Mushroom Town Part 12

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 Iago, and she had his breakfast ready for him when he arrived, which was between half-past ten and eleven o'clock. As if his suggestion had been a command, she had made her little encampment up the Glyn, fetching dry sticks from up the steep wood; her hat and her box only remained in the locked shed.

He did not cast a fly. Minetta began to ask him, when he returned at night, first what sport he had had, and then why he always chose to fish in the middle of the day. Then one night he returned to find his sister showing June her sketches. For some minutes he affected not to be interested; then, with a highly elaborate yawn, he said, "Oh, I say, Min--what became of that sketch you once made of that gipsy kid--you remember--the one mother once took in with a cut foot?--Best thing she ever did," he added carelessly to June.

"Oh, it got shoved away somewhere. Why?" said Minetta; but there was a little quick dropping look in her eyes.

"Nothing. I just happened to remember it. It was better than some of these."

The next morning the sketch, unearthed from some dusty heap or other, was on his plate when he came down to breakfast. Presently June and Minetta also came down. By that time he was able to say, quite composedly, "Oh, I see you found that thing. That's the sketch I was speaking of, June----"

But he wondered whether Minetta also could by any chance have seen Ynys on that, her single night in Llanyglo.

One rapidly advancing trouble was on his mind. He had not spoken to Ynys of the pa.s.sing of her holiday, but he himself could almost hear its seconds ticking away. Soon two days only remained; the morrow, when he would see her on Delyn again, would be the eve of her departure. She had told him that she had taken a return ticket; already he seemed to hear the whistle of the train by which it was available. She could take that train either at Llanyglo or at Porth Neigr.

On the morning of her last whole day he ascended the Glyn and found, as usual, his trout cooked for him and keeping hot between two plates. He ate it abstractedly. Again Minetta had remarked pointedly on his lack of fis.h.i.+ng-luck, but it was not that that was troubling him. He was wondering, not for the first time, what explanation Ynys gave herself of his untouched rods and buckled fly-book, and whether she too thought it unusual that he should come so far merely to lie by the stream with her hour after hour, or else, with a "Shall we go up there?" to ascend the stream, skirt the wood, gain the open mountain-side, and toil for half an hour to the summit. He had subst.i.tuted no other pretence for his first pretence of fis.h.i.+ng. What did she think of it? Or did she not think of it at all?

Again that morning, when she had scoured the plates and set them in a little rocky basin by the quivering moss, he proposed the mountain climb. In half an hour they were at the top. It was a plateau of volcanic rock, with scrubs of hazel, and bents and reeds and harebells ceaselessly stroked by the wind. Behind them, as they sat down under a rock, only Mynedd Mawr rose higher than they; below them Llyn Delyn lay like a bit of grey looking-gla.s.s set in its little mile-long cleft. They had raised other bits of looking-gla.s.s, too, in other far-off clefts. About them the mountains rolled as if invisible giants were being tossed in the visible blankets of the land. On the left only, far from Llanyglo, a scratch of silver showed that the sea was there.

"So you're off to-morrow," he said, when they had lain long. He did not hide from himself the ache the words caused him.

"My tick-ket say to-morrow," she answered, without emotion.

He muttered something foolish about an extension.--"But I suppose they wouldn't keep your place open," he answered himself hopelessly.

Her next words caused him a marvellous pang of lightness and hope.

"I think-k I not go back," she said, the seaweed eyes looking at that far-off silver scratch that was the sea.

Why did that pang at which he had winced instantly become another pang, at which he winced no less? What was it that the eyes of his spirit saw, far, far, farther off than her seaweed ones saw the sea? Her decision to stay, if she really meant that she would stay, should have meant the continuance of his happiness; what, then, should change it into something like an unhappiness and a fear?

He did not know. He was only an ordinary young man. He only knew that over that moment, which should have been one of a care removed, a faint shadow of an irremovable care already impinged.

He had sat up, and was looking at her.--"You mean--that you won't go back at all?" he said.

"Indeed I think I cannot go back," she answered; and her imperfect speech left it uncertain whether indeed she meant that she was still unresolved, or whether to her, who had not been able to endure a night in Llanyglo, a return to Liverpool would be more than she could bear.

"But--but--what would you do?" he asked.

"I stay here lit-tle longer, and then I get wick-ker from Dafydd Dafis, and mend chairs, like my mother."

