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.

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 deprecating hand.

"Aw-w-w, no!" he said. "Indeed it is very good of you, and I am very pleased you show so much confidence 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 proper 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 better. And I will see you get your labour. There is John Jones, Contractor, Porth Neigr. 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 displayed an equal bashfulness. This puzzled Terry. But 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 advantage 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 unfinished house came into it, and an affiliated interest, "Porth 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 this dim chapter of the twilight of Llanyglo's forebeing, and see what Terry did.

Starting at right angles from the Porth Neigr 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. Crossing 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, because 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, 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, CriÈre 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. 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 businessmen 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 confidential.... "What!" gasped the jester. "You've sold!... Wherever did you find him? In Manchester? 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.