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The first motive of every living creature must be to realise its own identity—to fight for itself against the cruelty of life, while die second motive of all conscious souls turned about towards the others.

One-two . . . One-two . . . went the heartbeat of the world! Was there a third pulse there that no one could yet hear? Why was it that Sam suddenly leapt up in great excitement to his feet? His fingers had encountered in the darkness at the foot of the post, an iron chain! This chain was not fastened to the ring, else he would have detected it before. It was fastened round the bottom of the post, so that it lay hidden in the grass. Sam crawled forward on his hands and knees following the course of the chain and he soon became aware of something floating on the water to which it was attached. From what he could discern, down there in the dark flow, it was a small black coal-barge. This accounLed for the constant gurglings and suckings that he had been aware of for some time, and by which his ear, trained to the river sounds as it was, had been obscurely fretted.

Hastily he rose to his feet and scrambling down the bank stepped into the barge. Yes! It still had some coal in it; and Sam could detect from the sharp turpentine smell that it had been newly tarred. There was a half-empty coal sack at one end; and groping with his fingers he turned this over on its side and sat down upon it, with his back against the barge's stern. The tarry smell was overpowered as he rested here by the smell of the river, and soon the flapping-up of some biggish bird—it wasn't a moor-hen, he knew that, but it wasn't large enough for a heron—gave him a desire to think out in his mind exactly what his geographical position was; for this would be a help to establishing the identity of that bird.

It was a habit natural to Sam and strengthened by long association with his father to take his bearings, as he called it: but at this juncture it did not seem as easy as usual to grasp the lay of the land as he sat in this barge. But he got it at last to his satisfaction. He was about half a mile northeast of Cradle Bridge Farm and about half a mile southwest of Cold Harbour Bridge where Young Tewsy had showed him that fish. If that bird, which may have been a stray wild duck, had flown due west from where he sat, it would have passed over the roofs of the villages of Cat-cott and Chilton-upon-Polden, and hit the swampy estuaries of the Parrett, somewhere about the centre of Horsey Level where the great Sedgemoor Drain flows into them.

All these places lay behind him as he sat in that barge on the Brue, for his face was turned directly towards the three eminences of the Isle of Glastonbury, Wirral Hill, Chalice Hill, and the Tor. Thus rested Sam Dekker; and then—without a second's warning—the earth and the water and the darkness cracked. . . . Whence it came, whether it came of its own volition and whether it was that same transformation of matter, which had been afEecting him so of late, carried one degree further, Sam never knew; but he knew what was happening to him, and he knew it without the least doubt or question.

What he saw was at first accompanied by a crashing pain. That was the word Sam himself thought of to express it—the word crashing. But as the vision clarified before him and grew distinct this pain died away. But it was dazzling, hurting, blinding, at first, and it was associated in his mind with the sense of a sharp, long-shaped thing piercing his guts. His sensation was indeed strangely definite. The pain was so overwhelming that it was as if the whole of Sam's consciousness became the hidden darkness of his inmost organism; and when this darkness was split, and the whole atmosphere split, and the earth and the air split, what he felt to be a gigantic spear was struck into his bowels and struck from below.

He had ceased to be a man sitting on a coal sack at the stern of a barge. He had become a bleeding mass of darkness- His consciousness was a dark surface of water; and up through this water, tearing it, rending it, dividing it, turning it into blood, shivered this crashing stroke, this stroke that was delivered from abysses of the earth, far deeper than the bottom of the Brue.

Whatever this “spear” was that struck him, to his whole ani> mal nature quivering under it, it was as much the shock of something totally unknown, something new to human experience, outrageous in its strangeness, that tore so at his vitals, as the crashing pain that it brought with it

But when the vision appeared, and it came sailing into the midst of this bleeding darkness that was Sam's consciousness, healing everything, changing everything, each detail of what he saw he saw with a clearness that branded it forever upon his brain. He saw a globular chalice that had two circular handles. The substance it was made of was clearer than crystal; and within it there was dark water streaked with blood, and within the water was a shining fish.

