of his life. He sweated racial hatred in the night. If it still sometimes struck him that in the stokehold he had fallen down the spout of the capitalist system, that feeling was now inseparable from his loathing of the Jews. It was somehow the fault of the poor old Jews, not merely Bolowski, but all Jews, that he'd found himself down the stokehold in the first place on a wild-goose chase. It was even due to the Jews that such economic excrescences as the British Mercantile Marine existed. In his day dreams he became the instigator of enormous pogroms--all-inclusive, and hence, bloodless. And daily he moved nearer his design. True, between it and him, from time to time rose up the shadow of the Philoctetes's lamp-trimmer. Or flickered the shadows of the trimmers in the Oedipus Tyrannus. Were not Bolowski and his ilk the enemies of their own race and the Jews themselves the cast-out, exploited, and wandering of the earth, even as they, even, once, as he? But what was the brotherhood of man when your brothers put stale bread in your sea-bag? Still, where else to turn for some decent and clear values? Had his father or mother not died perhaps? His aunt? Geoff? But Geoff, like some ghostly other self, was always in Rabat or Timbuctoo. Besides he'd deprived him once already of the dignity of being a rebel. Hugh smiled as he lay on the daybed.... For there had been someone, he now saw, to whose memory at least he might have turned. It reminded him moreover that he'd been an ardent revolutionary for a while at the age of thirteen. And, odd to recall, was it not this same Headmaster of his former prep school, and Scoutmaster, Dr. Gotelby, fabulous stalking totem pole of Privilege, the Church, the English gentleman--God save the King and sheet anchor of parents, who'd been responsible for his heresy? Goat old boy! With admirable independence the fiery old fellow, who preached the virtues each Sunday in Chapel, had illustrated to his goggling history class how the Bolshevists, far from being the child murderers in the Daily Mail, followed a way of life only less splendid than that current throughout his own community of Pangbourne Garden City. But Hugh had forgotten his ancient mentor then. Just as he had long since forgotten to do his good turn every day. That a Christian smiles and whistles under all difficulties and that once a scout you were always a Communist. Hugh only remembered to be prepared. So Hugh seduced Bolowski's wife.
This was perhaps a matter of opinion... But unfortunately it hadn't changed Bolowski's decision to file suit for divorce, naming Hugh as correspondent. Almost worse was to follow. Bolowski suddenly charged Hugh with attempting to deceive him in other respects, that the songs he'd published were nothing less than plagiarisms of two obscure American numbers. Hugh was staggered. Could this be? Had he been living in a world of illusion so absolute he'd looked forward passionately to the publication of someone else's songs, paid for by himself, or rather by his aunt, that, involvedly, even his disillusionment on their account was false? It was not, it proved, quite so bad as that. Yet there was all too solid ground for the accusation so far as one song was concerned...
On the daybed Hugh wrestled with his cigar. God almighty. Good God all blistering mighty. He must have known all the time. He knew he had known. On the other hand, caring only for the rendering, it looked as if he could be persuaded by his guitar that almost any song was his. The fact that the American number was infallibly a plagiarism too didn't help the slightest. Hugh was in anguish. At this point he was living in Blackheath and one day, the threat of exposure dogging every footstep, he walked fifteen miles to the city, through the slums of Lewisham, Catford, New Cross, down the Old Kent Road, past, ah, the Elephant and Castle, into the heart of London. His poor songs pursued him in a minor key now, macabre. He wished he could be lost in these poverty-stricken hopeless districts romanticized by Longfellow. He wished the world would swallow