MUSHROOM 
 TOWN 
 
 Oliver* Onions
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 MRS. VIRGINIA B. SPORER
 
 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 OLIVER ONIONS
 
 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 BY 
 
 OLIVER ONIONS 
 
 Author of "Gray Youth," "In Accordance with the 
 Evidence," "Debit Account," etc., etc. 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 NEW YORK 
 
 Publishers in America for Hodder fy Stoughton
 
 - 
 
 Copyright, 1914, 
 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 IN the following pages I have permitted myself to take 
 a number of liberties geographical, historical etymological, 
 and even geological with a country for which I have con- 
 ceived a strong affection; I trust I have taken none with its 
 beauty nor with its hospitality. It will be useless to search 
 for Llanyglo on any map. It is neither in North Carnar- 
 vonshire, in Merioneth, nor in Lleyn. Of certain features 
 of existing places I have made a composite, which is the 
 " MUSHROOM TOWN " of this book. 
 
 The kindnesses I have received in Wales during the past 
 six years have been innumerable; indeed, much of my work 
 has consisted of writing down (and not always improving} 
 things told me by one of my hosts. For this and other 
 reasons I should like to render him such acknowledgment 
 as a Dedication may express. " MUSHROOM TOWN " is 
 therefore inscribed, in gratitude and affection, to 
 
 ARTHUR ASHLEY RUCK 
 Hampstead, 1914 
 
 2046748
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 T!HE INVITATION 9 
 
 PART I 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I THE YEAR DOT 17 
 
 II ITS NONAGE 31 
 
 III THE MINDER 46 
 
 IV "Dim SAESNEG" 52 
 
 V THE HAFOD UNOS 75 
 
 VI THE FOOT IN THE DOOR 86 
 
 VII THE MEMBER . 98 
 
 VIII THELEMA . ; .109 
 
 PART II 
 
 I RAILHEAD 117 
 
 II THE CLERK OF THE WORKS 126 
 
 III THE CURTAIN RAISER 142 
 
 IV YNYS 168 
 
 PART III 
 
 I THE HOLIDAY CAMP 179 
 
 II THE GIANT'S STRIDE 205 
 
 III THE BLANK CHEQUE 218 
 
 IV PAWB . . 233
 
 CONTENTS 
 PART IV 
 
 CHAPTEB PAGE 
 
 I THE BLIND EYE 244 
 
 II JUNE 263 
 
 III DELYN 275 
 
 IV AN ORDINARY YOUNG MAN 297 
 
 V THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT 310 
 
 VI THE GLYN 323 
 
 PART V 
 
 I THE WHEEL 335 
 
 II ADIEU . . 347
 
 THE INVITATION 
 
 { 4 T TT TE'LL take the little cable-tram, if you like, 
 \ \ but it's not far to walk twenty minutes 
 or so the Trwyn's seven hundred feet high. You'll 
 see the whole of the town from the top. The sun will 
 have made the grass a little slippery, but there are 
 paths everywhere ; the sheep began them, and then the 
 visitors wore them bare. And we shall get the 
 breeze. . . . 
 
 " There you are : Llanyglo. You see it from up here 
 almost as the gulls and razorbills see it. The bay's a 
 fine curve, isn't it ? rather like a strongly blown kite- 
 string; and the Promenade's nearly two miles long. 
 But as you see, the town doesn't go very far back. 
 From the Imperial there to the railway station and 
 the gasometers at the back isn't much more than 
 half a mile ; the town seems to press down to the front 
 just as the horses draw the bathing-vans down to the 
 tide. Shall we sit down? Here's a boulder. It's 
 chipped all over with initials, of course; so are the 
 benches, and even the turf ; but you'd wonder that there 
 was a bit of wood or stone or turf left at all if you saw 
 the crowds that come here when the Wakes are on. It's 
 odd that you should never see anybody actually cutting 
 them. Some of them must have taken an hour or two 
 with a hammer and chisel, but I've been up here count- 
 less times and never seen anybody at it yet. 
 
 " Yes, that's Llanyglo ; but look at the mountains first, 
 
 9
 
 10 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 This isn't the best time of the day for seeing them ; the 
 morning or the evening's the best time; the sun isn't 
 far enough round yet. But sometimes, when the 
 light's just right, they start out into folds and wrinkles 
 almost as quickly as you could snap your fingers 
 it's quite dramatic. Foels and Moels and Pens and 
 Mynedds, look half the North Cambrian Range. 
 You couldn't have a better centre for motor-cycle and 
 char-a-banc tours than Llanyglo. . . . Then on the 
 other side's the sea. That's only a tinny sort of glitter 
 just now, but you should see the moon rise over it. 
 People come out from the concerts on the pier-head 
 just, to have a look. . . . 
 
 " The Pier looks tiny from up here ? Yes, but it's 
 three furlongs long for all that, and those two tart-tin- 
 looking things at the end hold nearly a thousand people 
 apiece. But, as you say, it is rather like one of those 
 children's toy railways they sell on the stalls in Gardd 
 Street for sixpence-halfpenny. And that always 
 strikes me as rather a curious thing about Llanyglo. 
 It's a big place now nine thousand winter popula- 
 tion; but somehow it has a smaller look than it had 
 when it was just a score of cottages, all put together 
 not much bigger than the Kursaal Gardens there. I 
 don't know why the cottages should have seemed more 
 in scale with the mountains than all this, but they did. 
 I suppose it was because they didn't set up for any- 
 thing, like the Kursaal and the Majestic and the Im- 
 perial. . . . But it doesn't do to tell the Llanyglo folk 
 that. They look at it in quite another way. To them 
 the sea and the mountains are so many adjuncts, some- 
 thing they can turn into money by dipping people at 
 sixpence a time and motoring them round at four-and- 
 sixpence the tour. . . , And sometimes you can't help
 
 THE INVITATION 11 
 
 thinking that it wouldn't take very much (a wind a 
 bit stronger than usual or an extra heave of the sea, 
 say) and all these hundreds of thousands of pounds' 
 worth of stone and iron and paint and gilding would 
 just disappear be sponged out like the castles and 
 hoof -marks on the sands when the tide comes in or 
 like a made-up face when you wipe the carmine and 
 pencilling from it. ... Eh ? No, I'm not saying 
 they've spoiled the place nor yet that they haven't. 
 You mustn't come here if you want a couple of miles 
 of beach to yourself. It all depends how you look at 
 it. If Llanyglo's cheap jack in one way, perhaps it 
 isn't in another. It's merely that I remember it as 
 it used to be. ... 
 
 " Would it surprise you to learn that the whole place 
 is only about thirty years old? That's all. It grew 
 like a mushroom ; there are people who were born here 
 who don't know their way about their own town. . . . 
 Mostly Welsh? Oh dear no, not by any means. I 
 should say about half-and-half. I suppose you're 
 thinking of the Welsh names of the streets? They 
 don't mean very much. There's Gardd Street, for in- 
 stance ; l gardd ' is only the Welsh for l garden,' and 
 Edward Garden, John Willie Garden's father, built 
 the greater part of it (for that matter, he built the 
 greater part of Llanyglo). And if anybody called 
 Wood (say) had put up a house here, he'd probably 
 have called it ' Ty Coed.' And some of it, of course, 
 is genuine Welsh. The Forth Neigr Koad does go to 
 Forth Neigr, and Sarn, over there, has always been 
 Sam. But people think they're getting better value 
 for their money if they come away for a fortnight and 
 see foreign names everywhere; they've a travelled sort 
 of feeling; so they give the streets these names, and
 
 12 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 print all the placards in two columns, with ' Rhybudd ' 
 on one side and l Notice ' on the other. 
 
 "And that's given rise to one rather amusing little 
 mistake. As you know, this headland that we're on 
 is called the Trwyn, and l trwyn ' simply means a nose 
 or a promontory. But over past the Lighthouse there, 
 there are the remains of an old Dinas, a British camp, 
 and half these Lancashire trippers think the head- 
 land's called after that 't'ruin' <th' ruin' you 
 know how they talk. . . . 
 
 " I'm interested in the place for several reasons 
 (not money ones, I'm sorry to say). For one thing, 
 I like to watch the Welsh and Lancashire folk to- 
 gether ; that's been very, amusing. And then, it's not 
 often you get the chance of seeing a whole development 
 quite so concisely epitomised as we've had it here. 
 Llanyglo started from practically nothing, and it's 
 grown to this before John Willie Garden has a single 
 grey hair on his head (though, to be sure, that cow- 
 slip colour doesn't show grey very much). Then 
 there's that curious essence I don't know what you 
 call it the thing a town would still keep even though 
 you cleared every brick away and built it all over again, 
 and sent every inhabitant packing and re-peopled it. 
 There's a field for speculation there, too, though per- 
 haps not a very profitable one. But most of all I've 
 been interested in seeing what various sets of people 
 have given Llanyglo, and what it's given to them in 
 return how the stones and the people have taken 
 colour from one another, if you understand me, and 
 what colour in fact (if it doesn't sound a little pom- 
 pous) in Llanyglo as an expression of the life of our 
 time. It's sometimes hard to believe that something 
 almost human hasn't got into its stone and paint and
 
 THE INVITATION 13 
 
 mortar. The whole place, as it's spread out down there 
 now two-mile line of front, houses, hotels, railway, 
 gasometers and all has had almost a personal birth, 
 and adolescence, and growing-pains, and sown its wild 
 oats, and has its things that it tells and its things that 
 it doesn't tell, in an extraordinary way or else, as 
 I say, it seems extraordinary, because you get it all 
 into a single focus. There may even be a bit of me 
 in Llanyglo. If you came half a dozen times there'd 
 be a bit of you too. 
 
 " I should like you to meet John Willie Garden. 
 He's the man to go to if you want to know anything 
 about these streets and hotels and the seaside and the 
 stations on the front. Why not come to the Kursaal, 
 on the Terrace, at about nine to-night ? Good. He's 
 a capital chap ; a Something or other on the Manchester 
 Chamber of Commerce, adopted Conservative Free 
 Trade candidate for his division (but a Protectionist 
 in other countries) and probably worth a quarter of a 
 million, a good deal of it out of Llanyglo. Not bad 
 for a little turned forty, eh? He'll probably ask you 
 to dinner. You can't see his house from here ; it stands 
 back from Gardd Street. It was the first house to go 
 up in Llanyglo no, I'm forgetting. There was one 
 before it just one before it, not counting the original 
 cottages, of course. . . . 
 
 " What do you say to a turn ? We've time to have 
 a look at the Dinas before we go down. . . . 
 
 " It's British, and the Sixpenny Guide will tell you 
 all that's known about it possibly more. Its founda- 
 tions are said to have been sprinkled with the blood of 
 Merlin. What's left of it's certainly sprinkled with 
 these everlasting initials. The Trwyn Light's just be- 
 hind, two reds and a white, and they're experimenting
 
 14: MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 with the Rocket Apparatus, but I don't think that will 
 come to much. There's little Forth Neigr, look and 
 that point thirty miles away's Abercelyn. . . . 
 
 " Now the mountains are beginning to show ; there 
 they are Delyn on the left, then Moel Eryr, then 
 Mynedd Mawr. That's Penyffestyn, with the great 
 cavity in his side, and his shadow's right across 
 Bwlch. . . . Yes, very fine, and a perfect evening for 
 it. The posters at Euston don't overstate it, do they? 
 Of course, you've seen that very familiar one, of a 
 Welsh Giantess, shawl, apron, steeple hat and all the 
 lot, holding a view of Llanyglo in her arms? 
 Pink hotels, indigo mountains and chrome-yellow 
 sands. . . . 
 
 " There's the Queen of the Waters coming in. If 
 we wait a few minutes longer we shall see the town 
 light up. Yes, electricity; the power-station was 
 finished only last year ; it's over there beyond the filter- 
 beds; Llanyglo handles its own sewage. . . . Ah! 
 There goes the Promenade lights; three jumps, and the 
 two miles are lighted up from end to end; the kite- 
 string's a necklace now; pretty, isn't it? . . . And 
 there goes the Pier. . . . There'll be a glare behind us 
 like a shout of light in a moment the Trwyn 
 Light. . . . 
 
 " The mountains are dark now, but how the day 
 lingers on the sea ! To-night it's like ribbon-grass. . . . 
 Hear the post-horns? Those are the chars-a-bancs 
 coming in. The last tripper's running for the station 
 now. . . . Now the light's dying on the sea ; it's a new 
 moon and a spring tide. Two or three riding-lights 
 only I say, it's solemn out there. . . . But they'll be 
 dining at the Majestic presently. That long golden 
 haze is Gardd Street, and that spangle at the end of it's
 
 THE INVITATION 15 
 
 the New Bazaar. There goes the Big Wheel in the 
 Kursaal Gardens, with its advertisement on it. We 
 might look in at the Dancing Hall to-night ; that's rather 
 a sight. They have firework displays in the grounds, 
 too, and last year there was one out in the bay ; they put 
 bombs and flares and serpents on rafts, and laid them 
 from boats, like mines. That was in honour of the 
 Investiture of the Prince of Wales. . . . 
 
 " We'd better take the tram down, I think ; we 
 might stumble and break our necks. . . . 
 
 "The other turnstile. That kiosk place? That's 
 the visitors' bureau. They'll tell you quite a number 
 of useful things there cab fares, porters' charges, 
 time and tide tables, excursions and so on; but John 
 Willie Garden can tell you more interesting things than 
 those. Don't forget you're to meet him to-night. . . . 
 
 " You're sure you can't dine with me ? Very well. 
 The Kursaal, then, on the Terrace, at a quarter to 
 nine. . . ."
 
 PART ONE 
 I 
 
 THE YEAB, DOT 
 
 ON 1 a Friday afternoon in the June of the year 
 1880, a roomy old shandrydan, midway between 
 a trap and a wagonette, moved slowly along the Forth 
 Neigr and Llanyglo road. It had been built as a pair- 
 horse vehicle for Squire Wynne, of Plas Neigr, but 
 the door at the back of it now bore the words, " Royal 
 Hotel, Forth Neigr," and its present or some inter- 
 mediate owner had converted it to the use of a single 
 horse. The shaky-kneed old brown animal at present 
 between the shafts might have had a spirit-level inside 
 him, so unerringly did he become aware when the road 
 departed by as much as a fraction from the true hori- 
 zontal. Taking the good with the bad, he was doing a 
 fair five miles an hour. At each of its revolutions the 
 off hind-wheel gave a dry squeak like a pair of boots 
 that has not been paid for. 
 
 The day was warm, and hay was cutting. Combings 
 of hay striped the hedges where the carts had passed, 
 and as the Royal Hotel conveyance was so wide that it 
 had to draw in in order to allow anything else to pass it, 
 wisps had lodged also in the cords of the great pile of 
 boxes and brown tin trunks that occupied the forward 
 part of it. Honeysuckle tangled the hedge-tops; the 
 wild roses were out below ; and in the ditches the paler 
 
 17
 
 18 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 scabious was of the colour of the sky, the deeper that 
 of the mountains towards which the old horse lazily 
 clop-clopped. 
 
 The pile of trunks in front hid the driver and the 
 two print-skirted and black-jacketed young women who 
 sat beside him from those inside the vehicle. These 
 two young women were two of Mrs. Garden's domes- 
 tics, and they travelled far more comfortably than did 
 their mistress. Packed up by her bustle behind, on 
 her right by her seven-years-old daughter who slept with 
 her head on her shoulders, on her left by the angle of 
 the trap, and in front by the hamper, the three or four 
 straw basses, the cardboard boxes, the hold-all of sticks 
 and umbrellas, with a travelling-rug thrown in (all of 
 which articles she strove to balance on her short, steep 
 lap), she could only perspire. Her husband, who sat 
 opposite, could see no more of her than the top of her 
 hen's-tail, lavender bonnet. Even this he shut out when 
 he took up, now his newspaper (every line of which 
 he had read twice), and now his daughter's Little Folks 
 (for the inspection of which periodical, though the 
 print was much bigger than that of the newspaper, he 
 put on his gold-rimmed glasses). The smell of his 
 excellent cigar mingled with the scents of the roses and 
 hay, and trailed like an invisible wake a hundred yards 
 behind. 
 
 John Willie Garden, who was eleven, had travelled 
 half the distance from Forth ISTeigr on the step of the 
 trap. During the rest of the time, now falling behind 
 and now running on ahead, now up a campion-grown 
 bank and again lying down flat to drink at a brook, he 
 had covered as much distance as a dog that is taken 
 out for a walk. He wore a navy blue jersey, which, 
 when peeled off over his head, had the double effect of
 
 THE YEAK DOT 19 
 
 wiping his short nose and causing his shock of gilded 
 hair to stand up like flames, all in one movement. He 
 carried a catapult in one hand. Both pockets of his 
 moleskin knickers bulged with ammunition for this 
 engine. In the heat of a catapult action, against hens or 
 windows, he used his mouth as a magazine, discharging 
 and loading again with great dexterity. But, a mile or 
 so back, his father, looking up over his paper, had called 
 the Cease Firing. John Willie now plipped the cata- 
 pult furtively, and without pebble. It was the chief 
 drawback of the holiday from his point of view that it 
 had to be taken in the company of his father. Among 
 his brighter hopes was that Mr. Garden, having seen 
 them installed, would return to Manchester on the 
 Monday. 
 
 Mr. Garden was head of the firm of Garden, Scharf 
 and Garden, spinners, and, to judge from his attire, he 
 might have stepped straight from the exchange. His 
 square-crowned billycock hat, buttoned-up pepper-and- 
 salt grey suit, and crossover bird's-eye tie with the pebble 
 pin in it, were at odds with the slumbrous lanes and the 
 scabious-blue mountains. He carried a wooden-sticked, 
 horn-handled umbrella, wrapped in a protecting sheath, 
 and from his heavy gold watch-chain depended a cluster 
 of little silver emblems that he would not have ex- 
 changed for as many Balas rubies. All Manchester 
 knew that he could have given up the dogcart in which 
 he drove daily to business, and set up a carriage and a 
 pair of horses in its stead, any day it had pleased him ; 
 and his opinions and judgments, when he saw fit to utter 
 them, were quoted. But he rarely uttered them. 
 When asked for his advice, say upon a letter, he would 
 adjust his glasses, read the letter slowly through, turn 
 back and read it all over again more slowly still, and
 
 20 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 then, when the person in difficulties was awaiting the 
 weighty pronouncement, would look through the letter 
 rapidly a third time, and at last, glancing over the top 
 of his glasses, would mildly observe, " This seems to he 
 a letter." Sometimes he would come to the very verge 
 of committing himself by adding, " From So-and-So." 
 The grey eyes that looked over those gold rims were 
 remarkable. They seemed to serve less as appreciative 
 organs of immediate vision than as passers-on of an 
 infinite number of visual data, which would be accepted 
 or rejected or laid for the present aside by some piece 
 of mechanism hidden behind. He was forty-four, clean 
 shaven, save for a pair of small mutton-chop whiskers 
 already turning grey, darkish and rather delicate- 
 looking, and only half the size of his stout, blonde wife. 
 As long as Free Trade remained untouched, he had 
 no politics, and he was an adherent of the lower forms 
 of the Established Church. He was taking this journey 
 on his daughter Minetta's account, who was not doing 
 so well as she ought to be. He had bought a couple of 
 the Llanyglo cottages, and judged that by this time they 
 must be ready for occupation. 
 
 The mountains drew nearer, and other pale colours 
 began to show through the scabious blue. The pile of 
 luggage continued to brush the hedges, and the off wheel 
 to creak. Minetta snored lightly as she slept, and the 
 black legs that issued from her pink check frock, 
 trimmed with crimson braid, swung slackly with every 
 jolt of the cart. Mrs. Garden's face glistened; Mr. 
 Garden allowed Little Folks to fall from his hand, and 
 dozed ; John Willie sought birds' nests and rabbits ; and 
 the old horse continued to change from lumpish trot to 
 slow walk and from slow walk to lumpish trot, as if he 
 had had a spirit-level inside him.
 
 THE YEAR DOT 21 
 
 After this fashion the Gardens jogged along the lanes 
 where to-day the summer dust never settles for touring- 
 cars, motor-cycles and the Llanyglo motor chars-a- 
 bancs. 
 
 "John Willie!" 
 
 It was five o'clock, and they had arrived. Leaving 
 the cluster of three or four farms that formed the land- 
 ward part of Llanyglo, they had turned through a gate- 
 less gap in a thymy earth-wall, and all save Mrs. Garden 
 and Minetta had descended. The cart-track had become 
 less and less distinct, and had finally lost itself altogether 
 in deep, sandy drifts in which their approach made no 
 noise. There was a fresher feel in the air. 
 
 And then, through a V in the sandhills, the sea had 
 appeared, and the lazy crash of a breaker had been 
 heard. 
 
 The irregular row of thatched cottages was set per- 
 haps a hundred yards back from high-water mark, and 
 the intervening space was a waste of sand, coarse tus- 
 socks, and the glaucous blue sea-holly. Half -overblown 
 rubbish strewed the beach rusty tin pans and kettles, 
 old kedge anchors, corks, a mass of potato-parings in 
 which three or four hens scratched, and the skeletons 
 of a couple of disused boats. The half-dozen service- 
 able boats were gathered a couple of hundred yards 
 away about a short wooden jetty. A mile away in the 
 other direction rose the Trwyn, bronze with sunny 
 heather and purple with airy shadow, with the light- 
 house and the Dinas on the top. A small herd of black 
 cattle had wandered slowly out to it, and was wandering 
 slowly back again at the edge of the tide. 
 
 "John Willie!" 
 
 The cottages were thatched and claywashed, and 
 while some of them had a couple of strides of garden in
 
 n MUSHEOOM TOWN 
 
 front, others rose from little tahises of blown sand. 
 Sand was everywhere. It lodged in the crevices, took 
 the paint off the doors, and had blunted the angles of 
 posts and palings until they were as smooth and rounded 
 as the two or three ships' figure-heads that stood within 
 them. Grey old oars leaned up in corners ; umber nets, 
 with cork floats like dangling fruit upon them, hung 
 from hooks in the walls ; and the squat chimneys had flat 
 stones on the tops of them. The windows were provided 
 with swing-back wooden shutters. Between the farm- 
 ing part and the fishing part of Llanyglo the family had 
 passed three chapels. 
 
 "John Willie!" 
 
 Mrs. Garden had descended, and stood over her neat 
 boot-tops in sand, wondering which of her cramped mem- 
 bers it would be best to try to straighten first. Standing 
 by her only half awake, Minetta rubbed her eyes. At a 
 respectful distance, but a convenient nearness, half a 
 dozen barefooted children described as it were rainbow- 
 curves in the air with their hands from the foreheads 
 downwards, and a little further away the maritime pop- 
 ulation of Llanyglo watched the Eoyal Hotel driver 
 struggle with the luggage. They did not stand off from 
 hostility, but from an excess of delicacy. Then, as a 
 heavy trunk slipped and stuck, a young man with braces 
 over his gansey gave a quick smile, started forward, and 
 bore a hand. 
 
 "John Willie!" 
 
 It was Mr. Garden who called. He had put his 
 key into the door of the cottage where the house- 
 leek grew like a turkey's neck on the claywashed gate- 
 post, and he wanted John Willie to help carry in the 
 smaller parcels. Now John Willie was neither deaf, 
 nor did he feign deafness, but he had a fine sense of the
 
 THE YEAE DOT 23 
 
 defensive uses of stupidity. Question him directly 
 (say about those apples or that broken window-pane), 
 and he knew nothing whatever. Question him further, 
 and he knew less than nothing. You might conceivably 
 have questioned him to the extreme point when his un- 
 admitting blue eyes would have said, as plain as speech, 
 " What is an apple ? " His primrose head could be seen 
 at this moment fifty yards away down the beach. He 
 was watching a fisherman scrape hooks with an old clasp- 
 knife. He had just spoken to the man. " Dim 
 Saesneg" the man had replied. John Willie was now 
 watching him, not as a man who scraped hooks, but as 
 the possessor of a new and admirable defence against 
 questions. 
 
 " John Wil " 
 
 But this time the summons was broken in two on 
 Mr. Garden's lips. He had opened the cottage door, 
 and was looking mildly within. 
 
 The orders he had given for the preparation of the 
 double cottage for his wife and children had included 
 the lining of the interior with match-boarding, and he 
 had understood that this had been finished a week and 
 more ago. It was a month since he had had the advice- 
 note from the timber merchant at Forth Neigr that the 
 material had been delivered. And so it had. There it 
 was. There, too, were the walls. But the match-board- 
 ing was not on the walls. It lay, tongued and grooved, 
 with the scantling for fixing it, just where the timber 
 merchant's men had deposited it on the floor. It filled 
 half the place. On the top of it, still in the sacking in 
 which they had been sewn, were the articles of furniture 
 that had been brought from Mr. Garden's Manchester 
 attics and lumber-rooms. The rest of the furniture he 
 had taken over from the previous tenants, whom some.
 
 24 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 vicissitude of fortune had taken far away to South 
 Wales. 
 
 Mr. Garden removed his glasses, wiped them, replaced 
 them, and then, looking over the top of them, spoke : 
 
 " Where's Daf ydd Dans ? " he said. 
 
 But a cry from his wife, who had come up behind him, 
 interrupted him. She fell back again, not mildly, but in 
 consternation. 
 
 " Nay, nay, Edward ! I never " she gasped. 
 
 " Where's Daf ydd Dafis ? " Mr. Garden asked again. 
 
 " Of all the sights ! If it isn't enough to I 
 thought you told me " 
 
 Mr. Garden blew his nose and slowly put his hand- 
 kerchief away again. 
 
 " Does anybody know where Dafydd Dafis is ? " 
 
 " and us fit to drop for a cup of tea ! " Mrs. 
 Garden continued. " Up since five this morning, and 
 come all that way, and not so much as a fire lighted nor 
 a kettle on to boil " 
 
 Mr. Garden was looking about him again, as if he 
 would have said, " These appear to be boards," when 
 suddenly his wife broke energetically in. 
 
 " Well, it's no good standing looking at it ; we must 
 all turn to, that's all. Jane ! Ellen ! Off with 
 them jackets, and one of you make a fire while the other 
 unpacks the groceries. The tea and things are in that 
 box under the shawls and to think we might have 
 come in wet, and not even a winter-hedge to dry our 
 things on ! There's no wood, you say ? Wood enough, 
 marry ! I can see nothing else ! And the tea isn't 
 there ? Then run out and buy a quarter of a pound to 
 be going on with; I won't have everything unpacked 
 now, not in the middle of this joiner's shop ! Tell her 
 where the grocer's is, Edward "
 
 THE YEAE DOT 25 
 
 And she threw off her lavender dolman and bonnet, 
 and bustled about, like the capable creature she was, as 
 ready to turn to as if she had never had a day's help in 
 her life. 
 
 A little girl stood at the door, still describing rainbows 
 from her forehead; but scarce had Ellen asked her 
 where the grocer's was when there came up at a half 
 run Howell Gruffydd himself, the keeper of the single 
 shop of the place. He was in his shirt-sleeves, wore an 
 old bowler hat, and wiped his hands on the coarse, white 
 apron about his middle. Over his glasses Edward 
 Garden watched his approach, but he did not speak. 
 It was not anger that kept him silent. Already he had 
 accepted fait accompli or in this case inaccompli. 
 Howell Gruffydd broke into sunny smiles of welcome. 
 
 " How d'you do, Mr. Garden ? So you have arrived ? 
 How d'you do, madam? How d'you do, miss? You 
 had a pless-sant journey ? " 
 
 He beamed on each of them, and then beamed on them 
 again. 
 
 " Do you know where Dafydd Dafis is ? " Mr. Garden 
 asked once more. 
 
 " Indeed I do not, Mr. Garden. Perhaps he maake 
 fenss for Squire Wynne. Perhaps he fiss." 
 
 Then Howell Gruffydd's eyes fell on the boards as if 
 he had not noticed them before. He gave a heartfelt 
 "Aw-w-w!" 
 
 " It is not finiss ! Dear me, dear me ! Hwhat a 
 pitt-ty ! " Then he became cheerfully explanatory. 
 " That will be old Mrs. Pritchard Dafydd Dafis he 
 that fond of her as if she wass his own fless and blood. 
 She iss nine-ty, and for two weeks they have prayers 
 for her in the chap-pil, and Doctor Williams, he come 
 from Porth Neigr, and that is five s'illing, but the pains
 
 26 MUSHROOM TOWN" 
 
 in her body was soa bad she not know hwhat to dooa ! 
 And it was good fiss-ing these three weeks and more 
 and the man who bring the boards, he say they well sea- 
 son, but it do them no harm to wait a little while 
 longer " 
 
 Mr. Garden's eyes were still looking over his glasses. 
 
 " Then is he going to let them season for ever ? " he 
 said. 
 
 Howell Gruffydd smiled soothingly. " Naw-w-w ! 
 Not for ev-GT, Mr. Garden ! " 
 
 " It's a good job he hasn't got to get his living in 
 Manchester," Mr. Garden observed. 
 
 At that Howell Gruffydd clasped his hands, as if he 
 congratulated himself that an interesting rumour was 
 confirmed. 
 
 " Indeed, now," he said, " they do say that the pip-pie 
 there is not the same as the pip-pie here ! " 
 
 At this point Mrs. Garden's voice was raised. She 
 was on her knees by the boxes, and could not find the 
 sugar for tea. At the word " tea," Howell Gruffydd 
 broke out with eager hospitality. 
 
 " Indeed it is cup of tea I came about," he said. " I 
 say to Mrs. Gruffydd, l They come all this way,' I say, 
 t and they will be want-ting cup of tea whatever.' It is 
 all ready . . . Eesaac Oliver ! " he called from the 
 doorway " run to your mother, and say we be there in 
 one minnit ! And do not answer me in Weiss when there 
 are pip-pie who do not understand it where are your 
 manners, indeed ! " He turned to the new-comers again. 
 " You s'all have cup of tea whatever, Mrs. Garden it 
 cost you noth-thing and the young gentleman, he is 
 down at the boats, but Eesaac Oliver s'all fetch him 
 come on " 
 
 Howell Gruffydd, the grocer, speaks rather better
 
 , THE YEAR DOT 27 
 
 English to-day than he spoke then, but there is no more 
 quickness and keenness in his black-lashed light-blue 
 eyes, and no more persuasiveness in his purring voice. 
 To the half-unpacked boxes of provisions on the floor he 
 did not drop an eye. He led the way past half a dozen 
 cottages to the little shop with showcards and paper 
 packages in the diminutive window. He showed them 
 in and round the counter, lifting the old curtain that 
 shut off the parlour from the public part of the shop. 
 Blodwen, his wife, in a clean apron that showed the 
 knife-edged creases of its ironing, was curtsying as if she 
 did not know how to stop. The parlour communicated 
 with the inner side of the counter, and behind the 
 counter, on the left, was the window. Bottles and can- 
 isters stood on the shelves, and below them were innu- 
 merable small drawers. The fire-place had a high 
 mantelpiece with countless china objects upon it, and a 
 large dresser with blue and white plates stood against 
 the inner wall. Next to the dresser was a tall clock, 
 with a ship sailing round the world on the dial. A 
 gigantic black turnip of a kettle sent out a cloud of 
 steam ; cranpogs were keeping hot in a dish within the 
 fender ; and near them an enormous marmalade-coloured 
 cat slept. The room smelt of pepper and soap and 
 pickles and cheese, and Howell Gruffydd's guests filled 
 it. He helped his wife to wait upon them, and in the 
 intervals attended to the shop. A little girl came in for 
 a pennyworth of bicarbonate of soda, and Howell, re- 
 turning from serving her, again showed his white, but 
 false, teeth. 
 
 " It maake the tea last longer," he said, with a jerk 
 
 of his head ; " but there is no bi " he smiled again 
 
 apologetically, though he was perfectly well able to pro- 
 nounce the word, " there is none of that in this tea,
 
 28 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 Mrs. Garden. It is not tea like the fine pip-pie in Man- 
 chester drink, but we are simple pip-pie here. Blodwen, 
 the cranpogs; make a good tea, Mr. Garden; indeed, 
 you eat noth-thing ; tut, tut, they taake up no room ! 
 You say what is that, young gentleman? That is a 
 Weiss Bible. Aha, you cannot read that! Nor you 
 cannot say, e Llanf airpwllgwyngyllgogerychyndro- 
 bwlantysiligogogoch ! ' You try ? I say it slow- 
 
 Though Howell had repeated the jaw-breaker twenty 
 times, John Willie Garden would still have maintained 
 the silence of defence. 
 
 " Ha, ha, ha ! It is easy ! . . . Well, I ask you rid- 
 dle instead. There was a young gentleman, and he 
 have eight " he held up his fingers " eight sis- 
 ters. And every one of them has a brother. Now you 
 tell me how many brothers and sisters there are ! " He 
 winked, but respectfully, at Mr. Garden. 
 
 " Nine," said John Willie Garden contemptuously, 
 with his mouth full of cranpogs and jam. 
 
 Howell showed no discomfiture. He laughed. 
 
 " Ha, ha, ha ! He say nine ! I ask him again. 
 There was a young gentleman . . . but, dear me, there 
 is the s'op again ! We must earn our living, all of us. 
 Business before pleas-sure it is a good rule - " 
 
 And he squeezed through to the counter again, while 
 his wife boiled more eggs and spiked the cranpogs on a 
 fork, five at a time. 
 
 After tea Mrs. Garden was seen to be pulling up her 
 skirt and to be feeling for her pocket in the folds of her 
 petticoat; but with an imperceptible gesture her hus- 
 band restrained her. He thanked Gruffydds, and they 
 returned to their own cottage, Eesaac Oliver accompany- 
 ing them to help to pile up the matchboards and to take
 
 THE YEAE DOT 29 
 
 the furniture from its sacking. The cottage was much 
 like the other cottages of the place. Its ceiling con- 
 sisted of tacked-up sheets, inside which spiders and dust 
 and sand whispered and the wind rippled. The black 
 mantelpiece had brass candlesticks and china ornaments, 
 and on one side of the tall clock was a grocer's almanac- 
 portrait of Mr. Gladstone, while on the other was one 
 of Dr. Kees, the President of the Congregational Union 
 of England and Wales. A sampler, rather difficult to 
 see in the bad light, hung immediately within the door, 
 and the window opened six inches, in which position it 
 had to be propped with a short stick. There were 
 geraniums on its sill, and a red sausage filled with sand 
 kept out the draught when it was closed. The outer 
 door of the second cottage was to be permanently 
 fastened up when the match-boarding should be finished. 
 The cottages adjoining belonged to fishermen, the one 
 with a wife and children, the other a widower who kept 
 his departed wife in mind by means of a number of 
 framed and glazed cenotaphs, consisting of a black 
 ground with white angels mourning over a tombstone, 
 
 and, above, the words, " Er Serchog Cof " 
 
 This was Llanyglo when Minetta Garden was first 
 brought there for the benefit of her health. The 
 authors of the Itineraries had not thought it worth men- 
 tioning; Wyndham has nothing to say about it, Skrine 
 did not visit it, Pennant passes it by. But you may find 
 an excellent steel engraving of it, by Copley Fielding, 
 full of accomplishment, elegance and taste, and pub- 
 lished by the London Art Union. If Minetta did well 
 there, it was Edward Garden's intention, so far as Ed- 
 ward Garden's intentions were ever known, to let or sell 
 his cottage and to build a more convenient house of his 
 own. There was stone to be had in abundance within
 
 30 
 
 three or four miles. Mutton was plentiful and de- 
 licious, beef not quite so plentiful nor quite so good. 
 The larger grocery supplies could be sent direct from 
 Manchester, the odds and ends purchased from Howell 
 Gruffydd. Water was to fetch only a hundred yards, 
 and lamp oil, etc., came twice a week in the cart from 
 Forth Neigr. And soon Edward Garden did not 
 know yet, and if he did not know you may be sure 
 nobody else did Forth Neigr might be brought nearer 
 to the rest of the world than ten miles' journey by road. 
 For, besides being a spinner and a good many other 
 things, Edward Garden was a Director of the Ratchet 
 and Rawtonstall Railway, and, as is the compliment 
 between railway and railway, those little silver trinkets 
 that dangled from his gold watch-chain little grey- 
 hounds and locomotives, winged orbs and other emblems 
 of speed were the tokens of his freedom at all times 
 over other lines, and of his personal intimacy with men 
 who open up land, not a field at a time with a plough, 
 but by running a sinew of steel through it, with a nerve 
 alongside that, touched at any point, quickens and thrills 
 throughout its length. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is quite true that he came to Llanyglo 
 first of all for the benefit of his daughter's health.
 
 II 
 
 ITS NONAGE 
 
 AT bottom, neither the good fishing nor the 
 illness of ancient Mrs. Pritchard had been the 
 real cause of Dafydd Dafis's procrastination in the mat- 
 ter of the match-boarding any more than those 
 greased cartridges were the real cause of the Mutiny. 
 He was merely vindicating the claims of a temperament 
 that kept him, and would always keep him, poor, yet a 
 power. He was a day-labourer, whom anybody could 
 hire to build a wall, mend a thatch or caulk a boat; 
 but and this was the secret of his influence he had 
 a harp in his cottage. In a glorious baritone voice he 
 sang Mentra Gwen, Y Deryn Pur, and lorn songs of 
 love and wild songs of battle. More than that, he sang 
 penillion; and as penillion which is an extempore 
 form of song into which you may plunge at any point 
 you please, provided you finish pat and triumphant 
 with the double bar as penillion concerns itself 
 mainly with two themes, namely, the loved mountains 
 and lakes of Cambria, and quick and topical inventions 
 of personal gossip, Dafydd Dafis held his hearers both 
 by their deeper sentiments and their lighter foibles. He 
 was a spare and roughly clad man of thirty, unmarried, 
 with a kindling eye, a handsome nose, and a ragged 
 dark moustache; and when his head was bowed by the 
 side of his harp, all the life of him seemed to run out 
 into the lean and roughened fingers on the strings. 
 
 He came to see Edward Garden about that match- 
 
 31
 
 32 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 boarding on the Saturday morning, bringing a youth 
 of eighteen with him. Edward Garden, who had had 
 experience of the Welsh in Liverpool, which is the 
 capital of Wales, received him with resignation. Fair 
 and softly goes far in a day, and he knew that the 
 luxury of chiding the bard of Llanyglo would prove a 
 dear one did Mrs. Garden find her egg supply suddenly 
 fail and the Llanyglo cows mysteriously cease to yield 
 milk. 
 
 His forbearance was rewarded. Before he departed 
 for Manchester on the Monday morning he had the 
 satisfaction of seeing Dafydd Dafis and the youth 
 actually begin the job. No doubt it would be finished 
 by the time divinely appointed for its finishing. 
 
 But whether Dafydd Dafis sang much as he worked, 
 or worked a little as he sang, remained an open question. 
 
 Now in whatever other respects Llanyglo may have 
 changed, its air then was the same air that the Guide 
 Book so justly praises to-day. Minetta felt the benefit 
 of it at once. During her illness she had had her dark 
 hair close-cropped ; for fear of taking cold, she still wore 
 a red " pirate " cap, that is, a cone of knitted wool with 
 a bob at the peak that fell on one side of her head : and 
 for the same reason she wore black stockings pulled well 
 up over the bamboo-like joints of her bony knees. She 
 was a slight, dark pixy of a child, on whom so much care 
 had been expended that she had begun to care for her- 
 self and to talk wisely about draughts and wet feet ; and 
 sometimes she consoled herself for the loss of her hair 
 by repeating her mother's assurance, that it would grow 
 the more strongly afterwards. 
 
 But within a fortnight of the Gardens' settling at 
 Llanyglo there was no further thought of taking her 
 back home until the cold weather should come. Her
 
 ITS NONAGE 33 
 
 doll's-house and paint-box were sent for. Her health 
 continued to improve. By and by she was to be found 
 squatted down by the sand-blown palings, surrounded 
 by the Llanyglo children, keeping a shop, of which the 
 commodities were shells, pebbles, starfish and the like. 
 Her dolls and their house were neglected. But the 
 other little girls, who had seen these wonders once, 
 sometimes lingered wistfully about Mrs. Garden's door, 
 looking within, and whispering, " There it is, Gwladys 
 see, by the cloch " 
 
 Long before the match-boarding of a single room was 
 completed, John Willie Garden, whom at first his 
 mother had not been able to drive out of doors, had lost 
 interest in Dafydd Dafis, his sawing, his hammering, 
 and his songs. He disappeared by the half-day together. 
 It was a holiday time at the school by the Baptist 
 Chapel, and, with Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd and other 
 youngsters as his companions, he scrambled among the 
 rocks at the base of the Trwyn, or climbed the head- 
 land itself, or digged for bait, or went out in the boats, 
 or fished for crabs with split mussels off the jetty end 
 (he stuffed his catch up underneath his blue jersey, 
 where the animals crawled about on his friendly and 
 naked skin) . The rainbow curves of the children ceased 
 when he or Minetta appeared, but they continued as a 
 salute to Mrs. Garden. The weather continued superb : 
 it rained scarcely at all. The mountains were never for 
 two hours the same ; the sea in the evenings was mother- 
 of-pearl ; and the rising moon seemed to stand up on it, 
 like the lateen of a felucca of gold. 
 
 Mrs. Garden sent to Manchester for her tricycle. 
 
 Then the school by the Baptist Chapel re-opened, 
 and for some days John Willie, hanging idly about 
 and listening to the droning within, was undecided
 
 34 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 whether to give the insulting cry of liberty or to lament 
 that he was left to his own devices. He himself would 
 not have to go back to school till the middle of Septem- 
 ber. Then he still further enlarged his circle of ac- 
 quaintance. He attached himself to a farmer's lad, 
 who shot rabbits of an evening among the sandhills, 
 and, after being allowed to fire the gun, gave his cata- 
 pult away to a " kid." July passed. The match- 
 boarding progressed by fits and starts. It was now 
 Minetta who impeded its progress. Dafydd Dafis loved 
 her as if she had been his own child, and told her stories 
 of dragons and knights and enchantments and fairies, 
 and sang Mentra Gwen to her, all by the hour together, 
 careless whether Edward Garden paid him for those 
 same hours or not. 
 
 With the passing of August, Llanyglo had made far 
 more difference to the Gardens than the Gardens had 
 to Llanyglo. Indeed, Llanyglo looked like absorbing 
 them altogether, as animals not ultimately capable of 
 domestication are sucked back into the feral state. In 
 the matter of dress, for example, they had deteriorated 
 alarmingly. Half his days John Willie spent in and 
 out of the water without a stitch on him, and he no 
 longer had a pair of sand-shoes to his name. And 
 Minetta ? First she lost the bob from the peak of her 
 red " pirate " cap, and then the cap itself was cast aside. 
 From careful nightly brushings of her " new " pleated 
 navy-blue frock with the white braid, she allowed the 
 pleats to get full of sand, and, where the prints of her 
 ribbed soles had been, now her bare feet patterned the 
 beach. Her bamboo legs were brown as seaweed and 
 barked up the shins; and when (with a totally aban- 
 doned display of knickers) she emptied her shoes of 
 sand, she would sit down in a pool as soon as not. And
 
 ITS NONAGE 35 
 
 Mrs. Garden ? Not for worlds would she have had any- 
 body from Manchester see her as she returned on her 
 tricycle from bathing among the Trwyn rocks, sessile 
 on the saddle, a mackintosh over her voluminous bath- 
 ing-dress, a towel cast across her shoulders, and her 
 plump ivory legs rising and falling on the pedals like 
 the twin cranks of a vertical human engine. Yes, the 
 Gardens were slipping back into savagery. They were 
 becoming part of Llanyglo. Manchester seemed, not so 
 much a hundred miles, as a hundred years away. 
 
 And when, on a Monday morning, it became neces- 
 sary that Mrs. Garden should put on her garments of 
 civilisation again and traverse those hundred miles, or 
 years, in order to see how her other home was getting 
 on, the whole population gathered about the Royal Hotel 
 shandrydan that came to take her to Forth Neigr, and 
 tears stood in eyes, and sobs choked throats, and shawls 
 and hands and handkerchiefs were waved as the vehicle 
 started off over the muffling sandhills, and as many 
 promises were made that Minetta and John Willie 
 should be well looked after as if she had been departing 
 never to return, instead of coming back again on the 
 Friday. Howell Gruffydd picked a tear from his eye 
 with his little finger, and spoke of the mutability of 
 human affairs. 
 
 " The one is ta-a-ke, the other left," he said. " It is 
 all change. Dear dear, it make me think of my cousin 
 Evan Evans, of Carnarfon, and his three boys, as fine 
 boys as ever you see, and so-a hap-py, all living under 
 one roof, till Mary Evans die and wass buried, and the 
 changes come, and where are those boys now? They 
 are scatter. One is in Bangor, and one is in Menai 
 Bridge, and one is in Pwllheli. Dear me ! Dear me ! 
 Mrs. Garden was a very kind one. There was no
 
 36 . MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 kinder 'ooman. Al-ways the sa-a-me. She seem like 
 one of ourselves. Well, well " 
 
 And he picked away another tear, as grief-stricken 
 as if he had been reciting an epitaph " Er Serchog Cof 
 Am Amelia Garden." 
 
 Then, when on the Friday she duly returned, there 
 was as much rejoicing as if she had been a sister, come 
 back again from a long wandering. 
 
 Mrs. Garden had brought back with her in the Eoyal 
 Hotel conveyance wellnigh as much luggage as had laden 
 the vehicle on their first coming ; for it had been decided 
 that Minetta's stay was to be still further prolonged. 
 So warm clothing had been brought, and more blankets, 
 and a screen for the door, and a small family med- 
 icine-chest, and Minetta's Compendium Box of Games. 
 And that was bad news for John Willie Garden, 
 for it brought the shadow of his own departure near; 
 and yet it was good news too, for it seemed to promise 
 a more sure establishment in the place, with per- 
 haps another visit for himself during the Christmas 
 holidays. He could not think how the summer days 
 had slipped away, and grew doleful as he remembered 
 how few of them now remained. 
 
 Then, when September was a week or so old, he 
 climbed the Trwyn in order to take his good-bye look at 
 Llanyglo. 
 
 A straggling row of cottages, a few paths over the 
 sandhills, three Chapels, a school, and a few scattered 
 farms: the rest, mountains, sea, and air. The tide 
 was creaming over the short thumb of a jetty, and the 
 herd of small black cows was patrolling the beach. 
 Morgan's cottage, Eoberts's cottage, their own cottage, 
 not more than a dozen other cottages ; and then Howell 
 Gruffydd's shop : already the place was full of memories
 
 ITS NONAGE 37 
 
 for John Willie Garden. That wide pool in the sands 
 that reflected the sky had not been there a fortnight be- 
 fore for the sea had now lost its summer look, and 
 it changed the configuration of the shore at night. A 
 puff of low-blown smoke showed where Dafjdd Dafis 
 was giving a boat a coat of tar. There was the small 
 crack of a gun John Willie's friend was shooting 
 rabbits. On the top of Mrs. Koberts's chimney a new 
 flat stone had been placed, and a new staple for the 
 shutter had been driven into the wall. John Willie 
 had still no stockings on, but he was sensible now of 
 the wind on his legs. They were as brown as rope. 
 His hands too were brown and grimy, and smelt pleas- 
 ant. That morning he had been helping the men to 
 get in the winter peat. . . . 
 
 So he watched, and at tea-time he descended; but 
 already he was making up the exultant tales he would 
 tell the boys of his form, of the spanking place where 
 his father had taken a cottage and might presently be 
 building a house. He would boast over them in the 
 Welsh words he had learned, and triumph no end that 
 they did not understand him. Only to a few of his 
 special friends would he confide the meanings of his 
 expressions in English. 
 
 Three days later he was doing even so, at Pannal 
 School, near Harrogate, in Yorkshire. 
 
 Mr. Garden came to Llanyglo once more, bringing a 
 doctor with him this time in order that Minetta's health 
 might be authoritatively reported upon, and again he 
 departed. The cottages, which in summer had been 
 places to live outside of, began to have a comfortable 
 look as the afternoons drew in. Minetta wore her boots 
 and stockings again now, and her maroon serge frock 
 with the white collar, and Mrs. Garden put her tricycle
 
 38 MUSHROOM TOWX 
 
 away in the little lean-to behind the house, smothering 
 the bright parts with vaseline and covering it up with 
 sacking. The last the very last piece of match- 
 board had been nailed in its place, and all had been 
 pale oak-varnished, so that the sheen of the fire could 
 be seen in the walls. The glowing peats were reflected 
 too, in still red spots, in the black glass rolling-pin, the 
 brass candlesticks, the windows of the dolls' house, the 
 plates and lustre jugs, and the china sitting hen where 
 they kept the eggs. The wind began to hoot in the 
 throat of the chimney. Mrs. Garden's ears became 
 accustomed to the louder falling of the breakers; soon 
 the cessation of this noise would have been the arresting 
 thing. October wore on. There was very little fishing 
 now. Each of the three Chapels had a week-night 
 service, and nearly everybody went to all three. Twice 
 the schoolroom was thrown open for concerts ; but most 
 of the singing took place in the kitchen. Sometimes, 
 on the edge of the dark, a fantastic irregular shape 
 would be seen, rising and dipping and lurching as it 
 approached over the sandhills; it was Dafydd Dafis, 
 carrying on his back the wooden case that contained 
 his harp. Save for these infrequent diversions, the 
 winter was a dead time at Llanyglo. The hamlet rolled 
 itself up and hibernated. Mrs. Garden sometimes 
 sighed for a Halle concert, or a dance, or " a few friends 
 in the evening," but she bore up for the sake of the dry 
 and sunny and exhilarating days and the good they did 
 Minetta. Minetta got out her dolls, their house, and 
 the Compendium Box of Games; and she and Gwladys 
 Roberts and Morwenna Morgan and Mary Price, with 
 the oil lamp on the table and the firelight glowing low 
 on the ceiling, had spring-cleanings of the mimic dwel- 
 ling (to which the Welsh children did not take with any
 
 ITS NONAGE 39 
 
 great heartiness), and epidemics among the dolls (which 
 were more interesting), and once a funeral (to which 
 they gave themselves rapturously). They played Snap 
 and Fishponds, and then Minetta set about the making 
 of a picture screen, with coloured figures which she cut 
 from the Queen and Lady's Pictorial and plain ones 
 which she coloured with her paint-box. 
 
 At Christmas Mr. Garden and John Willie came 
 down, the former for a few days, John Willie for a 
 fortnight. One of his days Mr. Garden spent in a 
 visit to Squire Wynne, who lived at the Plas, three miles 
 away. The sea was some days as black as iron, on 
 others as white as ash with the tumult of the wind. 
 There was snow on the mountains, but little at Llanyglo. 
 Even John Willie did not want to bathe. In the day- 
 time he tried to rig up a sail on his mother's tricycle, 
 so that he might coast along the two miles of beach 
 before the wind; at night he often walked down to the 
 edge of the dimly creaming water, and stood looking out 
 into the blackness, or else at the Trwyn Light, two reds 
 and a white. 
 
 Squire Wynne, the former owner of the Royal Hotel 
 shandrydan, was the ground landlord of Llanyglo, and 
 the reason of Edward Garden's Christmas call on him 
 was still quite simply and on Minetta's account- 
 that he had decided to build and wanted certain land to 
 build on. But this was not quite the simple matter it 
 might have appeared to be. With this, that, and the 
 other, the Squire floundered in a morass of mortgages, 
 and, for the scraping together of his interest money, 
 could scarce have re-papered the dilapidated walls of 
 the Plas dining-room. He had other property also, 
 thirty miles down the coast, which he had never the 
 heart to go and see. It was there that the family for-
 
 40 MUSHROOM TOWN" 
 
 tunes had been sunk. A score of broken shaft-chimneys 
 and heaps of fallen masonry on a promontory were all 
 he had to show for the good Wynne money these, and 
 a deed-box full of scrip and warrants which you could 
 have had for the price of the stamps on them. For that 
 remote volcanic waste had been a happy hunting-ground 
 for the prospectus-monger with hopeful views on paying 
 quantities, and the Squire had granted more concessions 
 than he could count. It was to be presumed that some- 
 body had made money out of the concessions, if not out 
 of the mines themselves. The last enterprise had been 
 manganese. 
 
 " Let me pour you out a glass of port first ; it's the 
 only thing I have that hasn't some sort of a charge on 
 it," said the Squire. He was a heavy man of near 
 sixty, the owner of a family pew in Forth Neigr 
 Church, a stickler for rainbowing, and, in a feckless 
 sort of way, something of an antiquary. His adher- 
 ence to the three-bottle habit helped to make the for- 
 tunes of several quacks in our own day, who advertise 
 infallible cures for the neuritis he and his kind have 
 bequeathed to their descendants. The only sign the 
 Squire himself showed of this was a slightly ochreous 
 eye. Then, when he had poured out the port, " It's 
 you who have the money nowadays," he said, meaning 
 by " you " Gladstonian Liberals. " Look at this ceil- 
 ing of mine. There isn't a ceiling in Wales with a finer 
 coffering, but look at the state it's in ! And that 
 chandelier! It holds forty candles, but I can't afford 
 'em ! This is what / use." He pointed to his father's 
 old reservoir colza lamp on the table. " And I'll show 
 you the staircase presently. . . . Sell ? It won't make 
 sixpence difference to me one way or the other. Which 
 piece is it you want ? "
 
 ITS NONAGE 41 
 
 Mr. Garden told him. 
 
 " Well, you'd better see my man about it. Sheard, 
 Forth Neigr, next to the corn-chandler's shop. Or I'll 
 see him if you like. But if we do come to terms I 
 should like to give you a piece of advice." 
 
 " What is that ? " Edward Garden asked. 
 
 " I suppose you're not Welsh by any chance ? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Well, I'm half Welsh, and things jog on well enough 
 as long as I'm alive. There are all sorts of questions 
 that simply don't arise. But they're a queer people 
 here, and when you get to the bottom of it, practically 
 the question of landowning resolves itself into keeping 
 on the right side of Dafydd Dafis, if you see what I 
 mean." It was not necessary to tell Edward Garden 
 that, but he begged the Squire to go on. 
 
 " For instance," the Squire continued, " I've a couple 
 of mortgages foreclosing any time now Sheard will 
 tell you I don't even know who the mortgagees are. 
 But if they're Welsh, so much the better for them. I 
 mean if they introduce changes, or go at things like a 
 bull at a gate, they'll wish I'd gone on paying them 
 interest. A smile does more than a smack here. If 
 they inclose, for example " 
 
 " Ah, this new Act " 
 
 " Or any other Act. There -"was a case at that No 
 
 Man's Land of mine over there " The Squire 
 
 jerked his head in the direction of the shafts where 
 the family fortunes had been sunk. " An Englishman 
 came, and began to fence, and there was a Dafydd Dafis 
 sort of fellow there, and this man Eodgers thought that 
 because he wore strings round the knees of his corduroys 
 he wasn't anybody of consequence . . . and there you 
 are. The only thing Edward the First could do with
 
 42 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 the bards was to destroy them, and they're the same 
 hreed yet. So that's my advice. For the rest, you'd 
 better see Sheard. Have another glass of port." 
 
 And, after he had been shown the magnificent ruin of 
 a staircase, and had noted without showing the grass on 
 the Squire's paths and the moss in the Squire's grass, 
 Edward Garden thanked the Squire for his advice and 
 took his leave. He was able to come to terms with 
 Sheard, and in the following spring a new house began 
 to go up in Llanyglo. 
 
 The site Edward Garden had selected for his house 
 lay a little way behind the row of cottages, over the 
 thatches of which it looked out to the sea. Rock 
 cropped up there, amid a waste of bents and potentilla 
 and sea-thrift and thyme, and a rill slipped over moss 
 and, a little further on, disappeared into the sand, to 
 emerge again down by the shore. From a stone quarry 
 on the Forth Neigr road stone was still being got for 
 the extension of Forth Neigr itself ; and it would actually 
 be nearer to bring it to Llanyglo. Sheard saw to that 
 also, and Edward Garden, taking the Squire's advice, 
 put Dafydd Dafis, match-boarder, in charge of the work. 
 It would take time, but it would save time. And, so 
 long as it was understood that it was Dafydd Dafis who 
 might say to this man " Come," and he came, and to the 
 other " Go," and he went, Edward Garden did not antici- 
 pate difficulties did he wish, later, to " stiffen " his 
 supply of labour by importing a plumber, or a mason, or 
 a carpenter or two from Manchester. 
 
 So, in the spring, the rock was cleared and chisels 
 began to clink ; and John Willie Garden, away at school 
 in Fannal, could scarce contain himself until the sum- 
 mer holidays should come. He sent, by letter, the most 
 peremptory specifications. His room was to be thus and
 
 ITS NONAGE 43 
 
 thus, and not otherwise. The letters also contained 
 complaints to his mother that his health was seriously 
 impaired by arduous study; so was the health of his 
 friend Percy Briggs: indeed, all the fellows were re- 
 marking how greatly in need of a change of air he and 
 Percy seemed. Mrs. Garden's chief preoccupation was 
 that the new house should have water upstairs and a cup- 
 board at every turn. 
 
 And as that was the first building of their own that 
 the folk of Llanyglo had ever seen, its progress became 
 their daily talk. The farmers came from inland to 
 look at it, and, as the weather grew milder, the fisher- 
 men no longer smoked of an evening under the shelter 
 of their boats down by the jetty, but instead made a kind 
 of club-house of the triangular pile of floor-boards that 
 the Porth ISTeigr timber merchant presently delivered. 
 They climbed inside this slatted prism, hung the inter- 
 stices with sacking as a protection from the wind, and 
 smoked and talked, while the stars peeped down on 
 them. They talked of progress and innovation, and of 
 how little they had ever thought they would live to see 
 such a change as this on the face of their sand-hills. 
 
 " But it will not be as big as the Plas, whatever," one 
 of them would remark, not so much as belittling Edward 
 Garden's new house as in order to correct a certain tend- 
 ency to wild and disproportionate talk. Indeed, they 
 were proud of Llanyglo's growth. Only the building 
 of another chapel could have made them prouder. 
 
 " Aw-w-w, William Morgan, h-what a way to talk ! " 
 another would reply. " You talk like a great simple- 
 ton! You say next it is not so big as the railway 
 station at Porth Neigr! Indeed, the Plas is big-ger, 
 but it is di-lap-i-date, a pit-ty to see, and the stair- 
 case aw-w-w dear ! They do say Squire Wynne he
 
 44 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 go in lit-tle bedroom, not to fall through the floor ! " 
 
 " And the stables is lock up, all but one stall, and 
 you shan't find a handful of corn there, no, not more 
 than will feed one horse ! " 
 
 " There was sixteen horses there " 
 
 " And the Squire, he hunt " 
 
 " It all go to that Abercelyn in the mines thou- 
 sands of pounds ! " 
 
 " There is land here to build stables if Mr. Garden 
 wiss " 
 
 " Indeed, Hugh Eoberts, if he build any more we 
 be bigger than Porth Neigr, whatever ! " 
 
 And this hyperbole always raised a laugh. Porth 
 Neigr, besides being the head of the railway, had a 
 market place, two banks, a stone quay, a court house, 
 and an English Church. 
 
 The house rose higher and higher, and by the time 
 John Willie Garden came again, in July, it had reached 
 the first floor. Long rows of roof slates were stacked 
 under a temporary shed, and, as if he had not had les- 
 sons enough in the school by the Baptist Chapel, Eesaac 
 Oliver Gruffydd did multiplication sums and Welsh- 
 English exercises upon them. John Willie's eyes 
 danced when they saw the scaffolding and ladders. He 
 was six rungs up a ladder before you could have turned 
 round. He was up that ladder and down a second and 
 up a third almost as quickly, nor did he take breath 
 until, short of swarming up the scaffold-poles, he had 
 stood on the topmost point of the structure. Then, with 
 the air of something accomplished, he condescended to 
 the level ground again. 
 