Sam's first thought was: “This is the Grail! This is the Grail! It has come back to Glastonbury!” His second thought was: “I must tell Father and Nell about this.” His third thought was more realistic; and it was one so congruous with his deepest being that the mere fact that he had had it—when he remembered the whole thing—put the seal of authenticity upon his vision. He thought in his heart: “What is that fish? It is a Tench. Surely it is a Tench!”

So anxious did he become to ascertain, before it vanished away, that this Ichthus out of the Absolute was what he thought it was, that Sam actually struggled up to his feet and cried the question aloud—“Christ!” he groaned in a harsh, queer voice that resembled the voice of a priest speaking from a scaffold. “Is it a Tench?”

He had been deriving such transports of late from rubble and mud and stones, that to see Christ in the form of a Tench seemed at that moment perfectly natural. He had read nothing of the Grail legends; so that it was no half-consciousness that all the successful Grail-seers cried out some crucial question, that tore from him these words.

Whole-hearted was Sam's groan to the Mystery, carried southward against the flowing waters of the Brue and westward across its mud-banks, towards Cradle Bridge Farm. It rose from his pity; it rose from his new insight into pain; it rose from that blood-stained umbel-cord across the gulf between his own ecstasies and the anguish he had glimpsed. It rose from the quick of his being, where life itself was strangling pity lest pity strangle life in the ultimate contest. It was the final desperate cry of humanity to the crushing, torturing universe that had given it birth.

Is it a Tench? Is there a fish of healing, one chance against all chances, at the bottom of the world-tank? Is it a Tench? Is cruelty always triumphant, or is there a hope beyond hope, a Something somewhere hid perhaps in the twisted heart of the cruel First Cause itself and able to break in from outside and smash to atoms this torturing chain of Cause and Effect?

The crystal goblet with the two curved handles was quite close to him now. He could see the darkness in the throat of the shining fish balanced motionless in its centre, but because of its position he could not see the Creature's eyes.

“Is it a Tench?” And then all at once it began to fade away. He felt sure afterwards that it was not his leaping to his feet or his raising his voice as he did, that made it vanish and he stood there in crushed humility like a man who says to himself: “It cannot be I who have seen this! It is a mistake; it was surely meant for another!”

But after he had remained, pondering upon what he had seen, for the space of five or six minutes, he clambered up out of the barge and with one final glance backward at the waters of the Brue, which looked exactly as they had looked before, he made his way slowly back to Manor House Road and to his room at the top of the Old Malt House.

It was a Saturday when Sam had his vision of the Grail and his first instinct was to take what he had seen and to plunge back with it into the ordinary routine of his new life. He must, however, tell his father and Nell about it. “I'll go to the Vicarage,59 he thought, ”'tomorrow night, when Father's mind will be free from his work and ready to listen.“ And then he thought: ”1 must tell everyone about it. It was a pure chance that it appeared to me. It has come back to Glastonbury. Many will see it now!"

He remembered that he had promised to go to Backwear Hut in the course of the next day and help old Abel Twig doctor himself. He had been over there several times of late and had found the old man so grievously afflicted with constipation that he wanted help with an enema. “I'll do that first,” he thought, “and then we'll see! It's lucky tomorrow's Sunday.”

Too excited to go to bed he spent half that night washing and scrubbing; and completely exhausted, when the work was over, sank down on his camp-bed under the window and slept till the bells of St. John's roused him in the morning. His window opened due west, and over the roofs of several barns and pigsties he could see the willows of the Brue bordering upon Lake Village Field. He could also see the telegraph posts of the Burnham and Evercreech Railway, and the white, winding road leading to Meare.

He noticed as soon as he was awake by the way St. John's bells were answered by St. Benignus' bells, and these again by many chapel bells from outlying districts, that it was for the regular morning service that they were ringing. It was half-past ten then! He had indeed slept long and deep. He gathered his pillow into a tight lump and sat propped up in bed, staring out of the window into a windless atmosphere of delicate haze, where a vague diffusion of sunlight floated upon the undispersed ditch-vapours and a sweet, rather sickly smell of mud came up from "the meadows.

