Mere rats, he declared, changing his metaphor. That was why he and every other intelligent man in the country refused to join in the rat fight which was the late war.
Olivia clutched Triona’s arm. “For God’s sake, Alexis, let us get out of this. It makes me sick.”
They drew deep breaths when they escaped into the fresh air. To Olivia, the little overcrowded drawing-room, deafening with loud voices, sour with the smell of milky tea and Virginian tobacco, reeking almost physically with the madness of anarchy, seemed a miniature of the bottomless pit. The irony of the man’s talk—the need to purify by flame a plague-stricken area! God once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Why did He not blast with fire from heaven this House of Pestilence?
Alexis Triona laughed sympathetically at her outburst.
“I confess they’re rather trying,” he remarked. “Whenever you hear English people say they belong to the intelligentsia, you may be sure they’re frightened at common sense as not being intellectual enough. Blenkiron and Dawkins are fools of the first water; but Pyefinch is dangerous. I am afraid I lost my temper,” he added after a few steps.
“You were splendid,” said Olivia.
More than ever did he seem the one clear-brained, purposeful man of her acquaintance in the confused London world. Rapidly she passed them in review as she walked. Of the others Mauregard was the best; but he was spending his life on fribbles, his highest heaven being a smile on the lips of a depraved dancing-woman. Then, Sydney Rooke, Mavenna, and, even worse now than Mavenna, the unspeakable Bobby Quinton. So much for the Lydian set of professed materialists and pleasure-seekers. In accepting Agnes Blenkiron’s invitation she had pleasurable anticipation of entering a sphere of earnest thinkers and social workers who might guide her stumbling footsteps into the path of duty to herself and her kind. And to her dismay she had met Dawkins and Blenkiron and Pyefinch, earnest, indeed, in their sophistry and mad in their theories of destruction. Her brain was in a whirl with the doctrines to which she had listened. She felt terrified at she knew not what. Even Lydia’s cynical world was better than this. Yet between these two extremes there must be a world of high endeavour, of science, art, philanthropy, thought; that in which, she vaguely imagined, Blaise Olifant must have his being; even that of the women at the club dinner. But her mind shook off women as alien to its subconscious argument. In this conjectural London world one man alone stood out typical—the man striding loosely by her side. A young careless angel, he had delivered her from Mavenna. A man, he had exorcised her horror of Bobby Quinton. And now, once more, she saw him, in her girlish fancy, a heroic figure, sane, calm, and scornful, facing a horde of madmen.
They walked, occasionally losing their way and being put on it by chance encounters, through the maze of new and distressingly decorous avenues, some finished, others petering out, after a few houses, into placarded building lots or waste land; a wilderness not of the smug villa-dom of old-established suburbs, but of a queer bungalow-dom assertive, in its distinctive architecture, of unreal pursuit of Aspirations in capital letters. Most of the avenues abutted on a main street of shops with pseudo-artistic frontages giving the impression that the inhabitants of the City could only be induced to satisfy the vulgar needs of their bodies by the lure of the æsthetic.
“Don’t let us judge our late friends too harshly,” said Triona waving an arm. “All this is the Land of Self-Consciousness.”
At last they made their way through the solider, stolider fringes of the main road, and emerged on the great thoroughfare itself, wide and unbusied on this late summer Sunday afternoon. Prosaically they lingered, waiting for an infrequent omnibus.