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humility.
    His inclination was to refuse, but he knew that he would accept, that he would suffer the hours of martyrdom, sitting in front of his dead wife’s pictures which hung on every wall, the exquisite stylized landscapes, the green populous vistas which had emerged so simply and certainly from her malicious cantankerous brain. During a long, faithful and unhappy marriage they had exposed each other to Caroline Bury with a complete lack of reticence, and now to visit Caroline was to expose himself again. ‘Sacrifice.’ There were occasions of brutal insight when she recognized the cause of his philosophy and his politics; his inability to conceal anything had humiliated him so often that he had needed to form a philosophy of humiliation, to found his career on self-exposure. ‘Be humble that you may be exalted,’ and from the depth of humility he would spring refreshed to the height of pride.
    â€˜Shall I whistle a taxi, sir?’
    He called to his servant through the closed door, ‘Can’t you leave me alone, Davis? I can look after myself,’ and twisting in the seesaw of pride and humility between the window and the door, between the mirror and the bust of Lenin, he heard his wife’s voice saying with fierce dislike: ‘You haven’t practised that expression enough.’ Suddenly through the stillness, like the ghost of old dinners, he heard a nut crack. He stayed very still, half expecting to smell the bouquet of port, to hear the clink of a glass, but there was a silence, except for the hiss of the gas fire, the faint rat-tat of the postman on the opposite side of the square. Not until he began to stride the room again was the sound repeated; it was unmistakably the cracking of a nut.
    Mr Surrogate gazed at the glass bowl of cobnuts on the sideboard and then stealthily approached the bookcase. All along one shelf stood the record of his intellectual progress: Forward to Free Trade, Back to Protection , in their English and American editions; only with The Capital Levy had his writing reached the Continent and German and Czechoslovakian publishers. His eye followed with pride the record of his increasing humility: The Nationalization of Industry, with An Appendix on Scales of Compensation was followed by the brief triumphant title, No Compensation . The shelf was not quite full. The American edition of The Dictatorship of the Worker leant at an angle against the shelf end. Mr Surrogate stooped and put his ear against The Capital Levy ; a nut cracked boisterously in the darkness behind.
    Mr Surrogate spread his fingers and withdrew suddenly and simultaneously three editions of No Compensation . There, surprised in the act of dining, a nut between its paws, sat a mouse. Mr Surrogate and the mouse were both startled. For quite a long while they stared at each other without moving. The mouse did not even drop the nut. Perhaps it hoped to remain unnoticed. It may never have seen before a human face so close, almost within reach of an extended tail, and the great white moony expanse may have had the appearance of a natural phenomenon. All round it, and all along the bookcase, lay the débris of uncounted meals and worse, breadcrumbs, broken shells, scraps of old envelopes and of discarded manuscript, toffee papers, for Mr Surrogate had a sweet tooth. It had evidently dined nightly and dined well. Mr Surrogate cautiously drew back, and the mouse, dropping the nut, whisked into the darkness behind The Capital Levy .
    With his hand already outstretched to rob it of that refuge, Mr Surrogate became compassionate. His whole face softened and relaxed. ‘Poor little mouse.’ His mouth fell a little open, and he yearned towards it in its shelter. ‘Poor, poor little mouse.’ He thought of the great Russian novelist comforted in the Siberian prison by the nightly visitation of a mouse. ‘I too. The prison of this world,’ and his eyes filled with tears,