 Half of Dafydd Dafis's men lodged at one or other of 
 the farms and cottages, to the tenants of which they were 
 bound by ties of consanguinity ; the others put up at the
 
 ITS NONAGE 45 
 
 little alehouse half a mile out on the Forth Neigr road, 
 which served also as a shop for the outlying farms. 
 Dafydd paid their wages, and they had built a hearth 
 near the mortar heap for the cooking of their dinners. 
 John Willie dined daily with them. Never was such 
 importance as that with which he came nigh to burst- 
 ing. The rocks and the rabbits, the boats and the 
 Trwyn, no longer called him ; here was not only a house 
 going up, but his house. In his father's absence he 
 could give orders. He became knowing in limes and 
 mortars, expert in the use of the plumb and level. He 
 strutted about with a square, setting it carelessly against 
 angles, and derided Eesaac Oliver and his slates and 
 long-division sums. The eaves-level was reached; they 
 began to get the roof-timbers *up ; the sandhills resounded 
 with hammering and sawing ; and the upper part of the 
 house began to resemble a toast-rack against the sky. 
 Only one stone remained to be set in position. This was 
 the gable-stone with " E. G., 1882" upon it. John 
 Willie warned Eesaac Oliver that the slates on which 
 he ciphered would soon be required. 
 
 As matters turned out, he was wrong in this. Al- 
 ready three men, a plumber, his mate, and a carpenter, 
 had been down from Manchester, and fresh supplies of 
 timber sections of staircase and so on had come in 
 carts over the sound-deadening sandhills. But how all 
 at once the work came to a sudden stop how that toast- 
 rack stood against the sky for another year without a 
 slate upon it and how Edward Garden, away in Man- 
 chester, had once more to accept the line of least resist- 
 ance, while his son loitered disconsolately about the un- 
 finished building until something even more exciting 
 claimed his interest to tell these things another chap- 
 ter had better be begun.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE MINDEB 
 
 THE land on which, as Squire Wynne had told 
 Edward Garden, other mortgages were being fore- 
 closed, began a furlong or so behind the unfinished house, 
 reaching to and including one of the farms Fotty, 
 John Pritchard's. It formed a three-hundred-yards- 
 wide strip of bents and rough grazing, which spread out 
 inland with Fotty in the middle of its base. The mort- 
 gagee was Squire Wynne's Liverpool wine-merchant, 
 and he had accepted the mortgage partly because he did 
 not wish to be at cross-purposes with such of Squire 
 Wynne's friends as were good customers of his, and 
 partly because he was not very likely to get anything 
 else in settlement of a longish account. This account 
 had been reckoned off the sum advanced, which, besides, 
 was based on a low valuation; and, not wanting the 
 land himself, he was ready enough to sell to any optimist 
 who did. 
 
 The land remained "in the possession of the wine- 
 merchant for exactly eleven weeks. At the end of that 
 time he had found his optimist in the person of Terry 
 Armfield. 
 
 And who was Terry Armfield, that his affairs should 
 thus become mixed up with those of Llanyglo ? 
 
 Well, the name of one of his grandfathers, which need 
 not be mentioned, is to be found, in certain circum- 
 stances of notoriety, in Gomer Williams's History of 
 
 46
 
 THE MINDER 47 
 
 the Liverpool Privateers; and that of his father is 
 associated with the bright story of the tea-clippers. 
 Thus a certain adventurousness in Terry may perhaps 
 be accounted for. But whence the rest of him derived 
 was a mystery. Belated young Tractarians who burn 
 incense in their monastic bedrooms were no more com- 
 mon in Liverpool then than they are to-day. In 
 appearance, Terry was an ill-adjusted compromise 
 between an ascetic and a young man about town. He 
 was tall and of a buoyant movement, excellently dressed, 
 had burning and ecstatic brown eyes, and was pos- 
 sessed of an extraordinary power of impressing people 
 as long as, and even a little longer than, he was actually 
 in their presence. This was all very well as long as he 
 spoke only of pictures that this self-made merchant 
 ought to buy, or of books without which some shipper's 
 newly formed library would be incomplete. He really 
 knew a little about these things, as also he did about 
 architecture and engravings, vestments and Ritualism 
 and furniture. The trouble began when he went beyond 
 them. Wealthy business men, looking up as Terry 
 lounged into their offices, would put up their hands 
 defensively, cry, " It's no good, Terry I won't listen," 
 but would presently find themselves listening none the 
 less. It was not that Terry was plausible. Plausible 
 was not the word. He persuaded you only because he 
 was, for the time being, overwhelmingly persuaded him- 
 self. His capacity for enthusiasm was astonishing. 
 Circumstances having driven him from his true voca- 
 tion (the Church) into business, he traded as it were 
 under Letters of Marque that had had an apostolic 
 blessing. House-property, leases, patents, picture- 
 exhibitions, concessions, bills for discount, Irish- 
 harvester agencies, philanthropy on a paying basis,
 
 48 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 and a hundred even vaguer values some idealistic 
 strain in Terry so moved the dullard-on-the-make that 
 he had a new light on business as a benison, and on 
 money-making as something nobler than he had sup- 
 posed. What such an one commonly lacked, Terry was 
 full and running over with ; and the end of the matter 
 frequently was that it was judged to be worth a certain 
 amount of risk to be on the side of Terry and the 
 angels. 
 
 Of course, Terry ought to have been locked up as a 
 public danger. Anybody but Terry would have been 
 locked up. But you cannot lock innocence and raptur- 
 ous good faith up. Terry, if you had locked him up, 
 would merely have sent for his crucifix, plunged into 
 fresh scheming, and would have come out again as run- 
 ning over with piracies and the humanities as ever. 
 
 So Terry Armfield, who hitherto had never heard of 
 Llanyglo and of whom Llanyglo had never heard, took 
 over Fotty and the strip of land that ran down to 
 Edward Garden's unfinished house, with, as it happened, 
 extremely notable results. 
 
 For nobody who knew Terry ever supposed that he 
 made purchases of real estate solely upon his own 
 account. He represented others ; and it is perhaps sig- 
 nificant that the nickname by which he was known 
 among the members of the Syndicate which made use 
 of him was borrowed from the slang of the " swell mob." 
 He was called " The Minder." 
 
 Now the Minder, as you ought not to know, is the 
 gentleman who makes himself charming to you while 
 the others consult about how much you may be worth, 
 and how you may most conveniently be made worth less. 
 Often, like Terry, he himself is not in the real councils 
 of his allies. They want his looks, his candours, his
 
 THE MINDER 49 
 
 repute, his address, and in Terry's case they especially 
 wanted his powers remarkable of persuasion. Until it 
 should be decided what people were to be persuaded of, 
 Terry minded. 
 
 Little did John Pritchard, tenant-farmer of Fotty, 
 dream of the solicitude with which his farm was re- 
 garded by a number of people who had never seen it 
 and did not want ever to see it. Little did he think that 
 that middling oat-bearing land was being minded and 
 brooded upon. Little did he imagine what interest, 
 what benevolence, what affectionate regard ... or, to 
 put it in plain English, he had no notion whatever that, 
 instead of having Squire Wynne for a landlord, he was 
 now the tenant of a set of prospectus-vendors of whom 
 two or three were the same men who had held those hope- 
 ful views on the paying-quantities of manganese that 
 could be obtained from that other property of Squire 
 Wynne's, the Abercelyn mines, thirty miles further 
 down the coast. 
 
 The Corporation did not insist on manganese or on 
 anything else. On the contrary, it was accommodating 
 in the extreme. You paid your money 'and took your 
 choice what commodity you found on its properties ; you 
 could have had tin, iron, copper, lead, anything you 
 happened to fancy. It merely wished to be able to show, 
 in case of need, its indefeasible title to real land, at 
 Llanyglo or anywhere else, but the further from civilisa- 
 tion the better. It would be safer, and really not much 
 dearer, to buy Pritchard's farm, than it would be to 
 have to confess in open Court that the tin or iron or 
 lead shares of which it was trying to create the value, 
 unfortunately happened to have Pritchard's farm sitting 
 on the top of them. 
 
 " No, we'd better get hold of a bit of real land from
 
 50 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 somewhere/' the Syndicate had said. " Better have it 
 in a new name too. All Abercelyn names exempt for 
 three years. Who is there? . . . What about Arm- 
 field?" 
 
 All had agreed that Terry would make an excellent 
 Minder. 
 
 When, in course of time, the Syndicate first heard 
 from Terry (who heard it goodness knows where) 
 that " glo " was the Welsh word for " coal," it was on 
 the point of plumping for coal without further question. 
 
 " What more do you want ? " it asked itself. " ' Glo ' 
 ' coal ' ; there you are. Place-name. Awful lot in a 
 genuine place-name. Find it on an old map, to show 
 that we didn't invent it, and the whole thing settles 
 itself. There's bound to be coal. Sure to be. They 
 didn't call it that for nothing. All ground's got some- 
 thing in it. / say coal. On the face of it. It seems 
 to me Providential. (Shut up, Abercelyn; we're talk- 
 ing about Llanyglo now.) . . . Who says coal, 
 then?" . . . 
 
 But Llanyglo was not destined to be a colliery village. 
 Latticed shaft-heads were not to rise under the Trwyn, 
 nor men to descend in cages to the galleries deep under 
 the sandhills. Edward Garden's house was not to be- 
 come a mine-manager's residence, nor a coal-quay to be 
 constructed where the wooden jetty stuck out like a 
 stumpy thumb into the sea. Nevertheless, it almost 
 looked at one time as if it might have been so. 
 
 The Syndicate's registered offices were within a hun- 
 dred yards of Lime Street Station, and Terry, looking 
 forth from an upper window, could see the august portico 
 of St. George's Hall and the cabs and steam-trams run- 
 ning to and fro past it. He sat day by day at a high 
 sloping desk, perched on a tall stool. A small pile of
 
 THE MINDER 51 
 
 letters lay by his side, weighted with a surveyor's reel- 
 tape, and on a shelf above the press with the dumb-bell 
 arm, thrust among directories and files, were Stones of 
 Venice and The Christian Year. There was a green 
 cardboard shade on the double-elbowed gas-bracket, and 
 on the wall near it hung an ebony-edged T-square and a 
 number of French curves. There was a second stool for 
 callers, and in a small outer office a youth of sixteen 
 read The Boys of London and New York and chewed 
 root-liquorice. The place was shabby, as befitted a 
 hole-in-corner enterprise, but Terry saw not that shabbi- 
 ness. He had splendour enough in his own visions. 
 He did not look very busy, but he was. A dozen in- 
 spired and half-baked schemes fermented in his head, 
 and besides these, he was minding Llanyglo the thyme 
 and wild pansies and butterflies of its sandhills, the 
 glaucous blue sea-holly of its shore, its heathery Trwyn, 
 its coal or what-not underfoot, and its crystal air over- 
 head especially its crystal air overhead. . . .
 
 IV 
 
 ON the forenoon of that day on which work on 
 Edward Garden's house suddenly ceased, Dafydd 
 Dafis, sitting astride of a coping, was singing as he 
 drove heavy cut nails into a beam. His song was 
 martial, and it almost made his joinering warlike. The 
 burden of it was that Cambria's foes (here a bang with 
 the hammer) should fall beneath the sword (another 
 bang) as the pine falls when the levin (bang) flashes 
 from the cloud that hides the head of Arenig (bang, and 
 a nail well home) . John Willie Garden, who had heard 
 somewhere that coins of the current mintage were 
 placed in cavities in foundation stones, was chipping a 
 hollow in the bedding of the " E.G." stone for the recep- 
 tion of a well-brightened sixpence and a document in 
 his own handwriting, that should tell future ages how 
 one John Willie Garden had lived and had done thus 
 and thus. The sun was hot; the new timbers were as 
 bright as John Willie's own primrose-coloured hair 
 against the intense blue ; and the workmen below seemed 
 to stand on their shadows as lead soldiers stand on their 
 little bases of metal. John Willie finished his cavity, 
 and then clambered up to the ridge-tree. There, put- 
 ting his hands behind his head, he lay on his back, his 
 dangling legs balancing him below. He blinked up at 
 the sky, and from time to time called across to Dafydd 
 
 Dafis, " Peth a elwir (whatever the English word might 
 
 62
 
 "DIM SAESNEG" 53 
 
 be) yn Cymraeg, Dafydd ? " Then Dafydd would give 
 him the Welsh, and he would practise it softly. 
 
 It was just on the stroke of midday when Dafydd 
 abruptly broke off his singing in the middle of a word. 
 John Willie, blinking up at the blue, waited for him to 
 resume; as he did not do so, John Willie turned his 
 head. Dafydd was looking away over the sandhills in 
 the direction of John Pritchard's farm. 
 
 John Willie sat up. 
 
 "Who is it? "he asked. 
 
 Dafydd continued to look tinder his hand. " Indeed, 
 it look like Mr. Sheard," he muttered, " but he have 
 strangers with him. It is Mr. Sheard's carr-adge, what- 
 ever. . . . Hugh Roberts!" He called to the men 
 down below, who were making ready for their midday 
 meal. He said something in Welsh to them, and they 
 too looked. 
 
 Mr. Sheard's governess-cart was drawn up by the 
 earth-wall half a mile away, and from it three figures 
 had descended. They climbed over the wall and began 
 to cross the sandhills. One of them walked slowly and 
 somewhat after the manner of a clock-work toy, as if he 
 was pacing a distance; and another, after looking this 
 way and that about him, moved off to the right, appar- 
 ently also pacing. He stopped and held up his hand, 
 and then returned, laying out along the ground as he 
 went, something that made a little glitter in the sun. 
 They came together again, and seemed to confer. Then 
 over the earth-wall John Pritchard climbed, and William 
 Sheard went to meet him. After that they all pointed, 
 in various directions. 
 
 Dafydd Dafis, from the top of the pale yellow toast- 
 rack, called something else in Welsh, too quick for John 
 Willie to hear. Then he gazed again. Something else
 
 54: MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 was coming along the Forth ISTeigr road. Dafydd, who 
 had the eyes of a river-poacher, knew both the cart and 
 the two men who rode on the load. It drew nearer. 
 Sheard and the two men seemed to be explaining some- 
 thing to John Pritchard. After a time John Pritchard 
 walked away. 
 
 Dafydd Dafis descended from the roof, followed by 
 John Willie Garden. He had put his hammer into his 
 pocket; his little heap of cut nails remained on the 
 coping. The men had gathered into a cluster, but none 
 went over the sandhills to see what was happening. 
 
 Then a frequently repeated word struck John Willie's 
 ear. He turned to Dafydd Dafis. 
 
 " Peth a elwir f adwydd ' yn Saesneg, Dafydd ? " he 
 asked. 
 
 Dafydd Dafis looked as if he had never sung in his 
 life. 
 
 " Post hedgestake," he replied. 
 
 Slowly they got out their dinner. 
 
 As they did so Howell Gruffydd came up from the 
 beach. Formerly, he had rebuked Eesaac Oliver for 
 speaking Welsh in the presence of those who did not 
 understand it ; now, John Willie Garden's presence was 
 entirely disregarded. He did not understand six words 
 of the low, rapid conversation. 
 
 Then in the middle of it a light sound came over the 
 sandhills, and the talk suddenly ceased. They waited. 
 The sound came again. 
 
 Hedgestakes were being flung from the cart down by 
 the side of the road. 
 
 The workmen continued to sit after dinner, but not a 
 ladder was mounted again that day. 
 
 John Pritchard was big and sickly and consumptive, 
 and his farm kitchen was also the Llanyglo Post Office.
 
 "DIM SAESKEG" 55 
 
 There John Willie went at six o'clock that evening to 
 post a letter for his mother. Nominally, John's mother, 
 ancient Mrs. Pritchard, whom Dafydd Dafis so greatly 
 loved, was the postmistress, but actually Miss Nancy 
 Pritchard, the schoolmistress, did most of the work. 
 She was sealing the letter-bag from a saucer of melted 
 wax when John Willie entered. The postman's cart 
 waited at the door, and beyond it, past the gate, could 
 be seen the hedgestakes that had been shot down on the 
 opposite side of the road. The postman was explaining 
 something to John Pritchard, and Dafydd Dafis and his 
 labourers listened in silence. In her chair by the fire 
 sat ancient Mrs. Pritchard, seeming old as the Dinas 
 itself, her face a skull with a membrane stretched over 
 it, a black gophered snood surrounding it, her hands 
 anatomies, and her mouth from time to time making a 
 sort of weak baa-ing. 
 
 Of the hushed and rapid conversation at the door, 
 John Willie caught this time a phrase or two he under- 
 stood. " Wait and see, whatever," he heard them say ; 
 " let them drive them in ... adwydd . . . perhaps it 
 be on Thursday . . . Saesneg. . . ." He approached 
 the group. 
 
 " Peth a elwir " he began. 
 
 But the men who formerly had made much of him 
 now took no notice of him at all. 
 
 The next day two strangers from Porth Neigr ap- 
 peared at Llanyglo, and began to stake out and to enclose 
 a belt of land that extended, roughly, from the Porth 
 Neigr road on both sides of John Pritchard's farm 
 nearly as far as Edward Garden's house. John Willie 
 watched these two men at work with their pawls, meas- 
 uring and driving, but the curious thing was that 
 nobody else did so. Save for the Porth Neigr men, the
 
 56 MUSHROOM TOWN" 
 
 blue and sulphur butterflies and the rabbits, the sand- 
 hills were extraordinarily deserted. John Willie 
 wandered here and there in search of somebody to talk 
 to, and by and by. found himself in Howell Gruffydd's 
 shop. The grocer showed his false teeth in a smile, and 
 then continued to weigh sugar. 
 
 " Well, John Willie Garden, can you say ' Llanf air- 
 
 pwllgwyngyll ' yet ? " he asked, his eyes gleaming 
 
 as brightly as the bright scoop in his hand. 
 
 " Where's everybody ? " John Willie demanded. 
 
 " You look for Eesaac Oliver ? " Howell asked. " He 
 go errand for me, to the lighthouse. You meet him 
 coming back if you go." 
 
 " Where are all the men ? " John Willie demanded 
 again, and Howell made a quick and mocking gesture. 
 
 " Indeed, one hide behind that cur-tain quick, look 
 see ! . . . Ha, ha, ha ! " he laughed when John Willie 
 involuntarily turned in the direction in which he had 
 pointed. " I cat-ss you that time, John Willie Garden ! 
 You think there's a man behind that lit-tle cur-tain, 
 hardly so big as my apron! Your sister, she s'arper 
 than that, whatever! . . . You go find Eesaac Oliver. 
 He fetch eggs from the lighthouse. Perhaps you meet 
 all the men there too " 
 
 And that was as much as John Willie could get out 
 of him. 
 
 It was plain that something extraordinary was 
 toward. It was a habit of John .Willie Garden's to look 
 in at Pritchard's farm of an evening, and there to pass 
 the news with John Pritchard and to watch his ancient 
 mother, bent doublefold over her Bible, running a rush- 
 light along line after line so close to the page that the 
 book was scored across with bars of smoky brown. He 
 went as usual that evening. But he had hardly opened
 
 "DIM SAESNEG" 57 
 
 the door when it was closed again upon him. " We go 
 to bed," said John Pritchard, and packed John Willie 
 off without his customary " Nos da." 
 
 But John Willie knew that they were not going to bed. 
 The door had not been closed so quickly but that he 
 had seen a dozen men crowding the kitchen, and Dafydd 
 Dafis's eyes, hollower than ever in the light of the candle 
 that stood at his elbow, with a sentimental and knife- 
 like gleam in them as they turned. 
 
 The next morning, every stake that those two Forth 
 Neigr men had driven in had been uprooted again, and a 
 board with " Rhybudd " on it lay down the beach, 
 already lapped by the rising tide. 
 
 It was once told to the writer of The Visitors' Six- 
 penny Guide to Llanyglo and Neighbourhood a young 
 man with so little regard for his bread and butter that 
 he made a labour of love of a job that brought him in 
 exactly ten pounds it was once told to this over- 
 conscientious author, by a man who had known Squire 
 Wynne very well, that the Squire, finding himself one 
 day in Liverpool, and taking a walk to the docks with an 
 acquaintance in the Royal Engineers, pointed down the 
 Mersey past New Brighton, and said, " Do you know, 
 I've sometimes had the idea that if this country was 
 ever invaded the enemy would come up there ? " " But 
 surely," exclaimed his friend, " it's a difficult piece of 
 navigation ? " " Yes," the Squire replied, " but half 
 the pilots are Welshmen." 
 
 No doubt the Squire said it without accepting too 
 much responsibility for it. No doubt, too, he would not 
 have allowed anybody else to suggest that Wales might 
 slyly open a back-door into England. But that there 
 was something, much or little, in it, the famous Llany-
 
 58 MUSHROOM TOWltf 
 
 glo Inclosures Dispute, that now began, lasted off and 
 on for three years, and then came to an end in as fantas- 
 tic a manner as you could conceive, seemed to show. 
 
 For that dispute would not have been so obstinate 
 and envenomed had it been simply a question of grazing, 
 turbary, and right-of-way. True, there might still have 
 been the fence-destruction and gate-burning that pres- 
 ently filled John Willie Garden's heart with a fearful 
 joy; but and this is what made the difference 
 Owen Glyndwr and his triumph over Mortimer would 
 not have been dragged in, nor Taliesin and his prophecy, 
 nor Howel Dda, nor Gruffydd ap Rhys, nor Llewelyn 
 ap lorwerth, nor a hundred other grey and valiant and 
 unforgotten ghosts of princes and saints and bards whose 
 names string (as it were) all Wales, from Braich-y-Pwll 
 to St. David's Head, making of it one Western Harp in 
 which the wind of sentiment is never still. 
 
 For these fences on the Llanyglo sandhills were not 
 fences they were Saxon fences. They were not 
 notice-boards and gates they were the insulting tokens 
 of invasion and rapine and defeat. The Welshman says 
 of himself that he is able to keep only that which he has 
 lost, and, in Dafydd Dafis's view of it, at all events, not 
 a piratical Liverpool Syndicate, but a marauding 
 Saesneg king had come again. 
 
 On the evening of the day on which those fences were 
 laid flat again, John Willie went once more to Pritch- 
 ard's farm, and this time was not refused admittance. 
 Perhaps nobody either saw or heard him enter. As if it 
 had been put there for a signal, a single candle in a flat 
 tin stick stood among the geraniums in the little square 
 window-recess, and, save for a dull glow from the shell 
 of peats on the hearth, that was the only light in the 
 room. Again seven or eight men were gathered there,
 
 "DIM SAESNEG" 59 
 
 some sitting on the hard old horsehair sofa, two on the 
 table, and others crouched or standing in corners; and 
 the candle-light rested here on a bit of lustre-ware, there 
 on a chair knob, and elsewhere on a cheekbone or the 
 knuckles of a hand. It barely reached Dafydd Dafis, 
 who sat in the farthest corner, with his cap on his head 
 and his head resting against a Post Office proclamation 
 that hung on the wall. No sound could be heard save 
 the loud tock-tocking of the tall clock with the in-turned 
 scrolls on the top and the gilt pippin between them. 
 
 John Willie thought it would be mere grown-up to 
 accept their silence and to share their motionlessness. 
 He set his elbows on the dresser and sank his neck 
 between his shoulders. The shadow of great John 
 Pritchard, who sat on the sofa's end, covered John Willie 
 and half the wall behind him as well, and John Willie's 
 eyes only discovered Dafydd Dafis in the farther corner 
 when Dafydd moved. As he moved, a bit of gilt fluting 
 dipped forward out of the gloom of the chimney-corner. 
 Dafydd had his harp. 
 
 The next moment a single thrumming note had broken 
 out. It was followed by a soft chord of three or four 
 more. . . . 
 
 " Mae hen wlad fy Nhadau yn anwyl i mi, 
 Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, enwogion o fri " 
 
 It is the commonest air you will hear in Wales 
 Land of my Fathers. Quarrymen sing it as they work 
 by their trucks, slate-splitters whistle it as they tap in 
 their wedges, farmers' lads tss-tss it between their teeth 
 as they clump along the road, sitting sideways on their 
 horses. You would think it had died an age ago of 
 familiarity and repetition. Had it been God Save the 
 King, played at an English theatre, there would have
 
 '60 MUSHROOM TOWN" 
 
 been a single line of it, half lost in the reaching for 
 shawls and cloaks and fans, and here and there a man 
 would have stood with an interval of an inch between 
 his hat and his head, and already the attendants would 
 have been getting out the sheeting for the stalls so 
 long is it since we knew adversity. But here, it needed 
 but a stake driven into a foreshore that would hardly 
 have pastured a donkey, and that was enough so much 
 adversity have they seen. . . . Then, as John Willie 
 craned his neck, a man moved from in front of the candle 
 among the geraniums, and Dafydd Dafis's hands could 
 be seen. They seemed not so much hands as multiple 
 things, assemblies of members each one of which was 
 possessed of an independent life and will. There was 
 not a finger that did not lurk, stiffen, clutch, and then 
 start back from the throbbing string as if each note had 
 been a poignant deed done, an old and secret vow re- 
 deemed. For the images that were evoked were cruel 
 images. Those fingers of Dafydd's might have been 
 choosing, not among strings of wire and gut, but among 
 the living nerves of an enemy whose moans of suffering 
 were transmuted into music. Know, that this not 
 the languid wrist nor the caressing hand, not the swans- 
 neck forearm nor the coquetry of the foot on the pedal 
 not these, but the hook, the claw, the distortion, and 
 the wreaking and the more than human and yet some- 
 how less than human love this is the harping of 
 Wales. , 
 
 Dafydd's head against the Post Office notice did not 
 move, but his twisted hand might have wrenched the 
 sinews from their shoulder-blade of a frame 
 
 " Pleidiol wyf i'm Gwlad! "
 
 "DIM SAESKEG" 61 
 
 He did not sing the words, but the words that sang 
 themselves in the ear of every man there meant that he 
 was so enwrapped in his country that an alien stake in 
 her soil was a stake in his heart also. . . . 
 
 Within a week of that harping of Hen Wlad, Terry 
 Armfield had more to mind than he had ever reckoned 
 for. 
 
 There was no doubt that the flame was fanned largely 
 by the Chapels. These were, respectively, of the three 
 denominations most common in Wales, namely, Baptist, 
 Calvinistic Methodist, and Independent; and Terry 
 Armfield, coming down presently to see for himself 
 what all the trouble was about, gave one affrighted look 
 at their architecture, gasped, " Shade of Pugin ! " and 
 fled. The Baptist Chapel was a plain slate-roofed 
 Noah's Ark of stone that, with the day-school adjoining 
 it, stood alone in the middle of the sandhills. At one 
 end of its roof -ridge was a small structure in which a bell 
 swung, and the building had this further peculiarity, 
 that, good stone being cheaper at Llanyglo than com- 
 mon bricks, the latter material had been used wherever 
 an embellishment had been desired. The Independent 
 Chapel was also of stone, with zinc ventilators like those 
 of a weaving-shed ; these looked over the fishermen's cot- 
 tages out to sea not far from Edward Garden's house. 
 And the third Chapel, that of the Methodists, of which 
 body Howell Gruffydd was the principal pillar, lay be- 
 hind the farms. It was of corrugated iron and wood, 
 painted inside with a skirting of chocolate brown and 
 upper walls of a peculiarly sickly light blue. On the 
 walls were stencilled ribbons with V-shaped ends, and 
 these bore texts in Welsh. Architecturally all these 
 were hideous, but, to those whose grandfathers had wor- 
 shipped in the fields and in clefts of the barren moun-
 
 62 
 
 tains and on the wide seashore, they had the beauty of 
 a thing that has been ardently desired, and long suffered 
 for, and passionately loved. 
 
 For from these three Chapels came not only the 
 impulse of the spiritual life of Llanyglo, but its local 
 politics of dissent also. Education, the Poor Law, mat- 
 ters of Local Government, Temperance, Tenure, the 
 Eisteddfod, and the nursing of Nationalism if these 
 things were not actually Llanyglo's religion, they were 
 hardly divisible from it. And this welding of Faith 
 with secular works was helped by two other circum- 
 stances. The first circumstance was that no language 
 was heard in the chapels but Welsh ; and the second was 
 that, as a result of the local-preacher system, three times 
 out of four the Welsh issued from the same mouths 
 from Howell Gruffydd's mouth at the Methodist Chapel, 
 from big John Pritchard at the Baptists', and from 
 Owen Morgan's among the Independents. None of 
 these went quite so far as openly to incite to the destruc- 
 tion of fences. 
 
 They merely prayed to be delivered from the situa- 
 tion in which they found themselves, 
 
 Whereupon, like Drake's men, heartened by prayer, 
 they rose from their knees again to take another pull on 
 the rope. 
 
 So three times in six weeks those fences were set up 
 and laid flat again ; and then it was that Terry Armfield 
 came down, saw the Chapels (as above mentioned), 
 gasped " Shade of Piigin ! " and straightway sought 
 Squire Wynne. 
 
 But before ever he set eyes on the Squire he had 
 already almost forgotten the errand that had brought 
 him. As the servant showed him to the dining-room 
 he saw that noble ruin of a staircase, and his eyes be-
 
 "DIM SAESKEG" 63 
 
 came illumined. Then, in the dining-room, those same 
 eyes rested on the coffered ceiling and the portraits and 
 the wide nmllioned lattice. By the time the Squire 
 entered he was adoring the stately stone fireplace. He 
 swung round, hearing the Squire's step. 
 
 " Magnificent, magnificent ! " hie cried. " Show me 
 over the house I beg you to show me over the 
 house ! " 
 
 The Squire, who had had this kind of visitor before 
 (though none with quite that perilous smoulder in his 
 eye that Terry had) naturally concluded that a fellow- 
 antiquary, finding himself in the neighbourhood, had 
 permitted himself to beg for a sight of the faded glories 
 of the Plas. 
 
 " I'll show you over part of the house with pleasure," 
 said the Squire ; and he did so. 
 
 " Magnificent ! " Terry cried again, when they were 
 once more back in the dining-room. " And oh, that 
 rood-screen early sixteenth and those sedilia in 
 your Church over there! I spent an hour there as I 
 came along." 
 
 " Oh, you came Forth Neigr way, did you ? " said the 
 Squire. 
 
 As if he had previously written the Squire a letter 
 setting forth his business in detail, which therefore he 
 need not repeat, Terry leaped light-heartedly ahead. 
 
 " Yes, sir and then, after that, to come upon those 
 incredible Chapels! (That's a misnomer, by the way, 
 unless they contain relics.) ... Of course, after that 
 I'm not surprised at anything these people do fences 
 or anything else " 
 
 The Squire was reaching port from the sideboard. 
 " Eh ? " he said, not quite understanding. 
 
 " Those places an expression of religious emotion ! "
 
 64 
 
 Terry cried, throwing up his hands. " Of course, 
 what's happened was a perfectly natural result ! Com- 
 mit such an outrage on the aesthetic sense as that and 
 and no fence is safe ! If I'd seen those Chapels first I'd 
 as soon have bought a volcano as that land ! They ought 
 to have been mentioned by the vendors flagrant sup- 
 pressio veri deliberate concealment of a material fact 
 an action ought to lie by Jove, I've a good mind to 
 take advice about it ! " 
 
 " I beg your pardon ? " said the puzzled Squire. 
 
 A very few questions served to enlighten him. His 
 mouth twitched as he filled his harebrained visitor's 
 glass. 
 
 " Well," he said, " I don't quite follow your processes, 
 but your result seems all right. If you mean there's 
 some connection between the Chapels and your fences 
 being pulled down, I dare say you're not very far wrong. 
 The places of worship do settle a good many things indi- 
 rectly here. But our own Establishment's been called a 
 branch of the Civil Service, so I don't see how we can 
 complain if some of their activities are a little secular 
 too." 
 
 "'A little secular!"' echoed Terry. "Pulling 
 down fences l a little secular ! ? . . . Now I'm anxious 
 not to go to extreme lengths " 
 
 " Eh ? " said the Squire rather quickly. He gave 
 Terry a longish look. ..." Do you know Wales ? " he 
 asked politely. 
 
 " I do not. But I've not heard that it's outside the 
 Law. I was going to say, that I don't want to issue 
 summonses if it can be avoided " 
 
 Thereupon the Squire, who was inclined to like this 
 half-mystical zany of a guest, gave him the same advice 
 he had given to Edward Garden.
 
 "DIM SAESKEG" 65 
 
 " Oh, avoid it if you possibly can ! " he said good- 
 humouredly. " There's nothing these people won't do 
 for you if you go the right way about it, but 
 it must be the right way. A new neighbour of yours 
 seems to be getting along with them quite success- 
 fully, a man called Garden. Quite an opportunist, I 
 should say takes things just as he finds them, 
 settles every question strictly on its merits and has a 
 good deal of audacity up his sleeve for use at the right 
 moment, I don't doubt. Can't you take a leaf out of 
 his book?" 
 
 " Do they pull down his fences ? " Terry demanded 
 over his shoulder; he had been looking at that mar- 
 vellous fireplace again. 
 
 " I don't think so. As a matter of fact they're build- 
 ing his house for him. By the way Sheard's told 
 me very little about it have you bought your land to 
 build on?" 
 
 Terry, remembering his Syndicate, had a momentary 
 check. " I don't know yet," he confessed. 
 
 " Because if you have," the Squire continued, " and 
 find them employment spend money in the place 
 and use a certain amount of tact you might hit it off 
 with them. But do try to overlook their Chapels. A 
 soul's sometimes saved under a tin roof, you know." 
 
 Terry looked as if he would far rather have his soul 
 damned under a Gothic nave. " That's simply buying 
 'em off," he said. He would have preferred to burn 
 them, each at one of the stakes they had uprooted. 
 
 " Well. . . . I'm afraid it's all the advice I can give 
 you. And now I shall have to ask you to excuse me. 
 I'll show you a rather fine carved kingpost before you 
 go if you like " 
 
 And Terry presently departed for Forth Neigr again,
 
 66 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 where he took the taste of the Chapels out of his mouth 
 in a further ecstatic contemplation of the early sixteenth- 
 century rood-screen. 
 
 The fences were set up again. 
 
 John Willie Garden could never be sufficiently grate- 
 ful to his stars that what happened next came before he 
 departed for school again. He had gone to bed that night, 
 but was lying awake, thinking of the suspended building. 
 He knew that the resumption of that building was not 
 irremediably involved in the fencing dispute; Edward 
 Garden had established a serviceable goodwill in Llany- 
 glo; and that very night, standing by Pritchard's 
 manure-heap, Dafydd Dafis had all but told John Willie 
 that when Llanyglo had settled with the intruder it 
 would have time to spare for the child of its adoption 
 again. He had told him this, and had then ruffled up 
 John Willie's fair hair with his hand and had added 
 that it was ten o'clock and time he was in bed. 
 
 His little window, as well as that of the next room, 
 where his mother slept, overlooked the sandhills, and 
 John Willie, lying awake, did not at first notice the 
 change in its colour. Neither did his ears hear at first 
 a low muffled cracking that had been going on for some 
 time. But suddenly he sat up. The muslin curtains 
 and the claywashed embrasure of the window had a 
 rusty glow, which reached the counterpane of the bed 
 in which John Willie lay. 
 
 The moment he saw this John Willie was out of bed. 
 Then, within thirty seconds, he had plunged into his 
 jersey, tucked his nightgown hastily into his knickers, 
 and, making as little noise as possible, had tiptoed 
 down the stairs and out of the cottage. 
 
 The bright glow over the sandhills guided him, and 
 he ran as fast as he could through the muffling sand.
 
 "DIM SAESNEG" 67 
 
 The continuous cracks were like pistols, and a deep 
 roaring could be heard, which became louder. Then, 
 mounting a hillock, John Willie saw the beautiful 
 blaze. It was as high as a cottage, and the twisting, 
 upstreaming column of sparks above it rose fifty feet 
 into the night. It illumined the sandhills far and 
 wide. The Baptist Chapel and schoolhouse looked as 
 if they were cut out of red cardboard against the night. 
 Even the zinc ventilators of the Independent Chapel, 
 down by the sea, showed faintly. Then all became 
 grey again as a dozen fresh stakes were piled on. By 
 the time John Willie Garden got there these too had 
 caught, with volleys of cracks. Every man in Llanyglo 
 was there, and, farther off, groups of women also. The 
 heat was intense, so that the men and lads who ran in 
 to throw back half -consumed ends did so with their faces 
 averted. 
 
 "Why didn't you tell me?" said John Willie to 
 Dafydd Dafis reproachfully. 
 
 Dafydd was watching this beautiful Red Dragon of 
 a flame that was burning Saxon stakes. His eyes 
 blinked rapidly. Then he leant over John Willie, and 
 his forefinger tapped two or three times on the boy's 
 heart. 
 
 " You wass tell me you go to bed," he whispered. 
 " You wass tell me that, at ten o'clock, at John Pritch- 
 
 ard's. There iss two men over there " suddenly 
 
 he straightened himself again and pointed, " you can 
 tell them the same whatever." 
 
 A hundred and fifty yards away two men watched. 
 They were the men from Forth Neigr who had set up 
 the fences. They put up at a wayside cottage two miles 
 away, and probably they were not surprised at what 
 was happening. They did not approach any nearer.
 
 68 MUSHROOM TOWN" 
 
 Then there was a call of " John Willie ! " and Mrs. 
 Garden's terrified face could be seen in the outer ring 
 of light. John Willie was haled off, in a rage that was 
 nearer to tears than he would have admitted. 
 
 Four days later summonses were served on Dafydd 
 Dafis and two other men. 
 
 The serving of those summonses had an instant and 
 very remarkable effect. This effect was, that three of 
 the inhabitants of Llanyglo straightway lost all recol- 
 lection of the English language. And not only did 
 they, the summoned ones, lose it, but every witness called 
 from Llanyglo fell into an ignorance as blank. This 
 happened at Sessions, before Squire Wynne himself, 
 who, in the days before this visitation of forgetfulness, 
 had talked English to all of them. The gloomy magis- 
 trates' Court opposite Forth !Neigr railway station was 
 crowded. Terry Annfield, at whose instance the sum- 
 monses had been issued, thought he had never seen such 
 a set of pigjobbers as stood against the perspiring walls 
 or sat with their chins on their outspread forearms, their 
 caps in their hands or in the pockets of their corduroys. 
 The two men who had put up the fences sat in the well 
 of the Court. They were brothers, and their name was 
 Kerr. The skylight shone on the baldish head of the 
 elder of them, and both had given their evidence in a 
 strong Lancashire accent. They had been watching on 
 the sandhills, they said, expecting something of the sort, 
 and knew that it had taken place at exactly ten o'clock, 
 because they had both looked at their watches. . . . 
 
 So " Dim Saesneg," said man after man ; and the 
 Squire could only make dots with his pen on the blotting- 
 paper before him, keep his eyes from Terry Annfield, 
 and call for an interpreter. 
 
 Now interpretation takes time, during which time the
 
 "DIM SAESNEG*" '69 
 
 person with most to gain can be thinking of the tale he 
 will tell next. So the prosecuting solicitor stood up 
 before Dafydd Dans, and this kind of thing began : 
 
 " Were you on this land at ten o'clock that night ? " 
 
 ( ef Oeddych chi ar y tir yma am ddeg o'r gloch y noson 
 "hono, Dafydd Dafis?" This from the interpreter.) 
 
 A rapid denial from Dafydd, not a hair of his shaggy 
 moustache moving. 
 
 " Ask him where he was." 
 
 "Lie r'oeddycTi chi, Dafydd Dafis? " 
 
 The harpist, his fingers twisting his cap, answered 
 that he had been at Pritchard's farm, and this also was 
 translated. 
 
 " Have you any witnesses ? " 
 
 ( ef - Oes genych chi dystion, Dafydd Dafis? ") 
 
 " Eh ? " 
 
 " Oes genych chidysiion?" 
 
 " R'oeddwn efo John Willie Garden." 
 
 ("He says he can call the son of the man who is 
 building a house there, sir.") . . . 
 
 And so it went on, hour after hour, with the English 
 evidence likewise translated for the benefit of the de- 
 fendants. At the end of the first day the case was 
 adjourned, but it came on again on the morrow, and 
 again on the day after that. It began to dam all other 
 business. As a block in traffic causes an accumula- 
 tion behind, so other cases began to collect drunks, 
 dog-licences, drivings without lights, and innumerable 
 other petty disputes. There was no question that the 
 fences had been burned ; the only question was whether 
 they had got hold of the right men. The Bench could 
 not understand the obstinacy with which the two Lan- 
 cashire witnesses persisted that the outrage had oc- 
 curred at exactly ten o'clock.
 
 70 MUSHROOM TOWN" 
 
 " But mightn't it have been half-past ten, or eleven, or 
 even half -past eleven ? " they were asked again and 
 again. 
 
 " Ah, it might," they admitted open-mindedly. 
 " But it wasn't," they added unshakably. 
 
 Dafydd Dafis wanted to know what they said. 
 
 " Oh, translate it," the Squire sighed, and for the 
 fortieth time it was translated. 
 
 " R'oeddwn efo John Willie Garden/' said Dafydd 
 once more. . . . 
 
 And that was great glory for John Willie, for he 
 was called, asked whether he knew the nature of an oath, 
 was sworn, and raised a general laugh by varying the 
 formula with which the Court was not so drearily 
 familiar, and saying, in Welsh, " Dim Cymraeg" He 
 stood to it that at ten o'clock Dafydd Dafis had been 
 talking to him by Pritchard's manure-heap. 
 
 " Oh, for God's sake settle it or do something ! " the 
 Squire said impatiently to Terry Armfield, as he crossed 
 the road to the Station Hotel for lunch. " You can't 
 say I didn't warn you." 
 
 " I doubt whether my own witnesses would let me 
 now," Terry replied. " They're as cranky in their way 
 as your own Fenians. Besides, as I told you, I'm acting 
 for others." 
 
 " Well, if I bind 'em over they'll only do it again," 
 sighed the Squire. 
 
 Terry himself began to weary. After all, he had 
 other things to mind than a piece of beggarly waste land 
 dotted with Chapels that were a blasphemy of the name 
 of beauty. 
 
 As the Squire ate his chop in the coffee-room, the 
 two witnesses from Lancashire sat each on a tall stool 
 in the sawdusted tap round the corner. Thick imperial
 
 "DIM SAEStfEG" 71 
 
 pint glasses of mild ale stood on the counter before them. 
 The elder and baldish one was a man of three or four and 
 forty, a hard, handy little man, with a curious dip and 
 slope about his right shoulder. This slight lopsided- 
 ness he had acquired during the years in which he had 
 wandered North Wales buying and felling alders for 
 clog-soles. Any time this last twenty years you might 
 have come across him in his little canvas hut in the 
 middle of a wood, with a pile of split alder-billets on 
 one side of him which, plying his hinged knife on its 
 solid base with marvellous dexterity, he shaped roughly 
 into the clog-soles which he cast on a pile on his other side, 
 while his brother felled. He would buy all the alders 
 in a wood, at so much a foot over all ; the rough-dressed 
 soles went off to Manchester ; and no doubt a good many 
 of them found their way into Edward Garden's spin- 
 ning-sheds. In the course of his travels he had picked 
 up from the gentry and their stewards volumes of gos- 
 sip of families and their vicissitudes, of wills, bounda- 
 ries, timber-news, and customs and tenures rapidly be- 
 coming obsolete ; and his coat, a brown check with wide 
 pockets, had probably been made a dozen years before 
 in Conduit Street. He wore a tie, but no collar. As 
 the Court had assumed on its own responsibility that he 
 spoke no Welsh, he had not considered it his business to 
 correct the mistake, but had allowed them to translate 
 for him also perhaps for reasons not fundamentally 
 different from those of Dafydd Dafis himself. He had 
 half a week's stubble on his chin and thin upper lip ; he 
 spat with great accuracy; and he turned to humour 
 things not generally accounted humorous, such as scaf- 
 fold accidents, fights, and deaths from dropsy. 
 
 His brother, save that he wore a collar and no tie, 
 was a younger edition of him.
 
 72 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 They drank from the thick glasses in silence, and then 
 the elder of them drew out a short clay pipe with a 
 dottle in the bottom of the bowl, struck a match on the 
 side of it, and lighted up. The dottle made a noise like 
 frying. His brother also drew out his pipe, a clay 
 shaped like a cowboy's head. He gave an indescribably 
 short jerk of his head in the direction of the other's 
 waistcoat pocket, then, when the stub of cake was 
 thrown over to him, cut it with a knife with a curved 
 blade. He stuffed these brains of black tobacco into the 
 cowboy's head, and made another minute gesture. This 
 was a request for a match. Then, bringing out six- 
 pence from his pocket, he knocked once with the heavy 
 glass on the counter. 
 
 " Two more cups o' tea," he said to the young woman 
 who approached. 
 
 They smoked again in silence. 
 
 It was the elder brother who spoke first. 
 
 " I'm capped about them watches, an' right ! " he 
 mused. 
 
 The other took a pull at his beer, and replaced the 
 cowboy pipe in his mouth. 
 
 " I cannot think th' bairn wor telling 'em lies," the 
 elder one mused again. 
 
 " Gi'e me another match," said his brother. 
 
 The alder-buyer's wrinkled eyes were peering side- 
 ways at an auction announcement pinned to the wall. 
 He shifted his feet in the legs of the tall stool. By and 
 by he spoke again. 
 
 " Let's see. Let's study it out. . . . We com' home 
 at tea-time that day, didn't we ? " 
 
 "Ay." 
 
 " Then we went out into th' yard and washed 
 we'rsens at th' bucket."
 
 "DIM SAESNEG" 73 
 
 "Ay." 
 
 A pause, and then, the speaker's eyes on his hearer's 
 face like two prickers : 
 
 " Did yet tak' your waistcoat off ? " 
 
 " I cannot tell ye." 
 
 " I did mine. I threw it down on a chair i' t' 
 kitchen." 
 
 This time the younger brother shifted his feet. 
 
 " Happen I did mine an' all." 
 
 " Wor your watch i' your pocket ? " 
 
 " Ay, it wad be." 
 
 " So wor mine." 
 
 They drank thoughtfully and simultaneously, and 
 again the silence fell. 
 
 Then, more slowly still, the elder Kerr resumed. 
 
 " D'ye remember a chap coming in, a thin chap, 'at 
 spoke Welsh to t' Missis ? " 
 
 "Ay." 
 
 " He com' to fetch a pair o' boots to mend." 
 
 "Ay." 
 
 " Think ye " again the look as of prickers, 
 
 " think ye there wor owt ? " 
 
 " How, owt ? " 
 
 " 'At he wanted to know what time it wor, or owt ? " 
 
 " There wor t' clock." 
 
 "Ay " 
 
 There were minutes of silence this time. Evidently 
 the younger brother occupied them by taking, in 
 thought, a considerable journey. He spoke as if in 
 objection to some far-fetched surmise. 
 
 " But they'd ha' to be set forrard again," he grunted. 
 
 " Ay, I'm bothered wi' that," the elder admitted, 
 " wi'out t' Missis herself " 
 
 "Aw! . . . Think ye? . . ."
 
 74 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 They knocked for two more cups of tea. 
 
 " And we've been swearing to ten o'clock." 
 
 " So ye think there wor summat ? " 
 
 " I cannot think t' lad wor telling 'em lies," said the 
 alder-buyer. 
 
 This time they both peered reflectively at the auction 
 announcement on the wall, smoking and spitting as they 
 peered.
 
 THE HAFOD THNOS 
 
 ," said Terry's Syndicate, or such Of its 
 members as lounged in Terry's office, looking 
 down on the Lime Street and St. George's Hall pave- 
 ments as if they had been so many fishermen selecting a 
 likely spot for the casting of a fly, " what about going 
 back to the old idea coal ? " 
 
 "Hm! - " (a very dubious " Hm !")." Far 
 better have another shot at manganese especially 
 after what's happened - " 
 
 What had happened had started remotely enough 
 from Llanyglo. It had started, to be exact, in the 
 Balkans. Much manganese comes from the Balkans; 
 a war there had suddenly made the supply a mere 
 trickle, so that prices had whooped up ; and wonder 
 of wonders those old workings of Squire Wynne's, 
 farther along the coast, actually looked like paying. 
 Terry's Company, unhappily, had just transferred its 
 rights, and was rather sore about it. 
 
 " Wouldn't that be a little too timely ? " a timid 
 member suggested. 
 
 " Not if you er put it properly. It's only 
 thirty miles away - " The speaker paused from 
 delicacy. " From the real manganese " was under- 
 stood. 
 
 " Might send a geologist down one we could 
 trust - " 
 
 75
 
 76 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 A very young member of the Syndicate hazarded a 
 remark. " But wouldn't burnt mine-works come dearer 
 than burnt fences ? " 
 
 They smiled indulgently at him. He was merely 
 suffering from a slight confusion of ideas. Nobody had 
 said anything about mine-works. Then they turned to 
 Terry. 
 
 " What do you say, Armfield ? " . . . 
 
 It was now winter, and the dispute was still drag- 
 ging on. There had been no further fence-burning, but 
 the Member for the constituency had been memorial- 
 ised, a joint meeting had been held in the Llanyglo 
 schoolroom, and he had promised to come down and see 
 for himself how matters stood. Until he should do so 
 the disputants glared, so to speak, at one another. A 
 certain element of contempt, that looked at first like 
 tolerance, had even entered into the quarrel. Thus, a 
 section of fence on a portion of the sandhills that it 
 would have been a positive inconvenience to visit was 
 allowed to stand. Llanyglo preferred to reserve its 
 strength. But elsewhere the stakes lay half buried in 
 the sand, and John Willie Garden now and then won- 
 dered what sort of a raft they would make. 
 
 " The whole thing looks like being a damned bad 
 spec," the Syndicate grumbled. 
 
 That opinion seemed to be gaining strength. 
 
 There seemed to be more than a chance that Llany- 
 glo, its heathery Trwyn and its purple mountains, its 
 unproductive sandhills and its non dividend-paying sea, 
 would be written off by Terry's Syndicate as a total loss. 
 
 Then, all in a night, something astonishing happened 
 at Llanyglo. 
 
 The words " all in a night " are to be understood in 
 their very plainest sense. Granted that it was a
 
 THE HAFOD UNOS 7T 
 
 winter's night, and therefore a long one, with the dark- 
 ness setting in soon after four and the sun not coming 
 up behind the mountains again until nearly eight ; none 
 the less the fact remained that Llanyglo went to bed as 
 usual, and woke up to rub its eyes, unable to believe 
 what it so plainly saw. What had happened was this : 
 With Edward Garden's house-roof still a toast-rack 
 against the wintry sky, and his slates just as they had 
 been left after Eesaac Oliver's last long-division sum, 
 and only half the staircase yet fitted, and the little 
 socket John Willie had scooped out under the date- 
 stone still awaiting its sixpence with all this arrested 
 as life and growth and motion were arrested in the En- 
 chanted Palace, the first new house had gone up in 
 Llanyglo. Where had been nothing the night before, 
 there it now was, staring at them when the sun rose, a 
 house, with smoke coming out of its chimney. 
 
 That same friend of Squire Wynne's who repeated 
 to the author of the Sixpenny Guide the Squire's re- 
 mark about invasion via the Mersey, told him also what 
 a Welsh " Hafod Unos " is. 
 
 " You know what the words mean," he said. 
 " Strictly speaking, it's the summer-house pavilion 
 shelter of a night. The essentials are that it 
 must be built on common land, and in a single night. 
 Then they can't eject you. At least that's the idea. 
 Don't ask me how it stands in Law. It may be a kind 
 of squatter's right, or anything else, or it may have no 
 standing at all. Probably it hasn't. But that's neither 
 here nor there. They have their notions about it, and 
 those at any rate are immemorial. Look here: you're 
 pottering about this country just now; just count how 
 many houses you find with the name ' Hafod Unos.'
 
 78 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 You'll find quite a lot. There's a very big one Ban-gor 
 way, that probably took some years to build, but prob- 
 ably one of these places was its foundation. . . . And a 
 house * within the meaning of the Act,' so to speak, 
 means that smoke must have gone up the chimney. 
 Cook your breakfast there, and well, after that you're 
 a sort of tolerated freeholder. It might be worth put- 
 ting into your Guide Book. You'd better add a foot- 
 note, though, that the ' f ' in ' hafod ' is a ' v/ and 
 1 unos ' is pronounced ' innos.' . . . Not at all ; you're 
 welcome to any help I can give you " 
 
 Llanyglo, snugly in bed, had heard the sounds across 
 the sandhills during the night, but they had been set 
 down to the newest development of the fencing dispute. 
 This development was that, a week or so before, several 
 cartloads of undressed stone had been shot down by the 
 side of the sandy gully that ran from Pritchard's gap 
 down to the shore. And Llanyglo had smiled. Aha ! 
 They were going to build a walled enclosure, were they ? 
 Something that wouldn't burn, whatever? Well, well, 
 if it amused them to build walls on winter nights when 
 everybody else was warm in bed, they might. They 
 would only lose their labour in the end. Mr. Tudor 
 Williams, of Ponteglwys, was going to ask a question 
 in the House of Commons, yes, and he was coming down 
 to speak at the Chapel and to see for himself. It was 
 a cold night for building walls, whatever 
 
 So they stayed in bed, and only the revolving Trwyn 
 light, two reds and a white, saw the planting of the 
 thorn in Llanyglo's side. 
 
 The two Kerrs did not do it alone. It took four of 
 them " a Kerr to each corner," as Howell Gruffydd 
 afterwards said. The two other brothers had been
 
 THE HAFOD UNOS 79 
 
 sent for from Katchet, where one of them worked in an 
 asbestos factory and the other was a builder's labourer ; 
 and if these imported ones lacked that spur of convic- 
 tion that their watches had been tampered with by 
 tricky Welshmen, they had another and a double incen- 
 tive the sense of family unity, and of the honour of 
 the gradeliest county on earth, Lancashire. No Kerr, 
 no lad from Lancashire whomsoever, could thole to be 
 bested by a Welshman. Lancashire was the place for 
 which Johnnie Briggs played cricket, the place where 
 the Waterloo Cup Meeting was held. They danced in 
 clogs there, clogs with soles of Welsh alder, and laaked 
 at quoits and knurr and spell, and knew a bit about hom- 
 ing pigeons, not to speak of cocks, the game kind. They 
 were lads, and right, in Lancashire. Wales? Wales 
 produced nothing but alders and oats and goats and 
 Chapels. 
 
 The idea had been that of Ned, the eldest brother, and 
 it was part of the miscellaneous general information he 
 had picked up on his alder-prospecting through Merion- 
 ethshire and Montgomery and Carnarvon and Denbigh 
 and Flint. He had seen a way of convicting Llanyglo 
 out of its own mouth. They threw down fences on 
 the grounds that the land was common land ; very well, 
 if it was common, as they claimed, it was a proper site 
 for a Hafod Unos. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the 
 gander; and merely as a poke in the eye for watch- 
 tinkering Welshmen, and a vindication of Lancashire's 
 superior wit and malice, it would be worth a night's 
 work to see their faces in the morning. 
 
 So to work in the dark the four brothers got. 
 
 They helped themselves to a modest slice of Llanyglo 
 earth, plotted it out with stakes and string, and then 
 began to dig. The night was moonless, and they worked
 
 80 
 
 by the light of four lanterns. These illumined little 
 enough of the waste; the moving, straddling shadows 
 they cast hardly began before they were lost in the 
 darkness again. Knitting-needles of light came and 
 went again on the polished handles of the rising and 
 falling spades, and faintly, regularly, and as if a spirit 
 passed high overhead in the night, the intermittent 
 Trwyn beam swung red, red, white red, red, 
 white 
 
 They had not to dig deep; there is much volcanic 
 rock under the Llanyglo sand ; and they had not set up 
 fences half a dozen times without having a notion where 
 it was. 
 
 " Here we are," Harry, the builder's labourer 
 grunted as his spade gave a clink and a jump in his 
 hand. " I thowt it wadn't be far off. Is t' barril 
 there, Tommy ? " 
 
 Across a mound of thrown-up sand one of the lanterns 
 cast a short parabola of shadow. It was the shadow of a 
 nine-gallon barrel of beer. 
 
 " Nay, we mun do a bit first," Tommy replied, spit- 
 ting on his hands and driving in his spade again. 
 
 Their house already existed, complete in their prac- 
 tical heads, before ever a spade was lifted. They had 
 seen through its entire anatomy in the taproom of the 
 Station Hotel, with beer to solve all difficulties. ISToth- 
 ing was done twice, and brother did not get in brother's 
 way. Even as Howell Gruffydd said, they took a 
 corner of their plan apiece and dry-walled, all save 
 Tommy, who went to and fro with a hand-cart, fetching 
 stone, not too much at a time, because of the dead soft- 
 ness of the sand. For the general design ISTed's word 
 was law; for details, each used his own gumption. 
 They worked and grunted, and worked and grunted, and
 
 THE HAFOD UNOS 81 
 
 worked. By the time Sirius appeared over faraway 
 Delyn, and Orion balanced himself on Mynedd Mawr, 
 they had a serviceable first course laid. Then they put 
 on their coats again, for it was a bitter night and they 
 perspired, and with a single blow Tommy neatly tapped 
 the barrel. They drank, threw off their coats again, 
 and set to work once more. 
 
 " Never heed that, Sam," Ned said once, seeing his 
 brother elaborating the stark essential plan that had 
 been agreed upon in the taproom of the Station Hotel. 
 " T' corners, t' beams, and t' roof ; we haven't time to 
 paint it and put a pot o' geraniums i' t' window." 
 
 By one o'clock the lanterns showed four irregular 
 angles of masonry, shoulder-high, as rough as you 
 please, but true by plumb and level. This might be a 
 joke against Llanyglo, but it was a workmanlike one. 
 Only two of the brothers now walled, for they had only 
 two ladders; Sam helped Tom to lift and carry beams. 
 
 By three o'clock only two of the beams were laid, 
 but they were the principal ones, and Ned seemed well 
 content. 
 
 " That's t' main o' t' work," he said, with satisfac- 
 tion. " How's t' barril going on, Tom ? " 
 
 " True by t' level yet," Tom replied. " Shall we 
 start on th' bread and cheese ? " 
 
 " Did ye think on to bring some pickled onions ? " 
 
 "Ay." 
 
 " Then we'll ha' we're nooning." 
 
 They took their nooning, with Sirius now over 
 Mynedd Mawr, and Orion soaring like a kite. They 
 took it at their leisure ; they were " lads from a reight 
 place," setting about a job as if they meant to finish it, 
 not Welshmen matchboarding. A mountain of sand 
 filled the space within their four corners, and they lay
 
 82 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 on their backs on it, smoking, and watching the red and 
 white spokes of the light high over their heads, twenty- 
 mile spokes, of a wheel that had no circumference but its 
 sweep through the night. Now and then Sam gave a 
 low chuckle ; but Ned smoked, spat, and was silent, save 
 that he said from time to time, " Did ye number and 
 letter them chamfers, Harry ? " or some similar ques- 
 tion. You would have said they had a month before 
 them. Certainly the Kerrs, when there was a surprise 
 to be prepared for foreigners who meddled with their 
 watches, were members one of another. 
 
 At half-past three they set to work again. By four 
 Ned had climbed up above, and was sitting astride a 
 beam with the light of a lantern shining up on his 
 streaming face. 
 
 " Give us another inch, Sam," he grunted, " a bit 
 more a bit more whoa ! Tom, that quoin no, 
 th' one wi' th' bolt this is th' chimney end and get 
 them three strutts ready, accordinglie to th' letters. . . . 
 How are ye down there, Harry ? " 
 
 The mason brother was building the chimney. It 
 was an outside one, massive as a buttress, and Harry 
 was building it well and truly, for it was the essential 
 of the house. Smoke must go up it before dawn, the 
 hearth-smoke of civilised man, the lowly and secular 
 and beautiful token that he has made himself an abid- 
 ing-place on a spot of earth, and becomes part of that 
 spot, and it part of him, so that to deracinate him is to 
 thrust him back again into the bestial state and to make 
 the land as desert as the sea. By all prognostication, 
 Edward Garden's smoke should have been the first to 
 add itself to that of the cluster of humble dwellings 
 between the mountains and the waves that was Llany- 
 glo ; but of that lawn of lightsome blue that veils Llany-
 
 THE HAFOD TOOS 83 
 
 glo to-day the breakfast-smoke of the Kerrs was the fore- 
 runner. At half-past four they were shovelling out the 
 mountain of sand and making the hearth for it. By 
 six Tommy had brought in the bundle of dry twigs and 
 faggots he had carefully hidden away. Harry was fill- 
 ing in the space between the main beam and the transom 
 of the door ; when Tom asked him for a match he sprang 
 down, and Ned and Sam also descended from the roof. 
 
 " What time is it ? " Tom asked. 
 
 Ned gave a glance round, and smiled for the first time 
 that night as he drew out his watch. 
 
 "Five past six/' he said, and added, with inde- 
 scribable dryness, " unless som'b'dy's been meddling 
 wi' my watch." 
 
