PREFACE
This
is a true story.
It has been rewritten only so far as was necessary to conceal
personalities.
It is a
terrible story; but it is also a story of hope and of beauty.
It reveals with startling clearness the abyss on which our
civilisation trembles.
But the self-same Light illuminates the path of humanity: it is
our own fault if we go over the brink.
This story is also true not only of one kind of huma n weakness,
but (by analogy) of all kinds; and for all alike there is but one way of
salvation.
As Glanvil says: Man is not
subjected to the angels, nor even unto death utterly, save through the weakness
of his own feeble will.
Do
what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
-
ALEISTER CROWLEY.
CHAPTER
I
A
KNIGHT OUT
Yes,
I certainly was feeling depressed.
I don't think that this was altogether the reaction of the day.
Of course, there always is a reaction after the excitement of a flight ; but
the effect is more physical than moral. One doesn't talk. One lies about and
smokes and drinks champagne.
No, I was feeling quite a different kind of rotten. I looked at
my mind, as the better class of flying man soon learns to do, and I really felt
ashamed of myself. Take me for all in all, I was one of the luckiest men alive.
War
is like a wave; some it rolls over, some it drowns,
some it
beats to pieces on the shingle; but some it shoots far up the shore on to
glistening golden sand out of the reach of any further freaks of fortune.
Let
me explain.
My name is Peter Pendragon. My father was a second son; and he
had quarrelled with my Uncle Mortimer when
they were boys. He was a struggling general practitioner in
Norfolk, and had not made things any better for himself by marrying.
However, he scraped together enough to get me some sort of
education, and at the outbreak of the war I was
twenty-two
years old and had just passed my Intermediate for M.D. in the University of
London.
Then, as I said, the wave came. My mother went out for the Red
Cross, and died in the first year of the war. Such
was the
confusion that I did not even know about it till over six months later.
My
father died of influenza just before t he Armistice.
I had gone into the air service ; did pretty well, though
somehow I was never sure either of myself or of my machine. My squadron
commander used to tell me that I should never make a great airman.
"
Old thing," he said, " you lack the
instinct," qualifying the noun with an entirely meaningless adjective
which somehow succeeded in making his sentence highly illuminating.
"
Where you get away with it," he said, " is
that you have an analytic brain."
Well, I suppose I have. That's how I come to be writing this up.
Anyhow, at the end of the war I found myself with a knighthood which I still
firmly
believe to
have been due to a clerical error on the part of some official.
As for Uncle Mortimer, he lived on in his crustacean way; a
sulky, rich, morose, old bachelor. We never heard a word of him.
And
then, about a year ago, he died ; and I found
to my
amazement that I was sole heir to his five or six thousand a year, and the
owner of Barley Grange ;
which is
really an awfully nice place in Kent, quite near enough to be convenient for
the prosperous young man about town which I had become ; and for the best
of it, a
piece of artificial water quite large enough for me to use for a waterdrome for
my seaplane.
I may not have the instinct for flying, as Cartwright said ; but
it's the only sport I care about.
Golf? When one has flown over a golf course, those people do
look such appalling rotters! Such pigmy solemnities !
Now
about my feeling depressed. When the end of
the war came, when I found myself penniless, out of
a job, utterly spoilt by the war (even if I had had the money) for going on
with my hospital, I had developed an entirely new psychology. You know how it
feels when you are fighting duels in the air, you seem to be detached from
everything. There is nothing in the Universe but you and the Boche you are
trying to pot. There is something detached and god -like about it.
And
when I found myself put out on the streets by
a grateful country, I became an
entirely different animal. In fact, I've often thought that there isn't any
"I"
at all ;
that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we
think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.
Well, bother that I The plain fact is that I had become a
desperate wild animal. I was too hungry,
so to speak,
even to waste any time on thinking bitterly about things.
And
then came the letter from the lawyers.
That
was another new experience. I had no idea
before of the depths to which servility could
descend.
"
By the way, Sir Peter," said Mr. Wolfe, " it will,
of course, take a little while to
settle up these matters. It's a very large estate, very large. But I thought
that
with times as they are, you
wouldn't be offended, Sir Peter, if we handed you an open cheque for a thousand
pounds just to go on with."
It wasn't
till I had got outside his door that I realised how badly he wanted my
business. He need not have worried. He had managed poor old Uncle Mortimer's
affairs
well enough all those years; not likely I should bother to put them in the
hands of a new man.
