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The house and garage of Percy Lamport was hemmed in by high walls and laurel bushes. In the most 'desirable' part of Hampstead, above which were once the wastes of the Heath, an unusual degree of privacy had been contrived by the original 'homemaker'. What was at present to be found at the core of this seclusion, within the massive Edwardian walls of the many-roomed palatial site? An individual, but not exactly the kind of human being around whom high walls must be raised.

Percy Lamport was a heavy doe-like creature. He had dwelt for a long time in Welwyn, the original 'garden-city': one of a group of families who had collectively evolved a strongly-marked mannerism, suggestive of the coy shyness of a retiring herbivore. If one can imagine a phenomenally smart, forever quietly-amused yak, standing quite still, slyly self-conscious, its big knowing eye shining with quiet, self-satisfied humour, standing almost as if it expected to be stroked or hugged, for being so entirely understanding an animal, if you can summon to stand there in your fancy such a curious beast, always sideways, always one-eyed, not looking at you, but at some mesmerically absurd thought which bemused and transfixed it, then you would, by the same token, be in the presence of Percy Lamport Esq.

In a street in Welwyn, to this day, a herd of these animals may be encountered: a whole tribe of people, neighbours and friends, who stand quietly like obedient ponies, or like Yaks on a secluded hillside, or in the cages of a zoo, presenting you with a profile in which is a big, amused, contemplative eye. One of these Welwynites was known to René, a colleague, a lecturer in physics. This strange professor would stand there, before his academic audience, as if thunderstruck with quiet fun, in front of a chart of the astral universe, making the entire galaxies and starry clusters seem delightfully ridiculous. René had watched him with uneasiness, almost with alarm, and with his brother-in-law Percy Lamport, most true to type and capable of remaining in profile with the 'Welwyn eye' as René called it for minutes at a time, he was never quite at his ease.

This great retiring mansion situated near the crest of Hampstead Hill, far from the built-over bog-lands of the Thames-side, had been selected in the 'twenties' by Percy Lamport and his wife Mary, to meet the needs of a growing family, and in view of his mounting prosperity. As an executive in a big Insurance business, now in his early fifties, Percy was a minor magnate. Ultra-liberal Welwyn-origins accounted for his reading-matter: the News Chronicle and The New Statesman and Nation and other left-wing periodicals. And as a matter-of-fact, the richer he became, the more to the left these newspapers and weeklies moved. An enlightened interest in the Fine Arts was also, with him, of radical origins. He had become the possessor of an original Matisse, two or three Vlaminks, a half-dozen Marie Laurençins, the painter most exactly corresponding to his taste. Shaw, G. D. H. Cole, Priestley, Katherine Mansfield, Wystan Auden, The Road to Wigan Pier, Father Brown, was the sort of literature to be found in his study. So his cultural habits of thought were orthodoxly-liberal and unusually developed for a City man.

Such was René Harding's brother-in-law: it was Tuesday, May the 23rd, and René and his wife accordingly were to go to dinner in Hampstead; with 'Big Business' as René called him.

*****

At 7.30 in the evening, as René stood beside the taxi, waiting for his change, his eye rested upon the superbly spacious house, so beautifully unlike the House that Jack Built. Nothing absurd about this house. How excellently abstract wealth was after all: it got rid of the idiosyncratic, the absurd! Lobb, the chauffeur, stood beside the Cadillac: so exactly uniformed, his face so excellently devoid of expression, he was not absurd. (His name was, but not the chauffeur.) And as to the Cadillac, no Cadillac can possibly be absurd. A few moments later René and Hester passed the waiting car and began to ascend the six steps to the pair of ponderous front doors. One of these opened, and 'Rod' (Rodriques), most hysterical of spaniels, rushed out, seething with the wildest joy. He was immediately followed by Pauline—his owner, speaking legally, his goddess in canine theology. Pauline was twenty, and though lacking the fanatical abandon of her dog, possessed the impulsive vitality of her years. On seeing René, with an ardour worthy of Rod, she sprang at him, seized his beard, and flung her arms convulsively around his neck.

