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"Don't interrupt me, Comrades from Wells! This is only half my plan. As you all know this is the year for the election of our Mayor. Geard is a fool. But he is a well-meaning fool. He is sympathetic to our cause. He is almost one of us. He is furthermore the sort of man that could be persuaded into anything! I have myself the entree into his house ... I needn't say any more at this moment . . . and if this Quarterly Meeting of the Comrades of Wells and Glastonbury delegated me to approach him as their representative, I believe there would be a good chance of persuading him. We would have to make his name prominent— that's what all bourgeois philanthropists want—to be talked of, to be heard of! The Comrades on the Town Council would then propose him for Mayor—to succeed that prize ass, Wollop. Nothing would please him better than to be proposed for Mayor. With Geard as Mayor, and the Party behind the Mayor, we might municipalise the water, the gas, the electricity and finally these factories! This, Comrades, is simply common sense. Some Comrades here may object that this is a wild-goose scheme; that in proposing it to them I am departing from practical politics. Let such Comrades bethink themselves a little! Here is this sum of money, inherited by this incredible fool who wants to spend it on being talked about. Why should not we elect him Mayor when the elections come on? No Party but our Party would bother with such a catspaw. But that's just why we must win in the end. Because we despise no means!

The Conservatives of course will oppose him. But the Liberals and Labour men will support us if we take a strong lead. That's the great thing; to take a strong, clear lead! Half the Town Council are sick to death of Wollop. He's been Mayor of Glaston-bury so long that everyone wants a change. The drinking men would all vote for Bloody Johnny, just for the sport of it and to stir things up. All the Nonconformists would vote for him. Crow hates the mere thought of the fellow. Crow will get angry and say wild things and make some howling blunder; and then the Town Council, with our Party in the background, will have Glas-tonbury in their------"

It was clear to Mr. Evans, who had begun at last to grow seriously interested in this discourse when he realized how closely it concerned “his relative, Mr. Geard” that the meeting had called the speaker to order and shouted him down. Some other voice was speaking now in cold, low, sarcastic tones. Evans caught the words “personal ambition,” “fancy scheme,” “fairy-tale poppycock,” “wasting the Party's funds,” “Menshevik-claptrap.” He even imagined he heard the name of “Crummie” coupled with a very gross epithet. The Quarterly Meeting evidently regarded itself as free from eavesdroppers and was permitting its speakers untrammelled licence. After a while Red Robinson's voice was audible again. Evans had met him once at the Geards' and was sure he was not mistaken as to his identity.

This time it was clear that the cockney orator was trying to carry the day by an emotional appeal. “We shall never have such a chance again, Comrades,” he was saying. “Geard is a fool but Geard has a good heart. By electing Geard as Mayor we shall be electing ourselves into the power behind the throne. And what could we not achieve then? Away with all these mediaeval superstitions! Away with all these pious Pilgrimages! Glastonbury is. only one town among other towns. There's nothing wonderful about Glastonbury but the health and freedom and happiness of its men, its women, its children! While this fellow Crow exploits the natural resources to his own profit, and while our bourgeois tradesmen exploit all this mediaeval superstition to their profit, what becomes of the real men and women, able-bodied Somersetshire men and comely Somersetshire women? They can't afford meat or butter! They can't afford fresh eggs! Their children are underfed. Look at them, Comrades! Look at the children in Beck-ery and Bove Town. Look at the children in Benignus Alley! and Paradise! There you have the whole issue! On the one hand Crow and Wollop exploiting the people's bodies; on the other these pious mountebanks exploiting their souls! And all these fine bourgeois gentry, Lawyer Beere, Doctor Fell, Parson Dekker and so on; and old Wollop the wTorst of all; what are they doing? They are burning toy candles to the 'oly Grail! Yes, they are burning incense while women and children haven't enough to eat! I tell you, Comrades, Geard is our man. I've talked to him already ... I have already ... I needn't go into that . . . though the Comrade from Wells did use insulting language I scorn to answer him. ... I have already a certain influence over Geard through his favorite daughter. . . . IVe already made Geard see the light upon many economic points ... I have already made Geard open his mind to many bourgeois tricks. Geard has had the working-class mentality opened up to him. It is the Comrade from Wells, not I, who has departed from the Party's principles in his abuse of me and Geard. The time has come for real action. The election of the Mayor comes on in a few weeks. We can't elect one of ourselves Mayor. The Comrade from Wells knows that perfectly well. But we could elect Geard; and then work the Council through Geard. My plan is not a wild-goose plan; it's a carefully thought-out scheme based upon psychology. That is the reason, no doubt, why the Comrade from Wells found it so hard to understand!”