The thing that really pleased me about the whole business was
the clause in the will. Th at old crab had sat in his club all through the war,
snapping at everybody he saw ; and yet he had been keeping track of what I was
doing. He said in the will that he had made me his heir "for the splendid
services I had rendered to our beloved country in her hour of need."
That's the true Celtic psychology. When we've all finished
talking, there's something that never utters a word, but goes right down
through the earth, plumb to the centre.
And now comes the funny part of the business. I discovered to my
amazement that the desperate wild animal hunting his job had been after all a
rather happy animal in his way, just as the desperate god battling in the air,
playing pitch and toss with life and death, had been happy.
Neither of those men could be depressed by mis -fortune; but the
prosperous young man about town
was
a much inferior creature. Everything more or
less bored
him, and he was quite definitely i rritated by an overdone cutlet. The night I
met Lou, I turned
into the Cafe' Wisteria in a sort of dull, angry
stupor. Yet the only irritating incident of the day had been a letter from the
lawyers which I had found at my club after flying from Norfolk to Barley Grange
and motoring up to town.
Mr. Wolfe had very sensibly advised me to make a settlement of a
part of the estate, as against the event of my getting married; and there was
some stupid
hitch about getting trustes.
I loathe law. It seems to me as if it were merely an elaborate
series of obstacles to doing things sensibly. And yet, of course, after all,
one must have formalities, just as in flying you have to make arrangement s for
starting and stopping. But it is a beastly nuisance
to
have to attend to them.
I thought I would stand myself a little dinner. I hadn't quite
enough sense to know that what I really wanted was human companions. There a
ren't such things. Every man is eternally alone. But when you
get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that
appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the
acute symptoms of its disease -that of thinking.
My old commander was right. I think a lot too much; so did
Shakespeare. That's what worked him
up to write those wonderful things about sleep. I've
forgotten what they were; but they impressed me at the time. I said to myself,
"This old bird knew how dreadful it is to be conscious."
So, when I turned into the cafe', I think the real reason was
that I hoped to find somebody there, and talk the night out. People think that
talking is a sign of thinking. It isn't, for the most part ; on the con -
trary, it's a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve
oneself of the strain of thinking, just as
exercising the muscles helps the body to become temporarily un - conscious of
its weight, its pain, its weariness, and the foreknowledge of its doom.
You
see what gloomy thoughts a fellow can have,
even when he's Fortune's pet. It's
a disease of civilisation. We're in an intermediate stage between the
stupor of
the peasant and-something that is not yet properly developed.
I went into the cafe' and sat down
at one of the marble tables. I had a momentary thrill of joy -it reminded me of
France so much -of all those days of ferocious gambling with Death.
I couldn't see a soul I knew. But at least I knew by sight the
two men at the next table. Every one knew that gray ferocious wolf -a man built
in every line for battle, and yet with a forehead which lifted
him clean out of the turmoil. The conflicting elements
in his nature had played the devil with him. Jack Fordham was his name. At
sixty years of age he
was still
the most savage and implacable of publicists. " Red in tooth and
claw," as Tenn yson said. Yet the man had found time to write great
literature ; and his rough and tumble with the world had not degraded
his
thought or spoilt his style.
Sitting next him was a weak, good -natured, working journalist
named Vernon Gibbs. He wrote practically the whole of a weekly paper -had done,
year after year with the versatility of a practised pen and the mechanical
perseverance of an instrument which has been worn by practice into perfect
easiness.
Yet the man had a mind for all that. Some instinct told him that
he had been meant for better things. The result had been that he had steadily
become a heavier and heavier drinker.
I learnt at the hospital that seventy -five per cent. of the
human body is composed of water ; but in this case, as in the old song, it must
have been that he was a relation of the McPherson who had a son,
"That
married Noah's daughter And nearly spoilt the flood By drinking all the water.
And this he would have done, I really do believe it,
But had that mixture been
Three parts or more Glen
Livet."
The slight
figure of a young -old man with a bulbous nose to detract from his otherwise
remarkable beauty, spoilt though it was by years of insane passions, came into
the cafe'. His cold blue eyes were shifty and malicious. One got the impression
of some filthy creature of the darkness-a raider from another world looking
about him for something to despoil. At his heels lumbered his jackal, a huge,
bloated, verminous creature like a cockroach, in shabby black clothes,
ill-fitting, unbrushed and stained,
his l inen dirty, his face bloated and pimpled, a horrible evil leer on his
dripping mouth, with its furniture like a bombed graveyard.
