Title: The Holy Terror (1939)
Author: H. G. Wells
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Title: The Holy Terror
Author: H. G. Wells





FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1939

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE INCUBATION

Chapter the First   Tender Years
Chapter the Second  Debut
Chapter the Third   Exploration

BOOK TWO THE HATCHING

Chapter the First   The Group Assembles
Chapter the Second  The Captured Platform
Chapter the Third   Rud becomes a Public Character

BOOK THREE UPRUSH

Chapter the First   The Enlargement of Rud
Chapter the Second  High Tide of World Mutiny
Chapter the Third   Mastery

BOOK FOUR ZENITH TRANSIT

Chapter the First   World Trustee
Chapter the Second  The God Caesar
Chapter the Third   Post-Mortem



PRELIMINARY NOTE

Every person, place and thing in this story--even the countries in which
it happens--are fictitious, and any resemblance, though it runs to the
pitch of identical names and circumstances, is at most a realistic device
and free of any libellous intention whatever. It is an imagination about
everyone and nobody, about everyland and nowhere, justified by the Lives
of Suetonius and our present discontents. Maybe it is life-like, that is
the incurable ambition of the novelist, he will not disavow it; but if so
it is because its characters have come alive. Their motives run about in
our world also, and it is our problems with which they wrestle in their
distinct and perhaps simpler but similar world. The England, the America,
the London in this book are not the England, America and London of
geography and journalism, but England, America and London transposed into
imaginative narrative. The tampering of J. W. Dunne with popular ideas of
space and time is having its influence upon fiction. So far as the writer
may judge his own story, it seems to begin on earth somewhere in the
nineteen-twenties, but it goes on and on unrestrainedly, into the years
to come. The writer has let that happen, he calls your attention to it to
prepare your mind for it, but he offers no explanation or apology.




BOOK ONE - INCUBATION


CHAPTER THE FIRST - TENDER YEARS


1


"It's a Holy Terror," said Betsy Barnacle, the monthly nurse. "I never
heard such a baby. Scream and scream it does. And its little fists!"

"There ain't nothing wrong with it?" asked cook.

"Only it's a little Turk," said Betsy. "Goes stiff it does and if you
tried to stop it, there'd be convulsions. Hark at it now! You'd think it
would rupture itself."

The two women listened judicially. Their eyes met in a common wonder.

"I shouldn't have thought its father had it in him," said cook.


2


The baby grew into an incessantly active, bilious little boy with a large
white face, a slight scowl and the devil of a temper. He was a natural
born kicker; he went straight for the shins. He was also a wrist-twister,
but he bit very little. On the other hand he was a great smasher of the
cherished possessions of those who annoyed him, and particularly the
possessions of his brothers Samuel and Alf. He seemed to have been born
with the idea of "serving people out." He wept very little, but when he
wept he howled aloud, and jabbered wild abuse, threats and recriminations
through the wet torrent of his howling. The neighbours heard him. Old
gentlemen stopped and turned round to look at him in the street.

By the time he was seven or eight quite a number of people had asked:
"What can you do with a boy like that?" Nobody had found a satisfactory
solution to the problem. Many suggestions were made, from "Knock his
little block off," to "Give him more love."

Nowadays many people deny that the unpleasantness of unpleasant children
comes naturally. They say they are love-starved. His Aunt Julia, for
example, did. "You think so," said his mother, and did not argue about
it, because at times she was very doubtful indeed whether she did love
him. She was for a mother unusually clear-headed. She was affectionate
but she was critical. And what to do with him she did not know.

His name was Rudolf, not perhaps the wisest name to give a child, which
shortened naturally into Rudie, but which after he had heard of the
existence and world-wide fame of Mr. Kipling he insisted upon shortening
further and improperly--since it altered the vowel sound--into "Rud." He
was also called Young Whitlow, Whitlow Tertius, Wittles and Drink,
Wittles and Stink, Grub and simply The Stink. He objected strenuously to
the last and always attempted the murder of anyone not too obviously an
outsize who used it. It referred to some early accident in his career
which he desired to have forgotten.

His relations with his brothers were strained. Samuel was inclined to
mock and tease him--a perilous joy. He threw a dinner-knife across the
table at Samuel and nicked a bit off the top of his ear. Samuel had
either taken an overdose of mustard or, as Rud declared, twisted his nose
in such a way as to imply "Stink." The subsequent enquiry never settled
this. The ear bled copiously into Mrs. Whitlow's handkerchief and nobody
could imagine what would have happened if the knife had gone four inches
straighter. "Might have blinded me," accused Samuel, from under Mother's
arm. "Might have cut my eye clean out." It was a tremendous scene and Mr.
Whitlow, who disliked the job extremely, took little Rudie upstairs and
spanked him, calling him "You little Devil!" between each smack, and left
him in the bedroom.

Thither presently came Mother.

"Why did you do it, Rudie?" she asked.

"He's always teasing me. He drives me wild," said Rudie.

"But to throw a knife!"

"He won't do it again," said Rudie, smearing his wet, dirty, woeful face
and nose with the back of his dirty little hand. "Your own brother!"

Later he threw a large, wooden toy-horse at Alf and missed him and
smashed the parlour window. "Your father will beat you again!" cried
mother in distress. "Say you were playing catch with him, Alfie!"

"I didn't catch the horse," brother Alf prevaricated stoutly to Father,
and the beating was averted.

But little Rudie never thanked Alfred for that. He never thought very
much of Alfred.

He stole his brothers' things, he played with their things and broke them
and they had no remedy--for you cannot sneak on a younger brother and
they were forbidden to take the law into their own hands. All three of
the boys drew and painted. Alf's work was the more delicate and he copied
meticulously, but Rudie's had a sort of splashing originality. When Alf
took a bright and careful bit of illumination to school the drawing
master praised it in front of the whole classroom, and he had never once
had a word of praise for Rudie's frequent and hasty performances. So
Rudie got hold of and tore up Alf's masterpiece and, when the master
wanted to exhibit it again, the story came out and Rudie was reproached
by the master before everybody. He went home with a bursting heart and
scribbled all over a number of pages in Alf's favourite book.

"What can you do with a boy like that?" asked Mr. Whitlow in the bar
parlour of the Bell.

"He's got spirit," said Mr. Cramble, the grocer. "An evil spirit," said
Mr. Whitlow.

"He'll change as he grows up," said Lozanda, the vet. "Adolescence. They
often do."

"If he doesn't," said Mr. Whitlow, "he'll face a jury one of these days.
I tell him that. But does he mind me? Not him."

"Spare the rod," hinted Mr. Cramble.

"His mother don't like his being touched," said Mr. Whitlow, "and I don't
much like it either. I suppose I'm a bit modern."

"You see," said Mr. Whitlow after reflection, "he's not over-strong. He
has these headaches and bilious fits. And he seems to be able to make
himself look pale when he wants to. I used to think his brothers would
keep him in order a bit. But he kicks them, he does, and they can't very
well kick back, him being delicate. Their mother'd never forgive them if
they left a bruise on him. All they seem able to do with him is to get
him upstairs in their bedroom and suffocate him with pillows. He
certainly don't like that. But he's got artful about it. He used to kick
and try to yell and so they knew he was all right. Now he goes limp right
away as soon as they've got hold of him. And naturally they take off the
pillows to look at him and see they've done him no harm and he sort of
comes-to very slowly. Last time they did it, he got away down the passage
and then went back and buzzed an old croquet ball at young Alf and raised
a lump--so big."

"Sort of Problem Child," said Skindles, the watch-maker.

"What's going to become of him?" said Whitlow and straightway abandoned
further enquiry.


3


Mrs. Whitlow was a woman of some intelligence and she had had a good
modern education, which had confused her .mind considerably. Nevertheless
she kept up her reading.

She thought that women were the race and men merely incidents, and that
every great man in the world owed nearly everything to his mother. She
thought that if Adam had had a mother things might have been very
different, and that the story of Ruth and Naomi was the most beautiful
story in the world. And she thought that after Sam and Alf she ought to
have had a daughter, and when Rudolf came squalling into her life she
repined gently.

Once or twice she said to him, wistfully but unwisely, "If only you had
been a dear little girl," and so sowed the seeds of an enduring misogyny.
The sex-war was all alight in him from the age of six onward.

The first girl he hit was his cousin Rachel, who had recited:

"Sugar and spice and all things nice
That's what little girls are made of
Slugs and snails and little dogs' tails
And that's what little boys are made of,"

to him. He hit her, and all she did was to slap back--just a stinging
slap--and then he got her by her long hair. Whereupon she pinched--so
painfully it made him yell with surprise--and then got hold of his wrists
in a strong sort of grip that immobilised him and then she put out her
tongue at him. "Yaaaa!" she said. He couldn't get free of her. Not for
the moment. Of course he would have won all right, in spite of the fact
that she was nearly a year older, but just at this point the mothers came
in.

Her mother completely misunderstood the situation. "Rachel!" she cried,
"what are you doing to that poor little boy?"

(Jimini! What wasn't he just going to do to her!)

He brooded on this affair afterwards. It left an uneasiness and an
aversion. There was something queer about these girls; they were like
insects; you didn't know what they might do to you next. And their shins
were difficult to get at. They weren't as soft as they ought to be, not
nearly.

What properly ought he to have done? Jerked his wrists free of course,
and then?

"He's not a gentle child," said his mother to Rachel's mother. "He's not
gentle."

"Love him all the more," said Aunt Julia who was also present.

But after one or two attempts to take him to her bosom and sit him on her
lap and reason with him gently or talk to him beautifully about the child
Jesus, about whose entirely undocumented youth she invented the most
unwarrantable stories, she realised her sister-in-law's difficulties
better. Rudie fought her love like a wild cat.

They tried to soften his nature by giving him pets. But they had to take
the white mice away from him again because he wanted to teach them to
swim and submerge themselves in the bath at the word of command and was
inclined to be punitive when they failed to realise what was expected of
them. Dogs he regarded with suspicion and had a way of picking up stones
when he saw them. The suspicion was mutual. His white rabbits died either
of eccentric and irregular dietary or by being dropped suddenly as a
punishment for squirming about and kicking in sudden disconcerting jerks.
For a time he seemed really to like a gay little kitten that pursued a
rabbit's foot on a piece of string with the most ridiculous nimbleness
and waggery. Then something happened. A great running and banging-about
upstairs was heard. The kitten came headlong down the staircase
incredibly scared. Rudie followed in pursuit--armed with his little
cricket bat.

"She won't play with me any longer," he bellowed. "She's got to. Where's
she gone?"

What can you do with a boy like that?


4


Aunt Julia's earliest attempts at changing Rudie's heart by love had not
been very successful, but she was a persistent woman and full of ideas of
the most diverse sort about the bringing up of children and the
lamentable foolishness with which people in general set about that
business. People marry for passion, a most improper motive, and their
children take them by surprise. They don't deserve them. Maybe in a more
scientific world only spinsters will have children. She knew she was on
the right track--or tracks--in disapproving of whatever had been done,
was being done or was ever likely to be done with Rudie. Children are
right, and parents and pedagogues never understand them. That is the
privilege and compensation of the observant spinster. Very likely she had
been a little precipitate with Rudie, but she felt she should try again.

She had a nice long talk one evening with Mrs. Whitlow. "You ought to
have him psycho-analysed," she said. "It lies too deep for us untrained
observers. Very likely that Oedipus complex. But what we have to remember
always is that, like every child, he is intrinsically good."

"At times," said Mrs. Whitlow, "that is very hard to believe."

"I copied some bits of wisdom out of a book by Mr. Neill," said Aunt
Julia. "Listen, dear: 'I cannot say the truth is, but I can declare my
strong conviction that the boy is never in the wrong.' What do you think
of that? And 'the self that God made'--isn't that beautifully put the
self that God made is in conflict with all our silly teaching and
interference.' And this !--what a comfort it is in these times of war and
trouble !--'Human beings are good, they want to do good; they want to
love and be loved.' When one thinks of all those poor love-starved young
aviators bombing--what was the name of that place in India--yesterday?
Just unsatisfied love-hunger. And then this again: 'Criminality,' he
says, my dear, 'springs from lack of love.'"

"On the part of the criminal--

"Oh, no, dear! No. No! NO! On the part of the people who make the laws.
And so you see what we have to do, is just to find out the complex that
is tying poor little Rudie down to all his naughtiness. When he broke the
leg of his rabbit when he was playing with it the other day, that was
really a protest--a symbol."

"It wasn't a nice symbol for the rabbit."

"We have to discover his complex--that is the next thing." "He keeps so
quiet about that."

"Naturally. We have to discover it. Now tell me--do you and George, do
you ever quarrel in front of Rudie?" "My dear!"

"Does he ever see you caressing or making love?" "Julia, darling !"

"Does he--is he disposed to avoid his father?"

"He keeps out of his way--especially when he is up to mischief."

"A pure Oedipus," said Julia, nodding her head several times. "Probably a
chemically pure Oedipus. Now tell me: When you and he are together and
his father comes in, does he seem to want to get close to you--edge
between you, so to speak? As if to protect you?"