'My bear-uncle! My old bear-uncle, where have you been? What have you been doing with yourself? Oh, make your bear-noise, René darling!' And René, lifting his bearded face in the air, gave his ho-ho-ho laugh: and she echoed delightedly, in a higher register, his famous ho-ho-ho.

Pauline turned to Hester, and another girl was now descending the steps. They were going to the Ballet at Covent Garden, Hester was told: and then Pauline stood just below René, with her face in profile, presenting him, for a few moments, a heredity 'Welwyn eye'. Then she looked up, and enquired, 'When am I coming to hear you lecture? They say you are a wonderful lecturer. May I come next week?'

René shook his head.

'Afraid not,' he told her. 'I shan't be there.'

'You always put me off. You despise my I.Q., I suppose, that's it.'

As she got into the car she was wagging her finger at him. From the doorway René blew her a bearded kiss. With a deafening ovation in reverse from Rod, the Cadillac moved away.

The quietness and gloom of the dark hall, after the noisy scene without, almost startled René and he stopped. At the far end a door was open, and through it Percy Lamport appeared. Before the latter had passed into the hall, René had put himself into rapid motion, at the same time crying 'Ah, Percy!' His advance across the hall was at so smart a pace that it caused small waves to dart and jump around the foot of his torso—where the jacket had no support the cloth was prone to frisk. His bearded head was carried heroically aloft, as the superb figure-head cut through the gloom towards his smiling host.

Le roi René was not a man to be unconscious of style, in himself or others. He delighted to swim through space with the air of a Louis the Eleventh, bearing himself as a King of France hurrying to meet the Emperor Maximilian. He realized that his gait and gesture were too superb for his status or for the occasion. But this amused him. Sometimes he would deliberately act the king, or the statesman, about whom he was just then reading. De Richelieu he was very fond of impersonating.

These tricks and fancies, however, were incidental, and they never caused him to forget a mission or an opportunity. The present, he recognized, belonged to the latter class. He understood quite well with what object Mary had arranged this visit.

As ever, like an ill-conceived figure on the reverse side of a splendidly designed coin, was the unfortunate Hester. It would be a pity to exaggerate this, for it was nothing more than an irritable consciousness at times presenting itself, as of something amiss, but never strong enough to spoil the sensation experienced in his more flamboyant moments. But there was after all Hester to be counted in, as part of any picture in which le roi René was starring.

Just in a flash, as he swept across the shadowy hall, he saw the figure at his heels: the hips were placed too low and gave her gait a sexish drag, her neck was too long, which acted as a sort of pole to carry Big Eyes aloft.

Mary's face, Mary's gait did not advertise . . . oh, the horror of our lot. But he was goatish, he knew that: and all Hester was—was the Sandwich woman of his Achilles' heel: with some women a man must feel like a dog with a chicken tied around his neck. But he switched off the tell-tale image, as one switches off the radio when it gets too bad, and thrust his head a fraction higher and quickened his quick dancing step.

But now, driving the smiling Percy back, he entered the drawing-room like a conqueror. When he looked in Mary's face the forecast was favourable, there were no danger signals in her eyes, they just looked at him serenely. As to Percy, he was standing sideways, an eye in the side of his face, a darkly mischievous, mesmerized amusement carrying the gaze outwards to the horizon. Suddenly awakening out of his trance he proposed a drink, and all of them soon stood holding their sherry glasses, containing a wine as near to a tasteless abstraction as the best Rhine wine. Among other things, Percy was a member of the Food and Wine Society. Sherry is the last thing the Englishman learns how to buy.

René disapproved of his host's orthodoxy in the matter of painting, of his tame acceptance of fashionable pressure, and the values imposed. He regarded these values as an offence, when sponsored by a stupid man. Percy was a prize idiot, he had no right to these views—he should be collecting Academic monstrosities. So, refusing to take Percy's avantgardisme seriously, he nevertheless always enquired with great politeness about any new purchase, which was usually to be found on the walls.

'A new one I think.'

He had observed something which it seemed to him he had not seen before: the figure of a hanging man in some enclosed place, with a number of big-headed, round-faced marionettes, all expressing blood-lust and derision. One pulled at the rope, one lighted an immodestly-carved pipe of great size. A dog scratched itself, with a flea nearly as large as the dog squatting on its rump. He examined it an inch from the glass, très amateur.