The cafe' sizzled as the men entered. They were notorious, if
nothing else, and the leader was the Earl of Bumble. Every one seemed to scent
some mischief
in the air.
The earl came up to the table next to mine, and stopped deliberately short. A
sneer passed across his lips. He pointed to the two men.
" Drunken Bardolph and Ancien t Pistol," he said, with
his nose twitching with anger.
Jack
Fordham was not behindhand with the repartee.
" Well roared, Bottom," he replied calmly, as pat as
if the whole scene had been rebearsed beforehand.
A dangerous look came into the eyes of the insane earl. He took
a pace backwards and raised his stick. But Fordham, old campaigner that he was,
had anticipated the gesture. He had been to the Western States
in his youth
; and what he did not know about scrapping was not worth being known. In
particular, he was
very much
alive to the fact that an unarmed man sitting behind a fixed table has no
chance against a man with a stick in the open.
He slipped out like a cat. Befor e Bumble could bring down his
cane, the old man had dived under his guard and taken the lunatic by the
throat.
There
was no sort of a fight. The veteran shook
his
opponent like a bull -dog; and, shifting his grip, flung him to the ground with
one tremendous throw.
In less than two seconds the affair was over. Fordham was
kneeling on the chest of the defeated bully, who whined and gasped and cried
for mercy, and told
the man
twenty years his senior, whom he had deliberately provoked into the fight, that
he mustn't hurt him because they were such old friends !
The behaviour of a crowd in affairs of this kind always seems to
me very singular. Every one, or nearly every one, seems to start to interfere ;
and nobody actually does so.
But this matter threatened to prove more serious. The old man
had really lost his temper. It was odds
that
he would choke the life out of the cur under his knee.
I had just enough presence of mind to make way for the head
waiter, a jolly, burly Frenchman, who
came pushing into the circle. I even lent him a hand
to pull Fordham off the prostrate form of his
antagonist.
A touch was enough. The old man recovere d his temper in a
second, and calmly went back to his table with no more sign of excitement than
shouting " sixty to forty, sixty to forty."
"
I'm on," cried the voice of a man who had just
come in at
the end of the cafe' and mi ssed the scene by a minute. " But what's the
horse ? "
I heard the words as a man in a dream ; for my attention had
suddenly been distracted.
Bumble
had made no attempt to get up. He lay
there
whimpering. I raised my eyes from so disgusting a sight, and found them fixed
by two enormous orbs.
I did not
know at the first moment even that they were eyes. It's a funny thing to say ;
but the first impression was that they were one of those thoughts that come to
one from nowhere when one is flying at ten thousand feet or so. Awfully queer
thing, I tell you-reminds one of the atmospherics that one gets
in wireless;
and they give one a horrible feeling. It is a sort of sinister warning t hat
there is some person or some thing in the Universe outside oneself: and
the
realisation of that is as frankly frightening as the other realisation, that
one is eternally alone, is horrible.
I
slipped out of time altogether i nto eternity. I
felt myself
in the presence of some tremendous influence for good or evil. I felt as though
I had been born -I don't know whether you know what I mean. I can't
help it, but I can't put it any different.
It's like this : nothing had ever
happened to me in my life before. You know how it is when you come
out of ether or nitrous -oxide at the dentist's-you
come back to somewhere, a familiar somewhere; but the place from which you have
come is nowher e, and yet you have been there.
That
is what happened to me.
I woke up from eternity, from infinity, from a state of mind
enormously more vital and conscious than anything we know of otherwise,
although one can't
give it a
name, to discover that this nameless thought of nothingness was in reality two
black vast spheres in which I saw myself. I had a thought of some vision
in a story of the middle ages about a wizard, and slowly,
slowly, I slid up out of the deep to recognise that these two spheres were just
two eyes. And then it occurred
to me-the
thought was in the nature of a particularly absurd and ridiculous joke -that
these two eyes belonged to a girl's face.
