And her eyes had not distinguished less between magnificent bloom and

magnificent bloom than they had between this and the other collar, tie,

and bowler hat who, his purchase made, had lingered, and had tried to

talk to her, and had come again. Young women who can see Delyn from

Liverpool can hardly be expected so to distinguish. These young men had

not even been, as the balls and buckets of Howell Gruffydd's shop-window

had been, beyond her reach, she below theirs. She and they might breathe

the same air, but they extracted different elements from it.

Was that true also of herself and John Willie Garden, lying now among

the fern of Delyn--John Willie, whose clothes (even) were what they were

by a kind of artifice, and not, like Dafydd Dafis's, as if the cropped

grasses themselves had by some natural alchemy become wool, and the wool

clothing, that would be worn out by labour not far from the grasses

again?...

Because he did not know, John Willie lay there, and watched her cheek

and arm, and forgot that he had said he was going to ask her questions.

The silence lasted for so long that, when at last he spoke, she might

(he thought) have supposed that he had had a nap in the meantime. He

hoisted himself to his feet, stretched himself, yawned "Ah, that's

better!" and then added, "I say, you might show me where you got those

fish."

Instantly, a gillie incongruously in a flower-seller's dress, she was on

her feet and walking a little ahead. But he caught her up and kept

abreast of her. They reached the boat, half in and half out of the

gravelly shallow, but she went straight on across a swampy little stream

that led to the upper margin of the lake. Presently it seemed to John

Willie that they would have done better to take the boat, for they had

to skirt a deep shaly spur the slope of which continued unbroken down

under the water and gave under their feet the moment they tried to

ascend it. At a point where she splashed a few yards ahead of him John

Willie suggested that they should take their boots and stockings off,

and he had a momentary fancy that the brown of her cheek deepened a

little; but she made no reply, and they kept on. Then, after more

hundreds of yards of walking and wading, they gained firm earth again.

They were at the bottom of a V-shaped ravine into which all the trees

and scrub of the mountain-sides seemed to have settled. It was known to

a few shepherds as Glyn Iago, and the stream came down it over jagged

stairs of purple slate and under dwarf-oak and birch, thorn and briar

and mountain-ash.

Again it would have been better to wade through the noisy shallows and

round the boulders spongy with drenched moss, and again he suggested it;

but perhaps the deep gurgle of the fall they were approaching drowned

his voice. He went ahead, putting aside the worst of the brambles, and

he knew without telling when they reached the pool. It was long enough

to have plunged into, too wide to have leapt across even had the rocks

afforded any take-off, and it deepened gradually to blackness, and then

boiled pale and tumultuous again under the plunge of a twelve-foot fall.

Over the pool itself the sunlight glowed in spots only through the

leaves, but on one bank there was a sunny clearing of a few yards

square. Then the trees began again, up and up and up to the sky, a cliff

of leaves that shut the mountains out and the stream in.

He let her sit down first. This she did where she could see the little

plants and mosses at the water's edge endlessly a-quiver with the tumult

of the fall. Then, sitting down beside her, he again felt that he must

begin talking to her all over again. His mouth flickered for a moment as

he thought of Percy Briggs on the Pier, and then he spoke.

"If I were you I should move up here," he said.

She was picking up a snail-shell to throw into the water. She turned,

extraordinarily quickly, and in the seaweed eyes there was a hard and

defensive look, instant, yet old.

"It iss only my hat and my box," she said quickly.

"Eh? Oh!----" He laughed. "I only mean there'll be brakes and wagonettes

all over the place now, and anybody might come to the lake.--I say, you

didn't think I meant to chuck you out, did you?"

"I thought prapss you want to fiss," she replied, turning away and

looking at the gasogene of black water again.

He laughed again.--"Oh, no. I mean you don't sleep there, and nobody'd

come here, and I could get you a lock and key so that your things would

be safe. You could go there if it rained."

She tossed the snail-shell into the water, neither accepting his offer

nor rejecting it.

"Besides," he went on, "I know that if anybody disturbed you you'd be

off. Look here. I'll get you that lock and key. I'm off back to-night,

and I'll bring 'em up to-morrow.--But you will be here won't you?"

Again--he could not be sure--he fancied her colour deepened.

"Hwhere should I go to?" she said over her shoulder.

"Well--anywhere--Liverpool--anywhere."

And again her reply was to gaze at the boiling of the air-bubbles at the

foot of the fall.

But John Willie no longer wondered that he should struggle thus with a

conversation when there were rills and rivulets of talk waiting for him

at home at Llanyglo. She was not mute; there were a thousand

communications wrapped up in her very presence. She ran over with

unspoken meanings, babbled for all her silence. Her hair, nearly all

cool green now, as the black water was cool green; that unlearned

balance of her head; the curve of her cheek; those lovely, despotic

forearms--whether that least member of her whole sweet parliament, her

tongue, moved or was still, there was more of approach in all of these

than in June's "Fancy! Do tell me! And how's So-and-So getting on?"

These were the weeds, the dusty groundsel of words; Ynys was her own

vocabulary, every part of her a part of speech....

And the theme? The theme that every corpuscle of her announced as she

sat there, listlessly tossing snail-shells and twigs and rolled-up

leaves and blades of grass into the water?

John Willie was a very ordinary young man. In Liverpool, his eyes would

have seen very little but Liverpool. Perhaps that was why, in Glyn Iago,

he had not the perfect freedom of sun and air, of growing and dying

things, and things growing again, of moving water, of that essential

speech with this creature at his side that at the last has no need of

words. For, for good and ill mingled, they make shames and fears in the

Liverpools of the land, and codes, and suppressions, and the apparatus

of Conscience, and it is too late for you, too late for me, too late for

John Willie, to unmake them. John Willie had begun by questioning Ynys;

now, far more searchingly, Ynys was questioning him.

And the end of her questioning of him was that he would have called

himself a cur had he as much as thought of not doing "the decent

thing...."

Indeed it was precisely because he thought so resolutely and intently of

doing that thing that by and by he rose. It was only half-past four; he

could be home in two, or two-and-a-half hours; and for that matter he

was not in any hurry to get home. He was in a hurry now only because

Ynys spoke too much. She gave him no rest from her close inquisition. He

must answer those questions that she so pressed home or take himself

quickly off, to add (as he knew) the fuel of thought to that flame with

which he already burned.

Therefore, again standing by her, he asked her one more question only.

"You will be here to-morrow?" he said, his eyes anxiously on her face.

What his answer would have been had she said "No," or had he not

believed that nod of her head, it is useless to ask.

He left her still tossing the debris into the water.

* * * * *

He began to be aware of the change the Wakes people had wrought in

Llanyglo before the trap had carried him a mile along the road. Twice in

that distance he had to whip up to get through the dust of vehicles

ahead. He had been right in saying that the landaus and brakes and

wagonettes would be all over the place now. They were taking the family

parties back to dinner at the hotels.

Then, still five miles from Llanyglo, he began to allow the brakes and

wagonettes to overtake him again. He had remembered that he was in no

hurry. Hurry would only mean the crowd sooner, the noise sooner, and

supper sooner, with the conversation of June and Minetta. At a place

called Doll he turned aside into a narrow lane that would take him by a

circuitous route into the Porth Neigr road near the stone quarries.

Then, sitting sideways on the seat, with his head sunk and the whiplash

trailing over the dashboard, he allowed the horse to take him at its own

pace.

Of course, he could marry Ynys; there was nothing to be said against

that except that hitherto he had not thought of marriage. Marriage, in

John Willie's observation of his married friends and acquaintances, was

a quite definite and circumscribed thing, in which prospects played a

part, and settlements, and houses of a certain kind, and certain

well-marked changes in the bride's demeanour towards her still

unmarried friends, and a certain tendency to stoutness and baldness on

the part of the groom. Moreover, behind every suggested marriage there

lurked the question whether it "would do." His father and mother, when

he came to speak of marriage, would want to know whether it would "do";

Minetta would have her opinion about whether it would "do"; and if it

did not "do," all his friends and acquaintances would by and by shake

their heads and say that it had been plain all along how _that_ would

turn out....

On the other hand, the case was complicated--not in principle (that was

beastly clear)--but by allowances in practise. Llanyglo had for some

time been far from exacting; it was now, in certain of its phases, at

any rate, almost exacting in the opposite direction. As many social

allowances were made for the young man who had something "on" as

liberties were granted to properly affianced couples who had got their

certificate that it would "do." Percy Briggs would have gone off alone,

with his hat on the back of his head and cheerfully whistling, at the

least hint that John Willie had something "on." ... But this that had

come so suddenly and overmasteringly over John Willie was a different

thing altogether. Here was not somebody who played a game of which the

rules and forfeits were known. That game, under one veiling or another,

might form the staple of the Lunas' Drawing-room Entertainment at the

Palace, or of the songs of Miss Sal Volatile in the Pavilion on the

Pier; but Ynys had not even known what she had turned her back on when

she had stood under the raspberry-coloured light, looking out at the

gathering darkness of sky and the still lingering gleam on the sea.

Warned probably, not by hearing and sight, but by some apprehension more

sensitive still, she had stayed to see that orange rising, and then,

before it had become a setting again, had been far on the road to

Delyn....

Suddenly John Willie sat up and shook the reins.

"No, damn it," he said.

He began to bowl more briskly along the hilly lanes.

It was after eight o'clock when he reached the quarry, and then for a

time he had to go carefully down the by-lane that the stone-carts had

deeply scored. But on the Porth Neigr road he whipped up again. Hearing

a sound behind him, he drew in; and when there had passed him a great

brake hung all over with Chinese lanterns and full of people singing,

the spell of silence under which he had lain all day was broken.

Thereafter sound merely succeeded sound. As he took the railway bridge,

a "special" roared past below, carrying more people to Llanyglo; and

before its red tail-lights had mingled with the other rubies and

emeralds of the line he had come upon the first couple turning at the

limit of their walk. Then came a large board with "Imperial Hotel" on

it, then a new horse-trough; then benches, then walls with placards on

them. A mile ahead lay the golden corona of the town. This began to

break up into single lights and groups of lights, and then, at a turn,

he saw the Wheel and the jewelled finger of the Pier. He could hear the

noise, an indistinguishable something in the air that was not the wind

and not the sound of the sea; and then at the first roadside lamp it

seemed suddenly to become night. More slowly he rounded Pritchard's

Corner; at the tram terminus the belated shopkeepers made a press about

the Promenade-Pontnewydd Street car; and from the open doors of the

"Tudor Arms" was wafted the smell of beer.

Delyn and Glyn Iago were part of the night behind him.

He did not attempt to drive through the crowd that suddenly thickened

about the middle of Pontnewydd Street, where half the road was being

taken up. One of the "Imperial" ostlers took the horse's head, said "All

right, Mr. Garden," and John Willie descended and walked. On the

balconies of the "Grand" and "Imperial," people stood and watched the

stream that descended to the Front. From the Kursaal Gardens came a

noise that presently the ear ceased to hear, so steady and monotonous

was it. Then, walking in the wake of a tram that moved slowly forward

among the street barriers with an incessant clanging of its bell, John

Willie reached the Promenade.