"But--but----" It was so new to his experience. "You mean you'd just go from place to place?"

"If I go to Liverpool I die," she answered.

John Willie, torturing himself over this long afterwards, could never decide what that subtle yet essential change was that came over their relations.h.i.+p from that moment. It was quite contrary to any change that might have been expected. But for that sullen "No, d.a.m.n it," he might have been conscious of hardier impulses as the term of her holiday approached; but very curiously, it was now that he learned that it had no term that he felt those hardier stirrings. It was exactly as if, with little time to spare, he had wasted time, and now, with time enough before him, he must lose no time. Perhaps it was also that growing wonder what she must think of fis.h.i.+ng expeditions without fis.h.i.+ng.

Or--or--could it be that that sweet clamour of her person had all along shown patient intention, and that he, he only, had been dull?...

But, more quickly than he had thought of charging her with this--(he was only an ordinary young man)--he had to acquit her again. Certainly she had not decided not to leave because, staying, she saw him daily. She merely dreaded towns and disliked those over-glorious waxen cenotaphs that were raised to the memory of the humble flowers she knew. And he was still sure that at an unguarded movement from him she would have fled days ago. At an unguarded movement she would fly now. He had what he had only on the condition that, by comparison with his hunger, it was and must remain nothing.... What then? Must he come, and still come, until the wraiths of the mists began to drive over a dead and sodden Delyn, and those tossing blankets of the mountains became hidden in rain, and the wood of Glyn Iago became brown and thin, and the stream an icy torrent, and Llanyglo itself as empty as a piece of old honeycomb?

He did not know, nor did he know how, without risking all, to ascertain.

Yet know he must; and in that moment, forgetting his "d.a.m.n it, no," he contrived as if by accident to touch her hand. But he was none the wiser for doing so. As his hand moved with intent, hers moved innocently; her fingers began to pull to pieces the little yellow flower she had plucked; and he had not the courage to essay it twice.

Nor did he, his broodings notwithstanding, find that courage again that day. The sun crept round; tiny Llyn Delyn far below began to s.h.i.+ne with an amethyst light; and a quietude filled the heavens above and the land beneath, so that the rolling mountains seemed to be no longer the tossing of giants, but rather as if the giants, their tumbling game ended, had crept under the blankets and had gathered them about their heads and shoulders for the night. The sea and sky became a s.h.i.+ning 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 st.u.r.dy expletive now. Chiefly he now feared to risk and fail.

He left abruptly.

He drove to Llanyglo that night with a bra.s.sy 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 pa.s.sed away from his dreamings. For the first time, he felt himself to be an ordinary young man returning from the mountains where he had something "on." This new slight bitterness extended even to his thoughts about the perspicacious Minetta. Be hanged to Minetta. If Minetta overstepped the mark he would very quickly tell her to mind her own business. He had to pull himself out of his moroseness and to remind himself that she had not done so yet.

As he pa.s.sed along the Pontnewydd Street he did not at first notice the diminution in the number of people usually to be seen there at that hour. Nor, as he sank into his reverie again, did it immediately strike him that the greater number of the people on the Promenade were hurrying in one direction--the direction of the Trwyn. But he entered the dining-room at home in time to find June and Minetta scrambling hastily through their supper. All the dishes had been laid on the table at once, and their shawls were cast in readiness over the backs of chairs. This time he deemed it prudent not to raise any opposition to their plans, whatever these had been. Instead, he drew up his own chair.

"Off out?" he remarked. "Well, I hurried back to take you somewhere. Just let me swallow something, and then I'll come with you. What's up?"

In telling him what was "up" Minetta seemed to make the most of some advantage she apparently fancied herself to possess. If he had only glanced at the newspapers, she said, instead of rus.h.i.+ng off the moment he'd bolted his breakfast, he'd have known what was "up." It had been "up" in Llanyglo that afternoon--such a crowd as never was, and Eesaac Oliver was to preach in the Floral Valley again that night.

"Unless he changes his mind," Minetta added. "Of course it's part of it all that he doesn't make arrangements. He'll stop in the middle of a walk and begin to preach just where he is, and then at other times, when they've made all ready for him and everybody waiting, he's praying in his bedroom or something and n.o.body dares go near him. So they never really know till he begins. There's only one thing he won't do----"

"Eesaac Oliver?" John Willie began, puzzled. "Wait a minute----"

Then, as Minetta once more tossed her head, he remembered. Of course. The Revival....