Across
the moaning body of the blackmailer, I was
looking at the face of a girl that
I had never seen before. And I said to myself, "Well, that's all right,
I've
known you all my life." And when I said to
myself
" my
life," I didn't in the least me an my life as Peter Pendragon, I didn't
even mean a life extending through
the
centuries, I meant a different kind of life -some-thing with which centuries
have nothing whatever to do.
And then Peter Pendragon came wholly back to himself with a
start, and wondered whether he had not perhaps looked a little rudely at what
his common sense assured him was quite an ordinary and not a particularly
attractive girl.
My mind was immediately troubled. I went hastily back to my
table. And then it seemed to me as if it were hours while the waiters were
persuading the earl to his feet.
I sipped my drink automatically. When I looked up the girl had
disappeared.
It
is a trivial observation enough which I am going
to make. I
hope at least it will help to clear any one's mind of any idea that I may be an
abnormal man.
As a matter of fact, every man is ultimately abnormal, because
he is unique. But we can class ma n in a few series without bothering ourselves
much about what each one of them is in himself.
I hope, then, that it will be clearly understood that I am very much
like a hundred thousand other young men of my age. I also make th e remark,
because the
essential bearing of it is practically the whole story of this
book. And the remark is this, after that great flourish of trumpets: although I
was personally entirely uninterested in what I had witnessed, the depre ssion
had
vanished from my mind. As the French say,
"
Un cku chasse l'autre."
I have learnt since then that certain races, particularly the
Japanese, have made a definite science starting
from this
fact. For example, they clap their hands four times " in order to drive
away evil spirits." That
is, of
course, only a figure of speech. What they really do is this : the physical
gesture startles the mind out
of its
lethargy, so that the idea which has been t roubling it is replaced by a new
one. They have various dodges
for securing
a new one and making sure that the new one shall be pleasant. More of this
later.
What happened is that at this moment my mind was seized with
sharp, black anger, entirely objectless. I
had at the time not the faintest inkling as to its
nature, but there it was. The cafe' was intolerable -like a pest-house. I threw
a coin on the table, and was astonished to notice that it rolled off. I went
out as
if
the devil were at my heels.
I remember practically nothing of the next half -hour. I felt a
kind of forlorn sense of being lost in a world of incredibly stupid and
malicious dwarfs.
I found myself in Piccadilly quite suddenly. A voice purred in
my ear, " Good old Peter, good old sport, awfully glad I met you -we'll
make a night of it."
The speaker was a handsome Welshman still in his prime. Some
people thought him one of the best sculptors living. He had, in fact, a
following of
disciples which I can only qualify
as " almost unpleasantly so. "
He had no use for humanity at the bottom of his heart, except as
convenient shapes which he might model. He was bored and disgusted to find them
pretending to be alive. The annoyance had grown until he had got into the habit
of drinking a good deal more and a good deal more often than a lesser man might
have needed. He was a much bigger man than I was physically, and he took me by
the arm almost as if
he had been
taking me into custody. He poured into my ear an interminable series of
rambling
reminiscences,
each of which appeared to him incredibly mirthful.
For about half a minute I resented him; then I let myself go and
found myself soothed almost to
slumber by the flow of his talk. A wonderful man, like an
imbecile child nine -tenths of the time, and yet, at the back of it all, one
somehow saw t he deep night of his mind suffused with faint sparks of his
genius.
I had not the slightest idea where he was taking me I did not
care. I had gone to sleep, inside. I woke to find myself sitting in the cafe'
Wisteria once more.
The head waiter was excitedly explaining to my companion what a
wonderful scene he had missed.
" Mr. Fordham, he nearly kill' ze Lord," he bubbled,
wringing his fat hands. " He nearly kill' ze Lord."
Something in
the speech tickled my sense of irreverence. I broke into a high-pitched shout
of laughter.
" Rotten," said my companion. " Rotten ! That
fellow Fordhain never seems to make a clean job of it anyhow. Say, look here,
this is my night out. You
go 'way
like a good boy, tell all those boys and girls come and have dinner."
The waiter knew well enough who was meant; and presently I found
myself shaking hands with several perfect strangers in terms which implied the
warmes t and most unquenchable affection. It was really rather a distinguished
crowd. One of the men was a fat German Jew, who looked at first sight like a
piece of
canned pork
that has got mislaid too long in the summer. But the less he said the more he
did ; and what he
did
is one of the greatest treasures of mankind.