It was thrice the width of Pontnewydd Street, and so there was more

room; but for all that it was difficult to walk at more than the general

pace. This, nevertheless, football-packs of young men attempted from

time to time to do, breaking their way through. They played

mouth-organs, and at moments, apparently without plan or premeditation,

suddenly formed into rings, feet pattering in clog-steps, eyes fixedly

on those same feet, their backs a fence to hold back the spectators,

while in the middle a couple of young men or a young man and a young

woman danced. Then, as suddenly as they had stopped, they were off

again, arms linked in arms or locked about the waist in front, each

figure a vertebra of a many-jointed onward-rushing snake. Under the

Promenade lamps they advanced, everybody else yielding place as they

came. The little rail-enclosed plots that lay between the pavements and

the hotels were magpied with torn paper and strown with lying figures.

They lay there, in meaningless embrace, moaning long harmonies in

thirds, hats decorated with penny gauds, eating nuts and "rock" and

chocolate, hardly moving when passers-by all but strode over them.

Probably they were discussing nothing more than "So I said to her,

straight to her face----" or the conduct of the shed-overlooker where

they worked throughout the year together and if the passers-by almost

trod on them, they, in return, half absently flirted the passing ankles

with whisks and penny canes.

But if these lay like bivalves, torpid and content, another and more

active element had awoke in the throng. The Alsatians, had they required

it, were put into countenance now. One felt that they veined and

threaded the mass with something that worked as quietly and as rapidly

as yeast. They fed on it, drawing from it at last an open and confirmed

sanction for all those things they would not have dreamed of doing at

home. One met them here and there in couples, or in couples of couples

with the invisible link between each pair of couples drawing ever

farther and farther out, the women with shawls and hoods and dominoes

over their dinner attire, the men with restless eyes, quick to show by a

touch of hand or elbow that avoidance was desirable or a glance of

complicity no harm. Lamps showed these gestures of understanding between

those who could not have sworn to one another's names. Of the two

solitudes, that of the mountain-top and that of this press where ribs

could hardly lift, they sought and found the second. Perhaps--who

knows?--they were even grateful to those others who moaned those gummy

thirds stretched on the lamplit grass....

And scarce two hundred yards away, under the railings of the sea-wall,

here and there a mask, with struggling breast and tightly shut eyes and

writhing lips, prayed....

As John Willie pushed at the garden gate, the door at the other end of

the path opened and closed again behind Minetta and June. He met them in

the middle of the path and asked them where they were going. When they

said they were only going for a stroll he ordered them back. Minetta's

"_Oh_--how you startled us!--why, we didn't know you were coming

back----" suggested that she thought her brother might have spoken in

another tone; but John Willie was not thinking of tones. He was thinking

that perhaps after all he had no business to be spending days up Delyn

just at present. A stroll with him to take care of them--well and good;

but not two girls alone.... He said so, rather curtly, in the

dining-room as Minetta got him some supper; but Minetta made no reply.

Again she was thinking that June was a very nice girl, but it was odd

that she should twice have brought her brother back from his fishing

like this.

John Willie, eating his supper almost savagely, had some ado to reply

politely to June's rills of pretty speech. He wondered now why she

should talk when she had nothing whatever to say. Only her tongue

wagged, and he hardly heard his own tongue wagging in reply. _This_ was

not speech; _this_ was not language!... "Not if I know it," he found

himself suddenly thinking, as June asked him whether the Water Scheme

had spoiled Delyn much, and said that she would like to go and see. But

Minetta said little. She only asked John Willie one direct question.

This was, Whether he had come back for good now. He replied that he

didn't know, and added some futility about fishing-weather and the

difference a night sometimes made.

Minetta thought that the only extraordinary thing about his reappearance

was that he should have troubled to go away at all.

June had one piece of information to give him, however. It was two days

old, she said, but there--if John Willie _would_ take himself off on his

unsociable excursions like this he must expect to be a bit out of

things. But she would forgive him, and tell him.--Ned Kerr was dead. It

seemed (June said) that he had once given somebody in Porth Neigr a

canary, and reports had reached him that the canary was not doing very

well--had the pip or the croup or whatever it was canaries did have. He

had worried a lot about the canary (June said), and, a week before, had

been to Porth Neigr to see it. He had had a cold or something himself,

June didn't know what; anyway, he had come back from seeing the canary

and the next day hadn't got up. So his brother had sent for a doctor,

and of course had told the doctor all about it--Ned, the canary, and all

the lot. The doctor had said that _he_ could see nothing the matter with

Ned (which was more than some of them admitted, going on sending bottles

of coloured water and so on and then a bill coming in for pounds and

pounds), but Ned hadn't said anything at all--he'd just died at two

o'clock in the morning. He might just as well have _had_ something the

matter with him, June said. And all about a stupid canary!----

Soon after that John Willie told them it was time they went to bed. He

followed them upstairs himself a few minutes later.

But it was long before he slept. Perhaps he knew already in his heart

that if he really meant that "Damn it, no" he might as well stay at

home now instead of leaving June and Minetta alone in the house. And he

had meant it. He vowed he meant it still. The rusty light on his

ceiling, cast from the corona outside, did not prevent his seeing the

hut again--Glyn Iago--the black-dressed gillie who had tossed the

snail-shells into the water; nor did the faint and harsh and ceaseless

noise outside drown that powerful and wordless eloquence that he had

heard with some faculty other than his bodily hearing.... Then the

sounds grew thinner, yet louder also; fewer, but clearer in the growing

silence of the night. He heard a long-drawn strain of tipsy song, the

tinny thread of sound of a mouth-organ, and then a clock striking

three....

But he must go up to Delyn on the morrow. It would be a rotten thing to

tell a girl to be sure to be there and then not to turn up himself.

And he would take her that lock and key.

IV

AN ORDINARY YOUNG MAN

He began to spend his days up Delyn and his nights at Llanyglo. To avoid

the shaly spur, he pulled across in the boat each morning from the

beaching-place near the hut to the foot of Glyn Iago, and she had his

breakfast ready for him when he arrived, which was between half-past ten

and eleven o'clock. As if his suggestion had been a command, she had

made her little encampment up the Glyn, fetching dry sticks from up the

steep wood; her hat and her box only remained in the locked shed.

He did not cast a fly. Minetta began to ask him, when he returned at

night, first what sport he had had, and then why he always chose to fish

in the middle of the day. Then one night he returned to find his sister

showing June her sketches. For some minutes he affected not to be

interested; then, with a highly elaborate yawn, he said, "Oh, I say,

Min--what became of that sketch you once made of that gipsy kid--you

remember--the one mother once took in with a cut foot?--Best thing she

ever did," he added carelessly to June.

"Oh, it got shoved away somewhere. Why?" said Minetta; but there was a

little quick dropping look in her eyes.

"Nothing. I just happened to remember it. It was better than some of

these."

The next morning the sketch, unearthed from some dusty heap or other,

was on his plate when he came down to breakfast. Presently June and

Minetta also came down. By that time he was able to say, quite

composedly, "Oh, I see you found that thing. That's the sketch I was

speaking of, June----"

But he wondered whether Minetta also could by any chance have seen Ynys

on that, her single night in Llanyglo.

One rapidly advancing trouble was on his mind. He had not spoken to Ynys

of the passing of her holiday, but he himself could almost hear its

seconds ticking away. Soon two days only remained; the morrow, when he

would see her on Delyn again, would be the eve of her departure. She had

told him that she had taken a return ticket; already he seemed to hear

the whistle of the train by which it was available. She could take that

train either at Llanyglo or at Porth Neigr.

On the morning of her last whole day he ascended the Glyn and found, as

usual, his trout cooked for him and keeping hot between two plates. He

ate it abstractedly. Again Minetta had remarked pointedly on his lack of

fishing-luck, but it was not that that was troubling him. He was

wondering, not for the first time, what explanation Ynys gave herself of

his untouched rods and buckled fly-book, and whether she too thought it

unusual that he should come so far merely to lie by the stream with her

hour after hour, or else, with a "Shall we go up there?" to ascend the

stream, skirt the wood, gain the open mountain-side, and toil for half

an hour to the summit. He had substituted no other pretence for his

first pretence of fishing. What did she think of it? Or did she not

think of it at all?

Again that morning, when she had scoured the plates and set them in a

little rocky basin by the quivering moss, he proposed the mountain

climb. In half an hour they were at the top. It was a plateau of

volcanic rock, with scrubs of hazel, and bents and reeds and harebells

ceaselessly stroked by the wind. Behind them, as they sat down under a

rock, only Mynedd Mawr rose higher than they; below them Llyn Delyn lay

like a bit of grey looking-glass set in its little mile-long cleft. They

had raised other bits of looking-glass, too, in other far-off clefts.

About them the mountains rolled as if invisible giants were being tossed

in the visible blankets of the land. On the left only, far from

Llanyglo, a scratch of silver showed that the sea was there.

"So you're off to-morrow," he said, when they had lain long. He did not

hide from himself the ache the words caused him.

"My tick-ket say to-morrow," she answered, without emotion.

He muttered something foolish about an extension.--"But I suppose they

wouldn't keep your place open," he answered himself hopelessly.

Her next words caused him a marvellous pang of lightness and hope.

"I think-k I not go back," she said, the seaweed eyes looking at that

far-off silver scratch that was the sea.

Why did that pang at which he had winced instantly become another pang,

at which he winced no less? What was it that the eyes of his spirit saw,

far, far, farther off than her seaweed ones saw the sea? Her decision to

stay, if she really meant that she would stay, should have meant the

continuance of his happiness; what, then, should change it into

something like an unhappiness and a fear?

He did not know. He was only an ordinary young man. He only knew that

over that moment, which should have been one of a care removed, a faint

shadow of an irremovable care already impinged.

He had sat up, and was looking at her.--"You mean--that you won't go

back at all?" he said.

"Indeed I think I cannot go back," she answered; and her imperfect

speech left it uncertain whether indeed she meant that she was still

unresolved, or whether to her, who had not been able to endure a night

in Llanyglo, a return to Liverpool would be more than she could bear.

"But--but--what would you do?" he asked.

"I stay here lit-tle longer, and then I get wick-ker from Dafydd Dafis,

and mend chairs, like my mother."

"But--but----" It was so new to his experience. "You mean you'd just go

from place to place?"

"If I go to Liverpool I die," she answered.

John Willie, torturing himself over this long afterwards, could never

decide what that subtle yet essential change was that came over their

relationship from that moment. It was quite contrary to any change that

might have been expected. But for that sullen "No, damn it," he might

have been conscious of hardier impulses as the term of her holiday

approached; but very curiously, it was now that he learned that it had

no term that he felt those hardier stirrings. It was exactly as if, with

little time to spare, he had wasted time, and now, with time enough

before him, he must lose no time. Perhaps it was also that growing

wonder what she must think of fishing expeditions without fishing.

Or--or--could it be that that sweet clamour of her person had all along

shown patient intention, and that he, he only, had been dull?...

But, more quickly than he had thought of charging her with this--(he

was only an ordinary young man)--he had to acquit her again. Certainly

she had not decided not to leave because, staying, she saw him daily.

She merely dreaded towns and disliked those over-glorious waxen

cenotaphs that were raised to the memory of the humble flowers she knew.

