Chapter VI: Part ONE: I (3)

The idea had been that of Ned, the eldest brother, and it was part of the miscellaneous general information he had picked up on his alder-prospecting through Merionethshire and Montgomery and Carnarvon and Denbigh and Flint. He had seen a way of convicting Llanyglo out of its own mouth. They threw down fences on the grounds that the land was common land; very well, if it was common, as they claimed, it was a proper site for a Hafod Unos. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander; and merely as a poke in the eye for watch-tinkering Welshmen, and a vindication of Lancashire's superior wit and malice, it would be worth a night's work to see their faces in the morning.

So to work in the dark the four brothers got.

They helped themselves to a modest slice of Llanyglo earth, plotted it out with stakes and string, and then began to dig. The night was moonless, and they worked by the light of four lanterns. These illumined little enough of the waste; the moving, straddling shadows they cast hardly began before they were lost in the darkness again. Knitting-needles of light came and went again on the polished handles of the rising and falling spades, and faintly, regularly, and as if a spirit passed high overhead in the night, the intermittent Trwyn beam swung--red, red, white--red, red, white----

They had not to dig deep; there is much volcanic rock under the Llanyglo sand; and they had not set up fences half a dozen times without having a notion where it was.

"Here we are," Harry, the builder's labourer grunted as his spade gave a clink and a jump in his hand. "I thowt it wadn't be far off.--Is t' barril there, Tommy?"

Across a mound of thrown-up sand one of the lanterns cast a short parabola of shadow. It was the shadow of a nine-gallon barrel of beer.

"Nay, we mun do a bit first," Tommy replied, spitting on his hands and driving in his spade again.

Their house already existed, complete in their practical heads, before ever a spade was lifted. They had seen through its entire anatomy in the taproom of the Station Hotel, with beer to solve all difficulties. Nothing was done twice, and brother did not get in brother's way. Even as Howell Gruffydd said, they took a corner of their plan apiece and dry-walled, all save Tommy, who went to and fro with a hand-cart, fetching stone, not too much at a time, because of the dead softness of the sand. For the general design Ned's word was law; for details, each used his own gumption. They worked and grunted, and worked and grunted, and worked. By the time Sirius appeared over faraway Delyn, and Orion balanced himself on Mynedd Mawr, they had a serviceable first course laid. Then they put on their coats again, for it was a bitter night and they perspired, and with a single blow Tommy neatly tapped the barrel. They drank, threw off their coats again, and set to work once more.

"Never heed that, Sam," Ned said once, seeing his brother elaborating the stark essential plan that had been agreed upon in the taproom of the Station Hotel. "T' corners, t' beams, and t' roof; we haven't time to paint it and put a pot o' geraniums i' t' window."

By one o'clock the lanterns showed four irregular angles of masonry, shoulder-high, as rough as you please, but true by plumb and level. This might be a joke against Llanyglo, but it was a workmanlike one. Only two of the brothers now walled, for they had only two ladders; Sam helped Tom to lift and carry beams.

By three o'clock only two of the beams were laid, but they were the principal ones, and Ned seemed well content.

"That's t' main o' t' work," he said, with satisfaction. "How's t' barril going on, Tom?"

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

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

"Ay."

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

They took their nooning, with Sirius now over Mynedd Mawr, and Orion soaring like a kite. They took it at their leisure; they were "lads from a reight place," setting about a job as if they meant to finish it, not Welshmen matchboarding. A mountain of sand filled the space within their four corners, and they lay on their backs on it, smoking, and watching the red and white spokes of the light high over their heads, twenty-mile spokes, of a wheel that had no circumference but its sweep through the night. Now and then Sam gave a low chuckle; but Ned smoked, spat, and was silent, save that he said from time to time, "Did ye number and letter them chamfers, Harry?" or some similar question. You would have said they had a month before them. Certainly the Kerrs, when there was a surprise to be prepared for foreigners who meddled with their watches, were members one of another.

At half-past three they set to work again. By four Ned had climbed up above, and was sitting astride a beam with the light of a lantern shining up on his streaming face.

"Give us another inch, Sam," he grunted, "--a bit more--a bit more--_whoa!_ Tom, that quoin--no, th' one wi' th' bolt--this is th' chimney end--and get them three strutts ready, accordinglie to th' letters.... How are ye down there, Harry?"

The mason brother was building the chimney. It was an outside one, massive as a buttress, and Harry was building it well and truly, for it was the essential of the house. Smoke must go up it before dawn, the hearth-smoke of civilised man, the lowly and secular and beautiful token that he has made himself an abiding-place on a spot of earth, and becomes part of that spot, and it part of him, so that to deracinate him is to thrust him back again into the bestial state and to make the land as desert as the sea. By all prognostication, Edward Garden's smoke should have been the first to add itself to that of the cluster of humble dwellings between the mountains and the waves that was Llanyglo; but of that lawn of lightsome blue that veils Llanyglo to-day the breakfast-smoke of the Kerrs was the fore-runner. At half-past four they were shovelling out the mountain of sand and making the hearth for it. By six Tommy had brought in the bundle of dry twigs and faggots he had carefully hidden away. Harry was filling in the space between the main beam and the transom of the door; when Tom asked him for a match he sprang down, and Ned and Sam also descended from the roof.

