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By Root 5719 0

fall of Penang. The former went around shaking hands with everyone politely and murmuring to them in a soothing voice, as if in the presence of a mortal illness. ‘Sad news, I’m afraid,’ he whispered to Matthew, who was startled to see him winking and nodding. But this was only a nervous idiosyncrasy, it appeared. The Doctor had entered accompanied by Dupigny whose wounds he had been dressing. Despite these wounds Dupigny seemed in good spirits. A dressing had been applied to one side of his face with sticking plaster and there was another dressing on the back of his skull where the hair had been partly shaved away to accommodate it. Nevertheless, his eyes glinted with malicious pleasure as he surveyed the despondent scene in the Blacketts’ drawing-room. This was for two reasons: firstly, the Blacketts had behaved so condescendingly towards him since the fall of France that he found it agreeable to see them in a humbler frame of mind; secondly, it vindicated all the sombre predictions he had been making for the past few months concerning the Japanese to the general amusement of Singapore. Moreover, in a general way it reinforced all his deterministic beliefs about the way nations behave.

For Dupigny a nation resembled a very primitive human being: this human being consisted of, simply, an appetite and some sort of mechanism for satisfying the appetite. In the case of a nation the appetite was usually, if not quite invariably, economic … (now and again the national vanity which at intervals gripped nations like France and Britain would compel them to some act which made no sense economically: but in this respect, too, they resembled human beings). As for the mechanism for fulfilling the appetite, what was that but a nation’s armed forces? The more powerful the armed forces the better the prospects for satiating the appetite; the more powerful the armed forces the more likely (indeed, inevitable, in Dupigny’s view) that an attempt would be made to satiate it; just as heavyweight boxers are more frequently involved in tavern brawls than, say, dentists, so the very existence of power demands that it should be used. His own failure in Indo-China had merely confirmed him in his cynical views. The League of Nations? Nothing but a pious waste of time!

‘Never mind, he’s had a good innings,’ the Doctor observed soothingly to no one in particular, while Matthew, who was sitting on a sofa nearby, gazed at him baffled by this remark for which he could see no sane explanation. Joan came to sit beside him and he realized with a mild shock: ‘People must now think we’re a couple!’ He could not think of anything to say to her, however. She said in an undertone: ‘Poor Monty, they keep trying to call him up for the F.M.S. Volunteers. But, of course, he’s doing essential war work and can’t possibly go. Besides, they can hardly be “volunteers” if they’re forcing him to join, can they?’ Matthew had to agree that, strictly speaking … She ignored him, however, and went on: ‘I do believe that François is wearing new clothes.’

It was true. After months of appearing in the threadbare suit he had managed to salvage in his flight from Saigon Dupigny was now smartly dressed in a new shirt, new trousers, and a new linen jacket, not to mention a splendid pair of gleaming shoes. This elegant attire he had succeeded, not without difficulty, in looting from a burning shop in George Town. The bandages which swathed the fingers and palms of both hands were the result of this gallant effort, though he did not say so when anyone remarked on them, implying diffidently instead that he had been obliged to rescue someone (himself, as it happened: he had spent too long searching for clothes that were the right size) from a blazing building where he had been trapped by a beam which had fallen across his foot. ‘With the roof about to fall,’ he was explaining modestly to Mrs Blackett as he gingerly accepted a pahit from the Chinese boy’s tray, ‘it was necessary to pick it up with the bare hands, otherwise he would not have had a chance, the poor fellow.’

Walter, overhearing