And every night now he played pontoon, that game of the Tommies, with Mrs Bolton, gambling with sixpences. And again, in the gambling he was gone in a kind of unconsciousness, or blank intoxication, or intoxication of blankness, whatever it was. Connie could not bear to see him. But when she had gone to bed, he and Mrs Bolton would gamble on till two and three in the morning, safely, and with strange lust. Mrs Bolton was caught in the lust as much as Clifford: the more so, as she nearly always lost.

She told Connie one day: `I lost twenty-three shillings to Sir Clifford last night.'

`And did he take the money from you?' asked Connie aghast.

`Why of course, my Lady! Debt of honour!'

Connie expostulated roundly, and was angry with both of them. The upshot was, Sir Clifford raised Mrs Bolton's wages a hundred a year, and she could gamble on that. Meanwhile, it seemed to Connie, Clifford was really going deader.

She told him at length she was leaving on the seventeenth.

`Seventeenth!' he said. `And when will you be back?'

`By the twentieth of July at the latest.'

`Yes! the twentieth of July.'

Strangely and blankly he looked at her, with the vagueness of a child, but with the queer blank cunning of an old man.

`You won't let me down, now, will you?' he said.

`How?'

`While you're away, I mean, you're sure to come back?'

`I'm as sure as I can be of anything, that I shall come back.'

`Yes! Well! Twentieth of July!'

He looked at her so strangely.

Yet he really wanted her to go. That was so curious. He wanted her to go, positively, to have her little adventures and perhaps come home pregnant, and all that. At the same time, he was afraid of her going.

She was quivering, watching her real opportunity for leaving him altogether, waiting till the time, herself himself should be ripe.

She sat and talked to the keeper of her going abroad.

`And then when I come back,' she said, `I can tell Clifford I must leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know it is you. We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia. Shall we?'

She was quite thrilled by her plan.

`You've never been to the Colonies, have you?' he asked her.

`No! Have you?'

`I've been in India, and South Africa, and Egypt.'

`Why shouldn't we go to South Africa?'

`We might!' he said slowly.

`Or don't you want to?' she asked.

`I don't care. I don't much care what I do.'

`Doesn't it make you happy? Why not? We shan't be poor. I have about six hundred a year, I wrote and asked. It's not much, but it's enough, isn't it?'

`It's riches to me.'

`Oh, how lovely it will be!'

`But I ought to get divorced, and so ought you, unless we're going to have complications.'

There was plenty to think about.

Another day she asked him about himself. They were in the hut, and there was a thunderstorm.

`And weren't you happy, when you were a lieutenant and an officer and a gentleman?'

`Happy? All right. I liked my Colonel.'

`Did you love him?'

`Yes! I loved him.'

`And did he love you?'

`Yes! In a way, he loved me.'

`Tell me about him.'

`What is there to tell? He had risen from the ranks. He loved the army. And he had never married. He was twenty years older than me. He was a very intelligent man: and alone in the army, as such a man is: a passionate man in his way: and a very clever officer. I lived under his spell while I was with him. I sort of let him run my life. And I never regret it.'

`And did you mind very much when he died?'

`I was as near death myself. But when I came to, I knew another part of me was finished. But then I had always known it would finish in death. All things do, as far as that goes.'

She sat and ruminated. The thunder crashed outside. It was like being in a little ark in the Flood.

`You seem to have such a lot behind you,' she said.

`Do I? It seems to me I've died once or twice already. Yet here I am, pegging on, and in for more trouble.'

She was thinking hard, yet listening to the storm.

`And weren't you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel was dead?'

`No! They were a mingy lot.' He laughed suddenly. `The Colonel used to say: Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful thirty times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea would give them a stoppage. They're the mingiest set of ladylike snipe ever invented: full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their boot-laces aren't correct, rotten as high game, and always in the right. That's what finishes me up. Kow-tow, kow-tow, arse-licking till their tongues are tough: yet they're always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs! A generation of ladylike prigs with half a ball each--'

Connie laughed. The rain was rushing down.

`He hated them!'

`No,' said he. `He didn't bother. He just disliked them. There's a difference. Because, as he said, the Tommies are getting just as priggish and half-balled and narrow-gutted. It's the fate of mankind, to go that way.'

`The common people too, the working people?'

`All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It's all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They're all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but machine-fucking!--It's all alike. Pay 'em money to cut off the world's cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind, and leave 'em all little twiddling machines.'

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.

She pulled open his clothing and uncovered his belly, and kissed his navel. Then she laid her cheek on his belly and pressed her arm round his warm, silent loins. They were alone in the flood.

`Tell me you want a child, in hope!' she murmured, pressing her face against his belly. `Tell me you do!'

`Why!' he said at last: and she felt the curious quiver of changing consciousness and relaxation going through his body. `Why I've thought sometimes if one but tried, here among th' colliers even! They're workin' bad now, an' not earnin' much. If a man could say to 'em: Dunna think o' nowt but th' money. When it comes ter wants, we want but little. Let's not live for money--'

She softly rubbed her cheek on his belly, and gathered his balls in her hand. The penis stirred softly, with strange life, but did not rise up. The rain beat bruisingly outside.