"What time is it?" Tom asked.

Ned gave a glance round, and smiled for the first time that night as he drew out his watch.

"Five past six," he said, and added, with indescribable dryness, "--unless som'b'dy's been meddling wi' my watch."

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

They exchanged glances that were near to winks as they watched the flames. It was their equivalent of a cheer.

The night paled; the Trwyn light went out; and off the headland a seal disported itself in the icy sea. The day stole across Delyn, but Mynedd Mawr still remained an awful precipice of ink--the shadow of the morning bank lay over him. Then came the first glitter on the waves, and, as if with light all other faculties awake, folk became conscious of the crowing of cocks and the falling of the breakers on the shore. Howell Gruffydd got up and began to rekindle his fire. A bolt was shot back at Pritchard's farm. Dafydd Dafis packed his breakfast in his tin and set out for his day's work--a little reslating of the roof of the Baptist Chapel.

But on his way across the sandhills he suddenly changed, not only his direction, but his gait also. He advanced cautiously, skirted certain mounds of sand that he did not remember to have seen before, and then as suddenly drew back. Then, instead of advancing again, he returned by a circuitous route, dropped into a sunken sandy way, and then ran as fast as his legs would carry him down to the cottages. There he thrust his head into Morgan's cottage and said something, and ran to the next one--or rather to the next but two, for Edward Garden's double cottage had been locked up since October. Then Howell Gruffydd came to his shop door, and Dafydd called him.

Five minutes later half Llanyglo was out on the sandhills staring through a gap at something that lay beyond.

It was an extraordinary house they saw, and then went round to the back to look at from another point of view. It appeared to consist of a living-room and a scullery, with a patch under the skeleton of a sort of penthouse at the back. It was not even on the land that had been fenced and unfenced and fenced again. Of roof it had none--for you could hardly call the three or four tarpaulins, that lifted as the wind got under them and were kept down by stones, a roof. Parts of the walls were solidly constructed; other parts had been battened up with hedgestakes, filled in with sods and peats, stuffed up with coats, anything. It had an old door that had been used somewhere else, and appeared to be propped up with stones. Over one window-opening hung an old brown coat, the other frame was empty. A bright glow shone on the rubble within, and smoke and sparks came merrily from the chimney. The fire crackled loudly, and there was a pleasant smell of cooking bacon. All about the cavity in the sand lay stones big and little, timbers, stakes, loops of rope. There was a hand-cart too, with its handle making a T in the air. A scraping sound was heard, as of somebody cleaning out a pan, and then came a low "Wouf" and flare of fat in the chimney. Then somebody spoke.

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

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

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

As if those walls vanished again even more quickly than they had sprung up, Llanyglo could see a picture vividly in its fancy--a picture of a tilted barrel, with the cheeks of one man distended over the spigot-hole while another caught a muddy trickle in a thick glass----

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

Slowly, and without a word, they moved off through the soft sand in the direction of the Baptist Chapel.

VI

THE FOOT IN THE DOOR

IT was a Saturday, a day on which the school did not assemble, and the door of the schoolhouse was locked. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd was sent off in haste for the key. They waited for him to come back, twenty of them, men and women, with others hurrying over the sandhills to join them. Eesaac Oliver ran panting up again, and they entered the schoolhouse. This was a large, yellow-washed room with beams making triangles overhead and hot-water pipes running round the walls below. A small squad of desks stood upright behind, and a number of smaller benches knelt, as it were, in front of them. These faced the raised desk of Miss Nancy Pritchard, the schoolmistress. A yellow chair or two, a couple of glass-fronted cupboards, a row of hooks for caps and cloaks at the back, and a harmonium, completed the furniture. A short covered way near Miss Pritchard's desk gave access to the adjoining Chapel. A door at the side of this led to the little stone outhouse where the water for the pipes both of school and Chapel was heated.

Their astonished exclamations had broken out now. As something legendary and dear and native to their land, it was in their hearts to defend the Hafod Unos; but for a stranger to set one up!

"Look you, it can-not be legal!" exclaimed Hugh Morgan, a little tubby man with semicircular brows and a round bald forehead. "It iss not even finiss; there iss holes in the walls so-a big I put my head through them! And that iss not a roof--it iss only rick-covers----"

"It is wonderful how they did it, whatever!" said little restless-eyed Mrs. Gruffydd. Those predatory eyes in Blodwen Gruffydd's pale face could see a sixpence a mile away, and, having seen it, would not leave it again until it had been safely dropped through the slot of the money-box into which the savings for Eesaac Oliver's education went. Eesaac Oliver was not to serve packets of tea and pennyworths of bicarbonate of soda over a grocer's counter. He was to go to Aberystwith College, and to become a preacher, and wear a black chip straw hat.

Howell Gruffydd, who had been as thunderstruck as the rest of them, now affected to take a jocular view of the matter.