'Ecole de Paris?' he enquired.

'No,' Percy told him. 'This is a Belgian etcher of the nineteenth century. His name is Ensor. I am not quite sure how much I like him.'

'No, I suppose it is not easy to make up one's mind straight away.'

'You have to live with a picture before you can say whether you really like it.'

'I can see how that might be.' René nodded his head sagely.

René stood gazing at the tongue protruding from the mouth of the victim. Meanwhile, the happy possessor of the picture stood in profile, the one eye amusedly and with infinite knowingness simmering away all to itself. As René turned to speak to him he had the mental comment, as his eye fixed itself upon the profile, 'Un Ensor, sapristi!'

'I must say I rather take to this,' he declared aloud.

'You like it? I am glad of that. I find I like it more and more.'

'It does grow on one,' the other agreed. René moved down the room to where he thought he saw a new Marie Laurençin. Laurençin heads all resemble one another to such a degree that anyone not an expert may well find it difficult to say which is which.

'I have not seen this one, have I, Percy?'

'"Clothilde"? . . . Yes, you have often seen the "Clothilde". It used to hang in the dining-room not far from the door. I mean on the same side as the door. I think it is wonderful.'

'Of course I remember it. How stupid of me.'

'It is not stupid,' Percy protested. 'With her pictures even I sometimes forget which is which.'

'How extraordinary!' exclaimed René. 'I should have thought . . .'

'I am not often at a loss,' Percy smiled.

René had noticed that they were now alone in the room. Mary, he had assumed, had abstracted Hester purposively. Percy looked up and said almost with violence, 'I want to tell you how greatly I admire your action in resigning your position at the University. It is one of the finest things I have ever heard of. I congratulate you.'

This took René's breath away. For a moment he said nothing and stared a little stupidly at his brother-in-law. Suddenly he recovered, and almost shouted, 'My dear chap, you don't know how those words have cheered me. I knew you would understand. But the wholehearted nature of your support, your uncompromising endorsement of what I have done, well, it's like a breath of fresh air. Thank you, Percy.'

'It is I who have to thank you for setting all of us an example of fearless courage, of facing up to obscurantism and hypocrisy, the conservative mind which crushes all the life out of our institutions. To give up everything rather than be privy . . . to the intellectual fraud perpetrated in the name of education. My dear chap, it is inexpressibly fine, it is to have done a great public service. I wish I had half your guts!'

René listened in growing amazement. Did Percy mean that if he had the guts he would denounce the villanies of the great Insurance Companies?

Did he regard himself as a village Hampden manqué? Apparently his amazing brother-in-law derived pleasure from imagining a day when he would return as usual from his office, kiss his wife, and announce that they at once must pack: that he was saying good-bye to Insurance, that he was selling his houses, cars, and so on, dismissing the servants and that in future they would dwell in a three-room flat in Pimlico or Shepherd's Bush. René had often speculated as to what effect a life-long diet of revolutionary journalism might have upon a highly successful executive. It now was obvious that Marxism was simply transmuted into romance, into British Dare-to-be-a-Danielism. As to whether Percy understood, or indeed took the faintest interest in what precisely were the principles behind his brother-in-law's unworldly action, René could only guess. He supposed that in a woolly way the good Percy labelled as 'idealism' any defiance of an established order, or institutions: 'idealism' being the word traditionally favoured by the revolutionary journalist for the impulse in the moral man to devote himself to the welfare of men-in-general. Clearly Percy's reaction would be just to affix the label 'idealism', without going further into the matter. He never went behind words or underneath clichés or slogans. Since they had never had any really serious talk, his brother-in-law could not be otherwise than quite ignorant of what René's beliefs were.

'Percy,' he said, with emotion in his voice, 'what you have been saying has had a tremendously tonic effect. I daresay you can imagine the view of the world is simply that I am a fool. I am not made of wood and such support as yours is a wonderful stimulus.'

Percy looked down at the floor steadily for about a minute, hearing himself praised; just as he would had he scored a century for his old school and was being congratulated by the Captain of the Eleven or the Headmaster: 'Splendid, Lamport. A faultless innings!' Then he looked up, smiling a little bashfully. 'Will you have another glass of sherry, René? It is some stuff Simon recommended.'

