As it happened, John Willie did not go off fishing on the morrow. He expected that Minetta would be in bed when he got home, but as he passed up the path he saw a light burning high in the front of the house. It was in the room beneath that date-stone under which he had once put a sixpence, and that room, because of its high and uninterrupted view of the sea, was one of the guest-chambers. He wondered who had come.
His supper was laid in the dining-room, but he did not want it, and so passed straight upstairs. As he turned along the landing to his own room he heard a door opened on the floor above, and his sister called "Is that you?" He answered, entered his bedroom, and began to undress.
But he had scarcely got his boots unlaced when there came a tap at the door, and Minetta entered. Her dark hair was in plaits, she wore a wrap over her nightdress, and she carried on her hip a tray with two claret-stained glasses and a salver with a cut cake. Evidently there had been a girls' bedroom orgie.
"Who's come?" John Willie asked, throwing aside his second boot.
"June Lacey. You knew she was coming," Minetta answered accusingly.
"No, I didn't—first I've heard of it."
"You never hear anything when you're reading a newspaper. I told you at breakfast this morning, and that she was going to wire the time of the train. And you were out, and I had to leave everything and go and meet her myself."
"Sorry," John Willie grunted. He remembered now. "I mean, I didn't gather it was to-day."
"Well, I hope you'll manage to spare her an hour or two now that she's here," Minetta said a little crossly. "I did tell her to come just whenever she wished, and she didn't know the Wakes were coming on."
"All right," John Willie yawned. "I was going fishing, that's all; but I won't if you don't want. How long's she staying?"
"At least a fortnight. So don't say I haven't told you that. And do try to be in just occasionally. Have you had supper?"
"I didn't want any, thanks. Sorry I forgot, Min. Say good night to June for me."
Five minutes later he had turned out the gas and tumbled into bed.
Except that she postponed his escape from ennui for a day or two, June's arrival was a matter of indifference to him. He had known her for so long that he regarded her almost as if she had been a split-off portion of Minetta herself, that happened to possess its own apparatus of speech and locomotion. He could no more have said whether she was pretty than he could have said whether Minetta was pretty. It was no trouble to talk to June. As much talk as was necessary came of itself. He had only to say "You remember so-and-so——" or "Like that time when——" and conversation sustained itself out of a hundred trifles desultorily familiar to both of them. That, at any rate, was a comfort. With anybody new he would have had to take a certain amount of trouble. With June it didn't matter.
So, at breakfast the next morning, he did not actually read the newspaper as he ate, but he threw out a remark from time to time as it were over the edge of an imaginary newspaper, and then asked June what she would like to do that morning. When she replied that she wanted him to do just whatever he had intended to do, he even hoisted himself to the level of a little ceremoniousness, and told her that he had no plans at all save to amuse her—what about a bathe, the morning Concert in the Pavilion, a drive in the afternoon, and so on? By keeping to this beaten track of enjoyment, he could, at one and the same time, be entertaining June and keeping an eye open for that gipsy girl who haunted his imagination.
"A bathe?" said June.... "Oh, of course! How stupid of me! I'd forgotten there was mixed bathing here now. What a change!... Wasn't there a frightful row about it?"
There had been a row, but it had been short and sharp. Briefly, Blackpool and Douglas and Llandudno had settled the matter for them, and, after a protest for conscience's sake—and also a little more well-judged absenteeism—even Howell Gruffydd, now Chairman of the Council, and John Pritchard, a Councillor in his second year, had yielded. A portion of the shore had been set apart for this "playing with fire," but within a year even this had become a dead letter. The only thing that now distinguished this portion of the beach from the rest was a certain heightened jocundity in the advertisements on the sides of the bathing-machines at that spot. The virtues of Pills and Laxatives were a little more loudly announced there, and this heartiness and lack of false shame culminated in a long hoarding that was erected on one of the groynes, and bore on one side the legend "THE NAKED TRUTH" (which was that Somebody's Remedies were the Best), and on the other the words "TO THE PURE" (who were warned against Fraudulent Imitations). For the rest folk now bathed where they would.
So, idly, John Willie told June of the town's struggle between its principles and its living, and then they rose from the table. When June heard that Minetta wasn't coming with them she wanted to stay behind and help; but Minetta persuaded her that she would only be in the way, and that anyway she couldn't help her with her painting; and presently, with towels and costumes, she and John Willie went forth and, after a casual discussion about its being rather soon after breakfast to bathe, descended to the beach.
June was certainly a pretty enough girl for even a fastidious young man to be seen about with. No neater shoes than those that moved beneath the gypsophylla of her petticoats were to be seen on the whole Promenade, and she held her longish figure trimly, and was almost on the "fast" side with her little thin switch of a cane. She was an inch taller than John Willie, too, which was another inch of smartness to be seen walking with. He found her a bathing-machine and secured another for himself; and when, presently, they lay on their backs side by side a hundred yards farther out from the shore than anybody else, with the sun hot on their faces and their eyes blinking up at the intense blue, they continued to talk as they had talked before—of who had been to Llanyglo lately and who had not, and of what had become of Mrs. Maynard, and whether anybody had seen Hilda Morrell lately, and whether that London man—what was his name—Mr. Ashton—had been heard of since. John Willie, for his part, asked how Mrs. Lacey and Wiggie were, and told June what a lot was thought of her father's laying out of the Kursaal Gardens, and asked her when the work was expected to be finished.
Then they came in again, dressed, and regained the Promenade.
John Willie was surprised to find how quickly the morning went. The Concert was half over by the time they reached the Pavilion, and when the Concert was over and the drub-drub on the boards of the Pier became incessant, June said that, build as they would, it would be a long time before they built on the Trwyn. To that John Willie replied that he wasn't so sure, and told her of how at one time it had been a toss-up whether they wouldn't make a terrace there and build the "Imperial" on it; and June's reply was that she would never have thought it. Then John Willie looked at his watch, and at first thought it must have stopped, the time had flown so. They turned their faces to the Promenade again, and at a Booking Kiosk John Willie ordered a landau for half-past two. Minetta (he told June) would have finished her work by then, and the three of them could go either out Abercelyn way, or through Porth Neigr and round home, or along the Delyn road, just as June wished. June said that if she really had her choice, she would like the Abercelyn drive, because it was years since she had been there, and she would like to see how much it had altered.
So out towards Abercelyn the three of them went that afternoon, and June's eyes opened wide at the Sarn manganese sidings, and John Willie told her to mind that gypsophylla of her petticoats against the coal-heaps and grease-boxes of the wagons. Then back in the landau again, he took a well-earned rest while Minetta and June talked. He leaned back against the hot leather, and smoked and watched them, and wondered, first, whether anybody would ever marry Minetta, and, next, whether anybody would ever marry June, and then all at once found himself wondering about the gipsy girl again.
Suppose he should take seats for June and Minetta at some entertainment that evening, should see them comfortably settled, and should then go out for another look for her?...
But, now that he knew who she was, he thought of her, somehow, ever so slightly differently. He was no less set on finding her; indeed he was more set; but part of the possible surprise and excitement had certainly gone. Had he apparently not been destined not to see her again, the thing would have been less of an adventure than he had at first supposed. There would have been far fewer discoveries to make. It might even have been difficult to talk to her. He could talk pleasantly to June and be thinking of something else all the time; but he could hardly have asked Ynys Lovell how her mother was getting on with her chair-mending and fortune-telling, or have told her that he had heard that her kinsman Dafydd Dafis had won the "penillion" contest at the Eisteddfod....