 " Here goes," said Tommy, striking a match. . . . 
 
 They exchanged glances that were near to winks as 
 they watched the flames. It was their equivalent of a 
 cheer. 
 
 The night paled ; the Trwyn light went out ; and off 
 the headland a seal disported itself in the icy sea. The 
 day stole across Delyn, but Mynedd Mawr still remained 
 an awful precipice of ink the shadow of the morning 
 bank lay over him. Then came the first glitter on the 
 waves, and, as if with light all other faculties awake, 
 folk became conscious of the crowing of cocks and the 
 falling of the breakers on the shore. Howell Gruffydd 
 got up and began to rekindle his fire. A bolt was shot 
 back at Pritchard's farm. Dafydd Dafis packed his 
 breakfast in his tin and set out for his day's work a 
 little reslating of the roof of the Baptist Chapel. 
 
 But on his way across the sandhills he suddenly 
 changed, not only his direction, but his gait also. He 
 advanced cautiously, skirted certain mounds of sand 
 that he did not remember to have seen before, and then
 
 84 MUSHROOM TOWK 
 
 as suddenly drew back. Then, instead of advancing 
 again, he returned by a circuitous route, dropped into a 
 sunken sandy way, and then ran as fast as his legs 
 would carry him down to the cottages. There he thrust 
 his head into Morgan's cottage and said something, and 
 ran to the next one or rather to the next but two, for 
 Edward Garden's double cottage had been locked up 
 since October. Then Howell Gruffydd came to his shop 
 door, and Dafydd called him. 
 
 Five minutes later half Llanyglo was out on the 
 sandhills staring through a gap at something that lay 
 beyond. 
 
 It was an extraordinary house they saw, and then 
 went round to the back to look at from another point of 
 view. It appeared to consist of a living-room and a 
 scullery, with a patch under the skeleton of a sort of 
 penthouse at the back. It was not even on the land that 
 had been fenced and unfenced and fenced again. Of 
 roof it had none for you could hardly call the three 
 or four tarpaulins, that lifted as the wind got under 
 them and were kept down by stones, a roof. Parts of 
 the walls were solidly constructed ; other parts had been 
 battened up with hedgestakes, filled in with sods and 
 peats, stuffed up with coats, anything. It had an old 
 door that had been used somewhere else, and appeared to 
 be propped up with stones. Over one window-opening 
 hung an old brown coat, the other frame was empty. A 
 bright glow shone on the rubble within, and smoke and 
 sparks came merrily from the chimney. The fire 
 crackled loudly, and there was a pleasant smell of cook- 
 ing bacon. All about the cavity in the sand lay stones 
 big and little, timbers, stakes, loops of rope. There 
 was a hand-cart too, with its handle making a T in the 
 air. A scraping sound was heard, as of somebody clean-
 
 THE HAFOB UNOS 85 
 
 ing out a pan, and then came a low " Wouf " and flare 
 of fat in the chimney. Then somebody spoke. 
 
 " Squeeze t' barril, Tom, and see if there's another 
 cup o' tea." 
 
 " Nay, we've supped t' lot." 
 
 " Blow down t' vent-hole. . . ." 
 
 As if those walls vanished again even more quickly 
 than they had sprung up, Llanyglo could see a picture 
 vividly in its fancy a picture of a tilted barrel, with 
 the cheeks of one man distended over the spigot-hole 
 while another caught a muddy trickle in a thick 
 glass 
 
 Then their vision fled, and they were staring at that 
 unimaginable house again 
 
 Slowly, and without a word, they moved off through 
 the soft sand in the direction of the Baptist Chapel.
 
 VI 
 
 THE FOOT IN THE DOOR 
 
 IT was a Saturday, a day on which the school did not 
 assemble, and the door of the schoolhouse was 
 locked. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd was sent off in haste 
 for the key. They waited for him to come back, twenty 
 of them, men and women, with others hurrying over the 
 sandhills to join them. Eesaac Oliver ran panting up 
 again, and they entered the schoolhouse. This was a 
 large, yellow-washed room with beams making triangles 
 overhead and hot-water pipes running round the walls 
 below. A small squad of desks stood upright behind, 
 and a number of smaller benches knelt, as it were, in 
 front of them. These faced the raised desk of Miss 
 Tancy Pritchard, the schoolmistress. A yellow chair 
 or two, a couple of glass-fronted cupboards, a row of 
 hooks for caps and cloaks at the back, and a harmonium, 
 completed the furniture. A short covered way near 
 Miss Pritchard's desk gave access to the adjoining 
 Chapel. A door at the side of this led to the little 
 stone outhouse where the water for the pipes both of 
 school and Chapel was heated. 
 
 Their astonished exclamations had broken out now. 
 As something legendary and dear and native to their 
 land, it was in their hearts to defend the Haf od Unos ; 
 but for a stranger to set one up ! 
 
 " Look you, it can-not be legal ! " exclaimed Hugh 
 
 Morgan, a little tubby man with semicircular brows and 
 
 86
 
 THE FOOT IN THE DOOR 87 
 
 a round bald forehead. " It iss not even finiss ; there 
 iss holes in the walls so-a big I put my head through 
 them ! And that iss not a roof it iss only rick- 
 covers " 
 
 " It is wonderful how they did it, whatever ! " said 
 little restless-eyed Mrs. Gruffydd. Those predatory 
 eyes in Blodwen Gruffydd's pale face could see a six- 
 pence a mile away, and, having seen it, would not leave it 
 again until it had been safely dropped through the slot 
 of the money-box into which the savings for Eesaac 
 Oliver's education went. Eesaac Oliver was not to 
 serve packets of tea and pennyworths of bicarbonate of 
 soda over a grocer's counter. He was to go to Aberyst- 
 with College, and to become a preacher, and wear a 
 black chip straw hat. 
 
 Howell Gruffydd, who had been as thunderstruck as 
 the rest of them, now affected to take a jocular view of 
 the matter. 
 
 " De-ar me, first Mr. Garden's house, and now Ty 
 Kerr! Well, it make trade. Indeed, I need a bigger 
 s'op presently I think I start a Limited Com- 
 pany " 
 
 But big consumptive John Pritchard spoke in deep 
 tones. More vividly than any of them, John had seen, 
 as if in a camera obscura, that vision of a Kerr blowing 
 into the vent-hote of a barrel, while another Kerr 
 anxiously watched the tap. " We need a bigger public- 
 house, I think," he said grimly. 
 
 " Indeed you are right, John Pritchard," Hugh 
 Morgan struck eagerly in, the curves of his brows all 
 marred with anxiety. " They sit in the Sta-tion Hotel 
 Porth Neigr, and do noth-thing but drinking all day 
 it set a s'ock-king example, whatever." 
 
 " And they call it * ano-ther cup of tea/ " said a third.
 
 88 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 " They very smart ones " 
 
 Again John Pritchard's deep voice came in. 
 " They're very deep ones." 
 
 Little Hugh Morgan spoke excitedly. 
 
 " Indeed you are right again, John Pritchard ! John 
 Williams Porth Neigr, he say to me it would not sur- 
 prise him if that Ned Kerr speak Weiss so well as 
 nobody if he wiss ! " 
 
 A shocked " Aw-w-w! " broke out. " And he say in 
 the Court, ' No Weiss!'" 
 
 " Tut-tut-tut de-ar me ! " 
 
 They were silent for a moment, contemplating this 
 duplicity. 
 
 " And there iss four of them now," one resumed. 
 " They send into England for two more." 
 
 "We soon have large population," said Howell 
 Gruffydd again. . . . 
 
 John Pritchard had sat down on one of the yellow 
 chairs with his knees a yard apart. His brows seemed 
 knitted. 
 
 " But there is noth-thing for them to do here," he 
 said. " No work, no wages only building fences." 
 
 " Perhaps they have lot of money. Their bacon smell 
 very good, whatever." 
 
 " They finiss their breakfast I heard them wipe 
 the frying-pan out as plain as if I see it with my eyes ! " 
 
 Again John Pritchard's heavy voice : " Finiss their 
 breakfast indeed ! They finiss a whole barrel of beer ! " 
 
 " And it is right what Hugh Morgan says," another 
 struck in. " That Ned Kerr, he know Wales as well as 
 I know my two hands ! I have let-ter from my cousin 
 Thomas Thomas in Towyn, and he say they buy lot-t 
 of alders up the Dysynni two years ago of Mr. Llewelyn 
 Jones of Abergynolwyn, and set up a hut in the 'ood,
 
 THE FOOT IN THE BOOK 89 
 
 and make their clog soles, and pay six-pence a foot for 
 the trees." 
 
 "He set up more than a hut at Llanyglo, what- 
 ever ! " 
 
 " Indeed they do no such thing ! The Haf od Unos 
 belong to the old days. There iss no new Hafod Unos 
 I don't know this how many years ! " 
 
 "All the old things was new things once, Hugh 
 Morgan." 
 
 Then, as if all at once they saw anew that house so 
 magically sprung up out of the sand, there fell a 
 silence. Howell Gruffydd might make his jests about 
 taking a larger shop and forming a Limited Company, 
 but the hard fact remained, that aliens had squatted 
 down at Llanyglo while they had slept, and, by force 
 or process of law, might be difficult to turn out again. 
 Howell's jocosity subsided; among the children's forms 
 and benches they took counsel together; and when, at 
 half-past ten, John Pritchard's eldest lad came in with 
 the news that one of the Kerrs had departed along the 
 Forth Neigr road, while the other three kept guard over 
 what they had won, they drew closer together still, and 
 spoke in low tones of boycott. 
 
 Then suddenly somebody asked what Mr. Tudor 
 Williams of Ponteglwys would say, and the quick little 
 outburst of " Yes, indeed," " Well said," " Mr. Tudor 
 Williams have some-thing to say," showed how perti- 
 nent the observation was considered. For Mr. Tudor 
 Williams, the Member, would be able to tell them, if 
 anybody could, whether the Hafod Unos was counte- 
 nanced by the Law, and whether the intruders could 
 be served with notice to quit. His promised visit now 
 took on an added urgency. 
 
 " It is a pit-ty Mr. Williams fall out with Squire
 
 90 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 Wynne," Hugh Morgan remarked. " It will be the 
 Squire who will have to give them notice, whatever." 
 
 " They quarrel one day outside the Court at Forth 
 Neigr." 
 
 "But indeed, Howell Gruffydd, Mr. Tudor Wil- 
 lianms wass in the right it was about the Tithes, 
 and the Tithe iss a wick-ked system " 
 
 " Aw-w-w, but the Weiss Members they alter all 
 that very soon ! " 
 
 " But the Squire and the Bis-sop of St. Asaph is 
 great friends " 
 
 " Indeed that Bis-sop of St. Asaph he look at a 
 Chap-pil like as if it wass not worth his eyesight ! " 
 
 Dafydd Dafis, who sat on a child's bench, looking 
 moodily at the floor, had not spoken yet. He gave a 
 quick glance up, and then looked down again. 
 
 " The Church iss a great robber," he muttered within 
 his moustache. . . . 
 
 They discussed questions of ecclesiastical polity. . . . 
 
 " It iss a great robber/' said Dafydd Dafis, again 
 resuming his former attitude. 
 
 Then Howell Gruffydd rose, and one or two others 
 followed his example. There was the day's work to be 
 done. Soon all moved to the door, but before going 
 about their businesses they went to take another look at 
 that astonishing house. 
 
 But they looked only from a distance. If they had 
 assumed that the Kerrs, having worked all night, would 
 now be sleeping, they were wrong. They could see 
 them, three of them, still busily walling, filling, shovel- 
 ling out sand. 
 
 " They try to finiss before Sunday," Hugh Morgan 
 said. 
 
 But big John Pritchard glared sternly at him. 

 
 THE FOOT IN THE DOOR 91 
 
 " They care noth-thing for Sunday, those ones," he 
 said. " That other one will have gone for more beer." 
 And he added, in solemn tones, " It iss a den of li-ons ! " 
 
 The fencing dispute had now sunk into insignifi- 
 cance. 
 
 It quickly appeared, even as John Pritchard had said, 
 that the Kerrs cared nothing for Sunday. At a quarter 
 to ten on the morning of that day, Howell Gruffydd, in 
 his tight black frock-coat and bowler hat, passing up the 
 sandy gully on his way to the Methodist Chapel, heard 
 sounds of carousing. He turned aside to look. The 
 door of the Hafod stood open, and a second barrel of 
 beer, together with provisions and some sticks of furni- 
 ture, had been fetched during the night. Tommy, the 
 youngest of the Kerrs, was already drunk and singing. 
 The eldest of them, seeing Howell Gruffydd, gave him 
 an insolently familiar nod, as if he had as much right 
 to be there as anybody else. 
 
 " Cold mornin'," he said. " Are ye coming in to 
 hev' a tot ? " 
 
 Howell turned away. 
 
 After service, Howell encountered John Pritchard. 
 John, too, had heard that godless levity from afar. 
 Others gathered round them by the gap in the thymy 
 earth-wall, and John raised his voice on high. It shook 
 with bitter zeal. 
 
 " We hear them in the Chap-pil, in the mid-die of 
 prayers, singing ! " he cried. " On a Sunday morning 
 they sing ; they sing ' Thomas, make Room for your 
 Uncle ! ' I said it was a den of li-ons, but indeed no 
 li-ons ever behave so s'ock-kingly ! They sing ' Thomas, 
 make Room for your Uncle/ in the mid-die of prayers, 
 like if it was out of the belly of hell ! " 
 
 Dafydd Daiis, whose head for a day and a half had
 
 92 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 drooped like a wet head of corn, gave a quick gleaming 
 glance. 
 
 " They not build it any more quick than it can be 
 pulled down again," he said quickly. " They come out 
 of the house sometime to work, I think. They not 
 gentry with lot of money, whatever." 
 
 And that was true. The Kerrs could hardly earn 
 their living by drinking beer and having continually to 
 mount guard over the house they had made. 
 
 " There will be no peace in Llanyglo now till Mr. 
 Tudor Williams has been." 
 
 Dafydd Bafis's head drooped again. 
 
 " Indeed we do not need Mr. Tudor Williams for 
 this," he muttered under his breath. 
 
 And the Kerrs themselves? Did they suppose they 
 could plant themselves thus in the enemy's midst and 
 not meet with hostile entertainment? 
 
 For this we may perhaps go once more to the gentle- 
 man without whose friendly help the Llanyglo Guide 
 would have been done quite as well as it needed to be, 
 and in half the time. 
 
 " It's difficult to say, for two reasons," this gentleman 
 said. " In the first place, the humour of some of these 
 Lancashire fellows is such an incalculable thing; you 
 never know how far they will carry it, nor how soon it 
 will end in black eyes and bloody noses. And in the 
 second place, there was that humanitarian scatterbrain, 
 Armfield. I believe myself that probably Armfield 
 had already told !Ned Kerr that there would be work 
 presently. . . . 
 
 " Of course, you've heard what Armfield's scheme 
 was. The Syndicate had decided not to rectify any 
 more errors of Providence about the disposition of coal 
 and manganese ; they only wanted to clear out altogether,
 
 THE FOOT IN THE DOOR 93 
 
 leaving somebody else ' holding the baby ' I believe 
 that's the expression. Their idea was simplicity itself : 
 to buy land at a shilling and sell it again at ten; but 
 they didn't express it quite so nakedly. That was where 
 Terry Annfield came in to dress the enterprise up 
 and m#ke it attractive. As long as he enabled them 
 to cut their loss they didn't care what he did with 
 Llanyglo. 
 
 "And there was nothing really wrong with the 
 scheme, except that Terry was twenty years before his 
 time, and naturally had to suffer for it. I think he 
 called it ' The Thelema Estate Development Company,' 
 and nowadays it would be called a Garden City. And 
 if Terry hadn't Edward Garden's sense of the line of 
 least resistance, you must remember that he hadn't 
 Edward Garden's ' inside ' information either. He 
 had nothing but that ecstatic power of persuading 
 people. And he did persuade them. I doubt if half a 
 dozen of the people he sold to ever saw the place. Two 
 of them did, though, two brothers, in the produce line. 
 They went down, and came back again, and quietly sold 
 out, keeping strictly to Terry's representations; and I 
 believe they warned Terry then that if he wasn't care- 
 ful he'd be getting into trouble. I asked them what 
 they'd been thinking of to let themselves be persuaded 
 by a hare-brained enthusiast like that. They told me 
 it was all very well for me to talk now. They knew 
 perfectly well all the time that it was only one of 
 Terry's dreams of a better and a brighter world, but 
 they bought for all that, and so did crowds of others. 
 Terry didn't admit a single difficulty. He talked about 
 angels and the higher life. He talked about Pugin and 
 the soul's need for seasons of contemplation and repose. 
 He talked about the air and the sea and the mountains
 
 94 
 
 and the Trwyn, and he made it out to be Llanyglo's 
 chief merit that it took a whole day to get there. . . . 
 And so on. To cut it short, they were to do their own 
 building, but Terry, as vendor, undertook the rest 
 laying out certain roads, draining and lighting them, I 
 believe the building of a sort of public hall, and so 
 forth. I don't think he said anything about the 
 Chapels. 
 
 " And that (to get back where we started from) is 
 probably the reason the Kerrs stood by." 
 
 Whether Dafydd Dafis would have watched the Kerrs 
 out of the Hafod, or, failing that, whether he would 
 have pulled it down over their heads, is hardly worth 
 debating; for, as it happened, that very Sunday night 
 there befell something that for the time being had all 
 the effect of a declared truce between the hamlet and 
 its invaders. Something deeper and more solemn than 
 the machinations of man took a hand in the making of 
 Llanyglo. This was the wind. It began to get up 
 at about three o'clock that afternoon ; all day there had 
 been a swell; and Dafydd Dafis and others, returning 
 from Ho well Gruffydd's house (where a second letter to 
 Mr. Tudor Williams Ponteglwys had been written, as 
 urgent as Eesaac Oliver's pen could make it), saw all 
 four of the brothers on the roof, trying to secure the 
 tarpaulin in which the wind volleyed; their roof-slates 
 were not expected till the following Wednesday. The 
 ground was a blurr of flying sand ; the sea resembled a 
 tossing fleece as far as the eye could see; and from 
 moment to moment the waves, breaking over the Trwyn, 
 rose in slow, gigantic fountains, fell again, and then 
 came the roar. The four men clung like limpets to 
 the roof, crouching until the worst gusts were past and
 
 THE FOOT IN THE DOOB 95 
 
 then resuming their hammering. They were trying to 
 nail the covering down, using pieces of wood as washers 
 to prevent the material from ripping. 
 
 Suddenly Dafydd Dans, looking up under his brows, 
 saw Ned Kerr pause with his hammer lifted and peer 
 out to sea. Then, without moving his head, Ned put 
 up his hand and appeared to be shouting something to 
 the others. All four looked, and so did the men of 
 Llanyglo, but from the ground below they could see 
 nothing. 
 
 Then, all in a moment, Ned Kerr gave a scramble 
 and a spring, came down like a bundle into a mound of 
 soft sand, and was followed tumblingwise by the others. 
 There was a rip and a crack, and the released tarpaulin 
 was a hundred yards away, napping grotesquely over the 
 sandhills. Ned was up again in an instant, and as he 
 passed Dafydd Dafis at a run he shouted a single word 
 in Welsh: 
 
 " Llongddrylliad ! " 
 
 It was a wreck. 
 
 The boats by the short thumb of a jetty had not been 
 used for a week, and lay high up the beach. Could 
 they have got them through that boiling of white sea 
 and brown sand there was a towering ridge to be seen 
 beyond, maned with spray, that rushed forward and 
 burst only to show another in the same place. No more 
 than one at a time could be seen. The boats were open 
 boats, and night was coming on. Small wonder there 
 seemed little to do but pray. 
 
 But Ned Kerr shouted another word. "Bad!" 
 
 From the top of the Hafod he had seen a ship's boat. 
 
 The next moment he and Dafydd Dafis had each a 
 shoulder to Hugh Morgan's boat, and William Morgan, 
 the three remaining Kerrs, and another man, were
 
 96 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 hauling. All save the youngest Kerr continued to 
 tumble aboard as the boat lifted. He tried to struggle 
 after it, but was overturned, and they dragged him out 
 and turned him upside down to pour the water out of 
 him. 
 
 They have a lifeboat now at Llanyglo, The Ratchet, 
 presented and maintained by the town of that name ; but 
 that night the men of Lancashire and the men of Llany- 
 glo went out in one of the half-dozen open boats. They 
 put her into the brown, and a moment later the water 
 had slipped from under her and she sat down on the 
 sand, with every plank started. They got ashore again 
 as best they could, and raced for another boat and more 
 oars. They put out again. They dare not use the 
 wooden jetty, of which only the beginning could be 
 seen. The first boat was already matchwood. A sea 
 crawled up the Trwyn almost as far as the Light. They 
 inspected its ravage the next day. It stood as a record 
 for many years. 
 
 Then the boat passed the brown, and stood out to 
 that pale wall smoking with spray. The wall came on 
 and broke with a crash that shook the shore. A woman 
 gave a shrill scream . . . then they saw the boat 
 again 
 
 It seemed madness to think that that open boat 
 would be safer out beyond 
 
 After that, though they watched, they saw nothing. 
 
 Then the Trwyn Light opened its eye, two reds and 
 a white. All Llanyglo was gathered on the beach, and 
 none thought of going to Chapel. Night fell; the sky 
 became clear as black ice ; the dim seas resembled a lair 
 of white bears at play. Seven o'clock passed, and 
 eight. . . . Already in folks' minds the grim thought 
 was born ; it might have been worse. They had dragged
 
 97 
 
 Hugh Morgan back as the second boat had pushed off, 
 and none of the Llanyglo men was married. Whether 
 the three Kerrs were married or not nobody knew. 
 
 Nine o'clock came. . . . 
 
 Blodwen Gruffydd saw the return first, if, indeed, 
 that vague speck lost in the grey combings were they. 
 Again the wave came on, and another hideous range 
 lifted its grey ridge. . . . By a miracle, it boiled far 
 away to right and left, but rolled, a grey-dappled dead 
 weight, under the boat. Already half a dozen men 
 with a rope were waist-deep in the water. . . . 
 
 Then, as the boat crawled on its oars like an insect, 
 another crest rose, tilted them so that man fell on man, 
 and a man came out. . . . 
 
 They at the rope were swept out by the backwash to 
 meet them. . . . 
 
 And after all, they had come back empty-handed. 
 They had seen neither ship nor boat. 
 
 But (and this, in this tale of Llanyglo and of those 
 who made it and were made by it, is the point), an 
 hour later Dafydd Dafis, opening his eyes for the first 
 time since he had been hauled out of the water, said 
 something in Welsh to John Pritchard, who bent over 
 him. Translated it ran : 
 
 " I would not pull that one's house down." 
 
 Then he closed his eyes again. 
 
 As far as the Haf od TJnos was concerned, Mr. Tudor 
 Williams's visit now seemed superfluous.
 
 VII 
 
 THE MEMBEB 
 
 OSTENSIBLY, Mr. Tudor Williams came to 
 Llanyglo to assist at a Sasiwn, which is a gath- 
 ering very much like the Love Feasts of other parts of 
 the country (indeed, if memory serves, Mr. Wesley 
 gave these assemblies for prayer and mutual consola- 
 tion the latter name as far north in Wales as Builth 
 hut then Mr. Wesley did not speak Welsh). Neither 
 the fencing dispute nor the question of the Hafod Unos 
 had taken nominal precedence of this. But Mr. Tudor 
 Williams's visit was also something more. He was a 
 Member returning to his own constituency exalted, 
 yet their servant, familiar with the great ones of the 
 land, yet by their favour. For that reason they liked 
 him to bring the evidences of his greatness back with 
 him. 
 
 Mr. Tudor Williams did so, and handsomely. He 
 was a small nimble man with black brows and a ragged 
 silvery moustache, and a very erect and conscious car- 
 riage of the head. He wore a silk hat, a turned-down 
 collar with a flat black bow, a frockcoat with volumi- 
 nous lapels of watered silk, grey trousers, and new 
 black kid gloves. He drove from Forth Neigr in the 
 carriage that had been lent him by a political supporter, 
 and alighted at the gap opposite John Pritchard's farm. 
 They would have run forward to greet him, but a certain 
 
 awe of his clothes and equipage combined with their 
 
 98
 
 THE MEMBER 99 
 
 own dignity as makers and unmakers of such as he to 
 keep them where they stood, in a semicircle across 
 the road. 
 
 But if they were at one and the same time a little 
 intimidated and filled out with pride in him, Mr. 
 Tudor Williams knew no hesitation. He sprang down 
 from the carriage, grasped John Pritchard by the hand, 
 and then, not content with that, patted him all up the 
 arm as far as the shoulder and across the breast with the 
 other hand, as if he conferred invisible decorations on 
 him. His eyes were moist, but glad greetings flowed 
 from his tongue, in an accent that would have put the 
 most diffident speaker of English at his ease. 
 
 "Well, John Pritchard! Well, well! Indeed you 
 have not grown any less! A lit-tle man like me, I 
 hardly reach up to your shoulder! Aw-w-w, you look 
 splen-did! I was spik-king of you a few days ago to 
 the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs but dear me, 
 here am I neglecting the ladies I tell you pres- 
 ently How are you, Mrs. Gruffydd? This young 
 man is never Eesaac Oliver ! Aw-w-w, how he grows ! 
 Did you write the let-ter to me, Eesaac Oliver ? That's 
 the style! Education, knowledge it is a grand 
 thing ! Now, Dafydd Dafis ! And how is the harp ? 
 You sing me Y Godly s by and by : 
 
 ' Mae cynhwrf yn y ceunant, 
 Ar derfyn dydd y gad ' 
 
 dear, dear, you have to go away before you can 
 come home again! There is nothing like this over 
 there; there is not the sym-pathy; as I was saying to 
 the Member for Caermarthen, Mr. Hughes Caegwynion, 
 not three, four days ago, ( You get no sym-pathy from 
 England and the Englishman ' and indeed you do
 
 100 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 not. Here comes Howell Gruffydd, run-ning (indeed 
 he runs like a deer, Mrs. Grufiydd!). Now, Howell 
 Gruffydd, you miss the train if you don't look sharp 
 (he's making so much money he cannot leave the shop 
 for a min-nit!). Now, my old friend William Mor- 
 gan ! How is the rheumatics ? How are you, Hugh ? 
 Is this your youngest, Mrs. Roberts ? Hwhat ! An- 
 other since ! Aw-w-w and you more like an elder 
 sister than a mother ! . . . And there is the Trwyn, just 
 the same " 
 
 He was staying the night with John Pritchard, and 
 the two moved away to the house, the others following 
 a yard or two behind. Mr. Tudor Williams advanced 
 to ancient Mrs. Pritchard's chair, took the hand that 
 resembled a dead bird's foot, and shouted in her 
 ear: 
 
 " Tou see I do not lose a min-nit before I come to 
 see you, Mrs. Pritchard! " he cried in Welsh. (" In- 
 deed she is a wonderful old 'ooman!) How many 
 grandchildren have you now, Mrs. Pritchard ? " (The 
 old woman nodded her aged head.) " Great-grand- 
 children! N o-o-o ! Think of that! But I think you 
 all live for ever at Llanyglo. It is not like London. If 
 I could take bagsfull of this air back with me I make my 
 f or-tune ! Now, Miss Pritchard, I think I must have 
 offended you, you are so long in spik-king to me ! And 
 how is all in school ? I tell you press-ently something 
 straight from the Board of Ed-u-ca-tion for you to try. 
 You whisper a subject in the scholar's ear as he cornea 
 in at the door, and he walk straight to the middle of the 
 room, no time for think-king, and speak for five minutes 
 about it ! That will make them ready speakers, hwhat ? 
 That will accustom them to public life and speaking in 
 the Chapel? But I tell you later. Now, my old
 
 THE MEMBER 101 
 
 friend John, if I could wash my hands before sitting 
 down to a cup of tea then we will talk " 
 
 He was shown into the best bedroom, with the cork- 
 framed funeral-cards and the cardboard watch-pockets 
 on the walls, and the sound of his moving about and 
 pouring out water and spluttering as he washed his face 
 could be heard by those who waited below. Then he 
 descended again and sat down. 
 
 " Well," he said by and by, from his place where he 
 sat at the table alone, they respectfully yet proprietor- 
 ially watching him eat and drink his tea, " now tell 
 me about those matters in the letter you wrote. ... I 
 mean the other matters. . . ." 
 
 Eut let us, before we pass to the other matters, look 
 at the company that watched Mr. Tudor Williams eat. 
 
 First there was John Pritchard, sitting on the other 
 side of the table with his hands upon his knees, and 
 now and then turning his body a little aside and bowing 
 his back to cough. There was John, stern religionist, 
 believing in God and Disendowment ; obstinate, dull, 
 just, unsmiling ; as ready for the Day of Judgment as if 
 it had been the audit-day of the accounts he kept as 
 principal trustee of the Baptist Chapel. For all that he 
 was so rooted in Llanyglo that he had never travelled 
 farther than Forth ITeigr in the whole of his life, he was 
 as ardent a supporter of Missionary Endeavour abroad 
 as his voice was powerful at the Sasiwn at home. He 
 watched Mr. Tudor Williams's plate, and with his 
 thumb made signs for his daughter to replenish it. 
 
 Next, there was Howell Gruffydd, with his pale and 
 studious son, Eesaac Oliver. You might have been 
 sure even then that, should Llanyglo ever grow, Howell 
 Grufiydd's fortune would grow with it. Howell con- 
 sidered a good penny worth the putting into his pocket,
 
 102 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 and, as if his apron (which, however, he had now left 
 behind at the shop) had made half a housewife of him, 
 he cared nothing, so it brought in money, whether he 
 did a man's labour or washed up the dishes or black- 
 leaded the grate. He could not read, but if at Forth 
 Neigr a stranger chanced to ask him the way, he would 
 smile and reply, " There is the signpost," allowing it to 
 be understood that his questioner might read as well as 
 he himself. Howell had his inner dream. It was of 
 a shop with two large windows, and a bell inside the 
 door, and brightly varnished showcards, and pyramids 
 of tinned salmon, and peas within the window that 
 should suggest the noses of children flattened against the 
 pane, and handbills distributed in the streets, and two 
 assistants, and a son at College, who should read for 
 two, and perhaps who knew ? sit while his con- 
 stituents watched him eat his tea Mr. Eesaac Oliver 
 Gruffydd, M.P. 
 
 Then, with his cap in his hands and his feet shifting 
 nervously, there was Dafydd Dafis, next to Eesaac 
 Oliver, on the sofa. Should purchases and rumoured 
 purchases of land prove to be a portent, Dafydd had 
 all to lose and nothing to gain by change. With that 
 soft cruelty of his of which the hard and more pro- 
 foundly sentimental Englishman knows nothing, Dafydd 
 was at least disinterested. The Kerrs he had forborne 
 to harm, but he only hated them the more on that ac- 
 count. He himself would not have killed one of the 
 blue and primrose butterflies that in the summer hovered 
 over the Llanyglo buffets of wild thyme, and he could 
 not understand a country that said it was fond of 
 animals and yet, like these Lancashire men, hunted rats 
 with terriers and coursed hares with dogs. Alone of 
 that nation he had for a time loved delicate little Minetta
 
 THE MEMBER 103 
 
 Garden, and had told her stories of fairies and had sung 
 Serch Hudol and Mentra Gwen to her ; but Minetta had 
 gone. All the things for which Dafydd Dafis cared had 
 gone, or were going, and Dafydd was lonely. He told 
 his harp so, with those warped and stealing fingers, and 
 the harp made music of his pain. All that Dafydd 
 would gain by change would be memories that became 
 ever the more poignant the more they were attenuated, 
 and the less the world cared for him and his unprofitable 
 life. 
 
 Passing constantly between Mr. Tudor Williams and 
 the saucepan where the eggs boiled, or the plate in the 
 fender where the lightcakes kept hot, was Miss Nancy 
 {nee IvTansi) Pritchard, schoolmistress and virtual cus- 
 todian of the Post Office. The development of Llany- 
 glo, did that ever come to pass, would be a good thing 
 for Nancy, for otherwise there was none in Llanyglo to 
 marry her, and to domestic service elsewhere she could 
 not have stooped. She was tall and plump and ruddy, 
 with black hair and black-lashed blue eyes, and in her 
 conversation she gave the preference to the longer words. 
 She had been to school in Bangor, wore the longest skirts 
 in Llanyglo, and between her and her father's guest was 
 the bond of their common superiority to everybody else 
 there. She was a partie, for John Pritchard was well- 
 to-do; but for whom? Apparently for nobody whom 
 Llanyglo had yet seen. 
 
 The remaining spectators, with the exception of old 
 Mrs. Pritchard, who resembled a mummy rather than a 
 spectator, partook in varying degrees of these same 
 characteristics; and there at the table sat Mr. Tudor 
 Williams, M.P., of Ponteglwys, one of his eyes aflow 
 with tears of sensibility while the other was glued to the 
 main chance; Baptist, nationalist, and arguer by meta-
 
 104 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 phor and analogy ; an elocutionist, and a maker of elocu- 
 tionists by that process of education that consists of giv- 
 ing a scholar a subject and bidding him straightway 
 speak for five minutes upon it ; and, above all, ever and 
 again suggesting, by slight gesture or quick glance, that 
 his secret thought was that there, in cap or corduroys, 
 but for the Grace of God, went Mr. Tudor Williams of 
 Ponteglwys. . . . 
 
 At last he put up his hand, refusing to eat more. 
 
 " No more, no more indeed ! It is the best bread and 
 but-ter I have tasted since I was here before, but I 
 should be ill in my stomach. Dear me, John Pritch- 
 ard, the hap-py hours I have spent in this room ! ' M id 
 Pleas-sures and Palaces ' indeed there is tears in my 
 eyes when I see the dres-ser with the plates on it, and 
 the jugs, and Mrs. Prit-chard's Bible in the window, just 
 the same as when I was a boy ! Well, I have had a 
 splen-did tea at all events, and if you will excuse me a 
 min-nit I will return thanks for it. ... Now, my 
 friends ! " 
 
 Five minutes later, Mr. Tudor Williams, not so near 
 to the Kerrs' Hafod that he had the appearance of 
 specially watching it, nor yet so far from it but that 
 he could see Ned Kerr and his brother Sam setting a 
 rough window-sash into position, was once more shaking 
 hands and patting shoulders and exchanging greetings 
 with such of the men and women and children of Llany- 
 glo as he had not yet seen. 
 
 And now that they had got him there they hardly 
 knew what they wanted of him. That building exploit 
 of the Kerrs having thrust the Inclosures Dispute a 
 good deal into the background, and Dafydd Dafis's 
 honourable if sullen refusal to injure men who had 
 risked their lives with him having given that exploit
 
 THE MEMBER 105 
 
 Itself a kind of condonation, it seemed as if their Mem- 
 ber had merely come to a Sasiwn after all. But land 
 had changed hands : they had a vague sense of impend- 
 ing change and of the discomfort of change; and, as 
 they answered their Member's questions, the very pres- 
 ence in their midst of this man who moved behind the 
 scenes of the drama of large events accentuated this 
 feeling. 
 
 " What is he like, this one ? " Mr. Tudor Williams 
 asked, gently yet absent-mindedly patting big John 
 Pritchard's back as he stooped to cough. They had been 
 speaking of Terry Armfield. 
 
 They described Terry as he had appeared to them 
 in the Court at Forth JSTeigr. 
 
 " Is he taking over any other land ? " . . . 
 
 You would not have supposed, from the way in which 
 Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., asked the question that 
 he merely sought to know how much they knew. And 
 it had not occurred to Llanyglo that these transfers of 
 land might be, not an end, but only a beginning. Yet 
 Mr. Tudor Williams had good, if private reasons, for 
 knowing that this very land might soon be more than 
 merely worth acquiring. . . . He was not deceiving 
 them. It pleased them to think that their Member was 
 the repository of weighty secrets, and he was merely 
 indulging this simple and legitimate liking. IBut al- 
 ready he intended to go to Liverpool in order to find 
 out what this Syndicate's plans really were. He 
 wanted to know whether the Syndicate, in its turn, was 
 aware of something else, something still very secret 
 indeed, so secret that five minutes at certain keyholes 
 might have been worth many thousands of pounds. . . . 
 
 " And this Haf od Unos on whose land is it erect- 
 ed ? " he next asked.
 
 106 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 He made a little grimace when they told him, on 
 Squire Wynne's. 
 
 " Then perhaps he will let it stand ; he is cracked 
 in his head about old customs, and antiquities, and 
 suchlike foolishness, when there is great work wait-ing 
 to be done. It is not our business if he likes to let 
 these people squat upon his land." 
 
 But here John Pritchard interposed heavily. 
 
 " But it is our business if they sing ' Thomas, make 
 Room for your Uncle ' in the middle of prayers," he 
 said. 
 
 " No-o-o ! " exclaimed Mr. Tudor Williams, shocked. 
 Perhaps also he wished to gain a little time ; he had no 
 wish to call upon Squire Wynne, either about this or 
 anything else. " Don't tell me they did that ! " he 
 added. 
 
 " Indeed, they did," said John quickly. 
 
 " Aw-w-w ! But it is a Liberal maxim, John, and 
 Radical, too, that force is no remedy. In my opinion 
 our friend Dafydd here " he put his arm affection- 
 ately about Dafydd Dafis's waist, " was a lit-tle head- 
 strong about burning the fences." 
 
 " I will not burn their house," said Dafydd sullenly. 
 (By the way, had the case been altered, it is doubtful 
 whether the Kerrs would have done as much for him. ) 
 
 " Well we can always take what the doc-tor told 
 the man who wanted information for noth-thing to take 
 advice," said Mr. Tudor Williams. 
 
 " It would be better to see Mr. Wynne first," said 
 John Pritchard. " If one comes others may come, and 
 indeed I never saw such behaviour, no, not in a den of 
 li-ons!" 
 
 They continued to discuss the matter, while, before 
 their eyes, the Kerrs fitted their window-sash.
 
 THE MEMBER 107 
 
 Yet it was curious to note how, within the bond 
 of their passionate, if loquacious nationalism, each man 
 was jealously for himself. It was not that their de- 
 mocracy was more conspicuously lacking in democrats 
 than are other democracies; perhaps it was rather that 
 the Welshman recognises two ties and two ties only 
 the tie of unity against the foreigner, and the private 
 claim of his strong family affections. Between these 
 two things is his void and vulnerable place. He has 
 not set up for himself the Englishman's stiff and service- 
 able and systematised falsity of Compromise, that has 
 no justification save that it works. He has his age-long 
 tradition, but no daily rule that can (and indeed must) 
 be applied without question. Each of his acts is his 
 first act, and so a retail act. Because his hypocrisy 
 lacks the magnificent scope of that of the Saxon, he bears 
 the odium of a personal stealthiness. Thus, perhaps, it 
 comes about that while too strict an adherence to the 
 letter is the Englishman's ever-present danger, for his 
 brother Celt the spirit slayeth. Noble dreams, petty 
 acts ; and here, if a little obscurely, may be hidden the 
 reason why, when he seeks his fortune in London, his 
 greatest successes are the minor successes of drapery 
 and milk. . . . 
 
 " Well," said Mr. Tudor Williams at last, " Wynne 
 is a man of no ideas. He is only a pettifogging country 
 Squire, whose views on the Land Question are ob-solete 
 in tot-to. But if he harbours men that are a nuisance, 
 as John Pritchard says, perhaps it would be better if I 
 went to see him " 
 
 Nevertheless, he had no intention whatever of doing 
 so. The truth was that the Squire's views on the Land 
 Question were too obsolete altogether. They were so 
 obsolete that he had sold when (as first Edward Garden
 
 108 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 had known, and now Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., knew) 
 he ought to have held; and it was for Mr. Tudor Wil- 
 liams to profit by his error if he could, rather than to 
 call his attention to it. He was very far from being a 
 wealthy man.
 
 VIII 
 
 THELBMA 
 
 BECAUSE Terry Armfield, '6elieving in his idea, 
 would not have abated one jot of it for all the 
 money in Liverpool, therefore he got all the money he 
 wanted. This alas ! is not optimism, nor a hardy 
 belief that merit infallibly meets with its deserts in 
 this world ; it merely means that a number of business- 
 men with rudimentary consciences were willing to pay 
 a kind of hedging-premium on the off-chance of being, 
 after all, on the side of Terry and the angels. It is 
 astonishing how often your visionary can get money 
 out of your man of affairs when another man of affairs 
 would fail. 
 
 And, even as the man who chatted to the author of 
 the Sixpenny Guide said, Terry was only a few years 
 before his time. The things he dreamed of have not 
 come to pass yet, but they are confidently promised 
 to-morrow. As happy as the day was long, he was 
 merely setting up the City that is not built with hands, 
 and lighting it with the Light that never was. And 
 if the " Thelema Estate Development Company " had 
 done nothing else, it did, at any rate, put an end to 
 that dispute that had begun when Dafydd Dafis had 
 pulled down fences and burned them in his beautiful 
 Red Dragon of a bonfire. 
 
 But, over and above that, it did leave its little mark 
 on Llanyglo a fleeting mark, laughable, bathetic, 
 
 109
 
 110 MUSHROOM TOWK 
 
 sad, tauntingly vacant, and lunatic (as Mr. Tudor 
 Williams would have said) " in tot-to." Come to that 
 little office near St. George's Hall, Liverpool, and see 
 Terry Armfield in the closing stages of his minding of 
 Llanyglo. 
 
 He not only conceived his Thelema; he drew the 
 plans of it as well. He drew them on drawing-paper, 
 on tracing-paper, on note-paper and bill-heads and the 
 backs of envelopes. A paper-weight, with a knob in 
 the shape of a clenched fist grasping a short staff, kept 
 half a hundred of his hasty drafts from flying off again 
 into the air that gave them birth. And he added to 
 them day by day, almost hour by hour. . . . Forty 
 or forty-five or fifty houses, say, each with its little plot 
 for private meditation and repose, yet sharing in com- 
 mon among them a spacious pleasaunce where friend 
 should meet friend and none but friends should come 
 that was the idea. A fair wide Way, with the moun- 
 tains looking down its perspective to where gentle steps 
 led down to the tawny sand that was the idea. A 
 wall all about it, or a ha-ha perhaps, not as against 
 trespass, but as a symbol that here was an Isle that the 
 tides of the care and of the trouble of the world did not 
 invade a shining and galleried chamber where light 
 and happy laughter should rise to the groining of the 
 roof (dim blue with gilt stars), and should echo and 
 linger there as if the fane itself whispered that was 
 the idea. None of it existed, none of it was ever likely 
 to exist; but without some such dreaming our life on 
 earth is little worth. The people who put up the real 
 money for it laughed at it, and laughed at Terry when 
 he had gone, but humoured him while he was there as a 
 nuisance, but a gentle one. If they lost their money 
 there would, at any rate, be a good many of them in
 
 THELEMA 111 
 
 company, thp land was exceedingly cheap, and they 
 need not begin to huild upon it till they pleased. Be- 
 sides, by taking shares in his Thelema they had bought 
 Terry off. When he came with his other wild and beau- 
 tiful schemes they could say, " No, no, Terry, we'll see 
 how Thelema turns out first," and pass him on to some- 
 body else. That alone was worth the money. 
 
 Then there came to Terry one day a man who not 
 only did not laugh at him, but grasped him by the hand, 
 patted him all up the arm and across the breast as if 
 he conferred invisible decorations upon him, gave 
 Thelema his blessing, and said, in moved tones, " In- 
 deed it is splen-did splen-did without vis-ion the 
 people perish-eth." He told Terry that his name was 
 Tudor Williams, and that he was the parliamentary 
 representative of the constituency a portion of which 
 Terry and the gods on high were developing. He did 
 not ask outright for anything. He told Terry that, 
 while he himself was a good Radical, believing that 
 God made the land for the people, nevertheless, in this 
 imperfect world things had to be done a lit-tle at a time, 
 and his principal objection to the (temporary) private 
 ownership of land was that it was too often in the wrong 
 hands. If it could be put into the right hands much of 
 the ini-quit-ty would disappear, whatever. Then, when 
 he came to inform Terry that in his opinion he could 
 be of great use to the Estate, he told him also that he 
 was far from being a wealthy man, and that his useful- 
 ness must be set off as against the cost of any interest 
 Terry might think fit to confer upon him. . . ." 
 
 " Look you," he said, " the conditions of labour are 
 peculiar, and things that would be easy for me you might 
 find a lit-tle diff-fi-cult. I do not say you would, and 
 indeed I am a good democrat, and do not believe in one
 
 112 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 law for the ritss and another for the poor; but nowa- 
 days, when every man has his rights and his vote . . . 
 well, without a word here and a word there it might be a 
 lit-tle diff-fi-cult. . . ." 
 
 And Terry, who was quite acute enough to see this, 
 asked Mr. Tudor Williams to come again. 
 
 When Mr. Tudor Williams came to see Terry for 
 the third time, Terry pressed him to accept a seat on 
 the Board. But Mr. Tudor Williams put up a deprecat- 
 ing hand. 
 
 " Aw-w-w, no ! " he said. " Indeed it is very good 
 of you, and I am very pleased you show so much confi- 
 dence in me, but it would not do. There is my public 
 position to consider. Indeed I would rather have a 
 nominee. It is hard to make people understand a 
 prop-per motive. If the time was ripe for it I would 
 nationalise all land, yes indeed I would, but if it must 
 be privately owned for a lit-tle while longer it is better 
 that it should be in the trust of men like you and me for 
 the public good. There is as many different kinds of 
 landowning as there is of landowners. That pet-ti-fog- 
 ging country squire, Wynne, he is repre-sen-ta-tive of 
 all that is worst in a vic-ious sys-tem ; he has no more 
 vis-ion than that chair you sit on now; but we are not. 
 like that. I have not often found a sym-pathy like 
 yours ; indeed there has been tears in my eyes while you 
 have talked. . . . But I will have a nominee. It will 
 be bet-ter. And I will see you get your labour. There 
 is John Jones, Contractor, Forth K"eigr. He may even 
 be willing to pay a lit-tle commission. We shall not 
 quarrel about that. But I am bet-ter off the Board." 
 
 Very curiously, he was not the only one who seemed 
 a little shy about being put on the Board. Others dis- 
 played an equal bashfulness. This puzzled Terry.
 
 THELEMA 113 
 
 Btit it never puzzled him for long at a time. Always a 
 fresh inspiration sent him off into his cloudland again. 
 It was about that time that he acquired his second slice 
 of Llanyglo, a tract adjoining the first and running 
 down to that shore that Copley Fielding depicted with 
 such accomplishment, elegance, and taste. And he took 
 with that second piece of land a responsibility greater 
 than that he had assumed when he had merely cajoled 
 money out of the pockets of men who had known his 
 tea-clipping father and whose fathers had known his 
 privateering great-grandfather. Briefly, by enlarging 
 his enterprise, Terry threw away the immediate advan- 
 tage of his personal idealism and charm. The thing 
 went to allotment shorn of his peculiar magnetism. He 
 received money that would not, merely on the score that 
 they liked him, be indulgently written off by those who 
 would see that money no more. 
 
 His Prospectus is extant. Edward Garden's unfin- 
 ished house came into it, and an affiliated interest, 
 "Forth Neigr Omnibuses, Ltd." about which Mr. 
 Tudor Williams knew something. There were great 
 swathes about the natural beauties of the situation, and 
 lesser ones (the Syndicate pruned them down behind 
 Terry's back) about the Thelema Idea. And there were 
 a number of other things that are impossible, yet facts 
 in the amazing History of Flotation. It is no good 
 saying these things cannot happen when they happen 
 daily. Had you or I bought shares in the " Thelema 
 Estate Development Company, Limited," we should 
 merely have bought, you and I, shares in that moonshine 
 that poor, gentle, rapturous, cat's-paw Terry Armfield 
 drew with freehand and French curves on his bits of 
 paper and presently spread out in such a lunatic fashion 
 over the sandhills of Llanyglo. Come, before we leave
 
 114 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 this dim chapter of the twilight of Llanyglo's forebe- 
 ing, and see what Terry did. 
 
 Starting at right angles from the Forth ISTeigr road, 
 a couple of hundred yards short of John Pritchard's 
 farm, there runs straight down to the shore a street of 
 rather more than a quarter of a mile in length. Cross- 
 ing this street in the middle runs another street, not so 
 long, but unfinished. These two streets intersect in an 
 open space or circus perhaps a hundred yards in 
 diameter. The first street is called Delyn Avenue, be- 
 cause of the mountain that commands it. The second 
 one is called Trwyn Way. The central circus is called 
 by the names of the four Crescents it comprises. 
 Farther back from the intersecting points are other 
 streets. They also are named. 
 
 But do not suppose that these streets and Crescents 
 and Avenues and Ways are streets in any ordinary 
 sense. They are twenty-two and thirty-five foot roads, 
 metalled, crowned, drained, and with a good stone kerb 
 running parallel on either side. But there are no 
 houses. There is not even a pavement, no, not a vestige 
 of one, flagged, macadamed, cobbled, nor of any other 
 description. There are no standards for gas or electric 
 light ; there are no standards even for the names of the 
 thoroughfares for you can hardly call those things 
 standards those low wooden boards, rather like the 
 " Please Keep off the Grass " notices in a public park, 
 that inform you that this is Delyn Avenue or that that 
 is Trwyn Way. Exactly as it was all drawn on Terry 
 Armfield's tracing-paper and envelopes and memo-heads, 
 so it is now drawn on the Llanyglo sandhills, with strips 
 of stone kerbing for pencil lines and the wind-blown 
 sand where his india-rubber has passed. Lie down on 
 the sandhills with your eyes at the level of the kerbs,
 
 THELEMA 115 
 
 and, save for those eighteen-inch-high street name-boards, 
 all disappears. Or if you care to climb the Trwyn you 
 can see it all rather well from there. . . . 
 
 There you are. Just a little patch of strapwork in 
 the middle of the waste. Or like a rather large gridiron 
 somebody has thrown away. And, if you are capable of 
 seeing what Terry saw, namely all the things that are 
 not there and that never will be there, then that little 
 grid of laid-down and abandoned streets has a curiously 
 mocking effect. You imagine the ghosts of Terry's 
 Thelemites moving noiselessly there, passing to and from 
 their non-existent habitations. They are going, friendly 
 ghost taking friendly ghost by the hand, to that groined 
 and lofty chamber of Terry's dream, where the faint 
 echoes of laughter linger in the roof of dim blue with 
 gilt stars. They are going to walk in Terry's closes and 
 courts and arbours, happy in that the sorrows and pains 
 and substantialities of the world touch them not in their 
 retreat. They are going down Delyn Avenue, to where 
 the broad and gentle steps descend to the yellow shore. 
 And all about them, but only to be seen if you can see 
 what Terry saw (otherwise you will see only the sand 
 and the wild thyme and the sulphur butterflies and the 
 blue), are Calaer and Anatole, Griere and Hesperia, 
 Mesembrine and Arctic, which are the six towers of that 
 Place with the great gate where bigots and hypocrites 
 and defrauded and whining shareholders enter not, nor 
 the violent Huns of the world of business nor the cruel 
 Ostrogoths of commerce, but only the spruce and noble 
 devotees of the Best, the Terrys before their time. 
 
 But when the wind gets up, then the sand blows over 
 it all, and John Pritchard or somebody else, catching 
 his foot against the unseen kerb, comes down his length 
 into the middle of Terry's lovely and desired Place.
 
 116 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 But the men and women of Llanyglo are beginning to 
 know their way about this phantom town, and none 
 other, save the Gardens (whose house is now finished), 
 and a friend or so of the Gardens' in the summer, ever 
 comes there. The Kerrs, however, still have their 
 Hafod, which they inhabit together when they are not 
 away buying and cutting alders and shaping them into 
 clog-soles with the free-hinged knife in the little canvas 
 hut. And among the business-men of Liverpool the 
 whole thing is still a rich joke. " Well, have you started 
 building that house of yours in Wales yet ? " a man who 
 has not bought will ask a man who did ; and this one will 
 reply, " Oh, I'm thinking about it," or, " You must come 
 down there and stop with me," or some other put-off. 
 And it was rich in the extreme when, one day, the man 
 at whose expense the joke was made took the jester by 
 the button, smiled, and whispered something confi- 
 dential. . . . "What!" gasped the jester. "You've 
 sold! . . . Wherever did you find him? In Manches- 
 ter ? Ha, ha, ha ! Splendid ! That's a dig in the ribs 
 for Manchester ! I should like to see his face when he 
 sees it ! ... A pity about poor Armfield, though he'll 
 
 catch snuff " 
 
 For Terry had been refused bail.
 
 PAET TWO 
 
 RAIX,HE.AJ> 
 
 BUT something was coming to Llanyglo. 
 As Edward Garden might have said, looking at 
 this something under his glasses and over his glasses as 
 it crept slowly up out of the east as Edward Garden 
 might have said, looking at it again and yet again, and 
 then gazing mildly and mistrustfully through the glasses 
 at you, it appeared to be a railway. 
 
 At any rate, if it was not coming to Llanyglo it was 
 coming within three miles of it. 
 
 As if a snail should leave behind it a track, not 01 
 slime, but of new iron, grey at first, then red with rust, 
 but soon to be bright again, so it came on ; and in other 
 respects also it resembled a snail. It carried, for ex- 
 ample, its lodging with it. And it put forward sensitive 
 and intelligent antennse as it sought its food thirty 
 miles away down the coast manganese. It left the 
 junction half a mile beyond Forth K"eigr, and it was 
 going to Abercelyn. 
 
 The lodging that the snail carried with it was called 
 Railhead. Seen from a distance of a couple of miles 
 it resembled a small excoriation on the face of the land ; 
 seen nearer it resolved itself into a town of wood and 
 corrugated iron, with stockades of creosoted sleepers and 
 trenches of earth and ramparts of ballast and metal for 
 
 117
 
 118 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 the laying of the permanent way. There were superin- 
 tendents' offices and the sheds of clerks of works ; there 
 were forges and stables and strings of waggons and a 
 telegraph cabin; there were huts and pumping-stations 
 and cranes, stationary and travelling, and a gas-plant; 
 and there were watchmen's boxes and the temporary 
 dwellings of hundreds of men. By day these could be 
 seen, spread out on the level or clustering about the em- 
 bankments as the flies clustered about the treacled strings 
 and fly-papers Howell Gruffydd hung up in his shop 
 in Llanyglo; at night the oncoming snail seemed phos- 
 phorescent, its phosphorescence the flares and fires and 
 lamps in cabin-~windows and red eyes for danger that 
 appeared when the other shift took over the work from 
 the men of the day. Whistle of construction-engine 
 and roar of dynamite cartridge ; hiss of steam and clang 
 of hammers as they fished the joints; rattle of road- 
 metal as it was shot from the carts, and thud of the 
 paviors' rammers; clank of couplings and agonised 
 scream of a circular saw ; purr of telephone-bells and the 
 " Hallo ! " as the clerk took down the receiver ; sough 
 of pumps and bubbling of cauldrons of tar; cries to 
 horses, slish and slap of mortar and the clinking of the 
 trowels ; spitting of dinners cooking over the firebaskets, 
 sounds of singing at night; with these and a hundred 
 other noises the snail crept on with a spirit-level inside 
 him the level that kept him true to the line that had 
 been laid down by staff and chain and theodolite a couple 
 of years before. 
 
 And in some respects that something that looked so 
 very much like a railway resembled not so much a snail 
 as a snake. Did you ever see the great python that died 
 lately at the Zoo climb his ragged staff of a tree ? Not a 
 joint or section of him but seemed to have that separate
 
 RAILHEAD 119 
 
 life of each of Dafydd Dafis's fingers when he mourned 
 over his harp. A yard, two yards of the gorgeous waist- 
 thick creature would ripple and flow and roll upwards 
 to the crutch of the stump ; another yard would follow, 
 piling ever up and up ; and you would wait for the top- 
 pling over of the great golden reticulated cable. And 
 then all motion in that portion of the great fake would 
 suddenly cease. Beyond the stump you would become 
 aware that another glittering section was a-crawl, bal- 
 ancing, making fast, ever continuing the ascent. . . . 
 Even so, before and behind Railhead, . the work pro- 
 gressed. At a point the construction-engine stopped, 
 the regiment of red and blue shirts and wondrous fore- 
 arms and corduroy would move off, and presently all the 
 life of the line would be five miles ahead, where they dug 
 and built and drained and by and by passed back the 
 word that all was well. S'o they moved,' between the fin- 
 ished and tested line at one point and the warning bell 
 and the dynamite stick at the other; and there was an 
 end of much gorse and heath and of many banks of flow- 
 ering campion and hassocks of wild thyme. 
 
 And, for all this snail with its iron slime was not 
 passing within three miles of Llanyglo, it was bringing 
 the hamlet's appointed destiny with it. It was bring- 
 ing (though, to be sure, not for some years yet) a pas- 
 senger-junction where yet only irises and bog-cotton grew 
 and frogs boomed out over the marsh at night. It was 
 bringing sidings where John Pritchard's farthest field 
 of oats now rippled silver-green in the wind. It was 
 bringing a goods-yard and signal-bridges, and sheds and 
 platforms and turntables and a cabrank in front and 
 rows of railwaymen's dwellings behind. It was bring- 
 ing a different breed of men, a breed that so far Llanyglo 
 knows only in the persons of the four Kerrs. More than
 
 120 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 this, it was bringing progress, and sophistication, and 
 wealth for some but nothing for others, and jollity, and 
 vice, and some knowledge that was good and some that 
 Llanyglo would have been no worse without, and 
 always loads, loads, trainloads of white-faced people 
 from the smoky towns. And most of all it was bringing 
 to that vague yet unmistakable town-soul of Llanyglo 
 growth and experience, growth that it could not escape 
 and experience that it must square with those num- 
 bered days of its idyllic nonage as best it can. Through 
 growing-pains and wild-oats, through revulsions of young 
 remorse and impossible panaceas of repentance, through 
 shrugging worldliness and cynicism and the forgetful- 
 ness that lies in laughter, Llanyglo must pass before it 
 becomes whatever it is to be. One thing only is 
 certain: it can never again be as it was when Edward 
 Garden first went there. Its wild thyme will remain 
 only in patches on its Trwyn, and its sandhills will be 
 glaucous with the blue sea-holly no more. The black 
 cattle have not much longer in which to pace its shore, 
 and Terry Armfield's gridiron will be forgotten no 
 Sixpenny Guide will point the way down Delyn Avenue 
 nor past his immaterial Crescents along Trwyn Way. 
 Railhead is creeping on. Two of the Kerrs are already 
 working there, the other two have just bought the last 
 of Squire Wynne's alders. Squire Wynne has now no 
 land except that occupied by the Plas and its tangled 
 and mossy and grassy and neglected gardens. " Forth 
 Neigr Omnibuses, Limited," is already a serious under- 
 taking, for it will ply between Llanyglo and the nearest 
 point of the line. Howell Gruffydd has an option on the 
 two original cottages that Edward Garden had had 
 matchboarded he may soon be requiring a larger shop. 
 Compensations will be paid right and left. And there
 
 RAILHEAD 121 
 
 will soon be a larger assortment of young men for Miss 
 Nancy Pritchard to choose a husband from. . . . 
 For something is coming to Llanyglo. 
 