"De-ar me, first Mr. Garden's house, and now Ty Kerr! Well, it make trade. Indeed, I need a bigger s'op presently--I think I start a Limited Company----"

But big consumptive John Pritchard spoke in deep tones. More vividly than any of them, John had seen, as if in a camera obscura, that vision of a Kerr blowing into the vent-hole of a barrel, while another Kerr anxiously watched the tap.--"We need a bigger public-house, I think," he said grimly.

"Indeed you are right, John Pritchard," Hugh Morgan struck eagerly in, the curves of his brows all marred with anxiety. "They sit in the Sta-tion Hotel Porth Neigr, and do noth-thing but drinking all day--it set a s'ock-king example, whatever."

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

"They very smart ones----"

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

Little Hugh Morgan spoke excitedly.

"Indeed you are right again, John Pritchard! John Williams Porth Neigr, he say to me it would not surprise him if that Ned Kerr speak Welss so well as nobody if he wiss!"

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

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

They were silent for a moment, contemplating this duplicity.

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

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

John Pritchard had sat down on one of the yellow chairs with his knees a yard apart. His brows seemed knitted.

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

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

"They finiss their breakfast--I heard them wipe the frying-pan out as plain as if I see it with my eyes!"

Again John Pritchard's heavy voice: "Finiss their breakfast indeed! They finiss a whole barrel of beer!"

"And it is right what Hugh Morgan says," another struck in. "That Ned Kerr, he know Wales as well as I know my two hands! I have let-ter from my cousin Thomas Thomas in Towyn, and he say they buy lot-t of alders up the Dysynni two years ago of Mr. Llewelyn Jones of Abergynolwyn, and set up a hut in the 'ood, and make their clog soles, and pay six-pence a foot for the trees."

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

"Indeed they do no such thing! The Hafod Unos belong to the old days. There iss no new Hafod Unos I don't know this how many years!"

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

Then, as if all at once they saw anew that house so magically sprung up out of the sand, there fell a silence. Howell Gruffydd might make his jests about taking a larger shop and forming a Limited Company, but the hard fact remained, that aliens had squatted down at Llanyglo while they had slept, and, by force or process of law, might be difficult to turn out again. Howell's jocosity subsided; among the children's forms and benches they took counsel together; and when, at half-past ten, John Pritchard's eldest lad came in with the news that one of the Kerrs had departed along the Porth Neigr road, while the other three kept guard over what they had won, they drew closer together still, and spoke in low tones of boycott.

Then suddenly somebody asked what Mr. Tudor Williams of Ponteglwys would say, and the quick little outburst of "Yes, indeed," "Well said," "Mr. Tudor Williams have some-thing to say," showed how pertinent the observation was considered. For Mr. Tudor Williams, the Member, would be able to tell them, if anybody could, whether the Hafod Unos was countenanced by the Law, and whether the intruders could be served with notice to quit. His promised visit now took on an added urgency.

"It is a pit-ty Mr. Williams fall out with Squire Wynne," Hugh Morgan remarked. "It will be the Squire who will have to give them notice, whatever."

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

"But indeed, Howell Gruffydd, Mr. Tudor Williams wass in the right--it was about the Tithes, and the Tithe iss a wick-ked system----"

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

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

"Indeed that Bis-sop of St. Asaph he look at a Chap-pil like as if it wass not worth his eyesight!"

Dafydd Dafis, who sat on a child's bench, looking moodily at the floor, had not spoken yet. He gave a quick glance up, and then looked down again.

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

They discussed questions of ecclesiastical polity....

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

Then Howell Gruffydd rose, and one or two others followed his example. There was the day's work to be done. Soon all moved to the door, but before going about their businesses they went to take another look at that astonishing house.

But they looked only from a distance. If they had assumed that the Kerrs, having worked all night, would now be sleeping, they were wrong. They could see them, three of them, still busily walling, filling, shovelling out sand.

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

But big John Pritchard glared sternly at him.

"They care noth-thing for Sunday, those ones," he said. "That other one will have gone for more beer." And he added, in solemn tones, "It iss a den of li-ons!"

The fencing dispute had now sunk into insignificance.

It quickly appeared, even as John Pritchard had said, that the Kerrs cared nothing for Sunday. At a quarter to ten on the morning of that day, Howell Gruffydd, in his tight black frock-coat and bowler hat, passing up the sandy gully on his way to the Methodist Chapel, heard sounds of carousing. He turned aside to look. The door of the Hafod stood open, and a second barrel of beer, together with provisions and some sticks of furniture, had been fetched during the night. Tommy, the youngest of the Kerrs, was already drunk and singing. The eldest of them, seeing Howell Gruffydd, gave him an insolently familiar nod, as if he had as much right to be there as anybody else.

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

Howell turned away.

After service, Howell encountered John Pritchard. John, too, had heard that godless levity from afar. Others gathered round them by the gap in the thymy earth-wall, and John raised his voice on high. It shook with bitter zeal.

"We hear them in the Chap-pil, in the mid-dle of prayers, singing!" he cried. "On a Sunday morning they sing; they sing '_Thomas, make Room for your Uncle_!' I said it was a den of li-ons, but indeed no li-ons ever behave so s'ock-kingly! They sing '_Thomas, make Room for your Uncle_,' in the mid-dle of prayers, like if it was out of the belly of hell!"