And they moved back to the table where the sherry and glasses had been placed.

Mary appeared followed by Hester, and she saw at once, by the faces of the two men, that both were agreeably excited; obviously their relations had been changed and cemented, by some emotional impact occurring for the first time. Percy wore an expression with which she was familiar. He had looked like that when he had appeared for the first time in coast-guard uniform, in the War to End War: or when, for instance, he had broken with the firm of family solicitors on learning that they had behaved with typical professional caddishness and disregard for the laws of fair-play in a case which he had entrusted to them. She guessed that her husband must have gone quixotic in emulation of her brother, and that he had just shown his mettle in setting about some windmill, to prove that he was just as mad as René. Her eyes rested with a gentle toleration on the pair of them. Perhaps, after all, they were right and she was wrong. But she found it very difficult to take either of them seriously.

At dinner a new consignment of champagne was tried out, to the popping of corks and raising of glasses (du champagne! just as if René had performed a remarkable feat forsooth). After a glass or two René began ho-ho-hoing. The occasion became almost festive, and Mary frowned a little as she smiled, feeling among other things that it was bad policy for her to appear in too carefree a rôle. Would Percy understand him? He was very easy to misunderstand! And Percy would expect him to behave with a proper gravity, his fellow-Quichote in keeping with his recent heroism. So Mary remained a little severe throughout.

When, however, Percy observed, 'What do you think, René, about the Russian Pact? Are we going to have an Alliance with Russia against Hitler, or not?', the face of the ex-professor subtly altered: it did not become graver, but rather a little soberer and immediately wary.

'No,' he said cautiously. 'No, there will of course be no pact between England and Russia against Germany.'

Percy looked almost startled at the aplomb of this assertion.

'You say of course there will be no pact. The Times seems to think there may be.' Percy looked up through the screen of his eyebrows, crumbling the bread at the side of his plate.

'That, I believe, is very unduly sanguine. All history points the other way. But it is quite usual for The Times to ignore history.'

Percy smiled. 'Sometimes, certainly.'

'There is much affinity between the Russians and Germans. The Russians naturally will think that it would give us great pleasure to see the Russian and German dictatorships destroying one another.'

'But may they not,' Percy protested, 'desire to see Hitler destroyed?'

René shook his head. 'That is too simple,' he said. 'Russia would not help Hitler, with arms. But might agree to a limited pact with her. Why not? Moscow, after all, would relish the sight of Germany exhausting itself in defeating England or vice versa. One of the great mistakes the English make is to believe themselves lovable.'

Percy laughed. 'There is some truth in that.'

'Russia will never go to war if it can possibly avoid it, though it is said to be much stronger than is generally supposed. It will always prefer not to commit itself deeply. . . . For the rest, there are two things always to bear in mind. First, the Russian people are traditionally very averse to war. Unlike the Germans. Unlike us. Secondly, the Russian ruling class have always got on well with the Germans, and have made use of them whenever possible. The Armies have still been friendly when the politicians were bickering.'

There was a pause, Percy continued to eat in silence. Mary and Hester smiled at one another, as if to say, 'Men are very clever! It is a debate where our merely feminine views would be de trop.'

The host wiped his mouth and pushed his chair back. 'Your two cardinal points,' he began, 'may or may not be of the decisive character that you attribute to them. I am not competent to judge. What I do know is that I should be indeed sorry should the pact not materialize.'

'I too.' René vigorously nodded his head.

'What is more,' Percy continued, 'the situation would then be of the utmost gravity.'

'I agree, it could hardly be graver. For ten years now we have carefully progressed, as if that were our aim, into this terrible situation. It seems to me, in all seriousness, that there has been a great deal of deliberation in getting ourselves tied up in a worse and worse position from which nothing can disengage us.'

Percy stared at him. 'Do I understand you to say that it was on purpose that we find ourselves in this highly dangerous situation?'

'After years of the closest observation and exhaustive research,' René told his brother-in-law, 'I find it impossible to come to any other conclusion.'