And he was still sure that at an unguarded movement from him she would

have fled days ago. At an unguarded movement she would fly now. He had

what he had only on the condition that, by comparison with his hunger,

it was and must remain nothing.... What then? Must he come, and still

come, until the wraiths of the mists began to drive over a dead and

sodden Delyn, and those tossing blankets of the mountains became hidden

in rain, and the wood of Glyn Iago became brown and thin, and the stream

an icy torrent, and Llanyglo itself as empty as a piece of old

honeycomb?

He did not know, nor did he know how, without risking all, to ascertain.

Yet know he must; and in that moment, forgetting his "Damn it, no," he

contrived as if by accident to touch her hand. But he was none the wiser

for doing so. As his hand moved with intent, hers moved innocently; her

fingers began to pull to pieces the little yellow flower she had

plucked; and he had not the courage to essay it twice.

Nor did he, his broodings notwithstanding, find that courage again that

day. The sun crept round; tiny Llyn Delyn far below began to shine with

an amethyst light; and a quietude filled the heavens above and the land

beneath, so that the rolling mountains seemed to be no longer the

tossing of giants, but rather as if the giants, their tumbling game

ended, had crept under the blankets and had gathered them about their

heads and shoulders for the night. The sea and sky became a shining

golden bloom of air. They descended to the Glyn again. There they ate a

packet of sandwiches which John Willie had brought, and then he rose and

stood, irresolute. He must go, he must go.... She was setting her

stick-heap in order; her plain black dress, that showed off Philip

Lacey's superfatted flowers, was an anomaly by the side of the Delyn

twigs....

"Nos da," he said.

If the face she lifted had not been glorious, his thoughts of it would

now have made it so.

"Nos da," she replied....

If he still said "No," it was not with the sturdy expletive now. Chiefly

he now feared to risk and fail.

He left abruptly.

He drove to Llanyglo that night with a brassy sunset on his left that

sank to the colours of dying dahlias as mile succeeded mile; and this

time he did not turn into the winding lanes that led to the quarry. From

the main road to which he kept he could see Llanyglo's corona three

miles away. But it moved him now, not to the revulsion and distaste of a

week ago, but only to a careless contempt. Some aroma seemed to have

passed away from his dreamings. For the first time, he felt himself to

be an ordinary young man returning from the mountains where he had

something "on." This new slight bitterness extended even to his thoughts

about the perspicacious Minetta. Be hanged to Minetta. If Minetta

overstepped the mark he would very quickly tell her to mind her own

business. He had to pull himself out of his moroseness and to remind

himself that she had not done so yet.

As he passed along the Pontnewydd Street he did not at first notice the

diminution in the number of people usually to be seen there at that

hour. Nor, as he sank into his reverie again, did it immediately strike

him that the greater number of the people on the Promenade were hurrying

in one direction--the direction of the Trwyn. But he entered the

dining-room at home in time to find June and Minetta scrambling hastily

through their supper. All the dishes had been laid on the table at once,

and their shawls were cast in readiness over the backs of chairs. This

time he deemed it prudent not to raise any opposition to their plans,

whatever these had been. Instead, he drew up his own chair.

"Off out?" he remarked. "Well, I hurried back to take you somewhere.

Just let me swallow something, and then I'll come with you. What's up?"

In telling him what was "up" Minetta seemed to make the most of some

advantage she apparently fancied herself to possess. If he had only

glanced at the newspapers, she said, instead of rushing off the moment

he'd bolted his breakfast, he'd have known what was "up." It had been

"up" in Llanyglo that afternoon--such a crowd as never was, and Eesaac

Oliver was to preach in the Floral Valley again that night.

"Unless he changes his mind," Minetta added. "Of course it's part of it

all that he doesn't make arrangements. He'll stop in the middle of a

walk and begin to preach just where he is, and then at other times, when

they've made all ready for him and everybody waiting, he's praying in

his bedroom or something and nobody dares go near him. So they never

really know till he begins. There's only one thing he won't do----"

"Eesaac Oliver?" John Willie began, puzzled. "Wait a minute----"

Then, as Minetta once more tossed her head, he remembered. Of course.

The Revival....

And what he did not remember he did not, in the circumstances, choose to

ask his sister. It would only be giving her another opportunity to

comment on his remarkable absences. He remembered much. He remembered

those rumours of the great spiritual thing that had broken out at

Aberystwith, had then rolled tumultuously up the coast to Barmouth, and

thence to Harlech and Portmadoc, and thence up the sky-high steeps of

Ffestiniog, and through the folds of those tossed blankets west into

Lleyn. He remembered--yes, he remembered now that his eyes were turned

outward from himself and his own affairs again--the preachings of Eesaac

Oliver on the bare mountain-sides, and his fastings among the rocks, and

his baptisms in rivers, and his liftings-up of his voice on the

outskirts of towns that had presently emptied to hear him, and his

calling on folk to turn from the wickedness of their ways while there

was yet time, for the Day of Judgment was at hand. He remembered these

things because at the time he had thought them rather one in the eye for

the Howell Gruffydds and the John Pritchards who, when the Council came

to debate such delicate but profitable subjects as licencing and mixed

bathing, had tactfully allowed themselves to be represented by the soft

closing of the door behind them. He knew what that interrupted sentence

of Minetta's meant, "There's only one thing he won't do----" The only

thing that Eesaac Oliver would not do was to preach within the stone

walls of their new Chapels. He held these bazaar-supported buildings to

be defiled, their Baptist temples places out of which the traffickers in

money and doves must be driven with scourges. It mattered not that John

Pritchard was a pillar, Howell his own father. "He that loveth father

and mother more than Me----" He would preach as the mighty Wesley

preached, from wall-tops, from the boulders of the stony places, from

the wheelbarrow, from the milking-stool, from the saddle. He would

journey and preach, and journey and preach again, four, six times a day.

There was a Door which, entering by it, gave his instant and flaming

Theme--the Door open to Llanyglo itself unless it would sink, it and its

Kursaals and its Big Wheels, its Lunas' Entertainments and its bivalves

lying under the lighted lamps on the public grass-plots, its Alsatians

and its greedy Chapel-goers, its harlotry and its cupidity and its

bright sin and its blasphemy of the Name, into the pit where it must be

destroyed.

"Oh, _do_ hurry up!" said Minetta impatiently....

Ten minutes later they were hastening along the half-empty Promenade.

The Floral Valley was no longer as it had been when Philip Lacey had

plotted it out so neatly with his pair of compasses and coloured it with

his geranium and lobelia and golden feather. At its upper end, a

Switchback now humped itself like a multiple dromedary, and clear across

it, from a staging on one side to a staging on the other, was swung the

cabled apparatus known as an Aerial Flight. Philip's bandstand still

occupied the middle, but the rest, save for a few outlying dusty beds,

was as barren as a gravel playground. The Valley had held five thousand

people on the occasion of the Brass Band Contest; that night it held and

overflowed with thrice five thousand. Half-way up the ascending path

that led to it John Willie Garden saw that there was no approach from

that quarter; there was nothing for it but to take to the slippery grass

and the darkness, avoiding the bivalves open and the bivalves shut, and

struggling as best they could to the crest. There, with an arm about

each of them, he led them through the slowly moving outer circle of

people who struck matches and laughed and occasionally craned their

necks forward to look over the dense mass in front. By degrees they

gained the ring where, if little was to be seen, a word now and then

could be heard; and thereafter, by losing no chance of wriggling

forward, they reached a point from which they could see the bandstand.

A ladder ran up to its roof, and up this ladder Eesaac Oliver and two

other men had climbed. The bight of a rope had been passed about Eesaac

Oliver's body, its ends running round the gilded spike that crowned the

flat eight-sided pyramid; and the men who crouched on the slope varied

the tether as Eesaac Oliver moved this way and that round the octagonal

gutter. The trapeze of the Flight hung motionless in the air above him;

the shrieking Switchback had stopped; and the slight white figure, so

precariously perched, turned to all sides of the vast speckled bowl

about him.

"See who that is, at the right hand rope?" John Willie whispered to

June. He still had an arm about either of their waists, and he fancied

that June pressed a little closer to him.

"No. Who?" she whispered back.

"Tudor Williams. Expect he couldn't get out of it. He made a speech the

other day, all about Young Wales, a regular dead set at them, and he'll

sweep the poll after this. I don't know who the other is.--Listen, he's

turning this way now----"

Eesaac Oliver's voice came across the packed still basin.

"Cry aloud--spare not--lift up your voice like a trumppp-pet! I say to

you young men, and I say to you young women, that this cit-ty by the sea

shall not be spared, no, no more than the cit-ties of the plain were

spared! It smells of corrupp-tion; it is an offence in the nostrils of

God! There is more sin packed into it than there is drops of blood in

your bodies, and more wick-kedness, and more fornication, and more

irreligion. And those who should help, do they help? Indeed they do not!

They fill their pock-kets instead! I tell them, their own souls go,

perhaps this night, into the pock-kets of Hell! Aw-w-w, their bazaars

prof-fit them lit-tle there! Their new Chap-pils prof-fit them lit-tle

there! Their funds, and their balance-sheets, and their

foundation-stones with their names on them, prof-fit them lit-tle

there!--But I say to you young men, and you young women, that the Wa-ter

of Life is free. Come now, come now! Do not say, 'I will sin one more

sin and then repent'--perhaps you be taken away before that sin iss

commit-ted----"

He turned again, and his voice became less clear.

Perhaps John Willie and his charges were well where they were, high on

the rim of the basin. Whether with the pressure of those behind, or with

the swelling of their own emotion, many below were moaning softly, and

one or two small and hushed commotions seemed to be centres of fainting.

The inner ring, close to the bandstand, was hatless; the belt above them

was packed so that it would have been impossible to remove a hat; and

always about the uppermost circle matches twinkled in and out. Again

Eesaac Oliver's voice was heard, as if borne upon a wind:

"--he that loveth father and mother more than Me----"

"Is his father here?" June whispered to John Willie....

* * * * *

Howell was at his own home, surrounded by sympathetic neighbours. Sunk

into his arm-chair, he sobbed. Big John Pritchard tried to console him,

but he was inconsolable. He shook with his emotion.

"My own fless and blood!" he sobbed. "To turn from his parents, that fed

him, and clothed him, and sent him to the Coll-idge, and gave him

allowance of twen-ty-six pounds a quarter, and bring him up in the fear

of God! Oh, oh!--John Pritchard, give me a drink of water if you

please.--And to call his father and mother sinful pip-ple! Indeed, Hugh

Morgan, you are happy you have no children! They know bet-ter than you

always; indeed the 'orld go on at a great rate, we get so wise! And the

Chap-els burdened with debt! There is half a dozen Chap-els for him to

preach in, but he say the highways and the hedges is his Chap-pil!...

Look you, he not even come home. I meet him in the street, I, his

father; and I say to him, 'Eesaac Oliver,' I say, 'if you will not

preach in the Chap-pils, then you preach in that field on the Sarn road;

you get crowds of pip-ple; it is a big field, and will hold crowds of

pip-ple.' But he turn away, indeed he turn his back on his own

father!... Look you: If he preached in that field, they find their way

to that field, look you, all those pip-ple--they learn the way to that

field as well as they learn the way to the sta-tion--and the Chap-el buy

it cheap--oh, oh!... By and by that field be worth ten bazaars--oh,

oh!... Blodwen, if the gas is lighted upstairs I think I go to bed--the

things that were good enough for his father and mother are not good

enough for him--this is a heavy day----"

John Pritchard and Hugh Morgan helped him up the stairs to bed.