Dafydd Dafis, whose head for a day and a half had drooped like a wet head of corn, gave a quick gleaming glance.

"They not build it any more quick than it can be pulled down again," he said quickly. "They come out of the house sometime to work, I think. They not gentry with lot of money, whatever."

And that was true. The Kerrs could hardly earn their living by drinking beer and having continually to mount guard over the house they had made.

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

Dafydd Dafis's head drooped again.

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

And the Kerrs themselves? Did they suppose they could plant themselves thus in the enemy's midst and not meet with hostile entertainment?

For this we may perhaps go once more to the gentleman without whose friendly help the _Llanyglo Guide_ would have been done quite as well as it needed to be, and in half the time.

"It's difficult to say, for two reasons," this gentleman said. "In the first place, the humour of some of these Lancashire fellows is such an incalculable thing; you never know how far they will carry it, nor how soon it will end in black eyes and bloody noses. And in the second place, there was that humanitarian scatterbrain, Armfield. I believe myself that probably Armfield had already told Ned Kerr that there _would_ be work presently....

"Of course, you've heard what Armfield's scheme was. The Syndicate had decided not to rectify any more errors of Providence about the disposition of coal and manganese; they only wanted to clear out altogether, leaving somebody else 'holding the baby'--I believe that's the expression. Their idea was simplicity itself: to buy land at a shilling and sell it again at ten; but they didn't express it quite so nakedly. That was where Terry Armfield came in--to dress the enterprise up and make it attractive. As long as he enabled them to cut their loss they didn't care what he did with Llanyglo.

"And there was nothing really wrong with the scheme, except that Terry was twenty years before his time, and naturally had to suffer for it. I think he called it '_The Thelema Estate Development Company_,' and nowadays it would be called a Garden City. And if Terry hadn't Edward Garden's sense of the line of least resistance, you must remember that he hadn't Edward Garden's 'inside' information either. He had nothing but that ecstatic power of persuading people. And he did persuade them. I doubt if half a dozen of the people he sold to ever saw the place. Two of them did, though, two brothers, in the produce line. They went down, and came back again, and quietly sold out, keeping strictly to Terry's representations; and I believe they warned Terry then that if he wasn't careful he'd be getting into trouble. I asked them what they'd been thinking of to let themselves be persuaded by a hare-brained enthusiast like that. They told me it was all very well for me to talk _now_. They knew perfectly well all the time that it was only one of Terry's dreams of a better and a brighter world, but they bought for all that, and so did crowds of others. Terry didn't admit a single difficulty. He talked about angels and the higher life. He talked about Pugin and the soul's need for seasons of contemplation and repose. He talked about the air and the sea and the mountains and the Trwyn, and he made it out to be Llanyglo's chief merit that it took a whole day to get there.... And so on. To cut it short, they were to do their own building, but Terry, as vendor, undertook the rest--laying out certain roads, draining and lighting them, I believe the building of a sort of public hall, and so forth. I don't think he said anything about the Chapels.

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

* * * * *

Whether Dafydd Dafis would have watched the Kerrs out of the Hafod, or, failing that, whether he would have pulled it down over their heads, is hardly worth debating; for, as it happened, that very Sunday night there befell something that for the time being had all the effect of a declared truce between the hamlet and its invaders. Something deeper and more solemn than the machinations of man took a hand in the making of Llanyglo. This was the wind. It began to get up at about three o'clock that afternoon; all day there had been a swell; and Dafydd Dafis and others, returning from Howell Gruffydd's house (where a second letter to Mr. Tudor Williams Ponteglwys had been written, as urgent as Eesaac Oliver's pen could make it), saw all four of the brothers on the roof, trying to secure the tarpaulin in which the wind volleyed; their roof-slates were not expected till the following Wednesday. The ground was a blurr of flying sand; the sea resembled a tossing fleece as far as the eye could see; and from moment to moment the waves, breaking over the Trwyn, rose in slow, gigantic fountains, fell again, and then came the roar. The four men clung like limpets to the roof, crouching until the worst gusts were past and then resuming their hammering. They were trying to nail the covering down, using pieces of wood as washers to prevent the material from ripping.

Suddenly Dafydd Dafis, looking up under his brows, saw Ned Kerr pause with his hammer lifted and peer out to sea. Then, without moving his head, Ned put up his hand and appeared to be shouting something to the others. All four looked, and so did the men of Llanyglo, but from the ground below they could see nothing.

Then, all in a moment, Ned Kerr gave a scramble and a spring, came down like a bundle into a mound of soft sand, and was followed tumblingwise by the others. There was a rip and a crack, and the released tarpaulin was a hundred yards away, flapping grotesquely over the sandhills. Ned was up again in an instant, and as he passed Dafydd Dafis at a run he shouted a single word in Welsh:

"_Llongddrylliad!_"

It was a wreck.

The boats by the short thumb of a jetty had not been used for a week, and lay high up the beach. Could they have got them through that boiling of white sea and brown sand there was a towering ridge to be seen beyond, maned with spray, that rushed forward and burst only to show another in the same place. No more than one at a time could be seen. The boats were open boats, and night was coming on. Small wonder there seemed little to do but pray.