"It's generally the other way about. He wants to be protected. Not that
his father ever ill-treats him. But the boy has that sort of conscience.
He always feels his father may have found out something."

"Exactly. And now tell me--tell me--do you think--has he any particular
feeling--any sort of aversion,"--Julia became very red in the face but
her eyes were bright and resolute--"Steeples?"

Mrs. Whitlow thought. "He certainly hates going to church for the
children's service," she said. "If you mean that."

"Exactly. Transfers it to the church--where dear Mr. Woolley presides.
And no doubt to Mr. Woolley. The Oedipus in perfection. The radiating
father-hate. But don't trust my untrained judgment, dear. Go to a proper
psychoanalyst and have all this cleared up. Then you will know..."

Thus Aunt Julia.

But Mrs. Whitlow did not go to a psycho-analyst. She had seen only one or
two in her life and she had not liked the look of them. But the idea of
getting some advice took hold of her and she decided to go to old Doctor
Carstall, who was so big and deliberate that you felt you could put the
utmost confidence in him. And by making an excuse of Rudie's bilious
attacks, old Doctor Carstall looked him over.

"He's the most ordinary boy I ever met," said old Doctor Carstall,
"except that he has a certain excess of--go in him, and a lack of
self-restraint. He's fairly intelligent of course--in his way."

"He's not an ordinary boy," said Mrs. Whitlow, defending every mother's
dearest illusion, "not by any means."

"As you will," said old Doctor Carstall. "But keep him out of the hands
of these faddists and send him to the most conventional school you can
find. He'll probably do as well as most ordinary little boys--get
scholarships, play games and all that. He has--well--tenacity. He doesn't
feel scruples if he wants anything. Don't imagine he's anything out of
the way for naughtiness. It's just that that curious go of his brings it
out..."

"Nasty little kid," soliloquised old Doctor Carstall, when Mrs. Whitlow
had departed. "There's millions like him--more or less.

"Millions," he repeated..."Most people forget what nasty children they
were themselves. They forget it.

"Just because children are small and pink--or small and sickly like this
little beast--they imagine them angelic. If you magnified them, everyone
would see plainer what they are."

He reflected. "Tenacity? That's no virtue...Though of course it may be an
advantage..."

The great lines of Wordsworth floated protestingly through his memory and
were ill received.

"But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our Home," he
said and then added irreligiously, vulgarly and outrageously: "I don't
think. His clouds of glory would smell of sulphur all the time."

Aunt Julia was never able to put her finger exactly on Rudie's
complex--if so be he had one. Whatever it was, presumably it remained
unresolved and festering in his soul, and this story can tell no more
about it.


5


Under the influence of old Doctor Carstall, Rudie went to Hooplady House
instead of having his subconsciousness explored, cleaned-up and made over
in a suitable establishment on soundly psycho-analytical lines. Probably
the results would have been very similar. Hooplady House, as an
educational institution, never gave a thought to character and the finer
shades of conduct--except on Speech Days. Then the headmaster said the
boys were a household of young English gentlemen, and the parents and
prefects heard him with quiet self-approval.

By way of teaching, the school devoted itself to satisfying the
requirements of various respectable examining bodies, and unless your
behaviour militated against the attainment of that objective, the school,
as an organisation, did not concern itself about what was happening to
you inside or outside or between the hours devoted to that purpose.
Beyond the lines laid down by these examining bodies it did not
adventure. Why should it? If they did not know what arrangement of
obligatory and optional subjects constituted a proper education, who did?
Most of the boys were day-boys, and by ordinary standards the tone was
good. Filth was furtive, and such vice as occurred was inquisitive,
elementary, infrequent and obscure. The head boy was a son of Doctor
Carstall's, a taciturn, fair, good-looking boy who seemed to do
everything he did well and with a minimum of effort. He won a sort of
qualified hero-worship from Rud, quite at the beginning of their
acquaintance.

Rud was engaged in an all-in scrap with a boy who had called him "The
Stink." He had been jabbing at his adversary with a penholder with a
broken nib. But the fellow had got him by the wrist now, only his left
fist was free and he was getting the worst of the punching.

Carstall appeared, tall and calm, standing over them. "Don't fight with
things like that, Whitlow. We don't do it here."

"He's bigger than me.

"Kick his shins if you must, junior's privilege, but don't use a filthy
thing like that. Might poison his blood. Or jab his eye. What's the
trouble?"

Explanation.

"Well, I say he's not to be called that. Nicknames ought to be tolerable.
And Russell, you; tease someone your own size. Get out of it, both of
you."

There was a splendour, Rud thought, about such authority. "Get out of it,
both of you," he whispered to himself presently and wondered how long it
would be before he was head of the school. He'd make 'em get out of it
all right. But it seemed hard to him that he wasn't to use pen-nibs or
scissors in warfare. Very hard. He was the sort of scrapper who would
have invented knuckle-dusters, if they hadn't already been invented.

On the whole he was less aggressive during his junior days at school than
at home. He was not much of a success at games and he was held to all
sorts of rules and customs he had been accustomed to disregard at home
with his brothers. He learnt quite early the inadvisability of mowing
down the wicket with his little bat when he got out at cricket, or of
quitting the game ostentatiously and vindictively directly after he had
had his innings, and he grasped the necessity of having the football
somewhere near at least, when he desired to hack another player. He
ceased to bawl and threaten loudly when annoyed, but on the other hand he
acquired a complete set of the recognised English bad words, and he
muttered them ferociously whenever exasperated. Brother Sam he saw little
of in the school; he was in the upper division; and brother Alf just
drifted about him quietly, pursuing ends of his own. There was a lot of
smouldering goodness in Alf and a touch of religion. "You didn't ought to
say words like that, Rud," he protested.

Rud replied with practically the complete vocabulary. Alf put his hands
to his ears and said: "You might be struck dead for that, Rud."

"He'd have to strike pretty near the whole school then," said Rud, who
had a keen sense of justice when he himself was concerned.

He speedily displayed an active, insensitive intelligence beyond his
years. His memory was exceptionally good, his reception uncritical. He
bolted the feast of knowledge and threw it up again with ease, completely
undigested. He was indeed a born examinee, and his progress up the school
was exceptionally rapid. He competed for marks vehemently. He was best at
English, Geography, History, French and Latin. He found mathematics
tricky and problems irritating. He could not ponder. Formulae he could
tackle but not problems. He got hot and cross in the face of difficulty.
He was all for cutting the Gordian Knot instead of fiddling about with
it, and he saw nothing idiotic in the classical story of Columbus and the
egg. Downright action was in his nature.

He read voraciously. His imagination was fired particularly by the
history of wars, conquests and campaigns. Then forthwith he became
Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon or Genghis Khan, whichever Rud it happened to
be. He conquered America with all Washington Irving's Conquistadors, and
subjugated Ireland with the sword of Cromwell. He was Clive; he was
Gustavus Adolphus. Fiction, generally speaking, he did not like, there
were too many of those incalculable girls in it. He had no use for
Fenimore Cooper and the noble Indian, and books about big-game hunting
merely strengthened his innate distrust and dislike of animals. If ever
he had to hunt tigers, he decided, he would do it with explosive bullets
from a machan, a good high, strong machan. When he saw the elephants and
gorillas in the zoological gardens he thrilled with hostility, and dreamt
afterwards about fighting them with machine-guns and catching them in the
most horribly spiky pitfalls. And when in his dream they just came closer
and closer to him, bleeding, half-blinded, but persistently undying and
intent upon him, he screamed and woke up in a frenzy of fear and hate.

Savages, barbarians, "natives," he "mowed down," he had no other use for
them. Omdurman was his ideal battle.

Since he was a day-boy and not very fond of games, and since he could do
his school work very quickly, he was free to take long, solitary walks in
which he could let his imagination run riot in anticipatory reverie. To
the passing observer he seemed to be a small, rather slovenly boy, with a
large, pale, egg-shaped face, big end up, and usually a sniff, but in
imagination he rode a magnificent charger, or occupied a powerful car,
and his staff and orderlies and messengers buzzed about him, and his
embattled hosts stormed the farmhouses and villages of the landscape and
swept over the hills, while his pitiless guns searched their recesses.
The advance was always victorious, and with the home-coming came the
triumph. Usually Hooplady House was involved in that. The prisoners stood
before him. That drawing-master, a proven traitor, was shot out of hand.
Several of the upper boys shared his fate. The rest of the staff were
shot or reproached and insulted according to the mood of the day.
Sometimes his father and mother appeared on the scene and were put under
protective detention. Cousin Rachel, the pincher, now in a greatly
chastened mood, submitted to her fate. Sam and Alf were rarely given
roles.

But one figure was very frequent in these dreams. He was sometimes
the second in command, sometimes the opposite general surrendering with
all the honours of war, sometimes an ambiguous political associate in the
revolution, or the counter-revolution, or the war of liberation, or the
great conquest, whichever it happened to be. His admiration for the
generalissimo was extreme, his loyalty amounted to devotion. This was
Carstall. "My trusty Carstall." Rudie never seemed able to keep Carstall
out of the phantasy. He never wanted to do so.

He whistled to himself as he took his imagination on these excursions. He
never learnt to whistle normally. It was a sort of acid piping through
his teeth and it lacked any consistent tune.

And always he got home by twilight. For in the dark the kings and
captains departed, the fighting and the conquests died away, and the
small boy was left exposed to those bears and tigers and gorillas, which
escape so frequently from menageries even in the most settled districts,
and to criminals and homicidal maniacs and hedge-bogies and all the
shapeless terrors of the night.

As his mind grew and his reading expanded his reveries became more
realist and coherent, and darkness less menacing. He began to study maps,
particularly maps in which each country and its foreign possessions were
done in the same colour; he began to collect pictures and comparative
diagrams of armies and navies and air forces. He was particularly keen on
air warfare. Dropping high explosive bombs together with printed warnings
and proclamations, appealed to him as just the perfect way of making war.
He read the newspapers with an avidity uncommon at his tender age. He
knew the salutes and symbols of all the dictators in the world and the
inner significance of every coloured shirt. And as he grew up towards
them, these heroes, these masters of men who marched like lurid torches
through the blue haze and reek of contemporary history, seemed
continually to come down nearer the level of his understanding and
sympathy.


So it was our Holy Terror nourished his imagination and anticipated his
career.

His extensive reading fed a natural disposition to accumulate vocabulary.
The staff realised that he could write the best examination paper in the
school, and told him so. He used long words. Some of the assistants, and
particularly the games master, were disposed to discourage this, but the
English master applauded. "Nevertheless, take warning from our Hindu
brethren," said the English master, and lent him a facetious book about
Babu English. "If the new word sticks out among familiar usage like an
unset gem--excise it, delete it. A new word is like a wild animal you
have caught. You must learn its ways and break it in before you can use
it freely."

Rud took that to heart. He learnt to write a good, nervous prose. He
developed a certain gift for effective phrases.


6


His early religious experiences did not amount to very much and they
played only a small part in his subsequent career. Still, one may say a
word or two about them before dismissing them.

He was never God-fearing.

Nowhere in the world in his days was there any atmosphere in which the
presence of God was felt. The general behaviour of people everywhere made
it plain that whatever they professed when they were questioned, they did
not feel any such Power within or about them. For most of them it would
have been an entirely paralysing thought to have been living in the
presence, in the sight and knowledge of an unseen and silent Deity. With
indefinite powers of intervention. The tension would have become
unendurable; they would have screamed. They dismissed the thought,
therefore, and they dismissed Him, not explicitly, of course, but tacitly
and practically. On most of their occasions, even the professional
religious people, from popes and archbishops down to confirmation
candidates, behaved exactly like atheists--as well but no better.

Young Rudolf indeed heard very little about the supreme immanence. Mrs.
Whitlow had a delicacy about mentioning Him except in connection with the
Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments and similar formalities, and Mr.
Whitlow only mentioned Him on occasions of dismay--as for example when he
heard that Aunt Julia had come in to see them. Then usually he would
exclaim: "Oh, God !"

From the outset young Rudolf put up a considerable God-resistance. He
read such portions of the scripture as were chosen for his learning
reluctantly and with incredulity and aversion. Father was bad enough
without this vaster Father behind him. From all the world around him Rud
caught the trick of putting divinity out of his mind in the ordinary
affairs of life. But only by degrees. He had some bad times, usually
about judgment-day and hell-fire. They were worse to dream about than
falling into tigers' dens. He had called Alf a fool several times. That,
he learnt, was a hell-fire business. And there was very little on the
other side of the account. He had tried praying--as, for example, at
cricket for a score of twenty and then he had got out first ball.

"All right, God," said little Rudie. "You see."

Then he heard tell that old Doctor Carstall was an atheist. The
schoolfellow who told him that spoke in hushed tones. "What's a
Natheist?" asked Rudie.

"It's--he don't believe there's any God at all. Ain't it orful?"

"He'll have to go to hell," said Rudie.

"He'll have to go to hell. And him so respected! It's a frightful pity."

At his next opportunity Rudie had a good look at Doctor Carstall.

He seemed to be carrying it off all right.

Then Rudie had an impulse to ask young Carstall about it, but he did not
dare.