* * * * *

June, Minetta, and John Willie left the valley before Eesaac Oliver

descended from the bandstand. As they walked along the now rather more

crowded Promenade Minetta seemed to be in livelier spirits; she

chattered with June; but John Willie was morose again. Again he was

wondering what would have happened had Ynys not chanced to pick a flower

at the moment when his hand had moved imperceptibly towards hers. He saw

her again, bending over the stick-heap and looking up as she gave him

that expressionless "Nos da." By this time she was probably asleep,

asleep far away up that Glyn, with the deep plunge of the fall for her

lullaby, the stars for her night-lights, and the sun over the wood-edge

for her alarum in the morning. Before the noises of Llanyglo should

awaken him, she would be lying flat on the bank, taking trout for his

breakfast.

And, again and ever again, he wondered whether, had that attempted touch

of his not miscarried, she would have been off as the trout would have

been off at the falling of her shadow on the water....

For one moment, just before he went to sleep, he seemed to hear Eesaac

Oliver's voice again:

"Do not say, 'I will sin one more sin and then repent'--perhaps you will

be taken away before that sin is committed----"

Then he slept, brokenly, waking at intervals to mutter "Damn it----" and

to think of her again where she lay, far up Glyn Iago.

V

THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT

John Willie began to spend his days up Delyn and his nights elsewhere

than at Llanyglo. He too passed them under the night-lights of the

stars--for if she could go to bed by those candles, so could he. On the

first night on which he did not return to Llanyglo they peeped down on

him where he lay, gazing at them, a mile and more over the head of

Delyn, to the summit of which he had reascended after bidding her "Nos

da" in the Glyn. On the second night he put another mile between herself

and him, bathing in the morning in a brook the chilliness of which only

a little refreshed him after his night's tossing; he slept for three

hours that afternoon, with her keeping watch by his side. And on the

third night he lay among the fern, in her own old place behind Sharpe's

hut. She did not know that he did not return each night to that dusty

town by the sea.

And now once again he was muttering to himself, fiercely and frequently,

"No--no----"

June's stay began to draw to a close. Minetta suspected her of moping

for John Willie, and told her that he often disappeared for days at a

time like that. Sometimes, she added, he called it fishing.

"But he'd be fearfully annoyed if we went to look for him," she said;

and she turned away and smiled.

She smiled again when one morning June had a letter from Wygelia, with a

postscript for herself. "_A bit of gossip for Minetta_," the postscript

ran. "_Ask her if she remembers a girl from Llanyglo father took into

one of his shops. He's thinking of sending out search-parties for her.

She went off for a holiday, and hasn't turned up again----_" etc., etc.,

etc.

And so it was that John Willie, filled now with one thought only, came

to miss quite a number of things that went down into the history of

Llanyglo. He missed, for example, those first days of Revival in which

the town, self-accused of sin, strove to purify itself. He missed that

storm of impassioned evangelicalism in which Eesaac Oliver, walking one

day on the Porth Neigr road, stopped at the foot of the lane that led to

the quarries, suddenly threw up his hands, broke forth, and presently

had the occupants of a dozen brakes and wagonettes listening to him in

the great echoing excavation of the quarry itself. He missed, too, an

odd little by-product of that gale of spiritual awakening--the

black-faced group that one morning made its appearance on the beach, and

resembled a troupe of ordinary seaside niggers until it broke, not into

Plantation Melodies, but into hymns, one of which had a catchy pattering

chorus that told over the names of the blest ones the redeemed would

meet in Heaven:

"_There'll be Timothy, Philip and Andrew,

Peter, Paul and Barnabas,

James the Great, James the Less

And Bar-tholo-mew_----"

He missed that other great storm of groans and fervour, when the pale

young regenerator, mounting the railway embankment from a low-lying

meadow near Porth Neigr, began to preach before sunset, preached until

the stars came out, and then sent hysterical young women and overstrung

young men home in couples along the benighted lanes together, to comfort

and enhearten and uplift one another as they went.... And he missed,

among these and a multitude of other things, a certain rather famous

exploit of his compatriot, Tommy Kerr.

He knew how Tommy had flouted and insulted Llanyglo, and how Llanyglo in

return had long been looking for signs that Tommy was drinking himself

to death. But neither John Willie Garden nor anybody else had thought of

the alternative solution of the inconvenience of Tommy's presence in

Llanyglo. This was, not that Tommy himself should fall one night and

break his neck, but that something should happen to the house that,

having been put up by the four brothers in a single night, was enjoyable

by them as long as they or any of them should remain alive.

During Ned's illness, if that listless state in which he had moved

between the accident to Harry and Sam and the death of the canary had

been an illness, the care of the Hafod had fallen to Tommy; and that was

as much as to say that it had been cared for very little. Moreover, the

fabric itself was perhaps by this time impaired. The digging of the

foundations of the hotels on either side of it had done it no good, and

the constant vibration of the Pontnewydd Street trams had done it even

less. On a certain Sunday morning, some weeks before the sickening of

the canary, Tommy had taken it into his head to make a thorough

examination of the place, while Ned had dozed in his chair. That

examination had given Tommy a bad fright. Mounting a short ladder and

looking up into the roof-space above the single living-room, he had

found the loft far lighter than it ought to have been; but it had not

been the gap in the roof that had scared him so badly. It had been what

he had seen through the gap--the chimney-stack all tottering, hooped out

on one side like a barrel....

With boards and baulks, an old pole-mast and other timbers from the

unsightly little backyard, it had taken him the greater part of the day

to shore the chimney up again.

Whew! He and Ned had been sleeping under _that_!----

It may be that there had been plotting against Tommy, too--or, if not

actually plotting, a great deal of quiet watching to see what would

happen, backed by a powerful desire that something should happen. Both

Howell Gruffydd and John Pritchard were on the Roads Committee,

and--well, it was obvious that Pontnewydd Street could not remain

unrepaired merely because these Kerrs happened to live there. Orders had

gone forth that its mains were to be seen to, pits had been dug in the

street and barriers erected round them, and red flags set there by day

and red lanterns by night.

Nothing had happened.

Then the excavations had been filled up again, and the road-metal carts

had come. The surface was to be tackled....

So it had been that John Willie Garden returning one night from Delyn,

had seen Dafydd Dafis's road-engine drawn up for the night opposite the

Imperial Hotel.

The engine had remained in Pontnewydd Street ever since.

It shook the Hafod as if it had been brought there expressly for its

destruction. During the very first hour of its slow and ponderous

passing backwards and forwards, Tommy's newly cobbled chimney had given

a not very loud crack, and, like a heavy sleeper, had settled down into

a more comfortable shape. Tommy had come out, and had hailed the man who

walked in front of the machine with a red flag. Nervously, almost

politely, he had asked him how long they were likely to be. The man had

replied that they had orders to "make a job of it." Then Tommy had seen

Dafydd Dafis's face, watching him from the cab.... Half an hour later he

had met Howell Gruffydd in the Marine Arcade. The Chairman of the

Council had stopped. He had patted the shoulder of the common enemy

gently with his hand, and his smile had been odiously affable.

"Well, Thomas Kerr," he had said, "how are you? I hear there is

improvements at Plas Kerr; you have a grand road to your house soon,

whatever! I think we have to assess you higher. How are you, Thomas

Kerr?"

Kerr had hated the Welshman's fine, small, regular teeth. They were

false, but by no means the falsest thing about his mouth. As he had made

to move away Howell had continued.

"I hope Dafydd Dafis does not incommode you with the road-engine, Thomas

Kerr? He has orders not to be a nuis-ance to the town. 'Drive as gently

as you can, Dafydd Dafis' is his orders.... You are off to the Marine

Hotel now, Thomas Kerr? Dear me, it is a curious fas-cin-ation such

places have for some pip-ple! Would it not be bet-ter to come to the

Chap-pel on Sundays?... Thomas Kerr." (Tommy had been shuffling

miserably away.) "Excuse me, Thomas Kerr, but you lose your handkerchief

if you are not careful!"

And at this reminder that he had intended to button up his pockets in

the presence of his foe, Tommy had been wellnigh ready to weep.

And then Ned had died....

There was a good deal of "edge," or vanity, or self-esteem, or conceit,

or whatever you like to call it, about Tommy Kerr. He knew now that that

road-engine would not be taken off as long as his crazy house stood, and

he was stung and mortified that a few beggarly Welshmen, backed by a

pettifogging Railway Company or two, with Kursaals Limited, a miserable

District Council, a Pleasure Boats' Amalgamation, a few Hotel Syndicates

and other such trifles, should be able to beat him. He felt very lonely

without Ned. He would have liked to see Lancashire again, particularly

Rochdale, his own town. He wanted to walk its hilly streets, and to see

the Asbestos Factory again, and Hollingworth Lake. He would almost

rather be found dead there than continue to live among these indigo

mountains and pink hotels and chrome-yellow sands.

And so he set about his exploit.

At the very outset they tried once more to baulk him. For the thing that

he intended to do certain timbers were necessary, and at six o'clock one

night he passed, none too steadily, to a timber-merchant's, and gave an

order to a clerk. The clerk smiled, and sent for his principal. Kerr

pointed to various pieces in the yard. "Ye can send that--an' that--an'

that t'other," he said thickly; "ye can get 'em out now--I'll fetch a

cart." Then, looking at the builder's face, he saw that he too, like the

clerk, was smiling....

There was no need of words. Howell Gruffydd had been beforehand with him

again. If one builder refused to sell to him, so, he knew, would all the

others. He was wasting precious time with builders.

How many inns he had been to that day he could not have told, but he now

felt the heart in him again. They thought they could dish Tommy Kerr

like that, did they? Well, he would show them.... He lurched away to the

"Lancashire Rose," in Gardd Street, and then crossed to the "Trafford."

But at neither of them did he stay very long. He left the "Trafford" at

a little after eight, three hours before he needed to have done so. He

wanted those three hours. He also wanted all the hours he could get

between then and sunrise.

* * * * *

No sober man would have dreamed of attempting it; but sobriety and large

deeds do not always go hand in hand. Neither do large deeds and very

clear thinking--which, stout hearts being commoner than unmuddled

brains, is lucky for us. Through Kerr's bemused head ran one thought and

one thought only, namely, that the Hafod had been built by himself and

his three brothers in a night--built in a night--built in a night----

If it had been built in a night it could be rebuilt in a night----

It had taken four of them to build it, but the rebuilding ought not to

be nearly so heavy a job----

He would show them he did not come from Lancashire for nothing!

But before entering his dwelling that night he committed an act of

theft. That damned road-engine had again been left drawn up opposite the

Imperial Hotel, and Tommy, fumbling under the tarpaulin that covered it,

stole something from the cab. He chuckled as he seemed to see again

Dafydd Dafis's cat-like face looking at him round the fly-wheel. _He'd_

show Dafydd Dafis!----

He entered his house and locked the door behind him.

