all the same, parallel legions with faces to the future and

faces to the grave--it is a little like Llanyglo itself. Suddenly you

find yourself drawn a little closer to John Willie Garden. You do not

want to look down from a balcony on all the young manhood and young

womanhood of the world. One, one only, will suffice you, and with her

you will come brightly down, all eyes and rosiness and laughter, and

with her go in a soberer livery away again.... But luckier you than John

Willie if you find that one. His eyes, practised as they were in

scanning the Kursaal throng, did not see her. The _coda_ came; the vast

oblong well lighted up for a moment as a poplar lights up when the wind

blows upon it--it was the slightly wider swing of skirts seen from above

as the dance quickened to its finale; and then, as if something else

potent and inimical had been dropped into the solution, there was a

break for the sides, and the shining floor was seen again.

"Damn!" muttered John Willie Garden.

Percy, relishing the spectacle of John Willie on the hunt, was in no

hurry. "The arbours?" he suggested laconically as John Willie rose; but

again John Willie did not reply. For one thing, it was a little

difficult to see into those dark nooks among Philip Lacey's barrows and

planks and new larches and heaps of upturned earth; for another, he had

an assurance that she he sought would not be there.

"Come on," he grunted.

"Ah!" said Percy, with an exaggerated shake of himself. "Has the moment

at last arrived when we quaff?"

But already John Willie had stridden on ahead.

They took a known short cut through dark and obstructed windings, and

presently reached the side-door of the adjoining hotel. It had certain

rooms where ladies unaccompanied might get a drink, but into these they

barely glanced. Percy grinned. Should John Willie find the object of his

search in one of the other rooms, then there was reasonable hope of a

row. He had never before seen John Willie so persistently asking for

trouble.

The door at which they paused showed a room crowded, bright, and full of

a lawn of tobacco-smoke. It was not a large room, but it must have held

twenty men and as many women, and you could have seen their like on any

summer Sunday at Tagg's Island, or any day in Regent Street, or on

Brighton Front. They sat in chairs of saddlebag or leather, and the

fingers of the men were poised over the large cigar-boxes the waiters

held before them, or else made little circular gestures about the

circumference of the little round tables, as much as to say "Same again"

or "Mine." Little but champagne, liqueurs, or brandies-and-soda seemed

to be to their taste, and John Pritchard might indeed have thought them

"very ritss whatever"; gold seemed to come from them at a touch, notes

at little more. Just within the door a very brown man sat with a plump

little lady about whose short fingers gems seemed to have candied, as

sugar candies about a string; and next to them another man admired as

much of his companion's shoes as could be seen for the champagne cooler

on the floor. There was not much noise. There was a good deal of

whispering about horses.

A ring was widened for the new-comers about one of the larger

tables--"Arthur!" Percy called as he passed one of the waiters. "Bag o'

beer, and Mr. P. Briggs's compliments to Miss Price and will she please

come at once." They settled down.

This was Percy's present humour--to drink pints of beer from a silver

tankard that resembled a tun among the gem-like liqueur-glasses, and to

make love to Miss Price, the fat and creasy and unapproachable

hotel-manageress. Perhaps he intended to convey that few other new

sensations remained to him at the end of his three-and-twenty hard-lived

years. Sometimes John Willie laughed at this posture of his friend's,

but to-night he thought it merely stupid and idiotic. He had come here

because he had thought he might as well be having a drink as

fruitlessly searching; now he thought he might as well be searching as

having a drink he didn't want. Percy was ordering the drinks

now--"Vermouth, Val? Cissie, your's is avocat, I know. Now, Johannes

Guglielmus, what will you imbibe?" Presently John Willie sat glowering

at a whiskey-and-soda. The girl on his left, whom Percy had addressed as

Cissie, made an arch attempt to talk to him, and then gave up the

laborious task and turned her back. Miss Price, the manageress,

appeared, and Percy began his stupid and facetious love-making. John

Willie wondered whether he had searched the Dancing-Hall thoroughly

after all.

The table grew noisy, and there were appreciative grins from other

tables; Percy was trying to draw that disgustingly fat manageress on to

his knee. And, with the pace thus set by Percy, the whole room woke up.

The waiters began to move about more quickly and to call for assistance,

and there was applause as somebody opened the lid of the piano....

John Willie sat before his untouched whiskey-and-soda. He was once more

wondering whether it would be worth while to return to the Dancing-Hall,

or whether she might not by this time be on the Pier. And again, and

ever again, he wondered when and where he had seen her before....

Again Percy's silly joyous voice broke in. He was expostulating with

Miss Price.