Ah!——
Again he had it, and, lying back on the hot leather of the hired landau, wondered that he had not had it sooner. Of course—Dafydd Dafis. If anybody knew where she was, Dafydd would know.Thatwas what he would do that evening while Minetta and June were at the Concert. He would take a stroll to Dafydd's house (which was no longer the single-roomed cottage near the old Independent Chapel, but a two-roomed one in Maengwyn Street), and he would sit down and have a smoke and ask Dafydd how all was with him....
At this point he became conscious that June was speaking to him. She was offering him a penny for his thoughts. Instantly he fell into the rut of easy conversation again. It took him hardly a moment to find a topic.
"Eh?" he said.... "Oh!—You can have them for nothing. I was just thinking of that place of the Kerrs in Pontnewydd Street. I suppose you've heard all about that?"
"No, I've not heard a word," June declared. "Do tell me!"
After all, it was but a step from his real thought to the narrative he now told June. Between Dafydd Dafis and Tommy Kerr was now the association of an all but declared feud, which would break out into open enmity the moment anything happened to Tommy's brother Ned. More than any man in Llanyglo Dafydd had writhed at that wonderful building of the Hafod Unos, and since then he had remembered something else that had set him darkly flushing. It had been Tommy Kerr (or one of his boon companions—it came to the same thing) who, when Dafydd had returned rapt after the first day of the Eisteddfod, had cast two-pence on the ground and had drunkenly demanded a song. Yes, that remark, scarce heard at the time, had come back since. They had offered him, Dafydd, their dirty dross in exchange for Song, and had bidden him stoop to pick it up....
And that mortal insult had reminded Dafydd of an older memory still. This was, that of the four Kerrs, Tommy had been the only one who had not tumbled into that open boat when that chilling cry of "Llongddrylliad!" had sounded on that stormy night years and years before. That that had not been Tommy's fault mattered nothing; as soon as Dafydd had remembered this he had felt himself released from the last shadow of an obligation. It was another stick to beat Tommy with and "beating him" now meant, as everybody knew, waiting until his brother died and then "purring" him out of the Hafod, if not by fair means, then—well, purring him out none the less.
And that stick Tommy was to be beaten with was only the latest of many. It was a whole history of sticks—of the Council's Sons of Belial set at Tommy, collectors, inspectors of this and that and the other, policemen to apprehend him for drunkenness, sergeants to warn publicans that if they harboured Tommy they might be made to feel it in other ways.... But lately they had withdrawn this last prohibition. Putting their heads together, they had judged it best that Tommy should drink all he could, and more.... He had done so, and did not seem a single penny the worse for it. Moreover, he had now openly declared himself an abominator of Welshmen and everything else Welsh. Nightly he zig-zagged home crying out against the whole smiling, thievish crew, their Kursaals and Pavilions and Dancing-Halls and Concerts Llanyglo. He lurched along Pontnewydd Street after everybody else had gone to bed, roaring "Glan Meddwdod Mwyn." How he had twenty times escaped breaking his neck when they had laid down the Pontnewydd Street tramlines nobody knew.... And whenever he remembered that they wanted his Hafod and would have it as soon as Ned died, he offered togiveit away to any Welshman who would repeat after him, word for word ... but his forms of words varied widely, and no more than the Amalekites could some of those against whom he railed pronounce his words that began with "sh."
So John Willie, as the landau bowled homewards, had to tell June all this, and June was extraordinarily interested. Minetta watched them both, and, in her turn, wondered about John Willie andhismarrying. She liked to have June to visit her; she wasn't so sure that she wanted June as a standing ornamental dish. Indeed she rather thought she didn't, and, allowing for many large but still accidental differences, Minetta was not without a trace of the malicious humour of Tommy Kerr himself.
In fairness she had to admit, however, that so far there were no signs that June was setting her cap at John Willie.
That night again, however, John Willie had little luck of his searching, this time of Dafydd Dafis. He sought him at his home, he sought him abroad, but he failed to find him and he joined June and his sister again where they sat listening to The Lunas, those incomparable Drawing-Room Entertainers. He bought them chocolate and he bought them ices, and then, at the end of the performance, he proposed a walk along the Promenade before they turned in. Not to lose them, he passed an arm through either of theirs, his sister's arm and that of this tall and pretty and undisturbing extension of his sister. They set their faces towards the Pier that stretched like a sparkling finger out to sea.
It was the hour of the ebb, and lately, at that hour, an odd and new activity had begun to make sharper that contrast between the bright and crowded and restless Promenade and the solemn void that pushed as it were its dark breast against that two-miles-long chain of gold and silver lamps, straining the slender fetter into a curve. Down below the railings, at three or four points, not more, an upturned face with tightly shut eyes was praying aloud. They looked like little floating, drowned, yet speaking masks. Each evangelist had his little knot of three or four companions, but these had come with him, and of hearers they had none. They stood on the trampled sand, just below the gas-lighted line of pebbles; a boat drawn up, or a yard or two of groyne, struggled between light and shadow beyond them; far out in the bay the twinkle of a solitary light could be seen; the rest was blackness and immensity. It made Infinity seem strangely weak. Here It was, striving to make Itself known to the finite, Its sole instrument a little oval mask and a voice that could not be heard five yards away; and never a head was turned. Calling and laughing, the babel of their voices like the rattle of the pebbles that roll back with the retiring wave, they passed and passed and passed. One would have said that some vast angelic skater had cut that sweeping outside-edge of light, and then, repulsed, had rushed away into the darkness again.
And this was something else for John Willie to tell this pretty, unexigent June. It had only been going on about a fortnight, he said, but he didn't think they'd heard the last of it yet. There was a Revival or something coming slowly up the coast, he said, and—who did June think was doing it?—why, Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd!
"Never!" June exclaimed.
"Rather! You remember him, don't you? Howell Gruffydd the grocer's son; pale-faced chap, with a great lump of hair; and by Jove, he is stirring 'em up! He started at Aberystwith, and worked his way up through Aberdovey and Towyn and Barmouth and Portmadoc, with no end of crowds following him wherever he went. I expect he'll be here presently. If he comes when the Wakes are on there will be a shindy!... I say, aren't you feeling a bit cold? Better be getting along home. I'll take you as far as the corner, and then if you don't mind I'll leave you—I want to find a man if I can——"
Five minutes later he had got rid of them, and stood in meditation. Was it worth while trying for Dafydd Dafis again? Or taking another stroll along the Pier? Perhaps it wasn't. He was rather tired, and this seemed a stupid kind of thing he had been doing for the last few days. He'd potter about with June for another day—perhaps he had rather neglected Minetta lately—and then for the fishing up Delyn. In that way he would be off just as the Wakes people arrived. Already the lodging-house keepers were getting ready for them, putting away their ornaments and so on. They would be here on Friday night; to-day was Wednesday; John Willie would be off on Friday morning.
This time he kept to his decision. He walked about with the pretty and untroublesome June all the next morning, and in the afternoon Minetta joined them. She approved warmly of his fishing-plan, and said she was sure the change would do him good. He told them to keep away from the crowds and not to be out too late, and then, on the Friday morning set off.
When, at nine o'clock the same night, he walked up the path again and appeared in the dining-room just as June and Minetta were thinking of going to bed, Minetta stared. She had thought him miles away.
She stared still harder when he mumbled that he had "forgotten something," and intended to be off again in the morning.
