VIII

THELEMA

Because Terry Armfield, believing 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 businessmen 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, sad, hauntingly 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 common 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 mountains 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 company, the land was exceedingly cheap, and they need not begin to build upon it till they pleased. Besides, by taking shares in his Thelema they had bought Terry off. When he came with his other wild and beautiful schemes they could say, "No, no, Terry, we'll see how Thelema turns out first," and pass him on to somebody 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, "Indeed 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 usefulness 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 law for the ritss and another for the poor; but nowadays, 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.