"Look, Cissie's sitting on Val's----"

"Let be, Mr. Briggs--indeed I will not be pulled about like that!----"

"Then sit on Mr. Garden's--cheer him up--he's looking for Gertie, the

Double-Blank from Blackburn, and can't find her----"

"There, now, Mr. Briggs!--Now I shall have to go and get a needle and

thread!----"

Somebody interposed.--"Here, chuck it, Percy; somebody might come in....

Hallo, John Willie, you off?"

For John Willie had pushed back his chair. He reached for his hat.

"Leave us a lock of your hair for my mourning-brooch," Percy's muffled

voice came after him, but he was off.

Perhaps she would be at the Wheel....

But she was not at that immense tyre slung with upholstered coaches, nor

yet to be seen at the side-shows round about. He left the Kursaal, and

joined the dense throng that made a double stream under the Promenade

lamps. He told himself he was a fool. She might have left Llanyglo

within a few hours of his having seen her--might be back in any of the

towns of England or Scotland or Wales by this time. But he did not cease

to seek. He reached the Pier again. Drub-drub-drub-drub-drub-drub-drub.

It was now solid with flesh, and indeed he had not walked half its

length when the closing-bell clanged. The glow over the pier-head

Pavilion went suddenly out, and so, a few moments later, did a hundred

yards of the lamps on either side. He heard the usual cries of

mock-terror. It was no good going up there now....

Nor would she be in the Floral Valley. In fact, he had better give it

up. He had better clear out of Llanyglo for a bit. He was sick of this

dusty dance of pleasure, and the Wakes crowds would be here in a few

days.... He would go and fish up Delyn. The Water Scheme hadn't spoiled

the lake; they had only built a quite small dam with locks at one end,

and the grid of service-reservoirs was lower down. Sharpe had left the

hut. He would go there for a few days and have his bread and mutton and

cheese sent up from the inn in the valley below. He would tell Minetta

to get somebody to stay with her, and would go in the morning....

He was passing the closed fancy-shop at the corner of Gardd Street when

he came to this resolution; and suddenly he stopped dead. Minetta!...

What was it that the thought of his sister, coming at this moment,

reminded him of? It was odd, but it had certainly reminded him of

something that had seemed to come near him only to escape him again

immediately. Minetta!... He saw Minetta daily. There was nothing new

about Minetta. She looked after the house, and if he wasn't going to be

in for meals he mentioned the fact, or sometimes didn't, and beyond

that, to tell the truth, he didn't very often think of Minetta. He

didn't suppose she would ever marry--wasn't that kind. He remembered

that years ago that genial idiot Percy Briggs had fancied himself

"sweet" on her, but that sketching of hers----

_Ah!_

John Willie, who had been still standing at the corner, moved slowly

forward again. He had got it.

He _knew_ he'd been right! It was a little boast of his that he

remembered faces rather well, and the thing that had perplexed him for

two days was now clear. In a flash he saw in his mind the Llanyglo of

the days of the Briggses and Laceys. He saw a bright diminutive picture

of deck-chairs and bathing-tents on the shore, and June Lacey and Wiggie

having their fortunes told. And he saw a gipsy child, with a head held

as if it had borne an invisible pitcher, and then a foot cut by a piece

of glass, and himself and Percy packed off home in disgrace, and Percy's

mother washing the gashed foot with water from a picnic-basket and

tying it up with a handkerchief. Then Minetta had come up, and had said

that she was going to make a sketch of the child....

Ah! It was _she_ who had stood under the red pier-light, watching that

cadmium horn of the moon that lifted itself out of the sea!

II

JUNE

As it happened, John Willie did not go off fishing on the morrow. He

expected that Minetta would be in bed when he got home, but as he passed

up the path he saw a light burning high in the front of the house. It

was in the room beneath that date-stone under which he had once put a

sixpence, and that room, because of its high and uninterrupted view of

the sea, was one of the guest-chambers. He wondered who had come.

His supper was laid in the dining-room, but he did not want it, and so

passed straight upstairs. As he turned along the landing to his own room

he heard a door opened on the floor above, and his sister called "Is

that you?" He answered, entered his bedroom, and began to undress.

But he had scarcely got his boots unlaced when there came a tap at the

door, and Minetta entered. Her dark hair was in plaits, she wore a wrap

over her nightdress, and she carried on her hip a tray with two

claret-stained glasses and a salver with a cut cake. Evidently there had

been a girls' bedroom orgie.

"Who's come?" John Willie asked, throwing aside his second boot.

"June Lacey. You knew she was coming," Minetta answered accusingly.

"No, I didn't--first I've heard of it."

