CHAPTER XXIX

 

The scene was Hyde Park; a Saturday in June.

      Dressed in green and wearing a sword, Everard Webley was addressing a thousand British Freemen from the back of his white horse, Bucephalus.  With a military precision which would have done credit to the Guards, the Freemen had formed up on the Embankment at Blackfriars, and marched with music and symbolic standards to Charing Cross, up Northhumberland Avenue, through Trafalgar Square and Cambridge Circus to the Tottenham Court Road and thence along the whole length of Oxford Street to the Marble Arch.  At the entrance to the Park they had met an Anti-Vivisection procession and there had been some slight confusion - a mingling of ranks, a musical discord, as the bands collided, of 'The British Grenadiers' and 'My Faith looks up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary', an entangling of banners, 'Protect our Doggies' with 'Britons never shall be slaves', 'Socialism is Tyranny' with 'Doctors or Devils?'  But the admirable discipline of the Freemen had prevented the confusion from becoming serious, and after a short delay the thousand had entered the Park, marched past their leader and finally formed themselves into three sides of a hollow square, with Everard and his staff at the centre of the fourth side.  The trumpets had sounded a fanfare and the thousand had sung the four verses of Everard's rather Kiplingesque 'Song of the Freemen'.  When the singing was done Everard began his speech.

      'British Freemen!' he said, 'comrades!' and at the sound of that strong effortless voice there was a silence even among the spectators who had idly collected to watch the proceedings.  Carrying a power not intrinsically theirs, a power that belonged to the speaker, not to what he spoke, his words fell one by one, thrillingly audible, into the attentive hush they had created.  He began by praising the Freemen's discipline.  'Discipline,' he said, 'voluntarily accepted discipline is the first condition of freedom, the first virtue of Freemen.  Free and disciplined Spartans held the Persian hordes at bay.  Free and disciplined Macedonians conquered half the world.  It is for us free and disciplined Englishmen to deliver our country from the slaves who have enslaved it.  Three hundred fought at Thermopylea against tens of thousands.  The odds we face are not so desperate.  Your battalion is only one of more than sixty, a single thousand among the sixty thousand Freemen of England.  The numbers daily increase.  Twenty, fifty, sometimes a hundred recruits join us every day.  The army grows, the green army of Freemen.

      'The British Freemen are uniformed in green.  Theirs is the livery of Robin Hood and Little John, the livery of outlaws.  For outlaws they are in this stupid democratic world.  Outlaws proud of their outlawry.  The law of the democratic world is quantity.  We outlaws believe in quality.  For the democratic politicians, the voice of the greatest number is the voice of God; their law is the law that pleases the mob.  Outside the pale of mob-made law, we desire the rule of the best, not the most numerous.  Stupider than their liberal grandfathers, the democrats of today would discourage individual enterprise and, by nationalizing industry and land, invest the state with tyrannical powers such as it has never possessed, except perhaps in India in the time of the Moguls.  We outlaws are freemen.  We believe in the value of individual liberty.  We would encourage individual enterprise; for we believe that, co-ordinated and controlled in the interests of society as a whole, individual enterprise produces the best economic and moral results.  The law of the democratic world is human standardization, is the reduction of all humanity to the lowest common measure.  Its religion is the worship of the average man.  We outlaws believe in diversity, in aristocracy, in the natural hierarchy.  We would remove every removable handicap and give every man his chance, in order that the best may rise to the position for which nature has qualified them.  In a word, we believe in justice.  And we revere, not the ordinary, but the extraordinary man.  I could go on almost indefinitely with the list of the points on which we British Freemen are in radical disagreement with the radical governors of what once was free and merry England.  But I have said enough to show that there can be no peace between them and us.  Their white is our black, their political good is our evil, their earthly paradise is our hell.  Voluntary outlaws, we repudiate their rule, we bide our time.  For our time is coming and we do not propose to remain outlaws for ever.  The time is coming when the laws will be of our making and the forest will be the place for those who now hold power.  Two years ago our band was insignificant.  Today it is an army.  An army of outlaws.  Yet a little while, my comrades, and it will be the army of those who make the laws, not of those who break them.  Yes, of those who break them.  For before we can become the makers of good laws, we must be the breakers of bad laws.  We must have the courage of our outlawry.  British Freemen, fellow outlaws, when the time comes, will you have that courage?'