At this unexpected dénouement, of what had succeeded his initial enquiry regarding the proposed Russian pact, Percy's first reaction was one of bewilderment. This was expressed in his face with a most graphic explicitness. Next, it could with a comic distinctness be observed transforming itself into something else. The bewilderment hardened into suspicion: Percy could be seen to cast a covert glance at the bearded oracle! Mary noted the arrival of second-thoughts with anxiety. For absurd as the phase of Percy and René's relationship appeared to her, in which the quixotic was in the ascendant, yet Mary would have far preferred that to one in which her husband came to look upon René as a lunatic. Nor was René unaware that he had gone too far. Formerly he had never moved on to an enlightened plane in conversing with Mary's husband, nor with Mary either, except for one lapse, which had not developed. He asked himself how he had come to be led into this, and why he had not contented himself with some conventional explanation. 'It was the prophet coming out,' he told himself, with an internal grimace.

René made no further move, as though to allow his oracular statement to take effect (though he sincerely hoped that it might not); meanwhile he gave himself up to the delights of a Coupe Marocaine, wondering what elixir it was which Percy's Greek cook had introduced into this exotic entremet. Mary and Hester, who both had memories of Pangbourne, were outside this political debate, discussing mutual friends. 'Old Mrs. Proctor,' Mary said, 'had been born in India, and told me she was a Buddhist, and was convinced that in her next incarnation she would be a Siamese cat.'—'I like old Mrs. Proctor,' Hester mused.—'I did too. Her choice of a Siamese cat accurately reflected her nature. She was a cat, but a Siamese cat!' And laughed.

But Percy was suffering another transformation. His face had cleared up. He was obviously once more in the clutches of some heroic emotion, it seemed to Mary. And at this moment he broke the silence between the two men, which must have lasted several minutes.

'What you said was a hard saying,' Percy told his brother-in-law. 'Just for a moment it was too much even for me.'

Greatly relieved at his tone, René replied ambiguously, 'The world is a hard place.' He was resolved not to permit himself any further departures from the beaten track.

'Indeed it is!' Percy answered heartily. 'But do you really believe that the Tories would be such ruthless monsters as to arrange a second world-war . . . yes, even connive at the successful emergence, or in effect create such a bloodthirsty little gangster as Herr Hitler, such a scourge of God, to advance their class interests by a shambles.'

René almost laughed outright. His brother-in-law was incapable of imagining any turpitude other than a Tory-capital one. It was a masterpiece of doctrinaire delusion.

'The macchiavellian Tory is capable of anything,' René asserted with suitable solemnity, having decided to convert it into a Party matter.

'You think he would go that far?' Percy leant forward. 'Do you think he would pull down the world about his head, if necessary, in order to have his stupid way?'

'Don't you? Consider the deeds of his secret service! He deals in political murder just as much as the Hitlerites or Italian fascists.'

'I still recoil,' Percy protested, 'at the picture of civilized men, however corrupt, plotting the destruction of whole populations, and even sacrificing perhaps half of their own. I consider Mr. Churchill a very bad man, but scarcely a Borgia.'

René stroked his beard; he was thinking of the Borgias.

'All Tories are potential Borgias,' René laid it down (for if he was so stupid as he had revealed himself, even so childish a statement as this would go down all right!). 'I say it quite seriously,' he added—for he believed he saw a shade of suspicion darkening his brother-in-law's face, and must plug it in pretty stiff. 'The ruling class of a country, the traditional ruling class, is completely ruthless. Human emotions are luxuries which those desiring power must discard entirely.'

'You speak like Machiavelli,' Percy smiled.

'But the modern politician behaves like Machiavelli. This is brought home to the historian, though he is very careful never to betray the guilty secrets he has learned. It is more than his place is worth. As the servant of the ruling class, he cannot but become privy in the course of his researches to the dark secrets of his masters.'

'But, René,' Mary interposed. 'Was Lord Macaulay, for instance, in possession of these criminal secrets?'

'Of course he was,' her brother told her, smiling. 'But he wanted to be a . . .'

'A LORD!' Percy almost roared delightedly.

'Exactly!' René smiled.