He had not at first seen that black dress. Sharpe's old cottage was never locked, and he had walked straight in, had put down his little dressing-bag, and had begun to empty his pockets, setting his flask, his fly-book, his store of tobacco and certain provisions on the little deal table under the single window. At a first glance there was nothing to show that the place had been entered since he had last been there. The mattress of Sharpe's narrow pallet had been rolled up at the bed-head and a patchwork quilt spread over it; the two windsor chairs stood in their accustomed places; and the rods in their brown canvas covers stood as usual in the corner. Only Sharpe's photographs had gone from the walls, leaving the little black heads of nails and tacks, each over its slightly paler oblong of plain deal boarding.
Had not John Willie thought that he had better drag the bedding on which he was to sleep out into the sun at once, he would not have found the frock. It had been thrown across the roll of mattress and covered with that old piece of patchwork. Nor, since it was folded in a square, did he even then recognise the thing for a frock. Only when he had picked it up and it had revealed itself had he stood, suddenly arrested, alternately gazing at it and then looking obliquely at the floor. Then, as he had slowly put it down again, at its full length this time, there had peeped at him from half under the roll of mattress, first a white linen collar with one of the little sham pearl studs that are given away with such things still in one of its button-holes, and next a pair of tiny cylindrical cuffs....
Perhaps already, deep within himself, he had known that she was not far away....
Then, slowly and methodically, he had begun to search the hut. His search had been productive of the following discoveries:—
Thrust under the bed: A newish oval brown tin box (which he had not opened), and a pair of black shoes.
On the lower shelf of Sharpe's little provision-cupboard: a round narrow-brimmed black hat.
On the upper shelf, among cups, plates, and other odds and ends: A seven-pound paper bag half full of flour, and a mug with some still fresh milk in it—he tasted it.
Outside the hut: A stone or two in a little clearing in the fern, a stick-heap, the ashes of a recent fire, and a frying-pan.
Then he had re-entered the hut. He had sat down in one of the windsor chairs. He had been filling his third or perhaps his fourth pipe when she herself had appeared in the doorway.
All this had been the day before.
As he now walked up that one-in-seven slope under the firs he remembered again, for the fiftieth time in twenty hours, her appearance as she had stood there. She had worn an old red blouse which she had not troubled to tuck in at the waist, a petticoat of faded greenish-blue (no gypsophylla there), and her legs and feet had been bare. And at first he had thought she was going to run away. But she had only recoiled as a cat recoils, yielding ground without abandoning it. He himself had not moved. Move, and she might still be off as suddenly as a hare; sit still and say "Hallo, Ynys, not much in the chair-mending line up here, is there?" and she might stay.... And now, as he trudged up under the firs, he blamed Llanyglo that he had not heard that her mother was dead. Had Llanyglo remained a hamlet, or had it grown merely reasonably and within measure, the death even of Belle Lovell would have been an event; now, with towns in Lancashire half-emptied (he had seen it that morning, Llanyglo black and boiling like a cauldron of pitch with the people of the Wakes)—now such simple happenings passed unnoticed. Belle had died a year before, but that was not the reason Ynys wore black. She wore black because black was the livery of Philip Lacey's Liverpool flower-shop girls. Black showed up the flowers to better advantage. Ynys, after months of lonely wanderings and getting of her bread as best she could, had remembered Philip Lacey's promise when she had cut her foot that morning on the shore, had tramped to Liverpool, had asked for Philip at his principal establishment in Lord Street, and now sold stately blooms the poor hedgerow cousins of which she had formerly given away, pattering bare-foot after pedestrians on the road with them in her hand. She had been given a fortnight's holiday, and had come to Llanyglo to spend it.
As the path under the firs grew steeper still, John Willie wondered whether she would have kept her word to him. He had made her welcome to the cottage of which she had already made free, but that, he knew, did not mean that she might not have packed up and fled the moment he had turned his back—no, not even though she had promised not to do so. He had seen enough of her yesterday to guess that her word given would be an empty and artificial thing the moment her inclination changed; nay, she might have given it with no intention whatever of keeping it, just to gain a little time. Even should he find her frock and her oval tin box still there, that would not necessarily mean that she would return. A box of matches was her luggage. Except as a depository for these things she had not used the hut. She had cooked her meals outside, and had slept on a litter of bracken.
Nevertheless, John Willie had left the cottage to her, and, for fear a stray shepherd might gossip, had himself returned home rather than sleep at the inn a few miles below.
He continued to climb, past rocks spotted with pennywort and trickling with rills, orange and whitey-green with lichen and tongued with polypodi, past crops of dead nettle and vistas of fronds, past dust of pine-needles and debris of cones. Now and then a flutter of wings broke the stillness of the aisles, but no song; and always he had the skyline almost overhead on his right, and on his left, beyond the little grid of reservoirs far below, the crisscrossing AAAA's of a mountain-side of larches.
She had not taken advantage of his absence to fly. He saw her as he ceased to climb and gained the half-way fold that held Llyn Delyn in its crook. She was standing outside the hut, but she was not wearing the old unconfined red blouse of the day before now. The small spot he saw a quarter of a mile ahead was a black one. He waved his hand, but she did not respond. He saw her sit down with her back against the wall of the hut and cross her arms over her knees. Three minutes later he was standing beside her.
And now that he had come he was not very clear in his mind why he had come. True, he could have given a dozen reasons—the bursting over the town of that flood of operatives he had seen that morning, his desire to fish, his wish (as he now suddenly and rather startlingly knew) to escape further attendance on June, and so forth; and these reasons would have been precisely a dozen too many. Had all Lancashire been drubbing on the Pier and she standing under the crimson light watching that strange and dhowlike sail of the moon glaring orange over the water, John Willie would not have been up Delyn. He had intended to fish, but fishing was now far from his thoughts. And already he was aware of another thing, namely, that while June had been no trouble at all to talk to, talk with Ynys was a heavy business. Yesterday, every sentence he had attempted had been as difficult as if it had been the first. Only by a series of almost violent extractions had he learned that her mother was dead and that she sold flowers (curious that they should have been June's father's flowers!) in Liverpool. He supposed he must begin to talk again now. He could hardly be with her and not talk. Well, if he must talk, he would.
"I say, you're well out of it all to-day!" he exclaimed, with apparent heartiness. "They began to come in at eleven last evening, and they've been coming in all night. Whew, but I ran, I can tell you!"
She had been looking in the direction of the lake, which, however, she could hardly have seen, so low did she sit; and he, as he stood, could see no more of her than the straight white parting of her hair and her tanned forearms and wrists about her knees. The black of her dress was a sooty black, but you would only have called her hair black because there was nothing else to call it. It was neither more nor less black than a bowl of black lustre is black; it had a surface, but it had also depths where you saw the sun again, and the sky lurked, and the green of the ferns that grew about the hut. Had John Willie put his hand near it it might have been dimly reflected, as it would have been reflected in a peat pool.
The sound of his voice seemed almost to startle her, but she did not look up.
"Hwhat do you say?" she said. She slightly overstressed the internal "h's," and her accent was Welsh, but uniquely soft. As she had not heard, he had to repeat his remark.
"I mean those Wakes people. There are thousands of them there now." He made a little motion of his head behind him. "It's better up here." Then, as still she did not reply, he asked her a direct question. "You didn't stay long in Llanyglo, did you?"
"I stay there one day," she answered. A scarcely perceptible movement of her forefinger accompanied the numeral.
"Oh, then of course that was the day I saw you. Did you see me?"
"No."
"You were standing at the pier-head, watching the moon rise."
Ynys did not deny this. Neither did she confirm it.
"Then you disappeared," John Willie continued, "and I couldn't find you again."