He had formed no plan, but yet, somehow, he was conscious of a plan, and

a reasonably clear one. Where it had come from he did not know; it was

as if he heard again, somewhere in the air quite near, the voices of his

brothers again, saying, in the loved Ratchet accents, "Never heed that,

Sam--here's where th' strain comes--we'll do th' paperin' and put a pot

o' geraniums i' th' window after." He saw these vital points and

master-members of his plan as if they had been marked in his mind in

red. He had not to stop to reason about them. He knew--dead Ned seemed

to tell him--that the wall between the living-room and the scullery

might stand. He knew--he seemed to have it from Sam--that the whole of

the street-frontage was sound. The ends, near the two hotels, were the

danger-points; most perilous of all was the main beam under the lately

propped chimney. The chimney must be taken down first of all. "To

lighten th' beam, ye see," Harry's voice seemed to sound; "nay, donnot

fiddle wi' it--shove it ovver into th' alley--we're pushed for time----"

So, whether you call it drink, or whatever you call it, Tommy did not

set to work quite unassisted.

At the very beginning he almost came to grief. This was over the

chimney, that essential member of the dwelling up whose throat the

comfortable smoke had passed on that far-off morning as a token of

habitation before the eyes of astonished little Llanyglo. He had climbed

out on to the perilous roof and had begun to "study" how best to take it

down; then, as cautiously he had unlashed and removed the baulks and the

pole-mast, the chimney had suddenly thrust out its stomach at him. His

heart gave a jump, and in a twink he had set his back against it,

grasping a rope to check his heave.... But the chimney would neither

stand, nor yet fall as he wished it to fall, over the end of the Hafod

into the side-alley. It wanted to fall inwards, over Tommy's head. He

thought his agonised effort would never end.... But end it did. He felt

the release of weight. The thing hung poised for a moment, and then....

He was once more down in his kitchen before the windows which had been

flung up in the two hotels had closed again. No doubt they had been

waiting for days for that crash. They did not know that the scandalous

Tommy himself had caused it. The ghost of a malicious smile crossed his

face. "Sucks," he muttered, "for Gruffydd."

Then, at eleven o'clock at night, he fell to his house-breaking.

* * * * *

"Kerr?" said the author of the _Sixpenny Guide_, when asked about this.

"I suppose you mean Tommy Kerr? Yes, I remember him.--His cottage? That

Hafod Unos place?--Yes, it's perfectly true. He did pull it down or put

it up again in one night, or at any rate something like it. An uncouth

little animal he was; a drunken little beast; still, he did this. Made

quite a job of it too.--How? That I can't tell you. But I saw the place

the next morning, and it seems to me that at one time during the night

both the ends and half the back must have been as open as an empty

rick-shed. Of course the whole thing was altogether preposterous. Six

men's work. I was staying a little farther up the road, and by daybreak

there must have been a thousand people in Pontnewydd Street. Nobody

lifted a finger. They just watched. He wasn't to be seen mostly; he was

busy inside; but when he did come out he never turned his head.--Sober?

Impossible to say. And of course he didn't quite finish the job. But

you've heard the rest."

The rest was as follows:

* * * * *

By three o'clock in the morning Tommy was neither drunk nor sober. He

was a will and a piece of muscular apparatus, the two things quite

separate, yet working together with never a jerk to mar the harmony. As

a worn-out old machine will continue to run provided it is not

interrupted, so Kerr worked, in a state to which the only fatal thing

would have been to stop. The Tommy Kerr Llanyglo knew was a base thing,

senseless as the lime and stone through which his chisel drove (with a

fearful racket), obstinate as the beams under which he hammered his

wedges; but this was another Tommy Kerr--somehow the name yet somehow

another--a Kerr who might have been imagined to mutter, as he laboured,

that it was a gradely night for a titanic act--that he came from

Lancashire, where men did impossible things as a matter of course--and

that if any Welshman would pocket his pride and ask him, he would pull

down and put up again their whole blasted flashy town for them while he

was about it.

And perhaps he was not really patching up his tottering cottage at all

that night. Perhaps he was rather doing one of those useless and

splendid things that alone among man's contrivances do not crumble and

fall. Perhaps he was doing in his ruined Hafod pretty much the same

thing that Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd did from bandstands and railway

embankments and rocks and bedroom windows--setting up an ideal, and

bidding men remember, though they might never attain, to strive. Or

perhaps he was working from the most religious motive known to man--to

please himself, trusting that if he did so he might please Something

greater than himself. If so, his idea might have had grandeur, but that

grandeur was curiously expressed. For he did not cease to grunt from

time to time, as his face became grimy and then washed clean again with

perspiration: "Damned Treacle-tongue! I'll _sew_ my pockets up next

time! Owd false-teeth--their road-engines--him an' his new brolly!----"

By four o'clock twenty road-engines could not have shaken down the beam

on the chimney side of the house, and without another look at it he

turned to the other wall. It was Ned's remembered voice that bade him

hasten. As he tackled the second beam he grew quite chatty with Ned. It

was Ned who kept him to those red-marked crucial points, and told him

that he needn't bother about the walls, for the ceiling-sheets would do

to cram into the interstices, and that, if he made haste, the golden

days would come again when he had mocked at all Welshmen, and had had on

the hip the Railway Companies and Kursaals and Hotels and Steamboats

that had done their utmost to get rid of him.

It was soon after this that he became conscious of other whispers than

Ned's. At last he had seen the crowd gathered in Pontnewydd Street. But

by this time he had ripped his ceiling-cloth down, and the grey incoming

day was suddenly darkened again as he ploughed across the talus of

debris and made a wall of cloth, fastening it anywise from beam to beam.

Ned said that that was quite good enough. You never caught wise old Ned

napping. Tommy Kerr had been very fond of his brother Ned. He had gone

ratting with him, and alder-cutting, and he remembered a whippet Ned

had once had, a rare dog for nipping 'em as they turned, and a canary

too....

Then Tommy Kerr's brain, which for more than seven hours had been as

steady as a sleeping top, gave a little wobble. This was as he paused in

the middle of the floor of his incredible house. There was something

else he had to do; what was it?... _What_ was it, now?... He knew there

was something else he had to do....

He would have done better to begin his work all over again than to stop

and think.

What ... ah yes, he remembered! He remembered and chuckled. Why, he had

been on the point of forgetting the cream of the whole joke!----

He stooped by the rounded grey mound of lime and plaster that

represented his bed, but his knees gave, and he came with a little thump

to the floor. But he rolled over on his side, and his fingers found what

they sought, and after a few minutes he rose again. In his hand was the

red flag he had stolen from the cab of Dafydd Dafis's road-engine. That

was to go up where his chimney had been, that chimney that had emitted

that first smoke on that far-off first morning. The town, when it awoke,

must on no account miss _that_. Tommy Kerr wanted to see the faces of

Howell Gruffydd, John Pritchard, Dafydd Dafis and Co. when they saw that

flag....

He tottered to the ladder that ran up into the loft.

He fell twice from the lower rungs of it, but a foot of lime made his

fall soft. He mounted to the top, and crawled on his belly across the

open rafters of the loft. He did not know how he got out on to the roof;

it seemed to him that he lay below for a long time, gazing up through a

gap at the paling sky and wondering how it was to be done, and then

miraculously found himself where he wished to be. Then he got on his

feet.

Then he saw them, the people in the street below. He had again forgotten

they were there. So much the better; they should see him do it. Then

he'd give a shout that should wake all Wales, and--and--by that time the

pubs ought to be opening....

But the little hand-staff of the flag was not long enough to please him.

He wanted a longer one, to make more of a show. It took a whole tree to

carry the flag over the Kursaal Dancing Rooms there. It was stupid of

Tommy not to have thought of that--not to have brought one up from

below, where there were plenty--yes, plenty----

As it happened, he did not need the stick. It all came about very softly

and gently. He was standing up, again looking about for a longer stick,

when once more his brain gave a wobble. The watchers below saw him lean,

as formerly his chimney had leaned, only now Tommy Kerr leaned the other

way----

And so gently did he come over, and so comparatively short a distance

had he to fall, that you would have sworn it did not hurt him very much.

He stuck to the little square of red calico at the end of the short

staff; it was still in his hand when they picked him up from the heap of

chimney-bricks that choked the little alley where the principal entrance

to the Kursaal Gardens now is.

Ancient Mrs. Pritchard, when she heard of it, baa-ed, and said that folk

came and went--came and went----

VI

THE GLYN

From sleeping badly, John Willie Garden had passed to sleeping hardly at

all. From that same fear of startling her, he still did not appear in

the Glyn much before his accustomed hour (though there had been times

without number when he had resolved otherwise); instead, he wandered

about, a mile, two miles away, sometimes setting himself a distant point

to walk to, on his return from which it would surely be time he was

seeking her. On the first two mornings of his absence from home he had

not shaved; then he had decided that that would never do, and has sent

somebody from the inn below to fetch him a bag. With the bag had come a

short note from Minetta. It had merely said that June was leaving on the

following Saturday, and that after that day she would be alone in the

house.

He now wished he had not asked Minetta to show June that sketch. She had

put it on his breakfast-plate for all the world as if _he_ had wished to

see it, instead of merely to show June how much better it was than the

others. He didn't think that Minetta cared in the least how he spent his

time, but she was so sharp, and queer as well as sharp. She watched

things without taking any part in them. The more self-absorbed the

actors showed themselves, the more keenly interested Minetta became. In

many respects she took after her father. Edward Garden too had that

habit of poking and prying into people's tastes and enjoyments and

passions and desires, noting and understanding them while remaining

himself inaccessible to such weaknesses. It wouldn't greatly have

surprised John Willie to learn that Minetta guessed what he was about up

Delyn.

The curious thing was that, if that were so, he didn't think that

Minetta would disapprove. She would look as it were over the tops of a

pair of imaginary glasses, and under them, and finally through them, and

her ironical glance would say as plainly as words, "This seems to be a

love-affair." She would neither disapprove nor approve, or, if she did

approve, it would be of his provision of entertainment for her. Her

disapproval would appear only if John Willie involved her in something

that would not "do."

This brought John Willie straightway back face to face with his old and

torturing dilemma, of having something "on"--but something that would

not "do."

A hundred times he had fought it out, and a hundred times he had come to

the conclusion that, while Minetta might resemble her not quite human

father, he, John Willie, was his mother's son. His mother would have

been entirely for that "No" that a hundred times had gained the day.

After each of these victories he had been on the point of turning his

back on the mountains and of not returning as long as he knew her to be

there. These impulses had now nothing to do with his fear of startling

her. They were born of that stiff and indispensable code. He had only to

thank her for a few breakfasts, to tell her he was going, to wish her

well, and all would be over. He found rest in the thought. He might

suffer an ache or two afterwards, but it would be the best way out. It

had been his first impulse, and it had proved to be his last

conclusion. He would consider it settled so. It would be much the best

course to act like an ordinary young man.

For several days he had said that.

He said it again on the morning when he shaved off half a week's growth

of beard.