      From the green-coated ranks rose an enormous shout.

      'When I give the word, will you follow?'

      'We will, we will,' the green thousand repeated.

      'Even if laws must be broken?'

      There was another burst of affirmative cheering.  When it died down and as Everard Webley was opening his mouth to continue, a voice shouted, 'Down with Webley!  Down with the rich man's militia!  Down with the Bloody B ...'  But before the voice could enunciate the whole hated parody of their name, half a dozen of the nearest British Freemen had thrown themselves upon its owner.

      Everard Webley rose in his stirrups.  'Keep the ranks,' he called peremptorily.  'How dare you leave the ranks?'

      There was a scurrying of officers to the scene of confusion, an angry shouting of orders.  The over-zealous Freemen slunk back to their places.  Holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose and escorted by two policemen, their enemy marched away.  He had lost his hat.  The dishevelled hair blazed red in the sunshine.  It was Illidge.

      Everard Webley turned to the officer commanding the company whose men had broken their ranks.  'Insubordination,' he began; and his voice was cold and hard, not loud, but dangerously penetrating, 'insubordination is the worst ...'

      Illidge removed his handkerchief from his nose and shouted in a shrill falsetto, 'Oh, you naughty boys!'

      There was a guffaw from the spectators.  Everard ignored the interruption and having concluded his rebuke, went on with his speech.  Commanding and yet persuasive, passionate, but controlled and musical, his voice thrilled out; and in a moment the shattered silence was reconstructed round his words, the dissipated attention was once more focused and concentrated.  There had been a rebellion; he had made another conquest.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      Spandrell waited without impatience.  Illidge’s tardiness gave him the opportunity to drink an extra cocktail or two.  He was at his third and feeling already much better and more cheerful, when the restaurant door swung open and in walked Illidge, very militant and defiant, with an air of truculently parading his blackened eye.

      ‘Drunk and disorderly?’ questioned Spandrell at the sight of the bruise.  ‘Or did you meet an outraged husband?  Or have words with a lady?’

      Illidge sat down and recounted his adventure, boastfully and with embellishments.  He had been, according to his own account, a mixture of Horatius defending the bridge and St Stephen under the shower of stones.

      ‘The ruffians!’ said Spandrell sympathetically.  But his eyes shone with malicious laughter.  The misfortunes of his friends were an unfailing source of amusement to him, and this of Illidge’s was a particularly entertaining disaster.

      ‘But at least I spoilt the best effect in Webley’s disgusting oration,’ Illidge went on in the same self-congratulating tone.

      ‘It might have been slightly more satisfactory if you’d spoilt his face for him.’

      Illidge was stung by the note of mockery in Spandrell’s words.

      ‘Spoiling his face wouldn’t be enough,’ he said with ferocity, scowling as he spoke.  ‘The man ought to be exterminated.  He’s a public danger, he and his gang of bravoes.’  He broke into profanity.

      Spandrell only laughed.  ‘It’s easy to yammer,’ he said.  ‘Why not do something for a change?  A little direct action in Webley’s own style.’

      The other shrugged his shoulders apologetically.  ‘We’re not well enough organized.’

      ‘I shouldn’t have thought it needed much organization to knock a man on the head.  No, the real trouble is that you’re not courageous enough.’

      Illidge blushed.  ‘That’s a lie!’

      ‘Not well enough organized,’ Spandrell went on contemptuously.  ‘At least you’re modern in your excuses.  The great god organization.  Even art and love will soon be bowing down like everything else.  Why are your verses so bad?  Because the poetry industry isn’t well enough organized.  And the impotent lover will excuse himself in the same way and assure the indignant lady that, next time, she’ll find his organization perfect.  No, no, my dear Illidge, it won’t do, you know; it won’t do.’