Then there was a voluble, genial
man with a shock of gray hair and a queer twisted smile on his face. He looked
like a character of Dickens. But he h ad
done more
to revitalise the theatre than any other man of his time.
I took a dislike to the women. They seemed so unworthy of the
men. Great men seem to enjoy going
about with
freaks. I suppose it is on the same principle as tbe old kings used to keep
fools and dwarfs to amuse them. " Some men are born great, some achieve
greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them."
But
whichever way it is, the burden is usually too heavy for their shoulders.
You remember Frank Harris's story of the Ugly Duckling ? If you
don't, you'd better get busy and do it.
That's really what's so frightful in flying -the fear of
oneself, the feeling that one has got out of one's
class,
that all the old kindly familiar things below have
The first of these women was a fat, bold, red -headed slut. She
reminded me of a white maggot. She exuded corruption. She was pompous,
pretentious, and stupid. She gave herself out as a great authority on
literature ; but all her knowledge was parrot, and her own attempts in that
direction the most deplorably dreary drivel
that ever
had been printed even by the chattering clique which she financed. On her bare
shoulder was the hand of a short, thin woman with a common, pretty face and a
would-be babyish manner. She was a
German woman
of the lowest class. Her husband was an influential Member of Parliament.
People said
that he
lived on her earnings. There were even darker whispers. Two or three pretty
wise birds had told
me they
thought it was she, and not poor little Mati Hara, who tipped off the Tanks to
the Boche.
Did I mention that my sculptor's name was Owen ? Well, it was,
is, and will be while the name of Art endures. He was supporting himself
unsteadily with one hand on the table, while with the other he put his
guests in
their seats. I thought of a child playing with dolls.
As the first four sat down, I saw two other girls behind them.
One I had met before, Violet Beach. She was a queer little thing -Jewish, I
fancy. She wore a sheaf of yellow hair fuzzed out like a
Struwwel-peter, and a violent
vermilion dress -in case any one should fail to observe her. It was her
affectation to
be an
Apache, so she wore an old cricket cap down on one eye, and a stale cigarette
hung from h er lip. But she had a certain talent for writing, and I was very
glad indeed to meet her again. I admit I am always
a little shy
with strangers. As we shook hands, I heard her saying in her curious voice,
high -pitched and yet muted, as if she had something wrong with her throat
"
Want you to meet Miss --"
I didn't get the name; I can never hear strange words. As it
turned out, before forty -eight hours had passed, I discovered that it was
Laleham -and then again that it wasn't. But I anticipate -don't try to throw me
out of my stride. All in good time.
In the meanwhile I found I was expected to address her as Lou.
"Unlimited Lou" was her nickname
among the initiate.
Now what I am anxious for everybody to understand is simply
this. There's hardly anybody who under - stands the way his mind works; no two minds
are alike, as Horace or some old ass said; and, anyhow,
So, instead of recognising the girl as the owner of the eyes
which had gripped me so strangely an hour earlier, the fact of the recognition
simply put me off the recognition-I don't know if I'm making myself clear. I
mean that the plain fact refused to come to the surface. My mind seethed with
questions. Where had I seen her before ?
And here's another funny thing. I don't believe that I should
have ever recognised her by sight. What put me on the track was the grip of her
hand, though I had never touched it in my life before.
Now don't think that I'm going off the deep end about this.
Don't dismiss me as a mystic -monger. Look
back each one into your own lives, and if yo u can't
find half a
dozen incidents equally inexplicable, equally unreasonable, equally repugnant
to the better regulated type of mid-Victorian mind, the best thing you can do
is to sleep
with your forefathers. So that's that. Good-night.
I told you that Lou was " quite an ordinary and not a
particularly attractive girl." Remember that this was the first thought of
my " carnal mind " which, as St. Paul says, is " enmity against
God."
My real first impression had been the tremendous psychological
experience for which all words are inadequate.
Seated by
her side, at leisure to look while she babbled, I found my carnal mind reversed
on appeal. She was certainly not a pretty girl from the standpoint of a
music-hall audience. There was something indefinably Mongolian about her face.