 Mr. Tudor Williams Ponteglwys had been clever 
 enough in the matter of the Omnibuses, Limited, nor, 
 for the matter of that, had his cleverness stopped there ; 
 but for astuteness he could not hold a candle to Edward 
 Garden. Edward Garden was not a Member of Parlia- 
 ment. As he musingly said when people asked him why 
 he was not, it was out of his line. Therefore, he and his 
 friends had left to others the promotion of the Bill, its 
 steering through Select Committees of both Houses, and 
 the whole conduct of the negotiations that, in their dif- 
 ferent way, were no less complicated than that concen- 
 tration of various forces by virtue of which Railhead 
 crept ever slowly forward. To a regiment of lawyers 
 had likewise been left the adjustments under the general 
 Acts to which, on the passing of the Bill, the enterprise 
 had become subject. Members and lawyers alike, those 
 drest in a little brief obedience to the commands of the 
 party whips, these as often as not Members themselves, 
 were virtually the nominees of Edward Garden and his 
 friends. Politics Edward Garden's " line " ? . . . To 
 all outward appearances he had no " line " at all. He 
 merely added another emblem to that little cluster of 
 Mercuries and Greyhounds and Winged Orbs that 
 formed the pendant of his watch-chain. It was only 
 when others, full of plans and hope and secrecy, 
 sought " lines " for themselves that they discovered 
 that he had been beforehand with them. To give an 
 instance: When Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., appar- 
 ently as representing somebody else, had come forward 
 with an offer to take up the remnants of poor Terry's
 
 122 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 Thelema, he had found there were no remnants to take 
 up. To give another instance: When, by carefully 
 engineered good offices and intermediaries, Mr. Tudor 
 Williams had sought a reconciliation with Squire 
 Wynne, and presently had gone- to see him, he had 
 found that he had pocketed his pride for nothing the 
 Squire no longer had a yard of land to sell. In a word, 
 before ever whispers of the Bill had begun to circulate 
 in the lobbies of the House of Commons, the sandhills 
 and oat-fields of Llanyglo had been cut up like a jigsaw 
 puzzle, raffled, dealt in, apportioned, and owned; and, 
 save for his small holding in Thelema, between the 
 Omnibuses at Forth Neigr and manganese at Aberce- 
 lyn, there were very few pickings for Mr. Tudor Wil- 
 liams of Ponteglwys. 
 
 Therefore he returned with an enthusiasm more 
 ardent than ever to his original crusade against the 
 private ownership of the land that God made for the 
 people, and took his constituents by the button-holes, 
 and spoke darkly of other Acts Acts which by and 
 by should give the Local Authority powers of compul- 
 sory purchase. 
 
 And all this time the eye still saw nothing to pur- 
 chase but bents and blown sand, blue and lemon butter- 
 flies, nodding harebells, a few tidemarks of black sea- 
 weed, a wooden jetty, a cluster of thatched kerb, the 
 three Chapels, Edward Garden's house, and Ty Kerr. 
 
 But something was coming to Llanyglo. 
 
 On the whole they did not talk very much about it. 
 Each had his reason for reticence, or brooding, or 
 resentment, or calculation, as the case might be. Nev- 
 ertheless, with Railhead still many miles away, they 
 began to become accustomed to the coming and going
 
 RAILHEAD 123 
 
 of strangers. They came, these strangers, to Edward 
 Garden's house, sleeping either there or else at the 
 double cottage down by the beach; Edward Garden 
 himself, with a lantern in his hand, saw them hos- 
 pitably over the sandhills to bed. They were survey- 
 ors and architects, accountants, geologists, prospectors, 
 men in control of the snail that left the track of iron 
 and grey ballast and upturned clay across the land, 
 lawyers, conveyancers, the directors of the stone- 
 quarries along the Forth Neigr road, and others at 
 whose business Llanyglo could only guess. And Mr. 
 Tudor Williams also went there, perhaps to talk about 
 compulsory powers. These and others wandered in 
 groups along the straggling lines of seaweed, and up 
 the Trwyn, and far inland behind John Pritchard's 
 farm, pointing, pacing, discussing, exactly as those 
 minions of the Liverpool Syndicate had done that 
 morning when work had suddenly ceased on Edward 
 Garden's new house; but there was no talk of fence- 
 burning now. Even Dafydd Dafis saw the hopeless- 
 ness of it, and once more went about with his head 
 bowed like a head of corn heavy with rain. Already 
 men were widening and levelling the Forth Neigr road. 
 One week-end in July, after an unusually large gather- 
 ing at Edward Garden's house, a new waggonette from 
 Forth Neigr came to take them back in a body. It 
 had a pair of horses, and it took the hills in style. 
 Dafydd Dafis, whom the vehicle overtook on his ten 
 miles' trudge into the town, was offered a seat, but 
 he appeared not to hear, and the vehicle drove on, en- 
 veloping him in its dust. Half-way to Forth Neigr 
 he came upon a squad of men setting up a telegraph 
 pole. One of them spoke to him, in English. " Dim 
 Saesneg," he muttered, and then perhaps wondered why
 
 124 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 he had done so. It might be " Dim Cymraeg " pres- 
 ently. A little farther on the waggonette passed him 
 again, once more hiding him in its dust. No doubt it 
 had turned aside up the rough road that led to the stone- 
 quarries. Dafydd continued his trudge. 
 
 But in the household of Howell Gruffydd the grocer, 
 a suppressed excitement reigned. This, when Dafydd 
 Dafis happened to be there, showed only as resignation 
 and a bowing to the inevitable; but at other times it 
 seemed to confer a more frequent glitter to Howell's 
 teeth, a new impulse to his jocularity, and a sparkle 
 and sharpness to his wife's eyes. Cases and canisters 
 the like of which he had never handled before were de- 
 livered at his door by the Forth Neigr carrier; these 
 were for the consumption of Edward Garden and his 
 guests; and he waited in person upon Mrs. Garden 
 every Monday morning. He thought of having a 
 Christmas almanack with his own name printed upon 
 it. Blodwen, his wife, made him, in anticipation, a 
 pair of linen half -sleeves that drew up over his fore- 
 arms. Eesaac Oliver was forbidden any longer to 
 fetch the eggs from the light-keeper's wife up the 
 Trwyn ; one of Hugh Morgan's boys might do this. As 
 a preparation for Aberystwith, Eesaac Oliver was 
 packed off to a second cousin of Blodwen's at Forth 
 Neigr, there to attend an excellent endowed school. 
 With the railway passing so near it would be a simple 
 matter for him to spend his week-ends at Llanyglo. 
 
 And big consumptive John Pritchard rarely said a 
 word about that onward-creeping snail that left its 
 double thread of permanent track behind it, but he 
 thought exaltedly and powerfully. Stories had already 
 reached him of drunkenness at Railhead, and fights, 
 and singing at nights, and other godless orgies, and
 
 RAILHEAD 125 
 
 his brow was sternly set. When he preached at the 
 Baptist Chapel about such as loved darkness and the 
 evil paths in which they walked, it was known that he 
 was thinking of Railhead. Men were now plotting 
 their levels almost within sight of Llanyglo. They 
 turned their surveying instruments on the hamlet as if 
 they had been guns, and laid out their chains as if they 
 had been enslaving the soil itself. Then an advance 
 gang approached, and, even while John knew that the 
 end was near (but not so near as all that), that end 
 came. Eight men marched one evening into Llanyglo, 
 bawling a bawdy chorus, with Sam Kerr showing the 
 way. They had bottles and piggins and stone jars of 
 beer, and, slung with joined-up leather belts between 
 two of them, swung a barrel. They stumbled through 
 the loose sand towards the Hafod Unos, hiccoughing 
 and polluting the peaceful evening. Ned Kerr had 
 evidently been advised of their coming ; he stood at the 
 door of the Hafod to receive them; and the carousing 
 began. ... It lasted half the night, and then each 
 clay-stained navvy and tattooed platelayer slept and 
 snored where he fell. John Pritchard did not sleep. 
 Faintly he could hear their singing where he lay. The 
 red and white of the Trwyn light dyed the darkness 
 overhead. John remembered his own words : " It is 
 
 a den of li-ons " 
 
 Something had already come to Llanyglo.
 
 II 
 
 THE C:LEB,K OF THE WOEKS 
 
 JOHN WILLIE GARDEN was by this time at the 
 age when he occasionally washed himself with- 
 out being told. This he probably did, not out of any 
 great love of cleanliness, but because by washing un- 
 bidden he acquired the right to retort, when the order 
 to wash came, " I have there ! " Did one of the 
 maids give the order he might add the word " Sucks ! " 
 This word he withheld when the command came from 
 his mother. 
 
 He was still at school at Pannal, but ardently longed 
 to leave. It was intended that sooner or later he should 
 go into business with his father, and during the past 
 Christmas vacation, which the Gardens had spent at 
 home in Manchester, he had had the run of the offices 
 and spinning-sheds. His real education, as distinct 
 from his scholastic one, had been immensely advanced 
 thereby. This real advance had taken place principally 
 after working hours. In such cases there is usually a 
 young clerk or market-man ready to take the son of the 
 firm into his charge, and a certain Jack Webster had 
 had the bringing of John Willie out. This he had 
 done at football matches, in the dressing-rooms where 
 the titans clad themselves for the fray, and at their 
 sing-songs and smokers afterwards. Therefore, John 
 Willie esteemed himself a boy of the world, and al- 
 ready the day seemed far distant when he had shot the 
 
 126
 
 THE CLERK OF THE WORKS 127 
 
 Llanyglo rabbits with his bow and arrow, and had 
 buried a sixpence beneath the date-stone of his father's 
 house. 
 
 To Llanyglo John Willie went again that summer, 
 as the snail crept forward yard by yard to Abercelyn 
 and the manganese. 
 
 All things considered, you might have been par- 
 doned had you supposed that, without John Willie, the 
 work at Railhead must have come to a stop. Had you 
 wished to know anything about that railway its cost 
 per mile, its contractors' time-limits and penalties, its 
 wages bills, its estimated upkeep you would have 
 gone, not to those men who spent week-ends at Edward 
 Garden's house, but to John Willie. Railhead was now 
 to him what the building of the Llanyglo house had 
 formerly been, and the fence-burning, and rugby foot- 
 ball, and many another interest of the days when he 
 had been a kid and immature. It was in the summer 
 of 1884 that the snail's antennae approached within 
 sight of Llanyglo, and, rain or shine, permitted or for- 
 bidden, John Willie spent most of his waking hours 
 among the masons and smiths and navvies and plate- 
 layers who formed the population of that nomad town 
 of wood and earth and sleepers and rolling stock and 
 escaping steam and corrugated iron. He knew half 
 the men by name. He joined them at dinner when 
 the great buzzer told half a county that it was half -past 
 twelve. He knitted his brows over the curling and 
 thumb-marked plans in the foremen's cabins. He 
 passed this section of work or that, and gave the other 
 his imprimatur. He adapted his stride to the dis- 
 tance between sleeper and sleeper. He spat reflectively 
 on heaps of clay and mortar. With his hands, not in 
 his pockets, but thrust (in imitation of the labourers
 
 128 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 with the " drop-front " corduroys) deep into his waist- 
 band, and his cap on the back of his yellow, thistle- 
 down head, he gave off-hand nods of greeting and warn- 
 ing " Steadys." He was variously known as " t' gaf- 
 fer," " t' ganger," " t' clerk o' t' works," and " t' fore- 
 man." 
 
 And his friend, Percy Briggs, of Pannal School and 
 Roundhay (where his father was an architect) accom- 
 panied him. Percy's father was one of Edward Gar- 
 den's week-enders. He was making the plans of a 
 second house, not far from where Terry Armfield's 
 Thelemites were to have descended the shallow, marble 
 steps to the golden shore. There was also some talk 
 of an hotel. 
 
 For by this time quite a number of people knew at 
 least the name of Llanyglo, and there is very little 
 doubt that, had the place but had houses, it might even 
 then have been that within another three or four years 
 it actually had become a quiet but not inaccessible 
 resort, with perhaps a dozen striped bathing-tents and 
 a row or two of deck-chairs drawn up on its beach, a 
 couple of comfortable hydros established and a large 
 new hotel a-building, a few donkeys (but no niggers 
 nor pierrots), a place for children and for such of their 
 elders as sought a quiet not to be found at Blackpool 
 nor the Isle of Man, a spot unvisited by trippers, 
 " select," a little on the expensive side, where an ac- 
 quaintance struck up between families might without 
 too much risk be improved afterwards, where the 
 nurses would be uniformed and the luggage would be 
 sent on in advance, where a wealthy patron might even 
 build a house of his own (if he could get the land), a 
 " nice " place, a place you could afterwards tell any- 
 body you had been to, a place from which you would go
 
 THE CLERK OF THE WOEKS 12.9 
 
 back feeling well and not in need of another holiday, 
 a place in short, a place like So-and-So, or So-and- 
 So, out of which we try to shut history and change by 
 being a little jealously secret about them. Llanyglo 
 might have been, and for a short time actually was, 
 such a place ; and Percy Briggs's father, with others to 
 tell him what to do and what not to do, was even now 
 in the act of planning how to make it so. 
 
 In the meantime, Edward Garden's own house was 
 a very different place from those two cottages that 
 Dafydd Dafis had taken his own good time about match- 
 boarding. That first lodging had been no more than 
 a temporary camping-place for the summer. Any sag- 
 ging old wicker-chairs or tables or chests of drawers 
 from lumber-rooms had been good enough for it, and 
 its crockery and kitchen appointments had been of the 
 cheapest kind that Forth Keigr could supply. But 
 not so with the new house. Everything about it spoke 
 of permanence. The large plate-box was carried back- 
 wards and forwards at the beginning and end of the 
 summer season, but not the Worcester dinner-service, 
 nor the glass that filled its cupboards, nor the linen in 
 its closets, nor the blankets nor the eiderdowns set by 
 for winter, nor the few the rather few books. 
 Mrs. Garden herself had told Howell Gruffydd that it 
 was not likely that the place would be locked up for 
 the winter months again. Edward Garden intended 
 to spend more and more time there; indeed he must, 
 unless by and by he would look musingly and a little 
 ill-favouringly through his glasses at that sparse line of 
 bathing-tents and that little knot of combination-saddled 
 donkeys and say, " This does not appear to be much of 
 a watering-place." Already he had made special ar- 
 rangement for the delivery of his Manchester letters;
 
 130 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 upstairs on the first floor he had his office, with a deep 
 window, the side bays of which looked, the one towards 
 the sea, the other to the mighty deltoid-shaped outline 
 of Mynedd Mawr; and where Edward Garden settled 
 he liked to settle comfortably. In that quiet and 
 rugged and curtained room he was once more following 
 the line of least resistance. The chances were that he 
 already foresaw the direction that line was likely to 
 take. 
 
 For Lancashire, which had been remote when folk 
 had had to jog the ten miles from Forth Neigr behind 
 a somnolent old brown horse, would be near when that 
 snail had packed his lodging up and departed, leaving 
 only its iron pathway behind it; and the Kerrs in 
 their Hafod Unos would have been astonished to learn 
 how much Edward Garden mused upon Lancashire and 
 upon just such people as themselves. He mused upon 
 the cost of living of such as they ; and he mused upon 
 their standard of living, which is a related thing, but 
 not the same thing. He mused again as he saw the 
 gradual change in that standard, and contrasted the 
 things he saw with the things he remembered in his own 
 early days. In those days, expressly taken holidays 
 had been unheard-of things. Folk's excursions had 
 reached little farther afield than their own legs could 
 carry them. If John Pritchard, of Llanyglo, had 
 never been to Forth Neigr, many and many a Manches- 
 ter man of the days of Edward Garden's boyhood had 
 never been to Liverpool. Many thousands had never 
 seen the sea. It had been holiday enough in those days 
 to meet in the streets, to play knurr and spell in the 
 nearest field, to lean over walls and watch their pigs, 
 and to tend their gardens. Slate Clubs and Goose 
 Clubs and Holiday Clubs had not been invented. A
 
 THE CLERK OF THE WORKS 131 
 
 shilling or half a crown a week painfully saved would 
 not have been squandered again for the sake of that 
 little superfluity that had now become the minimum 
 itself. The mass of the people of his day would no 
 more have dreamed of saving money in order that sea- 
 side lodging-house keepers should profit than they 
 would have dreamed of taking the Grand Tour. 
 
 But a generation seemed to have arisen, very dif- 
 ferent in some ways, yet exactly the same in others. 
 They were different in that they refused to be exploited 
 any longer according to the old familiar formulas, yet 
 the same in that they were as subject as their fathers 
 had been, and as their sons and grandsons will be, to 
 the man who could devise a new one. All manner of 
 circumstances contributed to their unuttered invita- 
 tion (it was that in effect, and the only thing they did 
 not utter) that somebody should bring to their exploita- 
 tion the spice of variety. There were smoulderings 
 everywhere smoulderings at Durham and West 
 Ham, at Ayr and Lanark and Swansea, at Sheffield 
 and Manchester and Liverpool and Leeds and Hull. 
 Over his glasses and under his glasses Edward Garden 
 noted them, and inferred that the sum of it all was 
 that folk intended to have a better time than they had 
 been having. They were quite unmistakably resolved 
 to have a much better time. Their grandfathers' idea 
 of a Wakes Week, for example, might have been staying 
 at home and timing the pigeons into the cote ; but they 
 meant to improve on that. They intended to doff their 
 clogs and to put on their thinnest shoes, to draw extrav- 
 agant sums from the Club, to take railway-tickets, and 
 not to rest from their arduous relaxation as long as a 
 penny remained unspent. . . . Manganese ? The mo- 
 ment they showed signs of coming his way, Edward
 
 132 MUSHEOOM TOWN 
 
 Garden was after richer returns than manganese would 
 yield. He granted that without manganese there 
 would have been no Railhead coming up out of the 
 east, but what he had his eye on was the new genera- 
 tion's deadly resolve to be amused, the crammed coffers 
 of its Holiday Clubs, the beginnings of those tens and 
 scores and hundreds of thousands of pounds that to-day 
 a single town will get rid of in a single fortnight by 
 the sea. 
 
 But only if it came his way. He was no Terry. It 
 was his business to take things as they were, not to 
 try to make them something they were not. He had 
 no theories, no criticisms, no impulses, no hesitations. 
 He asked for nothing but uncoloured data. Therefore, 
 and to that extent, Llanyglo's future was not entirely 
 in his hands. It was still free, and always, always, 
 save for a little rising of new stone here and there, just 
 the same to look at watched over by the Light on its 
 noble Trwyn, guarded by the majestic mountain behind, 
 and presenting to its diurnal tides the same shore that 
 Copley Fielding drew. 
 
 Now it befell towards the end of the July of that year 
 that the Welshmen of Llanyglo held an open-air service 
 for the young in one of the hollows of the sandhills. It 
 was a blazing Sunday afternoon, with the sea like 
 silk and the pale mountains seeming thrice their dis- 
 tance away. They had brought a small moveable plat- 
 form and reading-desk from the Baptist Chapel, and 
 first John Pritchard, and then Howell Gruffydd had 
 mounted it. The sun beat on the bare heads and best 
 bonnets and black-coated shoulders of parents ; myriads 
 of tiny hopping insects gave the surface of the sand the 
 appearance of being in motion ; and a buzzard sailed 
 in great steady circles in the sky of larkspur blue, now
 
 THE CLERK OF THE WORKS 133 
 
 standing out to sea, now a speck in the direction of 
 Delyn or Mynedd Mawr. 
 
 Howell was teaching the twelve or fourteen urchins 
 a new hymn-tune, singing it now alone, now with them, 
 now listening with little gestures of encouragement 
 and nods of pleasure as their voices rose. His secular 
 jocularity was not absent, but tempered to the occasion. 
 
 " Louder, louder and quicker it give you an appe- 
 tite for your tea," he said, waving his arms and beating 
 with his foot to the accelerated time. " You will not 
 wake Mrs. Hughes at the lighthouse now ' Joyful, 
 Joyful ?" 
 
 And, with Eesaac Oliver leading, they went through 
 the tune again. 
 
 That a special exhortation should be given to those 
 of tenderer years had been deliberately resolved upon. 
 Since that evening when the eight men from the line 
 had rolled drunkenly over the sandhills to the Kerrs' 
 house, a fear had weighed on the chapel-goers of Llany- 
 glo. Until then, their children had known nothing of 
 the wide and wicked world; but that ignorance could 
 not now be maintained. They must be put on their 
 guard, and for that job the ingratiating Howell was 
 the man. 
 
 The tune came to an end, and he put his leaflet of 
 printed words into his pocket and shepherded the row 
 of urchins into position with movements of his hands. 
 
 "Move that way, John Roberts I cannot see 
 Olwen Morgan's face. Hugh Morgan, stop poking 
 your foot into that rabbit-hole or you fall down it and 
 we have to dig you out. Miss Pritchard, give Gwen 
 Roberts her sunbonnet, if you please, or she catss a 
 sunstroke. Ithel, where is your handkerchief? Your 
 nose resem-bles a snail. . . Now listen to me. If I
 
 134 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 see a boy or girl not pay atten-sson I stop till he do 
 pay atten-sson " 
 
 And lie began. He told them that soon, with the 
 coming of the railway, there would come also all 
 manner of pip-pie, some good pip-pie, some bad pip-pie. 
 He told them that at Railhead were many bad pip-pie, 
 who swore, and drank a great deal more than was good 
 for them. He told them (discreetly, since he had no 
 wish to preach a jehad against customers so good as 
 the Gardens) that while some boys might go to Rail- 
 head to play, boys like some he would not mention, who 
 had lived in large towns, yet it would be bet-ter if they 
 kept themselves to themselves. . . . He did not go the 
 length of asserting that all good boys were Welsh and 
 country boys, and that all bad ones were town-bred and 
 English, but but well, things have to be put a 
 little starkly to the young. They shuffled their feet in 
 the hot loose sand as he talked. The buzzard sailed 
 back from the mountains. The sandhoppers danced as 
 if the ground had been a frying-pan.. A holy peace 
 brooded over the land. Away at Railhead men, those 
 sinful men who drank and swore slept in rows, stretched 
 face-downwards on the grass or the thrown-up banks of 
 clay. 
 
 Then the grocer began to promise the rewards of 
 virtue. He turned with an interrogative smile to John 
 Pritchard. 
 
 " And now, Mr. Pritchard, do you think I might 
 tell them that see-ret? Indeed I think I get into 
 trouble if I do! But yess, I will tell them. Atten- 
 sson now. Hugh Morgan, do not scratss your head. 
 Now ! Can any boy or girl tell me what there iss to 
 be in Mr. Pritchard's field next month ? " 
 
 They guessed at once, with one voice. Howell
 
 THE CLEEK OF THE WORKS 135 
 
 Gruffydd knew better than to ask an audience questions 
 it could not answer. He held up his hands in admiring 
 surprise. 
 
 " Indeed they guess they are every one right, Miss 
 Pritchard! Astonissing! Dear me, I never saw such 
 s'arp young men and women ! Yess, they are right. 
 There is to be a Treat for the Sunday School scholars ! 
 There now! And there will be races, and prizes, and 
 tea, and the books will be given for those who have had 
 the largest num-ber of attendances and have not been 
 late. And now : who is giving this Treat ? " 
 
 " Mr. Tudor Williams ! " they cried. 
 
 " Eight again it is Mr. Tudor Williams, the Mem- 
 ber of Parliament ! And Mr. Williams is giv-ing some- 
 thing else too. He is giv-ing I have seen them 
 new pictures pictures of the construc-tion of flowers 
 (bot-tany I think it is called, Miss Pritchard ?) 
 and an-i-mals and fiss-sses " 
 
 He turned up his eyes, as if to the heavens from 
 which these rewards of virtuous living descended. The 
 croupy shrilling of a cock came from down by the 
 beach. The bees droned, and the wheeling buzzard 
 suddenly dropped like a plummet a hundred yards 
 through the larkspur blue. 
 
 It was then, in that very moment, that Howell 
 Gruffydd's face was seen to change. He stopped, 
 listening. Beyond the hot cuplike hollow in which 
 they were assembled was another sunken way, and 
 along this way somebody was approaching. Probably 
 in complete unconsciousness that any hearer was at 
 hand, this somebody was singing softly as he came. 
 It was Tommy, the youngest of the Kerrs, and he 
 was singing to himself, in very bad Welsh, Glan 
 Meddwdod Mwyn.
 
 136 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 Now this song is one of the less reputable songs of 
 Wales. The English drifiking song usually contents 
 itself with extolling the mere convivial act, drawing a 
 decent veil over the lamentable effects of that act; but 
 even in its title Glan Meddwdod Mwyn (which words 
 mean Fair, Kind Drunkenness) has no such reti- 
 cence. It depicts . . . but you can see the difference 
 for yourself. No wonder it froze the words on Howell 
 Gruffydd's lips. In the singer's complete unconscious- 
 ness that he was not alone lay the whole sting. The 
 malice, the intent, the hateful Lancashire humour of 
 the Kerrs they had had before, but not this home-thrust 
 with a weapon they themselves had provided ! 
 
 Tommy might just as well have climbed the hummock 
 and told them that, since their language provided 
 equally for these eventualities, they were no better than 
 anyone else. . . . 
 
 An English drunkard, to grub in the lees of their 
 own language like this ! 
 
 And little Hugh Morgan had sniggered ! 
 
 The unseen Tommy and his (their) song passed on 
 towards the Hafod TJnos. 
 
 Then Howell bestirred himself again. " There, 
 now !" he said ; " what had he just been tell-ing them ? 
 Indeed, that was opp-por-tune, whatever ! " . . . But, 
 though he strove to hide it, there was a hollowness now 
 in his exhortation. He felt as if he had been building 
 a wall against a contagion that crept in upon the invis- 
 ible air. If Thomas Kerr knew Glan Meddwdod 
 Mwyn he might also know viler ditties still; if little 
 Hugh Morgan, whom he had thought pure, had snig- 
 gered at Glan Meddwdod he might guffaw outright at 
 the baser version of Sospan Bach. . . . 
 
 It could only (Howell thought) be original sin. . . .
 
 THE CLERK OF THE WORKS 13Y 
 
 It was at least a little balm to him to hear the 
 fervour with which Eesaac Oliver once more led the 
 singing of Joyful, Joyful. 
 
 And, by the way (speaking of songs), Eesaac Oliver's 
 choice of the narrow and difficult path had already 
 involved him in a persecution in which song played a 
 minor part. This persecution was at the hands of John 
 Willie Garden. For, in an unguarded moment, Eesaac 
 Oliver had confided to John Willie his plans for his 
 career; and since then the unfeeling John Willie, on 
 his way to Railhead and debauchery, had held over 
 him the song that contains the lines : 
 
 " He wass go to Je-sus College 
 
 For to try to get some knowledge 
 
 Wass you ever see" etc. etc. 
 
 John Willie, itching to get away from Pannal, could 
 not understand why anybody wanted to go to Jesus, 
 Aberystwith, or any other College. 
 
 " 1 think it would be wiser 
 
 For to stay with Sister Liza 
 
 Wass you ever see," etc. etc. 
 
 he would hum softly and (alas) contemptuously; and, 
 since it was part of his chosen career to do so, Eesaac 
 Oliver would very expressly forgive John Willie, get- 
 ting into quite a Christian heat about it. 
 
 On the day after that homily on the Llanyglo sand- 
 hills, John Willie Garden went as usual to Railhead, 
 and was enabled to delight his leather-belted and cordu- 
 royed friends there with a piece of information, 
 hitherto secret, that he had from his. father's table. 
 This was that the line was to be opened in the following 
 Spring by His Royal Highness the Duke of Snell. 
 The announcement produced an astonishing effect.
 
 138 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 Not one in ten of the men either knew or cared what 
 the enterprise was all about. They knew that the rail- 
 way was a railway, but beyond that, none of its divi- 
 dends being destined for their pockets, it was merely the 
 job " the " job, the job of the moment, the job not 
 very different from the last job, and very, very like all 
 the other jobs to come, until their living hands should 
 become as stiff as the picks they plied, and the light of 
 their eyes be extinguished as their own lanterns were 
 extinguished at daybreak. But at the news that the 
 Duke^of Snell was to do his trick when they had finished 
 theirs, they were innocently uplifted and delighted. 
 This would be something to tell their grandchildren in 
 the years to come ! They would spit on their hands and 
 work better all the afternoon for this! ... In the 
 meantime they discussed it when the great buzzer 
 called them to their beef and bacon sandwiches, their 
 chops and pickles and bread and cheese. 
 
 " So it's to be t' Dewk o' Snell ! " one of them ad- 
 mired, with as much satisfaction as if he himself had 
 had a tremendous leg-up in the world thereby ; he was a 
 West Riding navvy, whom twenty years of digging up 
 the length and breadth of England had delocalised of 
 everything save his powerful accent. " Well, now, I'd 
 figgered it out 'at it'ld happen be t' Prince o' Wales 
 mesen " 
 
 Here struck in a Cardiff man, so lean that you would 
 not have got another pennyweight of fat off him if you 
 had fried him in his own frying-pan. 
 
 " Wass-n't it the Duke of Snell that mar-ried the 
 Prin-cess Victorine ? " 
 
 " Noa, That wor t' Dewk o' Flint," the Yorkshire 
 navvy replied, with authority. " T' Dewk o' Snell wed 
 t' youngest, t' Princess Alix. I knaw all t' lot on 'em ;
 
 THE CLERK OF THE WORKS 139 
 
 t' missis bed all their pic'ters o' biscuit-boxes; they 
 reached from one end o' t' chimley-piece to t' other; 
 ye couldn't ha' got a finger in between." 
 
 " Well, well," said the Cardiff man, an inquiring 
 mind among many complacent ones, " it is curious, how 
 lit-tle diff-ference it makes to us. The Prinss of 
 Wales, say you ? If I wait for the Prinss of Wales to 
 give me ano-ther piece of this ba-con I wait a long time, 
 whatever! . . . But prapss we get our in-vi-ta-tions 
 soon," he added jocularly, taking an enormous bite of 
 bread. " S'all you be there, John Willie ? " 
 
 John Willie answered, a little doubtfully, that he 
 hoped to be present at the ceremony if he could get 
 away from school. The Cardiff man wagged his head. 
 There are few Welshmen who do not wag their heads 
 at the sound of the word school. 
 
 " Ah, school ; it iss a gra-and thing," he said, still 
 wagging. " I not be work-king here with my shirt wet-t 
 on my back if I go to a prop-per school." 
 
 " Oh, be dinged to that tale ! " returned the York- 
 shireman bluntly, cutting cheese on his leathery palm. 
 " T' schools is all my backside ! They learn 'em a lot 
 o' newfangled stuff, but I remember 'at when tea wor 
 eight shillin' a pund, an' they kept a penny nutmeg in 
 a wood case as if it wor diamonds " 
 
 " Aw-w-w, there iss that Burkie, talk-king again ! " 
 said the Cardiff man. 
 
 " It's reight, for all that " 
 
 And presently the talk had veered round to those 
 very changes of standards and conditions, his careful 
 study of which had led Edward Garden to the conclu- 
 sion that a generation had arisen that intended thence- 
 forward to have more of the world's good things 
 than it had been having or know the reason why.
 
 140 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 As it happened, the work on the line had that day 
 taken a new leap forward. Again all the life of the 
 python had rolled on ahead, and John Willie, lunching 
 with his friends, was doing so at a point actually be- 
 yond Llanyglo, two miles nearer to Abercelyn. From 
 the Abercelyn end also the line was coming to meet 
 them, and the two sections would meet at a place 
 called Sarn. Sam means Causeway, and there the sea 
 showed, like a piece of bright piano-wire, across a 
 waste of fleecy bog-cotton and bog-myrtle, sundew and 
 flags and rushes. A siding was to be made there. Be- 
 cause of Sarn Church, a tiny little building with an odd 
 Fifteenth-Century circular tower, Squire Wynne loved 
 this region, and attended service there ; but as that Serv- 
 ice was held only once a year, the " Hough ! " of the 
 shunting-engines and the clanking of couplings would 
 disturb it little. The Squire sighed to think that, 
 among so many, many other changes, it would be only 
 one change the more. His sales of land had provided 
 him with just enough money to last his time out, and 
 on the whole he thought he did not want to outlive his 
 time. Perhaps he too had had his glimpse of that 
 vision of Edward Garden's, though as it were in ob- 
 verse; and, looking, he shrugged his shoulders. Who, 
 in another twenty or thirty years, would care for the 
 things he had cared for ? Who would waste a thought 
 on antiquity ? WTio would open his County History, or 
 his books on Brasses or Church Plate, Memorials or 
 Heraldry or Glass? Who would know each tree he 
 came upon on his walks, as a country doctor knows his 
 patients its sickness, its health, its need of air, its 
 treatment, its amputations? Who would repair the 
 staircase at the Plas, and restore its magnificent ceil- 
 ings, and set the merry smoke streaming up its chimneys
 
 THE CLERK OF THE WORKS 141 
 
 once more ? . . . Mr. Tudor Williams would probably 
 do this last. He would no doubt convert the Plas into 
 a Museum (as he would have converted Sarn Church 
 itself into a Museum), and fill it with cases of ice- 
 scratched pebbles, and diagrams of strata and flowers, 
 for reluctant and educated urchins to gape at. The 
 Squire was entirely in sympathy with John Willie 
 Garden's corduroyed friend Burkie about these things. 
 It seemed to him that the multitude, which after all 
 had backbone enough to starve rather than go on the 
 Parish, would not resist this organised pauperisation of 
 its mind. It was time the Squire died, since he held 
 that not everybody has the right to everything and no 
 questions asked. Otherwise not an inhumane man, 
 there were nevertheless abstractions which he loved 
 more than he loved his fellow-being. . . . 
 
 And who would drink what was left of that won- 
 drous old port? 
 
 Well, the Squire, sighing and smiling a little wist- 
 fully both at once, intended to see to that himself.
 
 in 
 
 THE CtTETAIN EAISEE 
 
 BUT while the march of events drove the aborigines 
 of Llanyglo ever more and more closely together, 
 as the reaping of a field of corn drives the mice and 
 snakes and rabbits to the narrowing square in the 
 centre, at the same time something of the opposite 
 process went on. Two or three stood aloof, Welsh when 
 it suited them to be Welsh, less Welsh at other times. 
 One of these was Mr. Tudor Williams, the Member of 
 Parliament. Another was Howell Gruffydd, the 
 grocer. 
 
 For thick as thieves now were Edward Garden and 
 Tudor Williams, and to their frequent councils was 
 admitted also Raymond Briggs, the architect, whose son 
 had been John Willie's schoolfellow at Pannal. 
 
 This Raymond Briggs was a Yorkshireman, from 
 Hunslet, but you wouldn't have thought it to look at 
 him. You saw at a glance that he was superfine, but 
 you had no idea how superfine until he opened his 
 mouth. He was tall, plumpish, very erect, numerously 
 chinned and faultlessly dressed; and, having entered 
 into culture by one of the noblest of its portals, archi- 
 tecture, it was small wonder that he wished to forget 
 Hunslet, with its black canal, its serried weaving-sheds, 
 its grimy warehouses, and its sooty brickfields. Cer- 
 tainly he had completely forgotten it in his speech. 
 
 Over an alien mode he had acquired a really remark- 
 
 142
 
 THE CURTAIN EAISER 143 
 
 able mastery; and had it not been for a trifling uncer- 
 tainty about his vowels, particularly his " a's," you 
 would have set him down as quite as much London as 
 Leeds. And so more or less with everything else about 
 Raymond. But his wife haled you north again. To 
 her, acquirements were like hot plates to the fingers, to 
 be kept constantly in motion or else dropped altogether. 
 Her husband was probably the most humourless man 
 who ever came to Llanyglo ; but Maud Briggs would use 
 the homeliest of dialect-words in the most artificial of 
 accents, and would tell you, even while she was mother- 
 ing you with cool drinks in the most hospitable fashion, 
 that the piece of ice she dropped with a clink into your 
 glass was positively " the last piece in the hoil " if 
 you know your West Riding well enough to understand 
 the peculiar significance of the word " hoil " as applied 
 to a house. Her rings were dazzling, for Raymond's 
 invaluable lack of humour had enabled him to make his 
 mark on the world; the blue-and-white collapsible boat 
 which their son Percy brought with him to Llanyglo 
 had cost his father a cool twenty-five pounds in London ; 
 and it would not be for lack of money if Percy did not 
 turn out a very superior silk purse indeed. 
 
 So when the snail, his journey finished, rested and 
 made the siding at Sarn and then returned to Porth 
 Neigr again, and Railhead was dismantled, and grasses 
 began to seed themselves about the upturned soil, Ed- 
 ward Garden and Raymond Briggs and Tudor Wil- 
 liams, M.P., had their heads frequently together; and 
 no longer were the short days and long nights a season 
 of hibernation for Llanyglo. Three years out of four 
 the Llanyglo winters are mild; this particular winter 
 was not so inclement that it stopped building-operations 
 for more than a day or two at a time ; and, with a sort
 
 144 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 of miniature Railhead strung out along the Forth ISTeigr 
 road for his labour, Raymond's second house rose 
 steadily course by course, and already they were drain- 
 ing and digging for the first hotel. If they were mainly 
 Forth Neigr men Raymond employed, that did not 
 mean that Dafydd Dan's or any other Llanyglo man who 
 was so minded would not be taken on ; indeed they were 
 taken on ; but it did mean that the centre of gravity of 
 the labour-supply had shifted, and would never shift 
 back again. Those temporary dwellings along the 
 Forth ISTeigr road were a constant reminder that if the 
 Llanyglo men did not like it they might lump it; and 
 as they did neither, but while disliking it intensely, bore 
 a hand and took their wages just the same, they ap- 
 peared to be sufficiently quelled. 
 
 Edward Garden, while making Llanyglo his head- 
 quarters, was again much away. A whisper was started 
 that he was once more treating for land, but, as no 
 further land appeared to be available, the rumour was 
 derided as idle. Howell Gruffydd was already convert- 
 ing the two original matchboarded cottages to his own 
 use. Something Departmental happened somewhere 
 beyond Llanyglo's ken (probably Mr. Tudor Williams 
 knew all about it), and the word came that the Post 
 Oifice was to be transferred from John Pritchard's to 
 Howell's new shop ; and though the Post Office was on 
 the whole more trouble than it was worth, for a little 
 while Howell seemed likely to have a quarrel on his 
 hands. 
 
 But Howell had not definitely taken a part without 
 knowing equally definitely how to bear himself in that 
 part. He did not intend to be herded into the gloomy 
 company of a lot of beaten and sulking Welsh national- 
 ists! As if already a vast spud had cut about Man-
 
 THE CURTAIN BAISER 145 
 
 chester or Liverpool, and an equally vast spade had 
 taken either of these cities up bodily like a square of 
 peat and had set it down again on the Llanyglo sand- 
 hills, so the idea of expansion had taken hold of 
 Howell's mind. He even went a little preposterously 
 beyond bounds, as others did later, when they learned 
 that their old Welsh dressers and armchairs were a 
 rarity and marketable, and proceeded to put ridiculous 
 prices upon them. And probably Edward Garden had 
 a use for Howell. Already it looked like it. The 
 answer with which Howell appeased John Pritchard 
 in the matter of the transference of the Post Office 
 looked very much like it. Edward Garden himself 
 could not so have reconciled John to all this innovation 
 with a single whispered word. 
 
 For " Bazaars" Howell said furtively to John, be- 
 hind his hand ; and the quick electric gleam in his eyes 
 was instantly extinguished again. . . . 
 
 You see. They had never had a bazaar at Llanyglo. 
 There would have been little profit in passing their 
 own money about among themselves. But strangers' 
 money. . . . That was the soul of good in things other- 
 wise evil that Howell whispered to John Pritchard, and 
 later it was so observingly distilled out for the benefit 
 of the Baptist and other Chapels that for a time there 
 was actually a danger lest the mulcting should keep 
 folk away. 
 
 And if even Mr. Tudor Williams himself now ap- 
 peared a little absent-minded among his constituents, 
 and hauled himself, as it were, out of remote fastnesses 
 of thought to grasp them fervently (if indiscriminately) 
 by the hand, and to inquire after their rheumatics and 
 wives and other plagues, well, he was a busy, and not at 
 all a wealthy man. At Llanyglo, as elsewhere, it was
 
 146 MUSHKOOM TOWN 
 
 not only Welsh and English; it was also Get or Go 
 Wanting. The early bird. . . . 
 
 So (to push on) circular smears of white appeared 
 on the windows of the second of Raymond Briggs's 
 houses (it was finished by Christmas), and these gave it 
 the appearance of a sudden new Argus, looking out on 
 every side for other houses to join it ; and the scaffold- 
 poles began to rise about the new hotel like a larch- 
 plantation. Raymond came and went, and Mr. Tudor 
 Williams came and went, and short winter day followed 
 short winter day. Then, with cat's-ice still glazing the 
 ruts and pools but a feeling of Spring in the air, Forth 
 Neigr, ten miles away, came bustlingly to life. An 
 emissary of the Lord-Lieutenant of the County took up 
 his quarters at the Royal Hotel, and there he was one 
 day joined by the Lord-Lieutenant himself, with Sir 
 Somebody Something, of the Office of Works. These 
 summoned others, who in turn summoned others, and 
 maps and plans were sent for and a line of route was 
 chosen. Police were drafted in, and folk went up into 
 their upper front rooms to see which bedstead or table- 
 leg would best stand the strain of a rope across the 
 t street. The old station had been repainted to suit with 
 the new extension, and masts rose at its entrance. To 
 the residents in the principal streets the Council lent 
 loyal emblems and devices. The sounds of bands prac- 
 tising could be heard. His Royal Highness the Duke 
 of Snell was coming to open the line. 
 
 Then on the appointed day, the town broke into a 
 flutter of bunting. The March sun shone merrily on 
 Royal Standard and Red Dragon, on Union Jack and 
 ensign, on gold-fringed banners with " CROESAW " 
 on one side and " WELCOME " on the other. On the 
 new metals a Royal Salute of fog-signals was laid.
 
 THE CURTAIN RAISER 147 
 
 Warning of the Approach passed along the line, on 
 the red-dmggeted platform officials great and small 
 waited, and John Willie Garden's friends, whose picks 
 and shovels had made the clay fly, would no doubt read 
 all about it a few days later in the papers. 
 
 So, with detonation of fog-signals, and some cheers, 
 but more wide-eyed gazing, and bared heads and bowing 
 backs, and an Address, and other circumstances of 
 loyalty and fraternisation and joy, His Royal Highness 
 and John Willie Garden between them declared the line 
 open; but only the Duke rode on the footplate of the 
 garlanded engine with the crossed flags on its belly. 
 Probably intensely bored, he rode out about a mile 
 towards Abercelyn, and then returned to luncheon at 
 the Royal Hotel. An hour later, coming out again, he 
 passed away to Lancashire. All was over. Folk 
 might now take down their bunting as soon as they 
 pleased. The trick was virtually done for Llanyglo. 
 A loop at Sarn or a new junction, and a realisation on 
 the part of those in authority that there were things that 
 paid better than Abercelyn manganese, and Llanyglo 
 would be " linked up " with rigid iron to the rest of 
 the world. 
 
 Nay, it is already linked up even more straitly. A 
 few poles and a thread of wire, crossing the sandhills 
 and ending at the Llanyglo Stores, have some weeks ago 
 put an end to its isolation. It is the nerve that accom- 
 panies the sinew, and Howell Gruffydd now receives 
 and despatches telegrams. All is over bar the shouting, 
 and it will not be long before that begins. They are 
 busy now, painting and papering the new hotel, and 
 decorating and upholstering it. It reeks of new paint 
 and varnish and furniture-polish and the plumbers' 
 blowpipes. It resounds with all the doubly loud noises
 
 148 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 of a half -empty place with hammering and tacking, 
 clanking buckets, the " Whoas ! " to the horses of the 
 delivery-vans, the jolting of heavy things moved up- 
 stairs, the rasp of scrubbing-hrushes, the squeak of win- 
 dow-cloths. It is spick-and-span, from the feathery 
 new larches in front to the silvery new dustbins be- 
 hind. . . . Wherefore, seeing that we shall only be in 
 the way, with never a chair to sit down on yet, and 
 nothing to eat in the place save what the charwoman 
 and the green-aproned carters and carriers have brought 
 for themselves, we may as well leave all these things to 
 the folk whose business it is to attend to them, and take 
 a nap for a month or two, secure that when we wake up 
 again the scene will be set for Llanyglo's lever de rideau, 
 that starched and polite and not quite real little piece 
 that preludes the main action of our tale. There is 
 heather and wild thyme up the Trwyn, very comfort- 
 able to doze on ; suppose we have our nap up there ? . . . 
 
 Ah-Ti-Ti-Ti ! That was the July sun that woke us. 
 It's a warm and brilliant morning. Stretch yourself 
 first, and then have a look down. . . . 
 
 That's a surprise, isn't it? You didn't quite expect 
 that? Really not much changed, and yet it's entirely 
 changed. Two new houses and an hotel (in this clean 
 air they'll be new-looking for years yet), and that little 
 border of deck-chairs and bathing-tents and slowly mov- 
 ing parasols, not a couple of hundred yards long alto- 
 gether, and yet the whole appearance of the place is 
 altered. After a moment you find it quite difficult to 
 remember it as it was the last time we were up here. 
 See that little puff of smoke over there? That's a 
 shunting-engine at Sarn ; you'll hear the sound in a mo- 
 ment; there! Butterflies about us, like hovering
 
 THE CURTAIN RAISER 149 
 
 pansies ; you can see just one corner of poor old Terry's 
 Thelema showing ; and out there, where the sea changes 
 colour, just where the gulls are rocking, that's a bank 
 of sand a storm threw up three or four years ago. And 
 that's the telegraph-wire I spoke of, running straight 
 across to Howell Gruffydd's shop there. Yes, that 
 links Llanyglo up. . . . 
 
 Where did all these people come from? Well, it's 
 hard to say, but no doubt Edward (rarden's got them 
 here for one reason and another. He may even have 
 " packed " the place a little carefully ; I don't know. At 
 any rate, he's lent " Sea View " there (that's the newer 
 of the two houses) to Gilbert Smythe. Who's Gilbert 
 Smythe? Well, he's the Medical Officer for Bran- 
 newsome, Lanes., and a very clever and quite an honest 
 man. But Gilbert's family's grown more quickly than 
 his fortune, live as frugally as he will he's always in 
 debt, and he isn't going to say " No " to the free offer 
 of a well-built, roomy house, not three minutes from the 
 sands where the children can play all day, and furnished 
 from the potato-masher in the kitchen to the little square 
 looking-glasses in the servants' attics. And of course 
 Edward Garden asks nothing in return. But if Gilbert 
 cares to say that the Llanyglo water is abundant and 
 pure, Edward won't object it is excellent water. 
 And if Gilbert likes to praise its air and low rainfall 
 (low for Wales), well, he'll be telling no more than the 
 truth. And if Gilbert (not bearing ancient Mrs. 
 Pritchard too much in mind) finds the longevity at 
 Llanyglo remarkable, what's the harm in that? As a 
 matter of fact, there is a saying that the oldest inhab- 
 itant always dies first at Llanyglo, and the others follow 
 in order of age, which would be a poor look-out for any- 
 body setting up in the Insurance business here. ... So
 
 150 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 if by and by Gilbert signs a statement to this general 
 effect, you can hardly blame him. He has his way to 
 make, and he is a wise man who allows the galleons 
 of the Gardens of the world to give his skiff a tow. 
 
 The others ? Well, Edward Garden's a cleverer man 
 than I, and you can hardly expect me to explain the 
 workings of his mind to you in detail. But I think 
 we may assume he knows what he is about. I needn't 
 say they're all very well-to-do; you can see that even 
 from here ; but there's something else about them, some- 
 thing we saw in Raymond Briggs, that's a little difficult 
 to describe perhaps it's merely that they too intend 
 (mutatis mutandis, of course) that their children shall 
 have a better time than their parents have had or per- 
 haps we'd better say their grandparents had, for their 
 parents do themselves very well, indeed. I don't think 
 you can say more about them than that it's just that 
 dash of Raymond Briggs. . . . Squire Wynne wouldn't 
 understand them in the least. The Squire's wasted too 
 much time over antiquity. He doesn't know anything 
 about these people who are coming on. Except in their 
 clothes, and so on, he'd see very little difference between 
 them and people Raymond Briggs would look at as if 
 they weren't there. He wouldn't understand Philip 
 Lacey, for example. (Do you see that orange-and- 
 black striped blazer there by the seaweed : he's point- 
 ing; that's Philip Lacey.) Philip is the big Liverpool 
 florist, seedsman, and landscape-gardener; if he hasn't 
 his " roots in the land " in exactly the sense the Squire 
 understands, his plants have ; and Philip distinctly does 
 not intend that Euonyma and Wygelia, who are at 
 present at school at Brighton, shall go into one of his 
 fourteen or fifteen retail shops. Philip isn't spending 
 all that money for that. . . . (Understand me, I think
 
 THE CURTAIN EAISER 151 
 
 Philip's perfectly right; the only thing I don't quite 
 see is why he should veneer good sound stuff with some- 
 thing that's an obvious sham.) Of his wife, frankly, 
 I don't think very much. Her processes show too 
 plainly. Philip has his business to attend to, but Mrs. 
 Lacey never leaves her one idea, day or night. . . . 
 There, Philip's stopped and spoken to Mr. Morrell. Mr. 
 Morrell has just as many hopes and plans for Hilda as 
 the Laceys have for Euonyma and Wygelia, but he 
 knows that his " a's " are past praying for, so he makes 
 rather a display of his native speech. I needn't tell 
 you what a trial that is to Hilda. . . . 
 
 And bear in mind that these are prosperous people, 
 well-travelled people (though they mostly keep to the 
 beaten tracks where they meet one another it's Mrs. 
 Briggs's chief recollection of Florence that she met 
 some people she knew in Leeds there), people who put 
 up at far better hotels than you or I do. And if these, 
 who can afford it, can be shown the way to Llanyglo, 
 the chances are that a crowd of other people, who cer- 
 tainly can't afford it but as certainly won't be out of 
 it, will come in their wake. 
 
 What do you say to our going down and having a 
 closer look at them ? We might take a stroll as far as 
 Howell Gruffydd's shop I beg its pardon, Stores. 
 Sit still a moment though; here's Minetta Garden be- 
 hind us. She's been sketching the Dinas, very likely. 
 Minetta very much wants to be an artist, and you meet 
 her with her sketching things all over the place. It 
 may or may not be a passing fancy; she certainly has 
 what Raymond Briggs calls a " Rossetti head " enor- 
 mous dark eyes, sharpish jaw, straight dark hair, and a 
 disconcerting way of staring at people who are " putting 
 it on " a little more thickly than usual (she stares pretty
 
 152 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 frequently at Raymond himself). Ah, she's taking the 
 steep way down. We'll take the other way. . . . 
 
 Now we're on the level; better put your tie straight 
 or aren't you overpowered by these things ? I con- 
 fess I am; Raymond Briggs always chills me when he 
 casts his eye over my front elevation. No thick-booted 
 undergraduates' holiday-parties nor furry art-students 
 with knickers and bare throats here. We're spruce at 
 Llanyglo. Even on a week-day it's like a Church 
 Parade, and on Sundays we go one better still. All the 
 men have brightly coloured flannel blazers and gaudy 
 cammerbands, and the women carry many-flounced para- 
 sols by a ring at the ferrule end, and wear toilettes 
 straight out of the " Queen." Some of them will 
 change for lunch; all of them will for table d'hote at 
 seven. They protest that they vastly prefer dinner at 
 seven, but what with the servants' dinners at midday, 
 and husbands who prefer the old-fashioned hour, and 
 one thing and another, they take their principal meal 
 at one. There's no reason they shouldn't. There's no 
 reason they should mention it at all. But they do, 
 every day. If you're introduced to them, they'll all 
 have told you within twenty-four hours. It's as if they 
 didn't want there to be any mistake about something 
 or other. . . . 
 
 Here's where the donkeys turn. They have red and 
 white housings, and their names across their foreheads 
 " Tiny" " Prince" and so on ; the donkey-rides are a 
 little offshoot of Forth Neigr Omnibuses. Kite-flying's 
 popular here too that's Mr. Morrell's, the big star- 
 shaped one. The bathing-tents and deck-chairs are 
 mostly hired from Howell Gruffydd, but there are no 
 boats yet except Percy Briggs's twenty-five-pound col-
 
 THE CURTAIN KAISER, 153 
 
 lapsible one; those who want to go fishing have to use 
 one of those old Copley Fielding things by the jetty 
 there. . . . Now we're coming to the people. Here's 
 Raymond Briggs with Mr. Lacey, Raymond in his 
 orange-and-black blazer and a white Homburg hat, 
 Philip in a blue blazer with white braid and a plain 
 straw hat; both with perfect creamy rippling white 
 trousers and spotless white doeskin boots. They're 
 talking off-handedly about other holiday-places Nor- 
 way, the Highlands, the Riviera and they're afraid 
 of showing any enthusiasm or delight. Of every place 
 they know they say that it has " gone off " since they 
 first went there. There's a subtle undercurrent of con- 
 test about their conversation. Philip was at Hyeres as 
 recently as last winter, looking at the violets ; but Ray- 
 mond has been three times to Aries and Nimes. I sup- 
 pose honours are easy. 
 
 " Roman, I've heard ? " Philip remarks. (You can 
 hear him as you pass.) 
 
 "Yes, Roman, with a Saracenic tower." 
 
 " Ah, that tower's Saracenic, is it ? " 
 
 " Saracenic." 
 
 " Wonderful people ! " 
 
 " Indeed yes ! " 
 
 " Curious how it takes you back into ancient times." 
 
 " Yes, yes, it shortens history." 
 
 " But the hotel accommodation ! " 
 
 " Oh, bad in the extreme ! " 
 
 " What they want is entirely new and up-to-date 
 management " 
 
 " Quite so " 
 
 " Can't say I thought much of their l>ouilldbaisse." 
 
 " An acquired taste, I suppose " 
 
 And they pass on. They'll talk like that the whole
 
 154 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 morning. They're not really interested in their subject. 
 As I say, it makes you think of a sort of contest. Per- 
 sonally, I always want to applaud when somebody scores 
 a good point. Perhaps the idea is that they're doing 
 Llanyglo a favour by coming here 
 
 There, stepping over the tent-ropes, are Mrs. Briggs 
 and Mr. Ashton. Mr. Ashton is Edward Garden's 
 chief London representative, a man of pleasure and of 
 the world, and for all I know his function may be to 
 keep these prosperous northerners up to the metropoli- 
 tan mark. Mrs. Briggs, for example, who is very short 
 and stout, and wears a lavender bonnet and pelisse, and 
 certainly will not walk far on the sand in those heels, 
 is on her mettle now. She is telling Mr. Ashton some 
 London hotel experience or other. I like Mrs. Briggs. 
 She's worth ten of Raymond. But I don't think she 
 quite knows which is the paste and which the jewels in 
 her speech. 
 
 " and so at the l Metropole ' they couldn't take 
 
 Ray and I in ; not that I was surprised in the very least, 
 such frights as we looked after the voyage, and hardly 
 any luggage ; it hadn't come on from Paris, you see. So 
 I says to Ray, ' It's no good making a noration here, for 
 it's plain they don't want us. I'm glad they're doing so 
 well they can afford to turn money away.' So I 
 turns to the manager, who was staring at my slippers 
 I'd put on for the rail way- journey, and ' Don't if it 
 hurts you/ I said, and with that we slammed our things 
 together and drove off to the ' Grand ' " 
 
 You can hear Mr. Ashton's sympathetic murmurs . . . 
 but that's Mrs. Lacey, with Mr. Morrell, just turn- 
 ing; she thinks that Euonyma and Wygelia have been 
 quite long enough in the water. Mr. Morrell is in cool- 
 looking cream alpaca; Mrs. Lacey, who is hook-nosed
 
 THE CURTAIN RAISER 155 
 
 and pepper-and-salt haired and thin as a hop-pole, re- 
 sembles a many-flounced hollyhock in her silvery battle- 
 ship grey. 
 
 " They'll tak' no harm, weather like this," Mr. Mor- 
 rell is saying. " What's that I was going to ask you, 
 now ? . . . I have it. Is it right 'at Briggs is to build 
 you a new house ovver yonder ? " 
 
 A foot or so over Mr. Morrell's head, Mrs. Lacey 
 replies that Mr. Lacey hasn't decided yet. " You see, 
 with the girls at Brighton for another year yet, and 
 then of course they'll have to go to Paris, it's early to 
 say." 
 
 " There's some talk of his making a Floral Valley, 
 isn't there ? " 
 
 " I've not heard. But I'm sure those girls " 
 
 They're as right as rain wi' Mrs. Maynard 
 
 But that is precisely where Mrs. Lacey thinks Mr. 
 Morrell is mistaken. She has nothing whatever against 
 Mrs. Maynard, who is a young widow, but she would 
 like to know a little more about the late Mr. Maynard 
 before admitting her to unreserved intimacy. Mrs. 
 Maynard has not quite the figure a " Mrs." ought to 
 have, and does more bathing than swimming (if you 
 understand me). That's an accomplishment she 
 learned at Ostend (for if Mr. Ashton, the London agent, 
 is metropolitan, Mrs. Maynard brings quite a cosmopoli- 
 tan air to Llanyglo). The misses Euonyma and 
 Wygelia, on the other hand, learned to swim at Brigh- 
 ton, walking to the bathing-place in a crocodile. You 
 see the difference. Brighton is not Ostend, any more 
 than Llanyglo is either, and Mrs. Lacey considers that 
 you can't be too careful. . . . That's Mrs. Maynard, 
 with her back to the oncoming breaker. Her bathing- 
 dress is quite complete, as complete as Mrs. Garden's,
 
 156 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 drying outside her tent there; but Mrs. Lacey disap- 
 proves of those twinkling scarlet ribbons. She consid- 
 ers them to be little points of attraction, that do all that 
 is asked of them, and more. She prophesied that the 
 red would " run " in the water, but it didn't, and that 
 makes matters rather worse, for if Mrs. Maynard knows 
 as well as that which red will run and which won't she 
 is practised 
 
 And those two graceful but rather skinned-rabbit- 
 looking young shapes in the gleaming navy-blue cos- 
 tumes with the white braid are the girls. 
 
 $"ow we're among the castles. Quite a horde of chil- 
 dren, and very pretty children too, with their spades 
 and buckets and their petticoats bunched up inside 
 striped knickers (those too you get at Gruffydd's). 
 That's Gilbert Smythe, the Medical Officer, the tall 
 shaggy man carrying the bucket of water for the little 
 boy's moat. He'll be giving Llanyglo its bathing testi- 
 monial too. Don't tread on that seaweed ; it may be a 
 castle garden, or a sea-serpent, or anything else in the 
 child's imagination. . . . There are the boys trying to 
 launch the collapsible boat. John Willie hasn't grown 
 much; he won't be a tall man; but he's filling out. 
 That minx Mrs. Maynard makes quite a lot of him, and 
 says she likes the feel of his fine-spun hair. Whether 
 John Willie likes her to feel it or not he does not betray. 
 
 Now for Howell Gruffydd's. . . . 
 
 There you are. " THE LLAIs^YGLO STORES," 
 in big gold letters right across the front of the two 
 cottages. What do you think of it ? 
 
 Yes in one way and another, there must be a 
 largish sum sunk in " stock." Whether Howell's buy- 
 ing on credit or not I don't know, but he looks prosper-
 
 THE CURTAIN KAISER 
 
 cms; he's had his beard trimmed, and he wears a new 
 hat. Green butterfly-nets and brown and white and 
 grey sandshoes spades and buckets and balls and 
 fishing-lines and toy ships bottles of scent and the 
 " Llanyglo Sunburn Cure " (made up for him by the 
 chemist at Forth Neigr) a new board with " Tri- 
 cycles for Hire " on it (that's the shed at the back, and 
 Eesaac Oliver, home for the holidays, books the hirings 
 and does the repairs) baskets and spirit-kettles and 
 ironmongery, all in addition to the groceries. Yes, 
 Howell has quite a big business now. Let's go inside 
 and buy something. 
 
 " Good morning, Mr. Gruffydd ; papers in yet ? No ? 
 I thought I saw Hugh coming down the Sarn road half 
 an hour ago. Yes, a lovely day. How's Eesaac 
 Oliver? Still at Forth Neigr? . . . No, no, I know 
 he's home for his holidays; I saw him driving Mr. 
 Pritchard's hay-cart yesterday ; I mean when is he going 
 to Aberystwith ? . . . Next year ? Good ! He'll make 
 his mark in the world ! Mr. Garden been in this 
 morning yet? . . . He's driving in the mountains? 
 Well, there's always a breeze in the mountains. . . . 
 No, serve Mrs. Roberts first. How are you, Mrs. Rob- 
 erts?" 
 