      ‘You’re being very funny, no doubt,’ said Illidge, still pink with anger.  ‘But you’re talking rot.  You can’t compare poetry and politics.  A political party’s a lot of men who’ve got to be disciplined and held together.  A poet’s one man.’

      ‘But so’s a murderer, isn’t he?’  Spandrell’s tone, his smile were still sarcastic.  Illidge felt the blood running up again into his face like the warmth of a suddenly flaring inward fire.  He hated Spandrell for his power of humiliating him, for making him feel small, a fool and ashamed.  He had come in feeling important and heroic, flushed with satisfaction.  And now, with a few slow sneering words, Spandrell had turned his self-satisfaction to an angry shame.  There was a silence; they ate their soup without speaking.  When his plate was empty, ‘One man,’ said Spandrell meditatively, leaning back in his chair.  ‘With all one man’s responsibility.  A thousand men have no responsibility.  That’s why organization’s such a wonderful comfort.  A member of a political party feels himself as safe as the member of a church.  The party may order civil war, rape, massacre; he does what he’s told cheerfully, because the responsibility isn’t his.  It’s the leader’s.  And the leader is the rare man, like Webley.  The man with courage.’

      ‘Or cowardice, in his case,’ said Illidge.  ‘Webley’s the bourgeois rabbit terrified into ferocity.’

      ‘Is he?’ asked Spandrell raising his eyebrows derisiverly.  ‘Well, you may be right.  But anyhow, he’s rather different from the ordinary rabbit.  The ordinary rabbit isn’t scared into ferocity.  He’s scared into abject inactivity or abject activity in obedience to somebody else’s orders.  Never into activity on his own account, for which he has to take the responsibility.  When it’s a question of murder, for example, you don’t find the ordinary rabbits exactly eager, do you?  They wait to be organized.  The responsibility’s too great for the little individual.  He’s scared.’

      ‘Well, obviously nobody wants to be hanged.’

      ‘He’d be scared even if there wasn’t any hanging.’

      ‘You’re not going to trot out the categorical imperative again, are you?’  It was Illidge’s turn to be sarcastic.

      ‘It trots itself out.  Even in your case.  When it came to the point, you’d never dare do anything about Webley, unless you had an organization to relieve you of all responsibility.  You simply wouldn’t dare,’ he repeated, with a kind of mocking challenge.  He looked at Illidge intently between half-closed eyelids, and through the whole of Illidge’s rather rhetorical speech about the scotching of snakes, the shooting of tigers, the squashing of bugs, he studied his victim’s flushed and angry face.  How comic the man was when he tried to be heroic!  Illidge stormed on, uncomfortably conscious that his phrases were too big and sounded hollow.  But emphasis and still more emphasis, as the smile grew more contemptuous, seemed to be the only possible retort to Spandrell’s maddeningly quiet derision – more and still more, however false the rhetoric might sound.  Like a man who stops shouting because he is afraid his voice may break, he was suddenly silent.  Spandrell slowly nodded.

      ‘All right,’ he said mysteriously.  ‘All right.’

 

*     *     *     *

 

‘It’s absurd,’ Elinor kept assuring herself.  ‘It’s childish.  Childish and absurd.’

      It was an irrelevance.  Everard was no different because he had sat on a white horse, because he had commanded and been acclaimed by a cheering crowd.  He was no better because she had seen him at the head of one of his battalions.  It was absurd, it was childish to have been so moved.  But moved she had been; the fact remained.  What an excitement when he had appeared, riding, at the head of his men!  A quickening of the heart and a swelling.  And what an anxiety in the seconds of silence before he began to speak!  A real terror.  He might stammer and hesitate; he might say something stupid or vulgar; he might be long-winded and a bore; he might be a mountebank.  And then, when the voice spoke, unstrained, but vibrant and penetrating, when the speech began to unroll itself in words that were passionate and stiring, but never theatrical, in phrases rich, but brief and incisive – then what an exultation, what pride!  But when the man made his interruption, she had felt, together with a passion of indignation against the interrupter, a renewal of her anxiety, her terror lest he might fail, might be publicly humiliated and put to shame.  But he had sat unmoved, he had uttered his stern rebuke, he had made a pregnant and breathless silence and then, at last, continued his speech, as though nothing had happened.  Elinor’s anxiety had given place to an extraordinary happiness.  The speech came to an end; there was a burst of cheering and Elinor had felt enormously proud and elated and at the same time embarrassed, as though the cheering had been in part directed towards herself; and she had laughed aloud, she did not know why, and the blood had rushed up into her cheeks and she had turned away in confusion, not daring to look at him; and then, for no reason, she had begun to cry.