'I think you are a pair of dreadful cynics!' Mary laughed, all the jolliness of the dinner having returned.

'Well, I do not propose to reveal any of the dark secrets I have myself come across. Let me take an incident which is described in every history of the United States. I refer to the sinking in Havana Harbour of the battleship Maine. At the time the Americans were accused of doing this. The motive would be obvious: namely, so to inflame American opinion that war with Spain would be inevitable. Well now, when it was said that the Americans were responsible for the sinking of this ship, with enormous loss of life, the American Government was clearly visé. But the President was determined to have no war if he could possibly help it. So would it be the War-party of which Theodore Roosevelt was a prominent member? Would they murder hundreds of their countrymen, gallant seamen, in order to precipitate a war? The answer is, to my mind, that they would. Indeed, they would blow up half the world to have their way. And this goes for all politicians in all places. Guests are no longer poisoned by their hosts, as was the case in the Italy of the Borgias. That is too crude. Hypocrisy has, in our society, put a thick patina over everything: there are a number of forms of violence which must not be indulged in. But whereas in the Italy of the Borgias massacre was confined to quite modest numbers, today a man (a politician) may destroy ten million people without it ever being remarked that he has behaved rather badly.'

They all had listened to this more or less attentively.

'It may have been accident,' Mary observed. 'It may just have blown up of its own accord.'

'No one ever thought it did that,' René replied. 'The more sinister explanation is practically uncontradicted.'

'The Americans are a nation of gangsters,' was Percy's comment, 'and you can hardly argue, because Americans were capable of such an action, that Englishmen would be liable to commit an equally foul crime.'

René laughed.

'Upon such a generalization as that "all Americans are gangsters" you cannot safely base an argument. Bryan, for instance, Vice-President in Woodrow Wilson's administration, was not a gangster. There are, let us admit, a few exceptions to the rule that all politicians are blackguards. Americans as a whole are no more gangsters than we are. Sorry.'

'No. I am sorry too. The good Americans—if there are any—are untypical.' Percy, like many of his countrymen, took up a very rigid position regarding the Yahoo on the other side of the Atlantic. The ex-professor pushed his chair back and laughed negligently.

'My illustration was unfortunate. I forgot how opaque the atmosphere of prejudice is. I should not have gone for my illustration to the United States. But there is no particular point in re-starting and taking my illustration from nearer home. By all means retain your illusions regarding playing-the-game and a race of "Very Perfect Gentlemen".' He looked at his host and smiled. 'Remember, though, that it is usually Tories who speak about playing the game. Do not be too credulous.'

Soon after this the two ladies withdrew. The men remained standing. After a pause, as though for recueillement on the part of Percy, that gentleman practically re-enacted the scene of just before dinner, with this difference that he had now drunk quite a lot, and his guest also resembled him in this respect. During his emotional expansiveness Percy became quite red in the face, and once or twice moved dramatically close to his brother-in-law.

'How is it, René, that we have never until tonight really got to know one another? Why have we never had any good talks before? It is really astonishing how little we have found to say to one another.'

René knew perfectly well the answer, why they had never had any serious conversation before. But he affected to be at least as astonished as Percy at that fact. He had looked upon Mary's husband as a man with whom he had so little in common that it was unnecessary to exchange anything more than commonplaces. But René crashed, almost with violence, with a heartiness even exceeding the other's, 'Yes, is it not amazing that all these years we should have been content to discuss the weather, or some child-murder or football-match . . . Marie Laurençin!'

They both laughed, looking around for one of the ubiquitous stylized inanities.

'It is extraordinary,' he went on, 'how something happens . . . and two people begin talking without any social inhibition and are revealed to one another. It is one of the most extraordinary things in life!'

'Absolutely!' Percy noisily responded. 'The most extraordinary.'

'The most! It is like the discovery of Plastic.' René capped the whole matter. 'Just a jolly old milk-bottle, the sort the slovenly housewife leaves hardening away there on a shelf—too damned lazy to wash it out and return it to the milkman, and the stuff brought about by her slack habits is plastic. World-shaking discovery. A universal substance such as the alchemist dreamed of. Tea-trays, false-teeth, cups and saucers, eye-glasses, surgical instruments, flying-machines—all out of a bottle of milk. We have been like the indolent housewife, you and I, Percy. We ought to be damned-well ashamed of ourselves!'