It was the sort of Sunday morning he had known so well all his life—the typical Glastonbury Sunday. He could hear the shuffling of the feet of the passers-by, some of them going to church, some of them strolling out to enjoy themselves, many of them just drifting round to some favourite bridge, or low stone wall, or tavern-side bench, where they might meet a crony or two and discuss life.

The absence of the ordinary sounds of week-day work was something much more than a negation. It was a positive essence. It wrapt itself around Sam, soothing, drowsing, lulling him. One after another as he lay there, came memory pictures out of his past.

But full as he was of quite other intentions than the recalling of mere memory pictures, he soon broke the spell and jumped out of bed. Washing himself on his knees by his basin I for he had no washing stand) he made his preparations for breakfast. Over his tea package, his half loaf, his sugar, his butter, his tin oi golden syrup, Sam had placed upside-down, a large earthenware bowl. Milk, though he had previously always drunk it with his tea, he had decided to give up altogether; and this resolution simplified his housekeeping a great deal. A small tin receptacle he now placed over a tiny methylated stove and filling it with water from his jug, for he had no water-bottle, he lit the flame beneath it. Then rising from his knees he spread out bread, butter, sugar, tea upon the three-legged table, picking up these objects from the scrubbed floor where they had been covered by the earthenware bowl. From the broad window-sill he now took his knife, his spoon, his cup, his saucer, and his plate, and arranged them with the utmost nicety upon the three-legged table.

No prayer did Sam utter, whether ecclesiastical or traditional, but having made his tea he sat down on his kitchen chair and began pulling his loaf to pieces, crust and crumb, in great untidy-lumps, and with a hungry and simple satisfaction; dabbing the butter upon these pieces with his knife and the treacle with his teaspoon.

As he ate, Sam's thoughts concentrated themselves upon what he had resolved to do now that he had seen the Grail. He had resolved to obey that “externalised soul” of his in every least detail, and just see where it led him! If it led him to more and more suffering, well and good. If it led him to some secret revelation of blinding happiness, all the better! But for weal or for woe it was the command of his soul that he intended to follow.

As he went on chewing the sticky, buttery morsels and licking the tips of his fingers, and obscurely wishing that methylated stoves held a little more hot water, he thought about the change that had come over his conception of his tortured God since he had begun his new life on that day he took Mad Bet home from Wirral Hill.

“In those days,” he thought, “He was a tangible Person, a Person living in Space and Time, a Person conscious of my identity. But now He is different. I don't quite know what He is now. But I have seen the Grail and I shall find out what He is!”

Rising impatiently from the table, feeling still thirsty, and anxious to wash the sweetness of treacle out of his gullet, he filled his minute tin kettle with cold water from his jug and poured it down his throat. Then he opened a fresh packet of Player's Navy Cut cigarettes—for he was troubled with no ascetic scruples about smoking—and striking a match, which he was careful to .throw out of the window rather than upon his newly scrubbed floor, he flung himself down upon his ricketty little couch and continued his meditations.

“I've got to face it,” he said to himself. “I've seen the Grail, and I've got to face it. He's been dead and buried for two thousand years.”

Two thousand years? But even as he shaped this thought there rose up and stood in the frame of his closed door, as if it were open, the Figure of the personality he denied. Piercing the ice-cold, frozen darkness of more death-levels than a universe of dead suns, this Figure—harder to visualise than Time or Eternity for it contains the essence of both—gazed upon the man on the bed.

“Have it as thou wilt, my child!”

Sam listened to the bells for a moment. “But of course that's not putting it right,” he thought “What He has become is a power in ourselves that sets itself up contra mundum cruaelem, against the whole bloody world! Everybody feels it, and now that I've seen the Grail, it's got me by the throat! Man buried Him and Man has brought Him out of his Tomb. That's what the Grail means!”

He stared out at the vague, misty, translucent landscape, shot with fluctuating sun-streaks and sun-patches. His thoughts kept contradicting each other. “Christ is in the Stones and in the Water; it is Jesus who is dead and buried. There's something in Nature that has turned against Nature and is escaping from Nature. There's a Christ in matter that is nearer the Grail than the Christ of the Church.”