"You never hear anything when you're reading a newspaper. I told you at

breakfast this morning, and that she was going to wire the time of the

train. And you were out, and I had to leave everything and go and meet

her myself."

"Sorry," John Willie grunted. He remembered now. "I mean, I didn't

gather it was to-day."

"Well, I hope you'll manage to spare her an hour or two now that she's

here," Minetta said a little crossly. "I did tell her to come just

whenever she wished, and she didn't know the Wakes were coming on."

"All right," John Willie yawned. "I was going fishing, that's all; but I

won't if you don't want. How long's she staying?"

"At least a fortnight. So don't say I haven't told you that. And do try

to be in just occasionally. Have you had supper?"

"I didn't want any, thanks. Sorry I forgot, Min. Say good night to June

for me."

Five minutes later he had turned out the gas and tumbled into bed.

Except that she postponed his escape from ennui for a day or two, June's

arrival was a matter of indifference to him. He had known her for so

long that he regarded her almost as if she had been a split-off portion

of Minetta herself, that happened to possess its own apparatus of speech

and locomotion. He could no more have said whether she was pretty than

he could have said whether Minetta was pretty. It was no trouble to talk

to June. As much talk as was necessary came of itself. He had only to

say "You remember so-and-so----" or "Like that time when----" and

conversation sustained itself out of a hundred trifles desultorily

familiar to both of them. That, at any rate, was a comfort. With

anybody new he would have had to take a certain amount of trouble. With

June it didn't matter.

So, at breakfast the next morning, he did not actually read the

newspaper as he ate, but he threw out a remark from time to time as it

were over the edge of an imaginary newspaper, and then asked June what

she would like to do that morning. When she replied that she wanted him

to do just whatever he had intended to do, he even hoisted himself to

the level of a little ceremoniousness, and told her that he had no plans

at all save to amuse her--what about a bathe, the morning Concert in the

Pavilion, a drive in the afternoon, and so on? By keeping to this beaten

track of enjoyment, he could, at one and the same time, be entertaining

June and keeping an eye open for that gipsy girl who haunted his

imagination.

"A bathe?" said June.... "Oh, of course! How stupid of me! I'd forgotten

there was mixed bathing here now. What a change!... Wasn't there a

frightful row about it?"

There had been a row, but it had been short and sharp. Briefly,

Blackpool and Douglas and Llandudno had settled the matter for them,

and, after a protest for conscience's sake--and also a little more

well-judged absenteeism--even Howell Gruffydd, now Chairman of the

Council, and John Pritchard, a Councillor in his second year, had

yielded. A portion of the shore had been set apart for this "playing

with fire," but within a year even this had become a dead letter. The

only thing that now distinguished this portion of the beach from the

rest was a certain heightened jocundity in the advertisements on the

sides of the bathing-machines at that spot. The virtues of Pills and

Laxatives were a little more loudly announced there, and this

heartiness and lack of false shame culminated in a long hoarding that

was erected on one of the groynes, and bore on one side the legend "THE

NAKED TRUTH" (which was that Somebody's Remedies were the Best), and on

the other the words "TO THE PURE" (who were warned against Fraudulent

Imitations). For the rest folk now bathed where they would.

So, idly, John Willie told June of the town's struggle between its

principles and its living, and then they rose from the table. When June

heard that Minetta wasn't coming with them she wanted to stay behind and

help; but Minetta persuaded her that she would only be in the way, and

that anyway she couldn't help her with her painting; and presently, with

towels and costumes, she and John Willie went forth and, after a casual

discussion about its being rather soon after breakfast to bathe,

descended to the beach.

June was certainly a pretty enough girl for even a fastidious young man

to be seen about with. No neater shoes than those that moved beneath the

gypsophylla of her petticoats were to be seen on the whole Promenade,

and she held her longish figure trimly, and was almost on the "fast"

side with her little thin switch of a cane. She was an inch taller than

John Willie, too, which was another inch of smartness to be seen walking

with. He found her a bathing-machine and secured another for himself;

and when, presently, they lay on their backs side by side a hundred

yards farther out from the shore than anybody else, with the sun hot on

their faces and their eyes blinking up at the intense blue, they

continued to talk as they had talked before--of who had been to Llanyglo

lately and who had not, and of what had become of Mrs. Maynard, and

whether anybody had seen Hilda Morrell lately, and whether that London

man--what was his name--Mr. Ashton--had been heard of since. John

Willie, for his part, asked how Mrs. Lacey and Wiggie were, and told

June what a lot was thought of her father's laying out of the Kursaal

Gardens, and asked her when the work was expected to be finished.

Then they came in again, dressed, and regained the Promenade.