There was something about this sinister idea of Atheism that attracted
him. It was frightful. Oh! unspeakable, but it had a magnificence.
Suppose really there was nobody watching...

The things you might do!...

He did not talk very much about these high matters. They came too close
up to him for frankness or the risk of self-exposure. And even had he
wanted to do so most of the other kids would have been too scared. But he
listened to his elders. When he heard one of the senior boys arguing that
"somebody must have made the world," it seemed a perfectly valid
argument, though for any practical purposes it led nowhere.

Gradually his thoughts took the shape of feeling that the God one heard
about in school did not exist, that they didn't mean it whatever it was
about the Trinity, but that nevertheless there was a God--another God,
that Maker--who went away--so that you could do any little things you
wanted to do--who was indeed away generally, but who might at any time
stage a tremendous come-back. Then He would ask everybody what they had
done with the things of his making, and Rudie's impression was that most
people would look pretty silly long before it came down to him. There was
no reason Rudie could see why he in particular should be pitched upon. He
was quite prepared to turn God's-evidence against one or two people he
knew.

So far as Aunt Julia's edifying inventions about that exemplary Christ
Child were concerned, he believed in them only to the extent of disliking
him almost as heartily as he did his mother's hypothetical dear little
girl. And as for gratitude to anyone, who needn't have done it, mind you,
getting himself crucified (knowing quite well he would rise again the
third day) to save Rudie from that hell-fire from which nevertheless he
still somehow went in great danger, that was something too spiritual
altogether for his hard little intelligence. Long before he was
adolescent he had put religion outside of himself and thought about it
less and less.

His mother puzzled about him and tried to feel loving and proud about
him. If she had been quite frank with herself she would have confessed to
herself that this dome-browed son she had borne was a little cad in
grain, to whom unfeeling ruthlessness and greediness and implacable
wilfulness were as natural as night-prowling to a hyena or an evil odour
to flowering privet.

The chances of the genes had given her that, but her spirit struggled
against her luck. It was too much to admit. She knew better than anyone
how easily and meanly he could lie. She had found him pilfering, and his
instincts seemed furtively dirty, but she could not think of her own
flesh and blood in such harsh terms. "His soul is unawakened," she told
herself, "one must be patient."

And after all, he was very clever at school, continually top of his class
and passing examinations with facility. His essays were always
"excellent"; he had an "instinct for phrasing." (If only he would not
boast to her so much about these things!) And if he was horrid, he was
interesting. That at any rate could be said for him. With a certain
compunction his mother realised that she thought much more about him than
she did about Sam or Alf. They were no trouble. They were ordinary like
their father. You loved them, of course, but calmly. You did not distress
yourself about them.

For a term or so there was an earnest young assistant master in the early
stages of evangelical mania at Hooplady House. He perceived the moral
obscurity in which Rudolf lived and tried to throw a ray of light into
it. He got the boy to have a long walk with him and, beginning artfully
by botanising, led the talk to ideals and one's Object in Life.

It was mostly his own Object in Life he talked about. Rud was as hard to
draw as a frightened badger. The earnest young assistant master
confided that he himself might not live very long. He believed he was
tuberculous. Once or twice he had coughed blood.

"I spew up all my dinner sometimes," said Rud, faintly interested, "and
last Easter my nose bled something frightful. Until mother got a cold
key."

"That isn't like tuberculosis, which just eats your lungs away.

"Don't worms?" said Rud. "I saw a picture the other day of liver fluke in
a chap's liver. Something horrid. You get it from eating watercress."

The earnest young assistant master shifted his ground abruptly. "I'd hate
to die before I had done something really good and fine in the world," he
said. "Sometimes I think I'd like to take orders. After I've got my B.A.
London it wouldn't be so difficult. And then I could do God's work in
some dreadful slum. Or go to a leper colony. Or be the chaplain of a
hospital or prison. It would be fine to go to a war--as a chaplain, just
upholding the fellows. Helping them. Toc-H and all that. Don't you ever
want to do things like that?"

"I'd like to be a machine-gunner," said Rud.

"Oh, but that's killing!"

"Well, what will you do if this next war they keep talking about now
really comes?"

"I should certainly not be a soldier. Among other things, I doubt if I am
physically fit. I should either get into a Red Cross Unit or go as a
padre. Under fire, of course--into the front line. But without a weapon
in my hand--ever."

"Everyone isn't like that."

"There would be no more war if they were. What a death it would be, to
stand out boldly between the lines and cry aloud, 'Peace,' holding out
bare hands to both sides."

"You'd get peppered to rights," said Rud, regarding the young man's
exalted face with extreme disapproval.

The assistant Master was lost in a vision. He stood still with shiny
eyes and face uplifted and his thin, white, knuckly hands were tightly
clenched. He made his companion feel uncomfortable and absolutely
resolved never to come for a walk with him again.

"There's a shorter way back over this next stile and across the fields,"
said Rud after a lengthy pause.

And that is as much as need be told of the spiritual circumstances of
Rudolf Whitlow in his youth.

There is no record that his soul ever awakened. There is no record that
it stirred even in its sleep. There is no evidence indeed that he ever
had a soul.



CHAPTER THE SECOND - DEBUT


1


The country was already in a very disturbed state when Rudolf Whitlow's
schooldays drew to an end. He had believed that his facility in passing
examinations would lead up through a ladder of scholarships to university
distinction, security and authority. In the stabler past he might have
made such an ascent and rounded off his career as a formidably malicious,
secretly vicious, conservative don, the sort of don who is feared and
propitiated during his lifetime and forgotten gladly almost before he is
dead.

Father Whitlow wasn't doing at all well in business just then, and he had
heard that a son at the university was an expensive responsibility.
Neither of Rud's brothers was doing well. Sam didn't like his job. He
complained that it gave him no hope whatever of promotion, but he was
afraid to quit it because jobs were now so difficult to find, and Alf,
after one or two futile starts, became conscientious to a painful pitch
and deeply religious. He hung about at home being inconveniently helpful,
and on one occasion his mother, going quietly upstairs, was horrified to
find him praying on his knees. After a time he got tentative employment
in Doctor Carstall's dispensary and brightened up a little. Carstall
found him slow but very careful and exact, and spoke well of him in a
faintly contemptuous way. And also he increased his pay and said
encouraging things to him.

But Rud's white face during his last two terms at school became more and
more resentful and lowering.

He resolved to have things out with his once-dreaded father. "I'm going
in for these scholarships whether you like it or not, And you'll have to
pay the fees."

"I tell you it's no good," said Father Whitlow.

"What else can I do?"

"Edjicated proletariat--and what good's that?" "If I get top--"

"You won't get top."

Rud, regarding his father, looked still capable of knife-throwing.

"Couldn't you do something to help?" intervened his mother. "Write for
the papers? Do tutoring?"

"And eat up all my blasted time and energy!"

"Better than nothing," said Father Whitlow.

"Look at my brothers! Look at old Sam stuck in the?? from the very
start--for good and all. Look at Alf! Una,' Under-educated.
Under-qualified. Making pills in slow time Meek and holy. While young
Carstall soars away to be a?? physiologist. What have you done for us?
Give me one chance. See? Give me my chance, while there is a chance."

"Look here, Rudie, you've got to be reasonable. How was I to know that
business was going from bad to worse? I always meant to give you a
chance."

"Meant! What's meant to me?"

"This depression; it's got us. It's got everybody."

"And did you ever do anything to prevent it? Or dodge it? Some of them
have dodged it. Got you--of course it got you. Did any of your generation
ever think of escaping it? And so--here I am. One of the victims. I won't
stand it, Father, I tell you. I'll fight. You let me go for those
scholarships. See? You let me go in. Time enough to to tell me I can't do
it when I've failed."

"I can't face the expense of it."

"As though you had a choice now. Not a bit of it! You owe it to me.
D'you hear? You owe it to me. What did you bring me into the world for?
What did you bring me into the world for? To let me down now!"

Tears of indignation shone in his eyes.

Mrs. Whitlow had been watching the disputants. "Rudie dear," she said.

"Did I ask to be born?" said Rudie.

"Rudie!" she said, and put her hand on his.

He snatched his fist away. "Ow!--Rudie! Rudie--rot! It makes me sick."

"Listen, Rudie."

He glared at her.

"Maybe we could manage it. Maybe----"

"What?"

"There's my insurance--"

"Well?"

"It was always meant for you."

"And the others," corrected Father.

"Never mind him," said Rudie. "Tell me."

His mother made a halting explanation. The policy had a surrender value.
It might make things possible.

"What about the other boys!" protested Father.

"You give me my chance," said Rudie, "and I'll carry the darned lot of
you--I'll be an omnibus camel for the whole darned family. Trust me. But
if I can't take up these scholarships, I'm done. I'll blow my brains out.
I'll throw myself into the canal. And I'll leave a letter to scald the
skin off you."

"I'm sure you'll do yourself justice, Rudie," said his mother gently, "if
you have half a chance."

And so he was able to do himself justice, and the large, white, bilious
face with the permanent, resentful scowl, frequented the streets of
Camford beneath the exiguous tassel a second-hand mortar-board cap, for
four hardy and strenuous years.


2


While Rud Whitlow pursued his studies at Camford, such as they were, the
disintegration of the civilisation into which he had been born went on
steadily. Human society had in fact been progressing too fast; it had
slipped up on mechanisms and dislocated its class disciplines and
traditions. It was in a bad way; it was possibly in need of a major
operation. History was passing into a new and very perplexing phase. The
scale and pace of life had altered and mental habits had failed to keep
pace with the alteration. The social cog-wheels were failing to mesh with
one another and they ground and jammed more and more violently. At first
he did not apprehend this at all clearly, but the perception of it seeped
into his mind.

Mankind put to the test was indeed displaying the most extraordinary
inadaptability, politically, economically, educationally. The sole ideas
for relieving tension that anyone seemed able to entertain, were the
suicidal alternatives of blind social insurrection to shift the stresses to
other classes on the one hand, or aggressive war to shift the stresses to
other nations on the other. No one seemed to think of relieving the
stresses. One resounding crack followed another in the mighty edifice of
confidence and traditional usage which was the essential framework of
civilised society. Abyss after abyss yawned open wider and wider.
Insecurity appeared at the most unexpected points. And amidst it, like an
ant in an earthquake, our hero ran about and grew up.

It did not take him long to realise the advancing malaise of his world.
Hints of disillusionment, impalpable but cumulative, gathered in his
consciousness. Doubt accumulated in his mind and would not be dispelled.
The ladder of academic competition and of promotion to assurance and
dazzling opportunity, that he had started to climb, which by all
precedents should have made him more or less a member of a definite
governing class and opened the door to legal distinction or political
opportunity--or at very least to the higher civil service and
security--acquired a quality of unreality, became less and less credible
until at times it seemed more like some inaccessible spiral staircase
seen in the central incandescence of a burning house than a permanent
method of ascent.

It was hard for him to believe that he of all people had misjudged his
world, that even now that he had got to Camford, it was going to be a
much more difficult world than he had supposed. He thought about it at
nights and he betrayed an intense exasperation when people made banal
remarks about it to him. Apparently the whole system of things had
conspired to anticipate his ambitions and corner and defeat him.

But indeed the whole system of things was not thinking of Rud at all. It
was thinking and thinking very incoherently about itself. More and more
of the two thousand million or so who constituted humanity were falling
into very much the same line of thought and feeling as that along which
he was drifting. It was like the way particles change their orientation
in a magnetised bar. It was like bits of crumbling ore falling one after
another into a flux. This sense of insecurity was spreading about the
entire planet, and though people went on doing the things they usually
did, they had none of the assurance, the happy-go-lucky "all-right"
feeling, that had hitherto sustained normal men. They went on doing their
customary things because they could not think of anything else to do.
They tried to believe, and many did succeed in believing, that there
would presently be a turn for the better. They did nothing to bring about
that turn for the better; they just hoped it would occur. All the same,
they were worried. Rud was very seriously worried. He had no disposition
to believe in the natural benevolence of the universe.

"They ought not to have let things come to this," he said, but he was
never very clear even to himself who or why "They" were nor what "This"
was. Some person or persons unknown was to blame. He hated these unknowns
in general. But he was unable to focus his hatred into hating some
responsible person or persons in particular. If only he could find who it
was had neglected to do something, or had done something wrong or messed
about with things, they would catch it. He'd get even with them somehow.

There had been a time when Camford was the very heart of conservatism. It
was a bilateral conservatism in those days--and one half of it was called
the Liberal Party. It dominated the country without effort as a matter of
course. It changed and remained the same. It radiated out over an
unresentful empire in a state of unindicted exploitation--on which a sun
of unimpeachable loyalty never set. Odd specimens of the more coloured
subject-races came up to Camford and objected to something or other, but
in such funny Babu-English that their complaints dissolved in laughter.
In these happy days the tradition a the careless, wealthy, young
gentlemen ruled the whole university from the richest Fellow Commoner to
the poorest scholar. The only use for subversive ideas was the
opportunities they afforded for privileged rags. People with
revolutionary minds and "advanced" notions were invited to address
meetings and conduct debates, and were then kidnapped, ducked, personated
and so forth, all in the most perfect good-humour and with the
unostentatious approval of the authorities.

