He sat there in the hut, his face pulled to mocking irony. Yet even then, he had one ear set backwards, listening to the storm over the wood. It made him feel so alone.

‘But won’t it ever come to an end?’ she said.

‘Ay, it will. It’ll achieve its own salvation. When the last real man is killed, and they’re ALL tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame ones: then they’ll ALL be insane. Because the root of sanity is in the balls. Then they’ll all be INSANE, and they’ll make their grand ~auto da fe. You know AUTO DA FE means act of faith? Ay, well, they’ll make their own grand little act of faith. They’ll offer one another up.’

‘You mean kill one another?’

‘I do, duckie! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred years’ time there won’t be ten thousand people in this island: there may not be ten. They’ll have lovingly wiped each other out. The thunder was rolling further away.

‘How nice!’ she said.

‘Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else. And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta–tah! to the human species! Goodbye! darling! the serpent swallows itself and leaves a void, considerably messed up, but not hopeless. Very nice! When savage wild dogs bark in Wragby, and savage wild pit–ponies stamp on Tevershall pit–bank! TE DEUM LAUDAMUS!’

Connie laughed, but not very happily.

‘Then you ought to be pleased that they are all bolshevists,’ she said. ‘You ought to be pleased that they hurry on towards the end.’

‘So I am. I don’t stop ‘em. Because I couldn’t if I would.’

‘Then why are you so bitter?’

‘I’m not! If my cock gives its last crow, I don’t mind.’

‘But if you have a child?’ she said.

He dropped his head.

‘Why,’ he said at last. ‘It seems to me a wrong and bitter thing to do, to bring a child into this world.’

‘No! Don’t say it! Don’t say it!’ she pleaded. ‘I think I’m going to have one. Say you’ll he pleased.’ She laid her hand on his.

‘I’m pleased for you to be pleased,’ he said. ‘But for me it seems a ghastly treachery to the unborn creature.

‘Ah no!’ she said, shocked. ‘Then you CAN’T ever really want me! YOU CAN’T want me, if you feel that!’

Again he was silent, his face sullen. Outside there was only the threshing of the rain.

‘It’s not quite true!’ she whispered. ‘It’s not quite true! There’s another truth.’ She felt he was bitter now partly because she was leaving him, deliberately going away to Venice. And this half pleased her.