Welsh Journals

janker-boys and Brummagem crumpet, talk like a stone dropped in a goldfish bowl in which her orange pupils swam before his sight; pert and fluid eyes of his schoolgirl fancy, baffling as genius. A cormorant, he would have said, sat facing the incoming tide as a fresh extent of beach cut suddenly across the view. They were far from the boys' land of geysers, where the pale smoke curled between dwarf bushes and the grass swerved whitening away, gliding with the current over the weir into a different field of willowherb and down- tossed thistle. Takes you out of yourself," he continued, glimpsing then with some resentment a fatuity in this theory which he dispelled in a prolonged smoker's cough. For what, after all, could she know of that something nameless which atoned, in part at least, for the footsore unpaced wandering which had lasted a full seventeen days in addition to his spoken confidence ? the feeling which warmed, the glow one knew to share whenever in a 15-cwt. or draughty Nissen hut, a sergeant, say, forgetting his tapes, frailly remembered the baked-potato smells in the Bullring, or the football edition coming in by van from Stoke as the pubs filled, or the tempting delicacies of Manchester pork-shops, or the violets at Charing Cross ? The old-time, the rag-time, the first and the best, best for you and best for me. The swaying compartment was a coppery low-beamed interior pricking his eyeballs with haze and remembrance of a woman closely embraced and the man, who watched her wide eyes and held her, breaking in to span her song with his stronger broken voice. In dance- halls, the cigarettes burning self-consciously away, the wire-haired devotion of faces, impact of a dress, the dream of a veleta danced between wooden-slatted beds through a confiding match-striking dark. Much of this he recalled, to Mrs. Pritchard's cost. Smith, pimply son of roving father. It's the pals you make, more than anything." He felt now the gaze of the other woman upon him once more. She had been sitting quietly unseen during this interval, a blurred bulk in the corner of his eye like the thickly draperied shapes of a farmer's spouse at noon on the stoep or next to the reins of a covered wagon, placidly electing a site for bivouac. Hard, tranquil, and immovable, like Earth, Mother, whatever is immense in concept, her brown podgy eyes and large marsupial-like throat were ideally right for this casting, as also were her hands, like some little-seen wild-life of field and hedgerow. Eyes that were firm and like beads of bone rested upon him and his simple