Mr. Evans heard uproarious laughter

When Mr. Evans was at length in bed, with the little table and one of his two candles convenient to his hand, he proceeded, while he smoked his final cigarette, to take stock of wThat he had overheard. “I shall tell Cordelia all they are plotting,” he said to himself. “But I don't see why they shouldn't elect my relative Mayor. I think he would make a very good Mayor.” And before the Welshman's mind, as he squeezed out the fiery embers of his cigarette on a broken china saucer that he had brought up from the shop below, there floated an exciting dream of a communistic Glastonbury, presided over by his relative Geard; a Glastonbury in which he himself would play a sort of court-magician part and with Cordelia—that free spirit of the Cymric race—inaugurating the laws and regulations! As he finally turned over to the wall and shut his eyes, he felt happier, thinking of this, than he had felt for many a long week. “If these working-men decide upon this,” he thought, “I suppose it'll really happen. I wonder whether it's the Town Council, or the Church, or the Government that gives a person leave to excavate?” He saw himself possessed of John Crow's hazel-stick with its queer root-handle. He remembered how John had assured him that with such a stick a person could find anything buried in the earth.

“Hie jacet Arturus . . . Hie jacet . , . Arturus , . . Hie jacet . . . hie . . .”

CARBONEK

TWO OR THREE DAYS AFTER THE QUARTERLY MEETING ABOVE Old Jones' shop, the Bove Town robber band, that is to say Captain Jackie and his infantile followers, were deploying, if such a word may be used for the movements of so diminutive a troop, in loose marching order up the narrow Godney Road. They had left all the decent houses far behind when they debouched from the Wells Road. They had long ago passed the drive-gates of The Elms where Philip Crow lived. They were now on the edge of what was called Common Moor and were not far from Backwear Farm which is the site of the British Lake Village. The road they followed did not carry much traffic along its hard, tarred surface; but the weather was so warm that the robber band was exhausted. The air would have been dusty if the road had not been so polished and so hard, but wherever the brown earth showed between the clumps of rough grass by the roadside it was dry and sapless and unsympathetic and depressing. The day was one of those early Spring days that for some mysterious reason, very hard to analyse, are felt to be ill-omened and unpleasant. Something was certainly wrong with this day! All animal nerves felt it. All human nerves felt it. All living things were irritable, restless, disturbed; sick without being sick; sad without being sad; annoyed without any apparent cause for annoyance!

Sis was already carrying Bert on her back. “Plo-chuck . . . plo-chuck . . .” went her sturdy legs, under the weight of the complacent and impervious infant Nelly and Jackie were a little in advance; but even they were walking in single file, silent and grim. Nothing but the indomitable will of Captain Jackie could have kept this exhausted cortege on the move; or brought it so far afield on that nervous, touchy, irritable March afternoon.

At last they came to a standstill by a low, ancient, broken iron railing which separated an object from the Godney Road. This object could hardly be called a house. It was a tiny, little, stucco building of two storeys, each with two windows, one looking towards the road and one looking away from the road. The stucco was of a whitish-yellowish colour and was peeling off. It was stained here and there, too, with stains of a rusty brown. Only an expert in the decline of material substance under weather invasions could have interpreted these stains. They were not lichen. They were not moss. They looked like rusty blood; but they could not have really been blood; for no one would have thrown blood against the wall of a house eight or nine feet from the ground? Weather stains they obviously were, of chemical origin; but this did not lessen the strangeness of the fact that these rusty stains upon this stucco house had seen fit to assume the surprising shape of a map of North and South America.