But when Rudie went up, those golden days were already ancient history.
He had read about them in books, but behold! they were over. The Great
War had strained Camford, and Camford, after a phase of hectic optimism
while it was reconstructing what was left of the old undergraduates who
had gone to the front, remained strained and began even to realise how
strained it was. A subtle change in the quality of the multiplying
students and the younger dons, due to the belated but extensive expansion
of lower middle-class education and the development of what was called
the educational ladder, had gone on and continued. A new, uneasy type was
swamping the ancient confidence of those venerable colleges, young men
who said: "Yes, but-----" to everything, over whose apprehensive
minds the perception of decaying privileges and of imperial enervation,
shrinkage and decline, hung more and more heavily.

For a year and more Rud stuck to his lectures and books. The teaching of
Hooplady House had been urgent for examination successes rather than
first-class in itself, and he had much to revise and supplement. Then he
began to take notice of events outside the classroom.

Camford, since the mediaeval cosmogony had broken down and the Catholic
scheme of salvation had fallen into disuse, had never made the slightest
attempt to give any coherent picture of the universe to the new
generation that came to it for instruction. Its Church of England
orthodoxy broke down with Catholic emancipation and an influx of
Dissenters and Jews. Since then nothing in Camford except a few dreaming
spires had pointed anywhere. Inertia had carried the old place on for the
better part of a century. It resisted novel ideas and scientific
aggression as long as possible by the method of slight and innuendo, and
when it could resist no longer it yielded in the true Anglican style with
ambiguous and nearly inaudible acquiescences. This lulled the minds of a
certain proportion of the young people and diverted their energies to
games, rage, amateur theatricals, amateurish poetry and amateurish
literary criticism, and the less easily tranquillised ones resorted to
the bookshops in the town and to a diversity of intrusive movements that
promised in the most various ways to satisfy that impatience for plain
direction towards a concrete objective which is one of the natural
cravings of ripening adolescence. At first these uneasy ones had been a
small and derided minority, but in the post-war days they multiplied
rapidly.

In his school days he had devoured books whole. Now he was realising that
standard history had little to tell about what was happening in the
world. He began to attend political gatherings and discussion circles; he
took to reading and comparing a number of newspapers; his large brow and
lowering expression were to be seen at the back of stuffy and
draughty rooms, disliking and scrutinising the speakers and watching
every reaction of the audience. He was puzzled, but he hung on, and his
mind became more and more involved in this extra-academic stuff. He
joined the Union and snorted and growled and indulged in ironical and
imperfectly audible comments through three discussions. Each time he
wanted to speak and didn't dare. Then at a debate upon the resolution:
"That a drastic change in our economic life in the direction of
collectivism is long overdue," he wrenched himself up from his seat, drew
a deep breath and began his maiden speech.

He spoke for the motion. Words came. He found he could think on his legs.
He could forget himself in his subject. Once started, his speech rambled
indeed, but rambled interestingly. His sentences flowed easily. They were
going over, he realised. He was less and less scared and more and more
fluent. He was keeping his head and quite aware of what he was doing. He
found he could hold a sentence, even quite a long sentence, bring out its
conclusion with an emphasised clearness and a punch at the air that made
it seem significant even when it was not. He worked himself up into a
generous indignation. He ended in a whirl of patriotic anger.

"This is what they have made of our country! This is our inheritance!"
The "old men" caught it, the privileged incapables, the greedy,
short-sighted business organisers, the military caste, finance, the party
"gangs." All the recognised cockshies. Indeed they caught it. Even
"people in high places."

"Wake up England!---that was said thirty years and more ago. And see
where we are! We of the new crop! Where are we to go? Go into the cadet
corps, go into the flying corps! Yes--yes. Though those others died, they
thought, to save us! We're in the soup and we've got to do it over again,
my masters. We've got to do 1914 over again. It'll be our turn sure
enough. The way they're going. We've got to face up to it. But not
under the old fools and rogues, Sir, this time--not with the profiteers
at our heels. No, Sir! This time we fight with our eyes open, with our
eyes wide open."

And so on, growing loud and harsh, but still keeping pretty clear, more
and more sure of himself. Betsy Barnacle would hardly have recognised the
voice that had squalled upstairs in Mrs. Whitlow's room eighteen years
before, but it was the same voice growing up now, as protesting and as
unquenchable. The speech was the success of the evening. It was what so
many of his hearers had been feeling. But they had not been able to let
themselves go as he did. More and more applause broke into his flow. They
liked him. They really liked this thick-set figure with the punching
gesture and the big head. His words had the rather attractive bitterness
of quinine.

He sat down amidst a buzz of applause.

In one crowded half-hour Rud had become a Camford personality. Men
discussed him in their rooms that night, and young dons talked about him.

"That was a pretty good speech," said a voice beside him as the gathering
broke up. "A bit angry of course."

He looked up and saw Carstall at his elbow. That gave him a thrill.
Carstall was already a research Fellow and his work in physiology was
being talked about.

"How did you vote?" he asked.

"I voted with you, of course," said Carstall. "I'm all for a
revolution--maybe more of a revolution than yours. I don't know. Mine is
the cold deliberate sort and yours is the hot indignant stuff, but we're
revolutionaries all right. It takes all sorts to make the world budge."

"We're revolutionaries all right," from Carstall, gave a peculiar
confirmation to Rud's self-approval.

We!

Other hands got hold of his sleeves and caught at his elbow and drew him
away from Carstall. Or he would have liked to have lingered for a moment
over that. Men who had ignored him and even avoided him were asking him
to come along to their rooms for a talk. Others were obviously
intent upon questioning him.

He was not prepared to answer questions, he realised. He had made a
strong impression and he must not complicate it. A natural turn for
tactics came into play. "I'd love to," he said, "I'd love to but I've two
hours of work to-night before I go to bed..."

"No. No. It's work that won't wait..."

He hoped they got the faint flavour of mystery in that work that wouldn't
wait.

"I didn't mean to speak at all to-night. My ideas ran away with me..."

He felt he was doing it all magnificently. He was elated with himself. He
disengaged himself, got away to his own rooms and locked himself in.

It required a considerable effort to do this. There was something
intoxicating in this sudden transition from contemptuous negligence to
interest. It was the first time he had felt visible in Camford. But he
knew that he had to get out of it. He had to adjust himself before he
betrayed how little he was adjusted. His speech quite as much as its
reception had taken him by surprise. He hadn't thought it was in him.
Even the ideas he had expressed struck him as new. They had come up out
of him.

He sat before his fire for a long time in a state of confused
self-congratulation. If he could go on with this sort of thing! Dreams he
had kept at arm's length before he now accepted frankly. "Leadership," he
whispered. "The quality of leadership. Maybe I have it. Maybe I really
have it.

"Man to man I don't count for much, but man to meeting! It's going to be
different. I wonder why. And--yes I can do it."

He began that acid whistle between his teeth that had been the common
accompaniment of the walking day-dreams of his schoolboy years--at first
very softly and then loudly.

"A great speech, Rud, my boy. A magnificent speech!" To that he had
expanded Carstall's "pretty good speech." "Leadership. Leadership.
Leadership." The word sang through his brain.

He found himself in a vast dreamland auditorium compelling great waves in
that time-honoured "sea of faces."

He thrust out his fist, held it up to the level of his forehead and
glared at his arm-chair. It was his natural gesture, arrested and held.
The room was filled with phantom applause.


3


"Your son, I see, Mr. Whitlow," said Mr. Skindle, the watchmaker, "has
been getting into the papers. Seems he's been making speeches."

"Whe-where? I didn't see it," said Mr. Whitlow.

"It's in the District Weekly," said Lozanda. "I saw it too.

"'Local scholarship winner' they called him. Just a paragraph copied out
of the Camford News."

"Says he's a Rising Red," said Mr. Cramble the grocer, with a stern eye
over his pipe.

The paper was handed to Mr. Whitlow and there was silence while he read
the news.

"Now that's serious," he said. "You never know what to do with that boy.
Always breaking out in a new place. It won't do him any good at Camford
to be figuring about as a red."

"It will not," said Mr. Cramble.

"Seems he don't like the idea of this new war that's coming," said
Lozanda. "We had a dose. I don't see why these kids shouldn't be soaked a
bit. Make men of them."

"Or crosses," said Mr. Skindle. "You don't know what it is to have a
cross out there, Lozanda. I do. Ain't there no way of escaping it?"

"Not by talking Red Treason," said Mr. Cramble. "I don't know what's
happening to all these youngsters nowadays. Restless they
are--extravagant. No respect for established things. As if they were all
waiting about for something they didn't quite like, to come out of the
night and happen."

"I did think Rudie had settled down to work," said Mr. Whitlow with a
rising sense of grievance. "We made sacrifices for him."

"Seems the generals are old fools and the admirals old fools and the
bankers and business men fools and knaves," said Lozanda with the
District Weekly as evidence in his hands. "He's got a hot tongue, that
boy of yours. Hope it won't get him into trouble."

"Always had a hot tongue," said Mr. Whitlow. "Fancy his breaking out at
them like that...Silly young fool! Always talk, he would. Always. Burst
out--like. After our sacrifices."

He took his troubles home with him. He walked about the bedroom
undressing, and delivering his soul. "I ain't going to stand for it. I
sent him to Camford to get a first-class degree and a permanent job. I
didn't send him to Camford to get ideers. Who's going to listen to a
young fellow like him telling them off? I ask you."

But Mrs. Whitlow answered nothing, because she had been reading over
again Hans Christian Andersen's story of the Ugly Duckling. Ugly, Rudie
certainly was. Nasty, too. Cunning and mean to his brothers. He could say
the most horrid things...He seemed always angry about something...Why
should he be angry?...Maybe if one understood him better...understood him
better...

She went to sleep.


4


Rud did not make another speech for a week or so, and even then attempted
nothing so elaborate as his first outbreak; his instinct told him that a
second oration in the same term would not do; he wrote nothing but
lecture notes, gave four hours a day grimly but with a watch on his desk,
to text-books, and talked with the utmost discretion. He felt that
something very important had happened in his life and he did not quite
know what. In such brief leisure as his steadfast pursuit of a good
degree permitted him, he would catch himself dreaming over a gazetteer
and an atlas, or reading books about Napoleon and Hitler and Mussolini.
Or simply he dreamt and schemed. If he could move people once, he could
move them again...

He did his best to control those extravagant reveries. For they went even
beyond the range of his schoolboy battle-dreams.

People made his acquaintance now--almost with an effect of seeking him.
This did much to confirm his new-born sense of his own value. If there
was something they valued in him, then he would be a fool to give it
away. Of course these reveries were reveries, but for all that there
might be something in them. He could not help posing a little. He
regarded his various visitors with a faintly hostile expression, hands
behind his back, replied without committing himself to anything and
summed them up one after another in his own mind.

The latest thing in religion presented itself one afternoon as a man too
old for an undergraduate and too oily and shiny for a don, a queer fish
with a slightly American accent. He had called, he said, and stopped.
Whitlow thought he might be a canvasser. But he was much too rich and
smug-looking for that.

"I heard your speech," resumed the intruder. "You have, what shall I call
it?--mental energy. You have persuasive power--oh--great persuasive
power. There was something contagious in your indignation. I feel it
imperative upon me to implore you not to waste these gifts."

"I have my ideas," said Rudolf. "What do you suggest?" "Where do they
take you?"

"Nowhere yet. I asked you what do you suggest?" "Have you Guidance?"

"Tell me about it."

The visitor wanted to walk about the room. He had played for the
hearthrug but Rudie had got that. "Do sit down," said Rudie. "In that
chair there, the low one. No; I cannot listen to you if I have to keep on
watching you moving around. It distracts me. What is this Guidance?"

"Guidance," said the visitor, sinking into his chair. "Just that."

Rudie replied with an uncivil monosyllable.

The missioner was spurred to exposition. "You don't know," he said.

"I'm asking you."

"Let me illustrate."

"I'm attending."

The illustrations rambled a good deal. Rudie listened with a lowering
expression, that hampered the teller. He spoke of the fear and
uncertainty in so many lives nowadays, the constant struggle against
sinful impulses, of suicidal moments and how when at last it broke upon
them--

"What broke upon them?"

"Guidance!"

"Ugh!"

"Guidance and the fellowship of those who share. Then everything grew
simple, everything grew plain."

Rudolf remained in a pose of enigmatical attention. He realised that he
was embarrassing this spiritual windbag. He liked that. There was power
in this still silence; it was giving him an ascendency. It was a sort of
hypnotism. He must try it again. "Don't you feel something?" said the
visitor, trying to break this stony irresponsiveness.

"You go on with what you came to say," said his host.

Presently he brought the interview to an end. It was a sudden inspiration
came to him. He lost his breath for an instant and then forced himself to
speak.

"Tell me," he said. "This Guidance brought you here?" "I felt
impelled----"

"Yes, and now, don't you think it about time that Guidance packed you up
and took you away again?..."