And what he did not remember he did not, in the circ.u.mstances, choose to ask his sister. It would only be giving her another opportunity to comment on his remarkable absences. He remembered much. He remembered those rumours of the great spiritual thing that had broken out at Aberystwith, had then rolled tumultuously up the coast to Barmouth, and thence to Harlech and Portmadoc, and thence up the sky-high steeps of Ffestiniog, and through the folds of those tossed blankets west into Lleyn. He remembered--yes, he remembered now that his eyes were turned outward from himself and his own affairs again--the preachings of Eesaac Oliver on the bare mountain-sides, and his fastings among the rocks, and his baptisms in rivers, and his liftings-up of his voice on the outskirts of towns that had presently emptied to hear him, and his calling on folk to turn from the wickedness of their ways while there was yet time, for the Day of Judgment was at hand. He remembered these things because at the time he had thought them rather one in the eye for the Howell Gruffydds and the John Pritchards who, when the Council came to debate such delicate but profitable subjects as licencing and mixed bathing, had tactfully allowed themselves to be represented by the soft closing of the door behind them. He knew what that interrupted sentence of Minetta's meant, "There's only one thing he won't do----" The only thing that Eesaac Oliver would not do was to preach within the stone walls of their new Chapels. He held these bazaar-supported buildings to be defiled, their Baptist temples places out of which the traffickers in money and doves must be driven with scourges. It mattered not that John Pritchard was a pillar, Howell his own father. "He that loveth father and mother more than Me----" He would preach as the mighty Wesley preached, from wall-tops, from the boulders of the stony places, from the wheelbarrow, from the milking-stool, from the saddle. He would journey and preach, and journey and preach again, four, six times a day. There was a Door which, entering by it, gave his instant and flaming Theme--the Door open to Llanyglo itself unless it would sink, it and its Kursaals and its Big Wheels, its Lunas' Entertainments and its bivalves lying under the lighted lamps on the public gra.s.s-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 compa.s.ses and coloured it with his geranium and lobelia and golden feather. At its upper end, a Switchback now humped itself like a multiple dromedary, and clear across it, from a staging on one side to a staging on the other, was swung the cabled apparatus known as an Aerial Flight. Philip's bandstand still occupied the middle, but the rest, save for a few outlying dusty beds, was as barren as a gravel playground. The Valley had held five thousand people on the occasion of the Bra.s.s 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 gra.s.s and the darkness, avoiding the bivalves open and the bivalves shut, and struggling as best they could to the crest. There, with an arm about each of them, he led them through the slowly moving outer circle of people who struck matches and laughed and occasionally craned their necks forward to look over the dense ma.s.s in front. By degrees they gained the ring where, if little was to be seen, a word now and then could be heard; and thereafter, by losing no chance of wriggling forward, they reached a point from which they could see the bandstand.

A ladder ran up to its roof, and up this ladder Eesaac Oliver and two other men had climbed. The bight of a rope had been pa.s.sed about Eesaac Oliver's body, its ends running round the gilded spike that crowned the flat eight-sided pyramid; and the men who crouched on the slope varied the tether as Eesaac Oliver moved this way and that round the octagonal gutter. The trapeze of the Flight hung motionless in the air above him; the shrieking Switchback had stopped; and the slight white figure, so precariously perched, turned to all sides of the vast speckled bowl about him.

"See who that is, at the right hand rope?" John Willie whispered to June. He still had an arm about either of their waists, and he fancied that June pressed a little closer to him.

"No. Who?" she whispered back.

"Tudor Williams. Expect he couldn't get out of it. He made a speech the other day, all about Young Wales, a regular dead set at them, and he'll sweep the poll after this. I don't know who the other is.--Listen, he's turning this way now----"

Eesaac Oliver's voice came across the packed still basin.

"Cry aloud--spare not--lift up your voice like a trumppp-pet! I say to you young men, and I say to you young women, that this cit-ty by the sea shall not be spared, no, no more than the cit-ties of the plain were spared! It smells of corrupp-tion; it is an offence in the nostrils of G.o.d! 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 h.e.l.l! Aw-w-w, their bazaars prof-fit them lit-tle there! Their new Chap-pils prof-fit them lit-tle there! Their funds, and their balance-sheets, and their foundation-stones with their names on them, prof-fit them lit-tle there!--But I say to you young men, and you young women, that the Wa-ter of Life is free. Come now, come now! Do not say, 'I will sin one more sin and then repent'--perhaps you be taken away before that sin iss commit-ted----"

He turned again, and his voice became less clear.