John Willie was surprised to find how quickly the morning went. The

Concert was half over by the time they reached the Pavilion, and when

the Concert was over and the drub-drub on the boards of the Pier became

incessant, June said that, build as they would, it would be a long time

before they built on the Trwyn. To that John Willie replied that he

wasn't so sure, and told her of how at one time it had been a toss-up

whether they wouldn't make a terrace there and build the "Imperial" on

it; and June's reply was that she would never have thought it. Then John

Willie looked at his watch, and at first thought it must have stopped,

the time had flown so. They turned their faces to the Promenade again,

and at a Booking Kiosk John Willie ordered a landau for half-past two.

Minetta (he told June) would have finished her work by then, and the

three of them could go either out Abercelyn way, or through Porth Neigr

and round home, or along the Delyn road, just as June wished. June said

that if she really had her choice, she would like the Abercelyn drive,

because it was years since she had been there, and she would like to see

how much it had altered.

So out towards Abercelyn the three of them went that afternoon, and

June's eyes opened wide at the Sarn manganese sidings, and John Willie

told her to mind that gypsophylla of her petticoats against the

coal-heaps and grease-boxes of the wagons. Then back in the landau

again, he took a well-earned rest while Minetta and June talked. He

leaned back against the hot leather, and smoked and watched them, and

wondered, first, whether anybody would ever marry Minetta, and, next,

whether anybody would ever marry June, and then all at once found

himself wondering about the gipsy girl again.

Suppose he should take seats for June and Minetta at some entertainment

that evening, should see them comfortably settled, and should then go

out for another look for her?...

But, now that he knew who she was, he thought of her, somehow, ever so

slightly differently. He was no less set on finding her; indeed he was

more set; but part of the possible surprise and excitement had certainly

gone. Had he apparently not been destined not to see her again, the

thing would have been less of an adventure than he had at first

supposed. There would have been far fewer discoveries to make. It might

even have been difficult to talk to her. He could talk pleasantly to

June and be thinking of something else all the time; but he could hardly

have asked Ynys Lovell how her mother was getting on with her

chair-mending and fortune-telling, or have told her that he had heard

that her kinsman Dafydd Dafis had won the "penillion" contest at the

Eisteddfod....

_Ah!_----

Again he had it, and, lying back on the hot leather of the hired landau,

wondered that he had not had it sooner. Of course--Dafydd Dafis. If

anybody knew where she was, Dafydd would know. _That_ was what he would

do that evening while Minetta and June were at the Concert. He would

take a stroll to Dafydd's house (which was no longer the single-roomed

cottage near the old Independent Chapel, but a two-roomed one in

Maengwyn Street), and he would sit down and have a smoke and ask Dafydd

how all was with him....

At this point he became conscious that June was speaking to him. She was

offering him a penny for his thoughts. Instantly he fell into the rut of

easy conversation again. It took him hardly a moment to find a topic.

"Eh?" he said.... "Oh!--You can have them for nothing. I was just

thinking of that place of the Kerrs in Pontnewydd Street. I suppose

you've heard all about that?"

"No, I've not heard a word," June declared. "Do tell me!"

After all, it was but a step from his real thought to the narrative he

now told June. Between Dafydd Dafis and Tommy Kerr was now the

association of an all but declared feud, which would break out into open

enmity the moment anything happened to Tommy's brother Ned. More than

any man in Llanyglo Dafydd had writhed at that wonderful building of the

Hafod Unos, and since then he had remembered something else that had set

him darkly flushing. It had been Tommy Kerr (or one of his boon

companions--it came to the same thing) who, when Dafydd had returned

rapt after the first day of the Eisteddfod, had cast two-pence on the

ground and had drunkenly demanded a song. Yes, that remark, scarce heard

at the time, had come back since. They had offered him, Dafydd, their

dirty dross in exchange for Song, and had bidden him stoop to pick it

up....

And that mortal insult had reminded Dafydd of an older memory still.

This was, that of the four Kerrs, Tommy had been the only one who had

not tumbled into that open boat when that chilling cry of

"_Llongddrylliad!_" had sounded on that stormy night years and years

before. That that had not been Tommy's fault mattered nothing; as soon

as Dafydd had remembered this he had felt himself released from the last

shadow of an obligation. It was another stick to beat Tommy with and

"beating him" now meant, as everybody knew, waiting until his brother

died and then "purring" him out of the Hafod, if not by fair means,

then--well, purring him out none the less.

And that stick Tommy was to be beaten with was only the latest of many.