Once more he had slept within a stone's-throw of the hut. There had been

light showers during the night, but hardly enough to call a break of the

weather; the drops twinkled on fern and grass and spiders'-webs and tiny

flowers, but the ground was still as dry as tinder. As he shaved, with

the little mirror of his dressing-bag hung on a hazel, he reflected that

it was only half-past seven, and that the Llyn ought to be a good colour

for fishing. There would be plenty of time for a cast or two before

saying good-bye. But his rod was in the locked hut, of which she had the

key. No matter. Since he had now come to his decision, it would make no

difference did he seek her in the Glyn a little earlier than usual. He

would then be able to get away earlier in order to say good-bye to the

neglected June.

He was heartily glad it was all over. The only possible course seemed so

plain that he wondered now what he had been tormenting himself about all

this time. Smiling a little, he even thought of all the awkwardnesses

and dissimulations and machinations and deceits he was by one stroke

escaping. He _would_ have felt rather a brute had he come upon Dafydd

Dafis one day, and asked him how he was getting on, and, casually, what

had become of that little niece or cousin of his, whose name he would

have had to make a lying pretence of having forgotten. It _would_ have

been behaving rather off-handedly to June, to see her for the first two

days only of her stay and then to let her go without as much as seeing

her off. It _would_ be better that Minetta should not have to write home

saying that John Willie was away (fishing) and she alone in the house,

but she was quite all right. It _would_ be better to think of the things

that would permanently "do"--altogether more comfortable and

satisfactory not to have to call himself, in the waking hours of nights

in the years ahead, or in the days to come when business claimed him, by

a disquieting name. It was not as if there were not plenty of other

things to think of. This particular aspect of life was far too much

dwelt on. Percy Briggs dwelt on it too much, he himself had dwelt too

much on it. He wasn't sure that he hadn't been getting even a little

morbid about it. Not every lovely flower is picked because it is lovely

and then thrown wilting away again. John Willie had come to his senses.

It had taken him some time, but he was all right again now. He wondered

how those people at the inn below had been looking after his horse.

They'd probably let him get fat and lazy. Well, he would give him a

twisting on the way home. Too much inaction is good for neither horse

nor man....

He finished shaving, and began to whistle as he packed his tackle and

strapped the case. He would leave the case where it was, and pick it up

on his way back. He would take the boat, pull straight across, get it

over, and then have a swinging walk down to the inn. Despite his moping

wanderings, he felt the need of a really good hard walk.

He strode down to the lake, unfastened the boat, dashed the waterdrops

from the thwart with his cap, and pushed off.

It was a brilliant, if broken, sky. Up the mountain-side the light

mists were quickly evaporating, and a great crag of dazzling white

cloud, shaped like the north of Scotland on a map, was perfectly

reduplicated in the glassy Llyn. As if the surface of the water had had

a tenuity without abating a jot of its crystal clearness, the smooth V

from the bows seemed to shear through something that, even when the

water settled to rest again, did not return; there fled at each stroke

an intact perfection. He altered the boat's course, and the reflection

of the edge of Delyn broke into long smooth stripes. He altered it

again, and an invisible comb seemed to pass through the towering

inverted cloud. His wake was a dancing of broken glittering facets. He

stood in towards the shaly spur; a few more strong strokes and he

grounded abruptly; and he gathered up his boots and stockings from the

bottom of the boat, stepped out, and made fast at the bottom of the

Glyn.

The showers had swollen the stream a little, and mossy stones that had

been dry the day before were lapped by the water, and pools came farther

up his calf. But suddenly at a thought he stopped. In the new

circumstances it was a new thought. She did not expect him for some

hours yet; it might be better--in case of his coming upon her as she

might not wish to be come upon--to give a call. On second thoughts he

was sure that he ought to give a call. He opened his mouth----

But it was not necessary. Suddenly he saw her twenty yards ahead. She

had probably been up for hours, and had got her bathe over long since.

But even that glimpse of her through the leaves had been as it were two

glimpses. In the first of them he had seen that she was there; in the

second he had noted that her appearance was not her usual appearance.

She was no longer wearing the black dress of Philip Lacey's flower-shop,

but that old blouse, unconfined at the waist, and again, as on that day

when she had started back from the door of the hut, her legs and feet

were bare. Four trout lay on the grass beside her, one of them still

fluttering. She was stroking the drops of water from her forearms, and

wiping her hands on her old striped petticoat.

He did not call, but all in a moment she looked round as quickly as if

he had done so. At first he thought she was going to start to her feet

and run, but she remained seated. Then a bough intervened. He put it

aside behind him, threw his boots and stockings ashore, and climbed the

bank.

"Hallo, Ynys," he said, as he sat down beside her. "I'm a bit early, but

I've got to get off soon. They want me down there. There are some people

I must see before they go."

Then he wondered whether, after all, he had not startled her. In her

eyes was once more that look that had been there that other day, when

she had fallen back, though no farther than a cat falls back. If that

was so he must reassure her by going on talking. Without pausing, he

continued.

"Yes, I shall have to get off by eleven. I've not been home, you see.

Couldn't stand going back to that place, so I just made myself

comfortable by the hut there.--I say, I hope you didn't get wet with

that rain in the night?"

Simply, freely, naturally, and without a second thought, he put out his

hand to feel whether her petticoat was dry. He supposed she slept in her

petticoat, and that his early visit had not allowed her time to change.

But she crouched back so swiftly that he also fell a little back,

surprised. He forgot that his own words, "I'm a bit early," raised

twenty questions--questions of why he was there at all, of how it had

come to pass that a variation in his habit was a thing to be remarked

on, of why his announcement that he must be off early seemed even to

himself a breach of something that had never been established, but only

tacitly allowed. He forgot these things, stared at her, and suddenly

exclaimed, "Why, what's the matter?" Had she feared that he was about to

put his hand upon her? One of her elbows had shot up as if she would

have defended herself, and the frightened seaweed eyes looked at him

over the guarding forearm. Her other hand, behind her on the grass,

supported her. So they sat, she trembling, he covering her with an

astonished stare.

Then, as quickly as she had raised it, she dropped the defending arm.

She made a swift clutch at her petticoats and scrambled a foot farther

away from him. Her breast fluttered like that of the still living trout,

and her hand was clasped betrayingly about one foot hidden in the short

striped petticoat.

And in a twink John Willie saw his mistake. It was not from his advanced

hand that she had shrunk. It was from the resting of his eyes--those

eyes that, even as she had drawn herself back, had already rested. Those

eyes, of Scandinavian blue, had sought hers again, of the wet greenish

brown of the seaweed of the shore.

He spoke quietly.

"Come here, Ynys," he said.

She did not move.

"Come here, Ynys," he said again.

Her trembling became violent.

"Come here, Ynys--I want----"

He did not finish. His hand shot quickly forth. The next moment it held

what she had striven to hide. He was gazing at the silver mark that ran

round the outer edge of her foot near the little toe as a vein runs

round a pebble.

She had twisted her body so that her face lay on the grass, covered with

her hands. She made one feeble movement to draw the foot from his hand,

and then lay still. When, presently, he put it gently down, she made no

further attempt to hide it; what was the good, since he had seen? It lay

still now, a little crinkled brown sole with bits of vegetation pressed

into it, and, running across it, that old thread, silver, like the

wedding-ring of her mother--that hard little sole that had made the

kidney-shaped footprints on the Llanyglo beach, that had pattered after

pedestrians on the road, and that would take to the roads again rather

than be pressed into a shoe and walk the pavements of a town.

Yet, though he had seen the foot, she seemed determined he should not

see her face too. Presently she was conscious that he was trying to do

so, that he was gently trying to draw away the concealing hands. That

she resisted. "Ynys! Ynys!" he was saying remorsefully in her ear. She

lay quite still, and "Ynys! Ynys!" he continued to repeat, over and over

again.

At last he heard that uniquely soft voice of hers in reply. She spoke

into the grass, not sobbingly, only a little dully.

"I 'ould not show you," she begged him--movingly begged him--to

believe.

"Ynys--dear!----"

"Indeed you ask me, one day, if I take off my boots and stock-kings, and

I 'ould not----"

"No, no----" he soothed her.

"I not show nobody, in lot-t of years, never." She turned her face to

him for a moment; the anger of a fury lurked there for him had he not

believed her. "I not show nobody, if they kill me," she went on. "Lot-t

of years I _hate_ it----" the vindictiveness of the single word died

away, and he scarcely heard what came next, "--but I not hate it any

more now----"

His answer was to rise suddenly to his knees, to stoop again, and to

kiss the foot he had innocently maimed. He was conscious as he did so of

its quick little pressure against his mouth....

The next moment his arm was about her shoulder, and he was gently

seeking to see her face again.

"Cariad!" he murmured, his lips to her ear.

And he knew that by no other means could it have come to pass. "Lot-t of

years I hate it--but I not hate it any more." She had hated the foot for

its disfigurement. She had loved it for him.

There was no question of Yes or No as they ate their breakfast together;

it was as it was, and neither guilt nor innocence had any part in it.

From time to time, as they sat, he flung his arms about her shoulders as

frankly as children embrace, and she suffered the crushing with lips

parted and eyes immeasurably far away. The black pool was flecked with

froth; it danced over the whitey-green ebullition at the foot of the

swollen fall; and two dragon-flies, one blue as a scarab and the other

like a darting twig of green metal, hovered and set and spun. There

seemed to be no wind, but the great country of white cloud up aloft had

advanced, and a soft gloom filled the Glyn. They did not wash up;

impatiently John Willie tossed the platter they had shared aside; and

they embraced again.

Midday did not find John Willie on his way to Llanyglo, nor yet did he

see June off by the three o'clock train. By three o'clock he was on the

summit of Delyn again, under the same rock where he had tried, as if by

accident, to touch her hand. She had put on her shoes, but not her

stockings, for the climb, but he had drawn them off again, and once more

she lay, luxuriating with her foot under his hand. Even now she did not

talk very much. She had only one thing to say, with lovely monotony and

very few words to say it in; she strayed no farther from her little

store of English than to say, over and over again, "Boy bach!" with the

greenish-brown eyes slavishly on his, and her parted lips hurrying out

the diminutive before he crushed them again. She started from her dream

once, as a stray sheep close behind them gave a call like a rich oboe;

then she relapsed into it again. The shadows lay still and leagues long

over the rumple of mountains, and she had not changed, and had promised

that she would not again change, that unfastened bodice and short and

faded old petticoat.

So June steamed away, while Ynys's face was framed in John Willie's arm

on the summit of Delyn.

They descended to the Glyn again between the afternoon and the early

evening, and with each step as they dropped down the mountain a silence

grew and deepened on them. He knew its meaning, if she did not, and,

back by the pool again, he first cleaned the forgotten platter (which

she tried to prevent), and then stood before her as he had stood when

once, with an abrupt, "Nos da," he had stridden away. And in that pause

of gazing silence he knew how much was packed--his Yes, his No, hers

too; all that lay behind them, all that lay before. For him, there lay

enwrapped in it that slight black figure he had seen under the crimson

pier-light; his searching for her; his finding her; his struggles, his

decision, and then, even in the act of his relinquishment, his wonderful

recovery of her. And her memory took a farther flight still. She saw

herself, a little girl, sitting with a bandaged foot upon a chair, while

a testy girl not two years older than herself drew her likeness. She

remembered the unendurable length of those half-hours--unendurable, save

that occasionally there looked in at the door or passed the window a

cowslip-haired boy, with hard blue eyes that would stare down even his

own conscience and none be the wiser, a conquering boy, of a race so

habituated to conquest that it takes with the sword-hand and carelessly

tosses twice as much back with the other. That was what it meant to her,

that silver mark that ran round the edge of her foot as a vein runs

round the edge of a pebble....