When his oak closed on the intruder, Rudie's stern face relaxed into a
delighted grin. His mature earnestness fell from him like a mask. He
stuck out his tongue at the door and then put his thumb to his nose and
spread out his fingers in twiddling triumph. "That for you and your
Guidance," he said.

By which it is manifest that he was still only very partially grown-up.


5


That was the only approach made by any sort of religious organisation to
our emergent young man. Whatever other forms of faith flourished at
Camford were apparently under the impression that Rudie might just as
well be damned. But various politicians of a markedly "junior" character
enquired about him. They waylaid him in stony corridors; they accosted
him in the reading-room; they came to his room. There were Liberals who
just talked party politics of the most arithmetical sort and failed to
pass quite elementary examinations on what they meant by Liberal
principles; there were rather beefy Conservatives, one of them titled,
with an ill-concealed quality of condescension, who seemed to regard the
Empire as a sort of alluring Juggernaut to whom one would naturally and
gladly prostrate oneself; there were shrill Indians who tried to win his
respectful adhesion to their dusky cause, by proving with chapter and
verse that the English were cheats, liars, oppressors and only
temporarily necessary to India; there were Pacifists, some of whom were
total abstainers from life, neo-gnostics in fact, while others seemed to
make an exception in favour of serious eroticism. And there were
middle-class Fabians, those painless permeators, with schemes for
expropriating the rich and powerful so subtly that they would never know
it had happened to them, and various leftists, Stalinists, Trotskyites
and so forth, including several earnest young peers, who agreed that
what was needed was a vehement class war and a proletarian revolution.
And also he had a call from two oafish, unprepossessing, young men in
purple vests who talked against the Jews. Their indictment of the Jews
was a little flimsy, but there could be no question of the earnest gusto
with which they advocated the ancient sport of Jew-baiting. They wore
broad leather belts and their jersey sleeves were rolled up as if on the
off-chance of finding a pogrom round the corner. They told him Judaism
was a wicked conspiracy to rob, corrupt and enslave Gentile mankind. He
did not believe them for a moment. But he was quite polite to them
because they were so very hefty. He did not argue with them, but he paid
visible attention.

"You aren't called upon for any action," said the largest of them. "Just
speak. We want speakers with ginger.'

"I couldn't make a speech on the Jewish question to save my life. I
haven't got it up."

"We could give you material."

"No," said Rudie, shaking a smiling face with modestly resolute
conviction.

"You aren't by any chance a Jew yourself?" said the smaller (but still
considerable) purple-shirt, and his eye roved about the room as if in
search for convenient breakables.

Rudie had a nasty moment and then decided upon a virile line. "If I was
about four stone heavier," he said, "I'd smash your blasted jaw for
that."

It got a laugh, and the situation eased.

"Come along, Colin," said the big one. "He's not even a Pacifist. But you
ought to read the Protocols of Zion, you really ought, Mister--? I didn't
get your name?"

Rudie felt now that he was safe on the bantam tack. "I haven't got
yours," he said.

They pulled up their jerseys in search of pockets and produced cards.
They handed them to Rudie with a friendly solemnity, bowed genteely and,
forgetting all about a return card, louted off down the staircase
with an air of something accomplished, something done.

"Blaggards," said Rudie when their footsteps had died away and the door
was safely shut. "If I was a Jew I'd get a revolver. I'd get a razor like
niggers do."

And his mind went back to his shin-kicking days, when he had thrown
knives and jabbed with scissors and pens...

But it did not go forward to the time when myriads of such "blaggards"
would march at his bidding.


6


Of all the movements fermenting through the venerable halls and
colonnades and the narrow lanes and winding streets of Camford, the
Communists had the most convincing air of meaning something and
definitely going somewhere. Their scientific pretensions, the aggressive
confidence with which they sustained their remarkable, though
incomprehensible, Hegelianism, impressed him, and their bias for
revolutionary violence was all in their favour. But their doctrinaire
inflexibility and intolerance did not attract him.

A large, fat young man at one of their meetings was quite interesting
about the Seizure of Power. That sounded like sense. Of course one must
seize power.

But Rudolf did not join the "Party." He spoke at a meeting and intimated
a certain sympathy, but he kept outside. He did not speak very well on
that occasion. There was something uncongenial in the atmosphere for
which at first he could not find a name. It was as if he lacked some
shibboleth and was out of court from the beginning. And not only that.
They set their new adherents, he gathered, to do all sorts of undignified
and time-wasting jobs, such as distributing unconvincing leaflets and
selling newspapers full of stale provocation. And they were
shepherded--shepherded was the word--by a post-graduate, one Jim
Mortland, who had been four times to and fro to Moscow and behaved like a
Malay who had been to Mecca. He had the languid authority of a
rather jaded sergeant-major with a batch of new recruits. He seemed
always to be transmitting orders from higher up and far away. Moscow? Why
the devil should wisdom centre at Moscow? Why should Spain be the only
arena for revolutionary activities? What had all this stuff to do with
Rudie's perplexities and English social and economic unrest? And
moreover, there was this Stalin-Trotsky split, a world-wide scolding
match, irrelevances, personalities, alien issues, imported stuff. Where
was it likely to take this bunch of English trailers? He attended one or
two meetings; there were one or two young peers and hardly a single real
proletarian--and suddenly he found the missing word--dilettante! That
settled Camford Communism for him. It wasn't good enough. So for a time
he remained politically indeterminate.

Yet his reveries now were all of political adventure. The success of his
speech had lit and given a direction to his ambition, and every day it
burnt more brightly. He felt in his bones now that he had the making of a
political figure. Once he started. His very indecision about the line he
had to take marked the seriousness of his intentions. He found his
inclination towards a sort of scheming reverie more and more of an
interference with his work.

A day or so before the end of the term he went for a walk by the Cramb
meadows to get tea at Chuck's Hill Farm. He had cleared up all his work
and he felt free to indulge to the full in that ancient vice of his.

His thoughts ran over these various movements he had sampled. His ruling
thought was what he could do with them and what they could do for him.
"One has to take a line of one's own," he said, "and all the same, if one
is to get anywhere, one has to have an Organisation--with a capital O.
One must go over big or not go over at all. You've got to have a
newspaper. Newspapers. Radio talks. Great halls. Stewards. It has to be
paid for. You've got to have backers...

"One might capture some organisation..."

In his reveries capturing an Organisation involved a good lot of timely
shooting.

What was it caught people? What was it caught backers? What got faithful
adherents? What was it made them believe in you? So that you got started?
Other people got supporters. You had to be obviously successful to hold
them and you had to give them something, something that they felt they
could not get or do or be themselves...

Brooding in the warm afternoon sunshine over the Chuck's Farm tea-things,
with unlimited supplies of Mother Braybone's newish bread and admirable
butter and home-made strawberry jam, all things became possible. His
thoughts were like the printed text of a book that has been
over-illustrated by a far too enthusiastic illustrator. The text kept to
a certain level of possibility, but the reverie soared fantastically and
magnificently. He found himself presently with a group of intimate
colleagues, devoted to him. (They really were devoted to him.) And behind
them was the party, his party.

Would they wear a shirt?

Shirts were overdone. Brown shirts, green shirts, black shirts, purple
shirts; the idea was played out. The Whitlow-men wouldn't have that.
They'd have belts. They'd have trousers with elastic webbing in them and
belts with heavy buckles that could be whipped off in a moment for a
fight. Good. And by way of recognition, a badge, a badge worn inside the
jacket, like the sheriff's badge in an American gangster film. A good
idea that!

What to call them? The Whitlow men? The Rud men? They'd have to have a
slogan. Something to shout, something to stick on their banners.

And an idea? He had long thought that the separation of the United States
and the British Empire was a terrible waste of strength, that a drive for
reunion could be made very popular, and that gave him, "The man who
speaks English is my brother." Because nowadays, now that we were drawing
so near to America by air and radio and common dangers, why should
not our political movements straddle the Atlantic?

So far it had never happened. Even their Communists and our Communists
were different. But that needn't be so now. And that altered everything.
This was a great thought for Rudie.

The reverie produced a vision of the mighty canyons of the New York City
streets as he had seen them in photographs and pictures and films, and
people were scattering torn-up paper from the windows upon the milling
swarms below, and great banners hung across from one side to the other
bearing his slogan. "The man who speaks English is my brother." There was
an immense excited crowd, all displaying badges, all Rud men. It was a
tremendous occasion. Rud had arrived in America. The Big Union had been
achieved.

Why not? Various things stood in the way, of course; the monarchy,
ancient prejudices, irritations, suspicions on both sides of the
Atlantic. Rud's imagination swept them aside.

The reverie suddenly produced a touching meeting between a British
monarch, a very hypothetical British monarch, and Rud. "Our family," said
the monarch, opening his coat suddenly and displaying the hidden badge,
"have been Rudmen and Rud-women for some time. If it is necessary to
Anglo-American coalescence for us to efface ourselves, we are prepared."

An almost religious reverence came into Rud's eyes as he contemplated
this beautiful present from his imagination, over an unusually large, an
almost fervent bite of jam-spread bread and butter.

He found he had to assist that excessive mouthful with the back of his
disengaged hand.

Then he blushed at his own puerility, finished his slice in a more
business-like way, emptied his cup of tea and produced and lit a
cigarette.

"The problem," he whispered, "is to find those nuclear associates. Then
we could start something...

"But we have to give them something new...

"All these things that are going on now--communism, fascism and all
that--they are nearly played out--they are three-parts dead. By the time
I get going it would be like crying stinking fish to go in for any of
them. A new appeal. It has to have a freshness, whatever it is..."

And then suddenly it seemed to him that he saw an idea, a programme, a
scheme of operations, a way to success plain before him. For a moment he
had the impression of something full and completed, the exact thing
needful. His mind just stopped at that and stared at it--as one might
stare, if suddenly a door opened in a hitherto impenetrable and
unclimbable wall and revealed--the dark and indistinguishable landscape
of some unknown land on which no sun had ever yet risen. And then it was
as if the door slammed again.

"If they're all out," he whispered. "And if there is a right way--

"They haven't got it. Any of them...

"But if one did get it!"

He seemed to see the confusion suddenly crystallising under the spell of
a magic word--some missing elusive word--surely he had had it quite plain
only a moment before!--and in his reverie, he it was who had shouted that
word. And now it had gone. Gone altogether.

What was it? That missing Sesame?...

What was it? What was it?

There was an extraordinary blankness upon the sunlit meadows and the
steel-blue, winding Cramb...

He sat stock-still for some time realising his hallucination only very
gradually. His cigarette went out between his fingers. Then, still with a
dazed expression, he roused himself and began rattling his spoon against
his cup to get his bill.

Returning to college he was still trying to recall something that had
never really been in his mind.


7


Old Doctor Carstall, whom Mrs. Whitlow considered so big and deliberate,
had often wanted to talk things over with his son, things in general,
fundamental things, what everything was for and what one thought one was
up to, and things of that sort, and like all intelligent fathers he was
afraid of his son and shy of him. These young people, he felt, know so
much more than we do and so much less than we do; one ought to make some
sort of show-down to them and get some idea of what they thought they
were doing. There ought to be that much continuity between the
generations. His son's visit to his home en route for the Alps, that
trite and wholesome and not too expensive playground for the earnest
young don, seemed to give just the occasion needed. They sat at dinner,
an excellent dinner, for the doctor was an easy and stimulating master to
his cook.

"The world seems in a queer state nowadays," the old man began. "What do
you make of it all, Dick?"

"An old world dying, a new one unable to get born--Who was it said
something like that?"

"Only worlds don't die and get born again," said the doctor. "If a world
dies, it dies, and there's an end to it. There's no more on its
line...You might perhaps--Of course, if you're thinking of obstetrics,
the image might just pass...Died in childbirth...Something of that
sort...Is your world dying, Dick? And what are you doing about it?"

Young Carstall had been sitting at his ease and he had answered his
father after the manner of casual conversation. Now he sat up a little.
He felt the slovenliness of his previous response. "No one of my age,
sir, thinks his world is dying," he said. "It isn't natural. But we're
certainly in for troubled times. Dangerous times."

"Those fellows who lecture to us about the world and who talk on the
radio and write in the magazines and papers and all that have got
hold of a phrase lately; what is it? Ah!--imperfect adaptation."

"Not bad as an elementary statement. Don't you agree, Father? Imperfect
adaptation to all the new powers and implements in the world. Following
them up clumsily, using them vulgarly and not keeping pace with the new
possibilities and dangers. Particularly the dangers. Air-war and
disorganisation generally. It seems fairly obvious."

"A few years ago we used to talk about morality failing to keep its
ascendency over--what was it?--material progress?"

"Said by bishops usually, Father. I don't attach much value to all that
scolding of aeroplanes and the cinema and the radio and motor cars and so
on. No. It's the moral side which has to adapt. It always has had to
adapt. There's no such thing as a fixed and final morality. Though the
bishops like to think so. The immutable laws of Heaven! They're like
obstinate men with a dying patent--or a vanishing trade. Their stuff
doesn't go any more and they won't give it up. No, they won't give it up.
Until the Church files its petition in bankruptcy and there are no more
stipends forthcoming. But their game is pretty nearly over, all the same.
We have to get new values and ideas to fit these inflexible new facts
we've got ourselves up against. Or come a cropper."