      Absurd and childish, she now assured herself.  But there, the absurd and childish thing had happened; there was no undoing it.

 

*     *     *     *

     

From Philip Quarles’s Notebook

 

      In the Sunday Pictorial, a snapshot of Everard Webley with his mouth open – a black hole in the middle of a straining face – bawling.  ‘Mr E.W., the founder and chief of the B.B.F., addressed a battalion of British Freemen in Hyde Park on Saturday.’  And that was all that remained of the event, the gargoylish symbol of demagogy.  A mouth opened to bray.  What a horror!

      And yet the event was genuinely impressive.  A E’s bawling sounded quite nobly, at the time.  And he looked monumental on his white horse.  Selecting a separate instant out of what had been a continuity, the camera turned him into a cautionary scarecrow.  Unfair?  Or was the camera’s vision the true one and mine the false?  For after all, the impressive continuity must have been made up of such appalling instants as the camera recorded.  Can the whole be something quite different from its parts?  In the physical world, yes.  Taken as a whole, a body and brain are radically different from their component electrons.  But what about the moral world?  Can a collection of low values make up a single high value?  Everard’s photo poses a genuine problem.  Millions of monstrous instants making up a splendid half-hour.

      Not that I was without my doubts of the splendidness at the time.  E. talked a lot about Thermopylae and the Spartans.  But my resistance was even more heroic.  Leonidas had three hundred companions.  I defended my spiritual Thermopylae single-handed against E. and his Freemen. They impressed me; but I resisted.  The drill, to begin with, was superb.  I watched, enchanted.  As usual.  How does one explain the fascination of the military spectacle?  Explain it away, by preference.  I wondered all the time I was watching.

      A squad is merely ten men and emotionally neutral.  The heart only begins to beat at the sight of a company.  The evolutions of a battalion are intoxicating.  And a brigade is already an army with banners - which is the equivalent, as we know from the Song of Songs, of being in love.  The thrill is proportional to the numbers.  Given the fact that one is only two yards high, two feet wide and solitary, a cathedral is necessarily more impressive than a cottage and a mile of marching men is grander than a dozen loafers at a street corner.  But that’s not all.  A regiment’s more impressive than a crowd.  The army with banners is equivalent to love only when it’s perfectly drilled.  Stones in the form of a building are finer than stones in a heap.  Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd.  An army’s beautiful.  But that’s not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic.  The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power.  Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.  So I thought, as I admired the evolutions of Everard’s Freemen.  And by taking the admiration to bits, I preserved myself from being overwhelmed by it.  Divide and rule.  I did the same with the music and afterwards with Everard’s speech.

      What a great stage manager was lost in Everard!  Nothing could have been more impressive than (breaking the studiously prolonged silence) that fanfare of trumpets and then, solemnly, the massive harmonies of a thousand voices singing ‘The Song of the Freemen’.  The trumpets were prodigious – like the overture to the Last Judgement.  (Why should upper partials be so soul-shaking?)  And when the trumpet overture was done, the thousand voices burst out with that almost supernatural sound which choral singing always has.  Enormous, like the voice of Jehovah.  Reinhardt himself couldn’t have done the trick more effectually.  I felt as though there were a hole where my diaphragm should be; a kind of anxious tingling ran over my skin, the tears were very nearly at the surface of my eyes.  I did the Leonidas turn again and reflected how bad the music was, what ridiculous rant the words.