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

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

The next moment he and Dafydd Dafis had each a shoulder to Hugh Morgan's boat, and William Morgan, the three remaining Kerrs, and another man, were hauling. All save the youngest Kerr continued to tumble aboard as the boat lifted. He tried to struggle after it, but was overturned, and they dragged him out and turned him upside down to pour the water out of him.

They have a lifeboat now at Llanyglo, _The Ratchet_, presented and maintained by the town of that name; but that night the men of Lancashire and the men of Llanyglo went out in one of the half-dozen open boats. They put her into the brown, and a moment later the water had slipped from under her and she sat down on the sand, with every plank started. They got ashore again as best they could, and raced for another boat and more oars. They put out again. They dare not use the wooden jetty, of which only the beginning could be seen. The first boat was already matchwood. A sea crawled up the Trwyn almost as far as the Light. They inspected its ravage the next day. It stood as a record for many years.

Then the boat passed the brown, and stood out to that pale wall smoking with spray. The wall came on and broke with a crash that shook the shore. A woman gave a shrill scream ... then they saw the boat again----

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

After that, though they watched, they saw nothing.

Then the Trwyn Light opened its eye, two reds and a white. All Llanyglo was gathered on the beach, and none thought of going to Chapel. Night fell; the sky became clear as black ice; the dim seas resembled a lair of white bears at play. Seven o'clock passed, and eight.... Already in folks' minds the grim thought was born; it might have been worse. They had dragged Hugh Morgan back as the second boat had pushed off, and none of the Llanyglo men was married. Whether the three Kerrs were married or not nobody knew.

Nine o'clock came....

Blodwen Gruffydd saw the return first, if, indeed, that vague speck lost in the grey combings were they. Again the wave came on, and another hideous range lifted its grey ridge.... By a miracle, it boiled far away to right and left, but rolled, a grey-dappled dead weight, under the boat. Already half a dozen men with a rope were waist-deep in the water....

Then, as the boat crawled on its oars like an insect, another crest rose, tilted them so that man fell on man, and a man came out....

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

And after all, they had come back empty-handed. They had seen neither ship nor boat.

But (and this, in this tale of Llanyglo and of those who made it and were made by it, is the point), an hour later Dafydd Dafis, opening his eyes for the first time since he had been hauled out of the water, said something in Welsh to John Pritchard, who bent over him. Translated it ran:

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

Then he closed his eyes again.

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

VII

THE MEMBER

Ostensibly, Mr. Tudor Williams came to Llanyglo to assist at a Sasiwn, which is a gathering very much like the Love Feasts of other parts of the country (indeed, if memory serves, Mr. Wesley gave these assemblies for prayer and mutual consolation the latter name as far north in Wales as Builth--but then Mr. Wesley did not speak Welsh). Neither the fencing dispute nor the question of the Hafod Unos had taken nominal precedence of this. But Mr. Tudor Williams's visit was also something more. He was a Member returning to his own constituency--exalted, yet their servant, familiar with the great ones of the land, yet by their favour. For that reason they liked him to bring the evidences of his greatness back with him.

Mr. Tudor Williams did so, and handsomely. He was a small nimble man with black brows and a ragged silvery moustache, and a very erect and conscious carriage of the head. He wore a silk hat, a turned-down collar with a flat black bow, a frockcoat with voluminous lapels of watered silk, grey trousers, and new black kid gloves. He drove from Porth Neigr in the carriage that had been lent him by a political supporter, and alighted at the gap opposite John Pritchard's farm. They would have run forward to greet him, but a certain awe of his clothes and equipage combined with their own dignity as makers and unmakers of such as he to keep them where they stood, in a semicircle across the road.

But if they were at one and the same time a little intimidated and filled out with pride in him, Mr. Tudor Williams knew no hesitation. He sprang down from the carriage, grasped John Pritchard by the hand, and then, not content with that, patted him all up the arm as far as the shoulder and across the breast with the other hand, as if he conferred invisible decorations on him. His eyes were moist, but glad greetings flowed from his tongue, in an accent that would have put the most diffident speaker of English at his ease.

"Well, John Pritchard! Well, well! Indeed you have not grown any less! A lit-tle man like me, I hardly reach up to your shoulder! Aw-w-w, you look splen-did! I was spik-king of you a few days ago to the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs--but dear me, here am I neglecting the ladies--I tell you presently--How are you, Mrs. Gruffydd? This young man is never Eesaac Oliver! Aw-w-w, how he grows! Did you write the let-ter to me, Eesaac Oliver? That's the style! Education, knowledge--it is a grand thing!--Now, Dafydd Dafis! And how is the harp? You sing me _Y Gadlys_ by and by:

'_Mae cynhwrf yn y ceunant,
Ar derfyn dydd y gad_----'