 Howell still sells Mrs. Roberts her pennyworth of bi- 
 carbonate of soda, and with the same smile as ever, but 
 he could do without her custom now. Look round. 
 Crates of eggs (the Trwyn hens can't keep pace with 
 the demand now), great Elizabethan gables of tinned 
 fruits and salmon, a newspaper counter, the Post Office 
 behind the wire grating there, strings of things hanging 
 from the ceiling, scarcely an inch of Edward Garden's 
 matchboarding to be seen, and three assistants, all busily 
 weighing, packing, checking, snipping the string off on
 
 158 MUSHROOM TOWN" 
 
 the little knives on the wooden string-boxes, and passing 
 the parcels to the boys with the hand-carts. But we 
 ought to have been here a couple of hours ago. Mrs. 
 Briggs and Mrs. Lacey and Mrs. Garden were giving 
 their orders for the day then. They come every morn- 
 ing, rings on their fingers and bells on their toes, high 
 heels and flounced parasols and all the lot, and Howell 
 doesn't have it all his own way then, I can tell you. 
 For this is where our ladies are really efficient. They 
 may never dream of travelling otherwise than first-class, 
 but they know the price of everything to a halfpenny 
 and a farthing. There's no " If 'twill do 'twill do " 
 about them when it comes to the management of a house. 
 And when Hilda Morrell grows out of the stage of wish- 
 ing her father would talk " like other people," the 
 chances are that she'll discover too that this is her real 
 strength, as it was her mother's. Mrs. Maynard comes 
 in with them of a morning sometimes, and tells them 
 how tre-men-dously clever she thinks them, to know the 
 differences between things like that, and vows that her 
 tradesmen rob her right and left because she hasn't been 
 properly brought up; and then Mrs. Briggs, putting 
 down the egg she is holding to the light, cries, " Eh, it's 
 nothing, love I could learn you in a month ! " 
 
 But Mrs. Lacey detects a secret sarcasm in the phrase 
 about the bringing-up. 
 
 And the men will be in for their newspapers presently. 
 
 Now a stroll to the hotel, and just a peep at them 
 by and by as they have lunch. . . . 
 
 This is the hotel lounge. The varnish is quite dry, 
 though it doesn't look it. A dozen little round tables, 
 chairs heavily upholstered in crimson velvet, festoons 
 of heavy gilt cord on the curtains, and that's the service-
 
 THE CURTAIN KAISER 159 
 
 hatch in the corner. The waiters are rather melan- 
 choly; you see, it isn't a public-house; everything goes 
 down on the residents' bills ; and that means fewer tips. 
 Tea is served here in the afternoon, but of course the 
 ladies never dream of tipping. Those excellent pur- 
 chasers work out everything at cost price, omit such 
 items as interest on capital, insurance, depreciation, 
 and so on, and find a shilling for two pennyworth of 
 bread and butter, a twopenny cake, and a pinch of two- 
 shilling tea with hot water thrown in, tip enough. 
 
 "Ting I Ting I Ting I" 
 
 It is Val Clayton, ordering another drink for himself 
 and his two friends. He drinks vermouth, his friends 
 bottles of beer. Val drinks vermouth because it is 
 foreign (he runs over to Paris frequently, and travels 
 to Egypt for Clayton Brothers and Clayton), and per- 
 haps he makes love to Mrs. Maynard (if you can call 
 it making love) because she too is almost a continental. 
 Since Mrs. Maynard is to be seen in her red ribbons, 
 you might expect to find Val on the beach instead of 
 drinking vermouth in the hotel lounge; but that is far 
 from being " in character " when you know Val. The 
 world's pleasures a little in excess have already set their 
 mark on Val. He will tell you that he would not miss 
 his morning drink, " not for the best woman living." 
 Others may fetch and carry for their hearts' mistresses, 
 but not Val. In the afternoon, perhaps, if he feels a 
 little less jaded, in a hollow of the sandhills and with 
 the warm sun to help, Val may bestir himself a little, 
 but in the meantime he wants another vermouth. 
 
 " Ting I Ting I Ting! They want to have French 
 waiters here," Val grumbles. " I never mind tipping 
 a waiter if I can get what I want when I want it. Wai 
 oh, you've come, have you? Well, since you are
 
 160 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 here, you may as well bring these again, and then see if 
 
 the papers have come in yet " 
 
 " And bring me a box of Egyptian cigarettes." 
 
 " No hi ! don't bring those cigarettes. You 
 
 don't want to smoke the rubbish they sell here. Pill 
 
 your case out of this I've a thousand upstairs I 
 
 brought from Cairo myself " 
 
 " Oh ! . . . Thanks. Well, as I was saying 
 
 And the speaker (who might as well be in Manches- 
 ter for all he sees of Llanyglo, at any rate in the morn- 
 ings) resumes some narrative that the replenishing of 
 the glasses has interrupted. 
 
 Now the others are dropping in, those who like one 
 aperatif before lunch but not half a dozen. Their 
 wives have gone upstairs to tittivate themselves. The 
 velvet chairs fill; extra waiters appear; and a light 
 haze ascends from cigars and cigarettes to the roof. 
 Listen to the restrained hubbub. 
 
 " Waiter ! Ting! Waiter ! " and then a slight 
 
 gesture ; the waiters are supposed to know the tastes of 
 the real habitues by this time; (it counts almost as a 
 " score " if the waiter brings your refection without 
 your having as much as opened your mouth to ask for 
 it). "The usual, sir yes, sir coming!" And 
 again they are talking, not on subjects, but as if the act 
 of talking were itself subject enough. Philip Lacey 
 discusses with Mr. Ashton the improvement in the 
 Harwich-Hook of Holland crossing, and Mr. Morrell 
 exchanges views on Local Government with Raymond 
 Briggs. "Ting! ting! You haven't cassis? Then 
 why haven't you cassis ? " " Very sorry, sir coming, 
 sir ! " " What's happened to the newspapers this morn- 
 ing ? " " Of course, if it goes to arbitration " 
 
 " Nay, John, don't drown t' miller! " " Ten o'clock,
 
 THE CURTAIN RAISER 161 
 
 first stop Willesden " " Your very good health, Mr. 
 
 Morrell " " Debentures " " New heating in 
 
 both greenhouses " " Same again, Val ? " 
 
 "Ting!" 
 
 " BOO-0-O-OOM-M-MMMMM ! " 
 
 It is the luncheon gong. 
 
 Just a glance as they sit at table. Don't you think 
 it's a pleasant room ? Three tall windows looking out 
 on the sea, noiseless carpet, ornaments on the sideboards 
 rather like wooden broccoli, but the decorations straight 
 from London. But those two large chandelier gas- 
 brackets don't work yet ; the plant isn't installed ; that's 
 why the red-shaded oil-lamps are placed at intervals 
 down the T of tables. The older folk gather round the 
 head of the T, and down the stalk stretch the children. 
 These will rise before their parents, just as they go out 
 of Church after the Second Lesson ; they will break off 
 just below John Willie Garden and the Misses Euonyma 
 and Wygelia there who, by the way, are more usually 
 called June and Wy. The flowers are chosen to " last 
 well," for Llanyglo is almost as short of flowers as it is 
 of trees ; but the linen and plate and other appointments 
 are all good these actors in Llanyglo's little fore-piece 
 are not accustomed to roughing it, even on a holiday. 
 
 As I told you they would, half the women have 
 changed their frocks. Mrs. Lacey is a pink hollyhock 
 now, of which her daughters seem cuttings, and her hat 
 is a sort of pink straw kepi, trimmed with flowers that 
 resemble Virginia stock. She sits at the end of one arm 
 of the T, with her back to the window. Near her is 
 Mrs. Briggs, in stamped electric-blue velvet her fore- 
 arms, on which bracelets shiver, are as uniform in con- 
 tour from whatever point you look at them as if they
 
 162 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 had been turned in a lathe. The Misses June and Wy 
 also wear bracelets, from which depend bundles of six- 
 pences, a sixpence for each of their birthdays, sixteen 
 for Wiggie, fourteen for June. John Willie is lunch- 
 ing with Percy Briggs to-day, who lunched with him 
 yesterday. Next to his chair is an empty one. It is 
 Mrs. Maynard's, who has not come down yet. Then 
 comes Val Clayton. Over all, with his napkin tucked 
 into his collar as if he had prepared, not for a lunch, 
 but for a shave, Mr. Morrell presides. 
 
 For some reason or other, lunch always begins a 
 little stiffly ; but they unbend as they go on. At present 
 Raymond Briggs cannot get away from the subject of 
 the newspapers and their unaccountable lateness. 
 
 " Can't understand it," he says for the fifth or sixth 
 time. 
 
 " And they were late last Wednesday no, Thurs- 
 day no, I was right, it was Wednesday." 
 
 " Was it Wednesday ? " 
 
 " Yes, the day it looked like rain ; you remember ? " 
 
 " Ah, yes ; the day it cleared up again." 
 
 " All but a drop or two nothing to hurt " 
 
 A pause. 
 
 " Well, I don't suppose there's anything in them." 
 
 " Speaking for myself, I don't care a button. I 
 don't want to see the newspapers. * No letters, no news- 
 papers,' I always say when I go away." 
 
 " A real country holiday, eh ? " 
 
 " Change and rest those are the great things." 
 
 " You're right. Complete change. No trouble about 
 how you dress nor what you eat. That's the best of 
 this place." 
 
 " Still, if the newspapers are coming we may as well 
 know when they are coming."
 
 THE CURTAIN RAISER 163 
 
 " They ought to have a man, not that young boy." 
 
 " Hugh Morgan ? " 
 
 " Is that his name ? There are so many Morgans." 
 
 " Common Welsh name." 
 
 " Met another boy, I expect." 
 
 " Boys are all alike." 
 
 " Not a pin to choose among 'em." 
 
 "Wish I was behind him with a stick for all 
 that." 
 
 " Another glass of wine, Mr. Ashton ? " . . . 
 
 Then there enters with a little commotion, and trips 
 half running to the empty chair between John Willie 
 Garden and Val Clayton, Mrs. Maynard. She wears a 
 big black hat swathed in black tulle, and her dress is of 
 black lace, with close sleeves that reach to the middle 
 knuckles of her taper fingers. She shakes out the mitre 
 of her napkin and breaks forth to Val as she settles in 
 her chair. 
 
 " My horrid hair ! " she pouts ; " it always takes me 
 three-quarters of an hour ! Really, I shall have to stop 
 bathing, but I do love it so. It seems a kind of fate ; I 
 always have to give up the things I love ! " 
 
 Hereupon Val or perhaps vermouth, since Val 
 seems a little astonished at his own gallantry sud- 
 denly replies that if he were like that he would have to 
 give up Mrs. Maynard. If Mrs. Maynard also is a 
 little surprised she covers it with great readiness. 
 
 " Oh, now the dreadful man's beginning again ! " she 
 cries. ' " If you will say those things, Mr. Clayton, I 
 shall have to change places at table ! " 
 
 Mr. Clayton asks here what is wrong with her hair. 
 " I think it's champion," he adds. " Very nice in- 
 deed," he adds once more. 
 
 " Oh, how can you ! " (As a matter of fact, Mrs.
 
 164 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 Maynard's hair is rather wonderful, dark, and so long 
 that she can sit on it.) " No fish, thank you," she says, 
 with a smile to the waiter. 
 
 Then Mrs. Lacey's firm voice is heard. " Can any- 
 body tell me whether there have heen many wrecks on 
 this coast ? " 
 
 The person best qualified to give this information is 
 John Willie Garden, but Mrs. Maynard has turned to 
 John Willie, and is asking him whether he does not 
 think she swims rather nicely. Her tendril-like fingers 
 are again stroking his hair. Mrs. Lacey considers Mrs. 
 Maynard's tulle-swathed hat the ostentation of modesty 
 and the coquetry of mourning (if she is in mourning), 
 and, getting no answer to her question about the wrecks, 
 invents a name for Mrs. Maynard : " Mrs. Maynard 
 as she calls herself." Plates are changed, corks pop, 
 and from time to time a seltzogene gives a spurt and a 
 cough. Raymond Briggs explains that he is fond of 
 strawberries, but strawberries are not fond of him. 
 The chatter grows louder. 
 
 " I took her as a kitchen-maid, but she turned out 
 quite a good plain cook " 
 
 " Oh, like a top as Dr. Smythe says, it's the air." 
 
 " Oh, I prefer it rustic ; like this ! " 
 
 " Quite so the first tripper and I'm off ! " 
 
 " So I opened her box myself ; and there they were, 
 if you please four silver spoons ! " 
 
 " Now, June, you and Wy talk French you haven't 
 talked it for days " 
 
 " John's booked the rooms for next year al- 
 ready " 
 
 " Oh, 1/is-ter Clayton ! I never promised any such 
 thing!" 
 
 " They can talk it if they like, as fast as a mill "
 
 THE CURTAIN RAISEE 165 
 
 " If I were you I should see Tudor Williams about 
 it " 
 
 " You can put on your oldest things and there's 
 nobody to see you " 
 
 " But really I'm almost ashamed to go about the 
 fright I do! " 
 
 " But that's a new dress ? 
 
 "New! Last year but it's good enough for 
 
 here " 
 
 " Can't manage those double-1's " 
 
 " Gutturals " 
 
 " Llan Thlan Lan " 
 
 " June, your legs are younger than mine run and 
 get Aunt May's letter out of my dressing-table 
 drawer " 
 
 "Mrs. Smythe? . . . The best thing for the baby, 
 of course, but I can't help thinking that not quite so 
 publicly " 
 
 " Oh, I always let Percy suck, whoever was 
 there! " 
 
 " John will have his dinner in the middle of the 
 day " 
 
 " Smythe ? Oh, one of the nicest fellows, but no 
 push, I'm afraid " 
 
 " That's his failing " 
 
 " Where he misses it " 
 
 " Extraordinary " 
 
 " Well, some men are born like that " 
 
 "Wait for things to come to them instead of going 
 to fetch them " 
 
 " Up t' Trwyn ? We'll talk about it after I've had 
 my forty winks. I must have my forty winks after my 
 dinner." 
 
 " Lunch, William."
 
 166 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 " Lunch, then." 
 
 " He will call it his dinner " 
 
 " It is my dinner " 
 
 Then Mr. Morrell makes a signal, the younger ones 
 troop out, breaking into loud shouts the moment they 
 are clear of the room. They are off to the beach again. 
 Shall we follow them ? . . . 
 
 What do the Welshmen think of it all? It suits 
 Howell Gruffydd's book, as you see, and Howell has 
 pacified John Pritchard with the promise of Bazaars; 
 but the others ? Dafydd Dafis, say ? 
 
 Again nothing is going right for Dafydd. He feels 
 that another friend has changed towards him Min- 
 etta, to whom he used to sing Serch Hudol, and tell his 
 stories of fays and water-beings and knights, and make 
 much of for her elfin looks and quick and un-Saxon ways. 
 For Minetta is already displaying the artist's heartless- 
 ness, and does not see the sorrow in Dafydd's eyes, but 
 only what sort of a " head " he has from her special 
 point of view, and how he will " come " upon a piece 
 of paper. She tried to draw Dafydd only the other 
 day, and ordered him, half absently, to turn his head 
 this way and that, and grew petulant when her drawing 
 went all wrong, and suddenly cried " Don't look at me 
 like that ! " when Dafydd turned his eyes on her with 
 a tear in the corner of each. Poor Dafydd ! He, like 
 the Squire, would be better out of all this swiftly on- 
 coming change. . . . 
 
 But Dafydd, who is of the phrase-making kind, has 
 made out of his sadness a phrase that more or less repre- 
 sents the attitude of every Welshman in Llanyglo. He 
 watched all these people coming in ones and twos and 
 threes out of the hotel one morning and walking down to
 
 THE CURTAIN RAISER 167 
 
 their deck-chairs and bathing-tents on the beach. He 
 stood for a while, looking at the gay parterre of sun- 
 shades and summer clothes, of kites and spades and 
 buckets, and rings on fingers more carefully tended but 
 of coarser stuff than his own. And he listened to the 
 accents that even his alien ear told him were strained 
 and affected and false. And he gave them a half con- 
 temptuous and half pitying look as he turned away. 
 
 " These summer things" he said. . . . 
 
 But Howell Gruffydd has Dafydd Dafis's measure 
 also, and takes it, just as he took John Pritchard's, in a 
 single word. 
 
 " Eisteddfodau," he whispered to Dafydd behind his 
 hand. . . . 
 
 For they may by and by be advertising Llanyglo by 
 means of an Eisteddfod, and, as long as he is allowed to 
 play, Dafydd does not greatly care who he plays to nor 
 whether they understand him or not.
 
 IV 
 
 YNYS 
 
 came one day at about that time a Welsh 
 gipsy fortune-teller to Llanyglo. Her name was 
 Belle Lovell, she was a known character all over the 
 countryside, and she was some sort of a connection of 
 Dafydd Dafis's. There was always a packet of tobacco 
 for her in the Squire's kitchen when she appeared, and 
 her companion on her travels was her thirteen-years-old 
 daughter Ynys.* Belle sold baskets and mended chairs, 
 and Ynys drew the cart, which was no more than a large 
 deal packing-case mounted on four perambulator wheels, 
 and with two flat shafts roughly nailed to its sides. 
 The mother's boots, which you might have hit with a 
 hammer and not have dinted, resembled grey old wooden 
 dug-outs ; the child went barefooted and barelegged, and 
 it would have been a stout thorn that could have pierced 
 the calloused pads of her hardened soles. 
 
 These two appeared at Llanyglo at midday, ate their 
 frugal meal on the doorstep of Dafydd's single-roomed 
 cottage behind the Independent Chapel, and then, leav- 
 ing the cart behind them, strolled down to have a look 
 at that splendacious new caravan, Howell Gruffydd's 
 shop. Belle, her greenish light brown eyes never for a 
 moment still, gossiped with her old acquaintances; her 
 daughter, whose head was as steadily held as if she 
 balanced an invisible pitcher on it, stood looking at the 
 
 *Pron. "Unnis." 
 
 168
 
 YNYS 169 
 
 green butterfly-nets and red-painted buckets, admiring, 
 but no more desiring them than she would have desired 
 anything else impossibly beyond her reach. Her 
 mother joined a group about Mrs. Roberta's door; the 
 visitors, who had lunched, began to descend to the 
 beach again; and there approached down the path that 
 led to the Hafod Unos Ned, the oldest of the Kerrs. 
 
 Now Ned had run across Belle on many alder-expe- 
 ditions, and, while the invasion of " summer things " 
 had not driven Ned into naturalisation as a Welshman, 
 it had, by emphasising the distinction between the well- 
 to-do and the poor of the world, shown him how to jog 
 along in peace with his neighbours. He gave Belle an 
 intelligent grin, and jerked his head in the direction of 
 the bathing-tents. 
 
 " Well, mother," he said, " ye've dropped in at just 
 about th' right time." 
 
 " There iss no wrong time for seeing friends," Belle 
 replied, in an up-and-down and very musical Welsh 
 accent. 
 
 " Nay, I wanna thinking-g o' that," Ned replied, 
 strongly doubling the " g " that terminated the present 
 participle. " I wor thinking-g of a bit o' fortune-tell- 
 ing. There's a lot ower yonder wi' more brass nor 
 sense, and it allus tickles 'em to talk about sweethearts 
 an' sich." 
 
 " Indeed Llanygio has become grea-a-at big place, 
 whatever," the gipsy replied, and continued her conver- 
 sation with Mrs. Roberts. 
 
 And presently, whether she took the hint or whether 
 she had come precisely for that purpose, Belle's greenish- 
 brown eyes roved again, she made a slight gesture to 
 Ynys, who had turned from the butterfly-nets and was 
 looking out to sea, and the pair of them made off along
 
 170 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 the beach in the direction of that bright plot of colour 
 that made as it were a herbaceous border between the 
 grey-green tussocks and the glittering sea. 
 
 For a hundred yards Belle's dug-outs left behind her 
 a heavy shuffling track in the sand, parallel with the 
 light kidney-shaped prints of the child who walked as 
 if she carried an invisible pitcher on her head ; and then, 
 with the cluster of tents and parasols still far ahead, 
 they stopped. John Willie Garden and Percy Briggs, 
 with Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd ready to bear a hand if 
 called upon to do so, but otherwise a little fearful of 
 intruding, were victualling the blue-and-white collapsible 
 boat for a cruise. But it was not in order to tell the 
 fortunes of the three boys that Belle stopped. She 
 stopped for the same reason that the street-seller pulls 
 out his rattle or his conjuring trick, while his quick- 
 silver eyes dart this way and that in search of his crowd. 
 The only difference was that Belle was her own conjur- 
 ing-trick. The gesture with which she performed it 
 was superbly negligent. She had a wonderful old mig- 
 nonette-coloured shawl, which, when she had talked with 
 the group about Mrs. Roberts's doorstep, had been drawn 
 up over her head; and suddenly she allowed it to fall 
 to her shoulders. The effect might well have carried 
 twice the distance it was intended to carry. Out of the 
 folds of the shawl her neck rose as erect as the pistil of 
 an arum lily. Against it gleamed her heavy gold ear- 
 rings. Her cheekbones and the nodule of her high nose 
 gleamed like bronze, and about the whorl of the spring- 
 ing of her hair at the back of her head the sunshine made 
 as it were a sun-dog on the lustrous blackness. Her 
 silver wedding-ring, an old tweed jacket that might 
 have belonged to her kinsman Dafydd Dans, and a 
 patched old indigo petticoat, completed the legerdemain.
 
 YNYS 171 
 
 Ynys, clad to all appearances in a single garment only, 
 watched the boys exactly as she had watched the balls 
 and butterfly-nets and buckets outside Howell Gruffydd's 
 shop. 
 
 They too made a shining coup d'oeil. There was 
 just swell enough to set the long breakers hurdling in, 
 and wind enough to take the tops off them in rattling 
 showers of brilliant spray. Indeed it was so merry a 
 sea that, not half an hour before, Mrs. Maynard had 
 declared to John Willie that she had come within an ace 
 of drowning during her bathe that morning, and had 
 asked him whether, had he seen her in difficulties, he 
 would have come to her rescue. " Mmmmm, John 
 Willie ? " she had asked, curling his hair with her per- 
 fumed fingers; but John Willie, seeing Percy Briggs 
 approaching, had jerked away his head. This had not 
 been because he had been afraid of being laughed at 
 by Percy. For that matter, Percy had confided to John 
 Willie only a week before that he " liked their Minetta," 
 and so was in no position to jeer at the softer relations. 
 !Nb; it had merely been that, as Llanyglo's curtain had 
 risen, suddenly revealing a soft and alluring group of 
 Euonymas and Wygelias and Hildas, not to speak of 
 Mrs. Maynard herself, all temptingly set out like fruit 
 upon a stall, the curtain of John Willie Garden's pe- 
 culiar privacy had come down with a run. Mrs. May- 
 nard was always trying to peep behind it, but probably 
 there was nothing behind. Probably that was the 
 reason it had come so sharply and closely down. No boy 
 wants to show that he has nothing to show. 
 
 Smack ! A bucketful of spray drenched the stores, 
 and the wave ran hissing and creaming back under the 
 counter of the blue-and-white boat. John Willie 
 shouted rather crossly to Eesaac Oliver.
 
 1Y2 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 "Pull her up a bit, can't you, instead of standing 
 there doing nothing ! " 
 
 Eesaac Oliver started to life and obeyed. He was 
 rather a fetcher and carrier for these more happily 
 circumstanced boys, but privately he knew himself to 
 be in some things their superior. To tell the truth, 
 Eesaac Oliver knew just a lee-tie too much about what 
 went on within himself, and communicated it just a lee- 
 tie too readily to others. For he dropped no curtain ; on 
 the contrary, the windows of his soul were flung wide 
 open. The experience of the world he had acquired at 
 the school at Forth Ueigr had already caused him to de- 
 clare himself as being thenceforward powerfully on the 
 side of the angels ; and that ingenious educational exer- 
 cise which consists of speaking extempore on any subject 
 given only a moment ago had a lee-tie abnormally de- 
 veloped certain natural powers of expression which his 
 race rarely lacks. Had Mrs. Maynard attempted to 
 stroke Eesaac Oliver's hair (which was thick and black, 
 and rose in a great lump in front, falling thence in a 
 lappet over his pale forehead), he would either have 
 cried " Apage ! " or else, suffering the seduction, would 
 have undergone torments of remorse afterwards. 
 
 Therefore it was with a meek dignity that Eesaac 
 Oliver bore a hand with the boat, and then fell back and 
 a little enviously watched again. 
 
 Then that crafty and stately piece of legerdemain of 
 Belle's had its reward. In his rippling cream alpaca, 
 there approached along the sands Mr. Morrell himself, 
 and Belle's neck no longer resembled the pistil of an 
 arum lily. She bent ingratiatingly forward; as if a 
 key had clicked, a dazzling smile cut her face into two ; 
 and after a jocular word or two Mr. Morrell bore her 
 off, Ynys following. Let us follow too.
 
 YNYS 173 
 
 Do look at the contrast those summer things, and 
 the two wanderers in whom all the seasons are ingrained ; 
 carefully veiled and sunburn-cured complexions, and 
 these other vagrants, brown as the upturned earth; the 
 indefatigable maintenance of artificial attitudes even 
 before one another, and the grave ease of the child, the 
 deliberate gesture with which the mother looses as it were 
 in the sheath the only weapon she has against the 
 world. . . . Frith's "Derby Day?" Yes, it is a little 
 like it; but listen. Mrs. Maynard, with a sparkling 
 glance about her that says " Mum," has slipped off her 
 wedding-ring, and Belle has taken her hand. It is slim 
 as a glove that has never been put on, and Mrs. Maynard 
 intends to trip Belle if she can. 
 
 So, when Belle begins to promise Mrs. Maynard a 
 husband who shall be such-and-such, there are winks 
 and glances and nudges, as much as to say that now they 
 are going to have some fun, and Mr. Morrell says, 
 " Here, ho'd on a bit, mother how do you know she 
 isn't married ? " 
 
 If Belle shows the knife for a moment, she does it so 
 delicately that nobody notices it. 
 
 " If the prit-ty lady was married, her man he srink 
 a ring upon her finger, red-hot, as they srink a tyre 
 on a cart-wheel," Belle replies ; and the reading of Mrs. 
 Maynard's palm continues. 
 
 Mrs. Lacey, a pale blue hollyhock, looks as if she 
 pooh-poohed the whole thing; but inwardly she is a- 
 tremble with eagerness to have the fortunes of her two 
 daughters told. As it happens, no sooner is Mrs. May- 
 nard's hand dropped than Mr. Morrell, who happens 
 to be standing next to June, catches her by the arm. 
 
 " Come on, June, and be told how to get a husband ! " 
 he cries, and he slips a shilling into Belle's hand.
 
 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 June will never be prettier than she is now. She is 
 indeed very pretty apple-blossom and cream, bright- 
 haired, freshly starched, back straight and elbows well 
 down, and as glossy from top to toe as the broad mauve 
 ribbon of her sash. Soon she will be as tall as her 
 mother; already she is taller than her father, the land- 
 scape-gardener; and the thought of whether she will 
 marry or not, and whether brilliantly or otherwise, 
 never enters her head. Of course she will marry, and 
 of course her marriage will be a brilliant one. " Mar- 
 riage " and " brilliant marriage " are one and the same 
 thing. In this, as in most other things, Wygelia is of 
 the same opinion as June. A close understanding, 
 which has not yet outgrown the form of surreptitious 
 kicks under the table, and private and abbreviated words, 
 exists between the two sisters. Other things being 
 equal, they would probably prefer to marry two broth- 
 ers. 
 
 " I tell the prit-ty miss a harder thing than that I 
 tell her how to keep her man when she has got him," 
 Belle replied amid laughter; and she proceeds to de- 
 scribe June's husband. He is to come over the water 
 (landing at Newhaven, Mrs. Lacey instantly concludes, 
 and taking the first train to the Boarding School at 
 Brighton), and he shall be devoted to her, and she shall 
 have such-and-such a number of children. (Mrs. Lacey 
 straightens her back ; this is something like ; her grand- 
 father, whom she remembers quite well, was June's 
 great-grandfather, and will have been the great-great- 
 grandfather of June's boys and girls, which is getting 
 on, especially when you remember the younger sons and 
 grandsons of somebodies, who are estate-bailiffs and 
 engine-drivers and carriers of milk-cans in the Colonies. ) 
 When June's fortune is finished all applaud her, as if
 
 YNYS 175 
 
 she had performed some feat of skill, and then Mr. 
 Morrell seizes Wy. 
 
 " Come on, Wy no hanging back let's see what 
 sort of a fist Wy's going to make of it " 
 
 And Wy also is haled forward, blushing and conscious 
 and biting her lip, and is told that for her too some- 
 body is languishing, and that presently he will drink out 
 of her glass and thenceforward think her thoughts, which 
 are already complex. And Hilda's palm is read, and 
 little Victoria Smythe's fat one, and Val Clayton's, and 
 others, and silver rains into Belle's palm. Chaffingly 
 Mr. Morrell offers her a sovereign for her takings, un- 
 counted, but is refused. Then Mrs. Briggs " wants the 
 boys done," and somebody is despatched along the shore 
 for Percy and John Willie, and as they arrive, bear- 
 ing their bottles of milk and parcels of jam-sandwiches 
 (for the blue-and-white boat had been paid off), there 
 comes up also Minetta, carrying her sketching-kit. She 
 stands peering at Ynys, more as seeing in her a subject 
 than as at a fellow-being. 
 
 So, idly and laughingly, an hour of the summer after- 
 noon passes; and then an accident mars its harmony. 
 John Willie and Percy, feeling the pangs of thirst, had 
 drunk their milk and had then set up the bottle as a 
 mark to throw stones at ; and Ynys, walking down to the 
 sea-marge, has set her foot upon a piece of the broken 
 glass. Unconcernedly she bathes the cut in the salt 
 water. 
 
 But as the laughing group breaks up, and her mother 
 calls her again, the blood wells out once more, dabbling 
 with a dark stain those light kidney-shaped prints in the 
 sand. Mrs. Garden and Mrs. Briggs see the child's 
 plight simultaneously. It is a cruel gash, and the two 
 ladies utter loud cries.
 
 176 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 " Nay, nay, whatiwer in the world ! " cries Mrs. 
 Briggs, all of her that is not pure mother suddenly be- 
 coming pure Hunslet. " Nay, nay ! Come here, 
 doy! " 
 
 She and Mrs. Garden kneel down before the gipsy 
 child, and a dozen others gather round. Cries of sym- 
 pathy break out. 
 
 "T poor bairn! 
 
 "What a mess!" 
 
 " How did she do it ? " 
 
 " John Willie, quick, run and get the kettle from the 
 picnic-basket " 
 
 " Indeed, lady dear, it iss noth-thing " 
 
 " Quick, Hay, give me your handkercher too " 
 
 Yny's foot is bathed in fresh water from the picnic- 
 kettle, and bound up with Mrs. Briggs's tiny lace hand- 
 kerchief, with Raymond's large one over it to secure it. 
 The blood has already come through before the tying is 
 finished. And you forget the false accents and the elab- 
 orate pretences of these " summer things " of Llanyglo's 
 little preliminary piece, and remember only the better 
 things that lie beneath them. They flatter Ynys, and 
 encourage her with admiring words. 
 
 " She's a very brave little girl, anyway ! " 
 
 " What did you say her name was ? " 
 
 " Ynys." 
 
 "Well done, Ynys! Soon be well " 
 
 " John Willie, I've told you about throwing stones 
 at bottles before get you home till I come " 
 
 " And you too, Percy Briggs ; and you dare to stir 
 out till I tell you ! " 
 
 " Don't cry, little girl " 
 
 Ynys has no thought whatever of crying. She makes 
 no more motion than a pine makes when it bleeds its
 
 YNYS 177 
 
 gouts of resin in the spring. But they continue to com- 
 fort her. 
 
 " She'll never be able to walk like that ! " 
 
 " Better fetch Gilbert Smythe." 
 
 " June, you run " 
 
 " Here's half a crown for you, Ynys, for being a 
 brave little girl." 
 
 Then Minetta, who has been conferring with Belle, 
 speaks. "All right, mother, she's to come home with 
 us ; I'm going to paint her." 
 
 " There, now, Ynys, you're going to be painted ! 
 Won't that be fun!" 
 
 " And if she ever comes to Liverpool and asks for me," 
 says Philip Lacey, " I'll see she's all right. Yes, I will. 
 She shall sell flowers. That'll be better than going 
 about barefoot and getting her poor little foot cut, won't 
 it?" 
 
 But at that, for the first time, the child seems to 
 see and to hear. Her eyes, greenish-brown and deep 
 like her mother's, look into Philip Lacey's small but 
 kindly ones as if she had not seen him before. The half- 
 crown Philip has given her is still tightly clasped in her 
 hand, but then half crowns are things that do sometimes 
 visit people precisely like that. And she knows that 
 they have some mystic power or virtue by means of 
 which they can buy things green butterfly-nets and 
 red-painted buckets ; but Ynys can not quite understand 
 the people who can sell these wondrous things for mere 
 half-crowns. . . . Then she realises again that somebody 
 has just said something about selling flowers. . . . 
 
 They are promising her that if she is a brave little 
 girl and lets Doctor Smythe dress her foot she shall one 
 day sell flowers. . . . 
 
 Sometimes, meeting Belle Lovell and her daughter
 
 178 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 upon the road, the one with her loops of cane upon her 
 back and the other drawing the cart made of the deal 
 box mounted upon perambulator wheels, you will give 
 them good-day and pass on; and then, five minutes or 
 so afterwards perhaps, you will be conscious of an almost 
 noiseless pattering behind you, and will turn. It is 
 Ynys, holding out to you a little posy of hedge-flowers. 
 She may not refuse your penny for them; indeed she 
 will not; but you are not to suppose that it is for the 
 penny that she has brought you the nosegay. The poor 
 sticky little thing is unpurchasable. You would have 
 got it just the same had you been as poor as herself.
 
 PART THREE 
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 
 
 THE writer of the Sixpenny Guide to Llanyglo and 
 Neighbourhood, in speaking of the rise of the 
 town, made use of an obvious image which we will take 
 leave to borrow from him. " Thenceforward," he wrote, 
 " Llanyglo sprang up as if by magic out of the soil 
 itself." 
 
 Indeed it did something like it. Watching it, you 
 would have thought of one of Philip Lacey's gardens in 
 the short days before Spring had begun to warm the air. 
 Neat, bare, brown, friable soil, with not yet a crocus or 
 a snowdrop to be seen ; here and there a stick with a tiny 
 linen tab fluttering (reminding you of Terry Armfield's 
 little " Keep off the Grass " board with " Delyn Ave- 
 nue " written upon it) ; frames half open and inverted 
 bells, dibbing-strings, sprinklings of lime, and a few 
 whirligigs to keep the birds away ; these, and the promise 
 of the scent and colour to come it did indeed resemble 
 Llanyglo. Not all at once did the pea-sticks become 
 builders' scaffold-poles, the lines of string the plotting- 
 out of streets. As of Philip's gardens, you could not 
 have said of Llanyglo on any particular day, " This has 
 changed more than it was changing yesterday, more 
 
 than it will be again changing to-morrow." But for all 
 
 179
 
 180 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 that, nothing remained any longer the same. Philip's 
 men, working over the blindfold earth with clay and 
 spittle, caused its lids to open ; Edward Garden and his 
 associates, similarly, with money for manure, labour 
 to let in the air and light, and the gentle airs of adver- 
 tisement already fanning an incipient repute, made a 
 garden of stone and iron, with buds of stucco, flowers of 
 paint and glass and gilding, and fruit after its kind to 
 ripen by and by. 
 
 Humanity was the soil he worked on, and his knowl- 
 edge of it the force with which he did so. Its hopes and 
 appetites, its need of noise and change and laughter, its 
 stretching itself after fetters struck off and its resolve 
 to have a better, a much better time than it had ever had 
 before out of these things came Edward Garden's 
 beds and borders. He would grow flowers of pleasure 
 for those of the towns to pick. And, since you do not 
 advance the glory of July by neglecting to make the most 
 of March, his crops also had their rotation. For this, in 
 a manner of speaking, was Llanyglo's March, and what 
 though it lasted two, three, four years 2 The Laceys 
 and the Raymond Briggses were to be cultivated while 
 they were yet there. Blooming and falling again, they 
 would make an excellent preparation, and there was 
 plenty to do in the meantime. There were other hotels 
 to build, and a wet-weather pavilion for tea and talk and 
 dancing, and a landing-stage for the twenty new boats, 
 and this and that and the other and always, always, 
 the coming full summer to look forward to, the summer 
 of ten, eleven, twelve years thence, the summer when, 
 not the Laceys, but the employees of their fourteen or 
 fifteen shops should talk of Llanyglo ; the summer when 
 Mr. Morrell should come no more, but his operatives
 
 should draw their thousands from the Clubs and rain 
 them upon the town; the summer when all should be 
 changed but the steadfast Trwyn, and all different save 
 the mountains behind, and nothing the same save the still 
 and watching sea. 
 
 The Sarn-Porth ISTeigr Loop was constructed in 
 1886-7, and opened in the May of the last-named year. 
 One of its earlier trains brought, in a first-class compart- 
 ment, Philip and Mrs. Lacey and the Misses June and 
 Wygelia, fresh from Paris ; and in a third-class compart- 
 ment it brought a family called Topham. Mr. Topham 
 was head-clerk in a Liverpool Irish-bacon-importing 
 concern, and Philip Lacey, meeting him once or twice 
 at Philharmonic Promenade Concerts, had forgotten the 
 golden rule that it is easier to get into conversation with 
 a man than it is to shake Kim off again, and had fallen 
 into the habit of nodding to him. In fact, a sort of 
 acquaintanceship had been struck up. He had learned 
 Topham's name, and Topham his. All this had been in 
 Liverpool. 
 
 But it was one thing to strike up an acquaintanceship 
 in Liverpool, and quite another to continue that acquaint- 
 anceship elsewhere. Philip Lacey, seeing Barry Top- 
 ham get into the train, had not doubted that the bacon- 
 importer's clerk would be dropping off again after a few 
 stations. But at Stockport, where Philip had descended 
 to stretch his legs, Topham had met him on the platform 
 and had informed him that he was going to Llanyglo. 
 
 Now when Philip went away for a few weeks' change 
 he liked that change to be a change. He didn't come to 
 Llanyglo to meet casuals from Liverpool. 
 
 He began to wonder whether Llanyglo was quite what 
 it had been.
 
 182 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 And so did Mr. Morrell, who brought, his daughter 
 Hilda from Brighton that year. 
 
 And so did Val Clayton, who also came that year, 
 merely in order to see what sort of vermouth they sold 
 at the other hotels. 
 
 For soon there were three hotels, the original 
 " Cambrian," the " Cardigan," and the " Montgom- 
 ery." All these were on what by and by became the 
 front, and between the " Cambrian " and the " Cardi- 
 gan " was a space of perhaps a couple of hundred yards. 
 Thence to the "Montgomery," however, was quite a 
 walk for Val of a morning a quarter of a mile or more 
 on towards the Trwyn. Of the three hotels the " Mont- 
 gomery " was the largest. It had sixty bedrooms. Its 
 stabling (for there was now a landau-service up into the 
 mountains) blocked up one of Terry's dream-avenues a 
 hundred yards from where the easy marble steps were to 
 have descended to the shore. A wide metalled road ran 
 past the three hotels, but it reminded you of unexplored 
 rivers on an ancient map, which are traced for a score or 
 a hundred miles, and then dissipate in interrogative dots. 
 Another road at right angles ran past the Kerrs' Hafod 
 to the gap opposite Pritchard's farm, and there were yet 
 other roads, if those widish alleys bounded by stakes and 
 wire could properly be called roads. When the wind 
 rose the sand still whistled everywhere, scouring paint, 
 rounding wooden corners, stinging faces; but so far it 
 had made very little impression on a large, black, tarred 
 notice-board firmly stayed into the sand midway between 
 the " Cardigan " and " Montgomery " hotels, a board 
 bigger than the whole front of the Kerrs' Hafod, which 
 bore a straggling plan upon it in white, and the 
 words :
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 183 
 
 LEASEHOLD ! 
 For 99 9 Years! 
 Lots as Under: 
 
 Apply 
 
 To tell the truth, Llanyglo was now rather a dreary- 
 looking place. They had broken its sylvan eggs, but 
 had hardly yet begun the making of its urban omelette. 
 The above-mentioned announcement was not the only 
 one of its kind ; there was another halfway between the 
 Kerrs' house and Pritchard's, and a third at Pritchard's 
 corner. These, it was known, awoke faint and distant 
 echoes in little paragraphs in Manchester and Liverpool 
 papers. The Company so far was a private one; it 
 hardly knew yet what powers it might presently expect 
 to possess ; but Mr. Tudor Williams and others were find- 
 ing out. As a matter of fact, they were rather anxious 
 about these powers. An Act of Parliament two years 
 before had seemed to promise them certain things that 
 might prove immensely to their advantage; but of the 
 two great Local Government Acts (of 1888 and 1894), 
 the first was still in a plastic state, and the second not 
 yet thought of. Hitherto Porth Neigr had been the 
 centre of administration; it was now being sought to 
 shift that centre. And, with the cumbrous old machin- 
 ery of Boards of Guardians and Poor Law Overseers out 
 of the way, Howell Grufl'ydd, it was whispered, might 
 before long become a Councillor. Indeed, who would 
 make a better one? Edward Garden? Edward Gar-
 
 184 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 den preferred to depute powers of this kind. The 
 Laceys and Briggses, on a property qualification? 
 These had their own affairs to attend to, and were sum- 
 mer residents only. John Pritchard ? Stern John, as 
 unchallenged ruler of the Baptist Chapel, was already 
 a Councillor in a deeper sense than that defined by any 
 mundane Act. William Morgan? Not substantial 
 enough. John Roberts ? Dafydd Dafis ? The Squire ? 
 The claims of all of them paled before that of 
 Howell Gruffydd the grocer. . . . 
 
 The leases were being taken up too. The Llanyglo 
 Pavilion, Limited, was incorporated before a spade was 
 set in the sand. The great blackboard between the 
 Kerrs' house and Pritchard's Corner bore a significant 
 diagonal paper strip with four fifteen-inch letters in 
 red upon it SOLD. Negotiations were proceeding 
 for the acquisition of the land at the Corner itself. 
 And Edward Garden had completed that rumoured pur- 
 chase of his far up in the mountains. It was a " catch- 
 ment area " for water, and if, under the new distribu- 
 tion, the Council should find itself possessed of large 
 borrowing-powers, it might possibly find the private 
 ownership of those hundreds of acres far away up Delyn 
 an awkward matter. 
 
 And the excavation was already being made for the 
 TOW of houses that later was known as " Ham-and-Egg 
 Terrace " a hundred and fifty yards of building that 
 at first awed Llanyglo by its grandeur, but which they 
 subsequently came to think a poor affair and did their 
 best to conceal. 
 
 It was only partly for a holiday that those first visitor- 
 discoverers came to Llanyglo now. Considerations of 
 business had begun to play a part in their coming. Mr. 
 Morrell, for example, had sunk quite a lot of money in
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 185 
 
 the place, and liked to keep an eye on his interests. 
 Philip Lacey pored over a dozen sketch-drafts of his 
 Floral Valley, a project for converting a coombe or dean 
 that clove one portion of the Trwyn into an ornamental 
 arrangement of flower-beds with a bandstand in the 
 centre. And Raymond Briggs mused on houses and 
 hotels, on hotels and more and yet more houses. For 
 these Llanyglo was no longer simply a place " delight- 
 fully rural," a place " where you could dress as you 
 liked," a place for " a real rustic holiday." It was the 
 Tophams who made these discoveries and bestowed 
 these encomiums now. 
 
 Whether or not Barry Topham dressed as he liked, 
 he certainly dressed as the Briggses and the Laceys dis- 
 liked. At the Promenade Concerts his appearance had 
 been just decently unremarkable; alas, it was so no 
 longer ! Now, in the country, he broke out into a loose 
 tweed jacket, knickers made of a pair of long trousers 
 of striped cashmere cut down, low shoes, a flannel shirt, 
 no hat, and a tightly knotted red tie, this last as a 
 voucher for the socialism that, Philip Lacey discovered 
 to his horror, he talked in and out of season. He was 
 a small, bearded, wiry man of forty-four or five, who 
 gave you a curious impression of ferocity and mildness 
 mingled. The mildness was perhaps due to his bolt- 
 upright shock of frightened-looking sandy hair, the 
 ferocity to the pince-nez marks on either side of his 
 nose that gave his glance a concentrated look. His wife 
 did not appear to dress (you cannot call mere conceal- 
 ment of the person "dressing") until four o'clock in 
 the afternoon, and his two daughters, aged nineteen and 
 twenty-one, were school-teachers, less buxom than Miss 
 ISTancy Pritchard, but more professionally eager, as if 
 all the vital force in them had gone, not to the waste of
 
 186 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 mere pleasant flesh, but into the severer regions of the 
 mind. 
 
 This taking of Llanyglo at its word in the matter of 
 dress was bad enough, but worse was to come. 
 
 Scarcely were the Tophams installed at the " Mont- 
 gomery " when it became known that, though they had 
 appeared to come alone, they were merely an advance 
 party. Two days later the main body arrived, and 
 Llanyglo experienced its first social slump. 
 
 The party called itself a Holiday Camp. It was a 
 union of two semi-secular, semi-Nonconformist Insti- 
 tutions whose idea of having a better time than their 
 fathers had had was to botanise, to geologise, to read, 
 and to discuss these activities afterwards in whirlwinds 
 of communal talk. Strictly speaking, they did not 
 " camp " at all : they put up at the " Montgomery " ; 
 but they had camped, hoped to camp again, and called 
 their more convivial gatherings, when studies were cast 
 aside, Pow-Wows. 
 
 They overran the place instantaneously. You met 
 them with their brown canvas satchels and japanned 
 tin specimen-cases, poking about up the Trwyn or 
 groping in the boggy patches about Sam. They were 
 to be met in the lanes, carrying picnic paraphernalia. 
 They lighted fires of driftwood on the shore, which 
 coatless young men blew while the young women combed 
 their hair out in the sun. And wherever they went a 
 little red rash went with them, the rash of the small 
 red-backed book, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, of which 
 the contagion had raged among them. Not that they 
 had not books of other hues also. They had Hugh 
 Miller's Old Red Sandstone in green, and Selected Say- 
 ings of Marcus Aurelius in brown, and others in 
 various colours; but it was the red that struck the eye
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 187 
 
 at the greater distance. They and the books were insep- 
 arable. The unmarried ones, sharing a book between 
 them, seemed already to be creating that sage commun- 
 ity of intellectual interest that, as all the world knows, 
 comes in so very handy when the first fires of love have 
 become less devouringly hot; the married ones, with a 
 book apiece, kept the calm connubial ideal before the 
 maids' and bachelors' eyes. . . . And it was all exceed- 
 ingly disquieting and difficult to understand. One 
 hoped that the books were portals into high and fair and 
 spacious places, but feared that they might be but 
 pathetic posterns of escape from the world's weary 
 drudgery that has got to be done and that therefore 
 somebody must do. One had struggles of compunction 
 and abasement and doubt, and the humiliating feeling 
 that some clean and heathery and wind-swept place of 
 the mind was being invaded to sadly, sadly little pur- 
 pose. One tried, desperately tried, to tell oneself that 
 if poor lame Harry Stone got one single half-hour's joy 
 out of it all, nothing else mattered; and then one won- 
 dered whether even this was true. It is hard to be 
 social over an anti-social thing. ... So one bore, 
 humble heart and arrogant heart alike, each his portion 
 of Education's shame. 
 
 The coming of the Montgomeryites acted instantane- 
 ously. Within an hour of their issuing from their 
 sixty-bedroom hotel, the Cambrians and their deck- 
 chairs and bathing-tents had drawn a little more com- 
 pactly together on the sands. Certainly the Cambrians 
 did not see why they should take, intellectually, a second 
 place to these loftily and botanically thinking ones, 
 merely because they chose to pay a little attention to 
 appearances also. Moreover, the fact that the Reading 
 Party had come to Llanyglo only for a fortnight filled
 
 188 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 the Briggses and the Laceys with a certain compassion. 
 This was not compassion that the ecstacies with which 
 a zoophyte was discovered, or the glad cries with which 
 a bit of sundew was hailed, must be such transient joys. 
 It was rather compassion that the Montgomeryites 
 should find the place pristine. Llanyglo " pristine " 
 now ! . . . " Ah," they thought, " they wouldn't 
 think that if they'd known it as we knew it two 
 houses and a single hotel only ! " . . . The thought 
 opened a vista. Perhaps, in time to come, these 
 Utopians would tell others how, when they first set eyes 
 on Llanyglo, the place had not begun to be spoiled, but 
 had had three hotels only, a dozen or so houses, Ham- 
 and-Egg Terrace, and a blackboard here and there that 
 had emphasised rather than detracted from its virgin 
 charm. And these others would pass it on to others 
 still, and so it would go on, and so, in one sense, Llany- 
 glo would never grow. There would always be some- 
 body who had known it before somebody else, and would 
 say, " Ah, yes, but you ought to have seen it then! " . . . 
 Well, thought the Cambrians, perhaps it was a good 
 thing. To have inferiors is one of the great solaces of 
 Life, and they supposed that the Tophams also had their 
 inferiors. Perhaps some day a tripper would look 
 even on Philip Lacey's Floral Valley with much the 
 same shock of delight with which Eve opened her eyes on 
 the dew of Eden. . . . 
 
 A sorely tried man now was Philip. Sadly he 
 lamented the evening that had taken him and Barry 
 Topham to the same Philharmonic Concert in Liver- 
 pool. For the starched and hotpressed ones of the 
 " Cambrian," though they did not openly say so, held 
 him as in a manner responsible for this inferior spilling 
 all over their idyllic place. They seemed to be trying
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 189 
 
 to make out that the Tophams were Philip's chosen 
 friends. Philip felt this to be unfair. It was an acci- 
 dent that might have happened to anybody, and Philip's 
 views on culture and the multitude were every bit as 
 sound as Raymond Briggs's own. And as Philip did 
 not intend to be sat upon by Raymond Briggs or any- 
 body, he acted well, nay, even nobly. He had recog- 
 nised Topham; very well. He had not positively en- 
 couraged the fellow, but say that certain narrow-minded 
 persons wished to make it appear that he had done so ; 
 well again. He would stand by what he had done. He 
 would ask the Tophams to dinner at his hotel. 
 
 He did so, and took the disastrous consequences. 
 For the Tophams came, and, with the eyes of the whole 
 " Cambrian " upon them, behaved for all the world as 
 if they had been dining at their own inferior Liberty 
 Hall of a " Montgomery." So at least it seemed to 
 Philip, and bad enough surely that would have been; 
 but Mrs. Lacey made it far, far worse. It was plain 
 as plain could be (she said afterwards) that the Top- 
 hams' sprawls and freedoms were all put on, and that 
 they had been like four fishes out of water every minute 
 of the time he ought to be ashamed of himself, show- 
 ing them up before everybody's eyes like that! . . . 
 " Come as you are," Philip Lacey had said, with the 
 truest delicacy, since it was very unlikely that the Top- 
 hams had brought evening clothes to their Camps and 
 Pow-Wows ; and so nobody dressed. The " Cam- 
 brian's " tables were no longer arranged in the form of 
 a T. With the installation of gas, numerous smaller 
 tables, with a couple of large oval ones among them, 
 had taken its place, and at one of the oval tables the four 
 Laceys and the four Tophams sat. Mr. Lacey was at 
 one end, with Mrs. Topham on his right, Mrs. Lacey
 
 190 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 was at the other end with Mr. Topham on her right. 
 At the sides sat the younger ones, a Topham and a 
 Lacey on either side. This was not the happiest of 
 arrangements, since young ladies who have just " fin- 
 ished " in Paris usually think they have seen enough 
 of school-teachers for some time to come, but it was the 
 best that could be managed. Nor could Miss June kick 
 Miss Wy under the table. 
 
 The discord showed from the very first moment. 
 The Laceys, as urbane hosts, would have kept to such 
 light and frothy conversational matters as how the Top- 
 hams liked Llanyglo, whether they had been up into the 
 mountains yet, and similar subjects ; but not so the Top- 
 hams. Briefly, they went for the eternal verities like 
 four steam-navvies. Before she had unfolded her nap- 
 kin, Mrs. Topham had Philip Lacey helpless in the toils 
 of More's Utopia, and by the time she had asked him 
 half a dozen searching questions, looking mistrustfully 
 at him as much as to say, " You dare to lie to me, sir ! " 
 the unhappy man had to confess that it was some time 
 since he had read the book, and that his textual memory 
 was by no means as good as it had been. A second 
 attack rendered him abject. The third was not deliv- 
 ered. Seeing him such a rank and pitiable outsider, 
 Mrs. Topham contemptuously spared him. 
 
 " And this is the state of education to-day ! " she said 
 scornfully to her husband afterwards. . . . 
 
 Mr. Topham, in the meantime, tackled Mrs. Lacey 
 on certain problems of the Distribution of Wealth, 
 with no happier results. Quite simply, Mrs. Lacey 
 was unaware that such problems existed save insofar as 
 they were included in the specific question of marriage- 
 settlements for daughters. She scarcely troubled to 
 answer Mr. Topham, but, glancing from June and Wy
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 191 
 
 to the Misses Amy and Norah Topham, lost herself in 
 the problems of the Distribution of Proposals instead. 
 So she too, from the point of view of those who carried 
 Mill and Smith in their pockets and read these inhuman 
 authors in the shade of the crumbling Dinas, became 
 an outsider. 
 
 But worst of all fared the Misses June and Wy ; for 
 the Topham sisters had brought with them from Liver- 
 pool a holiday-pamphlet, which consisted of forty-two 
 questions, three of which, daily for a fortnight, the 
 holiday-maker was advised to ask himself. So: 
 
 " As I came along the beach this afternoon," said 
 Miss Amy to June, with a chatty note in her voice, but 
 the enthusiasm for knowledge smouldering in her eyes, 
 " I observed great quantities of seaweed. To what uses 
 are seaweeds put ? " 
 
 And said Miss Norah to Wy, slightly puckering her 
 shining and melon-like forehead : 
 
 " One of the boatmen told me yesterday that in the 
 Spring large masses of the vernal squill are to be found 
 upon the hills near here. Why is this ? " 
 
 Then Miss Amy again: 
 
 " There are fine examples of contorted strata on the 
 other side of the Trwyn. Perhaps you or your sister 
 can tell me the reason why these strata are contorted ? " 
 
 And again Miss Koran : 
 
 " Who was Taliesin ? When did he nourish 3 Tell 
 me anything you know about him." 
 
 Dearly would June and Wy have liked to reply, in the 
 words of Mrs. Briggs when the hotel-manager had looked 
 at her boots, " Don't if it hurts you ! " Wiggie nick- 
 lamed Miss Norah Topham " The Vernal Squill " on the 
 spot; June, a phanerogam herself, dubbed Miss Amy 
 " The Club Moss."
 
 192 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 After that dinner, there was nothing for Philip Lacey 
 to do but to live his indiscretion down. 
 
 But if this was the " Cambrian's " attitude to the 
 " Montgomery," it was not that of the Welshmen of 
 Llanyglo. These were now more in number, for half 
 the staffs of the three hotels were Welsh, and others 
 also had scented prosperity in the air. Within a few 
 hours friendly relations had been established between 
 the natives and the readers of Utopia. A Welshman's 
 eyes will always sparkle at the sight of a book or other 
 piece of the apparatus of knowledge, and the Montgom- 
 eryites, friendly souls all and ready chatters with 
 whomsoever they met, began to drop into Howell's shop 
 of a morning. None too reluctantly, they suffered 
 themselves to be drawn out by Howell on the subjects of 
 their studies, and then it was that Howell became a 
 proud man indeed. For he produced Eesaac Oliver, 
 home once more from Aberystwith College. Without 
 even having the titles given to him as he came in at the 
 door that divided the shop from the dwelling-rooms be- 
 hind, Eesaac Oliver swapped them book for book. 
 Howell's breast swelled. " Blodwen Blodwen 
 come quick ! " he called. Then, with his eyes sparkling 
 like bits of mica in a pebble and his small teeth gleam- 
 ing like a double row of barley, he looked fondly on the 
 assembly and murmured, " Dear me, I did not know 
 till to-day there wass so-o-a many books written ! " One 
 morning Mrs. Briggs and Mrs. Garden came in in the 
 very middle of one of these galas of the intellect. They 
 were kept waiting for a minute and more. There were 
 times when the Llanyglo Stores almost resembled a De- 
 bating Room. 
 
 It was left to the Misses Euonyma and Wygelia Lacey 
 to restore the balance that their father's luckless dinner-
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 193 
 
 party had disturbed; and right well they laboured to 
 that end. They brought all the resources of Brighton 
 and Paris to bear upon those two amiable but indefati- 
 gable school-teachers, the sisters Topham. They did 
 not avoid them; on the contrary, they put their heads 
 together and then went out in search of them. Then, 
 when they had met them, they asked them to tell them 
 whether it was true that the guillemot laid its blunt- 
 ended egg in order that it should not roll off ledges, 
 and whether the person who said that serviceable knife- 
 handles could be made of the stems of the Great Oar 
 Weed had been correctly informed. And when they 
 failed to come upon their unsuspecting victims, they 
 cathechised one another. 
 
 " As I was ascending the mountains the other day," 
 June would suddenly break out in the Vernal Squill's 
 raised and staccato voice, " I found myself walking 
 upon grass. What is grass? State reasons for your 
 answer." 
 
 And Wiggie, assuming the viva voce examination 
 tones of the Club Moss, would ask her sister what a man 
 was, and whether Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd could prop- 
 erly be classed as one. 
 
 Failing the turning up of those two marriageable 
 brothers, the Misses June and Wy were likely to be 
 what Mrs. Briggs called " bad to suit." 
 
 It was when the Z7opta-readers had been at the 
 " Montgomery " rather more than half their time that 
 the first bruit went abroad of the jollification that pres- 
 ently made memorable the eve of their departure. Nor 
 was this jollification to be confined to their own set. 
 All (as afterwards at the Llanyglo P.S.A. Meetings) 
 were to be welcome. The project was talked over, at 
 first informally at the Llanyglo Stores, afterwards more
 
 194 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 seriously at the " Montgomery " ; and a few days later 
 the rumour was confirmed by print. Eesaac Oliver 
 Gruffydd and Hugh Morgan distributed a number of 
 handbills, thrusting them into folk's hands in the stake- 
 and-wire-enclosed streets, pushing them under doors, 
 and even entering that Reservation on the shore where 
 the Cambrians sat stiffly, reading their novels, toying 
 with their fancy-work, or dozing after lunch. Then, on 
 the land-agents' blackboards and in the windows of the 
 Llanyglo Stores, larger bills appeared. Large bills and 
 small alike read as follows: 
 
 Llanyglo Holiday Camp, July, 18 8 Y. 
 
 THE AIGBURTH STREET AND CHOW BENT 
 
 SQUARE UNITED READING CIRCLES 
 
 beg to announce that a 
 
 GRAND POW-WOW 
 
 will be held in the Dinas, the Trwyn, Llanyglo, 
 
 on 
 Friday Evening, the 22nd, at 8.30 sharp. 
 
 BRING YOUR REFRESHMENTS! 
 BRING YOUR VOICE LOZENGES! 
 BRING YOUR MUSIC! 
 BRING YOUR LANTERNS! 
 BRING YOUR FRIENDS! 
 
 Visitors and Residents alike are Welcome! 
 Songs! ! Recitations!!! Short Speeches!!!! 
 
 LADIES SPECIALLY INVITED! 
 
 Grand Chief: Deputy Grand Chief: 
 
 BARRY TOPHAM, Esqr. HOWKLL GRTJFFYBD, Esqr. 
 
 Committee :
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 195 
 
 The Proceedings will open with the singing of 
 
 " God Save the People" 
 and will close with " Hen Wlad fy NJiadau." 
 
 EDWABD JONES, PBINTEB, POBTH NEIGB. 0616. 
 
 " Boy ! " called Raymond Briggs, as Eesaac Oliver, 
 having distributed this announcement to the occupants 
 of the Reservation, was passing on ; and Eesaac Oliver 
 turned. " Pick those papers up at once ! " Raymond 
 ordered, pointing to a litter of handbills where the 
 wavelets lapped the marge of seaweed. Then, over his 
 shoulder to Philip Lacey, who reclined almost horizon- 
 tally in the next deck-chair : " Making a mess of the 
 beach like that! Paper wherever you go; they're as 
 bad as a lot of trippers ! Can't make out what you see 
 in that fellow Topham " 
 
 Philip, who was frowning over the handbill, spoke, 
 also over his shoulder. " You going to this ? " 
 
 Raymond gave a short laugh. " Me ? " 
 
 It was almost as if he said, "I didn't ask them to 
 dinner, my dear man! I'm perfectly free to stop 
 away ! " 
 
 " Good. We'll have a game of chess, then," Philip 
 replied off-handedly. He could give Raymond pawn 
 and move. 
 
