Chapter XV: Part FOUR: I (3)

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.