It was a whole history of sticks--of the Council's Sons of Belial set at

Tommy, collectors, inspectors of this and that and the other, policemen

to apprehend him for drunkenness, sergeants to warn publicans that if

they harboured Tommy they might be made to feel it in other ways.... But

lately they had withdrawn this last prohibition. Putting their heads

together, they had judged it best that Tommy should drink all he could,

and more.... He had done so, and did not seem a single penny the worse

for it. Moreover, he had now openly declared himself an abominator of

Welshmen and everything else Welsh. Nightly he zig-zagged home crying

out against the whole smiling, thievish crew, their Kursaals and

Pavilions and Dancing-Halls and Concerts Llanyglo. He lurched along

Pontnewydd Street after everybody else had gone to bed, roaring "_Glan

Meddwdod Mwyn_." How he had twenty times escaped breaking his neck when

they had laid down the Pontnewydd Street tramlines nobody knew.... And

whenever he remembered that they wanted his Hafod and would have it as

soon as Ned died, he offered to _give_ it away to any Welshman who would

repeat after him, word for word ... but his forms of words varied

widely, and no more than the Amalekites could some of those against whom

he railed pronounce his words that began with "sh."

So John Willie, as the landau bowled homewards, had to tell June all

this, and June was extraordinarily interested. Minetta watched them

both, and, in her turn, wondered about John Willie and _his_ marrying.

She liked to have June to visit her; she wasn't so sure that she wanted

June as a standing ornamental dish. Indeed she rather thought she

didn't, and, allowing for many large but still accidental differences,

Minetta was not without a trace of the malicious humour of Tommy Kerr

himself.

In fairness she had to admit, however, that so far there were no signs

that June was setting her cap at John Willie.

That night again, however, John Willie had little luck of his searching,

this time of Dafydd Dafis. He sought him at his home, he sought him

abroad, but he failed to find him and he joined June and his sister

again where they sat listening to The Lunas, those incomparable

Drawing-Room Entertainers. He bought them chocolate and he bought them

ices, and then, at the end of the performance, he proposed a walk along

the Promenade before they turned in. Not to lose them, he passed an arm

through either of theirs, his sister's arm and that of this tall and

pretty and undisturbing extension of his sister. They set their faces

towards the Pier that stretched like a sparkling finger out to sea.

It was the hour of the ebb, and lately, at that hour, an odd and new

activity had begun to make sharper that contrast between the bright and

crowded and restless Promenade and the solemn void that pushed as it

were its dark breast against that two-miles-long chain of gold and

silver lamps, straining the slender fetter into a curve. Down below the

railings, at three or four points, not more, an upturned face with

tightly shut eyes was praying aloud. They looked like little floating,

drowned, yet speaking masks. Each evangelist had his little knot of

three or four companions, but these had come with him, and of hearers

they had none. They stood on the trampled sand, just below the

gas-lighted line of pebbles; a boat drawn up, or a yard or two of

groyne, struggled between light and shadow beyond them; far out in the

bay the twinkle of a solitary light could be seen; the rest was

blackness and immensity. It made Infinity seem strangely weak. Here It

was, striving to make Itself known to the finite, Its sole instrument a

little oval mask and a voice that could not be heard five yards away;

and never a head was turned. Calling and laughing, the babel of their

voices like the rattle of the pebbles that roll back with the retiring

wave, they passed and passed and passed. One would have said that some

vast angelic skater had cut that sweeping outside-edge of light, and

then, repulsed, had rushed away into the darkness again.

And this was something else for John Willie to tell this pretty,

unexigent June. It had only been going on about a fortnight, he said,

but he didn't think they'd heard the last of it yet. There was a Revival

or something coming slowly up the coast, he said, and--who did June

think was doing it?--why, Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd!

"Never!" June exclaimed.

"Rather! You remember him, don't you? Howell Gruffydd the grocer's son;

pale-faced chap, with a great lump of hair; and by Jove, he is stirring

'em up! He started at Aberystwith, and worked his way up through

Aberdovey and Towyn and Barmouth and Portmadoc, with no end of crowds

following him wherever he went. I expect he'll be here presently. If he

comes when the Wakes are on there will be a shindy!... I say, aren't you

feeling a bit cold? Better be getting along home. I'll take you as far

as the corner, and then if you don't mind I'll leave you--I want to find

a man if I can----"

Five minutes later he had got rid of them, and stood in meditation. Was

it worth while trying for Dafydd Dafis again? Or taking another stroll

along the Pier? Perhaps it wasn't. He was rather tired, and this seemed

a stupid kind of thing he had been doing for the last few days. He'd

potter about with June for another day--perhaps he had rather neglected

Minetta lately--and then for the fishing up Delyn. In that way he would

be off just as the Wakes people arrived. Already the lodging-house

keepers were getting ready for them, putting away their ornaments and so

on. They would be here on Friday night; to-day was Wednesday; John

Willie would be off on Friday morning.

