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fantastic future the Communist Party should take it into its crackpot head to order Miss Foulkes to blow up the factory, then poor Miss Foulkes, he imagined, torn asunder, schizophrenic, would probably go mad. Meanwhile he found a strange comfort in her loyalty, and now that things were going badly he relied upon it more and more.
    â€œBank or no Bank,” he said, “we’ll carry on, shall we, until we’re down to that last halfpenny in the Petty Cash?”
    She nodded, unsmiling, for she didn’t think there was anything funny about the halfpenny.
    â€œWe’ll make a few thousand elephants on spec,” he said. “Elephants always do go well at Christmas. Or shall it be pigs?”
    â€œPigs were more in demand last year.”
    â€œShall we put a squeak in them?”
    â€œIt adds to the cost, but they go better with a squeak.”
    â€œOur last dying squeak.” Still she did not smile. “Now I’ll go and tell Jim to change the formas. You’d better put those roses in water,” he said.
    The salmon-pink blush rose like a tide up her neck and arms and he hurried to the door, aware once again of her vulnerability, puzzled and embarrassed by it because it didn’t fit in with the rest of her, it was one of those complexities which he didn’t understand.
V
    The Committee Meeting, that typically and terribly English thing, had been going on for nearly two hours, and Stephen’s wounded knee, cramped under the table, was nagging him like a toothache. The end was not yet in sight.
    Originally the Committee had consisted of eight; but its membership had been doubled by the co-option of people who were said to have “felt hurt.” To-day there were several new members whom Stephen did not even know. The deliberations of this multitude, as it seemed to him, followed a course as tortuous as that of the town’s own river. They meandered, they ran in circles, they tied themselves in knots; unpredictable cat’s-paws of wind rippled them and uncharted currents stirred their depths. A proposal to insure against rain had just given the Vicar an excuse to deliver a considerable sermon on the subject of anticyclones. Stephen, who had heard it several times before, let his mind wander away while the voice of the Vicar bumbled on and a distant cuckoo mocked the whole proceedings through the open window.
    His thoughts went back through time and space to a spring morning in 1944, that had been full of unseen cuckoos too, and to an olive-grove in Thessaly. The occasion was the only one in his life when he had been really important; and his importance was due to the fact that a crumpled parachute lay in folds at his feet and he held a tommy-gun in his hands. Until that moment he had been a very ordinary person: in peace-time a history master at second-rate prep schools eking out his miserable pay by conducting archæological tours to Greece every summer holidays, in war-time a clerkly intelligence officer, one more dogsbody among all the dogsbodies on the swollen staff at Cairo. Then, quite suddenly, he had been translated—there was no other word for it—into a sort of Prometheus; for he brought fire from heaven, in the shape of grenades andmortar shells, to the men who had fought for years with old rifles and their bare hands. For thirteen months he had lived like an Olympian; until on VE-day a bone-shaking lorry had carried him back to Athens with a shattered knee, back to the ordinariness of hospital, demobilisation, unsuccessful bookselling, and small-town Committee Meetings at which the subject under discussion at the moment was, of all things, horse-manure.
    â€œA dollop of muck,” Mr. Handiman was saying, “from the Council’s stables would do ’em a world of good.”
    Nearly two years ago, when the Festival was first mooted, Mr. Handiman the ironmonger had received a poetic inspiration, although at the time he was fishing with