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Are you frightened of anything?

Suffer the little children, to come unto me, because they will speak the truths only fools know. Oh, the Son of Man knew what he was talking about, that was for certain.

And the Son of Man did his own sitting on the heights, thinking on the morrow, wondering if he might not simply slip away and leave his friends to sort it out.

A simple child that lightly draws its breath / And feels its life in every limb; what should it know of death? Interesting, that the Bard of Avon had so few children in his writing while Wordsworth had so many. If Wordsworth had been a playwright forced to deal with actors, would he, too, have replaced children with sprites and fairies?

A simple child should know nothing of death, or fear, or hunger. But children did, all the time. Estelle Adler certainly did, poor mite—mother murdered, father hunted. But what was that to him?

An ambulance driver had responsibilities, but they were not those of an officer. A driver’s demands were immediate, clear-cut, and rode light upon the conscience: Men died, but if one had done one’s job, those deaths could be laid at the foot of someone else. Some officer.

Even then, even Before, his very soul—that Other whom he once was—had cringed from an officer’s relationship with the men in his command. Not through cowardice: He would risk life and limb to bring a man home, even one who was not going to reach the field hospital alive. But he would not lead them. He would not love them and comfort them and cajole them into the path of flying metal. He’d have put a lump of metal into his own brain first.

Are you frightened of anything, Mr Robert?

An omnibus paused between his toes, sucking up a row of tiny figures, evacuating others. The Son of Man could walk among those figures and go unnoticed, for to their minds, they were the gods. Modern gods, whose mighty commands rang down the telephone wires; who parted the waters with steamers and digging machines; who rained fire from the heavens over the poor cowering wretches in the trenches; who thundered rage in the engines of their trains and the blare of their motorcar klaxons.

Take away this cup, for I am afraid. If the Son of Man couldn’t talk his way out of what was coming for him, how could any other son of man?

A tiny dot of brilliant blue caught his eye, and he bent forward to watch it: a woman’s hat, a spot of defiant joie de vivre sailing the drab sea before it was swallowed by a shop.

With the bright spot gone, he became aware of the pull of the street, far below. Mad world, mad kings, mad composition! There was earth beneath the tarmac and tile, real earth, and its call was, ultimately, not to be denied. Who was to say it would not be today?

Without a doubt, the time had passed for men like him. The city below him was a machine, its people mere moving parts generating goods and money. Cold rationality had spread across this fair land: Its nobility were those who stole for good purpose. Which he could understand—gods made their own rules—but these took no joy in life. The gods of this England were film stars and dispensers of tawdry advice, and they embraced brittle frivolity rather than the deep and supple exuberance of woodland creatures. In this England, Ariel would wear a straight-jacket, Hamlet would be fodder for the gossip columns. Hadn’t he seen Oberon and Titania this very morning, aged and worn as the feather in his borrowed hat: a man and a woman, older than their years, sitting on a park bench in their cast-off overcoats and sharing a scrap of ill-cooked food? The king and queen of the fairy world, eking out their days amongst the wind-blown biscuit wrappers.

Goodman pulled the feather from his hat band. This primary flight-feather of Strix aluco had greeted him one morning outside his front door, a gift from the tawny lady whose home was in the old oak, whose voice often called to him at night. His fingers smoothed the barbs to order, but there remained a gap. One barb was missing.