To this she replied after a moment.—"I went back to the house, and paid the Englishwoman, and then I came away. In the morning I arrive here."
"Do you mean you walked all night?"
"There is lit-tle night this time of the year."
John Willie was silent. Only a week before he had left an evening party at the "Imperial" to find the sun already burning a hole in the edge of Mynedd Mawr.
"And how much longer holiday have you?" John Willie asked presently.
"Six days," answered the girl; and again the numeral was accompanied by a slight gesture of her fingers.
"And then you go back to Liverpool?"
Complete silence was all the answer he had to that question.
Then, suddenly, Ynys moved. She stood up. For the first time her seaweed-coloured eyes looked straight into John Willie's.
"You left that place early. You will be hungry. I caught some fis-s—brithyll. I think she cooked now."
She disappeared round the corner of the hut.
John Willie would have liked to ask her why she had put on the black dress and the black shoes, but something seemed to whisper to him not to do so. No doubt she had caught the trout with her hand, in one of the pools of a stream that slid and chattered under fern down the side of Delyn, and he feared that did he approach her too suddenly even by words she might be off, even as those trout would have vanished in a flash at the least disturbance of the water by her hand. She had cooked them on the wood; she had also made a cake of flour and water and no salt; and she served the fish in a tin platter by the little clearing she had made for the hearth. He sat now, and she stood; she brought also a mug of milk, from the surface of which she took a tiny caterpillar with the tip of a frond; and when he had eaten she cleaned the platter by scouring it with a handful of fern-rot and then setting it in a little stream with a stone upon it. Then they stood before one another again, he with his back to the hut, she in front of him, her head always superbly erect, but slowly turning from time to time, while her eyes sought the lake, the line of bracken against the sky where the mountain dropped, and his own eyes, indifferently.
Then, unexpectedly, she asked a question.
"You come to fis-s?" she asked.
He said that he had thought of it.
"There is wa-ter in the boat, but indeed I not touch it. I go and empty it," she said.
But he stopped her.—"Oh, it's no good now—too bright," he said. "Might try in the evening. Sit down, won't you? I want to ask you some questions."
She curled herself up in the bracken, and he set his back against the wall of the hut and began to fill his pipe.
But instead of questioning her, John Willie had all the appearances of a man who was questioning himself. He sat a little behind Ynys, so that when she looked straight before her he lost her full profile; and he moved no more than she. He was suddenly thinking how thoroughly sick he was of Llanyglo.
For if he had helped to make Llanyglo, and knew its lighting and its watering, its building and its leases and its subsoil, Llanyglo had also helped to make him. The drub-drub on the Pier, the inanities of his friend Percy Briggs, evening parties that began at midnight and ended with the sun high in the sky, complaints from his sister that she saw him only in the short intervals between a coming home and a setting out again—this had been pretty much the reaction of Llanyglo on John Willie Garden. He was a very ordinary young man.—But here was a world peopled only by sheep, the myriad insects that hopped and wove and chirruped in the tall fern, the kites and curlews overhead, and the trout far below the surface of the lake. His lashes made rainbows before his half-closed eyes, and those eyes, opening again, could gaze at the tips of the sunny fern against the deeps of the sky until the difference between them became almost as intensified as the difference between dark and bright. Spiders no bigger than freckles seemed to be doing important things under their bright green roofs—for only the under sides of the fronds were green and translucent: the fern on which the sun beat directly was no more green than Ynys's hair was black.... And the sunny parts of Ynys's arms were of the colour of a hayfield with much sorrel, while the round beneath was as cool as the under curve of a boat on the water....
It would have been part of the peace of that hot midday could he have dozed with his head in the crook of that arm.
Of other desire to break its peace had he none.
And Ynys?
She had seen those fretted parasols of the fern, meshed and lacy and interpenetrating, a vast rug of whispering frondage—she had seen them, or their like, since they had been no more than tender, uncurling pastoral staffs, brown, with tiny inner crocketts not even green yet. She had watched them unfold their weak fingers—yes, from Lord Street, Liverpool, she had watched them unroll as a soft caterpillar unrolls. In a cool and darkened shop, with the floor always wet, she had seen, with those seaweed-coloured eyes, not the great queenly hydrangeas, nor the burning torches of the gladioli, nor the fat and scentless roses, nor the great half-pint pitchers of the arum lilies—she had seen, not these cold grandiflora, but the celandine and anemone of the hedge-bottoms, and the cool pennywort on the rocks, and the soft and imperceptible change, day by day, of those mountains many, many railway stations away. Those other great robed and wedding-dressed blooms? She had not considered them to be flowers. Flowers were the sappy bluebells she had pulled, white-stalked and squeaking, from the banks, receiving a penny for them—but not in exchange. She had sold the hydrangea-things without even seeing them. And her own weekly fifteen shillings of wages had not purchased a single glance of her eyes nor a single emotion of her heart.
And her eyes had not distinguished less between magnificent bloom and magnificent bloom than they had between this and the other collar, tie, and bowler hat who, his purchase made, had lingered, and had tried to talk to her, and had come again. Young women who can see Delyn from Liverpool can hardly be expected so to distinguish. These young men had not even been, as the balls and buckets of Howell Gruffydd's shop-window had been, beyond her reach, she below theirs. She and they might breathe the same air, but they extracted different elements from it.
Was that true also of herself and John Willie Garden, lying now among the fern of Delyn—John Willie, whose clothes (even) were what they were by a kind of artifice, and not, like Dafydd Dafis's, as if the cropped grasses themselves had by some natural alchemy become wool, and the wool clothing, that would be worn out by labour not far from the grasses again?...
Because he did not know, John Willie lay there, and watched her cheek and arm, and forgot that he had said he was going to ask her questions.
The silence lasted for so long that, when at last he spoke, she might (he thought) have supposed that he had had a nap in the meantime. He hoisted himself to his feet, stretched himself, yawned "Ah, that's better!" and then added, "I say, you might show me where you got those fish."
Instantly, a gillie incongruously in a flower-seller's dress, she was on her feet and walking a little ahead. But he caught her up and kept abreast of her. They reached the boat, half in and half out of the gravelly shallow, but she went straight on across a swampy little stream that led to the upper margin of the lake. Presently it seemed to John Willie that they would have done better to take the boat, for they had to skirt a deep shaly spur the slope of which continued unbroken down under the water and gave under their feet the moment they tried to ascend it. At a point where she splashed a few yards ahead of him John Willie suggested that they should take their boots and stockings off, and he had a momentary fancy that the brown of her cheek deepened a little; but she made no reply, and they kept on. Then, after more hundreds of yards of walking and wading, they gained firm earth again. They were at the bottom of a V-shaped ravine into which all the trees and scrub of the mountain-sides seemed to have settled. It was known to a few shepherds as Glyn Iago, and the stream came down it over jagged stairs of purple slate and under dwarf-oak and birch, thorn and briar and mountain-ash.
Again it would have been better to wade through the noisy shallows and round the boulders spongy with drenched moss, and again he suggested it; but perhaps the deep gurgle of the fall they were approaching drowned his voice. He went ahead, putting aside the worst of the brambles, and he knew without telling when they reached the pool. It was long enough to have plunged into, too wide to have leapt across even had the rocks afforded any take-off, and it deepened gradually to blackness, and then boiled pale and tumultuous again under the plunge of a twelve-foot fall. Over the pool itself the sunlight glowed in spots only through the leaves, but on one bank there was a sunny clearing of a few yards square. Then the trees began again, up and up and up to the sky, a cliff of leaves that shut the mountains out and the stream in.