Perhaps John Willie and his charges were well where they were, high on the rim of the basin. Whether with the pressure of those behind, or with the swelling of their own emotion, many below were moaning softly, and one or two small and hushed commotions seemed to be centres of fainting. The inner ring, close to the bandstand, was hatless; the belt above them was packed so that it would have been impossible to remove a hat; and always about the uppermost circle matches twinkled in and out. Again Eesaac Oliver's voice was heard, as if borne upon a wind: "--he that loveth father and mother more than Me----"

"Is his father here?" June whispered to John Willie....

Howell was at his own home, surrounded by sympathetic neighbours. Sunk into his arm-chair, he sobbed. Big John Pritchard tried to console him, but he was inconsolable. He shook with his emotion.

"My own fless and blood!" he sobbed. "To turn from his parents, that fed him, and clothed him, and sent him to the Coll-idge, and gave him allowance of twen-ty-six pounds a quarter, and bring him up in the fear of G.o.d! Oh, oh!--John Pritchard, give me a drink of water if you please.--And to call his father and mother sinful pip-ple! Indeed, Hugh Morgan, you are happy you have no children! They know bet-ter than you always; indeed the 'orld go on at a great rate, we get so wise! And the Chap-els burdened with debt! There is half a dozen Chap-els for him to preach in, but he say the highways and the hedges is his Chap-pil!... Look you, he not even come home. I meet him in the street, I, his father; and I say to him, 'Eesaac Oliver,' I say, 'if you will not preach in the Chap-pils, then you preach in that field on the Sarn road; you get crowds of pip-ple; it is a big field, and will hold crowds of pip-ple.' But he turn away, indeed he turn his back on his own father!... Look you: If he preached in that field, they find their way to that field, look you, all those pip-ple--they learn the way to that field as well as they learn the way to the sta-tion--and the Chap-el buy it cheap--oh, oh!... By and by that field be worth ten bazaars--oh, oh!... Blodwen, if the gas is lighted upstairs I think I go to bed--the things that were good enough for his father and mother are not good enough for him--this is a heavy day----"

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 "Nos 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 "d.a.m.n it----" and to think of her again where she lay, far up Glyn Iago.

V.

THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT.

John Willie began to spend his days up Delyn and his nights elsewhere than at Llanyglo. He too pa.s.sed 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 Llanyglo 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 "Nos 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, "No--no----"

June's stay began to draw to a close. Minetta suspected 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 fis.h.i.+ng.

"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 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 Revival in which the town, self-accused of sin, strove to purify itself. He missed that storm of impa.s.sioned evangelicalism in which Eesaac Oliver, walking one day on the Porth 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 appearance on the beach, and resembled a troupe of ordinary seaside n.i.g.g.e.rs until it broke, not into Plantation Melodies, but into hymns, one of which had a catchy pattering 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 Porth Neigr, began to preach before sunset, preached until the stars came out, and then sent hysterical young women and overstrung young men home in couples along the benighted lanes together, to comfort and enhearten and uplift one another as they went.... And he missed, among these and a mult.i.tude of other things, a certain rather famous exploit of his compatriot, Tommy Kerr.

He knew how Tommy had flouted and insulted Llanyglo, 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 Hafod had fallen to Tommy; and that was as much as to say that it had been cared for very little. Moreover, 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 ladder and looking up into the roof-s.p.a.ce 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 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 sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sing backwards and forwards, Tommy's newly cobbled chimney had given 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, almost 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 a.s.sess 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-ple! 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 b.u.t.ton 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 Lancas.h.i.+re again, particularly Rochdale, his own town. He wanted to walk its hilly streets, and to see the Asbestos Factory again, and Hollingworth Lake. He would almost rather be found dead there than continue to live among these indigo mountains 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 pa.s.sed, none too steadily, to a timber-merchant's, and gave an order to a clerk. The clerk smiled, and sent for his princ.i.p.al. 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 refused to sell to him, so, he knew, would all the others. He was wasting precious time with builders.

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 "Lancas.h.i.+re 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 sunrise.

No 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 rebuilding ought not to be nearly so heavy a job---- He would show them he did not come from Lancas.h.i.+re for nothing!