--dear, dear, you have to go away before you can come home again! There is nothing like this over there; there is not the sym-pathy; as I was saying to the Member for Caermarthen, Mr. Hughes Caegwynion, not three, four days ago, 'You get no sym-pathy from England and the Englishman'--and indeed you do not.--Here comes Howell Gruffydd, run-ning (indeed he runs like a deer, Mrs. Gruffydd!).--Now, Howell Gruffydd, you miss the train if you don't look sharp (he's making so much money he cannot leave the shop for a min-nit!).--Now, my old friend William Morgan! How is the rheumatics?--How are you, Hugh?--Is this your youngest, Mrs. Roberts? Hwhat! Another since! Aw-w-w--and you more like an elder sister than a mother!... And there is the Trwyn, just the same----"

He was staying the night with John Pritchard, and the two moved away to the house, the others following a yard or two behind. Mr. Tudor Williams advanced to ancient Mrs. Pritchard's chair, took the hand that resembled a dead bird's foot, and shouted in her ear:

"You see I do not lose a min-nit before I come to see you, Mrs. Pritchard!" he cried in Welsh. ("Indeed she is a wonderful old 'ooman!)--How many grandchildren have you now, Mrs. Pritchard?" (The old woman nodded her aged head.) "Great-grandchildren! _No-o-o!_ Think of that! But I think you all live for ever at Llanyglo. It is not like London. If I could take bagsfull of this air back with me I make my for-tune!--Now, Miss Pritchard, I think I must have offended you, you are so long in spik-king to me! And how is all in school? I tell you press-ently something straight from the Board of Ed-u-ca-tion for you to try. You whisper a subject in the scholar's ear as he comes in at the door, and he walk straight to the middle of the room, no time for think-king, and speak for five minutes about it! That will make them ready speakers, hwhat? That will accustom them to public life and speaking in the Chapel? But I tell you later.--Now, my old friend John, if I could wash my hands before sitting down to a cup of tea--then we will talk----"

He was shown into the best bedroom, with the cork-framed funeral-cards and the cardboard watch-pockets on the walls, and the sound of his moving about and pouring out water and spluttering as he washed his face could be heard by those who waited below. Then he descended again and sat down.

"Well," he said by and by, from his place where he sat at the table alone, they respectfully yet proprietorially watching him eat and drink his tea, "now tell me about those matters in the letter you wrote.... I mean the other matters...."

But let us, before we pass to the other matters, look at the company that watched Mr. Tudor Williams eat.

First there was John Pritchard, sitting on the other side of the table with his hands upon his knees, and now and then turning his body a little aside and bowing his back to cough. There was John, stern religionist, believing in God and Disendowment; obstinate, dull, just, unsmiling; as ready for the Day of Judgment as if it had been the audit-day of the accounts he kept as principal trustee of the Baptist Chapel. For all that he was so rooted in Llanyglo that he had never travelled farther than Porth Neigr in the whole of his life, he was as ardent a supporter of Missionary Endeavour abroad as his voice was powerful at the Sasiwn at home. He watched Mr. Tudor Williams's plate, and with his thumb made signs for his daughter to replenish it.

Next, there was Howell Gruffydd, with his pale and studious son, Eesaac Oliver. You might have been sure even then that, should Llanyglo ever grow, Howell Gruffydd's fortune would grow with it. Howell considered a good penny worth the putting into his pocket, and, as if his apron (which, however, he had now left behind at the shop) had made half a housewife of him, he cared nothing, so it brought in money, whether he did a man's labour or washed up the dishes or black-leaded the grate. He could not read, but if at Porth Neigr a stranger chanced to ask him the way, he would smile and reply, "There is the signpost," allowing it to be understood that his questioner might read as well as he himself. Howell had his inner dream. It was of a shop with two large windows, and a bell inside the door, and brightly varnished showcards, and pyramids of tinned salmon, and peas within the window that should suggest the noses of children flattened against the pane, and handbills distributed in the streets, and two assistants, and a son at College, who should read for two, and perhaps--who knew?--sit while his constituents watched him eat his tea--Mr. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd, M.P.

Then, with his cap in his hands and his feet shifting nervously, there was Dafydd Dafis, next to Eesaac Oliver, on the sofa. Should purchases and rumoured purchases of land prove to be a portent, Dafydd had all to lose and nothing to gain by change. With that soft cruelty of his of which the hard and more profoundly sentimental Englishman knows nothing, Dafydd was at least disinterested. The Kerrs he had forborne to harm, but he only hated them the more on that account. He himself would not have killed one of the blue and primrose butterflies that in the summer hovered over the Llanyglo buffets of wild thyme, and he could not understand a country that said it was fond of animals and yet, like these Lancashire men, hunted rats with terriers and coursed hares with dogs. Alone of that nation he had for a time loved delicate little Minetta Garden, and had told her stories of fairies and had sung _Serch Hudol_ and _Mentra Gwen_ to her; but Minetta had gone. All the things for which Dafydd Dafis cared had gone, or were going, and Dafydd was lonely. He told his harp so, with those warped and stealing fingers, and the harp made music of his pain. All that Dafydd would gain by change would be memories that became ever the more poignant the more they were attenuated, and the less the world cared for him and his unprofitable life.