 Outside the Reservation, however, little but the Pow- 
 Wow was talked of. Howell Gruffydd had looked the 
 word up in his little English-Welsh Dictionary, and, 
 though he had failed to find it, he was none the less set- 
 up at the thought of being a Deputy Grand Cnief. But 
 he became thoughtful again when there arrived for him 
 a bundle from Barry Topham, which, on being opened, 
 was found to contain a pair of very much creased mocca-
 
 196 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 sins, a broad-striped blanket, and a head-dress of 
 feathers similar to the one the Grand Chief himself was 
 to wear. Howell had remembered Dafydd Dans. 
 Dafydd might not like him to bedeck himself thus, and 
 what Dafydd might think always mattered a great deal 
 in Llanyglo. Dafydd, his old corduroys notwithstand- 
 ing, stood for the integrity of Nationalism, and even 
 Howell, willing to be English, must be careful not to 
 be too English or, in the present case, too Indian. 
 
 But the aliens themselves showed no such reserve. 
 They had bracketed a Welsh name with an English 
 one on their handbill, had placed Hen Wlad by the side 
 of God Save the People, and been otherwise hearty ; and 
 they did not' know that even in their hospitality they 
 were a little bustling, urgent, and compelling. As for 
 differences of race, such things were presently about to 
 be abolished. So they bade Llanyglo almost boister- 
 ously welcome to its own Trwyn, and Barry Topham, 
 passing Dafydd Dans on the afternoon of the day of the 
 celebration, shouted cheerily over his shoulder, " Don't 
 forget your harp, Davis. I'm not going to call you 
 1 Dafis ' we'll make an Englishman of you before 
 we've done with you! Eight-thirty sharp. . . . Eh? 
 . . . Stuff and nonsense ! Fiddlededee ! What sort o' 
 talk's that, man alive ! Of course you're bringing your 
 harp ! " 
 
 It was on a dullish summer evening, and none too 
 warm up there, that the Montgomeryites, in threes and 
 fours and sixes, began the ascent of the Trwyn. Some 
 of them had already set match to their lanterns, though 
 the Trwyn beam was not alight yet, and they carried 
 with them more than one copy of The Scottish Students' 
 Song Book. They tried their voices as they climbed, 
 and called to one another, pointing out false easy ways
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 197 
 
 and bursting into laughter when the misdirected ones 
 had to return again; and the Trwyn sheep started up 
 from before their feet and fled, baa-ing. The refresh- 
 ments had gone on ahead, as also had the fuel for the 
 camp-fire, but no Welshmen were to be seen yet. Per- 
 haps, gruff heartiness notwithstanding, they felt that 
 they were guests who should have been hosts. Perhaps 
 they felt that here was not the urgency there had been 
 on the only other occasion when they and the Saxon had 
 rushed hurriedly and tumultuously together that 
 wild nightfall when Ned Kerr, from the roof of the 
 new Hafod Unos, had seen something out in the lair of 
 grey, and, with a cry of " Llongddrylliad ! " Celt and 
 new-comer had flung themselves into an open boat pell 
 mell. 
 
 Bu't by and by they also began to move in a body 
 slowly along the shore, sometimes over the dry, some- 
 times plodding over their own reflections in the ebb. 
 There was no pointing out false ascents to them. 
 Eesaac Oliver Gruflydd, who came first, had fetched 
 eggs too often from the Trwyn light not to know every 
 cranny of the promontory, and his father remembered 
 the building of the lighthouse. Howell had seen them, 
 as a boy, locking and dowelling the great blocks of 
 masonry, shaped each like an intricate Chinese puzzle; 
 and in thirty odd years the Light seemed to have become 
 almost as much part of the headland as the ancient 
 Dinas itself. That seemed to be the way with building. 
 Even Edward Garden's house seemed a settled thing 
 now. So, in another year or two, would the " Mont- 
 gomery," the " Cardigan," Ham-and-Egg Terrace. 
 And Howell reflected that stones meant grocery-orders. 
 But that was not all. If he must be English, but not 
 too English for Dafydd Dafis, he must still be careful
 
 198 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 to be the right sort of English. He made little out of 
 these Utopia readers. They simply came in under the 
 " Montgomery's " contract. The Briggses and Laceys 
 still provided the richer yield. Whether was the better 
 the " Montgomery," where one visitor would pres- 
 ently be creeping into a bed that his predecessor had 
 left still warm, or these more prosperous ones, who, 
 Howell knew, would presently come no more? . . . 
 Moreover, he was already feeling the pressure of outside 
 competition. Ellis, of Forth Neigr, was even now 
 quoting cutting rates for the " Cardigan's" butter and 
 cheese, and for a long time Llanyglo had had to depend 
 on outsiders for its milk. The railway, that brought 
 people, also brought their provender. .... 
 
 Oh, don't think for a moment that Howell was pros- 
 pering without giving deep thought to things ! 
 
 They gained the Dinas, where already the fire was 
 yellow and crackling, and stood smiling Good evenings, 
 as if they waited to be asked inside. 
 
 How long ago it was since the foundations of that 
 Dinas had been sprinkled with the blood of Merlin 
 how long ago it was since the Red and White Dragons 
 had contended about it, now one gaining the advan- 
 tage, now the other how long ago these things had 
 been, not even Miss Amy Topham would have dared to 
 ask June Lacey. Now it resembled a grey old heel of 
 cheese, with a little scrabbling in one corner. This 
 scrabbling was where Bert Stoy, one of the younger and 
 most indefatigable of the Readers, had hoped he might 
 find a British grave. 
 
 " We thought you'd maybe changed your minds about 
 coming," were the words with which Barry Topham 
 welcomed them. He was an Indian, but a bearded one, 
 and he bustled here and there, wanting to know where
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 199 
 
 So-and-So was, and whether this requisite or that had 
 been brought up, and seeing to this and the other. The 
 goblin shadows of eighteen or twenty of the Readers 
 danced on the ruined works, and the sky behind their 
 illumined faces was of a sad and leaden lavender hue. 
 The lanterns made little patches in the short grass; 
 matches lighted faces momentarily; and then suddenly 
 there broke out over the shoulder of the headland and 
 continued thenceforward, the Light. Red, red, white 
 red, red, white it was numbing, intolerable. It 
 dyed the clouds that seemed to sag over the earth as the 
 ceiling-sheets sagged in the cottages, and its glare was 
 not lost high overhead now, as it had been on that night 
 when the Kerrs had rested for their " nooning " in the 
 midst of their building of their Hafod. The stagger- 
 ing blaze passed not twenty feet above them, seeming 
 to stumble and trip over the cloud-folds, and driving 
 the revellers to fresh places with their backs to it. You 
 would have said that those ancient Red and White 
 Dragons had come to life again and were chasing one 
 another across the rafters of the night. 
 
 Then Barry Topham, placing himself by a jagged 
 tooth of rock, held up his hand for silence. He had mo- 
 tioned Howell Gruffydd to his side, and had pointed at 
 somebody's cap. His fingers tweaked a tuning-fork ; he 
 set the vibrating prong against his teeth ; he gave them 
 a soft note " Doh " and then : 
 
 " When wilt Thou save the people, 
 God of Mercy, whenf . . " 
 
 Then when it was finished, Barry again stood with 
 uplifted hand. Caps were put on again by such as 
 wore them. 
 
 " Not weft enough," was Barry's brief comment on
 
 200 MUSHROOM TOWK 
 
 the singing; the Welsh, unfamiliar with the air, had 
 not sung. " IsTever mind ; it might ha' been worse. 
 Now I'm just going to say a few words, and then we'll 
 make a start." 
 
 And he began. 
 
 " Well, we've been here a fortnight now, and I think 
 we've all enjoyed it. I have for one. Some of us 
 has been up these grand mountains, finding out how 
 they were made, and some of us has been improving 
 ourselves among the rocks and on the shore. Some of 
 us has botanised, and some's collected butterflies, and 
 one and all we've read the books set down for us in the 
 Syllabus. That's a job done, at all events. 
 
 " But I think we shall one and all admit that we've 
 a great deal to learn about Llanyglo yet. There'd still 
 be something to learn if we were to come here six, 
 ten, twenty times. That's the grand thing about knowl- 
 edge we need never be afraid we shall come to 
 the end of it. When we've read fifty books there's 
 always fifty more. Ay, and there'll be another fifty 
 after that. 
 
 " But we've got other things besides knowledge at 
 Llanyglo. We've got health, health to keep us going for 
 another year. And we've got friends, new friends. I 
 think we can say," here he laid his hand on Howell's 
 shoulder, " that we've all done the little bit that in us 
 lies to break down prejudices and dislikes and racial 
 differences. We've had our quarrels, us Welsh and 
 English, in the past ; no doubt there's been battles fought 
 on this very spot; but that's all over, and, speaking as 
 Grand Chief for the year, though unworthy to succeed 
 Comrade Walker, who occupied this same position last 
 year at our Holiday Camp at Keswick, I think I may 
 say we've buried the hatchet now. So in the name of
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 201 
 
 one and all I greet these friends of ours. I think it 
 does us both good to come together like this. They're a 
 bit what shall I say ? on the poetical side, perhaps ; 
 more romantic than us ; we're just plain, practical folk 
 that has to tew for our livings ; but what I mean is, it's 
 a good thing for both of us to get to understand one 
 another. We do understand one another now, and I'm 
 sure we're all very glad to see them here." (Applause, 
 and cries from the Lancashire men of " Good old 
 Wales!") "You here that, Gruffydd Comrade 
 Gruffydd? That's hearty. That's Lancashire. !Nb 
 flowers o' speech, but we say a thing and mean it. And 
 we mean it when we say we're very glad to see you in- 
 deed, and hope this won't be our last visit to Llanyglo. 
 And now I won't take up any more of your time. We've 
 a long programme before us, and I see that the first 
 
 item is " he consulted a paper in his hand, " is 
 
 the old favourite, There is a Tavern. What's the key, 
 Harry ? C ? (Doh, lah lah, te, doh ) ." 
 
 And with the singing of There is a Tavern in the 
 Town the Pow-Wow began. 
 
 Did they come to understand one another the better 
 for it ? Were they who took part in that Pow-Wow so 
 " poetical and romantic " for the one part, so blunt and 
 rough and practical for the other? Did a score or so 
 of Saxons suddenly and miraculously cease that night 
 to belong to the world's most sentimental race, and were 
 the hearts of as many Celts as miraculously changed? 
 No doubt it all seemed simple enough to Barry Topham. 
 Hard-rinded himself, but not without a generous juice 
 within, he would have found it hard to believe that 
 pulpier fruits existed, with a stone inside he would but 
 crack his teeth upon. Perhaps perhaps it was 
 not so ; and yet what, after all, can the victor do to
 
 202 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 the vanquished more than vanquish him? . . . Barry" 
 saw their smiles only, and for every smile they received 
 they gave three. The jovial Campers became ever 
 bluffer and heartier and fonder of them as song followed 
 song. Nor did the Welshmen refuse to sing. Enlight- 
 ened Young Wales, in the person of Eesaac Oliver 
 Gruffydd, was presently to be seen with his back to the 
 intolerable Trwyn beam while the Dragons of the Light 
 chased one another behind his head ; and his voice was 
 lifted up in Vale of Liang ollen. Was the song a suc- 
 cess ? It was doubly a success. The blunt and genial 
 aliens applauded him as a breaker of the ice, his com- 
 patriots applauded him as a stepper into the breach 
 from which they themselves had hung back. Hardly 
 had he sat down before he was beset with requests to 
 hum the air all over again, in order that they might take 
 it down in the Tonic Sol-fa notation. . . . Then, almost 
 immediately, the clapping swelled again, and there were 
 cries of " Harry ! Harry ! " Harry Stone, who had 
 the voice of an angel, was allowed to sing as he sat, be- 
 cause of his lameness, and he could not be seen in his 
 dim angle of masonry, but only the unhurrying but 
 unceasing red and white spokes, that strode from afar 
 over the sea, passed overhead, and were off on their wide 
 circle again. Hearing his voice and not seeing him, you 
 thought of a pure spring that gushes suddenly out of 
 the dark and grudging earth. Cannibalee, he 
 
 sang 
 
 It was poor enough stuff. Its words were a laborious 
 parody, its harmonies exactly predicable; it was 
 facetious or nothing, and it marred an original with a 
 remote and deathly grace of its own; but these things 
 were forgotten as Harry sang. To-morrow they were 
 leaving Llanyglo. To-morrow they were filing back
 
 THE HOLIDAY CAMP 203 
 
 through that postern that had given them this, their 
 fortnight's respite, from tasks too often ignoble, from 
 cramped circumstances, from savourless lives. And it 
 weighed on them, tenderly yet heavily. Next year 
 seemed so sadly, sadly far away. . . . 
 
 " Her eyes were as fair as the star of the morn 
 And her teeth were as sharp as the point of a thorn 
 She was very fair to see ! " 
 
 Harry sang ; and the hands of young men sought those 
 of young women in the blackness of the Dinas's shadows, 
 and the married ones drew a little closer together, and 
 there was no parody at all in the little soft punctuations 
 of the refrain, in which every voice joined : 
 
 " 8 he was very fair to see 
 
 (So she was!) 
 
 She was very fair to see 
 
 (So she was!) " 
 
 Edward Garden was right 
 
 " Her eyes were as fair as the star of the morn 
 And her teeth were as sharp as the point of a thorn 
 My beautiful Cannibalee " 
 
 Edward Garden was right. That tender but heavy 
 weight, so tender, so heavy that it bore down the stupid 
 expression of the song, lay even on the Welshmen too. 
 He was admirably shrewd and right. It would not be 
 yet awhile it was too early yet but presently, as 
 an advertisement for Llanyglo, an Eisteddfod an 
 Eisteddfod, say, when the holiday season began in July, 
 and a Brass Band Contest towards its close in Septem- 
 ber. . . . 
 
 They were still singing when they came down again, 
 at eleven o'clock. You might have thought, from the 
 way in which Barry Topham clung to Howell Gruffydd's
 
 204 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 arm, that he was slightly drunk, but he was not; that 
 was only brotherliness and exaltation. He still wore 
 the gala-dress of the Grand Chief, but in that particular 
 Howell thought that he had come out of his dilemma 
 rather well. The feather head-dress he had tried on 
 had proved too big for his head, and in trying to shorten 
 the band he had torn off the button, thus rendering the 
 adornment useless. As for the striped blanket about 
 his shoulders well, it was a coolish night, and there 
 is no sense in taking a chill when there is a blanket to 
 be had to keep you warm. Even Dafydd would see 
 that. So Howell had worn it. ... 
 
 And looked at from below again, the Trwyn beam 
 no longer appeared a hunt of raving red and white 
 monsters, but a little lonely thing, familiar and disre- 
 garded, old, wise, minding its own business, and mean- 
 while quietly opening and shutting an eye.
 
 n 
 
 THE GIANT'S STBIDE 
 
 AFTER that summer they began in earnest the 
 building of Llanyglo. Come and see them at it. 
 
 Whence came these stone-carts and timber-carts, these 
 girders and castings, a single one only taking up a 
 couple of trucks? Whence came these wains of floor- 
 boards with their trailing tails bobbing up and down 
 within an inch or two of the white road, these bastions 
 of metal and ballast, these crawling and earth-shaking 
 traction-engines with the little bellies and the monstrous 
 wheels and the dotted line of lorries and trollies behind 
 them? Whence these sawn planks, these massive 
 frames with machinery parts on them so heavy that 
 every rut threatens a standstill, these contractors' vans 
 with absurd little trolley-wheels, these gatlings of drain- 
 pipes, these wagons of plumbers' material, these vans 
 of provisions, this army of men? Why do these now 
 choke the roads that formerly were empty save for the 
 passing of a wain of whispering hay, or the light 
 market-cart that left a smell of raspberries and a stain 
 of Welsh song behind, or Ned Kerr with his folding hut 
 and clogging-knife, or Ynys Lovell with her packing- 
 case cart and her mother with her loops of cane seeking 
 chairs to mend ? Where did they come from, and what 
 are they doing here ? 
 
 The stone, of course, comes from the Forth Neigr 
 
 quarry, where the blasts shake the rocks and the shoot- 
 
 205
 
 206 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 ing of waste resounds throughout the day. And the 
 castings come from Manchester and Middlesborough and 
 Wigan and Leeds. And the sawn planks come from 
 Russia and the Baltic, and the larches for scaffolding 
 from the Merionethshire valleys. These things come 
 from these places if you look at it that way. But 
 look at it the other way and they have an origin mystical 
 indeed. They are conceived of fecund nods and looks, 
 of the germination of writing and initials and signatures 
 and contract-stamps. They are born of print and pro- 
 motion and allotment, and the cord is cut when sums 
 are paid on application, and more in three months' time. 
 They thrive when Chairmen, standing up on platforms, 
 say " the adoption of the Accounts has been moved and 
 
 seconded ," and become lusty when more clerks 
 
 have to be called in, and temporary premises have to be 
 taken, to cope with the public rush for the splendid 
 thing. You see their real origin on those blackboards 
 that seem to set Llanyglo its new multiplication sum, 
 and in those paragraphs in the Manchester and Liverpool 
 and London papers. You see it again when the new 
 Local Government Bill receives the Eoyal Assent. You 
 see it once more when from the machines of printers in 
 Nottingham and Harrow and Frome and Belfast there 
 are turned out the posters that already overspread the 
 northern hoardings, bidding Blackpool look to itself, 
 warning Douglas that it has another competitor, elbow- 
 ing Bridlington, shoving Yarmouth aside. There are 
 half a dozen of these posters out already, and if they are 
 not strictly speaking representations of Llanyglo, they 
 are something more they are prophecies, which you 
 will do well to heed if you want to put your money on a 
 good thing. There is one in Lime Street Station, Liver- 
 pool (you need not glance at that upper window ; you'd
 
 THE GIANT'S STRIDE 207 
 
 have a job to find poor Terry Armfield's Trwyn Avenue 
 now). It is the "Welsh Giantess" one. She is 
 dressed in a black steeple hat with a white hood under- 
 neath it, red check shawl, striped petticoat, and has 
 buckles on her shoes. She holds the town in a three- 
 quarter circle in her arms, with children at play on the 
 sands and super-Briggses and super-Laceys all spilling 
 out in the foreground. The mountains are indigo, the 
 hotels pink, the sands chrome yellow, and the name 
 LLANYGLO sprawls across the sky as if the Trwyn 
 Light had dropped it there in passing, a letter at a 
 time. . . . The poster, of course, is a little grandiose: 
 nobody cries stinking fish. The Pier, for example, isn't 
 there yet. But it is somewhere, in somebody's desk- 
 drawer, perhaps, or perhaps it has even got farther than 
 that. Perhaps the caissons are already on the way; 
 certainly a group of strangers has been busy on the shore 
 any time this past twelve months. And the Promenade 
 isn't ex-act-\y like that yet. It has railings not unlike 
 those, but not yet that fine stretch of impregnable sea- 
 wall. And so with the hotels. . . . But all in good 
 time. These things will all be ready quite as soon as 
 those posters have sunk into the perception of the public. 
 We mustn't have a completely equipped town standing 
 empty for a number of seasons while folk make up their 
 minds whether they'll come or not. We have the money, 
 the men, powers under the new Act ample as our hearts 
 could wish, and the certainty of the coming reward. 
 
 Llanyglo itself found it difficult to realise what was 
 happening. It all came in such strides. Where the 
 stake-and-wire-enclosed roads had been, a giant hoard- 
 ing would rise, twenty, forty, fifty yards long. On this- 
 hoarding, by means of the railway posters, Llanyglo 
 would be told all about itself its climate, its mild
 
 208 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 winters, its accessibility from all parts, and its " un- 
 rivalled attractions." It read Gilbert Smythe's signa- 
 ture there. And among these were other bills curiously 
 opposite, which told them that if they in their turn 
 needed change, there were week-end tickets to be had to 
 Liverpool and Belle Vue at specially reduced rates. 
 And while Llanyglo knew, as month succeeded month, 
 that work was going on behind these hoardings, the effect 
 was none the less magical when, on the day they were 
 knocked to pieces again, the astounding frontage ap- 
 peared. They had known nothing like it since that piece 
 of witchcraft of the Kerrs, and now several times they 
 had seen it happen. It had happened between the 
 " Cambrian " and " Cardigan " hotels. It had happened 
 at Pritchard's Corner. And now it was about to happen 
 again, along a line that ran from a point just below the 
 Kerrs' Hafod to the piece of land, not built on yet, 
 where for three days one Spring a circus was set up, 
 its cages and caravans and the guy-ropes of its tenting 
 all mingled with the timber-stacks and mortar-engines 
 and breastworks of stone setts and other dumpings of 
 a dozen different contractors. Later, a temporary 
 wooden shed occupied this space. This shed was town- 
 hall, concert-hall, general purposes hall, and theatre 
 thrown into one. That was the time Llanyglo began 
 to discover that if one of its inhabitants wished to 
 meet another he had better appoint a time and place 
 to do so. To climb up the nearest sandhill and take a 
 look round no longer served. 
 
 And even these amazing unfoldings were as nothing 
 compared with that which (it was already known) was 
 to happen next the construction of the sea-wall and 
 the Pier. 
 
 Philip Lacey's Moral Valley was already finished.
 
 THE GIANT'S STEIDE 209 
 
 Its gravelled walks, with steps every few yards, 
 straggled up both sides of the ravine in the side of the 
 Trwyn, and from the topmost of these you could look 
 down on the octagonal roof of the bandstand that occu- 
 pied the levelled plot in the middle. Sticking (as it 
 were) the point of his compasses into the bandstand, 
 Philip had described successions of eighth and quarter- 
 circles, with radiating paths and variously shaped 
 smaller beds in between; and of these he had made a 
 piece of crewel-work of colour. Golden feather and 
 London pride, lobelia and pinks and bachelors'-buttons, 
 formed the borders; behind them, in ovals and stars 
 and crown-shapes and monograms, mignonette and 
 arabis and dwarf pansies and Virginia stock were set; 
 and so he had brushed-and-combed and curled and 
 scented the whole place. He had staked his profes- 
 sional reputation, too, that from the first crocus to the 
 last Michaelmas daisy, the gaudy Catherine-wheel 
 would never be for a single day out of bloom ; and then 
 he had departed, leaving the responsibility of upkeep to 
 the delighted town. John Willie Garden, looking at 
 the Valley's logical plan, wished that the town itself 
 had had as fair, if severe, a start. 
 
 For John Willie was Clerk of the Works now in a 
 very different sense from that in which he had had 
 charge of the coming of Railhead. He was now nine- 
 teen, and had no longer any wish to go into the business 
 in Manchester. His father, noting his tastes and 
 capacity, had judged it perfectly safe to depart, leaving 
 John Willie to look after things in his stead ; and as no 
 contractor's foreman wished to quarrel with the son of 
 the principal maker of the place, he had a fairly large 
 authority. So John Willie occupied the house by the 
 shore, with Minetta to make him comfortable. He
 
 210 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 spent his days in passing from this building to that, 
 pushing at doors in hoardings marked " No Admit- 
 tance," threading his way along the wheeling-planks, 
 mounting ladders, looking down on the swarming men 
 from the stagings, looking up through the groves of the 
 scaffold-poles, looking out, not over the sandhills now, 
 but over other houses built and building. The masts 
 and spars of other scaffold-poles here and there might 
 almost have made you think that a navigable river 
 twisted through Llanyglo, and that these were the rig- 
 ging of the vessels upon it. From one work to another 
 he passed, approving, questioning, telephoning, making 
 notes. There is scarce a room of that period of Llany- 
 glo's up-springing but, even to-day, John Willie Garden 
 can tell you the lie of its water-pipes, where its main- 
 cocks are, where its drains, its gas-connections, the depth 
 of its foundations, the branchings of its chimney-flues. 
 He hasn't been into half of them since, but the present 
 occupiers can tell him nothing about which cellars are 
 on the rock and when the girders are due to be repainted. 
 And he could talk to the men as well as to their bosses. 
 He addressed them authoritatively, but he knew their 
 football and their drinking, their jokes and songs, which 
 dog belonged to which and which among them 
 " subbed " or " liened " before his wage was due. 
 John Willie Garden's boyhood lay behind him now. 
 
 What was John Willie like to look at by this time, 
 and what was his outlook on the world ? 
 
 You may meet his kind at six o'clock any morning, 
 the sons of Alderman This or Sir John That, going to 
 their fathers' engineering-shops in Leeds, or to Man- 
 chester spinning-sheds, or Rochdale factories, or dye- 
 works, or rolling-mills, or drawing-offices, or electrical 
 works. They wear greasy blue overalls and carry tin
 
 THE GIANT'S STRIDE 211 
 
 luncheon-cans, and use cotton-waste for handkerchiefs. 
 They glory in the readiness of their repartee to their 
 fathers' workmen, to be mistaken for one of whom 
 gives them the keenest pleasure. Joyously they attack 
 the blackest and greasiest of the work, honestly forget- 
 ting that they could leave this to others if they wished. 
 But see them in the evening! They have had tea 
 and a " clean-up " by this time. Their heads have been 
 soused and their hands pumiced, they have on their 
 mahogany boots and their white collars, the hands that 
 wielded crowbars or strained with the grip of spanners 
 ply thin and expensive canes now, and you can see the 
 radiance of their approach a quarter of a mile away. 
 They are off to billiard-rooms and card-parties, theatre- 
 boxes, or courting. They will be home fairly early, 
 because of the five-o'clock alarum in the morning, but 
 until then they are so evidently about to enjoy them- 
 selves that you sigh if you are unable to join them. Go 
 one night and watch them when next the Pantomime 
 comes. Sit in the second row of the stalls (you won't 
 be able to get into the first row). If the leading lady 
 is pretty, and John Willie and Percy Briggs are there, 
 you won't consider your evening wasted. The show is 
 sure to " go." 
 
 That, more or less, was John Willie. He had rather 
 a lot of money to spend, but nowhere much to spend it 
 yet. His hair was a little less primrose coloured than 
 it had been (pomatum does darken hair a little), but his 
 eyes had not altered. They were still just as receptive 
 or just as stupid as he cared to make them, blue as flax, 
 and capable, if you happened to catch him at something 
 he did not wish to be caught at, of a rather hard and 
 prolonged stare. He was not tall long ago it had 
 been plain he would not be but, looking at his
 
 212 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 shoulders, hung as it were from an apex at the back of 
 his head, you would have wondered at the lightness of 
 the pit-pat of his feet when he did a step-dance on the 
 occasion of one of the men's " birthdays " (which have 
 nothing to do with days of birth, by the way, but fre- 
 quently much to do with an unfancied horse and a long- 
 ish price). In a word, he was a nicish, powerful young 
 rascal, with an expensive dressing-case and a trace of 
 those Lancashire final " g's " ; and he and his friends 
 (of whom he had a good many down to Llanyglo) had 
 their own corner in the " Cambrian " lounge, unless the 
 evening's programme included cards or involved the use 
 of a room with a piano in it. 
 
 Yet, though the Llanyglo air might thrill with the 
 clink-clink of chisels on stone, and vibrate with the 
 jolting of the builders' carts, and resound with all the 
 noises of the swift building, still, nobody who now 
 came thought it ruined. On the contrary, exactly as 
 the Briggses and the Laceys had predicted, it came to 
 them with shocks of delight. For think of it : here was 
 no twopenny ride on a clanging tram through naked, 
 unshaded streets before they could reach the sea. Here 
 was no two-miles plod back again over the burning 
 asphalt, slackening every nerve that had been braced 
 up by the bathe. Here was no Brighton nor Scar- 
 borough nor Blackpool yet, with nettings of electric 
 wires overhead and perspective of rails below. No: 
 from any part of the place, three minutes would take 
 you, if not in every case to the beach itself, at any rate 
 to an open space of thyme and harebells and hillocks of 
 clean sand, where, if you got on the right side of the 
 sandhill, you might not know that there was a crane or 
 a scaffold within miles. And if the beach was ploughed
 
 THE GIANT'S STEIDE 213 
 
 and harrowed and tramped and trodden until it re- 
 sembled a dirty batter-pudding, half a day and a tide, 
 and the sands were smooth and shining again, and the 
 wet stretches seemed as much sky as land, and passing 
 birds were reflected in their depths. The sea tidied 
 up the shore again as the housemaids took up the crumbs 
 from the hotel carpets. And there were dozens of 
 boats now, in which you could push out a few hundred 
 yards and find yourself in spots that man can never 
 sully. Five minutes' tugging at the oars and you could 
 rock and gaze up at the sky, or look over the boat's side 
 at the translucent green reflection of its curving boards 
 below, and past that into glassy clear depths, and so 
 past that again to where the water began to show you, 
 not its depths, but the broken mirroring of the sky 
 again. The boating was one of the " unrivalled at- 
 tractions." By nine o'clock every morning a row of 
 boatmen leaned against the railings between the 
 " Cambrian " and the jetty, smoking, scanning the 
 front, showing you fresh bait, and offering boats by 
 the hour, the morning, or the day. Foremost among 
 them, as likely as not, would be Tommy, the youngest 
 of the Kerrs. He wore a blue gausey with a diamond 
 woven across the breast, touched the peak of his dirty 
 old petty-officer's cap constantly, and told folk it was 
 ".a gradely morning for fishing." Though the young- 
 est, he was the least reputable of the Kerrs. Ned, the 
 eldest, Llanyglo counted part of itself; the two middle 
 ones were both contractors' foremen, and respected cit- 
 izens ; but Tommy had become the scandal of Llanyglo. 
 You were well advised to allow him double time or more 
 if you gave him a bag to carry anywhere and there was 
 the temptation of beer on the way ; and you might catch
 
 214 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 him sober if you engaged him and his boat soon after 
 breakfast, but your chance of doing so became ever less 
 as the day wore on. 
 
 Who were these people who strolled among the 
 droning bees of the sandhills or pushed out from the 
 shore in boats? Well, they were of more kinds than 
 one or two now. The charges at the " Cambrian " 
 were still stiffish; a week there cost as much as a fort- 
 night at the " Cardigan," or a month at the " Montgom- 
 ery " ; and so we still exhibit the social degrees. There 
 has even been a certain amount of " feeling " about this. 
 Of two Rochdale men, say, with little to choose between 
 them in point of income, one will be seen on the " Cam- 
 brian's " balcony in the evening after dinner, his 
 heart-shaped dinner-shirt one of a number of heart- 
 shaped dinner-shirts, the bosom and neck and head of 
 the lady he is chatting with rising out of her lacy 
 corsage as a bouquet rises from the paper frill that 
 encloses and bedecks it. He will be seen there, with 
 the red-shaded lamps of the empty dining-room behind 
 him and the moonlight making his sunburnt face very 
 dark. But the other's face is sunburnt too, and at 
 half the cost. He too could attitudinise like this were 
 he so minded. And he reflects that Jones or Jackson 
 may cut a dash among strangers, but he mustn't try 
 it on with people who know him at home. As for him- 
 self, he's thankful to say that he's just the same 
 wherever he is, at home or away on a holiday. . . . 
 
 In fact Jones or Jackson is precisely the man Ed- 
 ward Garden more than half expected the man who 
 can't quite afford it, but will. . . . But this, it is 
 hardly necessary to observe, is to take the " Cambrian " 
 at less than its average and the " Cardigan " at rather 
 more.
 
 THE GIANT'S STEIDE 215 
 
 The " Montgomery " is actually outclassed by the 
 better " Private Hotels " and one or two of the superior 
 " Boarding Establishments." Indeed, of these last the 
 " Cadwallader " almost ranks with the " Cambrian " 
 itself. And so we come by degrees down to Ham-and- 
 Egg Terrace. But enough of these nuances of differ- 
 ence of a fortnight's duration. Who, taken by-and- 
 large, are these people, and where do they come from ? 
 
 You have only to ask yourself, " Who else should 
 they be ? " and your question is half answered. Re- 
 member the smallness of these Islands, and the scores 
 of pulsing, radiating, almost radio-active centres within 
 them, every one swarming with folk who intend to have 
 a better time than their fathers have had. Could the 
 East Coast be pushed out beyond the North Sea, and 
 Lancashire be stretched until it took in Galway, St. 
 George's Channel and all, there might be room enough 
 on England's shores for every parliamentary voter to 
 have a few acres of Trwyn foreshore of his own and a 
 black cow walking up and down them, seeking coolness 
 and food hock-deep in the glistening ebb ; but, as things 
 are, the littoral is by much too small. True, scores and 
 fifties of miles of it remain practically unvisited; but 
 no snail has snuffled out its manganese there, and they 
 are not within a few hours and a thirty-shilling circular 
 fare of the human ant-heaps of the land, where King's 
 Ransoms of Holiday Club money are put by. There 
 was no wonder about the growth of Llanyglo. Geo- 
 graphically situated as it was, the marvel would have 
 been had it not grown. With a few posters and similar 
 devices to advertise it, it would presently continue to 
 advertise itself. 
 
 Therefore the folk who flocked there were of every 
 kind, short of the grey and overwhelming multitude itself.
 
 216 MUSHEOOM TOWN 
 
 Because it was only partly built, because it had not yet 
 shaken down to a definite character and physiognomy 
 and personality, it spread its net the wider. Did you 
 want to dress for dinner, and to have your luggage car- 
 ried by a man in a red jacket ? There was the " Cam- 
 brian." Did you want everything that the Cambrians 
 had, barring only the luxury of being seen lounging in 
 one of the wicker-chairs about its portals, and still to 
 keep your money in your pocket ? There was the " Car- 
 digan." Did you want to read or to idle, to botanise 
 or merely to forget your cares for a fortnight, to picnic 
 up the Trwyn or to have your meals in bed? They 
 asked no questions at the " Montgomery." From Philip 
 Lacey's piece of Floral Geometry to the nooks on the 
 farther side of the Trwyn where you could spend a whole 
 morning undisturbed, there was something for every 
 taste. And they actually had to turn people away who 
 had been so ill-advised as to come with their luggage 
 without having first secured their lodging. 
 
 And now it had come to this : that while these came 
 to Llanyglo for a change of air, John Willie Garden, who 
 spent his days among lime and mortar and wheeling- 
 planks and newly dressed stone, frequently turned his 
 back on Llanyglo for precisely the same reason. Once 
 a week or so he was seen to drive past Pritchard's Cor- 
 ner in a light yellow trap at nine o'clock in the morning. 
 He was off to see to another of his father's interests 
 that " catchment area " far away up in the mountains. 
 He drove eight miles, put up at an inn past which a 
 trout-stream brawled (hardly yet settled from its pre- 
 cipitous plunging cataracts), and then set out on foot 
 up a road that rose one-in-five under a whispering wood, 
 to see the skyline of which you had to throw your head 
 back. It took him an hour of walking to get to his desti-
 
 THE GIANT'S STRIDE 217 
 
 nation a solitary wooden cabin where the agent lived. 
 The agent had on the whole an easy time of it, for hardly 
 a hundred yards from his cabin door, above the woods 
 now, lay Llyn Delyn, pure looking-glass in the mile long 
 crook of the mountain. An old boat was moored among 
 the sedges at one end, the launching of which on the un- 
 broken surface of that lovely water always seemed to 
 invoke vague judgments, penalties perhaps forborne, but 
 none the less incurred. Here the agent, whose name was 
 Sharpe, fished. John Willie fished with him. Fishing 
 was a good enough way of passing the time, for they 
 were not really doing anything up there. They were 
 merely waiting -waiting for more people to come to 
 Llanyglo, for the Town Hall to rise, for the seat of local 
 administration to be shifted from Forth Neigr, and then 
 for the Waterworks Scheme. They had the water as 
 fast as prevision and Law could make it. They would 
 not drive too hard a bargain with the town. In the 
 meantime they fished, speaking little, noting whether it 
 was the gnat or the cochybondhu that killed, casting so 
 lightly that the boat scarcely rocked. Sometimes, when 
 the amber evening light was clear behind them, so im- 
 peccable was the profound mirror below that, while their 
 tweed-clad forms could hardly be distinguished from the 
 hues of the mountain behind, the upside-down shapes 
 beneath them were sharp and dark as the silhouettes in 
 your grandmother's little oval frames.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE BLAJSTK: j 
 
 DEATH took a hand that winter in Llanyglo's 
 making. They were getting well up with the 
 Town Hall, in what is now Gardd Street ; still the flag 
 floated at the polehead, in token that they had got thus 
 far without serious mishap ; and then it had to be run 
 down to the half-mast. It was a common scaffold acci- 
 dent. Harry Kerr, on one of the upper stages, stepped 
 back upon empty air ; Sam sprang forward to save him ; 
 and they picked them both up from among the debris 
 below. A few remembered the launching of that open 
 boat on that wild night seven years before, and said that 
 it seemed out of nature that these comparatively young 
 men should go off before ancient Mrs. Pritchard; and 
 Mrs. Pritchard herself baa-ed, and said that there would 
 be more room now in the Hafod Unos whatever. But 
 most of the residents were new-comers now, who knew 
 more of Tommy Kerr's present delinquencies than of 
 the history of his brothers, and they could hardly be 
 expected to grieve. They buried them both at Sarn, 
 under the shadow of that pepper-caster of a fifteenth- 
 century church tower, and the problem of however the 
 Hafod had held them all became a thing of the past. 
 
 The Town Hall was the outward and visible sign that 
 Llanyglo had not only caught up with Porth Neigr, but 
 had outstripped it. It had special conveniences for a 
 
 centre of administration, which it forthwith became; 
 
 218
 
 THE BLANK CHEQUE 219 
 
 and at the election that Autumn Howell Gruffydd was 
 made a Councillor. He had two branch shops now, one 
 at Forth ]STeigr and the other at Sarn, and to his news- 
 paper counter he had added a Library of books bought 
 at Mudies' clearance sales. He charged fourpence a 
 week for the loan of each book, which was twopence 
 more than the old stationer's library at Forth ISTeigr had 
 charged; but there was the railway-fare to take into 
 account if you considered the charge extortionate. 
 Later, a good deal later, when the picture postcard was 
 invented, Howell did rather well out of that too. He 
 praised your amateur snapshot of the Trwyn or the 
 Promenade of the fagade of the Town Hall, and made 
 you what no doubt seemed to him a fair offer ; namely to 
 give you a dozen prints in exchange for your film. He 
 then proceeded to fill a revolving stand with other 
 prints, which he sold at seven for sixpence, or, highly 
 glazed, at twopence apiece. With pennies and two- 
 pences accumulated in this and similar ways he bought 
 certain house-property behind Ham-andEgg Terrace, 
 paying a ground-rent to Edward Garden. He had by 
 this time acquired a little personal habit of Mr. Tudor 
 Williams's the habit of shaking hands with one hand, 
 while the other affectionately kneaded and patted his 
 interlocutor's right arm from the wrist up to the 
 shoulder. 
 
 Hitherto the developments of Llanyglo had lain in a 
 few hands only the hands of Edward Garden and his 
 shareholders, of one or two others who had forgotten 
 they had a holding in Terry Armfield's Thelema, but 
 remember it now with joy and thanksgiving, of Mr. 
 Tudor Williams, and of not very many more. But now 
 a more ponderous machine began to rumble into motion. 
 This was the machine of which the Railway Companies
 
 220 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 and a couple of Pleasure Packet Services were the visible 
 active parts. Rumours now began to fly about of de- 
 velopments long since planned and now imminent, 
 developments astounding and gigantic. These rumours 
 began with hotels. Hitherto the " Cambrian " had 
 been thought to be rather more than so-so, but of course 
 nobody would have dreamed of comparing it with the 
 " Grands " and " Majesties " which " Lancashire 
 Hotels, Limited " possessed in the great centres of the 
 ITorth. These had half a dozen tennis-courts in front, 
 palm-courts and winter-gardens behind, and five and six 
 and seven hundred bedrooms. But now the rumour ran 
 that, not one of these, but two, owned by opposing Syndi- 
 cates, were to be set up in Llanyglo. The sites on which 
 they were to be built varied according to the version of 
 the tale. Some said that the " Montgomery " was to be 
 pulled down again, some that the whole row of fisher- 
 men's cottages was to be demolished, some that a terrace 
 was to be dug out of the side of the Trwyn itself and a 
 funicular railway constructed. However it might be, it 
 was known that there were prolonged meetings of the 
 Council about it, and that at one point the whole thing, 
 whatever it might be, seemed likely to fall through. 
 And that, as they now knew, would be their death-blow. 
 They would do anything, anything rather than that these 
 immense reservoirs of capital, already partly opened, 
 should be shut up again. They would hold out the town 
 itself as security, a twopenny rate, promises, accommo- 
 dations, anything. It was said that Sheard, the Porth 
 Neigr solicitor, who had moved to new premises opposite 
 the Llanyglo Town Hall, sat up five nights in the week, 
 making actuarial calculations, estimating yields, meas- 
 uring margins, and balancing all with the possibility of 
 the town's bankruptcy. Edward Garden was once more
 
 THE BLANK CHEQUE 221 
 
 at Llanyglo, and closeted frequently with Mr. Tudor 
 Williams and Howell Gruffydd. . . . Even the two 
 projected hotels were not much more than a detail as 
 matters now stood; the whole town must now be given 
 a tremendous upward heave or collapse with a crash. 
 Even those hotels could go up now only on one condi- 
 tion namely, that the base of the visiting population, 
 that foundation of which innumerable units are the 
 strength, should at once be immensely broadened. Eor 
 every individual who could afford to put up at a palace, 
 they must rake in scores, hundreds of people who could 
 not. The real foundation of the hotels must be row on 
 row, acre on acre, of Ham-and-Egg Terraces. For the 
 rest, a place that must live through the year on the 
 takings of three months must be big, as those places of 
 entertainment must be big that are full on Saturdays 
 only and empty during the rest of the week. Nothing 
 smaller would tempt the Railway Companies. (This, 
 by the way, was not altogether good news for Raymond 
 Briggs. Architecture is not needed for that broadened 
 base. Any working master-builder can run up houses 
 that are good enough. The pattern of one is the pattern 
 of all, and Raymond would have small chance in compe- 
 tition with the bigger men of his profession.) 
 
 Nor would it suffice merely to house and feed the 
 people who came. Other watering-places were awake 
 to the new menace now, so that the rival announce- 
 ments on the hoardings resembled a desperate grapple 
 for the possession of those sixpences and shillings and 
 half-crowns that were poured without ceasing into the 
 coffers of the Holiday Clubs. Not one in five hundred 
 of those who contributed those shillings and half-crowns 
 stopped to think that Wales herself has no Holiday Clubs 
 that Wales does not go abroad with a year's savings
 
 222 MUSHEOOM TOWN 
 
 in her pocket of which it is black shame to bring as much 
 as a single penny back again. They wanted amusement. 
 The Resort or Spa that could provide the most amuse- 
 ment would get the lion's share. Amusements were a 
 more urgent necessity than chairs and tables and roofs. 
 
 So it was that, between this place and that, the 
 people who intended to have a better time than their 
 fathers had had were in some danger of being pampered. 
 
 The project for the Llanyglo Big Wheel was set 
 a-going. 
 
 The promise that Howell Gruffydd had made behind 
 his hand to John Pritchard had already begun to be 
 redeemed. The Town Hall was not three months old 
 before a Grand Bazaar was held there in aid of the 
 Llanyglo Joint Chapels. On the first of the four days 
 during which the Bazaar lasted the proceedings were 
 opened by Tudor Williams, Esquire, M.P. On the 
 second day they were opened by Edward Garden, 
 Esquire. On the third Mrs. Howell Gruffydd opened 
 them, in heliotrope satin; and on the fourth day Ray- 
 mond Briggs, Esquire, who scented Chapel-building in 
 the air, performed the ceremony. Raymond guessed 
 that at least three new Chapels were certain presently 
 to go up in the stead of those buildings of tin and boards 
 and sickly blue paint that had so outraged Terry Arm- 
 field's Oxford Movement susceptibilities. As a matter 
 of fact, five went up, and have debts on them to this day, 
 in spite of the long series of Bazaars, two a season at 
 least, at which the Saxon veins were opened. . . . For 
 the money poured in. It rained into the square collect- 
 ing-sheets that were placed at intervals along all the 
 principal streets. It clattered into the slots of the 
 wooden boxes that were rattled under the nose of the 
 passer-by. It was minted in the Bran Tubs from which,
 
 THE BLANK CHEQUE 223 
 
 paying your threepence, you drew forth a penny toy. 
 It multiplied with every flower Miss Nancy Pritchard, 
 with twenty other young women in Welsh national cos- 
 tume, sold. It made heavy the pockets of the stall- 
 holders, who had never any change. It made little 
 cylinders of silver and copper, three and four and five 
 inches high, on the tables folk had to pass before they 
 were admitted to the Concerts. . . . Believe it, the 
 Chapel-goers of Llanyglo, seeing all that money to be 
 had for little more than the asking, opened their eyes, 
 and sat up, and took notice. If this was the Saxon 
 invasion, why had they not welcomed it long ago ? A 
 few bales of hired bunting, a few pounds for evergreens 
 and velvet banners with texts on them, a few paid assist- 
 ants and a not unreasonable printers' bill, and these 
 splendid results! 
 
 As big as John Pritchard himself said, putting on 
 his spectacles to see whether the astonishing total could 
 really be true, " They must be very rit-ss, whatever ! " 
 
 But the Bazaars had not this golden harvest to them- 
 selves. They found competition, which they a little 
 resented. Secular amusements more than held their 
 own. Gigantic castings had begun to arrive for the 
 Big Wheel; under the booth-awnings of Gardd Street 
 (recently christened) penny articles could be had for 
 a penny; and a long row of automatic machines 
 Wheels of Fortune, little iron men who kicked footballs, 
 Sibyls of Fate and Try-your-Grip machines had 
 sprung up along the railings of the sea-front. A few 
 stage-gipsies with green parrakeets had made the town 
 their summer home. There was a rifle-range on the 
 farther sandhills you could hear the " plunk " of the 
 bullets on the iron targets. Near it was a travelling 
 Herry-go-Kound. Photographers had their " pitches "
 
 224 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 on the sands, with humourous canvas flats with oval 
 holes in them, through which you put your face, so that 
 you could have your portrait taken as " E e Won't be 
 Happy till He Gets It " or in the act of embracing a two- 
 dimensional young woman, whichever was to your 
 liking. And there were niggers. These danced and 
 sang and played the banjo on a raised platform, dressed 
 in wide turned-down schoolboy collars and pink striped 
 trousers; the concentric rings of green chairs about 
 them resembled the spread of a large symmetrical 
 thistle plant; and outside this ring one or other of the 
 troupe constantly moved, shaking a sort of jellybag 
 under your nose (as the Chapel-goers had shaken the 
 collecting-boxes) and blinking the pink lids in his burnt- 
 cork face. A little farther on was the men's bathing- 
 place. They had wooden machines now, into which 
 youths entered four at a time no more the trim and 
 private striped tents of the Laceys and the Raymond 
 Briggses. The ladies' bathing-place was farther on 
 still a boat stood off between the two lest the sexes 
 should not keep their distance. And a hundred yards 
 past that, beyond a great scabrous groyne of loose stone, 
 clay-coloured at the shore end but slimy with green as it 
 ran down to the sea, with red flags and notice-boards 
 along the top and a moveable rope-barrier at its base 
 where two men walked on sentry-go, they were at work 
 upon the Pier. 
 
 By this time there was one question which, more 
 than others, was beginning to disturb Llanyglo. This 
 was the question of drink. In the old days, when the 
 old brown horse who had walked as carefully as if he 
 had had a spirit-level inside him had first brought the 
 Gardens and their luggage so softly over the sandhills, 
 there had been no inn nearer than Forth Neigr. Save
 
 THE BLANK CHEQUE 225 
 
 on market-days, scarce a drop of alcohol passed a Llany- 
 glo man's lips from year's end to year's end. If John 
 Pritchard had preached occasionally against drunken- 
 ness, it had been conventionally only, with little more 
 bearing on Llanyglo's own habits than if he had preached 
 against cannibalism. Then Railhead had crawled 
 across the land ; Howell Gruffydd had found it necessary 
 to warn the young against contamination ; and with the 
 building of the " Cambrian " had come Llanyglo's first 
 licence. 
 
 But for long enough after that there had been no 
 public-houses. The travelling army of labourers had 
 had their own canteens, and even when a necessary beer- 
 licence or two had been applied for at Sessions, the appli- 
 cations had been granted as it were behind the hand, and 
 the affair had been got over as quickly as possible. No : 
 Tommy Kerr's unconscious soft carolling of Glan 
 Meddwdod Mwyn as he had crossed the sandhills on 
 that torrid Sunday afternoon had held no real personal 
 reproach for Llanyglo. For Forth Neigr, perhaps yes ; 
 for other places, yes ; but not for Llanyglo. 
 
 But since then things had changed. Things had 
 changed since they had been able to tell themselves that 
 what went on in the " Cambrian " lounge was no con- 
 cern of theirs. They had begun to change when Llany- 
 glo had been no longer able to shut its eyes to the beer- 
 drinking of the navvies and bricklayers and the brothers 
 Kerr. Then for a time a convenient connection had 
 been established between drunkenness and rough 
 trousers tied about the knees with string. For cases 
 such as these, the little Station at the extreme end of 
 Gardd Street, with " Police " over the door and gerani- 
 ums in the windows, had ample powers. The half-dozen 
 constables must exercise discretion, that was all.
 
 226 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 But it became a not uncommon sight to see a tipsy 
 reveller singing himself unsteadily home on one side of 
 the street, while the officer, watching him from the other 
 side, stood questioning his discretion until the delin- 
 quent had passed out of sight. For a time Tommy 
 Kerr, who had been twice run in, had served as a scape- 
 goat, but that was little permanent help. It began to be 
 seen that the real problem was, that if they would get 
 folk with money to spend into the town, they must accept 
 these folk, within reason, as they were, tipplers and 
 teetotalers alike. For some reason or other, convivial 
 drinking also seemed to come under the head of amuse- 
 ments. Blackpool provided liquor; Douglas was in an 
 exceptional position for the provision of liquor; and 
 more and more it appeared that Llanyglo must open the 
 Bazaar doors with one hand and the doors of inns and 
 taverns with the other. 
 
 Meanwhile, the " Lancashire Rose," on one side of 
 Gardd Street, and the " Trafford " on the other, were 
 quickly becoming notorious. These were both fully 
 licenced houses, with Tap and Saloon entrances, and it 
 was idle to pretend to think that all the scandal origi- 
 nated in the humbler compartments. Heady young men 
 with full pockets, respectable fathers of families, and 
 others whom they could by no means lock up as they 
 could lock up Tommy Kerr, went into these places in 
 broad daylight, sometimes coming out again obviously 
 affected: and it was almost certain that not all their 
 stomachs were so innocent and unaccustomed that a 
 single glass of the poison had produced this result. 
 Dolefully they wished that a sober Lancashire would 
 come to Llanyglo ; but a Lancashire of some sort they 
 must have. Why else were they doing all they could
 
 THE BLANK CHEQUE 227 
 
 to win its favour ? What else was their Big Wheel for, 
 of which four mammoth standards of plate and lattice- 
 girder had already risen thirty feet above the sandhills, 
 where they were stepped and anchored into the oldest 
 rocks of earth? Why else were they toiling day and 
 night at their Pier, and at the building, section by sec- 
 tion, of the sea-wall? Why else were they setting up 
 gasometers beyond Pritchard's, and discussing a Sewage 
 Scheme, and most urgent of all gnawing their 
 fingers anxiously until some arrangement should be 
 come to with Edward Garden's lawyers about that 
 water far away up Delyn ? The supply was becoming 
 terrifyingly insufficient. For want of mere water the 
 growth of the town might come to a stop as plants 
 shrivel and fall again in an arid bed. . . . And, save to 
 get Lancashire folk there, drunk or sober, why did they 
 solemnly discuss this inanity of an amusement or that 
 Big Wheels and Switchbacks, Scenic Railways, Tobog- 
 gan Slides, Panoramas, Fat Women, Dancing Halls, 
 Floral Valleys and Concerts and Town Bands ? There 
 was no going back now. They had spent money that 
 they would never, never see again if they persisted in 
 being visionaries in business and irreconcilables on mere 
 minor points of demeanour. . . . 
 
 " They spend more when they are . . . like that," 
 said Howell Gruffydd one day to the Council assembled. 
 He said it a little shamefacedly, his fingers fiddling with 
 the green cloth of the Council-table. 
 
 Nobody spoke. 
 
 "I saw a man," Howell continued, " a re- 
 spectable man, with good clothes on his back and a new 
 hat, all spoiled it was a pity to see it I saw him 
 knock over row of bot-tles at John Parry's in Gardd
 
 228 MUSHKOOM TOWN 
 
 Street, just for amusement, and lie laugh, and say ' How 
 mut-ss ? ' like it wass noth-thing, he was so-a 
 
 " It is a pit-ty they make such a noise sometimes," 
 somebody said, in a curiously aggrieved voice. . . . 
 
 Evan Pugh, the landlord of the " Trafford," was of 
 precisely the same opinion. 
 
 They escaped their dilemma by means of a noteworthy 
 bit of government by minority. There was a small sec- 
 tion of the Council, easily outvotable at ordinary times, 
 which urged that, after all, things were as they were, 
 that you must live and let live in this world, and that 
 even good things could be pushed to extremes when they 
 became no longer good. And, as these began to speak, 
 one stern bazaar-promoter after another began to look 
 at his watch and to mutter " Dear me I had no idea 
 it wass so late indeed I not catss him if I not go 
 now - ' 
 
 They left. 
 
 This, or else a tactful absenteeism, became their cus- 
 tom whenever licencing matters came up to be discussed. 
 
 But cases of conscience are cases of conscience all 
 the world over. 
 
 The sum that Edward Garden proposed as a fair 
 price for that catchment-area up Delyn was two hundred 
 thousand pounds this for about two thousand acres ; 
 and on the day when his lawyers named the figure it 
 was a wonder that the whole Council did not take in a 
 body to their beds. Two hundred thousand pounds! 
 They could not believe their ears. Nor could they be- 
 lieve their eyes either when they got it in writing, words 
 first, and the figures in brackets afterwards. If they 
 had written the single word " Fancy ! " across that doc- 
 ument and sent it straightway back to the lawyers they
 
 THE BLANK CHEQUE 229 
 
 would no doubt have followed their first impulse; but 
 somebody, less hard hit in the wind than the rest, man- 
 aged to gasp out the proposal that they should sleep on 
 it, and sleep on it they did. But the night did not alter 
 it. In the morning it was still two hundred thousand 
 pounds (200,000). 
 
 News of the rapacity of the demand had leaked out 
 almost immediately. Ordinarily, anybody who had 
 stopped Howell Gruffydd in the street and had asked 
 him a Council secret would have been met with the 
 smiling facer he deserved, but this was extraordinary 
 altogether. On the morning after they had slept on it, 
 William Morgan saw Howell on the Promenade, came 
 up to him, and, making no bones about it whatever, asked 
 him whether it was true. 
 
 " Who told you, William Morgan ? " Howell be- 
 gan . . . but he really had not the heart to go on. He 
 took off his hat, wiped the lining of it with his handker- 
 chief, and the bright sunlight showed his brows lined 
 with anxiety and sick fear, crumpled and embossed 
 like one of his own pats of butter. He replaced his 
 hat and blew his nose violently. 
 
 " Is it true ? " demanded William Morgan again. 
 
 Howell became grim. " It was an e-vil day for this 
 town when that man came here," he said, forgetting how 
 little town there had been when that old brown horse 
 had first brought the Gardens softly jolting across the 
 sandhills. 
 
 " Then it is true ? " said William Morgan once again. 
 
 " It is true that a man sometimes asks one thing, and 
 finiss by getting something very diff-ferent from what 
 he ask," Howell replied, and walked abruptly away. 
 
 He crossed the Promenade and turned into Pont- 
 newydd Street. There he stood, irresolutely plucking
 
 230 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 his lip and gazing into a stationer's window. Dafydd 
 Dafis's voice in his ear caused him to start almost vio- 
 lently. 
 
 "H-what is this, Howell Gniffydd?" Dafydd de- 
 manded without preface, his eyes burningly and trucu- 
 lently on the Chairman's face. He wore his everyday 
 corduroys, but his air was that of a monarch in banish- 
 ment. Howell turned. 
 
 " Ah, how are you, Dafydd ? Indeed you look well ! 
 They do say the smell of road-tar is a very healthy 
 smell " 
 
 "H-what is this we hear, Howell Gruffydd?" 
 Dafydd repeated. 
 
 Howell tried to smile. " Indeed, how can I answer 
 a question like that, ' What is this we hear ? ' " 
 
 " H-what is this about Delyn and the Water ? " 
 
 There was a dangerous quickness in Dafydd's voice. 
 Involuntarily Howell gave a little hiccough of emotion, 
 which answered Dafydd sufficiently. His eyes were 
 like the windows of a burning house. 
 
 " He sell us two thousand acres, of our own land, for 
 how mut-ss ? " 
 
 " Two hundred thou-sand pounds," sobbed 
 Howell. 
 
 " Of our own mountains Delyn, that belong to 
 us he sell us Delyn, this Saxon ? " 
 
 " Indeed, indeed, Dafydd, do not excite yourself 
 it will have to go to arbi-tra-tion " 
 
 " It will go to Hell, with his soul ! " Dafydd replied 
 fiercely. " He sell us Delyn he sell us Delyn water 
 he sell us our own moun-tains ! It iss not for this 
 we make you Chairman of the Council, Howell 
 Gruffydd!" 
 
 Howell trembled, but put up a soothing hand.
 
 231 
 
 " Aw-w-w, you wait and see, Dafydd Dafis ! A prof- 
 fit is a prof-fit, but this is wick-ed, and preposterous, and 
 out of all reason ! You wait and see ! We have a meet- 
 ing this morning, and p'rapss we show Mister Edward 
 Garden he is not so clever as he think he is ! He think 
 he put his Saxon pistol to our heads like this ? Indeed 
 he make a great mistake ! You wait and see, Dafydd. 
 There iss a saying, l He laughs best who laughs last ' 
 you wait and see ! " He patted Dafydd's shoulder and 
 arm reassuringly, and perhaps felt heartened by his own 
 words. " You wait and see ! " he said once more, 
 almost cheerily now. " We not pay it never fear ! 
 I see you later " 
 
 And he hurried away, leaving Dafydd standing on 
 the pavement. 
 
 But the Council Meeting that morning settled noth- 
 ing, and neither did the next Meeting nor the next after 
 that. They wrote to Mr. Tudor Williams, but it almost 
 looked as if Mr. Tudor Williams was taking a leaf out 
 of their own book : if they had pressing private affairs 
 when questions of ales and wines and spirits appeared 
 on the agenda, so Mr. Tudor Williams pleaded a multi- 
 plicity of urgent engagements now that it was a question 
 of water. The meeting adjourned, reassembled, ad- 
 journed again, and met again. Days passed, weeks 
 passed. Legal opinions were taken, but no action. 
 They fetched Mr. Tudor Williams down almost by force, 
 and he proffered his good offices, but deprecated the 
 serving of notices of compulsory arbitration. He ad- 
 vised an amicable settlement if one could possibly be 
 arrived . at. Llanyglo's anger died away, and blank 
 despair began to take its place. 
 
 Then one day Edward Garden's lawyers hinted that 
 in the event of an arrangement being come to within
 
 232 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 a given time they were in a position to enter into certain 
 pledges on behalf of the Railway Companies. They 
 hinted also that they were equally in a position to do 
 the other thing. Surely, they said, Llanyglo saw that 
 this was a matter of its life or its death ; and surely, they 
 added, it was plain that it would not really be they who 
 were paying ! Nothing of the sort ! Lancashire would 
 pay. Yorkshire would pay. The Midlands would 
 help to pay, and perhaps also the West and South. 
 Whoever footed his bill at hotel or boarding-establish- 
 ment would be contributing they must see that he 
 did contribute his portion. What though visitors 
 grumbled and talked about extortion ? They forgot all 
 about it the next day. What though residents groaned 
 under the burden of the rates ? They must submit to 
 conditions, like ' everybody else. Llanyglo must pay, 
 and pass it on. 
 
 In short, all the people who intended to have a better 
 time than their fathers had had were to be shaven and 
 shorn exactly as their fathers had been. 
 
 Llanyglo saw it, sighed, and acquiesced. There was 
 nothing else to do. 
 