Percy did not entirely come up to his guest's comic picture of him, and there were times when he showed a certain uneasiness. So now, smiling a little dubiously, he remarked, 'We neither of us perhaps can claim to possess such staggering properties as are to be found in a neglected milk-bottle. But I think you are a very remarkable person: our talk tonight has given me furiously to think. And I like thinking furiously.'

'So do I.' René discharged a furious puff of smoke from his dilated nostrils. They sat down and talked a little more, Percy saying, among other things, what a marvellous insight his new friend had into American history. 'But of course it is your job,' to which the historian replied, 'It is in fact a pity that Englishmen do not know a little more how America came to be what it is.' Then suddenly Percy drew his chair, with some violence, near to that of René.

'Look here, my dear fellow, I have been thinking about this ever since Mary informed me of your splendid gesture, how you laid down your post . . . in a spirit of the purest idealism. Whenever I think of it I marvel—how many people would sacrifice everything for a principle, expose themselves . . . well, to penury? Now, my dear fellow, I am a relative and you must allow me to say this. In order to meet the difficulties which must immediately confront you, you must allow me to place at your disposal the sum of one thousand pounds.'

René began to say, 'I could not think of allowing . . .' But he was interrupted by Percy, waving such remonstrances away with an imperious hand.

'The sum I have mentioned means nothing to me, I can very easily spare it. Needless to say, it is not my habit to distribute cheques. But in this case I look upon it as a paltry sum, and let me say at once that if you should require more in the first year or two to keep you going, do not hesitate to turn to me. I should be ashamed of myself if I did not support you in any way in my power.'

'But really, old chap . . .'

Getting to his feet with a purposeful air, Percy said, 'Will you wait here for a moment, I shall be back immediately. I am going to my study to draw this cheque on the spot. Excuse me. I shall really only be two or three minutes.'

He left the room, and René, who had risen, went to the table and poured himself out another brandy. As soon as he was alone René's face contracted. Glaring down at his glass, he would appear to be concentrating for purposes of analysis.

The Absurd was once more puzzling him. This man he was with was so obviously not screwed down tight, and half-finished: kept attacking him—yes, actually assaulting him—with nonsensical approbation! Then he would shoot off, as he now had done, into the néant, soon to reappear with a cheque for a thousand pounds. Was this faery gold? Was he an emissary of Nonsense in person? Yes, would these thousand pounds only be convertible into a thousand absurdities? For such a figure could not possibly deal in a rational currency.

But René poured down more brandy and squared his shoulders. It was his brother-in-law . . . after all, who slept with Mary every night. Mary, stable as a rock, she would not be closely associated with so unstable an entity were she not assured that his money came from a normal mint. No.

Although he had drilled himself into tolerance of the Absurd by the time Percy hustled in, the first impact of the bird's-nest coloured thatch, the rimless glasses (put on to write the cheque), produced a mild spasm of alarm, of the type always experienced when Mrs. Harradson emitted, 'Oo, sir, Professor Harding, sir!'

But he forced an agreeably abstracted expression on to his face (no unseemly expectancy of what was about to happen, yet . . . in a musing of a happy kind, so that if anything did drop in his lap it would be received benignly, without too crudely abrupt a change of countenance).

'I say, Percy, I ought not to take this you know! I am quite serious,' he protested, as Percy placed an envelope upon the table beside him. 'You're a terrific brick!' (He supposed that 'brick' was the kind of idiot word that belonged to the vocabulary of this sort of homunculus.) 'But I know I should refuse!'

'Nonsense, my dear chap!'

René looked up quickly at the word 'nonsense'.

'I don't know what Hester would say if she could see me pocketing this,' as he picked up the envelope and put it in his breast pocket. He almost laughed at the thought of Hester's disgust at the sight of a thousand quid. 'Hester always says I have no proper pride.'

'She will soon get over it, I expect.' For this was rather in excess of what could be absorbed by the homunculus on the serious level.

'I expect so, poor dear girl. For she takes a more serious view than I do of our future.'