Passing constantly between Mr. Tudor Williams and the saucepan where the eggs boiled, or the plate in the fender where the lightcakes kept hot, was Miss Nancy (_nee_ Nansi) Pritchard, schoolmistress and virtual custodian of the Post Office. The development of Llanyglo, did that ever come to pass, would be a good thing for Nancy, for otherwise there was none in Llanyglo to marry her, and to domestic service elsewhere she could not have stooped. She was tall and plump and ruddy, with black hair and black-lashed blue eyes, and in her conversation she gave the preference to the longer words. She had been to school in Bangor, wore the longest skirts in Llanyglo, and between her and her father's guest was the bond of their common superiority to everybody else there. She was a _partie_, for John Pritchard was well-to-do; but for whom? Apparently for nobody whom Llanyglo had yet seen.

The remaining spectators, with the exception of old Mrs. Pritchard, who resembled a mummy rather than a spectator, partook in varying degrees of these same characteristics; and there at the table sat Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., of Ponteglwys, one of his eyes aflow with tears of sensibility while the other was glued to the main chance; Baptist, nationalist, and arguer by metaphor and analogy; an elocutionist, and a maker of elocutionists by that process of education that consists of giving a scholar a subject and bidding him straightway speak for five minutes upon it; and, above all, ever and again suggesting, by slight gesture or quick glance, that his secret thought was that there, in cap or corduroys, but for the Grace of God, went Mr. Tudor Williams of Ponteglwys....

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

"No more, no more indeed! It is the best bread and but-ter I have tasted since I was here before, but I should be ill in my stomach.--Dear me, John Pritchard, the happy hours I have spent in this room! '_Mid Pleas-sures and Palaces_'--indeed there is tears in my eyes when I see the dres-ser with the plates on it, and the jugs, and Mrs. Prit-chard's Bible in the window, just the same as when I was a boy!--Well, I have had a splen-did tea at all events, and if you will excuse me a min-nit I will return thanks for it.... Now, my friends!----"

Five minutes later, Mr. Tudor Williams, not so near to the Kerrs' Hafod that he had the appearance of specially watching it, nor yet so far from it but that he could see Ned Kerr and his brother Sam setting a rough window-sash into position, was once more shaking hands and patting shoulders and exchanging greetings with such of the men and women and children of Llanyglo as he had not yet seen.

And now that they had got him there they hardly knew what they wanted of him. That building exploit of the Kerrs having thrust the Inclosures Dispute a good deal into the background, and Dafydd Dafis's honourable if sullen refusal to injure men who had risked their lives with him having given that exploit itself a kind of condonation, it seemed as if their Member had merely come to a Sasiwn after all. But land had changed hands: they had a vague sense of impending change and of the discomfort of change; and, as they answered their Member's questions, the very presence in their midst of this man who moved behind the scenes of the drama of large events accentuated this feeling.

"What is he like, this one?" Mr. Tudor Williams asked, gently yet absent-mindedly patting big John Pritchard's back as he stooped to cough. They had been speaking of Terry Armfield.

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

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

You would not have supposed, from the way in which Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., asked the question that he merely sought to know how much _they_ knew. And it had not occurred to Llanyglo that these transfers of land might be, not an end, but only a beginning. Yet Mr. Tudor Williams had good, if private reasons, for knowing that this very land might soon be more than merely worth acquiring.... He was not deceiving them. It pleased them to think that their Member was the repository of weighty secrets, and he was merely indulging this simple and legitimate liking. But already he intended to go to Liverpool in order to find out what this Syndicate's plans really were. He wanted to know whether the Syndicate, in its turn, was aware of something else, something still very secret indeed, so secret that five minutes at certain keyholes might have been worth many thousands of pounds....

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

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

"Then perhaps he will let it stand; he is cracked in his head about old customs, and antiquities, and suchlike foolishness, when there is great work wait-ing to be done. It is not our business if he likes to let these people squat upon his land."

But here John Pritchard interposed heavily.

"But it is our business if they sing '_Thomas, make Room for your Uncle_' in the middle of prayers," he said.

"No-o-o!" exclaimed Mr. Tudor Williams, shocked. Perhaps also he wished to gain a little time; he had no wish to call upon Squire Wynne, either about this or anything else. "Don't tell me they did that!" he added.

"Indeed, they did," said John quickly.

"Aw-w-w!--But it is a Liberal maxim, John, and Radical, too, that force is no remedy. In my opinion our friend Dafydd here----" he put his arm affectionately about Dafydd Dafis's waist, "--was a lit-tle headstrong about burning the fences."

"I will not burn their house," said Dafydd sullenly. (By the way, had the case been altered, it is doubtful whether the Kerrs would have done as much for him.)

"Well--we can always take what the doc-tor told the man who wanted information for noth-thing to take--advice," said Mr. Tudor Williams.

"It would be better to see Mr. Wynne first," said John Pritchard. "If one comes others may come, and indeed I never saw such behaviour, no, not in a den of li-ons!"

They continued to discuss the matter, while, before their eyes, the Kerrs fitted their window-sash.