      The Last Trump, the voice of God – and then it was Everard’s turn to speak.  And one wasn’t let down.  How well he did it!  His voice took you in the solar plexus, like those upper partials on the trumpets.  Moving and convincing, even though you knew that what he said was vague and more or less meaningless.  I analysed the tricks.  They were the usual ones.  The most effective was the employment of inspiring words with two or more meanings.  ‘Liberty’, for example.  The liberty in the title and programme of the British Freemen is the liberty to buy and sell and own property with a minimum of government interference.  (A pretty large minimum, parenthetically; but let that pass.)  Everard bawls out the word in his solar-plexus-punching voice: ‘we are fighting for liberty; we are going to free the country,’ etcetera.  The hearer immediately visualizes himself sitting in shirt-sleeves with a bottle and a complaisant wench and no laws, no code of good manners, no wife, no policeman, no parson to forbid.  Liberty!  Naturally it arouses his enthusiasm.  It’s only when the British Freemen come to power that he’ll realize that the word was really used in an entirely different sense.  Divide and conquer.  I conquered.  P.S. – Or rather one part of me conquered.  I’ve got into the habit of associating myself with that part and applauding when it triumphs.  But, after all, is it the best part?  In these particular circumstances, perhaps yes.  It’s probably better to be dispassionately analytical than to be overwhelmed by Everard’s stage-managing and eloquence into becoming a British Freeman.  But in other circumstances?  Rampion’s probably right.  But having made a habit of dividing and conquering in the name of the intellect, it’s hard to stop.  And perhaps it isn’t entirely a matter of second nature; perhaps first nature comes in too.  It’s easy to believe one ought to change one’s mode of living.  The difficulty is to act on the belief.  This settlement in the country, for example; this being rustic and paternal and a good neighbour; this living vegetably and intuitively – is it really going to be possible?  I imagine it; but in fact, in fact …?  Meanwhile, it might be rather interesting to concoct a character on these lines.  A man who has always taken pains to encourage his own intellectualist tendencies at the expense of all the others.  He avoids personal relationships as much as he can, he observes without participatinga, doesn’t like to give himself away, is always a spectator rather than an actor.  Again, he has always been careful not to distinguish one day, one place from another; not to review the past and anticipate the future at the New Year, not to celebrate Christmas or birthdays, not to revisit the scenes of his childhood, not to make pilgrimages to the birthplaces of great men, battlefields, ruins and the like.  By this suppression of emotional relationships and natural piety he seems to himself to be achieving freedom – freedom from sentimentality, from the irrational, from passion, from impulse and emotionalism.  But in reality, as he gradually discovers, he has only narrowed and desiccated his life; and what’s more, has cramped his intellect by the very process he thought would emancipate it.  His reason’s free, but only to deal with a small fraction of experience.  He realizes his psychological defects, and desires, in theory, to change.  But it’s difficult to break life-long habits; and perhaps the habits are only the expression of an inborn indifference and coldness, which it might be almost impossible to overcome.  And for him at any rate, the merely intellectual life is easier; it’s the line of least resistance, because it’s the line that avoids other human beings.  Among them his wife.  For he’d have a wife and there would be the elements of drama in the relations between the woman, living mainly with her emotions and intuitions, and the man whose existence is mainly on the abstracted intellectual plane.  He loves her in his way and she loves him in hers.  Which means that he’s contented and she’s dissatisfied; for love in his way entails the minimum of those warm, confiding human relationships which constitute the essence of loving in her way  She complains; he would like to give more, but finds it hard to change himself.  She even threatens to leave him for a more human lover; but she is too much in love with him to put the threat into effect.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      That Sunday afternoon Elinor and Everard Webley drove down into the country.

      ‘Forty-three miles in an hour and seven minutes,’ said Everard, looking at his watch as he stepped out of the car.  ‘Not bad considering that includes getting out of London and being held up by that filthy charabanc in Guildford.  Not at all bad.’