The planes were flat ; the cheek-bones high ; the eyes oblique ; the nose wide,
short, and vital; the mouth a long, thin, rippling
curve like a mad sunset. The eyes were tiny and green, with a
piquant elfin expression. Her hair was curiously colourless ; it was very abundant;
she had wound
great ropes about her head. It reminded me of the armature of a
dynamo. It produced a weird effect - this mingling of the savage Mongol with
the savage Norseman type. Her strange hair fascinated me. It
was that delicate flaxen hue, so fine -no, I don't know how to
tell you about it, I can't think of it witho ut getting all muddled up.
One
wondered how she was there. One saw at a
glance that
she didn't belong to that set. Refinement, aristocracy almost, were like a
radiance about her tiniest gesture. She had no affectation about bein g
an artist.
She happened to like these people in exactly the same way as a Methodist old
maid in Balharn
might take an interest in natives of Tonga, and so she went
about with them. Her mother didn't mind. Probably, too, the way things are
nowadays, her mother didn't matter.
You mustn't think that we were any of us drunk, except old Owen.
As a matter of fact, all I had had was a glass of white wine. Lou had touched
nothing at all. She prattled on like t he innocent child she
was, out of
the sheer mirth of her heart. In an ordinary way, I suppose, I should have
drunk a lot more than
I did. And
I didn't eat much either. Of course, I know now what it was-that much-derided
phenomenon, love at first sight.
Suddenly we were interrupted. A tall man was shaking hands
across the table with Owen. Instead
of using
any of the ordinary greetings, he said in a very low, clear voice, very clear
and vibrant, as though tense with some inscrutable passion: -
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."
There was an uneasy movement in the group. In particular, the
German woman seemed distressed by the man's mere presence.
I looked up. Yes, I could understand well enough the change in
the weather. Owen was saying -
" That's all right, that's all right, that's exactly what I
do. You come and see my new group. I'll do another sketch of you -same day,
same time. That's all right."
Somebody introduced the new -comer-Mr. King Lamus-and murmured
our names.
" Sit down right here," said Owen, " what you
need is a drink. I know you perfectly well; I've known you for years and years
and years, and I know you've done a good day's work, and you've earned a drink.
Sit right down and I'll get the waiter."
I looked at Lamus, who had not
uttered a word since his original greeting. There was something appalling in
his eyes ; they didn't focus on the foreground. I was only an incident of utter
insignificance in an
illimitable
landscape. His eyes were parallel; they were looking at infinity. Nothing
mattered to him. I hated the beast !
By
this time the waiter had approached.
" Sorry, sir," he said to Owen, who had ordered a '65
brandy.
It appeared that it was now eight
hours forty -three minutes thirteen and three -fifth seconds past noon. I don't
know what the law is ; nobody in England knows
what the law
is-not even the fools that make the laws. We are not under the laws and do not
enjoy the liberties which our fathers bequeathed us; we are under a
complex and
fantastic system of police administrat ion nearly as pernicious as anything
even in America.
" Don't apologise," said Lamus to the waiter in a tone
of icy detachment. " This is the freedom we fought for."
I was
entirely on the side of the speaker. I hadn't wanted a drink all evening, but
now I was told I couldn't have one, I wanted to raid their damn cellars and
fight the Metropolitan Police and go up in my 'plane and
drop a few
bombs on the silly old House of Commons. And yet I was in no sort of sympathy
with the man.
The contempt
of his tone irritated me. He was in -human, somehow; that was what antagonised
me.
He
turned to Owen.
"
Better come round to my studio," he drawled; I have a machine gun trained
on S cotland Yard." Owen rose with alacrity.
" I shall be delighted to see any of you others,"
continued Lamus. " I should deplore it to the day of my death if I were
the innocent means of breaking up so perfect a party."
The invitation sounded like an insult. I went red behind the
ears; I could only just command myself enough to make a formal apology of some
sort.
As a matter of fact, there was a very curious reaction in the
whole party. The German Jew got up at once-nobody else stirred. Rage boiled in
my heart. I understood instantly what had taken place. The intervention of
Lamus had automatically divided the party into giants and dwarfs ; and I was
one of the dwarfs.
During the dinner, Mrs. Webster, the German woman, had spoken
hardly at all. But as soon as the three men had turned their backs, she
remarked acidly: -
" I don't think we're dependent for our drinks on Mr. King
Lamus. Let's go round to the Smoking Dog."
Everybody agreed with alacrity. The suggestion seemed to have
relieved the unspoken tension.
We found ourselves in taxis, which for some in-scrutable reason
are still allowed to ply practically
No comments:
Post a Comment