"You mean?"

"Political ideas. Religion. History. Ownership. All the ideas we have
about such things are threadbare and rotten and splitting. I suppose
they've all got to be changed. The material facts won't change."

"Such facts as?"

"Three hundred miles an hour travel. News almost instantaneous. Limitless
power. Over-production--whenever you try in the least, that is. Health
control. Population control. No animal has ever faced such changes in
what it can do and what it can bring down on itself, and survived."

"I know that song, Dick. Yes. I can sing it almost in unison with you. I
guess we agree pretty completely about all that. Man is now a new
animal, a new and different animal; he can jump a hundred miles, see
through brick walls, bombard atoms, analyse the stars, set about his
business with the strength of a million horses. And so forth and so on.
Yes. Yes. But all the same he goes on behaving like the weak little needy
ape he used to be. He grabs, snarls, quarrels, fears, stampedes and plays
in his immense powder magazine until he seems likely to blow up the whole
damned show. Eh?"

"That's on the face of things, Father."

"That's where we stand. That's our situation."

"That's our situation. Yes...You read your Nature, I see. You keep up
with the times."

"I shan't do that much longer, Dick."

"You're good for another twenty years. I don't need to be a doctor to
tell you that."

"Not very good for action now. Retiring from active practice. Quite soon.
Yes. I see the distant land of the future like Moses, but you--you have
to carry on...The problem comes to you. Sixty years of life may be in
front of you. Sixty tremendous years. What are you going to do about it,
Dick? Is it all going to happen to you or are you going to do something
about it? It's for your generation now, you know, to do something about
it. No good blaming us. That won't help you."

"Inform ourselves, I suppose. Readjust our imaginations. Think out a new
behaviour."

For an interval the elder man answered nothing.

"I suppose," he resumed presently, "that some sort of mental renascence
is possible. A sufficient renascence. I hope so. But I see very few signs
of it. That adaptation you talk about...There's a lot of unteachable
stuff in humanity. Down here I've been watching a little section of
mankind, bringing new individuals into the world, seeing the old ones
drop out of it, seeing the insides and the undersides and the backsides
of the creatures. Queer stuff and weak stuff, they are. Mean. A lot
of malice in them. And also a sort of obduracy. Do you know that almost
always they lie to me about themselves. Their doctor, I am, and they lie
to me. Out of self-protective vanity--mostly. They come for advice and
then they fake their facts and dodge their medicine. Only just a few work
with me. Silly stuff, they are. Intricately silly."

"All of them?"

"Most. There's differences. Considerable differences. They vary. Their
imaginations vary. And their go. Very widely. So widely that at times I
seem to be dealing with different species of creature. But on the whole I
don't see that renascence of will and understanding which is needed to
head off catastrophe. No..."

He paused, but his son remained silently attentive.

"Maybe it isn't altogether hopeless. Maybe there are different species in
mankind--all mixed up. That idea seems to be getting about, Dick. You
must have heard of it. Maybe the real differences in men lie in the kinks
of their brains. Scattered about among the silly multitudes there may be
men of a different quality--with a different power of vision."

"A sort of anonymous unsuspected aristocrats?"

"Exactly."

"So you don't believe in democracy any longer?" "I never did. Look at
'em! Do you?"

"I'd like to."

"But you don't."

"But during your forty years of practice," said the younger man, "hasn't
there been a certain amount of general, all over, mental progress? More
education, more books, more information? Not enough, I admit, but some.
If only we were able to increase the tempo of that sort of thing?..."

The old man shook his head with a smile of unbelief.

"You'll never get the whole lot intelligent. You'll only widen the gap. A
born fool is a fool to the end. Maybe there will be more and more of the
right sort proportionally. As they get opportunities to emerge. But
the crowd will remain a crowd and behave like a mob...That's where I
stand, Dick."

"I don't like to feel that is right. Somehow--at my age--and with a sort
of implicit reservation about our noble selves, you know, Daddy..."

He made a grimace.

"You don't like that, and neither do I. At my age, too, Dick. It makes me
feel--uncomfortable, to admit even to myself that there are these
differences. But if the truth is that all men are not equal, then is it
fair to treat an inferior as an equal? Even at golf you give a handicap.
And I don't ask my patients to vote on their treatment and then blame
them for the result."

Then with a change of manner that his son found very characteristic, he
said: "This is getting academic..."

Dick didn't seem to mind. He was plainly interested in this evidently
long-meditated discourse. He waited for his father to resume.

"Well, anyhow, the practical outcome of all these crude democratic ideas,
is that men of our quality--yes, damn it! we have a quality--excuse
themselves from the hard and thankless service they owe--not to the
crowd, Dick, but to the race. (Much good it will do us to shirk like that
in the long run.) We will not presume, we say, no. We shrug our shoulders
and leave the geese, the hungry sheep, the born followers, call them what
you will, to the leaders who haven't our scruples. The poor muts swallow
those dead old religions no longer fit for human consumption, and we say
'let 'em.' They devour their silly newspapers. They let themselves be
distracted from public affairs by games, by gambling, by shows and
coronations and every sort of mass stupidity, while the stars in their
courses plot against them. We say nothing. Nothing audible. We mustn't
destroy the simple faith that is marching them to disaster. We mustn't
question their decisions, That wouldn't be democratic, And then we sit
here and say privately that the poor riff-raff are failing to adapt
themselves to those terrible new conditions--as if they had had half a
chance of knowing how things stand with them. They are shoved about by
patriotisms, by obsolete religious prejudices, by racial delusions, by
incomprehensible economic forces. Amidst a growth of frightful
machinery..."

He stopped short and stared at his son and his son smiled back at him
faintly and nodded for him to go on.

"You haven't been watching a community for four full decades, Dick. I
have. My practice here is a fair sample of mankind...I have seen a sort
of self-confidence fading out of this world. Like a twilight. When I
bought this practice everyone who came to me, every man Jack of them,
felt he had a place in the world, that there were things he ought to do,
and things he mustn't do. Maybe people were a little lower then, nearer
the earth, but that was how things were. A normal man got along in a
system he thought he understood. Now--

"Dick, people aren't nearly as straight in business as they were. They've
ceased to feel that honesty is the best policy. They've found themselves
put out of business by competition they think unfair. They try to get
even by counter-cheating. And they aren't clever enough. They find the
incomes they had counted on, their pay or what not, raided by taxation,
shattered by currency manipulation and slumps, knocked to pieces by all
this messing about with money, this inflation, deflation, and all the
rest of it. Even the wages-earners never know now what their money can
buy. And more and more of them are pottering about with poor little
parcels of stocks and shares, hunting after Capital Appreciation. That's
the great phrase now. I've heard it three times from three separate
people this past fortnight. There's ten men speculating in a small
miserable way for one who knew his way to a broker forty years ago. Ten,
do I say?--fifty! They lie awake at nights. They get chronic indigestion.
They get neurasthenia and neuritis. Some are frankly betting. These
football pools are a sort of disease of vain hopes, social dropsy. The
women bet. It was unheard of in the old days. There's hardly a man in my
area now, Dick, under fifty, who finds any satisfaction in a job well
done, or believes that it will secure him any sort of reward. Think of
what that means in social stability...

"And the women I have to deal with, Dick, the younger women; they're all
demoralised as we understood demoralisation. They don't understand
themselves. There was a certain amount of sly adultery and still slyer
fornication going on then, but it didn't disturb the even surface of
things. It was just healthy incontinence...Chastity now is out of
fashion. Children are an encumbrance. The women want, or feel they ought
to want, a sort of gadding-about amusement and a man has to pay for it.
They sell themselves almost frankly, wholesale or retail. They aren't
steady because the men aren't steady. The men are insecure and rattled
and the women follow suit. You'd be amazed, Dick, at the people who come
along nowadays hinting at abortion..."

He hesitated and plunged. "What are you making of women, Dick? What are
you going to do about all that?"

"I like them," said Dick after a long, downcast pause for reflection. "I
like them a lot."

"And they like you?" said his father.

"Things have changed, Father."

"Mutual comfort, eh? That's all got relaxed. It's all different from the
repressions of my time. Perhaps it's not worse, perhaps it's better, but
it's all shockingly different...And that sort of thing is not going to
eat you up?"

"I don't think so. No. So far it hasn't done any harm to my work, and I
don't think it will."

"Sex," his father reflected, "used to have a certain biological
significance. And social aspects. And a kind of idea of mating. Is all
that changed?"

"It's changed in a way, yes."

"And what becomes of your young women in the end? Rather jaded little
bitches, eh? Some, anyhow. Some don't seem to suffer much damage, but
most who go loose stay loose. And a loose woman who is getting old is a
damn nasty thing...And yourself, Dick, as you grow older?"

"I think I shall marry. Long before I grow nasty. You ought to have some
grandchildren, you know. It won't be a grand passion...Maybe it's a
defect, Father, but the truth is I don't like romance in love. I like
humour...

"I'm not so sure of that mating business either. Women's minds don't seem
to move with ours. They don't keep step with us. I've seen that. I guess
I shall have time to think about it some more before I fix myself. When
Adam delved and Eve span, there was a sort of partnership. But now--do
men and women hunt in couples? Can they? Under the new conditions. My
work...I'd hate to have a wife who knew too much about my work. When I
was going slack, when I was casting about in my mind, preoccupied, in
that sort of exasperating, dissatisfied worry one must go through, when
one is feeling about for something missing. Think of the horror of a nice
intelligent question at the breakfast-table! 'Tell me all about it,
darling'...But all the same I'd hate to have a wife who knew nothing
about it."

"There's a middle way," said his father. "Maybe you'll not marry, Dick,
maybe you'll never find a wife at all, but all the same some woman will
come along, who will think you over and decide to marry you. And do it.
I'm inclined to think that's the way things are going. Anyway it's the
way things ought to go. It's their business really. Damn it! What else
are they for? You aren't likely to be too rich or too conspicuous, to
attract the exploiting sort. But you're not unattractive, Dick."

"I take after you, Father, a bit."

"You'll be picked all right. But it will be more her business than yours,
and if things go on as they are going, she'll probably ask you. I've
watched people. Picking out women by men is silly. They don't give their
minds to it. Far better have it the other way about. Though I doubt
whether they ought to pick much before two or three and twenty. That's by
the way. Be sure she has our sense of humour, Dick, and then marry her
and thank God for her--even if she gives you moments of doubt. A woman
with unsatisfied desires or a craving vanity is the worst thing in life,
but a woman with living and responsive things to protect and take care
of, is the best. Believe me..."

And then the doctor made what he firmly believed was an entirely
original, outstanding and remarkable statement--the statement that a
countless multitude of widowers in his position have been moved to make.

"There never was a woman in the whole world," he said, "so good and
uncomplicated, so generous and self-forgetful, as your mother. I wonder
if you remember her. I never knew anyone with so swift and sure a
judgment of character. You couldn't harbour a mean thought when she was
about. And yet she regarded politics as a kind of male silliness--like a
hunt or race-meeting--she thought science was woolgathering and she
hadn't the slightest idea of the--the blundering uncertainties of medical
practice. She thought I cured whenever a cure was possible. Fifteen years
ago, she died, and I talk to her in my dreams still. I think of things I
should like to tell her. Sometimes when I am in trouble and sometimes
just because I want to share something with her. But one can't do things
like that, Dick. So that's that...I'm wandering, Dick, from what we were
talking about..."

He mused for a moment and returned to his original drift.

"You think your scientific work is good enough to hold your imagination
and carry you on? It opens out, eh? That second paper of yours certainly
had a periscope. It ranged...Sometimes I think we biologists may find
ourselves coming into politics from our own angle. If things go on as
they are going--We may have to treat the whole world as a mental
hospital. The entire species is going mad; for what is madness but a
complete want of mental adaptation to one's circumstances? Sooner or
later, young man, your generation will have to face up to that."

He stopped and looked at his son's face.

"Those--what was it we said?--anonymous unsuspected aristocrats," said
the younger man, and thought.

He leant forward on the table and picked his way among his ideas as he
spoke. "I have an idea, Father, a half-formed idea, that before we can go
on to a sane new order, there has to be a far more extensive clearing-up
of old institutions...The world needs some sort of scavenging, a
burning-up of the old infected clothes, before it can get on to a new
phase. At present it is enormously encumbered...This is just a shadowy
idea in my mind...Something like breaking down condemned, old houses. We
can't begin to get things in order until there has been this scavenging
phase. And, you see, what one might call civilised men can't do that sort
of rough work."

"I suppose it has to be rough work?"

"What do you think? Conservatism insists on it. The old order of things,
the patriots, the priests and the old laws won't deal with reasonable
men. They won't hear of it. They're cunning, they're subtle in their way.
Subtly stupid. They've got an unintelligent suicidal instinct for what
they think is self-preservation. They won't stand criticism; they won't
adapt. They'll listen and seem to agree and they'll play tricks. They're
afraid of any light, any clearness. They fog education. They obstruct.
What! Deal with us! They're much more disposed to deal with the roughs
and turn them against us. You've got to capture the rough from them,
you've got to use the rough against them, educate him, civilise him--as
far as he will stand it."