He let her sit down first. This she did where she could see the little plants and mosses at the water's edge endlessly a-quiver with the tumult of the fall. Then, sitting down beside her, he again felt that he must begin talking to her all over again. His mouth flickered for a moment as he thought of Percy Briggs on the Pier, and then he spoke.
"If I were you I should move up here," he said.
She was picking up a snail-shell to throw into the water. She turned, extraordinarily quickly, and in the seaweed eyes there was a hard and defensive look, instant, yet old.
"It iss only my hat and my box," she said quickly.
"Eh? Oh!—--" He laughed. "I only mean there'll be brakes and wagonettes all over the place now, and anybody might come to the lake.—I say, you didn't think I meant to chuck you out, did you?"
"I thought prapss you want to fiss," she replied, turning away and looking at the gasogene of black water again.
He laughed again.—"Oh, no. I mean you don't sleep there, and nobody'd come here, and I could get you a lock and key so that your things would be safe. You could go there if it rained."
She tossed the snail-shell into the water, neither accepting his offer nor rejecting it.
"Besides," he went on, "I know that if anybody disturbed you you'd be off. Look here. I'll get you that lock and key. I'm off back to-night, and I'll bring 'em up to-morrow.—But you will be here won't you?"
Again—he could not be sure—he fancied her colour deepened.
"Hwhere should I go to?" she said over her shoulder.
"Well—anywhere—Liverpool—anywhere."
And again her reply was to gaze at the boiling of the air-bubbles at the foot of the fall.
But John Willie no longer wondered that he should struggle thus with a conversation when there were rills and rivulets of talk waiting for him at home at Llanyglo. She was not mute; there were a thousand communications wrapped up in her very presence. She ran over with unspoken meanings, babbled for all her silence. Her hair, nearly all cool green now, as the black water was cool green; that unlearned balance of her head; the curve of her cheek; those lovely, despotic forearms—whether that least member of her whole sweet parliament, her tongue, moved or was still, there was more of approach in all of these than in June's "Fancy! Do tell me! And how's So-and-So getting on?" These were the weeds, the dusty groundsel of words; Ynys was her own vocabulary, every part of her a part of speech....
And the theme? The theme that every corpuscle of her announced as she sat there, listlessly tossing snail-shells and twigs and rolled-up leaves and blades of grass into the water?
John Willie was a very ordinary young man. In Liverpool, his eyes would have seen very little but Liverpool. Perhaps that was why, in Glyn Iago, he had not the perfect freedom of sun and air, of growing and dying things, and things growing again, of moving water, of that essential speech with this creature at his side that at the last has no need of words. For, for good and ill mingled, they make shames and fears in the Liverpools of the land, and codes, and suppressions, and the apparatus of Conscience, and it is too late for you, too late for me, too late for John Willie, to unmake them. John Willie had begun by questioning Ynys; now, far more searchingly, Ynys was questioning him.
And the end of her questioning of him was that he would have called himself a cur had he as much as thought of not doing "the decent thing...."
Indeed it was precisely because he thought so resolutely and intently of doing that thing that by and by he rose. It was only half-past four; he could be home in two, or two-and-a-half hours; and for that matter he was not in any hurry to get home. He was in a hurry now only because Ynys spoke too much. She gave him no rest from her close inquisition. He must answer those questions that she so pressed home or take himself quickly off, to add (as he knew) the fuel of thought to that flame with which he already burned.
Therefore, again standing by her, he asked her one more question only.
"You will be here to-morrow?" he said, his eyes anxiously on her face.
What his answer would have been had she said "No," or had he not believed that nod of her head, it is useless to ask.
He left her still tossing the debris into the water.
He began to be aware of the change the Wakes people had wrought in Llanyglo before the trap had carried him a mile along the road. Twice in that distance he had to whip up to get through the dust of vehicles ahead. He had been right in saying that the landaus and brakes and wagonettes would be all over the place now. They were taking the family parties back to dinner at the hotels.
Then, still five miles from Llanyglo, he began to allow the brakes and wagonettes to overtake him again. He had remembered that he was in no hurry. Hurry would only mean the crowd sooner, the noise sooner, and supper sooner, with the conversation of June and Minetta. At a place called Doll he turned aside into a narrow lane that would take him by a circuitous route into the Porth Neigr road near the stone quarries. Then, sitting sideways on the seat, with his head sunk and the whiplash trailing over the dashboard, he allowed the horse to take him at its own pace.
Of course, he could marry Ynys; there was nothing to be said against that except that hitherto he had not thought of marriage. Marriage, in John Willie's observation of his married friends and acquaintances, was a quite definite and circumscribed thing, in which prospects played a part, and settlements, and houses of a certain kind, and certain well-marked changes in the bride's demeanour towards her still unmarried friends, and a certain tendency to stoutness and baldness on the part of the groom. Moreover, behind every suggested marriage there lurked the question whether it "would do." His father and mother, when he came to speak of marriage, would want to know whether it would "do"; Minetta would have her opinion about whether it would "do"; and if it did not "do," all his friends and acquaintances would by and by shake their heads and say that it had been plain all along howthatwould turn out....
On the other hand, the case was complicated—not in principle (that was beastly clear)—but by allowances in practise. Llanyglo had for some time been far from exacting; it was now, in certain of its phases, at any rate, almost exacting in the opposite direction. As many social allowances were made for the young man who had something "on" as liberties were granted to properly affianced couples who had got their certificate that it would "do." Percy Briggs would have gone off alone, with his hat on the back of his head and cheerfully whistling, at the least hint that John Willie had something "on." ... But this that had come so suddenly and overmasteringly over John Willie was a different thing altogether. Here was not somebody who played a game of which the rules and forfeits were known. That game, under one veiling or another, might form the staple of the Lunas' Drawing-room Entertainment at the Palace, or of the songs of Miss Sal Volatile in the Pavilion on the Pier; but Ynys had not even known what she had turned her back on when she had stood under the raspberry-coloured light, looking out at the gathering darkness of sky and the still lingering gleam on the sea. Warned probably, not by hearing and sight, but by some apprehension more sensitive still, she had stayed to see that orange rising, and then, before it had become a setting again, had been far on the road to Delyn....
Suddenly John Willie sat up and shook the reins.
"No, damn it," he said.
He began to bowl more briskly along the hilly lanes.
It was after eight o'clock when he reached the quarry, and then for a time he had to go carefully down the by-lane that the stone-carts had deeply scored. But on the Porth Neigr road he whipped up again. Hearing a sound behind him, he drew in; and when there had passed him a great brake hung all over with Chinese lanterns and full of people singing, the spell of silence under which he had lain all day was broken. Thereafter sound merely succeeded sound. As he took the railway bridge, a "special" roared past below, carrying more people to Llanyglo; and before its red tail-lights had mingled with the other rubies and emeralds of the line he had come upon the first couple turning at the limit of their walk. Then came a large board with "Imperial Hotel" on it, then a new horse-trough; then benches, then walls with placards on them. A mile ahead lay the golden corona of the town. This began to break up into single lights and groups of lights, and then, at a turn, he saw the Wheel and the jewelled finger of the Pier. He could hear the noise, an indistinguishable something in the air that was not the wind and not the sound of the sea; and then at the first roadside lamp it seemed suddenly to become night. More slowly he rounded Pritchard's Corner; at the tram terminus the belated shopkeepers made a press about the Promenade-Pontnewydd Street car; and from the open doors of the "Tudor Arms" was wafted the smell of beer.
Delyn and Glyn Iago were part of the night behind him.