And for the future? His future might be anything, but hers could be one

thing only. For the gipsy loves never but the once. In all but love, the

waters of the world are not more unstable than she; in love, the rocks

are not more irremovable. Therefore she has no past and no regrets. She

has no regrets, for there is no scar upon her heart--how can there be a

scar, when a scar is a healing, and this wound is never healed, but ever

new, ever quivering? And she has no past--how can she have a past when

all is a poignant and lovely present, that endures to the end?...

There was so little for John Willie to do. He had only to go away

without kissing her again.

Kiss her, however, he must not--he was only an ordinary young man----

He knew it, and----

He passed his arms about her waist and drew her down by his side.

It was dark in the Glyn long before the light had faded from the open

hillside above. In Llyn Delyn not a fish rose to break that dark and

intact perfection. The fall into the pool diminished a little in volume,

and mossy cushions that had lately been covered began to rise out of the

water again. And a heart was laid quiveringly open where formerly only a

foot had been maimed. She was twice conquered, for she was Welsh and

woman too. In the hearts of the men of her race the fame of their story

still lives, and while it lives strife will not cease. As their own

proverb says, what the sword took, the tongue will take back again.

But the woman goes with the land.

PART FIVE

I

THE WHEEL

It was a summer nightfall in the Kursaal Gardens. The turnstiles of the

new Main Entrance in Pontnewydd Street revolved ceaselessly, with a

noise as of an unending rack and pinion. The lightly clad merrymakers

poured under the trees that had electric globes for fruit; they moved

towards the cream-coloured buildings that, with their illuminations,

seemed no more than footlights to the solemn stage of the immeasurable

blue beyond. Most of them were going to that Dancing-Hall where all the

youths and maidens of the world seemed to dance together; the others

hurried to keep appointments, to sit at the little tables where the

waiters moved on the grass, to join the slowly moving circle about the

bandstand, or to see the side-shows. The band played the "Lohengrin"

Prelude; the soft sound of gravel crunching underfoot mingled with the

music; and the great lighted circle of the Big Wheel rose against the

sky.

In the topmost coach of the Wheel sat John Willie Garden and June Lacey.

They were alone in the bright upholstered compartment. June wore her

Juniest frock and an engagement ring; John Willie, who had been walking,

was in cap and knickers. They had been engaged since the Spring, and

everybody had said how splendidly it would "do." They had played

together (everybody had said) since childhood, knew exactly what to

expect and what not to expect of one another, had (as they put it) the

solid cake to cut at when the sugar and the almond-paste had begun to

pall, and what could have been more romantic?

"They'd be hard put to it to think of anything they're short of,"

everybody had said.

From the windows of the car they could see the whole of Llanyglo. With

the turning of the Wheel they had watched its lights rise slowly over

the intervening roofs, and then slowly sink away again. Now, to see the

grounds below, they had to step to the windows and to look almost

vertically down, through the intricacy of girders and lattice and

mammoth supporting piers.

"It takes about twenty minutes to go round, doesn't it?" June asked.

"About that," John Willie replied absently.

"Look at the Trwyn light!"

"Yes, dear."

"We aren't as high as that, are we?"

"Oh dear no."

"I suppose we've stopped to take more passengers up?"

"I expect so."

Then, after a pause, June said, "Do you know, dear, I think I've finally

decided about the drawing-room. I think I shall have it all white--every

bit----"

From her white gloves to her gypsophylla petticoats, she was a girl any

young man would have been glad to spend his shillings on, and her house

was going to be as smart and complete as herself. Her father was coming

down very handsomely for her wedding, and in addition to his other

gifts, was going to lay out the gardens and the greenhouse for them.

Counting her silver, tapping her flower-pots to see which was in need of

water, trimming bits of raffia with her scissors and putting drops of

gum into her geraniums, June would be exactly in her right place. She

was already attending a Cookery Class, and had all her household linen

marked. And already they were promised any number of presents. "Presents

are so useful," she had said to John Willie, "because then you have

them, and so often they're the kind of thing you'd put off buying for

yourself." It was all going to "do" very splendidly.

"I say," said John Willie by and by, "we don't seem to be moving."

"The Wheel?" June asked.

"Yes. But it will go on in a minute, I expect."

"I hope it won't stop long," June replied.

John Willie also hoped it would not stop long, but for the life of him

he couldn't have told you why he hoped so. Indeed he tried to smother

the hope. He tried to smother it because he had an obscure feeling

that--that--well, if a reason can smile, that his reason for not wishing

to stay up there too long was quietly smiling at him. It seemed to

tell him that he and everything about him were enviably all

right--safe--thoroughly and entirely comfortable--need have no fears for

the future--and that all would continue to be just as comfortable and

safe and altogether all right until he should come to die, in a best

bed, with eiderdowns, and frilled pillow-cases, and hot bottles, and the

certainty of a handsomely appointed funeral a few days later. Few were

as sure of their future as that. John Willie was one of the lucky

ones....

He moved, not to the windows from which he could look down on the

lights of the Promenade and Pier, but to those that were turned to the

dark and unseen mountains. Somehow this reason he had for hoping that

the car would not stop long seemed to come from there. He told himself

that he would be better presently. He had these--bad humours, call

them--sometimes. He hid them from June, but Minetta had noticed them,

and he knew all about them himself. He turned to June again.

"I wonder what's happened," he said.

"It's--it's quite safe, isn't it?" June asked.

"Oh, quite." His lips compressed a little. It was quite safe--neither

more nor less safe than everything else in John Willie's life. That,

somehow, was at the bottom of these ill-humours of his.

"Dash it," he muttered....

"It is a nuisance," June agreed. "But I don't suppose Minetta will be

anxious."

"I wasn't thinking of Minetta," John Willie replied.

Now when you are reluctant to enter into explanation, and there is

something you badly want to do, you never (if you are an ordinary young

man) look very far for a reason. The first that comes will serve your

turn. If it is a flimsy one, no matter; you then get angry when its

flimsiness is pointed out to you, and presently out of your anger and

obstinacy you will have found a reason as good as another. John Willie

did not at all like those interior smiling taunts of himself that took

the form of congratulations on his neatly planned life and pillowed and

feathered death to close it. If anybody of his own weight had taunted

him thus he would have knocked that person down. But you cannot knock

down a whisper that seems to come on the wind from the mountains

through the night, making you, your ordered comfort notwithstanding,

absolutely wretched. Again John Willie turned to June.

"I say, June; this won't do, you know," he said.

June looked enquiringly at him.

"But we can't do anything but wait, dear, can we?"

He did not answer.

They waited. Half an hour passed. Then John Willie muttered again that,

among so many other things that would "do" beautifully, this particular

thing would not "do." June coloured a little.

"But--but--it isn't our fault," she murmured, picking at the fingers of

her gloves.

He saw she understood. Again they waited.

Then, suddenly, John Willie came shortly out with that reason that must

serve in the stead of his real reason. He knew how lame it was. A score

or two of other young couples were in precisely the same situation as

they, and more that cheerfully resigned to their plight; but then they

were not being goaded and taunted as John Willie was being goaded and

taunted. They were not being told that their paths lay, so to speak, on

flowers, while the paths of others were the stony road, that cut and

blistered the foot, and tired the eyes, and bowed the back (but had no

power, perhaps, thus to reproach the heart).... Anyway, John Willie was

not disposed to stand it.

"June," he said abruptly, "I can't stay up here all night with you."

Her wail interrupted him.--"Oh-h-h!----"

"It wouldn't do."

"Oh-h-h--it isn't our fault----"

"No, but that can't be helped. The woman I marry----"

"Oh-h-h--but there isn't anything to do!"

"Oh, yes there is. We needn't be together. I can get into another car or

something. It will only be like walking along the footboard of a train."

She gave a little shriek.--"Oh--if you do I shall throw myself out--I

know I shall!----"

"You won't do anything so silly. Get up, dear; I've quite made up my

mind. I tell you it wouldn't do. The woman I marry...."

With gentle force he picked her up and set her on the seat of the car.

Then he approached the window. There was a bar across it, which it took

him a minute to bend, but the chances were that where his head would

pass the rest of his body might follow. June hid her face and moaned as

he took off his coat; then he kissed her and thrust his head under the

bar. He wriggled through, stood on the footboard, smiled again grimly

through the window, and then looked down.

At any rate, he had given a reason of sorts.

Then he looked up.

Instantly he saw that, unless head or wrist or finger should

unexpectedly fail him, the most dangerous part of his exploit lay at the

very beginning. There was no descent from the step on which he stood.

The cars were slung from axles, and in order to get to the rim that held

the axles themselves he must climb to the roof of the coach. He glanced

at the roof of the coach twenty feet below and to his left. He saw that

it had a curved rain-sill like that of the top of a railway carriage.

Good; the coaches would be all alike. He set his knees in the

window-frame once more. June was still lying with her face hidden on the

seat. His fingers felt blindly for the rain-sill; they found it, and he

moistened his other hand. He wished he could have glued it, for for some

moments mere friction must be half his support. For an instant he

thought calmly and abysmally; then he risked it....

It succeeded. He knelt on the roof, holding the sling and coupling that

hung from the car-axle overhead. He glanced up at the axle to which he

must swarm. The singing in the cars continued, and a babble of sound

rose lightly from below. Evidently he had not been seen to get out of

the car.

But then, who would have thought of looking?

* * * * *

It was as he swarmed up the coupling that there first came over him the

sense of the difference between the reason he had given, and the real

reason that had brought him out from that brightly lighted and cushioned

car in which he might far more easily have stopped. And the realisation

of that difference brought with it, very strangely, the sense, not of

bodily peril, but of inner peace. It was unaccountable, but there it

was, not to be argued about. The only thing that disturbed this peace,

and that but lightly, was that his venture had not a more profitable

object. Folk did less dangerous things for far better reason--to save

life, or property, or something else worth while. But this neck-risking

of his was--could only be--bravado. He knew perfectly well that in the

circumstances nobody would have thought a penny the worse of June. "The

woman I marry----" he had known that to be an hypocrisy even when he had

said it. No, he was merely idiotically showing-off, and that peace at

his heart would presently prove to be an illusion....

It was quite suddenly, as he lay out along the Wheel's topmost

car-axle, that the thought of Ynys came to him. He didn't know why it

should come at that moment, unless it was born of his bodily isolation

on the very top of that immense bracelet hung with trinkets of cars. But

perhaps it was that; perhaps there was a connection, if only an idle and

fanciful one. Save perhaps the keeper of the Trwyn light, nobody in

Llanyglo was nearer the stars than he that night; and only Mynedd Mawr

had been higher than he when he had lain on the rocky head of Delyn....

Or was it, not the isolation of his body at all, but his isolation of

soul, that had brought that mysterious and inexplicable and probably

fallacious peace.