"A bit roundabout and underhand," said the old man. "Modern jesuitry.
Rather on old Marx's lines, eh? Call these roughs 'proletarian' and there
you are! Flatter them until you've organised their discipline. Maybe I
misunderstand you?"

"I'm telling you my ideas, Father, as well as I can. You've asked for it.
But I see no way out of the present break-up, but 'Let the best rough
win.' Then so soon as you've got a top rough in the world, he'll have to
organise efficiently to save himself from the next possible rough, and
he'll have to be quick about it. The bigger he grows--and you know the
next rough may be world-wide--the less of the administration, the less of
the planning he and his gang will be able to control, and the more he'll
have to use and trust the able, resolute, relatively unambitious type..."

"Meaning our sort? Our virtuous sort? Eh?" "Well--yes."

"After the democracies, the demagogues who become dictators and after
them a World Civil Service? Fabian permeation and all that. And I'm not
so sure of that Civil Service. It may develop a high standard of comfort
and a taste for dependants."

The young man reconsidered it. "All sorts of complications and
interludes," he said, "but, like it or not, that I take it is the general
shape of the story ahead. A World Civil Service if you like--but based,
that's the restraining force--on a World Public Opinion."

"Something of that sort," said the doctor, with a grape in his mouth,
"existed in Egypt. In Ancient Egypt. Which was practically a world in
itself. B.C. two thousand. Charming cultivated people."

For a time they gave their attention to dessert.

"Civilisation has always been something of a patch-up," reflected the
doctor. "You seem pretty convinced that it has to be worse before it is
better...I agree...This particular earthquake looks likely to be the
biggest so far. How do you see it in terms of yourself, Dick? You may not
be able to keep out of the way of these--what do you call
them?--scavengers. Concentration camp or prison examination. You cannot
smash and remake a social system without breaking men--incidentally and
accidentally--and the chances may pick on you to be broken. It may
degrade you, Dick. You won't be able to help yourself if your skull gets
burst open or your brain or your mind gets exhausted or poisoned. After
all, it won't be the end of the world, but it may be the end of your
world. That's as may be, you say...I agree...It will mean you will begin
your decay before you are dead. A slight but nowadays not an uncommon
inversion of the normal order. But an end comes to all of us. Until then
and while you are yourself, you mean to keep a stiff backbone. Eh? No
cringing, no compromise."

"I want that," said his son. "A stiff backbone, I mean. As long as
possible I will keep out of money-making and politics and the scrambles
and stampedes, and go on with my special work. You've made it possible.
But if a straight challenge comes, if I'm absolutely prevented from
working or if I see a plain occasion before me and my sort..."

"Working, waiting and watching for something that may call you and compel
you...Waiting for the time when dictators dwindle and roughs relax...You
might do worse...For the life of me, I don't see what else there is to do
now. If you fight them now you'll only fight for the old system."

With a palpable effort not to seem self-indulgent and to throw a
sacramental flavour about the gesture, Doctor Carstall poured himself
some of his own very excellent brandy. "Good luck to you, my son. I'm
glad we've had this talk."



CHAPTER THE THIRD - EXPLORATION


1


Rudie went down home for the Long Vacation because there seemed to be
nowhere else to go. But in his state of adventurous unrest he found home
altogether unendurable before a week was out. His father with a manifest
disposition to administer discouraging advice, his mother with her
general air of asking him not to (whatever it was) for her sake, and his
brothers with their ill-controlled jealousy of his Camford advantages,
were all so tiresome, and the district when he tried a lonely walk or so,
so full of stale memories, that he felt himself driving towards one of
those smashing and screaming and abusive outbreaks that had disfigured
his childhood. But among the disciplines he was imposing upon himself for
ambition's sake, was the practice of self-control. He had buried, even if
he had not killed, little Rud the knife-thrower. But he had not buried
him very deep. Once or twice his father exasperated him almost to the
verge of a resurrection.

"You've got to work hard at Camford, my boy, and mind what they tell
you," said his father, "for it's your only chance. And you mustn't make
enemies, my boy. You mustn't make enemies."

"Ow! Who's making enemies?" snarled Rudie.

"I didn't say you were making enemies, my boy. I didn't say that. You
catch me up too quick. I said you mustn't make them."

"Ugh!"

"What I say is for your good, my boy. You've got a quick tongue and you
may give offence before you know where you are. I know. I've lived. I've
given way to wit in my time or I might have been a better-off man than I
am to-day. When I was young, before I learnt better, I was a good deal
like you, my boy. Very like you. Quick. And something of your gift of the
gab. No sooner did I think of a thing than I was out with it. It made me
enemies. And all this saying things about politics and socialism and
people. Seems clever at the time..."

"Oh, Criky!" said Rudie sotto voce...

He decided that somehow he would wangle five pounds out of his mother and
go off for a walking tour. Anywhere. He was wasting his time here. He
couldn't even study; he had no room to work in and no seclusion. He felt
perhaps if he went through the country looking in on meetings, listening
to speakers at street corners, talking to people, he might get ideas.
He'd wear old clothes, take his stuff in a rucksack, be a university
gentleman, incognito, so to speak. A lot of fellows nowadays were doing
that. Odd lodgings and doss houses. And weren't there hikers' camps and
road-houses? He'd manage all right.

He would head for Birmingham or Sheffield and then turn north. He might
find a strike going on and anyhow he'd get a glimpse of industrial
conditions. There'd be unemployed men to talk to. He'd find out what
kinds of organisation were possible among them. If the weather was fine
he might cultivate a sunburn by a few days on the Lancashire moors or in
the Peak country. What he would have liked to do was to have gone to New
York and prowled with his eyes and ears open. He was now very keen to
learn about America, and in the vacation away from the Union he could not
even see Time or the New Yorker. He hadn't the money to buy them. And as
for crossing the Atlantic, he had neither fare nor time now. America must
wait. He might get in touch with those Mass Observers one was beginning
to hear about, but they might keep him too busy for his private concerns.
He had no desire to do jobs for other people. If he had thought of it
before he might have joined one or other of the conferences that were
always afoot now in some hostel or other, but that might have involved a
subscription he could ill have afforded. But anything was better than
stagnation and more father.

Mother had been watching him. She was ready for his appeal and helped him
out with it. She got the five pounds somehow. She got together six pounds
ten shillings.

"Of course, dear, you want more of a change than you get here..."


2


He found little to excite him in the first two days of his pilgrimage and
he was beginning to feel more than a little solitary when he came upon
Chiffan. It was in the late afternoon and he was consuming as big a tea
as he could manage with eggs and cake and jam at a pleasant generous
little wayside cottage. He was going on a two-meal system, hearty
breakfast and late high-tea and that was all. He found it the most
economical way of feeding. And perforce he had become a strict
teetotaller.

Chiffan, it seemed, was on the road in much the same spirit. He was an
older man than Rudie, he might have been twenty-six or seven, and he had
a pale, intelligent face with a decided nose, a faint, wry smile, bright,
rather distraught, grey-blue eyes and untidy, dark brown hair. His
trousers were relaxed grey slacks and he wore a knitted blue pullover in
place of a jacket. His gear beside him was in an ancient Japanese-cane
valise which he carried by a strap, and he had a stout cabbage-stick laid
across the table. He studied Rudie for a time and Rudie, looking up from
a copy of the Daily Worker, found he was being accosted.

"Doing a lonesome hike?" asked Chiffan.

"Looking about at things," said Rudie.

"Sociology? Mass observation? Something of that sort? I see you're
reading the Daily Worker. Communist, maybe?"

"No-o," said Rudie, finding himself hard to explain and making a mystery
of it. "No. Just interested. What are you doing?"

"I make no secret of it. I'm a disgruntled communist wandering about like
a lost dog. The Left's gone to pieces...Stalin and Trotsky...

"Spain...

"United Front rot. When there is no sort of unity. Rudie was in the
completest agreement.

"Anti-Fascist. Anti-Purple shirts. What a lot they are! What good is it
being just Anti-? It lets the other side choose the battlefield and you
have to run after them and attack. They say it first and you say 'No.'
Look at this rag."

He smacked the Daily Worker, so to speak, in the face.

"Now that's an idea!" said Chiffan alertly, taking in what Rud had said.
"That's a real good idea. Yes. Anti-. If you're just Anti-. That lets the
other chap choose his battlefield. Good! Oh, good!"

Rudie felt he could like this stranger. "Well, that's how I see it," he
said modestly. "We want something positive. Surely we do. I've been
feeling that lately. I tell you--"

Chiffan stuck out a long forefinger. "The old game is up," he said.
"You've got it. We want a new formula. That's what we want--a new
formula! As you say. Exactly what I have been saying! And until we get
it, I'm going back to my brother's at Booksham to help him get out the
Booksham Messenger and do general printing. I'm disgruntled, I tell
you--deadly disgruntled, and that's all about it. I'm just going to drop
in to the New World Summer School at Wexley on the way, but I don't
expect anything much from that."

"And what might the New World Summer School be?" asked Rudie.

Particulars were forthcoming. They discovered themselves similar and
sympathetic from the outset. There seemed no reason why they should not
visit this school together.

They set out for a four-day tramp to the New World Summer School and as
they tramped they talked, and while they ate they talked, and they talked
while they sat in woods and under shady trees beside pleasant rivulets or
hung over the parapets of little bridges during the heat of the
afternoon, and when they shared a bedroom they talked most of the night,
and when they slept in a Youth Hostel they talked and argued until the
consensus of opinion that they ought to "Shut Up" could be disregarded
no longer. Chiffan declared loudly and frequently that he had rarely met
anyone with the freshness and lucidity of Rud, and Rud knew that in
Chiffan he had found just that experience, response and appreciation that
would bring out all the best that was in him. As he talked he discovered
brilliant opinions in his mind that he had never even suspected were
there.

Chiffan was in a phase of disillusionment, and his disbelief in people
and especially in the leaders of the left world was acute and acid. But
he had a gift for admiration. It is a winning gift. He was prepared to
admire Rudie, but at first only on condition that he joined in a general
denigration of the distressful world about them. He wanted a world
revolution and everything completely upside down more passionately but
much less hopefully than Rudie. He had the advantage of eight or nine
years of experience. He knew more people and he had watched the careers
of many more people. He had done a considerable amount of journalistic
work. He had always been against the Government. He had picketed. He had
rioted. He had been locked-up. He had been married in some imperfect way
that had come undone, but he laid no stress on that. He could talk more
abundantly than Rudie, though he lacked his facility of phrase. And he
found something very sustaining in Rudie's manifest belief that there
were still possibilities of revolutionary activity in the world. With
reconstructed formulae. (Great phrase!)

Three main topics interlaced during their four-day tramp to the New World
conference. One was Rudie's notion that the revolutionary movement in
Great Britain should cut away from continental associations altogether
and get into the closest co-operation with American revolutionists.

"You can't work with people who not only speak a different language,"
said Rudie, "but who're in a different phase. None of these Communists
ever seem to think of that. We are laying out a revolution in a
democratic country. That's our phase. Isn't it? But Russia is in a phase
of"--he scarcely hesitated before the words rolled out--"precocious
Communist senescence."

"Precocious Communist senescence! Oh grand, man! Oh, simply grand! And
you're right."

"Spain, on the other hand, isn't even up to Marx. This anarchist
syndicalism of theirs! It's pure Rousseau. Read Sender. It's a hundred
and fifty years behind us."

"You're so right about this."

"But America and here are not ten years apart. Some things they're ahead
and some things we are. That's our fight. Hands across the sea. One
tongue. One culture. Take a hint from the Anschluss..."

That was Rudie's chief contribution.

Chiffan brought in the second theme and that was the monetary question.
"It took me a time to see it, and most of them don't see it themselves,
but those currency cranks have got something. Mark my words, Rud! They've
really got something. They've got something fundamental. Money, you see,
is the key to the whole property problem. Socialism is just William
Morris and News from Nowhere until it has a theory of money. Socialism
has been poking about in the factory when it ought to have been going
through the books in the counting-house. Setting the worker against the
employer has been barking up the wrong tree. It's the banker, Rudyard,
it's the private banker. The Bank is the key position in the social war.
Go for that. Control banking, control the issue of credit--arid money,
you know, is only a credit counter--and private enterprise is yours to do
just exactly what you like with."

This took some explaining and wrangling. It was newish stuff for Rud. But
Chiffan was tremendously equipped for that argument. They went about the
whole question and came back to this bit of it or that. Rud would get new
ideas and objections in the most unexpected circumstances and hurry to
find Chiffan and expound them. Before they got to the summer school Rud
was no longer talking of "Capitalists," he was talking of "Money Barons."

(And here in parenthesis we may note that henceforth we must call our
Rudie, Rud and nothing else. Because Chiffan had assumed from the outset
that Rud stood for Rudyard. When he had used "Rudyard" for the third
time, Rud reflected upon the matter and decided not to correct him. He
had always had a faint dislike to the foreign romantic flavour about
Rudolf, and he felt now that for a potential demagogue in the great
English-speaking community, it would be a serious handicap. He began to
think of himself as Rudyard. A time was to come when he would not even
recognise himself as Rudolf Whitlow.)

