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By Root 5892 0

quivering little girl underneath the business-like shell of her had often fallen in love. But the terror of being pawed about, of being even touched, had always been stronger than the love. At the first sign of danger, she had desperately pecked, she had hardened her shell, she had fled. Arrived in safety, the terrified little girl had drawn a long breath. Thank Heaven! But a little sigh of disappointment was always included in the big sigh of relief. She wished she hadn’t been frightened, she wished that the happy relationship that had existed before the pawing could have gone on for ever, indefinitely. Sometimes she was angry with herself; more often she thought there was something fundamentally wrong with love, something fundamentally dreadful about men. That was the wonderful thing about Denis Burlap; he was so reassuringly not a pouncer or a pawer. Beatrice could adore him without a qualm.

‘Susan used to sit on poufs, like little Miss Muffett,’ Burlap resumed after a pause. His voice was melancholy. He had spent the last minutes in ruminating the theme of his dead wife. It was nearly two years now since Susan had been carried off in the influenza epidemic. Nearly two years; but the pain, he assured himself, had not diminished, the sense of loss had remained as overwhelming as ever. Susan, Susan, Susan—he had repeated the name to himself over and over again. He would never see her any more, even if he lived for a million years. A million years, a million years. Gulfs opened all round the words. ‘Or on the floor,’ he went on, reconstructing her image as vividly as he could. ‘I think she liked sitting on the floor best. Like a child.’ A child, a child, he repeated to himself. So young.

Beatrice sat in silence, looking into the empty grate. To have looked at Burlap, she felt, would have been indiscreet, indecent almost. Poor fellow! When she turned towards him at last, she saw that there were tears on his cheeks. The sight filled her with a sudden passion of maternal pity. ‘Like a child,’ he had said. But he was like a child himself. Like a poor unhappy child. Leaning forward she drew her fingers caressingly along the back of his limply hanging hand.

‘Batrachian grapplings!’ Lucy repeated and laughed. ‘That was a stroke of genius, Willie.’

‘All my strokes are strokes of genius,’ said Willie modestly. He acted himself; he was Willie Weaver in the celebrated role of Willie Weaver. He exploited artistically that love of eloquence, that passion for the rotund and reverberating phrase with which, more than three centuries too late, he had been born. In Shakespeare’s youth he would have been a literary celebrity. Among his contemporaries, Willie’s euphuisms only raised a laugh. But he enjoyed applause, even when it was derisive. Moreover, the laughter was never malicious; for Willie Weaver was so good-natured and obliging that everybody liked him. It was to a hilariously approving audience that he played his part; and, feeling the approval through the hilarity, he played it for all it was worth. ‘All my strokes are strokes of genius.’ The remark was admirably in character. And perhaps true? Willie jested, but with a secret belief. ‘And mark my words,’ he added, ‘one of these days the batrachians will erump, they’ll break out.’

‘But why batrachians?’ asked Slipe. ‘Anything less like a batrachian than Beatrice…’

‘And why should they break out?’ put in Spandrell.

‘Frogs don’t peck.’ But Slipe’s thin voice was drowned by Mary Rampion’s.

‘Because things do break out,’ she cried. ‘They do.’

‘Moral,’ Cuthbert concluded:’don’t shut anything up. I never do.’

‘But perhaps the fun consists in breaking out,’ Lucy speculated.

‘Perverse and paradoxical prohibitionist!’

‘But obviously,’ Rampion was saying, ‘you get revolutions occurring inside as well as outside. It’s poor against rich in the state. In the individual, it’s the oppressed body and instincts against the intellect. The intellect’s been exalted as the spiritual upper classes; the spiritual lower classes rebel.’

‘Hear, hear!’ shouted Cuthbert, and banged the table.