This time he kept to his decision. He walked about with the pretty and

untroublesome June all the next morning, and in the afternoon Minetta

joined them. She approved warmly of his fishing-plan, and said she was

sure the change would do him good. He told them to keep away from the

crowds and not to be out too late, and then, on the Friday morning set

off.

When, at nine o'clock the same night, he walked up the path again and

appeared in the dining-room just as June and Minetta were thinking of

going to bed, Minetta stared. She had thought him miles away.

She stared still harder when he mumbled that he had "forgotten

something," and intended to be off again in the morning.

III

DELYN

He had not at first seen that black dress. Sharpe's old cottage was

never locked, and he had walked straight in, had put down his little

dressing-bag, and had begun to empty his pockets, setting his flask, his

fly-book, his store of tobacco and certain provisions on the little deal

table under the single window. At a first glance there was nothing to

show that the place had been entered since he had last been there. The

mattress of Sharpe's narrow pallet had been rolled up at the bed-head

and a patchwork quilt spread over it; the two windsor chairs stood in

their accustomed places; and the rods in their brown canvas covers stood

as usual in the corner. Only Sharpe's photographs had gone from the

walls, leaving the little black heads of nails and tacks, each over its

slightly paler oblong of plain deal boarding.

Had not John Willie thought that he had better drag the bedding on which

he was to sleep out into the sun at once, he would not have found the

frock. It had been thrown across the roll of mattress and covered with

that old piece of patchwork. Nor, since it was folded in a square, did

he even then recognise the thing for a frock. Only when he had picked it

up and it had revealed itself had he stood, suddenly arrested,

alternately gazing at it and then looking obliquely at the floor. Then,

as he had slowly put it down again, at its full length this time, there

had peeped at him from half under the roll of mattress, first a white

linen collar with one of the little sham pearl studs that are given away

with such things still in one of its button-holes, and next a pair of

tiny cylindrical cuffs....

Perhaps already, deep within himself, he had known that she was not far

away....

Then, slowly and methodically, he had begun to search the hut. His

search had been productive of the following discoveries:--

Thrust under the bed: A newish oval brown tin box (which he had not

opened), and a pair of black shoes.

On the lower shelf of Sharpe's little provision-cupboard: a round

narrow-brimmed black hat.

On the upper shelf, among cups, plates, and other odds and ends: A

seven-pound paper bag half full of flour, and a mug with some still

fresh milk in it--he tasted it.

Outside the hut: A stone or two in a little clearing in the fern, a

stick-heap, the ashes of a recent fire, and a frying-pan.

Then he had re-entered the hut. He had sat down in one of the windsor

chairs. He had been filling his third or perhaps his fourth pipe when

she herself had appeared in the doorway.

All this had been the day before.

* * * * *

As he now walked up that one-in-seven slope under the firs he remembered

again, for the fiftieth time in twenty hours, her appearance as she had

stood there. She had worn an old red blouse which she had not troubled

to tuck in at the waist, a petticoat of faded greenish-blue (no

gypsophylla there), and her legs and feet had been bare. And at first

he had thought she was going to run away. But she had only recoiled as a

cat recoils, yielding ground without abandoning it. He himself had not

moved. Move, and she might still be off as suddenly as a hare; sit still

and say "Hallo, Ynys, not much in the chair-mending line up here, is

there?" and she might stay.... And now, as he trudged up under the firs,

he blamed Llanyglo that he had not heard that her mother was dead. Had

Llanyglo remained a hamlet, or had it grown merely reasonably and within

measure, the death even of Belle Lovell would have been an event; now,

with towns in Lancashire half-emptied (he had seen it that morning,

Llanyglo black and boiling like a cauldron of pitch with the people of

the Wakes)--now such simple happenings passed unnoticed. Belle had died

a year before, but that was not the reason Ynys wore black. She wore

black because black was the livery of Philip Lacey's Liverpool

flower-shop girls. Black showed up the flowers to better advantage.

Ynys, after months of lonely wanderings and getting of her bread as best

she could, had remembered Philip Lacey's promise when she had cut her

foot that morning on the shore, had tramped to Liverpool, had asked for

Philip at his principal establishment in Lord Street, and now sold

stately blooms the poor hedgerow cousins of which she had formerly given

away, pattering bare-foot after pedestrians on the road with them in her

hand. She had been given a fortnight's holiday, and had come to Llanyglo

to spend it.