On the left-hand side of this tiny house was an open shed, one portion of which served as the roosting-place for half a dozen white fowls who were now wandering in the adjoining field.

At the back of the house was one of those large dykes or rhynes on the edge of which grew three pollarded willows; and between this little stream and the back door of the one single ground-floor room there was a small vegetable garden, the leafy promise of which was a good deal further advanced above the loamy clay than in either of the grand bourgeois gardens tended by Mr. Weatherwax.

Seated in his shed, sharpening a faggot of sticks for the support of his young peas, crouched the owner of Backwear Hut, a very old man called Abel Twig.

No sooner did Jackie catch sight of Mr. Twig than he caused his lieutenant Nelly to proclaim a halt.

It was not difficult to obtain obedience to this command, so exhausted was the main body of the Alley Gang; and Bert, slipping like a sack of flour from the back of Sis, was soon propped up against the iron railings, through which his round eyes stared in wonder at the map of North and South America.

The small hands of Jackie, Nelly and Sis clung in a row to the topmost railing of Mr. Twig's sole line of defense while the hat-less heads of Jackie, Nelly, and Sis looked down in unabashed curiosity upon the interior of Mr. Twig's shed.

“Hullo!” cried Jackie in a shrill voice. “Hullo, Number One!”

In every town of the size of Glastonbury there are produced by great creative Nature certain laughing-stock?, or butts of derision, for the amusement of the rabble. Old Jones of the Antiquity Shop—now in the local hospital—and Old Twig, now before us in his shed, were the butts of Glastonbury. Thev were bosom cronies, these two old men, and not a child in the poorer district but had not at one time or other followed these queer ones down the street mocking and shouting. They were always called Number One and Number Two; and so widely spread were these nicknames that in some of the bewildered heads of the contemporaries of Young Bert the two great excretory functions of our poor animal organism, so prominent in children's lives, were confusedly associated with these venerable old persons.

"Hullo, Number One!'9 repeated Jackie.

“Number Two be in Orspital!” echoed Nelly.

“Bert wants a glass o' water, Bert do,” added Sis in a less combative voice.

“What did I tell 'ee, eh? What did I tell 'ee, ye young sea-mooches? I told 'ee yesternight I'd set Bumboggle at ye if ye came again. Hi there! Good dog! Hi there! Hi there, Bumboggle! Hi! Bumboggle! Ye girt sleepy beast! Come and eat up these three impidents!”

Captain Jackie did not budge. Lieutenant Nelly did not flinch. It is impossible, however, to conceal the fact that after this alarming invocation there were only five little hands clutching the railings. Sis, concerned for Bert, had thrown one arm round her small brother's neck. Bert himself, however, to the honour of the Alley Gang, replied to the challenge in a momentous sentence.

“I baint afeard o' no fancy dogs, I baint.”

“Bert wants a glass o' water, Number One, Bert do!” repeated Sis in a singsong monotone.

“Oh, he does, does he?” growled Old Twig. “I'll water him. I'll firk him! I'll ferret him! Oh, he does, does he?”

Talking to himself all the time in the manner of a ferocious ogre, Old Twig got up and retired into that square object which went by the name of Backwear Hut. He returned almost immediately with a tin cup, full of water, which he handed to Bert between the-railings, not relinquishing it himself, but tilting it up, while the child drank long and deep. No sooner had the old man returned to his shed and his task of whittling his pea-sticks than Nelly lifted up her high-pitched voice.

“Tell us some more about they funny men what lived in Lake Village in your grand-dad's time.”

Muttering and chuckling the old man moved up to the railings and leaning over tried to lift Bert across. But Bert, far too heavy for him, was already pushing himself under the lowest bar. The three older children were now scrambling over the top of the railings; and in about three minutes after their first “Hullo” they were all seated at Old Twig's feet in the front of his shed listening spellbound to what he was saying.