The third and more absorbing topic between these two young men was the
possible creation of a New Revolutionary Party. It was all very well to
be a great revolutionary leader in reverie, but at first it seemed almost
indecent to Rud to expose that secret thought in conversation in the
sunlight. Still it had to be brought forward.

"These other fellows," he said, "after all, compared to us, they aren't
so wonderful. How did they get there?"

How did they get there? Or to be nearer the intention of the question;
how can we get there?

Here Chiffan's eight years of observation and detraction was of the
utmost value. Rud became his lively and intelligent pupil.

They canvassed this leader and group and that. Chiffan explained the
faults and failures of the endless imperfect coagulations and
dissolutions and recoagulations of leftism with the utmost lucidity. He
had an astonishing memory. The two of them began to shape out more and
more definitely the movement and organisation that was needed to correct
that tangle of faults. It was to be Anglo-American (and Dominion.
Certainly Dominion) from the start. It was to adopt an attitude of
self-respecting co-operation towards the good industrialists. It was to
promise abundant money and abundant cheap goods in a world relieved of
rent and financial overheads. It was to pursue the banker and the Stock
Exchange and all "speculation" pitilessly. There were to be no rent, no
debentures and no sort of mortgages in the new world, and the State was
to take care of the people's savings and lend their money for them to
initiate profitable enterprises--guaranteeing an adequate return. "The
land," they would say, "is the State's and the fullness thereof."

"Not a bad slogan," said Chiffan. "I like that biblical twang! Fullness
thereof!"

"The land for mankind and the fullness thereof," tried Rud, always a
little fastidious about phrasing.

A tremendous benevolence welled up in them, especially on the finer
afternoons, as they sketched their economic programme. They seemed to
feel already the grateful response and the eager support of mankind. They
settled the little matters of shirts in favour of Rud's badges and they
tried over a lot of other slogans and argued out the main conditions of
launching a movement.

A point Chiffan made that seemed fresh to Rud was the necessity for
invading and "capturing" already existing groups and parties.

"We've got to capture people," said Chiffan. "You can't be like Cadmus
and the dragon's teeth; you can't call a party out of nothing. Nearly
everybody who is politically-minded enough to join a party has joined a
party already. Our party would have to raid..."

"Now that's an idea," said Rud.

"And where?"

"You know better than I do."

"I've cast about in my mind," said Chiffan, "since I chucked communism in
London. But not very hopefully until I hit upon you. Now things look
different somehow and I'm casting about in my mind more than ever.
There's these Guidance people...No. No. Not to be sniffed at like that.
They gather a lot of raw stuff. They're worth raiding. Then there's that
fool Lord Horatio Bohm and his purple shirts--mauve shirts really they
are, for he never had the wit to get his shirts fast colour. There's a
deuce of a lot of money behind him, a lot of meaty young men and precious
little in the way of ideas. Sort of vaguely anti-communist and that's
about all. Fancy dress and ragging. Aristocratic--nothing to do with the
blasted bourgeoisie. They might be ready to take on a good set of
ideas--and there you are!"

"They do want speakers," said Rud. "In fact...I was approached...You know
they're anti-Jewish?"

"Because that fool can think of nothing else. He's quarter Jew himself.
It obsesses him. He's always running away from that nose of his and it
annoys him by keeping just in front of him. However I merely mentioned
him by the way. For the sake of illustration."

"New York," said Rud, "is the greatest Jewish city in the world."

"You think ahead," exclaimed Chiffan in warm approval. "You certainly
think ahead. Mind you, Jews are not always easy to work with. They're as
clever as anyone could wish, but they've always one foot in the Ghetto."

"I don't know anything about Jews," said Rud compactly. "You will," said
Chiffan...

And so discoursing, elaborating in common a magnificent reverie of revolt
and power, our two young men, with their heads pleasantly swelled by
these imaginative exercises, and their confidence erect, arrived at the
New World Summer School at Wexley and found that with a little squeezing
there was room for their admission.


3


They got on very well at Wexley. They had much to say, and Wexley found
it fresh and lively stuff. Things there had been going rather slackly.
The school had been feeling the need for new blood. And here it was.
Chiffan saw fit to play the role of impresario, an admirable impresario,
for Rud. Chiffan too was made of imaginative stuff. He was elaborating
his own reverie about Rud. Rud's peculiar type of ugliness attracted him.
He conceived himself as a sort of deferential elder-brother tutor to this
new acquisition. He knew just when it was time for Rud to speak, he
advised him quite sagely about the temper of the place, suggested lines
of action, talked about him loyally behind his back and set the school
remarking Rud's exceptional quality.

The New World Summer School was a fair sample of the continually
increasing chaff of mentally unsettled people that was being winnowed out
of the social order by the advancing disorganisation of the period. It
was a sort of lodgement of wind-driven minds in a cranny of the Yorkshire
hills. They had one thing in common, an enthusiasm for progress. The New
World Society was pledged to progress in any direction, to anywhere, and
to any idea about a New World its members chose to entertain. It was of
all ages above fourteen and it included everything from barely cryptic
nudists to extremely woolly vegetarians, and from single-taxers to
Douglasites; there were Swedenborgians, Spenglerites, modern
spiritualists, aberrant Fabians, seers and great thinkers, teachers of
all grades, sex-reformers, thoughtful people who listened intently and
never said anything, professional and genuine refugees from Nazi tyranny,
Indian nationalists and one Chinaman of incomprehensible speech and
consequently unknown attribution, who bowed very politely. The school led
a hardy, healthy and extremely inexpensive life, sleeping crowdedly in
austerely simplified dormitories at night, and eating in tumultuous
refectories on trestle-tables covered with marbled white American cloth
by day. There was much walking and swimming, table-tennis, medicine-ball
and Badminton, and a series of conferences that it was bad form to cut
altogether. There were a number of young women, brightly rather than
over-dressed, who supplied little more than applause to the discussions,
but manifestly appealed and set themselves to appeal to the pairing
instinct of mankind. One or two of them decided to betray an interest in
Rud, but he was wary and unresponsive. Chiffan after a slight resistance
lit up and responded almost too much.

Rud never discovered who was running the assembly. There was a secretary,
an anxious-looking spectacled lady of the head mistress type whose name
he never learnt, who stood up and made proclamations and stuck up
notices, and there was an omnipresent white-bearded old gentleman in a
state of earnest inactivity, who may have been her husband. And there was
something that met somewhere called the Committee. The essential interest
for Rud were a score of nuclear individuals, who did seem to be trying to
shape out some sort of ideas about the current world drama and the roles
they might have to play in it. Chiffan made rapid and quite plausible
estimates of their quality and Rud concentrated upon them to learn and
impress.

It was not that he was indifferent to the sexual stir that was going on
around him. Indeed he was acutely aware of it, but his habits and
instinct in these matters were becoming increasingly solitary and
secretive. He did not like to give himself away to a fellow creature even
amorously. He made no advances and no responses. He wouldn't go near the
bathing-pool or look a girl in the face if he could help it. He was
acutely jealous and at the same time contemptuous of Chiffan's
gallantries and of all the other scarcely masked love-affairs in
progress.

Nevertheless he showed off as brilliantly as he could in the meetings.

Mainly the newcomers summarised and decanted what they had discussed
during their four days of interchanges. There was an earnest
ex-ophthalmic little man with a black beard and an uncontrollable feather
at the back of his head who had swallowed the Douglas gospel whole and
apparently digested some of it. His mind ran on certain definite rails,
and if an argument knocked him off them he just picked himself up and put
himself on his rails again. He had already been making Social Credit
unattractive by dragging it in as an irrelevant topic and so
disorganising other issues, but Rud, talking across the table at supper,
seemed to take a fresh sort of hold upon the question, and the little
man, when it came to his turn to give a conference, was pleased to find
an unexpectedly full room awaiting him. He did not realise at first that
he was to be the victim at the feast. He read a paper that most of the
School had already heard in fragments several times.

Chiffan sat and listened with a growing admiration while Rud, who had had
only the most rudimentary and casual ideas about the whole business three
days ago, now not only repeated but expanded and filled in and rounded
off what he had picked up in their conversations. Chiffan watched the
bulging forehead and the pugnacious profile with an almost parental
interest and kept up a sotto voce endorsement to the sentences that came
clear and emphatic from Rud's determined mouth.

"You can't deal with money questions in this way," said Rud in the
magisterial tones of one who had studied the subject for years. "You
can't do it like that. Before you can begin to talk about money you must
settle in your mind what you mean by property--for money is only a ticket
for property--and before you can talk about property you must have made
up your mind about the social system you want. How much private property
is there to be? What can be bought? What can be sold?"

"Hear, hear!" became audible from Chiffan.

"In a theoretically complete socialism, it goes without saying, the only
property you will be able to buy will be consumable goods, and the only
way you will ever get hold of money will be as anticipatory or current or
deferred wages. It won't matter whether it is cash down or cash held over
because there will be no interest."

"Dole?" said someone.

"Dole is just vacation wages," said Rud. "It's the duty of the community
to find a man work."

"Hear, hear!"

For a time the assurance of his manner carried the meeting. Then
objections arose.

A young man from Belfast, Figgis, raised the issue of foreign trade and
started an excursus about the Workers' International. That and one or two
unfamiliar phrases promised trouble for Rud, but Chiffan, to whom no
current political phrase seemed unfamiliar, came to his help and pulled
the debate back within his reach.

That was Rud's debut. After supper nine or ten of them sat and talked
round him for a good three hours, they talked of "Socialism in our Time,"
and the talk went wide and far. "Socialism," said Chiffan, "has got to
rejuvenate itself. Prewar socialism was sentimental and insufficient. He
and I have been talking about that for days. Socialism's got to dot its
i's and cross its t's. Marx ran away with it and lost bits as he ran. It
never understood money."

"What I told you," said the ex-ophthalmic young man with the black beard.
"Exactly what I told you."

Next day a well-trained Marxist from the Black Country, named Bennet,
took on Rud with considerable vigour.

"All this sneering at Marx," he opened, "I don't know who started it..."

It was a live discussion and once or twice Rud felt himself cornered,
and broke through with some effective rhetoric.

"Talk every time you can," said Chiffan late that night and with the
manner of a trainer. "It's all you can do here."

"As long as they listen," said Rud.

"They'll listen to you," said Chiffan.

Rud displayed no gratitude for Chiffan's aid and support. He took Chiffan
as a matter of course. He was always to take Chiffan as a matter of
course. He trusted him, he relied upon him; he expected everything from
him and gave nothing in return. He took credit to himself for everything
Chiffan taught him or told him to do. That was Rud's way with life and it
worked very well for him...

When Rud was disposed to guy the Swedenborgian's account of the Master as
Socialist, Chiffan kicked him on the ankle.

Afterwards Rud discussed that kick with some heat. "Never ridicule a man
except for a definite party purpose," said Chiffan. "And then kill him.
Guy him so that he will never rise again. But don't make an enemy of him
for fun...Oh, yes, I know I do. But I'm different."

Two tepid discussions on "Agriculture in a Socialised World" and "The
Nationalisation of Mineral Products" were instructive rather than
provocative for Rud, and Chiffan did most of the talking. Rud began to
realise that the level of information in the School was higher than he
had assumed. Several of these non-university men were much better read
than he was.

Things livened up to flaming reality with a discussion of pacificism and
non-resistance.

"Are we to Use Force and if so How Much?" was the question mooted, and
before the two days' debate had lasted for an hour Rud realised that
hitherto he had consistently shirked this particular and very fundamental
issue in political affairs. In his reveries of a stupendous political
ascent there had been great marches and demonstrations, flag-waving and
cheering, there had been battles (heard off) and tremendous displays of
armament, thousands of planes in the air and the like, but so far the
rougher stuff had always been fairly remote from his person. Once or
twice he had been under fire in dreamland, undismayed and unscathed. When
he had imagined himself arrested and put on trial, it had always been an
open trial, numerous reporters present, the whole world wondering, the
judge cowed or secretly sympathetic, and himself practically in control
of proceedings. Prisons, concentration camps, domiciliary visits,
disappearances and secret examinations had been far beyond the actual
margin of his picture.

But now, in clumsy and distressful speeches, in broken sentences and
broken English, came harsh reality, at first hand, One of the refugees
had been crippled and broken. He limped. He clung to the chair in front
of him as he talked. "Even here," he said, "among friends, one hesitates
to tell."

He spoke admirable, bookish English, slowly, carefully and with a German
flavour rather than a positive accent.

He told them of the foul indignities that men, when they encourage
instead of discouraging each other in cruelty, can put upon their
victims. "And your martyrdom," he said in a faded voice, "is in vain.
Your courage is wasted. You suffer and you are hidden away and lied
about. Your persecutors are more horrible than apes, because they are
subtler. Beasts and disease and accidents can cause men pain and misery,
but such things do not torment you with hope and snatch it away, they do
not caricature and disgrace you as well as destroy. They do not leave
your friends in doubt whether you have betrayed them. They do not make
those you love vanish without a trace or put them to pain and indign