As the path under the firs grew steeper still, John Willie wondered

whether she would have kept her word to him. He had made her welcome to

the cottage of which she had already made free, but that, he knew, did

not mean that she might not have packed up and fled the moment he had

turned his back--no, not even though she had promised not to do so. He

had seen enough of her yesterday to guess that her word given would be

an empty and artificial thing the moment her inclination changed; nay,

she might have given it with no intention whatever of keeping it, just

to gain a little time. Even should he find her frock and her oval tin

box still there, that would not necessarily mean that she would return.

A box of matches was her luggage. Except as a depository for these

things she had not used the hut. She had cooked her meals outside, and

had slept on a litter of bracken.

Nevertheless, John Willie had left the cottage to her, and, for fear a

stray shepherd might gossip, had himself returned home rather than sleep

at the inn a few miles below.

He continued to climb, past rocks spotted with pennywort and trickling

with rills, orange and whitey-green with lichen and tongued with

polypodi, past crops of dead nettle and vistas of fronds, past dust of

pine-needles and debris of cones. Now and then a flutter of wings broke

the stillness of the aisles, but no song; and always he had the skyline

almost overhead on his right, and on his left, beyond the little grid of

reservoirs far below, the crisscrossing AAAA's of a mountain-side of

larches.

She had not taken advantage of his absence to fly. He saw her as he

ceased to climb and gained the half-way fold that held Llyn Delyn in its

crook. She was standing outside the hut, but she was not wearing the old

unconfined red blouse of the day before now. The small spot he saw a

quarter of a mile ahead was a black one. He waved his hand, but she did

not respond. He saw her sit down with her back against the wall of the

hut and cross her arms over her knees. Three minutes later he was

standing beside her.

And now that he had come he was not very clear in his mind why he had

come. True, he could have given a dozen reasons--the bursting over the

town of that flood of operatives he had seen that morning, his desire to

fish, his wish (as he now suddenly and rather startlingly knew) to

escape further attendance on June, and so forth; and these reasons would

have been precisely a dozen too many. Had all Lancashire been drubbing

on the Pier and she standing under the crimson light watching that

strange and dhowlike sail of the moon glaring orange over the water,

John Willie would not have been up Delyn. He had intended to fish, but

fishing was now far from his thoughts. And already he was aware of

another thing, namely, that while June had been no trouble at all to

talk to, talk with Ynys was a heavy business. Yesterday, every sentence

he had attempted had been as difficult as if it had been the first. Only

by a series of almost violent extractions had he learned that her mother

was dead and that she sold flowers (curious that they should have been

June's father's flowers!) in Liverpool. He supposed he must begin to

talk again now. He could hardly be with her and not talk. Well, if he

must talk, he would.

"I say, you're well out of it all to-day!" he exclaimed, with apparent

heartiness. "They began to come in at eleven last evening, and they've

been coming in all night. Whew, but I ran, I can tell you!"

She had been looking in the direction of the lake, which, however, she

could hardly have seen, so low did she sit; and he, as he stood, could

see no more of her than the straight white parting of her hair and her

tanned forearms and wrists about her knees. The black of her dress was a

sooty black, but you would only have called her hair black because there

was nothing else to call it. It was neither more nor less black than a

bowl of black lustre is black; it had a surface, but it had also depths

where you saw the sun again, and the sky lurked, and the green of the

ferns that grew about the hut. Had John Willie put his hand near it it

might have been dimly reflected, as it would have been reflected in a

peat pool.

The sound of his voice seemed almost to startle her, but she did not

look up.

"Hwhat do you say?" she said. She slightly overstressed the internal

"h's," and her accent was Welsh, but uniquely soft. As she had not

heard, he had to repeat his remark.

"I mean those Wakes people. There are thousands of them there now." He

made a little motion of his head behind him. "It's better up here."

Then, as still she did not reply, he asked her a direct question. "You

didn't stay long in Llanyglo, did you?"

"I stay there one day," she answered. A scarcely perceptible movement of

her forefinger accompanied the numeral.

"Oh, then of course that was the day I saw you. Did you see me?"

"No."

"You were standing at the pier-head, watching the moon rise."

Ynys did not deny this. Neither did she confirm it.

"Then you disappeared," John Willie continued, "and I couldn't find you

again."

To this she replied after a moment.--"I went back to the house, and

paid the Englishwoman, and then I came away. In the morning I arrive

here."

"Do you mean you walked all night?"

"There is lit-tle night this time of the year."

John Willie was silent. Only a week before he had left an evening party

at the "Imperial" to find the sun already burning a hole in the edge of

Mynedd Mawr.

"And how much longer holiday have you?" John Willie asked presently.