He did not attempt to drive through the crowd that suddenly thickened about the middle of Pontnewydd Street, where half the road was being taken up. One of the "Imperial" ostlers took the horse's head, said "All right, Mr. Garden," and John Willie descended and walked. On the balconies of the "Grand" and "Imperial," people stood and watched the stream that descended to the Front. From the Kursaal Gardens came a noise that presently the ear ceased to hear, so steady and monotonous was it. Then, walking in the wake of a tram that moved slowly forward among the street barriers with an incessant clanging of its bell, John Willie reached the Promenade.
It was thrice the width of Pontnewydd Street, and so there was more room; but for all that it was difficult to walk at more than the general pace. This, nevertheless, football-packs of young men attempted from time to time to do, breaking their way through. They played mouth-organs, and at moments, apparently without plan or premeditation, suddenly formed into rings, feet pattering in clog-steps, eyes fixedly on those same feet, their backs a fence to hold back the spectators, while in the middle a couple of young men or a young man and a young woman danced. Then, as suddenly as they had stopped, they were off again, arms linked in arms or locked about the waist in front, each figure a vertebra of a many-jointed onward-rushing snake. Under the Promenade lamps they advanced, everybody else yielding place as they came. The little rail-enclosed plots that lay between the pavements and the hotels were magpied with torn paper and strown with lying figures. They lay there, in meaningless embrace, moaning long harmonies in thirds, hats decorated with penny gauds, eating nuts and "rock" and chocolate, hardly moving when passers-by all but strode over them. Probably they were discussing nothing more than "So I said to her, straight to her face——" or the conduct of the shed-overlooker where they worked throughout the year together and if the passers-by almost trod on them, they, in return, half absently flirted the passing ankles with whisks and penny canes.
But if these lay like bivalves, torpid and content, another and more active element had awoke in the throng. The Alsatians, had they required it, were put into countenance now. One felt that they veined and threaded the mass with something that worked as quietly and as rapidly as yeast. They fed on it, drawing from it at last an open and confirmed sanction for all those things they would not have dreamed of doing at home. One met them here and there in couples, or in couples of couples with the invisible link between each pair of couples drawing ever farther and farther out, the women with shawls and hoods and dominoes over their dinner attire, the men with restless eyes, quick to show by a touch of hand or elbow that avoidance was desirable or a glance of complicity no harm. Lamps showed these gestures of understanding between those who could not have sworn to one another's names. Of the two solitudes, that of the mountain-top and that of this press where ribs could hardly lift, they sought and found the second. Perhaps—who knows?—they were even grateful to those others who moaned those gummy thirds stretched on the lamplit grass....
And scarce two hundred yards away, under the railings of the sea-wall, here and there a mask, with struggling breast and tightly shut eyes and writhing lips, prayed....
As John Willie pushed at the garden gate, the door at the other end of the path opened and closed again behind Minetta and June. He met them in the middle of the path and asked them where they were going. When they said they were only going for a stroll he ordered them back. Minetta's "Oh—how you startled us!—why, we didn't know you were coming back——" suggested that she thought her brother might have spoken in another tone; but John Willie was not thinking of tones. He was thinking that perhaps after all he had no business to be spending days up Delyn just at present. A stroll with him to take care of them—well and good; but not two girls alone.... He said so, rather curtly, in the dining-room as Minetta got him some supper; but Minetta made no reply. Again she was thinking that June was a very nice girl, but it was odd that she should twice have brought her brother back from his fishing like this.
John Willie, eating his supper almost savagely, had some ado to reply politely to June's rills of pretty speech. He wondered now why she should talk when she had nothing whatever to say. Only her tongue wagged, and he hardly heard his own tongue wagging in reply.Thiswas not speech;thiswas not language!... "Not if I know it," he found himself suddenly thinking, as June asked him whether the Water Scheme had spoiled Delyn much, and said that she would like to go and see. But Minetta said little. She only asked John Willie one direct question. This was, Whether he had come back for good now. He replied that he didn't know, and added some futility about fishing-weather and the difference a night sometimes made.
Minetta thought that the only extraordinary thing about his reappearance was that he should have troubled to go away at all.
June had one piece of information to give him, however. It was two days old, she said, but there—if John Williewouldtake himself off on his unsociable excursions like this he must expect to be a bit out of things. But she would forgive him, and tell him.—Ned Kerr was dead. It seemed (June said) that he had once given somebody in Porth Neigr a canary, and reports had reached him that the canary was not doing very well—had the pip or the croup or whatever it was canaries did have. He had worried a lot about the canary (June said), and, a week before, had been to Porth Neigr to see it. He had had a cold or something himself, June didn't know what; anyway, he had come back from seeing the canary and the next day hadn't got up. So his brother had sent for a doctor, and of course had told the doctor all about it—Ned, the canary, and all the lot. The doctor had said thathecould see nothing the matter with Ned (which was more than some of them admitted, going on sending bottles of coloured water and so on and then a bill coming in for pounds and pounds), but Ned hadn't said anything at all—he'd just died at two o'clock in the morning. He might just as well havehadsomething the matter with him, June said. And all about a stupid canary!——
Soon after that John Willie told them it was time they went to bed. He followed them upstairs himself a few minutes later.
But it was long before he slept. Perhaps he knew already in his heart that if he really meant that "Damn it, no" he might as well stay at home now instead of leaving June and Minetta alone in the house. And he had meant it. He vowed he meant it still. The rusty light on his ceiling, cast from the corona outside, did not prevent his seeing the hut again—Glyn Iago—the black-dressed gillie who had tossed the snail-shells into the water; nor did the faint and harsh and ceaseless noise outside drown that powerful and wordless eloquence that he had heard with some faculty other than his bodily hearing.... Then the sounds grew thinner, yet louder also; fewer, but clearer in the growing silence of the night. He heard a long-drawn strain of tipsy song, the tinny thread of sound of a mouth-organ, and then a clock striking three....
But he must go up to Delyn on the morrow. It would be a rotten thing to tell a girl to be sure to be there and then not to turn up himself.
And he would take her that lock and key.
He began to spend his days up Delyn and his nights at Llanyglo. To avoid the shaly spur, he pulled across in the boat each morning from the beaching-place near the hut to the foot of Glyn Iago, and she had his breakfast ready for him when he arrived, which was between half-past ten and eleven o'clock. As if his suggestion had been a command, she had made her little encampment up the Glyn, fetching dry sticks from up the steep wood; her hat and her box only remained in the locked shed.
He did not cast a fly. Minetta began to ask him, when he returned at night, first what sport he had had, and then why he always chose to fish in the middle of the day. Then one night he returned to find his sister showing June her sketches. For some minutes he affected not to be interested; then, with a highly elaborate yawn, he said, "Oh, I say, Min—what became of that sketch you once made of that gipsy kid—you remember—the one mother once took in with a cut foot?—Best thing she ever did," he added carelessly to June.
"Oh, it got shoved away somewhere. Why?" said Minetta; but there was a little quick dropping look in her eyes.
"Nothing. I just happened to remember it. It was better than some of these."
The next morning the sketch, unearthed from some dusty heap or other, was on his plate when he came down to breakfast. Presently June and Minetta also came down. By that time he was able to say, quite composedly, "Oh, I see you found that thing. That's the sketch I was speaking of, June——"
But he wondered whether Minetta also could by any chance have seen Ynys on that, her single night in Llanyglo.