      ‘And what’s more,’ said Elinor, ‘we’re still alive.  If you knew the number of times I just shut my eyes and only expected to open them again on the Day of Judgement …’

      He laughed, rather glad that she should have been so frightened by the furiousness of his driving.  Her terrors gave him a pleasing sense of power and superiority.  He took her arm protectively and they walked away down the green path into the wood.  Everard drew a deep breath.

      ‘This is better than making political speeches,’ he said, pressing her arm.

      ‘Still,’ said Elinor, ‘it must be rather wonderful to sit on a horse and make a thousand people do whatever you want.’

      Everard laughed.  ‘Unfortunately there’s a bit more in politics than that.’  He glanced at her.  ‘You enjoyed the meeting?’

      ‘I was thrilled.’  She saw him again on his white horse heard his strong vibrating voice, remembered her exultation and those sudden tears.  Magnificent, she said to herself, magnificent!  But there was no recapturing the exultation.  His hand was on her arm, his huge presence loomed almost threateningly over her.  ‘Is he going to kiss me?’ she nervously wondered.  She tried to drive out the  questioning dread and fill its place with yesterday’s exultation.  Magnificent!  But the dread would not be excorcized.  ‘I thought your speech was splendid,’ she said aloud and wondered parenthetically as she spoke what it had been about.  She remembered the sound and timbre of the words, but not their significance.  Hopeless!  ‘Oh, what lovely honeysuckle!’

      Everard reached up, enormous, and picked a couple of blossoms.  ‘Such beauty, such loveliness!’  He quoted Keats, fumbed in his memory for a line in the Midsummer Night’s Dream.  He wondered lyrically why one lived in towns, why one wasted one’s time in the pursuit of money and power, when there was all this beauty waiting to be loved.

      Elinor listened rather uncomfortably.  He seemed to turn it on, this love of beauty, like an electric light – turn out the love of power, turn out efficiency and political preoccupations and turn on the love of beauty.  But why shouldn’t he, after all?  There was nothing wrong in liking beautiful things.  Nothing, except that in some obscure indescribable way Everard’s love of beauty wasn’t quite right.  Too deliberate, was it?  Too occasional?  Too much for holidays only?  Too conventional, too heavy, too humourlessly reverent?  She preferred him as a lover of power.  As a power-lover he was somehow of better quality than as a beauty-lover.  A poor beauty-lover, perhaps, because he was such a good power-lover.  By compensation.  Everything has to be paid for.

      They walked on.  In an open glade between the trees the foxgloves were coming into flower.

      ‘Like torches burning upwards from the bottom,’ said Everard poetically.

      Elinor halted in front of one tall plant whose first flower-bells were on a level with her eyes.  The red flesh of the petals was cool and resilient between her fingers.  She peeped into the open bell-mouth. 

      ‘Think of the discomfort of having freckles in one’s throat,’ she said.  ‘Not to mention little beetles.’

      They moved away in silence through the trees.  It was Everard who first spoke.

      ‘Will you ever love me?’ he asked suddenly.

      ‘You know how fond I am of you, Everard.’  Her heart sank; the moment had come, he would want to kiss her. But he made no gesture, only laughed, rather mournfully.

      ‘Very fond of me,’ he repeated.  ‘Ah, if only you could be a little less reasonable, a little more insane!  If only you knew what loving was!’

      ‘Isn’t it a good thing somebody should be sane?’ said Elinor.  ‘Sane beforehand, I mean.  For everybody can be sane afterwards.  Much too sane, when the fit’s over and the lovers begin to wonder whether, after all, the world was well lost.  Think, Everard, think first.  Do you want to lose the world?’

      ‘I shouldn’t lose it,’ Everard answered, and his voice had that strange thrilling vibration which she seemed to hear, not with her ears, but with her body, in the very midriff.  ‘They couldn’t take it away from me.  Times have changed since Parnell’s day.  Besides I’m not Parnell.  Let them try to take it away!’  He laughed.  ‘Love and the world – I’m going to have both, Elinor.  Both.’  He smiled down at her, the power-lover triumphant.

      ‘You’re asking too much,’ she answered laughing, ‘you’re greedy.  The exultation tingled again through her, was like the breath-taking warmth of hot wine.