"Six days," answered the girl; and again the numeral was accompanied by

a slight gesture of her fingers.

"And then you go back to Liverpool?"

Complete silence was all the answer he had to that question.

Then, suddenly, Ynys moved. She stood up. For the first time her

seaweed-coloured eyes looked straight into John Willie's.

"You left that place early. You will be hungry. I caught some

fis-s--_brithyll_. I think she cooked now."

She disappeared round the corner of the hut.

John Willie would have liked to ask her why she had put on the black

dress and the black shoes, but something seemed to whisper to him not to

do so. No doubt she had caught the trout with her hand, in one of the

pools of a stream that slid and chattered under fern down the side of

Delyn, and he feared that did he approach her too suddenly even by words

she might be off, even as those trout would have vanished in a flash at

the least disturbance of the water by her hand. She had cooked them on

the wood; she had also made a cake of flour and water and no salt; and

she served the fish in a tin platter by the little clearing she had made

for the hearth. He sat now, and she stood; she brought also a mug of

milk, from the surface of which she took a tiny caterpillar with the

tip of a frond; and when he had eaten she cleaned the platter by

scouring it with a handful of fern-rot and then setting it in a little

stream with a stone upon it. Then they stood before one another again,

he with his back to the hut, she in front of him, her head always

superbly erect, but slowly turning from time to time, while her eyes

sought the lake, the line of bracken against the sky where the mountain

dropped, and his own eyes, indifferently.

Then, unexpectedly, she asked a question.

"You come to fis-s?" she asked.

He said that he had thought of it.

"There is wa-ter in the boat, but indeed I not touch it. I go and empty

it," she said.

But he stopped her.--"Oh, it's no good now--too bright," he said. "Might

try in the evening. Sit down, won't you? I want to ask you some

questions."

She curled herself up in the bracken, and he set his back against the

wall of the hut and began to fill his pipe.

But instead of questioning her, John Willie had all the appearances of a

man who was questioning himself. He sat a little behind Ynys, so that

when she looked straight before her he lost her full profile; and he

moved no more than she. He was suddenly thinking how thoroughly sick he

was of Llanyglo.

For if he had helped to make Llanyglo, and knew its lighting and its

watering, its building and its leases and its subsoil, Llanyglo had also

helped to make him. The drub-drub on the Pier, the inanities of his

friend Percy Briggs, evening parties that began at midnight and ended

with the sun high in the sky, complaints from his sister that she saw

him only in the short intervals between a coming home and a setting out

again--this had been pretty much the reaction of Llanyglo on John Willie

Garden. He was a very ordinary young man.--But here was a world peopled

only by sheep, the myriad insects that hopped and wove and chirruped in

the tall fern, the kites and curlews overhead, and the trout far below

the surface of the lake. His lashes made rainbows before his half-closed

eyes, and those eyes, opening again, could gaze at the tips of the sunny

fern against the deeps of the sky until the difference between them

became almost as intensified as the difference between dark and bright.

Spiders no bigger than freckles seemed to be doing important things

under their bright green roofs--for only the under sides of the fronds

were green and translucent: the fern on which the sun beat directly was

no more green than Ynys's hair was black.... And the sunny parts of

Ynys's arms were of the colour of a hayfield with much sorrel, while the

round beneath was as cool as the under curve of a boat on the water....

It would have been part of the peace of that hot midday could he have

dozed with his head in the crook of that arm.

Of other desire to break its peace had he none.

And Ynys?

She had seen those fretted parasols of the fern, meshed and lacy and

interpenetrating, a vast rug of whispering frondage--she had seen them,

or their like, since they had been no more than tender, uncurling

pastoral staffs, brown, with tiny inner crocketts not even green yet.

She had watched them unfold their weak fingers--yes, from Lord Street,

Liverpool, she had watched them unroll as a soft caterpillar unrolls. In

a cool and darkened shop, with the floor always wet, she had seen, with

those seaweed-coloured eyes, not the great queenly hydrangeas, nor the

burning torches of the gladioli, nor the fat and scentless roses, nor

the great half-pint pitchers of the arum lilies--she had seen, not these

cold grandiflora, but the celandine and anemone of the hedge-bottoms,

and the cool pennywort on the rocks, and the soft and imperceptible

change, day by day, of those mountains many, many railway stations away.

Those other great robed and wedding-dressed blooms? She had not

considered them to be flowers. Flowers were the sappy bluebells she had

pulled, white-stalked and squeaking, from the banks, receiving a penny

for them--but not in exchange. She had sold the hydrangea-things without

even seeing them. And her own weekly fifteen shillings of wages had not

purchased a single glance of her eyes nor a single emotion of her heart.