One rapidly advancing trouble was on his mind. He had not spoken to Ynys of the passing of her holiday, but he himself could almost hear its seconds ticking away. Soon two days only remained; the morrow, when he would see her on Delyn again, would be the eve of her departure. She had told him that she had taken a return ticket; already he seemed to hear the whistle of the train by which it was available. She could take that train either at Llanyglo or at Porth Neigr.
On the morning of her last whole day he ascended the Glyn and found, as usual, his trout cooked for him and keeping hot between two plates. He ate it abstractedly. Again Minetta had remarked pointedly on his lack of fishing-luck, but it was not that that was troubling him. He was wondering, not for the first time, what explanation Ynys gave herself of his untouched rods and buckled fly-book, and whether she too thought it unusual that he should come so far merely to lie by the stream with her hour after hour, or else, with a "Shall we go up there?" to ascend the stream, skirt the wood, gain the open mountain-side, and toil for half an hour to the summit. He had substituted no other pretence for his first pretence of fishing. What did she think of it? Or did she not think of it at all?
Again that morning, when she had scoured the plates and set them in a little rocky basin by the quivering moss, he proposed the mountain climb. In half an hour they were at the top. It was a plateau of volcanic rock, with scrubs of hazel, and bents and reeds and harebells ceaselessly stroked by the wind. Behind them, as they sat down under a rock, only Mynedd Mawr rose higher than they; below them Llyn Delyn lay like a bit of grey looking-glass set in its little mile-long cleft. They had raised other bits of looking-glass, too, in other far-off clefts. About them the mountains rolled as if invisible giants were being tossed in the visible blankets of the land. On the left only, far from Llanyglo, a scratch of silver showed that the sea was there.
"So you're off to-morrow," he said, when they had lain long. He did not hide from himself the ache the words caused him.
"My tick-ket say to-morrow," she answered, without emotion.
He muttered something foolish about an extension.—"But I suppose they wouldn't keep your place open," he answered himself hopelessly.
Her next words caused him a marvellous pang of lightness and hope.
"I think-k I not go back," she said, the seaweed eyes looking at that far-off silver scratch that was the sea.
Why did that pang at which he had winced instantly become another pang, at which he winced no less? What was it that the eyes of his spirit saw, far, far, farther off than her seaweed ones saw the sea? Her decision to stay, if she really meant that she would stay, should have meant the continuance of his happiness; what, then, should change it into something like an unhappiness and a fear?
He did not know. He was only an ordinary young man. He only knew that over that moment, which should have been one of a care removed, a faint shadow of an irremovable care already impinged.
He had sat up, and was looking at her.—"You mean—that you won't go back at all?" he said.
"Indeed I think I cannot go back," she answered; and her imperfect speech left it uncertain whether indeed she meant that she was still unresolved, or whether to her, who had not been able to endure a night in Llanyglo, a return to Liverpool would be more than she could bear.
"But—but—what would you do?" he asked.
"I stay here lit-tle longer, and then I get wick-ker from Dafydd Dafis, and mend chairs, like my mother."
"But—but——" It was so new to his experience. "You mean you'd just go from place to place?"
"If I go to Liverpool I die," she answered.
John Willie, torturing himself over this long afterwards, could never decide what that subtle yet essential change was that came over their relationship from that moment. It was quite contrary to any change that might have been expected. But for that sullen "No, damn it," he might have been conscious of hardier impulses as the term of her holiday approached; but very curiously, it was now that he learned that it had no term that he felt those hardier stirrings. It was exactly as if, with little time to spare, he had wasted time, and now, with time enough before him, he must lose no time. Perhaps it was also that growing wonder what she must think of fishing expeditions without fishing.
Or—or—could it be that that sweet clamour of her person had all along shown patient intention, and that he, he only, had been dull?...
But, more quickly than he had thought of charging her with this—(he was only an ordinary young man)—he had to acquit her again. Certainly she had not decided not to leave because, staying, she saw him daily. She merely dreaded towns and disliked those over-glorious waxen cenotaphs that were raised to the memory of the humble flowers she knew. And he was still sure that at an unguarded movement from him she would have fled days ago. At an unguarded movement she would fly now. He had what he had only on the condition that, by comparison with his hunger, it was and must remain nothing.... What then? Must he come, and still come, until the wraiths of the mists began to drive over a dead and sodden Delyn, and those tossing blankets of the mountains became hidden in rain, and the wood of Glyn Iago became brown and thin, and the stream an icy torrent, and Llanyglo itself as empty as a piece of old honeycomb?
He did not know, nor did he know how, without risking all, to ascertain.
Yet know he must; and in that moment, forgetting his "Damn it, no," he contrived as if by accident to touch her hand. But he was none the wiser for doing so. As his hand moved with intent, hers moved innocently; her fingers began to pull to pieces the little yellow flower she had plucked; and he had not the courage to essay it twice.
Nor did he, his broodings notwithstanding, find that courage again that day. The sun crept round; tiny Llyn Delyn far below began to shine with an amethyst light; and a quietude filled the heavens above and the land beneath, so that the rolling mountains seemed to be no longer the tossing of giants, but rather as if the giants, their tumbling game ended, had crept under the blankets and had gathered them about their heads and shoulders for the night. The sea and sky became a shining golden bloom of air. They descended to the Glyn again. There they ate a packet of sandwiches which John Willie had brought, and then he rose and stood, irresolute. He must go, he must go.... She was setting her stick-heap in order; her plain black dress, that showed off Philip Lacey's superfatted flowers, was an anomaly by the side of the Delyn twigs....
"Nos da," he said.
If the face she lifted had not been glorious, his thoughts of it would now have made it so.
"Nos da," she replied....
If he still said "No," it was not with the sturdy expletive now. Chiefly he now feared to risk and fail.
He left abruptly.
He drove to Llanyglo that night with a brassy sunset on his left that sank to the colours of dying dahlias as mile succeeded mile; and this time he did not turn into the winding lanes that led to the quarry. From the main road to which he kept he could see Llanyglo's corona three miles away. But it moved him now, not to the revulsion and distaste of a week ago, but only to a careless contempt. Some aroma seemed to have passed away from his dreamings. For the first time, he felt himself to be an ordinary young man returning from the mountains where he had something "on." This new slight bitterness extended even to his thoughts about the perspicacious Minetta. Be hanged to Minetta. If Minetta overstepped the mark he would very quickly tell her to mind her own business. He had to pull himself out of his moroseness and to remind himself that she had not done so yet.
As he passed along the Pontnewydd Street he did not at first notice the diminution in the number of people usually to be seen there at that hour. Nor, as he sank into his reverie again, did it immediately strike him that the greater number of the people on the Promenade were hurrying in one direction—the direction of the Trwyn. But he entered the dining-room at home in time to find June and Minetta scrambling hastily through their supper. All the dishes had been laid on the table at once, and their shawls were cast in readiness over the backs of chairs. This time he deemed it prudent not to raise any opposition to their plans, whatever these had been. Instead, he drew up his own chair.
"Off out?" he remarked. "Well, I hurried back to take you somewhere. Just let me swallow something, and then I'll come with you. What's up?"
In telling him what was "up" Minetta seemed to make the most of some advantage she apparently fancied herself to possess. If he had only glanced at the newspapers, she said, instead of rushing off the moment he'd bolted his breakfast, he'd have known what was "up." It had been "up" in Llanyglo that afternoon—such a crowd as never was, and Eesaac Oliver was to preach in the Floral Valley again that night.