 And if Parry, of the " Lancashire Rose," or Pugh, 
 of the " Trafford," reaped too rich a harvest by making 
 people drunk, they must be assessed higher and higher 
 still, and still higher, that was alL
 
 IV 
 
 PAWB. 
 
 THIS question of assessment had already raised 
 another question, which at first seemed a small 
 one, but swelled afterwards into ominous proportions. 
 When the rumours of those two towering new hotels had 
 first begun to circulate, it had been a gentle and stimu- 
 lating mental exercise to place, in fancy, these palaces 
 on this spot or that. Among other suggestions, the 
 vacant plot of land adjacent to the Kerrs' Hafod Unos 
 had been mentioned as a fitting site for one of them. 
 Hereupon folk had begun to ask one another: What 
 about the Kerrs' title ? 
 
 Hitherto they had not thought of this. The four 
 brothers had planted themselves there when all about 
 had been a waste of sand, had since taken firm root, 
 and there two of them still remained. But between 
 such a squatting eight or nine years ago, and a sitting 
 tight now that everything had gone up a hundredfold in 
 value, was an immense difference. To this difference, 
 moreover, was now added the evil repute in which 
 Tommy Kerr lived. Ned, the alder-cutter, they would 
 have accepted; they could live with Ned; but his 
 brother, besides being in his unpleasant person a public t 
 nuisance, was beginning to appear a setter-back of the 
 fingers of History's clock, a mongrel in their fine new 
 manger, a thorn in the side of that lusty young Welsh 
 
 Giantess whose figure was now one of the familiar 
 
 233
 
 234: MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 sights on a thousand hoardings in the ISTorth. The in- 
 visible odour of stale beer-fumes in which he moved 
 poisoned the air of the Promenade, and, though he cer- 
 tainly did his best to remedy this as far as the staleness 
 was concerned (invariably beginning the day with pints 
 and ending it with quarts), that did not improve mat- 
 ters in the long run. 
 
 As long as Tommy Kerr was merely locked up once 
 in a while for drunkenness, he himself paid no heed to 
 the whispers that had begun to gather about him. He 
 could sleep as heavily and happily in a cell as in his 
 own Hafod. Nor were his eyes at once opened even 
 when an inspector appeared at the Hafod and began to 
 ask questions about its sanitation which, by the way, 
 was of a low order. But his brother Ned began to 
 " study," as he called it, and the result of his studying 
 was that he said one day to Tommy, " They'll be want- 
 ing to be shut o' you and me, Tommy." 
 
 Tommy was in the act of wiping out a greasy frying- 
 pan with a piece of old newspaper. He stopped sud- 
 denly. After a pause, "Eh?" he said. . . . "D'ye 
 mean purr us out ? " 
 
 " We're a bit i' t' road to my way o' thinking," Ned 
 replied, sinking back into his arm-chair again and 
 closing his eyes. 
 
 He had taken badly to heart the deaths of his 
 brothers Harry and Sam; indeed he had not been the 
 same man since. He frequently walked over to Sarn 
 churchyard, sat on a flat tombstone near his brothers' 
 grave, and smoked and spat ; he was " studying " about 
 a stone for them. Intermittently he talked about carv- 
 ing this with his own hands, but he delayed to do so. 
 All the work he now did was to doze in a street-watch- 
 man's hut, with a two-days-old newspaper on his knee
 
 PAWB 235 
 
 and a firebasket in front of him set sideways on the 
 wind. He was no longer the beer-drinker he had been. 
 " Think ye ? " said Tommy, after another silence. 
 " But we donnot want to be purred out," he added 
 resuming the wiping of the frying-pan, though more 
 slowly. 
 
 And as it seemed to be a condition of their remaining 
 in their Hafod unmolested that they should make a show 
 of satisfying the sanitary inspector's demands, they 
 overhauled their drainage system and gave it the mini- 
 mum of attention it demanded. 
 
 Then one day an offer was made them, which was also 
 an admission. It was an offer of compensation and of 
 another dwelling elsewhere, and the admission appar- 
 ently was that their title was a good one. Ned was for 
 accepting the offer, and accepted it would probably have 
 been but for a circumstance that Tommy discovered only 
 in a roundabout way. He was congratulated one morn- 
 ing in the " Marine " Tap on having escaped ejectment. 
 This was the first he had heard of ejectment. He asked 
 a few questions, and soon after went out for a walk. 
 
 Ejectment! Apparently they had been considering 
 his ejectment, had found it for some reason or other not 
 to be feasible, and had substituted the offer of compensa- 
 tion. . . . 
 
 Then, while this offer was still neither accepted nor 
 rejected, something else came to Tommy Kerr's ears. 
 This was that the sites, not of one, but of both the new 
 hotels, were at last decided on. As a matter of fact, 
 this choice was now almost a foregone conclusion. Next 
 to Gardd Street, which ran parallel with the shore, Pont- 
 newydd Street, in which lay the Hafod, was becoming 
 the principal street of the town. It ran from the shore 
 to Pritchard's Corner, was prolonged past that to the
 
 236 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 new station, and was the main thoroughfare for landaus 
 and wagonettes off to the mountains. The hotels were to 
 be built one on either side of the Hafod, not actually 
 adjoining it, but not more than a couple of strides away. 
 
 Already in Tommy Kerr's suspicious mind the 
 mischief was done. Howell Gruffydd, all blandish- 
 ments to his face, had been making secret inquiries 
 behind his back, had he? He had been talking about 
 compensation and whispering with attorneys and 
 such-like, had he? Very well. That settled it. 
 Tommy would go when he was purred out, and not 
 before. As for that snuffling Howell Gruffydd. . . . 
 
 " So that's it, Mister Treacle-Tongue, is it ? " he had 
 muttered. " Reight. As long as we know where we 
 are. I'm off out to buy a ha'porth o' thread " 
 
 And with the ha'porth of thread he had sewn a large 
 button on each of his pocket-flaps, and thenceforward 
 meeting Howell Gruffydd in the street, had osten- 
 tatiously buttoned every pocket up before answering the 
 prosperous grocer's smiling " Good morning." 
 
 They began to dig the foundations of those glittering 
 hotels. 
 
 They did so, as it happened, in the early part of that 
 same summer that saw Edward Garden's ingenious ad- 
 vertisements put into execution the summer of the 
 Eisteddfod and the Brass Band Contest. Llanyglo was 
 packed with people. Two days before the Eisteddfod, 
 there began to troop into the town from all parts bards 
 and singers, poets and harpers and minstrels and the 
 members of a chorus five hundred voices strong. They 
 came in their everyday clothes, moustached like vikings, 
 bearded and maned like lions, and instantly with their 
 coming the Saxon took a back seat. Shopkeepers left 
 their counters, publicans clapped down the half-filled
 
 PAWB 237 
 
 glasses, and ran to their doors as this honoured singer 
 or that famous bard passed their windows. They walked 
 with stately slow walk and stately slow head-turnings, 
 and happy was the Welshman who got a motion of the 
 hand or a henign smile from them. The Gorsedd had 
 been publicly proclaimed; the temporary dancing hall 
 behind Gardd Street, big enough for a regiment to drill 
 in, had been made ready ; the insignia in the Town Hall 
 were as jealously watched and guarded as are the Crown 
 Jewels in the Tower of London ; and he was a prudent 
 visitor who had realised that for three whole days he 
 was likely to get but negligent attention from those who 
 at other times were his humble servitors. For, fleer as 
 aliens would, this was the Awakening of the Eed Dragon. 
 Their reproach that he was but a pasteboard Dragon fell 
 to the ground. The Dragon was what the Dragon was, 
 and if his service was theatrical, theatricalism is en- 
 nobled when its boards are the soil itself and each of its 
 actors an Antaeus, strong because his foot is upon the 
 ground that bred him. In England, behind his smile, 
 the Welshman is an enigma of reserve; but see him at 
 his Eisteddfod, with money waiting to be taken at his 
 closed shop-doors. . . . 
 
 With the ceremony of the Gorsedd on the opening day 
 Dafydd Dafis's spellbound and uplifted hours began. 
 At the sounding of the trumpets his head flew proudly 
 up ; at the Drawing of the Sword and the solemn ques- 
 tion, " Is there Peace in the land ? " his voice joined in 
 the reply, like a thunder-clap, " There is Peace " for 
 that was before the year when, for three whole days, the 
 blade remained naked and bright, while far over the seas 
 brave Englishmen and brave Welshmen fell and died 
 together. It was the single victory of Dafydd's life. 
 On ordinary days he now drove a road-engine Howell
 
 238 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 Gruffydd had got him the job under the Council; but 
 he was a Lord of Song now. He had put his name down 
 for the " penillion " contest ; should he prove successful, 
 not he himself only, but Llanyglo also, the place of 
 his birth, would be forever famous. He sat behind 
 the semicircle of white-robed and oak-crowned and 
 druid-like figures that occupied the front part of the 
 platform, looking down on the vast oblong of faces, 
 Saxon and Welsh, that resembled a packed bed of 
 London Pride ; he was in the tenor wedge of the chorus ; 
 and as the five hundred voices pealed together you 
 thought of the roof and of that singer whose voice had 
 shivered vessels of glass. . . . Coming out of the hall 
 again at the end of the first day, Dafydd was still in his 
 trance. As he walked along the street past the " Traf- 
 ford " Tap, Tommy Kerr, who sat within drinking, 
 hailed him and called for a song, while one of his boon 
 companions crying " Nay, we don't ask nobody to sing 
 for nowt ! " cast a couple of pennies on the ground ; but 
 Dafydd seemed neither to see nor to hear. At the break- 
 up after the last chorus an august hand had been placed 
 on Dafydd's shoulder, and an archangelic voice had 
 spoken to him, saying that he, he the great one, had 
 heard of Dafydd Dafis; and what, after that, did pot- 
 house insults matter ? He passed on, his eyes still flash- 
 ing and his face shining like the Silver Chair itself. . . . 
 
 Two days later he was proclaimed the victor in the 
 " penillion " contest, and on the day after that, still 
 drunk with song, he drove his road-engine again. And 
 so passed Llanyglo's first Eisteddfod. 
 
 The Brass Band Contest five weeks later was a 
 triumph in a different way. The impression now was 
 one, not of unity, but of the keen spirit of faction. The 
 " Besses o } tli Barn " were at the crest of their fame,
 
 PAWB 239 
 
 but the " Black Dike " ran them close, and not far be- 
 hind came " Wyke Temperance " and " Meltham 
 Mills " ; and had these been, not Bands, but football 
 teams, local rivalry could not have run higher. True, 
 underneath the sporting interest lay the musical. This 
 performer's " lipping " and the " triple-tonguing " of 
 the other were matters of endless debate among the ex- 
 pert ; nuances of ensemble and attack were hotly argued 
 in strong Lancashire and Yorkshire accents; and the 
 devotees were ready to fight with their fists over the fame 
 of the conductors of their fancy. But, without unity, 
 the Contest proved, for all save the Brass-band-maniacs, 
 a little wearisome. The ear began to revolt against the 
 reiterated " test-piece," and one pitied the judge hidden 
 away in his carefully guarded cubicle. Fewer Welsh 
 attended the Contest than had English the Eisteddfod, 
 and a day was judged sufficient for it. After a sensa- 
 tional replay with the " Besses" " Black Dike " took 
 pride of place, with " Meltham Mills" third. The 
 strains of Zampa and The Bronze Horse sounded once 
 more only, when they massed the Bands in the evening in 
 the Floral Valley; and (the Council having sanctioned 
 a charge of sixpence as the fee for entrance) the sum of 
 115 was taken at the temporary barriers. So passed 
 the Brass Band Contest also. 
 
 By the June of that year the understructure of the 
 Pier was finished, and the rest was advancing with the 
 speed of paper-hanging. The contractors were under 
 time-penalties to be ready for the formal opening on the 
 forthcoming August Bank Holiday. All through the 
 night the sounds of the planking could be heard, and 
 pavilion-parts, lettered and numbered and ready gilded 
 and painted, were rushed along in haste. At the same 
 time the Big Wheel began to resemble the largest circle
 
 240 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 of the Floral Valley set up on end ; it was wonderful to 
 stand beneath it and to gaze up through the intricacy of 
 tie and strut and lattice at the sky. Immense hoard- 
 ings filled a large part of Pontnewydd Street; by and 
 by they would be taken down again, and the fagades of 
 those magnificent new hotels would appear; but Llany- 
 glo would scarcely turn its head to look at them. They 
 were getting used to this now. Besides, they had plenty 
 else to do. The town was so full that they were turning 
 away money into its nearest place of overflow Forth 
 Neigr. 
 
 Then, in the beginning of August, a hundred portents 
 were fulfilled. There began to run into the station 
 train after train, with three or four faces at each win- 
 dow. Doors opened almost before the engines had be- 
 gun to slow down, and (as if the trains had been veins 
 and somebody had suddenly slit them up, spilling out 
 the life within) the platforms were suddenly black and 
 overrun with people. They carried bags, baskets, ham- 
 pers, parcels, stools, pillows, babies. Inside the carriages 
 they left crumpled newspapers, trodden sandwiches, 
 bottles, nuts, corks, the heads and tails of shrimps. 
 Their tickets had been taken miles back no collecting- 
 staff could have coped for a moment with the emptying 
 of those wheeled and windowed veins of impoverished 
 blood. Parents carrying babies stood prudently aside 
 from that first mad rush to the entrance. Many of them 
 had been up since half -past four that morning ; they had 
 spent seven hours in the train, twelve and thirteen and 
 fourteen in a carriage, standing, sitting on one another's 
 knees, lying on the rows of feet; and now they made 
 straight for air. Certain trains had been told off for 
 week-end travellers ; others were labelled " Special " or 
 " Day Excursion Only" Those who had come by these
 
 PAWB 241 
 
 would have seven hours in Llanyglo, and at the end of 
 that time they would squeeze into the trains again for 
 seven, eight, ten hours more for on the return journey 
 they must attend the convenience of every other wheel 
 on the line, and a stand of an hour or so at two o'clock in 
 the morning would be but an incident. During that 
 short space in which they would breathe the wonderful 
 Llanyglo air they would eat the meals they had brought 
 with them, or else besiege the inns and eating-houses and 
 tea-rooms and confectioners'-shops. They were the first 
 trippers spinning operatives, weavers, twisters, warp- 
 dressers, mechanics, asbestos-hands, stokers, clerks, 
 shopkeepers, the grey and unnumbered multitude itself. 
 Some would enjoy themselves, some would vow they 
 enjoyed themselves, and soine would declare it " a toil of 
 a pleasure," and would drag about on hot and swollen 
 and weary feet, repeating at intervals, * Niver again 
 niver as long as I live ! " And the lagging children's 
 arms would be almost wrenched off at the shoulders, and 
 some would fall asleep with the sticky paint of the penny 
 toys dyeing their hands, and the platforms would begin 
 to fill up again three hours before the time of departure 
 of the train, for the sake of the chances of corner seats, 
 or indeed of seats at all, and also because, on that hor- 
 rible arduous day, the station itself would seem almost 
 like a home. . . . 
 
 Yes, as the Laceys and Briggses had followed Edward 
 Garden, and those who could not (but would) afford it 
 had followed the Briggses and Laceys, and the Utopia 
 readers these, and the fortnight and ten-days' people 
 these, and all sorts and conditions of people for varying 
 lengths of time these again, so now the unnumbered rest 
 had come. ..." The first tripper, and I'm off," 
 the Briggses and the Laceys had said ; and which of us
 
 242 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 is not a Briggs or a Lacey in this ? Which of us can 
 say without misgiving that he would have remained in 
 Llanyglo? Could we have endured the sight of our 
 kind in this bulk or could we have endured to think, 
 either, that if they were not there for that dreadful day 
 they would still be elsewhere ? Can we, in the unshared 
 solitude of our hearts, bear to think of this rank and 
 damp and steaming human undergrowth at all ? Would 
 the Squire, seeing these, still have thought as much of 
 his books on Church Plate and Brasses, still have de- 
 fended the integrity of something not for all ? Would 
 Minetta Garden have looked on them with a sort of 
 incurious interest as so many " types " ? Or would we 
 all, Minetta, the Squire, you, I, have felt meanly and 
 skulkingly relieved when the last tail-light had died 
 away in the night again ? 
 
 There is. neither " Yes " nor " ~No " to be answered. 
 I may rant of brotherhood and humanity, but you 
 you may remember that cart jolting without noise over 
 the sandhills, the blue and primrose petals of those but- 
 terflies, the amethyst-tufts of wild thyme, the milkwort, 
 the harebells, and then, of a sudden, that V with the 
 sea beyond. I, choosing to shoulder all the responsi- 
 bility of a world in the making of which I was not con- 
 sulted, may moisten that human peat with my tears, 
 but you you, passionate for beauty's sake, may mourn 
 a loveliness deflowered and a simplicity destroyed. It 
 is no virtue in me, no harshness in you. We both are 
 what we are and do what we can. Llanyglo also was 
 what it had become and did what it could. And Llany- 
 glo, after all, had a solace that we lack. It was an 
 inferior one, but better than nothing. Their beach 
 might be littered, their streets made pitiful ; their lodg- 
 ing-house keepers might put every loose jug or china dog
 
 PAWB 243 
 
 or ornament away, and replace them again only after 
 these had gone; strange accents might grate upon their 
 ears, different and disliked minds frame the thoughts 
 those accents expressed ; yet balm remained. There was 
 not a tripper, no, not the poorest of them, but spent his 
 three, four, or five shillings in the town.
 
 D 
 
 PAET FOUR 
 
 THE BLIND BYE 
 
 RUB-DRUB drub-drub-drub drub-drub 
 
 It was the sound of heels on the Pier. From 
 one end of it to the other they walked, past the recesses 
 and lamp-standards and the bright kiosks where tobacco 
 and confectionery and walking-sticks and picture-post- 
 cards and souvenirs were sold, and then they turned and 
 walked back. After a time the drub-drubbing became 
 curiously hypnotising. At moments it conformed al- 
 most to a regular rhythm; then it broke up again into 
 mere confusion, out of which another metrical beat 
 would rise for a second or so and then become lost again. 
 For long spaces the ear would become accustomed and 
 cease to hear it, and would take in instead the lighter 
 registers of tittering, soft laughter, the striking of 
 matches and an occasional scuffle and call; but the 
 groundwork of sound would break through again, like 
 a muffled drum tapped by many performers at once, 
 
 monotonous, reverberating, dead 
 
 Drub-drub-drub drub-drub drub-drub 
 
 It was half -past eight of a July night. Crowded as 
 the Pier was, it would become still more so when the 
 Concert Hall just within the turnstiles, and the Pavilion 
 at the pier-head, turned out their audiences again. 
 There would hardly be space to move them. The 
 
 244
 
 THE BLIND EYE 245 
 
 Promenade was a sweep of brilliants ; Gardd Street lay 
 unseen behind it under a golden haze; behind that 
 again the lighted rosette of the Big Wheel turned slowly 
 high in the sky ; and the great hotels of the front were 
 squared and mascled with window-lights. All this 
 dance of gold and silver made a 1 ! already blue evening 
 intensely blue, and the Pier was so long that, even with 
 quick walking, several minutes passed between your 
 losing the rattle of hand-clapping outside the Concert 
 Hall at one end of it, and your picking up the strains of 
 the Pavilion orchestra at the other. 
 
 Drub-drub-drub drub-drub-drub drub-drub 
 
 There was hardly a bed to be had in Llanyglo. 
 Visitors who had rashly chosen to take their chance com- 
 monly passed their first night in the waiting-rooms of 
 the railway station. Servant-girls lay in their clothes 
 under kitchen tables, while their own garrets were let 
 for half a sovereign a night. Dozens slept on sofas, 
 chairs, hearthrugs, billiard-tables, on the Promenade 
 benches, under the tarpaulins of wagonettes and chars-a- 
 bancs, or curled up in the boats on the shore. They 
 Boxed-and-coxed it as they could, and the police did not 
 trouble to shake the slumberers on whom they turned 
 their bull's-eyes in the nooks and arbours of the Eloral 
 Valley. 
 
 Drub-drub-drub drub drub 
 
 And who were they now, they whose heels wore down 
 the Pier timbers and made the brain drowsy with their 
 ceaseless tramp ? 
 
 It was a curious and a rather arresting change. To 
 all appearances, Llanyglo had now got a " better class 
 of visitor " than it had had since the Briggses and 
 Laceys had shaken the dust of the place from their feet. 
 Even in this puzzle of gold and silver light and deep
 
 246 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 mysterious blue, it could be seen that there was not much 
 Holiday Club money there. In another fortnight or so 
 those coffers would burst over the town, drenching it with 
 gold; but in the meantime who were these others, and 
 what were they doing at Llanyglo ? 
 
 Let us ask the author of the Sixpenny Guide. 
 
 "When did you arrive? Only last night? And 
 you're stopping at the ' Majestic ' ? Well, you've some- 
 body there who can tell you more about it than I can 
 Big Annie the head-chambermaid on the first floor. 
 There are a good many things about Llanyglo now that 
 I've had to keep out of my Guide, you see. But I'll tell 
 you what I can. 
 
 " And I don't want to give you any false impression. 
 Don't forget that scores and hundreds of families come 
 here and bathe, and picnic, and dance, and go for drives, 
 and enjoy themselves, and go away again without a no- 
 tion that everybody here isn't exactly like themselves. 
 And there's no harm in the Wakes people either. The 
 worst you can say of them is that now and then one 
 of them gets violently or torpidly drunk, as the case may 
 be, and that all of them make a most hideous and infernal 
 noise. So don't think I'm talking disproportionately, 
 and that this is the only place of its kind I was ever in. 
 
 " But I do mean this : that somehow or other we've 
 now acquired a very peculiar kind of notoriety. You 
 can deny it, disprove it, show that it isn't there at all, 
 and there it remains all the time. For one thing, 
 you'll see if you look round that the place is very much 
 less northern in character than it was, and as it happens 
 that's very significant. For it might conceivably happen 
 that a northerner or a southerner, or anybody else 
 might have his reasons for avoiding a place that was full
 
 THE BLIND EYE 247 
 
 of other northerners, many of whom might know him 
 (they have an expression in the North for the kind of 
 thing I mean ; they call it ( making mucky doorstones '). 
 So you'll find lots and lots of Londoners here now, and 
 midlanders, and easterners and westerners. They come 
 here, where nobody's ever seen them before and will 
 never see them again perhaps, for much the same reason 
 that some Englishmen are said to go to Paris. 
 
 " I don't want to make them out more in number than 
 they are. Spread out over the whole country they'd only 
 be a fractional percentage, and you'd never notice them ; 
 but when they're brought together here they're quite 
 enough to give the place a character. They aren't the 
 open and reckless kind. Furtiveness complete dis- 
 appearance if possible is the whole point. They're 
 the men who arrange for somebody to post their letters 
 home from the place they're supposed to be really at, and 
 the women who, as the Bible says, eat and wipe their 
 lips and say they haven't eaten. They want to dodge, 
 not only everybody else, but themselves also, something 
 they're perhaps afraid of in themselves, for a fortnight, 
 three weeks, a month. You see, they've persuaded them- 
 selves (and Llanyglo's done too well out of them to un- 
 deceive them) that things done here somehow ' don't 
 count.' If you want to do something you'd never dare 
 to do in a place where you were known, you come to 
 Llanyglo to do it. If you can imagine the oasis in the 
 desert with exactly the contrary meaning that's us. 
 We're an asylum for those who've lost their moral 
 memories. 
 
 " And it isn't that wedding-rings are juggled off and 
 on, and false names entered in hotel registers, nor any- 
 thing of that kind. That goes on more or less every- 
 where, and we haven't become notorious merely for that.
 
 248 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 And as usual, it's easier to say what it isn't than what it 
 it. It isn't the Trwyn, for example, though that does 
 twitter so with kisses from morning till night that you'd 
 think it was the grasshoppers. And it isn't the almost 
 open displays you see at certain hours wherever you go. 
 It isn't any one fact, not even the worst. It's a faint 
 attar of some abandonment, some bottomlessness, that 
 you can't name. It may be my imagination, but I've 
 fancied I've actually smelt it with my nostrils, coming 
 into it from a mile out of the town. They relinquish 
 even appearances. Most of us have the grace to cover 
 up our sins with a decent and saving hypocrisy, but these 
 know and understand one another so horribly well. 
 They seem to find a comfort that they're all in the same 
 boat. As they say themselves, ' Heaven for climate but 
 Hell for company/ Give them your name on your 
 visiting-card and they'll ask you by and by what your 
 real name is. Until then, neither your name nor any- 
 thing else about you is their business. They haven't any 
 business. For a week, or a fortnight, or a month, 
 they've turned their backs on that tremendous common 
 business that keeps the world going. It's the blind eye, 
 and Llanyglo provides the blinkers. . . . 
 
 " But go and talk to Big Annie. She's really a 
 rather remarkable woman. At stated hours she sits 
 on point duty on the landing of her floor of eighty bed- 
 rooms, just where everybody's got to pass her, and if 
 you look like making er a mistake (and your 
 hotel's quite an easy place to get lost in) she sets you 
 right without a quiver of her face. Yes, she's rather 
 an alarming person. There's a swiftness about her way 
 of summing up people from a single glance at their 
 faces. Oh, you don't take Annie in with a wedding- 
 ring and a ' darling ' or so especially when the lady
 
 THE BLIND EYE 249 
 
 asks the darling whether he takes sugar in his early 
 morning cup of tea. . . . 
 
 " Yes, you go and see Annie." 
 
 Drub-drub drub-drub-drub 
 
 After a time that stupor of the ear became a stupor 
 of the eye also. Even when a match glowed before a 
 face for a moment, the stage-like lighting gave you no 
 physiognomical information. The lamps shone on the 
 crowns of the passing hats, but the faces beneath them 
 were lost ; all cats were grey. Any one of them might 
 have been a giggling flapper with her eyes still sealed to 
 Life, or one of those others mentioned by the too-curious 
 author of the Guide, who would be dead to sight and 
 thought for a space that didn't count. Light frocks 
 and darker hues, bare heads and plaits and shawls and 
 hooded dominoes, shop-girl and high-school girl, caps 
 and straws and panamas, pipes and cigarettes, youths 
 thoughtless and youths predatory you paid your 
 threepence at the turnstiles and watched them pass and 
 repass. Drub-drub-drub. . . . And if you sat long 
 enough, changes began to be perceptible. The flappers 
 who were evidently high-school girls began to be fewer, 
 and others took their places for most of the shops of 
 Llanyglo closed at nine or half -past, and the released 
 waitresses and assistants who had been on their feet all 
 day were still not too weary to add to the drub-drubbing. 
 It was difficult to say in what particular these were dis- 
 tinguishable. It was not their dress the universal 
 attainment of a certain standard of dressing is one of 
 our modern miracles. You would not have had it from 
 their own lips you would have been tactless in the 
 extreme not to have assumed that they also were visitors 
 (as a matter of fact, they would calmly make appoint-
 
 250 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 ments for four o'clock of the next day, knowing perfectly 
 well that at that hour they would be giving change in a 
 cash-desk or hurrying hither and thither with piles of 
 bread and butter and trays awash with spilt tea). Per- 
 haps it was the young men they greeted and their way of 
 greeting them. They didn't come out for these last 
 hours of the day to gossip with those to whom they had 
 called " Sign ! " all the afternoon, their own foremen, 
 companions, or the tradesmen of the shop opposite. 
 
 Drub-drub drub-drub 
 
 There passed through the Season Ticket turnstile 
 two young men. Both wore dark suits and conven- 
 tional collars and ties (as if they, at any rate, had no 
 need to don their coloured jackets and flannel trousers 
 while they could), and the attendant at the turnstile 
 had touched his cap as they had passed. One of them, 
 the taller of the two, wore his straw hat halo-wise at 
 the back of his head, filled his pipe as he walked, and 
 looked cheerfully and unobservingly about him; the 
 other's straw was well down, and the eyes beneath its 
 brim sought somebody or something, and would appar- 
 ently be satisfied with nothing less. The first was Percy 
 Briggs, and everybody in Llanyglo knew Percy 
 Briggs Percy Briggs, who strolled casually into Hotel 
 Cosies towards midday, nodded to the more favoured 
 ones, said to the barmaid " So and So been in yet ? " 
 and, getting a bright " No, Mr. Briggs, not yet " for an 
 answer, lounged out again without having had a drink 
 a sufficient gage of privilege and familiarity with the 
 place. The other was John Willie Garden, who knew 
 Llanyglo, knew which faces had been there last year and 
 the year before, and was now looking for a face he had 
 seen yesterday evening for one moment only and had 
 then lost again.
 
 THE BLIND EYE 251 
 
 The Pier was an old, old story to him now. Between 
 seasons, on winter nights, the drab-drub of a few months 
 before seemed sometimes still faintly to echo in his ears 
 this when the grey skies came, and in the hotels a 
 few rooms only were kept open for unprofitable com- 
 mercial travellers, and the Promenade was empty, and 
 the Pleasure Packet Service laid up, and a walk to the 
 end of the Pier and back seemed a long way to feet that 
 had covered the distance twenty times on a summer's 
 evening, and the colourless sea seemed to give to the 
 red and white blink of the Trwyn Light a sudden and 
 nearer significance. He knew every hour of Llanyglo's 
 day the hours of departure of the pleasure-boats to 
 Ehyl and Llandudno and round Anglesey, the bathing- 
 hours in the morning, the high-school parade at mid- 
 day, the second bathing relay in the afternoon, the tea- 
 hour, the walk of parents and children to see the boats 
 come in again in the early evening, and then, as the 
 evening wore on, the successive appearances and drop- 
 pings out of this kind or that, the emptying of the Pavil- 
 ions, the inflow of the shop-girls and waitresses, the 
 rush for the public-houses half an hour before the Pier 
 lights went out, the thinning numbers who beat the Pro- 
 menade, the parties of the Alsatians who sat up in one 
 another's hotels long after every public drinking-place 
 had been closed. He had nothing further to learn 
 about it all, and it bored him. Only his search for 
 that girl had brought him on the Pier to-night. 
 
 He had been almost certain he knew her, but where 
 he had seen her face before he could not for the life of 
 him remember. Perhaps he did not know her after all ; 
 indeed, when he came to think of it, no memory of a 
 voice seemed to go with the face, so that the probability 
 was that if he had seen her before he had never spoken
 
 252 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 to her. She had been standing, in that blue twilight, 
 clear of the throng, under the single crimson pier-head 
 light, looking out over the water that seemed still to 
 reflect a light that had faded from the sky, and for a 
 moment John Willie had wondered what she was looking 
 at. The next moment he had seen and so, confound 
 it, had twenty others. A yellow spot, like a riding- 
 light, had risen out of the sea ; almost as quickly as the 
 second-hand of a watch moves, it had become a tip ; and 
 then the lookers-in at the glass sides of the Pavilion 
 had run to see the rising of the bloated, refraction-mag- 
 nified, burning yellow horn. In that little running of 
 people he had lost her. Twice, thrice he had walked 
 the whole length of the Pier, but without seeing her 
 again. All of her that he could now remember was the 
 carriage of her head and her plain black dress, and he 
 knew that dress, in this extraordinary raising of the 
 standard of dressing which implies the possession by 
 almost everybody of two dresses at least, was an uncer- 
 tain guide. 
 
 Another rattle of hand-clapping broke out as Percy 
 Briggs and John Willie passed the turnstiles. " Any 
 good looking in there ? " Percy asked, nodding towards 
 the Concert Hall, but John Willie made no reply. He 
 was as cross as a bear with a sore head. Twice already 
 he had rounded on Percy, who had proposed drinks at 
 this place or that, and had snapped " You go if you 
 want I'm not keeping you ; " but Percy had replied 
 good-naturedly, " Oh, all right, keep your hair on." 
 
 The sounds of two more pairs of heels were added to 
 the drub-drubbing on the planks of the Pier. 
 
 It seemed idle to seek, but John Willie stood looking 
 in at the glass sides of the Pavilion at the pier-head, 
 searching the bright and crowded interior. His mind
 
 THE BLIND EYE 253 
 
 was as obstinately set as that of a mule. It seemed 
 to him idiotic that all those rows and rows of people 
 should clap the inanities of the young man in knee- 
 breeched evening-dress who strutted and made painted 
 eyes over the top of a flattened opera-hat, or encore Miss 
 Sal Volatile, all spidery black silk stockings below and 
 cocksfeather boa and enormous black halfmoon hat 
 above. John Willie turned away to the low-burning 
 crimson pier-light. He stood there for some moments, 
 and then began to stride back the length of the Pier 
 again. 
 
 " Chucking it ? " said Percy, half sympathetic, half 
 " getting at " John Willie. 
 
 " Come on to the Kursaal," John Willie grunted. 
 
 The Kursaal lay behind the two frontages of Gardd 
 and Pontnewydd Streets, and it could be reached from 
 either thoroughfare. From Gardd Street, up another 
 short street, the great lighted semicircle of what was 
 then its Main Entrance could be seen ; and if the minor 
 entrance from Pontnewydd Street was at that time less 
 resplendent, that was because the Kerrs' Hafod stood in 
 the way of opening it up. With its grounds and the- 
 atre and vast dancing-hall, the Kursaal covered getting 
 on for an eighth of a square mile ; but a third or more 
 of that was still in progress of being laid out and planted 
 once more by Philip Lacey. 
 
 Crossing the Promenade to the less crowded pave- 
 ment beyond, John Willie and Percy strode the half- 
 mile to the Kursaal. There was a queue about the 
 turnstiles, but John Willie made a sign to an attendant, 
 who flung up the Exit Only barrier. They passed un- 
 der trees with many-coloured electric lights among the 
 branches, and the slowly turning Big Wheel, which made 
 a quarter-arch of lights over the tower of the Central
 
 254 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 Hall, dipped behind it again as they reached the steps 
 that led to the vestibule. 
 
 For size alone, apart from any other consideration, 
 the dancing-hall of the Llanyglo Kursaal is one of the 
 wonders of the North. It cost a hundred thousand 
 pounds to build, and since it can dance a thousand 
 couples, to seek anybody there without going up into 
 the balconies is like looking for a needle in a bottle 
 of hay. The band was not playing at the moment when 
 Percy and John Willie entered; but before they had 
 reached the top of an empty half-lighted series of stair- 
 cases the distant strains of a Barn Dance had broken 
 out. Then, with the pushing at a door, it burst loudly 
 upon them. John Willie strode down the shallow gal- 
 lery steps, made for a front seat whence he could see 
 the whole length of the vast oblong below, spread out his 
 elbows and set his chin on his wrists, and, once more 
 muttering " You go and get your drink if you want," 
 began to search the hall with gloomy blue eyes, very 
 much as a boy flashes a bit of looking-glass hither and 
 thither in the sun. 
 
 Now when the Wakes people come to Llanyglo, 
 and the pleasant family parties yield place a little, 
 and drive in the mountains more frequently, and leave 
 the Pier and Promenade a little earlier, and gather 
 more often at one another's hotels even then that 
 dancing-hall is so vast that twenty different elements 
 can be accommodated there without mixing or encroach- 
 ment. But that series of precipitations had not yet 
 taken place. That night all was homogeneous. Per- 
 haps here and there other contacts had sparsely 
 " crossed," as it were, that fresh blooming, as the white 
 hawthorn takes on faintly the hue of the pink in the 
 spring, but that was probably rare. John Willie, had
 
 THE BLIND EYE 255 
 
 lie had eyes for it, looked down upon a wonderful sight. 
 The hall was a creamy gold, with bow after bow along 
 its balcony tiers ; without its other innumerable clusters 
 of lights, the eight arc-lamps in its high roof would have 
 lighted it no better than a railway station is lighted; 
 and the mirrors on the walls were hardly more polished 
 than its satiny floor. A fully appointed stage half-way 
 down one of the sides held an orchestra of thirty per- 
 formers; walking across that wonderfully swung floor 
 you felt something almost alive under your feet; and 
 four thousand feet moved upon it that night. 
 
 It was beautiful. The band was playing, slowly, as 
 is the dancing-fashion of the North, that Barn Dance; 
 and almost every girl was in white. The whites were 
 the whites of flowers the greenish white of guelder- 
 roses, the yellow white of elder or of meadow-sweet, the 
 pinkish white of the faintest dog-rose, the dead white 
 of narcissi, but little that was not white. And because 
 of all that soft whiteness, faces caught by the sun were 
 browner, and hair that the wind had blown through all 
 day glossier, and eyes brighter, and perhaps blushes 
 quicker and more readily seen. And to the whole 
 bright spectacle was added the impressiveness of un- 
 faltering rhythm and simultaneousness of movement. 
 The Colour on the Horse Guards' Parade is not hon- 
 oured with greater precision of physical movement than 
 these disciplined feet, these turning bodies ; the pulsing 
 floor itself answered to the delicate dip of the conductor's 
 stick. For two bars . . . but look at them as they 
 pour towards you down the left side of the room. 
 Every face is towards you, forty abreast, and forty fol- 
 lowing those, and more forties, columns and squadrons 
 of them, coming forward as grain comes down a chan- 
 nel, as graded fruit pours down a shoot. You do not
 
 256 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 see where they come from their turn is far away 
 tinder the pillars there; you do not see where they go 
 to they pass away out of sight again beneath you. 
 They do not seem the same over and over again, but all 
 the youths and maidens of the world, coming on and 
 on, and new, always new. . . . Then you look to the 
 right, and instantly your eyes are sensible of a darker 
 ensemble. That is because you see, not faces now, but 
 the backs of heads; not gaily striped shirts and bright 
 ties, but plain shoulders only. And they pass away as 
 they came, all the youths and maidens of the world 
 with their backs to you. Not one turns for a look at 
 you, not one nods you farewell. It is like your own 
 youth leaving you. . . . And then magically all alters. 
 Two more bars and, as if some strange and all-potent 
 and instantaneously acting element had been dropped 
 into the setting and returning human fluid, of a sudden 
 it all breaks up. It effervesces. Every couple is seen 
 to be waltzing. Two by two they turn, and your youth 
 is no longer coming to you nor departing from you, but 
 stops and plays. It stops and plays for two bars 
 and lo, the other again. Once more they troop towards 
 you with their faces seen, once more troop away with 
 faces averted. The illusion becomes a spell. Coming, 
 going, all different, all the same, parallel legions with 
 faces to the future and faces to the grave it is a little 
 like Llanyglo itself. Suddenly you find yourself drawn 
 a little closer to John Willie Garden. You do not want 
 to look down from a balcony on all the young manhood 
 and young womanhood of the world. One, one only, will 
 suffice you, and with her you will come brightly down, 
 all eyes and rosiness and laughter, and with her go in a 
 soberer livery away again. . . . But luckier you than 
 John Willie if you find that one. His eyes, practised
 
 THE BLIND EYE 257 
 
 as they were in scanning the Kursaal throng, did not see 
 her. The coda came; the vast oblong well lighted up 
 for a moment as a poplar lights up when the wind blows 
 upon it it was the slightly wider swing of skirts seen 
 from above as the dance quickened to its finale; and 
 then, as if something else potent and inimical had been 
 dropped into the solution, there was a break for the sides, 
 and the shining floor was seen again. 
 
 " Damn ! " muttered John Willie Garden. 
 
 Percy, relishing the spectacle of John Willie on the 
 hunt, was in no hurry. " The arbours ? " he suggested 
 laconically as John Willie rose ; but again John Willie 
 did not reply. For one thing, it was a little difficult to 
 see into those dark nooks among Philip Lacey's barrows 
 and planks and new larches and heaps of upturned 
 earth; for another, he had an assurance that she he 
 sought would not be there. 
 
 " Come on," he grunted. 
 
 " Ah ! " said Percy, with an exaggerated shake of 
 himself. "Has the moment at last arrived when we 
 quaff?" 
 
 But already John Willie had stridden on ahead. 
 
 They took a known short cut through dark and ob- 
 structed windings, and presently reached the side-door 
 of the adjoining hotel. It had certain rooms where 
 ladies unaccompanied might get a drink, but into these 
 they barely glanced. Percy grinned. Should John 
 Willie find the object of his search in one of the other 
 rooms, then there was reasonable hope of a row. He 
 had never before seen John Willie so persistently asking 
 for trouble. 
 
 The door at which they paused showed a room 
 crowded, bright, and full of a lawn of tobacco-smoke. 
 It was not a large room, but it must have held twenty
 
 258 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 men and as many women, and you could have seen their 
 like on any summer Sunday at Tagg's Island, or any 
 day in Regent Street, or on Brighton Front. They sat 
 in chairs of saddlebag or leather, and the fingers of the 
 men were poised over the large cigar-boxes the waiters 
 held before them, or else made little circular gestures 
 about the circumference of the little round tables, as 
 much as to say " Same again " or " Mine." Little but 
 champagne, liqueurs, or brandies-and-soda seemed to be 
 to their taste, and John Pritchard might indeed have 
 thought them " very ritss whatever " ; gold seemed to 
 come from them at a touch, notes at little more. Just 
 within the door a very brown man sat with a plump 
 little lady about whose short fingers gems seemed to 
 have candied, as sugar candies about a string ; and next 
 to them another man admired as much of his compan- 
 ion's shoes as could be seen for the champagne cooler 
 on the floor. There was not much noise. There was a 
 good deal of whispering about horses. 
 
 A ring was widened for the newcomers about one of 
 the larger tables " Arthur ! " Percy called as he passed 
 one of the waiters. " Bag o' beer, and Mr. P. Briggs's 
 compliments to Miss Price and will she please come at 
 once." They settled down. 
 
 This was Percy's present humour to drink pints 
 of beer from a silver tankard that resembled a tun 
 among the gem-like liqueur-glasses, and to make love to 
 Miss Price, the fat and creasy and unapproachable hotel- 
 manageress. Perhaps he intended to convey that few 
 other new sensations remained to him at the end of his 
 three-and-twenty hard-lived years. Sometimes John 
 Willie laughed at this posture of his friend's, but to- 
 night he thought it merely stupid and idiotic. He had 
 come here because he had thought he might as well be
 
 THE BLIND EYE 259 
 
 having a drink as fruitlessly searching ; now he thought 
 he might as well be searching as having a drink he didn't 
 want. Percy was ordering the drinks now " Ver- 
 mouth, Val? Cissie, your's is avocat, I know. Now, 
 Johannes Guglielmus, what will you imbibe ? " Pres- 
 ently John Willie sat glowering at a whiskey-and-soda. 
 The girl on his left, whom Percy had addressed as Cissie, 
 made an arch attempt to talk to him, and then gave up 
 the laborious task and turned her back. Miss Price, the 
 manageress, appeared, and Percy began his stupid and 
 facetious love-making. John Willie wondered whether 
 he had searched the Dancing-Hail thoroughly after 
 all. 
 
 The table grew noisy, and there were appreciative 
 grins from other tables ; Percy was trying to draw that 
 disgustingly fat manageress on to his knee. And, with 
 the pace thus set by Percy, the whole room woke up. 
 The waiters began to move about more quickly and to 
 call for assistance, and there was applause as somebody 
 opened the lid of the piano. . . . 
 
 John Willie sat before his untouched whiskey-and- 
 soda. He was once more wondering whether it would 
 be worth while to return to the Dancing-Hall, or whether 
 she might not by this time be on the Pier. And again, 
 and ever again, he wondered when and where he had 
 seen her before. . . . 
 
 Again Percy's silly joyous voice broke in. He was 
 expostulating with Miss Price. 
 
 " Look, Cissie's sitting on Val's " 
 
 " Let be, Mr. Briggs indeed I will not be pulled 
 about like that ! " 
 
 " Then sit on Mr. Garden's cheer him up he's 
 looking for Gertie, the Double-Blank from Blackburn, 
 and can't find her "
 
 260 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 " There, now, Mr. Briggs ! Now I shall have to go 
 and get a needle and thread ! " 
 
 Somebody interposed. " Here, chuck it, Percy ; 
 somebody might come in. ... Hallo, John Willie, you 
 off?" 
 
 For John Willie had pushed back his chair. He 
 reached for his hat. " Leave us a lock of your hair for 
 my mourning-brooch," Percy's muffled voice came after 
 him, but he was off. 
 
 Perhaps she would be at the Wheel. . . . 
 
 But she was not at that immense tyre slung with 
 upholstered coaches, nor yet to be seen at the side- 
 shows round about. He left the Kursaal, and joined 
 the dense throng that made a double stream under the 
 Promenade lamps. He told himself he was a fool. 
 She might have left Llanyglo within a few hours of his 
 having seen her might be back in any of the towns of 
 England or Scotland or Wales by this time. But he 
 did not cease to seek. He reached the Pier again. 
 Drub-drub-drub-drub-drub-drub-drub. It was now solid 
 with flesh, and indeed he had not walked half its length 
 when the closing-bell clanged. The glow over the pier- 
 head Pavilion went suddenly out, and so, a few moments 
 later, did a hundred yards of the lamps on either side. 
 He heard the usual cries of mock-terror. It was no 
 good going up there now. . . . 
 
 Nor would she be in the Floral Valley. In fact, he 
 had better give it up. He had better clear out of Llany- 
 glo for a bit. He was sick of this dusty dance of 
 pleasure, and the Wakes crowds would be here in a few 
 days. . . . He would go and fish up Delyn. The Water 
 Scheme hadn't spoiled the lake; they had only built a 
 quite small dam with locks at one end, and the grid of 
 service-reservoirs was lower down. Sharpe had left the
 
 THE BLIND EYE 261 
 
 hut. He would go there for a few days and have his 
 bread and mutton and cheese sent up from the inn in the 
 valley below. He would tell Minetta to get somebody 
 to stay with her, and would go in the morning. . . . 
 
 He was passing the closed fancy-shop at the corner 
 of Gardd Street when he came to this resolution; and 
 suddenly he stopped dead. Minetta! . . . What was 
 it that the thought of his sister, coming at this moment, 
 reminded him of ? It was odd, but it had certainly re- 
 minded him of something that had seemed to come near 
 him only to escape him again immediately. Minetta! 
 . . . He saw Minetta daily. There was nothing new 
 about Minetta. She looked after the house, and if he 
 wasn't going to be in for meals he mentioned the fact, 
 or sometimes didn't, and beyond that, to tell the truth, 
 he didn't very often think of Minetta. He didn't sup- 
 pose she would ever marry wasn't that kind. He 
 remembered that years ago that genial idiot Percy 
 Briggs had fancied himself " sweet " on her, but that 
 sketching of hers 
 
 Ah! 
 
 John Willie, who had been still standing at the corner, 
 moved slowly forward again. He had got it. 
 
 He knew he'd been right! It was a little boast of 
 his that he remembered faces rather well, and the thing 
 that had perplexed him for two days was now clear. 
 In a flash he saw in his mind the Llanyglo of the days 
 of the Briggses and Laceys. He saw a bright diminu- 
 tive picture of deck-chairs and bathing-tents on the 
 shore, and June Lacey and Wiggie having their fortunes 
 told. And he saw a gipsy child, with a head held as if 
 it had borne an invisible pitcher, and then a foot cut 
 by a piece of glass, and himself and Percy packed off 
 home in disgrace, and Percy's mother washing the
 
 262 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 gashed foot with water from a picnic-basket and tying it 
 up with a handkerchief. Then Minetta had come up, 
 and had said that she was going to make a sketch of the 
 child. . . . 
 
 Ah! It was she who had stood under the red pier- 
 light, watching that cadmium horn of the moon that 
 lifted itself out of the sea !
 
 II 
 
 JUNE 
 
 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." 
 
 " Tou never hear anything when you're reading a 
 
 263
 
 264 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 indiffer- 
 ence to him. He had known her for so long that he 
 regarded her almost as if she had been a split-off por- 
 tion 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 neces- 
 sary came of itself. He had only to say " You remem- 
 ber 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
 
 JUNE 265 
 
 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 ac- 
 tually 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 morn- 
 ing Concert in the Pavilion, a drive in the afternoon, 
 and so on? By keeping to this beaten track of en- 
 joyment, he could, at one and the same time, be enter- 
 taining 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 Coun- 
 cillor 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 jocund- 
 ity in the advertisements on the sides of the bathing- 
 machines at that spot. The virtues of Pills and Laxa-
 
 206 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 tives 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 Imi- 
 tations). For the rest folk now bathed where they 
 would. 
 
 So, idly, John Willie told June of the town's strug- 
 gle 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 Prome- 
 nade, 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
 
 JUKE 267 
 
 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 be- 
 came 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
 
 268 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 won- 
 dered, first, whether anybody would ever marry Mi- 
 netta, 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
 
 JUKE 269 
 
 where she was, Dafydd would know. That was 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 
 Dan's 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
 
 270 MUSHROOM TOWK 
 
 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 " Llong- 
 drylliad!" had sounded on that stormy night years 
 and years before. That that had not been Tommy's 
 fault mattered nothing; as soon as Dafydd haql remem- 
 bered 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 every- 
 body 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 abom- 
 inator 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
 
 JUNE 271 
 
 had twenty times escaped breaking his neck when they 
 had laid down the Pontnewydd Street tramlines no- 
 body knew. . . . And whenever he remembered that 
 they wanted his Hafod and would have it as soon as 
 Ned died, he offered to give it 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 and his marrying. 
 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 un- 
 disturbing extension of his sister. They set their faces
 
 2T2 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 rest- 
 less 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
 
 JUNE 273 
 
 who did June think was doing it? why, Eesaac 
 Oliver Gruffydd! 
 
 " Never ! " June exclaimed. 
 
 " Eather ! 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? Bet- 
 ter 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 an- 
 other 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 Wed- 
 nesday; John Willie would be off on Friday morn- 
 ing. 
 
 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
 
 274: MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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, Mi- 
 netta 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.
 
 Ill 
 
 DEX-Ytf 
 
 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 re- 
 vealed 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 
 
 275
 
 276 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 fol- 
 lowing 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-cup- 
 board : 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
 
 DELYN 277 
 
 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, 
 Tnys, 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 Lan- 
 cashire 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 happen- 
 ings 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 prin- 
 cipal establishment in Lord Street, and now sold stately 
 blooms the poor hedgerow cousins of which she had 
 formerly given away, pattering bare-foot after pedes- 
 trians 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,
 
 278 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 penny- 
 wort and trickling with rills, orange and whitey-green 
 with lichen and tongued with polyp odi, 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 reser- 
 voirs far below, the crisscrossing AAAA's of a moun- 
 tain-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.
 
 DELYN 279 
 
 He saw her sit down with her back against the wall of 
 the hut and cross her arms over her knees. Three min- 
 utes 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 sup- 
 posed 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 ex- 
 claimed, 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
 
 280 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 noth- 
 ing 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 over- 
 stressed 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
 
 DELYN 281 
 
 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 num- 
 eral 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
 
 282 MUSHKOOH TOWN 
 
 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 set- 
 ting 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 him- 
 self. 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 think- 
 ing 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 in-
 
 DELYJST 283 
 
 tervals 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 be- 
 tween 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 f rondage 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,
 
 284 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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, re- 
 ceiving 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 emo- 
 tion 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 ex- 
 pected 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
 
 DELYK 285 
 
 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 bet- 
 ter ! " 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 lago, 
 and the stream came down it over jagged stairs of pur- 
 ple slate and under dwarf-oak and birch, thorn and 
 briar and mountain-ash. 
 
 Again it would have been better to wade through
 
 286 MUSHROOM TOW3T 
 
 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, in- 
 stant, 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, turn-
 
 DELYN 287 
 
 ing 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 ac- 
 cepting 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. . . .
 
 288 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 lago, 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 un- 
 make 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 reso- 
 lutely 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.
 
 DELYK 289 
 
 " You will be here to-morrow ? " he said, his eyes 
 anxiously on her face. 
 
 What his answer would have been had she said 
 " ISTo," 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 al- 
 low 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 Forth ISTeigr road near the stone quarries. 
 Then, sitting sideways on the seat, with his head sunk 
 and the whiplash trailing over the dashboard, he al- 
 lowed 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 ob- 
 servation 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
 
 290 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 the bride's demeanour towards her still unmarried 
 friends, and a certain tendency to stoutness and bald- 
 ness 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 
 how that would turn out. . . . 
 
 On the other hand, the case was complicated not 
 in principle (that was beastly clear) but by allow- 
 ances 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 certifi- 
 cate 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 Enter- 
 tainment 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 linger-
 
 DELY.N 291 
 
 ing gleam on the sea. Warned probably, not by hear- 
 ing 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 Forth ISTeigr 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. There- 
 after sound merely succeeded sound. As he took the 
 railway bridge, a " special " roared past below, carry- 
 ing 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 be- 
 gan 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 indis- 
 tinguishable something in the air that was not the wind 
 and not the sound of the sea ; and then at the first road- 
 side lamp it seemed suddenly to become night. More 
 slowly he rounded Pritchard's Corner ; at the tram term- 
 inus the belated shopkeepers made a press about the
 
 292 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 Promenade-Pontnewydd Street car; and from the open 
 doors of the " Tudor Arms " was wafted the smell of 
 beer. 
 
 Delyn and Glyn lago 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. Prom 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, neverthe- 
 less, 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 pat- 
 tering 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 yield- 
 ing place as they came. The little rail-enclosed plots
 
 DELYN 293 
 
 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 desir- 
 able 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. . . .
 
 294 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 And scarce two hundred yards away, under the rail- 
 ings of the sea-wall, here and there a mask, with strag- 
 gling 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 " sug- 
 gested 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. This 
 was not speech ; this was 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
 
 DELYN 295 
 
 added some futility about fishing-weather and the differ- 
 ence 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, how- 
 ever. It was two days old, she said, but there if John 
 Willie would take himself off on his unsociable excur- 
 sions 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 Forth 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 Forth Neigr to 
 see it. He had had a cold or something himself, June 
 didn't know what ; anyway, he had come back from see- 
 ing 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 that lie could 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 have had something 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
 
 296 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 lago 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.
 
 IV 
 
 AN ORDINARY YOUNG MAN 
 
 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 lago, and she had his 
 breakfast ready for him when he arrived, which was 
 between half -past ten and eleven o'clock. As if his sug- 
 gestion had been a command, she had made her little en- 
 campment 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 
 297
 
 298 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 dusty heap or other, was on his plate when he came down 
 to breakfadt. Presently June and Minetta also came 
 down. By that time he was able to say, quite com- 
 posedly, " 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 Forth E"eigr. 
 
 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 explana- 
 tion 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 moun- 
 tain-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
 
 OKDINARY YOUNG MAN 299 
 
 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 un- 
 happiness and a fear ? 
 
 He did not know. He was only an ordinary young 
 man. He only knew that over that moment, which
 
 300 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 in- 
 deed she meant that she was still unresolved, or whether 
 to her, who had not been able to endure a night in Llany- 
 glo, 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 Dans, 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 after- 
 wards, 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 im- 
 pulses 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 ex- 
 actly 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 fish- 
 ing. 
 
 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
 
 AN ORDINARY YOUNG MAN 301 
 
 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-glor- 
 ious 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 con- 
 dition 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 lago 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 risk- 
 ing 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 inno- 
 cently; her fingers began to pull to pieces the little 
 yellow flower she had plucked ; and he had not the cour- 
 age to essay it twice. 
 
 Nor did he, his breedings 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
 
 302 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 Mi- 
 netta. 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 him- 
 self that she had not done so yet. 
 
 As he passed along the Pontnewydd Street he did not
 
 AN ORDINARY YOUNG MAN 303 
 
 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 Prome- 
 nade 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 read- 
 iness 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 some- 
 thing, 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 news- 
 papers, 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 arrange- 
 ments. 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 "
 
 304 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 out- 
 ward 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
 
 AN OKDINARY YOUNG MAN 305 
 
 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 sad- 
 dle. 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, do hurry 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 Switch- 
 back 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,
 
 306 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 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 de- 
 grees they gained the ring where, if little was to be 
 seen, a word now and then could be heard; and there- 
 after, by losing no chance of wriggling forward, they 
 reached a point from which they could see the band- 
 stand. 
 
 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.
 
 AN OKDINAKY YOUNG MAN 307 
 
 " 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 founda- 
 tion-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 "
 
 308 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 " Is his father here ? " June whispered to John 
 WiUie. . . . 
 
 Howell was at his own home, surrounded by sympa- 
 thetic 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 
 a-nd mother sinful pip-pie! 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-pie ; it is a big field, and will 
 hold crowds of pip-pie.' 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-pie 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 ! ... Blod- 
 wen, if the gas is lighted upstairs I think I go to bed 
 the things that were good enough for his father and
 
 309 
 
 mother are not good enough for him this is a heavy 
 
 day " 
 
 John Pritchard and Hugh Morgan helped him up the 
 stairs to bed. 
 
 June, Minetta, and John Willie left the valley before 
 Eesaac Oliver descended from the bandstand. As they 
 walked along the now rather more crowded Promenade 
 Minetta seemed to be in livelier spirits; she chattered 
 with June ; but John Willie was morose again. Again 
 he was wondering what would have happened had Ynys 
 not chanced to pick a flower at the moment when his 
 hand had moved imperceptibly towards hers. He saw 
 her again, bending over the stick-heap and looking up 
 as she gave him that expressionless " JSTos da." By this 
 time she was probably asleep, asleep far away up that 
 Glyn, with the deep plunge of the fall for her lullaby, 
 the stars for her night-lights, and the sun over the wood- 
 edge for her alarum in the morning. Before the noises 
 of Llanyglo should awaken him, she would be lying flat 
 on the bank, taking trout for his breakfast. 
 
 And, again and ever again, he wondered whether^ 
 had that attempted touch of his not miscarried, she 
 would have been off as the trout would have been off 
 at the falling of her shadow on the water. . . . 
 
 For one moment, just before he went to sleep, he 
 seemed to hear Eesaac Oliver's voice again : 
 
 " Do not say, ' I will sin one more sin and then 
 repent ' perhaps you will be taken away before that 
 sin is committed " 
 
 Then he slept, brokenly, waking at intervals to mutter 
 
 " Damn it " and to think of her again where she 
 
 lay, far up Glyn lago.
 
 V 
 
 THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT 
 
 JOHN" WILLIE began to spend his days up Delyn 
 and his nights elsewhere than at Llanyglo. He 
 too passed them under the night-lights of the stars 
 for if she could go to bed by those candles, so could he. 
 On the first night on which he did not return to Llany- 
 glo they peeped down on him where he lay, gazing at 
 them, a mile and more over the head of Delyn, to the 
 summit of which he had reascended after bidding her 
 " K~os da " in the Glyn. On the second night he put 
 another mile between herself and him, bathing in the 
 morning in a brook the chilliness of which only a little 
 refreshed him after his night's tossing; he slept for 
 three hours that afternoon, with her keeping watch by 
 his side. And on the third night he lay among the 
 fern, in her own old place behind Sharpe's hut. She 
 did not know that he did not return each night to that 
 dusty town by the sea. 
 
 And now once again he was muttering to himself, 
 fiercely and frequently, " JSTo no " 
 
 June's stay began to draw to a close. Minetta sus- 
 pected her of moping for John Willie, and told her that 
 he often disappeared for days at a time like that. 
 Sometimes, she added, he called it fishing. 
 
 " But he'd be fearfully annoyed if we went to look 
 for him," she said ; and she turned away and smiled. 
 
 She smiled again when one morning June had a letter 
 
 from Wygelia, with a postscript for herself. " A bit of 
 
 310
 
 THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT 311 
 
 gossip for Minetta" the postscript ran. " Ask her if 
 she remembers a girl from Llanyglo father took into one 
 of his shops. He's thinking of sending out search- 
 parties for her. She went off for a holiday, and hasn't 
 
 turned up again " etc., etc., etc. 
 