'Women are born pessimists,' Percy told him.

René nodded his head. 'They are the eternal Greek Chorus.' Then quickly placing his hand upon that of his host, which lay, hairy and sprawling, on the table, and administering a slight pressure, he exclaimed fruitily, 'I am your debtor for life, old man. I do not mean I shall not repay you this sum. I mean that when I do, I shall still be your debtor.'

'Nonsense!'

At this second 'nonsense' René shot up his head even more quickly, and examined closely the bird's-nest hair, the blankly shining eye-glasses. Had he read his suspicions? Has this old bourgeois second-sight?

But Percy resumed the dinner-table conversation, which had apparently given him an appetite for political and other discussion; or there had been something René had said which had stirred him into unaccustomed speculation.

'In my lifetime,' he began, 'the attitude to violent death has completely changed.'

'In mine too. We have become like the Orientals.'

Signs of animation were seen in the bird's-nest-topped head, with its glazed eye-sockets (for the glasses were still there). 'Orientalized, are we? You think that?'

'All I meant was,' René clarified, 'that in the past it was always said that our attitude to death was different from that of the Oriental races. Today one does not hear that said, and I think that there is no longer any justification for saying it.'

'No, there is not. I do not mind being blasted out of my house by a "super-bomb" at any moment. This is a quite new attitude.—I mean my callousness about myself.'

A frown grew upon René's face, like a hieratic tree, during Percy's self-analysis. The last thing that he desired was a serious discussion with this auriferous Nobody. But such self-complacent revelation of callousness normally would have provoked him to didactic reproof.

'Ah ha, yes, very painful,' he muttered.

'Rather the reverse,' the callous one smilingly corrected. 'But I often have wondered,' he went on, 'whether the sort of orientalizing we have undergone was not due to the extraordinary growth of Jewish influence.'

(Ha! An anti-semite, thought to himself the surprised listener. One of the City Man's substitutes for thought—the fox-hunting still in the blood of the stockjobber. But he waited.)

'It is my opinion that the Jews have too much influence,' Percy continued truculently, glancing at his frowning companion; the frown still there which had grown under the stimulus of passing reference to high explosives and high finance.

'I should be interested to know your opinion, René, of the Jewish question.'

Stirring himself reluctantly, this frowning guest, whose profession it was to have opinions, drank his brandy slowly, ponderously put down the glass, and a shade grumpily gave his opinion.

'The Jews. The Jews are an alibi for all the double-dealers, plotters and intriguers, fomenters of wars, und so weiter. A useful tribe, they take the rap for everything.'

It was with a much colder voice that the bird's-nest-crowned mask drawled, 'So you regard the Jews as much maligned?'

'They certainly are maligned. They have their own advocates in plenty; I am only interested in justice, and I notice numbers of malefactors escaping on the backs of the Jews.'

Percy's disappointment was patent, he was even ruffled. 'In the Insurance business . . .'

'Ah yes, in the Insurance business you do meet a lot of bad hats with semitic cognomens.'

'You do indeed,' Percy asserted with asperity and then followed several accounts of fabulous Insurance frauds, and the part his company had played in same. The last of these stories was laughter-provoking, the delinquent possessing an eye for the farcical, and both narrator and listener became uproarious and mingled their laughs as they poured themselves fresh glasses of brandy. The bad patch in the conversation was over. Subjects in which the City man's passions were not aroused succeeded, one or two of which revealing an identity of view and so confirming Percy's new-found belief in his brother-in-law's wisdom. It seemed a long time to René since their wives had left them when his host got up and led the way to the drawing-room.

As all were moving about near the open front door preparatory to the departure of the two guests, René went up to his sister and kissed her, murmuring almost in her ear, 'Marie, tu est si belle, tu est si bonne!' The serene roman-face of the slightly-smiling Mary accepted the mariolatry blandly, squeezing her brother's arm. And over her shoulder could be seen in the light of the hall lamp the figure of Percy, his head once more in profile, his shining eye rapt in a dream of unutterable knowingness. René saw him as a large bird, a hen-bird, a bird's-nest upon its head, transfixed in a dream of exultant intensity; a bird who had just laid a splendid golden egg.