      He bent down and kissed her.  Elinor did not shrink.

      Another car had pulled up at the roadside, another couple strolled along the green path into the wood.  Through the glaring pink and white of her cosmetics the woman’s face was old; the weary flesh had sagged out of its once charming shape.

      ‘Oh, isn’t it lovely!’ she kept exclaiming as she walked along, carrying her heavy body rather unsteadily on very high-heeled shoes over the uneven ground.  ‘Isn’t it lovely?’

      Spandrell – for it was he – did not answer.

      ‘Pick me some of that honeysuckle there!’ she begged.

      He pulled down a flowered spray with the crook of his stick.  Through the reek of chemical perfumery and not very clean underlinen the scent of the flowers came cool and delicious to his nostrils.

      ‘Don’t they smell simply divine!’ she exclaimed, rapturously sniffing.  ‘Too divine!’

      The corner’s of Spandrell’s mouth twitched into a smile.  It amused him to hear the cast-off locutions of duchesses in the mouth of this ageing prostitute.  He looked at her.  Poor Connie!  She was a skeleton at the feast – more gruesomely deathly for being covered with so much loose and sagging flesh.  Really gruesome. There was no other word.  Here, in the sun, she was like a piece of stage scenery seen by daylight and close at hand.  That was why he had gone to the expense of hiring the Daimler and taking her out – just because the poor superannuated punk was so gruesome.  He nodded.  ‘Quite nice,’ he said.  ‘But I prefer your scent.’

      They walked on.  A little uncertain already of the distinction between a second and a minor third, a cuckoo was calling.  In the slanting corridors of sunlight tunnelled through the green and purple of the forest shadows the little flies jerkily danced and zigzagged.  There was no wind, the leaves hung down heavy with greenness.  The trees were as though gorged with sap and sunshine.

      ‘Lovely, lovely,’ was Connie’s refrain.  The place, the day reminded her, she said, of her childhood in the country.  She sighed.

      ‘And you wish you’d been a good girl,’ said Spandrell sarcastically.  ‘”The roses round the door make me love mother more.”  I know, I know.’  He was silent for a moment.  ‘What I hate about trees in the summer,’ he went on, ‘is their beastly fat complacency.  Bulging – that’s what they are; like bloated great profiteers.  Bulging with insolence, passive insolence.’

      ‘Oh, the foxgloves!’ cried Connie, who hadn’t even been listening.  She ran towards them, grotesquely unsteady on her high heels.  Spandrell followed her.

      ‘Pleasingly phallic,’ he said, fingering one of the spikes of unopened buds.  And he went on to develop the conceit, profusely.

      ‘Oh, be quiet, be quiet,’ cried Connie.  ‘How can you say such things?’  She was outraged, wounded.  ‘How can you – here?’

      ‘In God’s country?’ he mocked.  ‘How can I?’  And raising his stick he suddenly began to lay about him right and left, slash, slash, breaking one of the tall proud plants at every stroke.  The ground was strewn with murdered flowers.

      ‘Stop, stop!’  She caught at his arm.  Silently laughing, Spandrell wrenched himself away from her and went on beating down the plants.  ‘Stop!  Please!  Oh, don’t, don’t.’  She made another dash at him.  Still laughing, still laying about him with his stick, Spandrell dodged away from her.

      ‘Down with them,’ he shouted, ‘down with them.’  Flower after flower fell under his strokes.  ‘There!’ he said at last, breathless with laughter and running and slashing.  ‘There!’  Connie was in tears.

      ‘How could you?’ she said.  ‘How could you do it?’

      He laughed again, silently, throwing back his head.  ‘Serve them right,’ he said.  ‘Do you think I’m going to sit still and let myself be insulted?  The insolence of the brutes!  Ah, there’s another!’  He stepped through the glade to where one last tall foxglove stood as though hiding among the hazel saplings.  One stroke was enough.  The broken plant fell almost noiselessly.

      ‘Damn their insolence!  It serves them right.  Let’s come back to the car.’