 And so it was that John Willie, filled now with one 
 thought only, came to miss quite a number of things 
 that went down into the history of Llanyglo. He 
 missed, for example, those first days of Eevival in 
 which the town, self-accused of sin, strove to purify 
 itself. He missed that storm of impassioned evangel- 
 icalism in which Eesaac Oliver, walking one day on the 
 Forth Neigr road, stopped at the foot of the lane that 
 led to the quarries, suddenly threw up his hands, broke 
 forth, and presently had the occupants of a dozen brakes 
 and wagonettes listening to him in the great echoing 
 excavation of the quarry itself. He missed, too, an odd 
 little by-product of that gale of spiritual awakening 
 the black-faced group that one morning made its appear- 
 ance on the beach, and resembled a troupe of ordinary 
 seaside niggers until it broke, not into Plantation Melo- 
 dies, but into hymns, one of which had a catchy pattef- 
 ing chorus that told over the names of the blest ones 
 the redeemed would meet in Heaven : 
 
 " There'll ~be Timothy, Philip and Andrew, 
 Peter, Paul and Barnabas, 
 James the Great, James the Less 
 And Bar-tholo-mew " 
 
 He missed that other great storm of groans and fervour, 
 when the pale young regenerator, mounting the railway 
 embankment from a low-lying meadow near Forth 
 JSTeigr, began to preach before sunset, preached until 
 the stars came out, and then sent hysterical young
 
 312 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 women and overstrung young men home in couples 
 along the benighted lanes together, to comfort and en- 
 hearten and uplift one another as they went. . . . And 
 he missed, among these and a multitude of other things, 
 a certain rather famous exploit of his compatriot, 
 Tommy Kerr. 
 
 He knew how Tommy had flouted and insulted Llany- 
 glo, and how Llanyglo in return had long been looking 
 for signs that Tommy was drinking himself to death. 
 But neither John Willie Garden nor anybody else had 
 thought of the alternative solution of the inconvenience 
 of Tommy's presence in Llanyglo. This was, not that 
 Tommy himself should fall one night and break his 
 neck, but that something should happen to the house 
 that, having been put up by the four brothers in a single 
 night, was enjoyable by them as long as they or any 
 of them should remain alive. 
 
 During Ned's illness, if that listless state in which he 
 had moved between the accident to Harry and Sam and 
 the death of the canary had been an illness, the care of 
 the Haf od had fallen to Tommy ; and that was as much 
 as to say that it had been cared for very little. More- 
 over, the fabric itself was perhaps by this time impaired. 
 The digging of the foundations of the hotels on either 
 side of it had done it no good, and the constant vibration 
 of the Pontnewydd Street trams had done it even less. 
 On a certain Sunday morning, some weeks before the 
 sickening of the canary, Tommy had taken it into his 
 head to make a thorough examination of the place, 
 while Ned had dozed in his chair. That examination 
 had given Tommy a bad fright. Mounting a short lad- 
 der and looking up into the roof-space above the single 
 living-room, he had found the loft far lighter than it 
 ought to have been ; but it had not been the gap in the
 
 THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT 313 
 
 roof that had scared him so badly. It had been what 
 he had seen through the gap the chimney-stack all 
 tottering, hooped out on one side like a barrel. . . . 
 
 With boards and baulks, an old pole-mast and other 
 timbers from the unsightly little backyard, it had taken 
 him the greater part of the day to shore the chimney 
 up again. 
 
 Whew! He and Ned had been sleeping under 
 that! 
 
 It may be that there had been plotting against 
 Tommy, too or, if not actually plotting, a great deal 
 of quiet watching to see what would happen, backed by 
 a powerful desire that something should happen. Both 
 Howell Gruffydd and John Pritchard were on the 
 Roads Committee, and well, it was obvious that 
 Pontnewydd Street could not remain unrepaired merely 
 because these Kerrs happened to live there. Orders 
 had gone forth that its mains were to be seen to, pits 
 had been dug in the street and barriers erected round 
 them, and red flags set there by day and red lanterns 
 by night. 
 
 Nothing had happened. 
 
 Then the excavations had been filled up again, and 
 the road-metal carts had come. The surface was to be 
 tackled. . . . 
 
 So it had been that John Willie Garden returning one 
 night from Delyn, had seen Dafydd Dafis's road-engine 
 drawn up for the night opposite the Imperial Hotel. 
 
 The engine had remained in Pontnewydd Street ever 
 since. 
 
 It shook the Hafod as if it had been brought there 
 expressly for its destruction. During the very first 
 hour of its slow and ponderous passing backwards and 
 forwards, Tommy's newly cobbled chimney had given
 
 314: MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 a not very loud crack, and, like a heavy sleeper, had 
 settled down into a more comfortable shape. Tommy 
 had come out, and had hailed the man who walked in 
 front of the machine with a red flag. Nervously, al- 
 most politely, he had asked him how long they were 
 likely to be. The man had replied that they had orders 
 to " make a job of it." Then Tommy had seen Dafydd 
 Dafis's face, watching him from the cab. . . . Half an 
 hour later he had met Howell Gruffydd in the Marine 
 Arcade. The* Chairman of the Council had stopped. 
 He had patted the shoulder of the common enemy 
 gently with his hand, and his smile had been odiously 
 affable. 
 
 " Well, Thomas Kerr," he had said, " how are you ? 
 I hear there is improvements at Plas Kerr; you have 
 a grand road to your house soon, whatever! I think 
 we have to assess you higher. How are you, Thomas 
 Kerr?" 
 
 Kerr had hated the Welshman's fine, small, regular 
 teeth. They were false, but by no means the falsest 
 thing about his mouth. As he had made to move away 
 Howell had continued. 
 
 " I hope Dafydd Dafis does not incommode you with 
 the road-engine, Thomas Kerr? He has orders not to 
 be a nuis-ance to the town. ' Drive as gently as you 
 can, Dafydd Dafis ' is his orders. . . . You are off to 
 the Marine Hotel now, Thomas Kerr ? Dear me, it is 
 a curious fas-cin-ation such places have for some pip- 
 pie ! Would it not be bet-ter to come to the Chap-pel on 
 Sundays? . . . Thomas Kerr." (Tommy had been 
 shuffling miserably away. ) " Excuse me, Thomas 
 Kerr, but you lose your handkerchief if you are not 
 careful ! " 
 
 And at this reminder that he had intended to button
 
 THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT 315 
 
 up his pockets in the presence of his foe, Tommy had 
 been wellnigh ready to weep. 
 
 And then Ned had died. . . . 
 
 There was a good deal of " edge," or vanity, or self- 
 esteem, or conceit, or whatever you like to call it, about 
 Tommy Kerr. He knew now that that road-engine 
 would not be taken off as long as his crazy house stood, 
 and he was stung and mortified that a few beggarly 
 Welshmen, backed by a pettifogging Railway Company 
 or two, with Kursaals Limited, a miserable District 
 Council, a Pleasure Boats' Amalgamation, a few Hotel 
 Syndicates and other such trifles, should be able to beat 
 him. He felt very lonely without Ned. He would 
 have liked to see Lancashire again, particularly Roch- 
 dale, his own town. He wanted to walk its hilly streets, 
 and to see the Asbestos Factory again, and Holling- 
 worth Lake. He would almost rather be found dead 
 there than continue to live among these indigo moun- 
 tains and pink hotels and chrome-yellow sands. 
 
 And so he set about his exploit. 
 
 At the very outset they tried once more to baulk him. 
 For the thing that he intended to do certain timbers 
 were necessary, and at six o'clock one night he passed, 
 none too steadily, to a timber-merchant's, and gave an 
 order to a clerk. The clerk smiled, and sent for his 
 principal. Kerr pointed to various pieces in the yard. 
 " Ye can send that an' that an' that t' other," he 
 said thickly ; " ye can get 'em out now I'll fetch a 
 cart." Then, looking at the builder's face, he saw that 
 he too, like the clerk, was smiling. . . . 
 
 There was no need of words. Howell Gruffydd had 
 been beforehand with him again. If one builder re- 
 fused to sell to him, so, he knew, would all the others. 
 He was wasting precious time with builders.
 
 316 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 How many inns he had been to that day he could not 
 have told, but he now felt the heart in him again. They 
 thought they could dish Tommy Kerr like that, did 
 they? Well, he would show them. . . . He lurched 
 away to the " Lancashire Rose," in Gardd Street, and 
 then crossed to the " Trafford." But at neither of them 
 did he stay very long. He left the " Trafford " at a 
 little after eight, three hours before he needed to have 
 done so. He wanted those three hours. He also 
 wanted all the hours he could get between then and sun- 
 rise. 
 
 !Nb sober man would have dreamed of attempting it ; 
 but sobriety and large deeds do not always go hand in 
 hand. Neither do large deeds and very clear thinking 
 which, stout hearts being commoner than unmuddled 
 brains, is lucky for us. Through Kerr's bemused head 
 ran one thought and one thought only, namely, that the 
 Hafod had been built by himself and his three brothers 
 in a night built in a night built in a night 
 
 If it had been built in a night it could be rebuilt in a 
 night 
 
 It had taken four of them to build it, but the rebuild- 
 ing ought not to be nearly so heavy a job 
 
 He would show them he did not come from Lan- 
 cashire for nothing! 
 
 But before entering his dwelling that night he 
 committed an act of theft. That damned road-engine 
 had again been left drawn up opposite the Imperial 
 Hotel, and Tommy, fumbling under the tarpaulin that 
 covered it, stole something from the cab. He chuckled 
 as he seemed to see again Dafydd Dafis's cat-like face 
 looking at him round the fly-wheel. He'd show Dafydd 
 Dans!
 
 THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT 317 
 
 He entered his house and locked the door behind him. 
 
 He had formed no plan, but yet, somehow, he was 
 conscious of a plan, and a reasonably clear one. 
 Where it had come from he did not know ; it was as if 
 he heard again, somewhere in the air quite near, the 
 voices of his brothers again, saying, in the loved Eatchet 
 accents, " Never heed that, Sam here's where th ? 
 strain comes we'll do th' paperin' and put a pot o' 
 geraniums i' th' window after." He saw these vital 
 points and master-members of his plan as if they had 
 been marked in his mind in red. He had not to stop 
 to reason about them. He knew dead Ned seemed to 
 tell him that the wall between the living-room and 
 the scullery might stand. He knew he seemed to 
 have it from Sam that the whole of the street-front- 
 age was sound. The ends, near the two hotels, were 
 the danger-points; most perilous of all was the main 
 beam under the lately propped chimney. The chimney 
 must be taken down first of all. " To lighten th' beam, 
 ye see/' Harry's voice seemed to sound ; " nay, donnot 
 fiddle wi' it shove it ower into th' alley we're 
 pushed for time " 
 
 So, whether you call it drink, or whatever you call it, 
 Tommy did not set to work quite unassisted. 
 
 At the very beginning he almost came to grief. This 
 was over the chimney, that essential member of the 
 dwelling up whose throat the comfortable smoke had 
 passed on that far-off morning as a token of habitation 
 before the eyes of astonished little Llanyglo. He had 
 climbed out on to the perilous roof and had begun to 
 " study " how best to take it down ; then, as cautiously 
 he had unlashed and removed the baulks and the pole- 
 mast, the chimney had suddenly thrust out its stomach 
 at him. His heart gave a jump, and in a twink he had
 
 318 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 set his back against it, grasping a rope to check his 
 heave. . . . But the chimney would neither stand, nor 
 yet fall as he wished it to fall, over the end of the Hafod 
 into the side-alley. It wanted to fall inwards, over 
 Tommy's head. He thought his agonised effort would 
 never end. . . . But end it did. He felt the release of 
 weight. The thing hung poised for a moment, and 
 then. . . . 
 
 He was once more down in his kitchen before the 
 windows which had been flung up in the two hotels had 
 closed again. No doubt they had been waiting for days 
 for that crash. They did not know that the scandalous 
 Tommy himself had caused it. The ghost of a 
 malicious smile crossed his face. " Sucks," he mut- 
 tered, " for Gruffydd." 
 
 Then, at eleven o'clock at night, he fell to his house- 
 breaking. 
 
 " Kerr ? " said the author of the Sixpenny Guide, 
 when asked about this. " I suppose you mean Tommy 
 Kerr? Yes, I remember him. His cottage? That 
 Hafod Unos place ? Yes, it's perfectly true. He did 
 pull it down or put it up again in one night, or at any 
 rate something like it. An uncouth little animal he 
 was; a drunken little beast; still, he did this. Made 
 quite a job of it too. How? That I can't tell you. 
 But I saw the place the next morning, and it seems to me 
 that at one time during the night both the ends and half 
 the back must have been as open as an empty rick-shed. 
 Of course the whole thing was altogether preposterous. 
 Six men's work. I was staying a little farther up the 
 road, and by daybreak there must have been a thousand 
 people in Pontnewydd Street. Nobody lifted a finger. 
 They just watched, He wasn't to be seen mostly; he
 
 THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT 319 
 
 was busy inside; but when he did come out he never 
 turned his head. Sober ? Impossible to say. And of 
 course he didn't quite finish the job. But you've heard 
 the rest." 
 
 The rest was as follows : 
 
 By three o'clock in the morning Tommy was neither 
 drunk nor sober. He was a will and a piece of muscular 
 apparatus, the two things quite separate, yet working 
 together with never a jerk to mar the harmony. As a 
 worn-out old machine will continue to run provided it is 
 not interrupted, so Kerr worked, in a state to which the 
 only fatal thing would have been to stop. The Tommy 
 Kerr Llanyglo knew was a base thing, senseless as the 
 lime and stone through which his chisel drove (with a 
 fearful racket), obstinate as the beams under which he 
 hammered his wedges; but this was another Tommy 
 Kerr somehow the name yet somehow another a 
 Kerr who might have been imagined to mutter, as he 
 laboured, that it was a gradely night for a titanic act 
 that he came from Lancashire, where men did impos- 
 sible things as a matter of course and that if any 
 Welshman would pocket his pride and ask him, he would 
 pull down and put up again their whole blasted flashy 
 town for them while he was about it. 
 
 And perhaps he was not really patching up his tot- 
 tering cottage at all that night. Perhaps he was rather 
 doing one of those useless and splendid things that alone 
 among man's contrivances do not crumble and fall. 
 Perhaps he was doing in his ruined Hafod pretty much 
 the same thing that Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd did from 
 bandstands and railway embankments and rocks and 
 bedroom windows setting up an ideal, and bidding 
 men remember, though they might never attain, to strive.
 
 320 MUSHROOM TOWN" 
 
 Or perhaps he was working from the most religious 
 motive known to man to please himself, trusting that 
 if he did so he might please Something greater than him- 
 self. If so, his idea might have had grandeur, but that 
 grandeur was curiously expressed. For he did not cease 
 to grunt from time to time, as his face became grimy 
 and then washed clean again with perspiration: 
 " Damned Treacle-tongue ! I'll sew my pockets up 
 next time! Owd false-teeth their road-engines 
 him an' his new brolly ! " 
 
 By four o'clock twenty road-engines could not have 
 shaken down the beam on the chimney side of the 
 house, and without another look at it he turned to the 
 other wall. It was Ned's remembered voice that bade 
 him hasten. As he tackled the second beam he grew 
 quite chatty with Ned. It was Ned who kept him to 
 those red-marked crucial points, and told him that he 
 needn't bother about the walls, for the ceiling-sheets 
 would do to cram into the interstices, and that, if he 
 made haste, the golden days would come again when 
 he had mocked at all Welshmen, and had had on the 
 hip the Railway Companies and Kursaals and Hotels 
 and Steamboats that had done their utmost to get rid 
 of him. 
 
 It was soon after this that he became conscious of 
 other whispers than Ned's. At last he had seen the 
 crowd gathered in Pontnewydd Street. But by this 
 time he had ripped his ceiling-cloth down, and the grey 
 incoming day was suddenly darkened again as he 
 ploughed across the talus of debris and made a wall of 
 cloth, fastening it anywise from beam to beam. Ned 
 said that that was quite good enough. You never 
 caught wise old Ned napping. Tommy Kerr had been 
 very fond of his brother Ned. He had gone ratting
 
 THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT 321 
 
 with him, and alder-cutting, and he remembered a 
 whippet Ned had once had, a rare dog for nipping 'em 
 as they turned, and a canary too. . . . 
 
 Then Tommy Kerr's brain, which for more than seven 
 hours had been as steady as a sleeping top, gave a little 
 wobble. This was as he paused in the middle of the 
 floor of his incredible house. There was something else 
 he had to do; what was it? ... What was it, now? 
 . . . He knew there was something else he had to 
 do. ... 
 
 He would have done better to begin his work all over 
 again than to stop and think. 
 
 What ... ah yes, he remembered! He remem- 
 bered and chuckled. Why, he had been on the point of 
 forgetting the cream of the whole joke ! 
 
 He stooped by the rounded grey mound of lime and 
 plaster that represented his bed, but his knees gave, and 
 he came with a little thump to the floor. But he rolled 
 over on his side, and his fingers found what they sought, 
 and after a few minutes he rose again. In his hand 
 was the red flag he had stolen from the cab of Dafydd 
 Dafis's road-engine. That was to go up where v his 
 chimney had been, that chimney that had emitted that 
 first smoke on that far-off first morning. The town, 
 when it awoke, must on no account miss that. Tommy 
 Kerr wanted to see the faces of Howell Gruffydd, John 
 Pritchard, Dafydd Dafis and Co. when they saw that 
 
 He tottered to the ladder that ran up into the loft. 
 
 He fell twice from the lower rungs of it, but a foot 
 of lime made his fall soft. He mounted to the top, 
 and crawled on his belly across the open rafters of the 
 loft. He did not know how he got out on to the roof; 
 it seemed to him that he lay below for a long time, gaz-
 
 322 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 ing up through a gap at the paling sky and wondering 
 how it was to be done, and then miraculously found 
 himself where he wished to be. Then he got on his feet. 
 
 Then he saw them, the people in the street below. 
 He had again forgotten they were there. So much the 
 better; they should see him do it. Then he'd give a 
 shout that should wake all Wales, and and by that 
 time the pubs ought to be opening. . . . 
 
 But the little hand-staff of the flag was not long 
 enough to please him. He wanted a longer one, to make 
 more of a show. It took a whole tree to carry the flag 
 over the Kursaal Dancing Rooms there. It was stupid 
 of Tommy not to have thought of that not to have 
 brought one up from below, where there were plenty 
 yes, plenty 
 
 As it happened, he did not need the stick. It all 
 came about very softly and gently. He was standing 
 up, again looking about for a longer stick, when once 
 more his brain gave a wobble. The watchers below saw 
 him lean, as formerly his chimney had leaned, only 
 now Tommy Kerr leaned the other way 
 
 And so gently did he come over, and so comparatively 
 short a distance had he to fall, that you would have 
 sworn it did not hurt him very much. He stuck to the 
 little square of red calico at the end of the short staff ; 
 it was still in his hand when they picked him up from 
 the heap of chimney-bricks that choked the little alley 
 where the principal entrance to the Kursaal Gardens 
 now is. 
 
 Ancient Mrs. Pritchard, when she heard of it, baa-ed, 
 and said that folk came and went came and 
 went
 
 VI 
 
 THE GLTN 
 
 FROM sleeping badly, John Willie Garden had 
 passed to sleeping hardly at all. From that same 
 fear of startling her, he still did not appear in the Glyn 
 much before his accustomed hour (though there had 
 been times without number when he had resolved other- 
 wise) ; instead, he wandered about, a mile, two miles 
 away, sometimes setting himself a' distant point to walk 
 to, on his return from which it would surely be time he 
 was seeking her. On the first two mornings of his ab- 
 sence from home he had not shaved ; then he had decided 
 that that would never do, and has sent somebody from 
 the inn below to fetch him a bag. With the bag had 
 come a short note from Minetta. It had merely said 
 that June was leaving on the following Saturday, and 
 that after that day she would be alone in the house. 
 
 He now wished he had not asked Minetta to show 
 June that sketch. She had put it on his breakfast- 
 plate for all the world as if lie had wished to see it, 
 instead of merely to show June how much better it 
 was than the others. He didn't think that Minetta 
 cared in the least how he spent his time, but she was 
 so sharp, and queer as well as sharp. She watched 
 things without taking any part in them. The more 
 self-absorbed the actors showed themselves, the more 
 keenly interested Minetta became. In many respects 
 she took after her father. Edward Garden too had 
 
 323
 
 324 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 that habit of poking and prying into people's tastes and 
 enjoyments and passions and desires, noting and under- 
 standing them while remaining himself inaccessible to 
 such weaknesses. It wouldn't greatly have surprised 
 John Willie to learn that Minetta guessed what he was 
 about up Delyn. 
 
 The curious thing was that, if that were so, he didn't 
 think that Minetta would disapprove. She would look 
 as it were over the tops of a pair of imaginary glasses, 
 and under them, and finally through them, and her 
 ironical glance would say as plainly as words, " This 
 seems to be a love-affair." She would neither disap- 
 prove nor approve, or, if she did approve, it would be 
 of his provision of entertainment for her. Her disap- 
 proval would appear only if John Willie involved her 
 in something that would not " do." 
 
 This brought John Willie straightway back face to 
 face with his old and torturing dilemma, of having some- 
 thing " on " but something that would not " do." 
 
 A hundred times he had fought it out, and a hun- 
 dred times he had come to the conclusion that, while 
 Minetta might resemble her not quite human father, he, 
 John Willie, was his mother's son. His mother would 
 have been entirely for that " No " that a hundred times 
 had gained the day. After each of these victories he 
 had been on the point of turning his back on the moun- 
 tains and of not returning as long as he knew her to be 
 there. These impulses had now nothing to do with his 
 fear of startling her. They were born of that stiff and 
 indispensable code. He had only to thank her for a 
 few breakfasts, to tell her he was going, to wish her 
 well, and all would be over. He found rest in the 
 thought. He might suffer an ache or two afterwards, 
 but it would be the best way out. It had been his
 
 THE GLYN 325 
 
 first impulse, and it had proved to be his last con- 
 clusion. He would consider it settled so. It would be 
 much the best course to act like an ordinary young 
 man. 
 
 For several days he had said that. 
 
 He said it again on the morning when he shaved off 
 half a week's growth of beard. 
 
 Once more he had slept within a stone' s-throw of the 
 hut. There had been light showers during the night, 
 but hardly enough to call a break of the weather; the 
 drops twinkled on fern and grass and spiders'-webs and 
 tiny flowers, but the ground was still as dry as tinder. 
 As he shaved, with the little mirror of his dressing- 
 bag hung on a hazel, he reflected that it was only half- 
 past seven, and that the Llyn ought to be a good colour 
 for fishing. There would be plenty of time for a cast 
 or two before saying good-bye. But his rod was in the 
 locked hut, of which she had the key. No matter. 
 Since he had now come to his decision, it would make 
 no difference did he seek her in the Glyn a little earlier 
 than usual. He would then be able to get away earlier 
 in order to say good-bye to the neglected June. 
 
 He was heartily glad it was all over. The only pos- 
 sible course seemed so plain that he wondered now what 
 he had been tormenting himself about all this time. 
 Smiling a little, he even thought of all the awkward- 
 nesses and dissimulations and machinations and deceits 
 he was by one stroke escaping. He would have felt 
 rather a brute had he come upon Dafydd Dafis one day, 
 and asked him how he was getting on, and, casually, 
 what had become of that little niece or cousin of his, 
 whose name he would have had to make a lying pre- 
 tence of having forgotten. It would have been behav- 
 ing rather off-handedly to June, to see her for the first
 
 326 MUSHEOOM TOWN 
 
 two days only of her stay and then to let her go without 
 as much as seeing her off. It would be better that 
 Minetta should not have to write home saying that John 
 Willie was away (fishing) and she alone in the house, 
 but she was quite all right. It would be better to 
 think of the things that would permanently " do " 
 altogether more comfortable and satisfactory not to 
 have to call himself, in the waking hours of nights in 
 the years ahead, or in the days to come when business 
 claimed him, by a disquieting name. It was not as if 
 there were not plenty of other things to think of. This 
 particular aspect of life was far too much dwelt on. 
 Percy Briggs dwelt on it too much, he himself had 
 dwelt too much on it. He wasn't sure that he hadn't 
 been getting even a little morbid about it. Not every 
 lovely flower is picked because it is lovely and then 
 thrown wilting away again. John Willie had come to 
 his senses. It had taken him some time, but he was 
 all right again now. He wondered how those people at 
 the inn below had been looking after his horse. They'd 
 probably let him get fat and lazy. Well, he would give 
 him a twisting on the way home. Too much inaction 
 is good for neither horse nor man. . . . 
 
 He finished shaving, and began to whistle as he 
 packed his tackle and strapped the case. He would 
 leave the case where it was, and pick it up on his way 
 back. He would take the boat, pull straight across, 
 get it over, and then have a swinging walk down to the 
 inn. Despite his moping wanderings, he felt the need 
 of a really good hard walk. 
 
 He strode down to the lake, unfastened the boat, 
 dashed the waterdrops from the thwart with his cap, 
 and pushed off. 
 
 It was a brilliant, if broken, sky. Up the mountain-
 
 THE GLYN 327 
 
 side the light mists were quickly evaporating, and a 
 great crag of dazzling white cloud, shaped like the 
 north of Scotland on a map, was perfectly reduplicated 
 in the glassy Llyn. As if the surface of the water had 
 had a tenuity without abating a jot of its crystal clear- 
 ness, the smooth V from the bows seemed to shear 
 through something that, even when the water settled to 
 rest again, did not return ; there fled at each stroke an 
 intact perfection. He altered the boat's course, and 
 the reflection of the edge of Delyn broke into long 
 smooth stripes. He altered it again, and an invisible 
 comb seemed to pass through the towering inverted 
 cloud. His wake was a dancing of broken glittering 
 facets. He stood in towards the shaly spur; a few 
 more strong strokes and he grounded abruptly; and he 
 gathered up his boots and stockings from the bottom of 
 the boat, stepped out, and made fast at the bottom of 
 the Glyn. 
 
 The showers had swollen the stream a little, and 
 mossy stones that had been dry the day before were 
 lapped by the water, and pools came farther up his calf. 
 But suddenly at a thought he stopped. In the new 
 circumstances it was a new thought. She did not ex- 
 pect him for some hours yet; it might be better in 
 case of his coming upon her as she might not wish to 
 be come upon to give a call. On second thoughts 
 he was sure that he ought to give a call. He opened 
 his mouth 
 
 But it was not necessary. Suddenly he saw her 
 twenty yards ahead. She had probably been up for 
 hours, and had got her bathe over long since. 
 
 But even that glimpse of her through the leaves had 
 been as it were two glimpses. In the first of them he 
 had seen that she was there ; in the second he had noted
 
 328 MUSHEOOM TOWN 
 
 that her appearance was not her usual appearance. She 
 was no longer wearing the black dress of Philip Lacey's 
 flower-shop, but that old blouse, unconfined at the waist, 
 and again, as on that day when she had started back 
 from the door of the hut, her legs and feet were bare. 
 Four trout lay on the grass beside her, one of them 
 still fluttering. She was stroking the drops of water 
 from her forearms, and wiping her hands on her old 
 striped petticoat. 
 
 He did not call, but all in a moment she looked 
 round as quickly as if he had done so. At first he 
 thought she was going to start to her feet and run, but 
 she remained seated. Then a bough intervened. He 
 put it aside behind him, threw his boots and stockings 
 ashore, and climbed the bank. 
 
 " Hallo, Ynys," he said, as he sat down beside her. 
 " I'm a bit early, but I've got to get off soon. They 
 want me down there. There are some people I must 
 see before they go." 
 
 Then he wondered whether, after all, he had not 
 startled her. In her eyes was once more that look that 
 had been there that other day, when she had fallen back, 
 though no farther than a cat falls back. If that was so 
 he must reassure her by going on talking. Without 
 pausing, he continued. 
 
 " Yes, I shall have to get off by eleven. I've not 
 been home, you see. Couldn't stand going back to 
 that place, so I just made myself comfortable by the 
 hut there. I say, I hope you didn't get wet with that 
 rain in the night ? " 
 
 Simply, freely, naturally, and without a second 
 thought, he put out his hand to feel whether her petti- 
 coat was dry. He supposed she slept in her petticoat,
 
 THE GLYN 329 
 
 and that his early visit had not allowed her time to 
 change. 
 
 But she crouched back so swiftly that he also fell a 
 little back, surprised. He forgot that his own words, 
 " I'm a bit early," raised twenty questions questions 
 of why he was there at all, of how it had come to pass 
 that a variation in his habit was a thing to be remarked 
 on, of why his announcement that he must be off early 
 seemed even to himself a breach of something that had 
 never been established, but only tacitly allowed. He 
 forgot these things, stared at her, and suddenly ex- 
 claimed, " Why, what's the matter ? " Had she feared 
 that he was about to put his hand upon her ? One of 
 her elbows had shot up as if she would have defended 
 herself, and the frightened seaweed eyes looked at him 
 over the guarding forearm. Her other hand, behind 
 her on the grass, supported her. So they sat, she 
 trembling, he covering her with an astonished stare. 
 
 Then, as quickly as she had raised it, she dropped 
 the defending arm. She made a swift clutch at her 
 petticoats and scrambled a foot farther away from him. 
 Her breast fluttered like that of the still living^ trout, 
 and her hand was clasped betrayingly about one foot 
 hidden in the short striped petticoat. 
 
 And in a twink John Willie saw his mistake. It 
 was not from his advanced hand that she had shrunk. 
 It was from the resting of his eyes those eyes that, 
 even as she had drawn herself back, had already rested. 
 Those eyes, of Scandinavian blue, had sought hers 
 again, of the wet greenish brown of the seaweed of the 
 shore. 
 
 He spoke quietly. 
 
 " Come here, Ynys," he said.
 
 330 MUSHEOOM TOWN" 
 
 She did not move. 
 
 " Come here, Ynys," he said again. 
 
 Her trembling became violent. 
 
 " Come here, Ynys I want " 
 
 He did not finish. His hand shot quickly forth. 
 The next moment it held what she had striven to hide. 
 He was gazing at the silver mark that ran round the 
 outer edge of her foot near the little toe as a vein runs 
 round a pebble. 
 
 She had twisted her body so that her face lay on the 
 grass, covered with her hands. She made one feeble 
 movement to draw the foot from his hand, and then 
 lay still. When, presently, he put it gently down, she 
 made no further attempt to hide it ; what was the good, 
 since he had seen? It lay still now, a little crinkled 
 brown sole with bits of vegetation pressed into it, and, 
 running across it, that old thread, silver, like the wed- 
 ding-ring of her mother that hard little sole that had 
 made the kidney-shaped footprints on the Llanyglo 
 beach, that had pattered after pedestrians on the road, 
 and that would take to the roads again rather than be 
 pressed into a shoe and walk the pavements of a town. 
 
 Yet, though he had seen the foot, she seemed deter- 
 mined he should not see her face too. Presently she 
 was conscious that he was trying to do so, that he was 
 gently trying to draw away the concealing hands. That 
 she resisted. " Ynys ! Ynys ! " he was saying re- 
 morsefully in her ear. She lay quite still, and " Ynys ! 
 Ynys ! " he continued to repeat, over and over again. 
 
 At last he heard that uniquely soft voice of hers in 
 reply. She spoke into the grass, not sobbingly, only a 
 little dully. 
 
 " I 'ould not show you," she begged him movingly 
 begged him to believe.
 
 THE GLYN 331 
 
 " Ynys dear ! " 
 
 " Indeed you ask me, one day, if I take off my 
 boots and stock-kings, and I 'ould not " 
 
 " No, no " he soothed her. 
 
 " I not show nobody, in lot-t of years, never." She 
 turned her face to him for a moment; the anger of a 
 fury lurked there for him had he not believed her. 
 " I not show nobody, if they kill me," she went on. 
 
 " Lot-t of years I hate it " the vindictiveness of 
 
 the single word died away, and he scarcely heard what 
 came next, " but I not hate it any more now " 
 
 His answer was to rise suddenly to his knees, to stoop 
 again, and to kiss the foot he had innocently maimed. 
 He was conscious as he did so of its quick little pressure 
 against his mouth. . . . 
 
 The next moment his arm was about her shoulder, 
 and he was gently seeking to see her face again. 
 
 " Cariad ! " he murmured, his lips to her ear. 
 
 And he knew that by no other means could it have 
 come to pass. " Lot-t of years I hate it but I not 
 hate it any more." She had hated the foot for its dis- 
 figurement. She had loved it for him. / x 
 
 There was no question of Yes or No as they ate their 
 breakfast together; it was as it was, and neither guilt 
 nor innocence had any part in it. From time to time, 
 as they sat, he flung his arms about her shoulders as 
 frankly as children embrace, and she suffered the crush- 
 ing with lips parted and eyes immeasurably far away. 
 The black pool was flecked with froth; it danced over 
 the whitey-green ebullition at the foot of the swollen 
 fall ; and two dragon-flies, one blue as a scarab and the 
 other like a darting twig of green metal, hovered and 
 set and spun. There seemed to be no wind, but the 
 great country of white cloud up aloft had advanced,
 
 332 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 and a soft gloom filled the Glyn. They did not wash 
 up ; impatiently John Willie tossed the platter they had 
 shared aside ; and they embraced again. 
 
 Midday did not find John Willie on his way to 
 Llanyglo, nor yet did he see June off by the three 
 o'clock train. By three o'clock he was on the summit 
 of Delyn again, under the same rock where he had tried, 
 as if by accident, to touch her hand. She had put on 
 her shoes, but not her stockings, for the climb, but he 
 had drawn them off again, and once more she lay, 
 luxuriating with her foot under his hand. Even now 
 she did not talk very much. She had only one thing to 
 say, with lovely monotony and very few words to say 
 it in; she strayed no farther from her little store of 
 English than to say, over and over again, " Boy bach ! " 
 with the greenish-brown eyes slavishly on his, and her 
 parted lips hurrying out the diminutive before he 
 crushed them again. She started from her dream once, 
 as a stray sheep close behind them gave a call like a 
 rich oboe ; then she relapsed into it again. The shadows 
 lay still and leagues long over the rumple of mountains, 
 and "she had not changed, and had promised that she 
 would not again change, that unfastened bodice and 
 short and faded old petticoat. 
 
 So June steamed away, while Ynys's face was framed 
 in John Willie's arm on the summit of Delyn. 
 
 They descended to the Glyn again between the after- 
 noon and the early evening, and with each step as they 
 dropped down the mountain a silence grew and deep- 
 ened on them. He knew its meaning, if she did not, 
 and, back by the pool again, he first cleaned the forgot- 
 ten platter (which she tried to prevent), and then stood 
 before her as he had stood when once, with an abrupt, 
 da," he had stridden away. And in that pause
 
 THE GLYN 333 
 
 of gazing silence he knew how much was packed his 
 Yes, his No, hers too ; all that lay behind them, all that 
 lay before. For him, there lay enwrapped in it that 
 slight black figure he had seen under the crimson pier- 
 light; his searching for her; his finding her; his 
 struggles, his decision, and then, even in the act of his 
 relinquishment, his wonderful recovery of her. And 
 her memory took a farther flight still. She saw her- 
 self, a little girl, sitting with a bandaged foot upon a 
 chair, while a testy girl not two years older than her- 
 self drew her likeness. She remembered the unendur- 
 able length of those half -hours unendurable, save 
 that occasionally there looked in at the door or passed 
 the window a cowslip-haired boy, with hard blue eyes 
 that would stare down even his own conscience and none 
 be the wiser, a conquering boy, of a race so habituated 
 to conquest that it takes with the sword-hand and care- 
 lessly tosses twice as much back with the other. That 
 was what it meant to her, that silver mark that ran 
 round the edge of her foot as a vein runs round the edge 
 of a pebble. . . . 
 
 And for the future ? His future might be anything, 
 but hers could be one thing only. For the gipsy loves 
 never but the once. In all but love, the waters of the 
 world are not more unstable than she ; in love, the rocks 
 are not more irremovable. Therefore she has no past 
 and no regrets. She has no regrets, for there is no 
 scar upon her heart how can there be a scar, when 
 a scar is a healing, and this wound is never healed, but 
 ever new, ever quivering? And she has no past 
 how can she have a past when all is a poignant and 
 lovely present, that endures to the end ? . . . 
 
 There was so little for John Willie to do. He had 
 only to go away without kissing her again.
 
 334 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 Kiss her, however, he must not he was only an 
 ordinary young man 
 
 He knew it, and 
 
 He passed his arms about her waist and drew her 
 down by his side. 
 
 It was dark in the Glyn long before the light had 
 faded from the open hillside above. In Llyn Delyn 
 not a fish rose to break that dark and intact perfection. 
 The fall into the pool diminished a little in volume, 
 and mossy cushions that had lately been covered began 
 to rise out of the water again. And a heart was laid 
 quiveringly open where formerly only a foot had been 
 maimed. She was twice conquered, for she was Welsh 
 and woman too. In the hearts of the men of her race 
 the fame of their story still lives, and while it lives 
 strife will not cease. As their own proverb says, what 
 the sword took, the tongue will take back again. 
 
 But the woman goes with the land.
 
 PART FIVE 
 
 THE "WHETTL 
 
 IT was a summer nightfall in the Kursaal Gardens. 
 The turnstiles of the new Main Entrance in Pont- 
 newydd Street revolved ceaselessly, with a noise as of 
 an unending rack and pinion. The lightly clad merry- 
 makers poured under the trees that had electric globes 
 for fruit ; they moved towards the cream-coloured build- 
 ings that, with their illuminations, seemed no more than 
 footlights to the solemn stage of the immeasurable blue 
 beyond. Most of them were going to that Dancing- 
 Hail where all the youths and maidens of the world 
 seemed to dance together; the others hurried to keep 
 appointments, to sit at the little tables where the wait- 
 ers moved on the grass, to join the slowly moving circle 
 about the bandstand, or to see the side-shows. The 
 band played the " Lohengrin " Prelude ; the soft sound 
 of gravel crunching underfoot mingled with the music ; 
 and the great lighted circle of the Big Wheel rose 
 against the sky. 
 
 In the topmost coach of the Wheel sat John Willie 
 Garden and June Lacey. They were alone in the 
 bright upholstered compartment. June wore her Juni- 
 est frock and an engagement ring; John Willie, who 
 had been walking, was in cap and knickers. They had 
 been engaged since the Spring, and everybody had said 
 
 335
 
 336 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 how splendidly it would " do." They had played to- 
 gether (everybody had said) since childhood, knew 
 exactly what to expect and what not to expect of one 
 another, had (as they put it) the solid cake to cut at 
 when the sugar and the almond-paste had begun to pall, 
 and what could have been more romantic ? 
 
 " They'd be hard put to it to think of anything 
 they're short of," everybody had said. 
 
 From the windows of the car they could see the 
 whole of Llanyglo. With the turning of the Wheel they 
 had watched its lights rise slowly over the intervening 
 roofs, and then slowly sink away again. Now, to see 
 the grounds below, they had to step to the windows and 
 to look almost vertically down, through the intricacy of 
 girders and lattice and mammoth supporting piers. 
 
 " It takes about twenty minutes to go round, doesn't 
 it ? " June asked. 
 
 " About that," John Willie replied absently. 
 
 " Look at the Trwyn light ! " 
 
 " Yes, dear." 
 
 " We aren't as high as that, are we ? " 
 
 " Oh dear no." 
 
 " I suppose we've stopped to take more passengers 
 up?" 
 
 " I expect so." 
 
 Then, after a pause, June said, " Do you know, dear, 
 I think I've finally decided about the drawing-room. 
 I think I shall have it all white every bit " 
 
 From her white gloves to her gypsophylla petticoats, 
 she was a girl any young man would have been glad to 
 spend his shillings on, and her house was going to be as 
 smart and complete as herself. Her father was coming 
 down very handsomely for her wedding, and in addi- 
 tion to his other gifts, was going to lay out the gardens
 
 THE WHEEL 337 
 
 and the greenhouse for them. Counting her silver, 
 tapping her flower-pots to see which was in need of 
 water, trimming bits of raffia with her scissors and put- 
 ting drops of gum into her geraniums, June would be 
 exactly in her right place. She was already attending 
 a Cookery Class, and had all her household linen 
 marked. And already they were promised any num- 
 ber of presents. " Presents are so useful," she had 
 said to John Willie, " because then you have them, and 
 so often they're the kind of thing you'd put off buying 
 for yourself." It was all going to " do " very splen- 
 didly. 
 
 " I say," said John Willie by and by, " we don't 
 seem to be moving." 
 
 " The Wheel ? " June asked. 
 
 " Yes. But it will go on in a minute, I expect." 
 
 " I hope it won't stop long," June replied. 
 
 John Willie also hoped it would not stop long, but 
 for the life of him he couldn't have told you why he 
 hoped so. Indeed he tried to smother the hope. He 
 tried to smother it because he had an obscure feeling 
 that that well, if a reason can smile^ that his 
 reason for not wishing to stay up there" too long was 
 quietly smiling at him. It seemed to tell him that he 
 and everything about him were enviably all right 
 safe thoroughly and entirely comfortable need 
 have no fears for the future and that all would con- 
 tinue to be just as comfortable and safe and altogether 
 all right until he should come to die, in a best bed, with 
 eiderdowns, and frilled pillow-cases, and hot bottles, and 
 the certainty of a handsomely appointed funeral a few 
 days later. Few were as sure of their future as that. 
 John Willie was one of the lucky ones. . . . 
 
 He moved, not to the windows from which he could
 
 338 MUSHROOM TOWX 
 
 look down on the lights of the Promenade and Pier, but 
 to those that were turned to the dark and unseen moun- 
 tains. Somehow this reason he had for hoping that the 
 car would not stop long seemed to come from there. 
 He told himself that he would be better presently. He 
 had these bad humours, call them sometimes. 
 He hid them from June, but Minetta had noticed them, 
 and he knew all about them himself. He turned to 
 June again. 
 
 " I wonder what's happened," he said. 
 
 " It's it's quite safe, isn't it ? " June asked. 
 
 " Oh, quite." His lips compressed a little. It was 
 quite safe neither more nor less safe than everything 
 else in John Willie's life. That, somehow, was at the 
 bottom of these ill-humours of his. 
 
 " Dash it," he muttered. . . . 
 
 " It is a nuisance," June agreed. " But I don't sup- 
 pose Minetta will be anxious." 
 
 " I wasn't thinking of Minetta," John Willie re- 
 plied. 
 
 Now when you are reluctant to enter into explana- 
 tion, and there is something you badly want to do, you 
 never (if you are an ordinary young man) look very 
 far for a reason. The first that comes will serve your 
 turn. If it is a flimsy one, no matter; you then get 
 angry when its flimsiness is pointed out to you, and 
 presently out of your anger and obstinacy you will have 
 found a reason as good as another. John Willie did 
 not at all like those interior smiling taunts of himself 
 that took the form of congratulations on his neatly 
 planned life and pillowed and feathered death to close 
 it. If anybody of his own weight had taunted him 
 thus he would have knocked that person down. But 
 you cannot knock down a whisper that seems to come
 
 THE WHEEL 339 
 
 on the wind from the mountains through the night, 
 making you, your ordered comfort notwithstanding, 
 absolutely wretched. Again John Willie turned to 
 June. 
 
 " I say, June ; this won't do, you know," he said. 
 
 June looked enquiringly at him. 
 
 "But we can't do anything but wait, dear, can 
 we?" 
 
 He did not answer. 
 
 They waited. Half an hour passed. Then John 
 Willie muttered again that, among so many other things 
 that would " do " beautifully, this particular thing 
 would not " do." June coloured a little. 
 
 " But but it isn't our fault," she murmured, 
 picking at the fingers of her gloves. 
 
 He saw she understood. Again they waited. 
 
 Then, suddenly, John Willie came shortly out with 
 that reason that must serve in the stead of his real 
 reason. He knew how lame it was. A score or two of 
 other young couples were in precisely the same situa- 
 tion as they, and more that cheerfully resigned to their 
 plight; but then they were not being goaded and 
 taunted as John Willie was being goaded and taunted. 
 They were not being told that their paths lay, so to 
 speak, on flowers, while the paths of others were the 
 stony road, that cut and blistered the foot, and tired the 
 eyes, and bowed the back (but had no power, perhaps, 
 thus to reproach the heart). . . . Anyway, John Wil- 
 lie was not disposed to stand it. 
 
 " June," he said abruptly, " I can't stay up here all 
 night with you." 
 
 Her wail interrupted him. " Oh-h-h ! " 
 
 " It wouldn't do." 
 
 " Oh-h-h it isn't our fault "
 
 340 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 "No, but that can't be helped. The woman I 
 marry ' 
 
 " Oh-h-h but there isn't anything to do ! " 
 
 " Oh, yes there is. We needn't be together. I can 
 get into another car or something. It will only be like 
 walking along the footboard of a train." 
 
 She gave a little shriek. " Oh if you do I shall 
 throw myself out I know I shall ! " 
 
 "You won't do anything so silly. Get up, dear; 
 Fve quite made up my mind. I tell you it wouldn't 
 do. The woman I marry . . ." 
 
 With gentle force he picked her up and set her on 
 the seat of the car. Then he approached the window. 
 There was a bar across it, which it took him a minute 
 to bend, but the chances were that where his head 
 would pass the rest of his body might follow. June 
 hid her face and moaned as he took off his coat; then 
 he kissed her and thrust his head under the bar. He 
 wriggled through, stood on the footboard, smiled again 
 grimly through the window, and then looked down. 
 
 At any rate, he had given a reason of sorts. 
 
 Then he looked up. 
 
 Instantly he saw that, unless head or wrist or finger 
 should unexpectedly fail him, the most dangerous part 
 of his exploit lay at the very beginning. There was 
 no descent from the step on which he stood. The cars 
 were slung from axles, and in order to get to the rim 
 that held the axles themselves he must climb to the roof 
 of the coach. He glanced at the roof of the coach 
 twenty feet below and to his left. He saw that it had 
 a curved rain-sill like that of the top of a railway car- 
 riage. Good; the coaches would be all alike. He set 
 his knees in the window-frame once more. June was 
 still lying with her face hidden on the seat. His fin-
 
 THE WHEEL 341 
 
 gers felt blindly for the rain-sill ; they found it, and he 
 moistened his other hand. He wished he could have 
 glued it, for for some moments mere friction must be 
 half his support. For an instant he thought calmly 
 and abysmally; then he risked it. ... 
 
 It succeeded. He knelt on the roof, holding the 
 sling and coupling that hung from the car-axle over- 
 head. He glanced up at the axle to which he must 
 swarm. The singing in the cars continued, and a 
 babble of sound rose lightly from below. Evidently he 
 had not been seen to get out of the car. 
 
 But then, who would have thought of looking? 
 
 It was as he swarmed up the coupling that there 
 first came over him the sense of the difference between 
 the reason he had given, and the real reason that had 
 brought him out from that brightly lighted and cush- 
 ioned car in which he might far more easily have 
 stopped. And the realisation of that difference brought 
 with it, very strangely, the sense, not of bodily peril, 
 but of inner peace. It was unaccountable, but there it 
 was, not to be argued about. The only tljing that dis- 
 turbed this peace, and that but lightly, was that his 
 venture had not a more profitable object. Folk did less 
 dangerous things for far better reason to save life, or 
 property, or something else worth while. But this 
 neck-risking of his was could only be bravado. 
 He knew perfectly well that in the circumstances no- 
 body would have thought a penny the worse of June. 
 
 " The woman I marry " he had known that to be 
 
 an hypocrisy even when he had said it. No, he was 
 merely idiotically showing-off, and that peace at his 
 heart would presently prove to be an illusion. . . . 
 
 It was quite suddenly, as he lay out along the
 
 342 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 Wheel's topmost car-axle, that the thought of Ynys came 
 to him. He didn't know why it should come at that 
 moment, unless it was born of his bodily isolation on 
 the very top of that immense bracelet hung with 
 trinkets of cars. But perhaps it was that ; perhaps there 
 was a connection, if only an idle and fanciful one. 
 Save perhaps the keeper of the Trwyn light, nobody in 
 Llanyglo was nearer the stars than he that night; and 
 only Mynedd Mawr had been higher than he when he 
 had lain on the rocky head of Delyn. . . . 
 
 Or was it, not the isolation of his body at all, but his 
 isolation of soul, that had brought that mysterious and 
 inexplicable and probably fallacious peace ? 
 
 While not ceasing to keep his carefully calculating 
 eyes open, and every motor-fold of his brain intent on 
 the preservation of his balance, he began to think of 
 Delyn. 
 
 He had stayed many days up there ; some weeks per- 
 haps; he couldn't have told you how long. Its rain 
 had soaked him, and its winds dried him again; its 
 streams had fed him and its herbage furnished his litter 
 at night ; but the sun itself had not warmed him more 
 than had her impulsive looks and surrendering gestures 
 when he had but lifted up a hand. With another eye 
 than that that now measured the distances between gird- 
 ers and axles and ties, he seemed to see the rocks again, 
 and the lake shining in its morning intactness, and the 
 drowned bubbles of the fall in the Glyn, and the thin 
 wind stroking the short grass, and the mountain-ashes 
 under which they had sat, their leaves like finger- 
 prints against the sky. He could see again the trout 
 she had cooked- for him her breast had fluttered as 
 those dying silvery things had fluttered, silvery as that 
 dry old scar he had kissed. He could smell the smoke
 
 THE WHEEL 343 
 
 of her morning fire again, her hair, her breast. . . . 
 And he could hear again the shrill warning note in that 
 unique voice of hers that had first set him wondering 
 whether, after all, it would " do." . . . 
 
 That quarrel had not been on that heart-breaking 
 morning of their parting. There had been no quarrel 
 then. No ; it had been at something unguarded he had 
 said about his sister and her friends. Yes, he saw 
 again the insensate jealous flame in those seaweed eyes, 
 and heard the ugly passionate cracking of the voice in 
 which she had cried, " They noth-thing, your fine 
 miss-es! They mar-ry house without a man if they 
 could they take house in. their arms they make 
 those eyes at house, and kiss house, and call it cariad ! 
 You no dif-f erent from them ! You go to your miss 
 
 and say, ' I have house ' she want-t you then ! ' 
 
 It had taken a whole morning before he had had her, 
 humble and sobbing and remorseful and enslaved, in his 
 arms again. . . . No, it wouldn't have done to marry 
 a temper like that and, temper altogether apart, it 
 wouldn't have done. There are only a few years of this 
 world and its companionships, and, though your friends 
 may have their twists and crankinesses, "they are .still 
 your friends, all you are likely to have. Better be in 
 the stream with them while you are here. He would 
 only have been sorry for it later, on her account as well 
 as on his own. She had been quicker to see that than 
 he, and had spoken of it in her soft and halting Eng- 
 lish. At first he had laughed and said " Kiss me "... 
 but she had been right. . . . 
 
 But John Willie, with a Wheel to descend, must not 
 let these things take him too far from the business in 
 hand. 
 
 He had reached a chain in a great guiding sprocket,
 
 344 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 but he thought of what at any moment a hand upon 
 a lever in the power-house far below might do, and of 
 one of his father's men who had once been carried 
 round shafting. No moving parts for him. . . . He 
 looked down through an iron-framed lozenge at the 
 people below. The grounds resembled a tray of many- 
 coloured moving beads. All Llanyglo seemed to have 
 run to see the stopped Wheel. Probably the Pier itself 
 was half empty. If so, all the more room for anybody 
 who wanted to watch, not a Wheel, but the moon lift 
 her gilded sacrificial horn out of the sea. . . . There 
 had been far too much drub-drub-drubbing. John Wil- 
 lie was weary of it. It was time he settled down. 
 And Llanyglo itself seemed to have come to much the 
 same conclusion. It had begun to make a restriction 
 here and a regulation there, as if it wished to purge 
 itself of its evil name. There was no doubt that for a 
 time it had been a very sinful place, and . . . (here 
 John Willie, with a slow steady pull, hoisted himself 
 to where he wished to be, on the long curved upper 
 plate of a massive H, rivet-studded like a boiler, that 
 was knitted with iron lace to other H's John Willie 
 must not venture too far down that slope unless he 
 should suddenly acquire a fly's faculty for walking up- 
 side-down) . . . and perhaps the town had begun to 
 get a little frightened, as sinful people, and perhaps 
 sinful towns also, sometimes do. But that would be 
 all right presently. Llanyglo was going, in a manner 
 of speaking, to be married. It was turning over, had 
 turned over, a new leaf. Soon it would be a churlish 
 thing to reproach it for a past that it had lived down; 
 it was becoming sadder and wiser, and better able to 
 distinguish between the things that would " do " and 
 the things that would not. The less talk . . . (here
 
 THE WHEEL 345 
 
 John Willie began to realise that he was not a fly, and 
 to collect his nerves for the turn-over to the under side 
 of that H that a few yards away dropped over, with a 
 little gleam, into nothing) . . . the less talk the soon- 
 est mended. He did not intend to say anything > 
 to June. Indeed he intended . . . (there: that was 
 rather a jerk to his shoulder socket, but he was safely 
 underneath) . . . indeed he intended that his attitude 
 to June about such matters should be rather severe. 
 This was not because June's own thoughts were in the 
 least degree lax (she erred, if anywhere, on the prudish 
 side), but because women were very tender things. A 
 whisper was fatal to them. That was why John Willie 
 was clinging now to that enormous piece of knitting of 
 iron and upholstered carriages and electric light. He 
 had climbed out in order that nobody should be able to 
 say, after that, that . . . 
 
 Then it was that he knew, once and for ever, that 
 this was a lie. Then it was that he knew that he was 
 not where he was, suspended between the stars of 
 heaven and the lamps of earth, on June's account. He 
 was there because a gipsy girl had called him. This 
 was his service, not of the pretty and pleasant June he 
 was presently going to marry, but of one whom he had 
 not married, of one he had not feared to compromise, 
 of one who had known nothing, cared nothing, save 
 that she had been lost in a wild and tender and beauti- 
 ful love. She, none other, had called him 
 
 Then, too, it was that there rose to him from below 
 a faint yet high and shuddering " A-a-a-ah ! " that was 
 followed by a sudden cessation of all sound whatever 
 save only a distant throb and pulsing in the Dancing- 
 Hail. It surprised him for a moment ; then he remem- 
 bered. Of course. He had been seen
 
 346 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 She, none other, had called him, and he knew now 
 that so she would continue to call him, wherever he 
 might be from his labour by day and from his rest 
 by night, from his laughter with his children and his 
 clasping of his wife. She would continue to call him 
 until softness and ease should have done their slow and 
 fatal work, would continue to call him until that nerve, 
 with her harping on it, should have become dull. . . . 
 
 He seemed to hear the echoes of that voiceless call- 
 ing, diminishing through the years to come. They 
 would end in a silence that his wife's innocent gar- 
 rulity would never, never be able to break 
 
 The faint throb in the Dancing-Hail also ceased. 
 The Kursaal Gardens were a bead mat of faces. There 
 was not a whisper. Delyn was not stiller. 
 
 Unconscious that already he was black and torn and 
 bleeding, he looked down from his girder upon the bead 
 mat. He knew what, presently, if he came down alive, 
 every bead there would be singing his daring and 
 his quixotry and his devotion, and the possession by 
 June of a husband who would do this rather than suffer 
 the lightest breath upon the mirror of her name 
 
 He looked at them as he clung, scarce bigger than a 
 speck, high in that webbed diadem of the Wheel 
 
 And as he hung there, with only the guardian of the 
 Trwyn light higher than he, and the rest of the descent 
 still to make, he still could not decide, of the two things 
 that oppressed his heart, which was the atonement and 
 which the sin.
 
 . II 
 
 ADIEU 
 
 "TTOU'RE leaving Llanyglo? Well, holidays 
 J[ must come to an end. You'd like another 
 walk up the Trwyn? Very well; but you've seen all 
 there is to see. . . . 
 
 " Here we are. . . . What's going on at the Light ? 
 Oh, that's the Board of Trade, experimenting with 
 some new fog apparatus or other. By the way, the 
 Light people are rather sore because of a new Regula- 
 tion, that they mustn't have lodgers at the farm; and 
 also because they'd like to grow roses up the look-out 
 wall, and that's prohibited too; I suppose the authori- 
 ties think they'd be spending the day looking at the 
 roses instead of at the ships. They've moved the rocket 
 apparatus farther along the coast ; they found it wasn't 
 much use here, and it's turned out very successfully at 
 Abercelyn. Eh? Yes, where the manganese comes 
 from. They still get a certain quantity, but there's 
 peace in the Balkans or wherever it is for the moment, 
 so nobody's growing very rich out of the mines 
 here. . . . 
 
 " Hallo, that's rather a coincidence. Don't look 
 round too quickly. You see that tallish man over 
 there? I don't suppose you've even seen him before; 
 as a matter of fact he hasn't been er to be seen. 
 He got into trouble once; in plain English, they put 
 
 him in prison. His name's Armfield, and his trouble 
 
 347
 
 348 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 was all about Llanyglo. Awkward things, meetings 
 like these. I think Armfield's a capital, chap, and I 
 should like to go and talk to him; but prison's a cruel 
 thing, and you never know how the poor fellow himself 
 feels about it. ... Ah ! As I thought, he looks rather 
 broken. If you don't mind we won't watch him. 
 Come on to the Dinas and have a smoke. . . . 
 
 " How's John Willie Garden ? Perfectly rosy, if 
 beginning to get a bit fat. Lucky dog! Four chil- 
 dren, two boys and two girls, quite an amiable chatter- 
 box of a wife, and rich enough to buy almost anything 
 he wants. Lucky, lucky dog ! Did I tell you he was 
 the adopted Conservative Free Trade candidate for one 
 of the Manchester divisions ? Not that he cares a snap 
 about Free Trade politically; economically it merely 
 happens to be a good part of his bread and butter ; but 
 then you have to be careful about what you say on 
 platforms, and so John Willie talks like the editor of 
 the Spectator himself. June Garden runs her two 
 houses, one here and one in Manchester, like clockwork, 
 and they go backwards and forwards between them in a 
 really regal car. Every tramp and gipsy on the road 
 knows that car. However fast he's driving, John Wil- 
 lie always pulls up and gives them a shilling. Just a 
 foible of his. We all have 'em in one shape or form. 
 
 " Llanyglo's going in heartily for these new proposals 
 for advertising the town out of the rates. A young 
 man called Ithel Williams is very keen on it ; he's a son 
 of Tudor Williams, the Tudor Williams who used to be 
 M.P. for this division. Young Ithel's got rather a nice 
 billet here, as Librarian or something for the Council, 
 and if this new thing goes through he'll be quite in 
 clover. Jobbery? Well, I suppose that's the name
 
 ADIEU 349 
 
 for it, but personally I'm not altogether against it. It 
 seems to me that the only alternative is putting these 
 berths up for competitive examination, which in my 
 opinion's failed all along the line, so find the right man 
 and then job him in, I say. The right man's so fre- 
 quently a relative? Well . . . there you are. That 
 is the weak spot. But there's always a crab some- 
 where. . . . 
 
 " I wonder if Armfield's gone yet ? Let's have a 
 look. . . . No, he's still there. . . . 
 
 " A good season ? Yes, from all accounts it's been 
 a very good season. There have been better from the 
 purely money point of view, I should say, but after all 
 everybody can't be everything, and every place can't get 
 all there is. Llanyglo, like other places, has its natural 
 limits of expansion. I don't think it will get any big- 
 ger yet awhile. There's no doubt the Wakes people 
 were the people who flung the money about, and they've 
 a little fallen off; but even if Llanyglo has to write 
 down some of its obligations it will probably gain in the 
 long run. A section of the Council's coming to see that, 
 and is pressing for reconstruction (that's always rather 
 wonderful to me, that they should construct things of 
 solid materials and then reconstruct them by saying they 
 cost less than they did) ; but that's the Council's busi- 
 ness, or rather the powers behind the Council. Edward 
 Garden isn't one of these any longer, at any rate not to 
 the extent he was. He sits in Manchester and makes 
 towns in Canada now. But he still looks at letters 
 under his glasses, and over them, and backwards and 
 forwards and upside down, and then looks mildly up at 
 you and says the letter seems to be a letter. . . .
 
 350 MUSHROOM TOWN 
 
 "A last look at the place: there you are: bay, 
 Promenade, Pier, the ring of mountains behind. It 
 grew from a few fishermen's huts to over-capitalisation 
 in a very few years. And there's Terry Armfield, still 
 looking at it all, like a not very old Rip Van Winkle. 
 I wonder what he's thinking! I suppose he couldn't 
 keep away, but must come and remember it as it was 
 and dream over it again as it was never, never to be. 
 . . . Walk past quickly; he's sobbing, poor chap. His 
 dream was of a place I don't know how to describe 
 it all friendliness and loveliness and graciousness, 
 fowl and flesh and good red-herring all in one, so to 
 speak, what you might call a diaphanous sort of place, 
 a jolly place to think of during those few minutes of the 
 morning or evening when you're not quite asleep and 
 not quite awake, but hm ! I'm not so sure . . . 
 not in this imperfect world. . . . 
 
 " Anyway, that down there is what he sees. . . . 
 
 " I suppose the other wouldn't have done. . . . 
 
 "Shall we go " 
 
 THE END
 
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