Yet it was curious to note how, within the bond of their passionate, if loquacious nationalism, each man was jealously for himself. It was not that their democracy was more conspicuously lacking in democrats than are other democracies; perhaps it was rather that the Welshman recognises two ties and two ties only--the tie of unity against the foreigner, and the private claim of his strong family affections. Between these two things is his void and vulnerable place. He has not set up for himself the Englishman's stiff and serviceable and systematised falsity of Compromise, that has no justification save that it works. He has his age-long tradition, but no daily rule that can (and indeed must) be applied without question. Each of his acts is his first act, and so a retail act. Because his hypocrisy lacks the magnificent scope of that of the Saxon, he bears the odium of a personal stealthiness. Thus, perhaps, it comes about that while too strict an adherence to the letter is the Englishman's ever-present danger, for his brother Celt the spirit slayeth. Noble dreams, petty acts; and here, if a little obscurely, may be hidden the reason why, when he seeks his fortune in London, his greatest successes are the minor successes of drapery and milk....

"Well," said Mr. Tudor Williams at last, "Wynne is a man of no ideas. He is only a pettifogging country Squire, whose views on the Land Question are ob-solete in _tot-to_. But if he harbours men that are a nuisance, as John Pritchard says, perhaps it would be better if I went to see him----"

Nevertheless, he had no intention whatever of doing so. The truth was that the Squire's views on the Land Question were too obsolete altogether. They were so obsolete that he had sold when (as first Edward Garden had known, and now Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., knew) he ought to have held; and it was for Mr. Tudor Williams to profit by his error if he could, rather than to call his attention to it. He was very far from being a wealthy man.

VIII

THELEMA

Because Terry Armfield, believing in his idea, would not have abated one jot of it for all the money in Liverpool, therefore he got all the money he wanted. This--alas!--is not optimism, nor a hardy belief that merit infallibly meets with its deserts in this world; it merely means that a number of businessmen with rudimentary consciences were willing to pay a kind of hedging-premium on the off-chance of being, after all, on the side of Terry and the angels. It is astonishing how often your visionary can get money out of your man of affairs when another man of affairs would fail.

And, even as the man who chatted to the author of the _Sixpenny Guide_ said, Terry was only a few years before his time. The things he dreamed of have not come to pass yet, but they are confidently promised to-morrow. As happy as the day was long, he was merely setting up the City that is not built with hands, and lighting it with the Light that never was. And if the "_Thelema Estate Development Company_" had done nothing else, it did, at any rate, put an end to that dispute that had begun when Dafydd Dafis had pulled down fences and burned them in his beautiful Red Dragon of a bonfire.

But, over and above that, it did leave its little mark on Llanyglo--a fleeting mark, laughable, bathetic, sad, hauntingly vacant, and lunatic (as Mr. Tudor Williams would have said) "_in tot-to_." Come to that little office near St. George's Hall, Liverpool, and see Terry Armfield in the closing stages of his minding of Llanyglo.

He not only conceived his Thelema; he drew the plans of it as well. He drew them on drawing-paper, on tracing-paper, on note-paper and bill-heads and the backs of envelopes. A paper-weight, with a knob in the shape of a clenched fist grasping a short staff, kept half a hundred of his hasty drafts from flying off again into the air that gave them birth. And he added to them day by day, almost hour by hour.... Forty or forty-five or fifty houses, say, each with its little plot for private meditation and repose, yet sharing in common among them a spacious pleasaunce where friend should meet friend and none but friends should come--that was the idea. A fair wide Way, with the mountains looking down its perspective to where gentle steps led down to the tawny sand--that was the idea. A wall all about it, or a ha-ha perhaps, not as against trespass, but as a symbol that here was an Isle that the tides of the care and of the trouble of the world did not invade--a shining and galleried chamber where light and happy laughter should rise to the groining of the roof (dim blue with gilt stars), and should echo and linger there as if the fane itself whispered--that was the idea. None of it existed, none of it was ever likely to exist; but without some such dreaming our life on earth is little worth. The people who put up the real money for it laughed at it, and laughed at Terry when he had gone, but humoured him while he was there as a nuisance, but a gentle one. If they lost their money there would, at any rate, be a good many of them in company, the land was exceedingly cheap, and they need not begin to build upon it till they pleased. Besides, by taking shares in his Thelema they had bought Terry off. When he came with his other wild and beautiful schemes they could say, "No, no, Terry, we'll see how Thelema turns out first," and pass him on to somebody else. That alone was worth the money.

Then there came to Terry one day a man who not only did not laugh at him, but grasped him by the hand, patted him all up the arm and across the breast as if he conferred invisible decorations upon him, gave Thelema his blessing, and said, in moved tones, "Indeed it is splen-did--splen-did--without vis-ion the people perish-eth." He told Terry that his name was Tudor Williams, and that he was the parliamentary representative of the constituency a portion of which Terry and the gods on high were developing. He did not ask outright for anything. He told Terry that, while he himself was a good Radical, believing that God made the land for the people, nevertheless, in this imperfect world things had to be done a lit-tle at a time, and his principal objection to the (temporary) private ownership of land was that it was too often in the wrong hands. If it could be put into the right hands much of the ini-quit-ty would disappear, whatever. Then, when he came to inform Terry that in his opinion he could be of great use to the Estate, he told him also that he was far from being a wealthy man, and that his usefulness must be set off as against the cost of any interest Terry might think fit to confer upon him....