"Unless he changes his mind," Minetta added. "Of course it's part of it all that he doesn't make arrangements. He'll stop in the middle of a walk and begin to preach just where he is, and then at other times, when they've made all ready for him and everybody waiting, he's praying in his bedroom or something and nobody dares go near him. So they never really know till he begins. There's only one thing he won't do——"
"Eesaac Oliver?" John Willie began, puzzled. "Wait a minute——"
Then, as Minetta once more tossed her head, he remembered. Of course. The Revival....
And what he did not remember he did not, in the circumstances, choose to ask his sister. It would only be giving her another opportunity to comment on his remarkable absences. He remembered much. He remembered those rumours of the great spiritual thing that had broken out at Aberystwith, had then rolled tumultuously up the coast to Barmouth, and thence to Harlech and Portmadoc, and thence up the sky-high steeps of Ffestiniog, and through the folds of those tossed blankets west into Lleyn. He remembered—yes, he remembered now that his eyes were turned outward from himself and his own affairs again—the preachings of Eesaac Oliver on the bare mountain-sides, and his fastings among the rocks, and his baptisms in rivers, and his liftings-up of his voice on the outskirts of towns that had presently emptied to hear him, and his calling on folk to turn from the wickedness of their ways while there was yet time, for the Day of Judgment was at hand. He remembered these things because at the time he had thought them rather one in the eye for the Howell Gruffydds and the John Pritchards who, when the Council came to debate such delicate but profitable subjects as licencing and mixed bathing, had tactfully allowed themselves to be represented by the soft closing of the door behind them. He knew what that interrupted sentence of Minetta's meant, "There's only one thing he won't do——" The only thing that Eesaac Oliver would not do was to preach within the stone walls of their new Chapels. He held these bazaar-supported buildings to be defiled, their Baptist temples places out of which the traffickers in money and doves must be driven with scourges. It mattered not that John Pritchard was a pillar, Howell his own father. "He that loveth father and mother more than Me——" He would preach as the mighty Wesley preached, from wall-tops, from the boulders of the stony places, from the wheelbarrow, from the milking-stool, from the saddle. He would journey and preach, and journey and preach again, four, six times a day. There was a Door which, entering by it, gave his instant and flaming Theme—the Door open to Llanyglo itself unless it would sink, it and its Kursaals and its Big Wheels, its Lunas' Entertainments and its bivalves lying under the lighted lamps on the public grass-plots, its Alsatians and its greedy Chapel-goers, its harlotry and its cupidity and its bright sin and its blasphemy of the Name, into the pit where it must be destroyed.
"Oh,dohurry up!" said Minetta impatiently....
Ten minutes later they were hastening along the half-empty Promenade.
The Floral Valley was no longer as it had been when Philip Lacey had plotted it out so neatly with his pair of compasses and coloured it with his geranium and lobelia and golden feather. At its upper end, a Switchback now humped itself like a multiple dromedary, and clear across it, from a staging on one side to a staging on the other, was swung the cabled apparatus known as an Aerial Flight. Philip's bandstand still occupied the middle, but the rest, save for a few outlying dusty beds, was as barren as a gravel playground. The Valley had held five thousand people on the occasion of the Brass Band Contest; that night it held and overflowed with thrice five thousand. Half-way up the ascending path that led to it John Willie Garden saw that there was no approach from that quarter; there was nothing for it but to take to the slippery grass and the darkness, avoiding the bivalves open and the bivalves shut, and struggling as best they could to the crest. There, with an arm about each of them, he led them through the slowly moving outer circle of people who struck matches and laughed and occasionally craned their necks forward to look over the dense mass in front. By degrees they gained the ring where, if little was to be seen, a word now and then could be heard; and thereafter, by losing no chance of wriggling forward, they reached a point from which they could see the bandstand.
A ladder ran up to its roof, and up this ladder Eesaac Oliver and two other men had climbed. The bight of a rope had been passed about Eesaac Oliver's body, its ends running round the gilded spike that crowned the flat eight-sided pyramid; and the men who crouched on the slope varied the tether as Eesaac Oliver moved this way and that round the octagonal gutter. The trapeze of the Flight hung motionless in the air above him; the shrieking Switchback had stopped; and the slight white figure, so precariously perched, turned to all sides of the vast speckled bowl about him.
"See who that is, at the right hand rope?" John Willie whispered to June. He still had an arm about either of their waists, and he fancied that June pressed a little closer to him.
"No. Who?" she whispered back.
"Tudor Williams. Expect he couldn't get out of it. He made a speech the other day, all about Young Wales, a regular dead set at them, and he'll sweep the poll after this. I don't know who the other is.—Listen, he's turning this way now——"
Eesaac Oliver's voice came across the packed still basin.
"Cry aloud—spare not—lift up your voice like a trumppp-pet! I say to you young men, and I say to you young women, that this cit-ty by the sea shall not be spared, no, no more than the cit-ties of the plain were spared! It smells of corrupp-tion; it is an offence in the nostrils of God! There is more sin packed into it than there is drops of blood in your bodies, and more wick-kedness, and more fornication, and more irreligion. And those who should help, do they help? Indeed they do not! They fill their pock-kets instead! I tell them, their own souls go, perhaps this night, into the pock-kets of Hell! Aw-w-w, their bazaars prof-fit them lit-tle there! Their new Chap-pils prof-fit them lit-tle there! Their funds, and their balance-sheets, and their foundation-stones with their names on them, prof-fit them lit-tle there!—But I say to you young men, and you young women, that the Wa-ter of Life is free. Come now, come now! Do not say, 'I will sin one more sin and then repent'—perhaps you be taken away before that sin iss commit-ted——"
He turned again, and his voice became less clear.
Perhaps John Willie and his charges were well where they were, high on the rim of the basin. Whether with the pressure of those behind, or with the swelling of their own emotion, many below were moaning softly, and one or two small and hushed commotions seemed to be centres of fainting. The inner ring, close to the bandstand, was hatless; the belt above them was packed so that it would have been impossible to remove a hat; and always about the uppermost circle matches twinkled in and out. Again Eesaac Oliver's voice was heard, as if borne upon a wind:
"—he that loveth father and mother more than Me——"
"Is his father here?" June whispered to John Willie....
Howell was at his own home, surrounded by sympathetic neighbours. Sunk into his arm-chair, he sobbed. Big John Pritchard tried to console him, but he was inconsolable. He shook with his emotion.
"My own fless and blood!" he sobbed. "To turn from his parents, that fed him, and clothed him, and sent him to the Coll-idge, and gave him allowance of twen-ty-six pounds a quarter, and bring him up in the fear of God! Oh, oh!—John Pritchard, give me a drink of water if you please.—And to call his father and mother sinful pip-ple! Indeed, Hugh Morgan, you are happy you have no children! They know bet-ter than you always; indeed the 'orld go on at a great rate, we get so wise! And the Chap-els burdened with debt! There is half a dozen Chap-els for him to preach in, but he say the highways and the hedges is his Chap-pil!... Look you, he not even come home. I meet him in the street, I, his father; and I say to him, 'Eesaac Oliver,' I say, 'if you will not preach in the Chap-pils, then you preach in that field on the Sarn road; you get crowds of pip-ple; it is a big field, and will hold crowds of pip-ple.' But he turn away, indeed he turn his back on his own father!... Look you: If he preached in that field, they find their way to that field, look you, all those pip-ple—they learn the way to that field as well as they learn the way to the sta-tion—and the Chap-el buy it cheap—oh, oh!... By and by that field be worth ten bazaars—oh, oh!... Blodwen, if the gas is lighted upstairs I think I go to bed—the things that were good enough for his father and mother are not good enough for him—this is a heavy day——"