While not ceasing to keep his carefully calculating eyes open, and every

motor-fold of his brain intent on the preservation of his balance, he

began to think of Delyn.

He had stayed many days up there; some weeks perhaps; he couldn't have

told you how long. Its rain had soaked him, and its winds dried him

again; its streams had fed him and its herbage furnished his litter at

night; but the sun itself had not warmed him more than had her impulsive

looks and surrendering gestures when he had but lifted up a hand. With

another eye than that that now measured the distances between girders

and axles and ties, he seemed to see the rocks again, and the lake

shining in its morning intactness, and the drowned bubbles of the fall

in the Glyn, and the thin wind stroking the short grass, and the

mountain-ashes under which they had sat, their leaves like finger-prints

against the sky. He could see again the trout she had cooked for

him--her breast had fluttered as those dying silvery things had

fluttered, silvery as that dry old scar he had kissed. He could smell

the smoke of her morning fire again, her hair, her breast.... And he

could hear again the shrill warning note in that unique voice of hers

that had first set him wondering whether, after all, it would "do." ...

That quarrel had not been on that heart-breaking morning of their

parting. There had been no quarrel then. No; it had been at something

unguarded he had said about his sister and her friends. Yes, he saw

again the insensate jealous flame in those seaweed eyes, and heard the

ugly passionate cracking of the voice in which she had cried, "They

noth-thing, your fine miss-es! They mar-ry house without a man if they

could--they take house in their arms--they make those eyes at house, and

kiss house, and call it cariad! You no dif-ferent from them! You go to

your miss and say, 'I have house'--she want-t you then!----" It had

taken a whole morning before he had had her, humble and sobbing and

remorseful and enslaved, in his arms again.... No, it wouldn't have done

to marry a temper like that--and, temper altogether apart, it wouldn't

have done. There are only a few years of this world and its

companionships, and, though your friends may have their twists and

crankinesses, they are still your friends, all you are likely to have.

Better be in the stream with them while you are here. He would only have

been sorry for it later, on her account as well as on his own. She had

been quicker to see that than he, and had spoken of it in her soft and

halting English. At first he had laughed and said "Kiss me" ... but she

had been right....

But John Willie, with a Wheel to descend, must not let these things take

him too far from the business in hand.

He had reached a chain in a great guiding sprocket, but he thought of

what at any moment a hand upon a lever in the power-house far below

might do, and of one of his father's men who had once been carried round

shafting. No moving parts for him.... He looked down through an

iron-framed lozenge at the people below. The grounds resembled a tray of

many-coloured moving beads. All Llanyglo seemed to have run to see the

stopped Wheel. Probably the Pier itself was half empty. If so, all the

more room for anybody who wanted to watch, not a Wheel, but the moon

lift her gilded sacrificial horn out of the sea.... There had been far

too much drub-drub-drubbing. John Willie was weary of it. It was time he

settled down. And Llanyglo itself seemed to have come to much the same

conclusion. It had begun to make a restriction here and a regulation

there, as if it wished to purge itself of its evil name. There was no

doubt that for a time it had been a very sinful place, and ... (here

John Willie, with a slow steady pull, hoisted himself to where he wished

to be, on the long curved upper plate of a massive H, rivet-studded like

a boiler, that was knitted with iron lace to other H's--John Willie must

not venture too far down that slope unless he should suddenly acquire a

fly's faculty for walking upside-down) ... and perhaps the town had

begun to get a little frightened, as sinful people, and perhaps sinful

towns also, sometimes do. But that would be all right presently.

Llanyglo was going, in a manner of speaking, to be married. It was

turning over, had turned over, a new leaf. Soon it would be a churlish

thing to reproach it for a past that it had lived down; it was becoming

sadder and wiser, and better able to distinguish between the things that

would "do" and the things that would not. The less talk ... (here John

Willie began to realise that he was not a fly, and to collect his nerves

for the turn-over to the under side of that H that a few yards away

dropped over, with a little gleam, into nothing) ... the less talk the

soonest mended. He did not intend to say--anything--to June. Indeed he

intended ... (there: that was rather a jerk to his shoulder socket, but

he was safely underneath) ... indeed he intended that his attitude to

June about such matters should be rather severe. This was not because

June's own thoughts were in the least degree lax (she erred, if

anywhere, on the prudish side), but because women were very tender

things. A whisper was fatal to them. That was why John Willie was

clinging now to that enormous piece of knitting of iron and upholstered

carriages and electric light. He had climbed out in order that nobody

should be able to say, after that, that....

Then it was that he knew, once and for ever, that this was a lie. Then

it was that he knew that he was not where he was, suspended between the

stars of heaven and the lamps of earth, on June's account. He was there

because a gipsy girl had called him. This was his service, not of the

pretty and pleasant June he was presently going to marry, but of one

whom he had not married, of one he had not feared to compromise, of one

who had known nothing, cared nothing, save that she had been lost in a

wild and tender and beautiful love. She, none other, had called him----

Then, too, it was that there rose to him from below a faint yet high and

shuddering "A-a-a-ah!" that was followed by a sudden cessation of all

sound whatever save only a distant throb and pulsing in the

Dancing-Hall. It surprised him for a moment; then he remembered. Of

course. He had been seen----

She, none other, had called him, and he knew now that so she would

continue to call him, wherever he might be--from his labour by day and

from his rest by night, from his laughter with his children and his

clasping of his wife. She would continue to call him until softness and

ease should have done their slow and fatal work, would continue to call

him until that nerve, with her harping on it, should have become

dull....

He seemed to hear the echoes of that voiceless calling, diminishing

through the years to come. They would end in a silence that his wife's

innocent garrulity would never, never be able to break----

The faint throb in the Dancing-Hall also ceased. The Kursaal Gardens

were a bead mat of faces. There was not a whisper. Delyn was not

stiller.

Unconscious that already he was black and torn and bleeding, he looked

down from his girder upon the bead mat. He knew what, presently, if he

came down alive, every bead there would be singing--his daring and his

quixotry and his devotion, and the possession by June of a husband who

would do this rather than suffer the lightest breath upon the mirror of

her name----

He looked at them as he clung, scarce bigger than a speck, high in that

webbed diadem of the Wheel----

And as he hung there, with only the guardian of the Trwyn light higher

than he, and the rest of the descent still to make, he still could not

decide, of the two things that oppressed his heart, which was the

atonement and which the sin.

II

ADIEU

"You're leaving Llanyglo? Well, holidays must come to an end.--You'd

like another walk up the Trwyn? Very well; but you've seen all there is

to see....

"Here we are.... What's going on at the Light? Oh, that's the Board of

Trade, experimenting with some new fog apparatus or other. By the way,

the Light people are rather sore because of a new Regulation, that they

mustn't have lodgers at the farm; and also because they'd like to grow

roses up the look-out wall, and that's prohibited too; I suppose the

authorities think they'd be spending the day looking at the roses

instead of at the ships. They've moved the rocket apparatus farther

along the coast; they found it wasn't much use here, and it's turned out

very successfully at Abercelyn.--Eh? Yes, where the manganese comes

from. They still get a certain quantity, but there's peace in the

Balkans or wherever it is for the moment, so nobody's growing very rich

out of the mines here....

"Hallo, that's rather a coincidence. Don't look round too quickly. You

see that tallish man over there? I don't suppose you've even seen him

before; as a matter of fact he hasn't been--er--to be seen. He got into

trouble once; in plain English, they put him in prison. His name's

Armfield, and his trouble was all about Llanyglo. Awkward things,

meetings like these. I think Armfield's a capital chap, and I should

like to go and talk to him; but prison's a cruel thing, and you never

know how the poor fellow himself feels about it.... Ah! As I thought, he

looks rather broken. If you don't mind we won't watch him. Come on to

the Dinas and have a smoke....

* * * * *

"How's John Willie Garden? Perfectly rosy, if beginning to get a bit

fat. Lucky dog! Four children, two boys and two girls, quite an amiable

chatter-box of a wife, and rich enough to buy almost anything he wants.

Lucky, lucky dog!--Did I tell you he was the adopted Conservative Free

Trade candidate for one of the Manchester divisions? Not that he cares a

snap about Free Trade politically; economically it merely happens to be

a good part of his bread and butter; but then you have to be careful

about what you say on platforms, and so John Willie talks like the

editor of the _Spectator_ himself. June Garden runs her two houses, one

here and one in Manchester, like clockwork, and they go backwards and

forwards between them in a really regal car. Every tramp and gipsy on

the road knows that car. However fast he's driving, John Willie always

pulls up and gives them a shilling. Just a foible of his. We all have

'em in one shape or form.

"Llanyglo's going in heartily for these new proposals for advertising

the town out of the rates. A young man called Ithel Williams is very

keen on it; he's a son of Tudor Williams, the Tudor Williams who used to

be M.P. for this division. Young Ithel's got rather a nice billet here,

as Librarian or something for the Council, and if this new thing goes

through he'll be quite in clover.--Jobbery? Well, I suppose that's the

name for it, but personally I'm not altogether against it. It seems to

me that the only alternative is putting these berths up for competitive

examination, which in my opinion's failed all along the line, so find

the right man and then job him in, I say.--The right man's so frequently

a relative? Well ... there you are. That _is_ the weak spot. But there's

always a crab somewhere....

* * * * *

"I wonder if Armfield's gone yet? Let's have a look.... No, he's still

there....

* * * * *

"A good season? Yes, from all accounts it's been a very good season.

There have been better from the purely money point of view, I should

say, but after all everybody can't be everything, and every place can't

get all there is. Llanyglo, like other places, has its natural limits of

expansion. I don't think it will get any bigger yet awhile. There's no

doubt the Wakes people were the people who flung the money about, and

they've a little fallen off; but even if Llanyglo has to write down some

of its obligations it will probably gain in the long run. A section of

the Council's coming to see that, and is pressing for reconstruction

(that's always rather wonderful to me, that they should construct things

of solid materials and then reconstruct them by saying they cost less

than they did); but that's the Council's business, or rather the powers

behind the Council. Edward Garden isn't one of these any longer, at any

rate not to the extent he was. He sits in Manchester and makes towns in

Canada now. But he still looks at letters under his glasses, and over

them, and backwards and forwards and upside down, and then looks mildly

up at you and says the letter seems to be a letter....

"A last look at the place: there you are: bay, Promenade, Pier, the ring

of mountains behind. It grew from a few fishermen's huts to

over-capitalisation in a very few years. And there's Terry Armfield,

still looking at it all, like a not very old Rip Van Winkle. I wonder

what he's thinking! I suppose he couldn't keep away, but must come and

remember it as it was and dream over it again as it was never, never to

be.... Walk past quickly; he's sobbing, poor chap. His dream was of a

place--I don't know how to describe it--all friendliness and loveliness

and graciousness, fowl and flesh and good red-herring all in one, so to

speak, what you might call a diaphanous sort of place, a jolly place to

think of during those few minutes of the morning or evening when you're

not quite asleep and not quite awake, but--hm!--I'm not so sure ... not

in this imperfect world....

"Anyway, that down there is what he sees....

"I suppose the other wouldn't have done....

"Shall we go?"

THE END

* * * * *

Transcriber's Note: Hyphen variations left as printed.