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then a little group of children, a nursemaid and a woman going shopping, and so forth. They
came on to the stage right or left, up or down the street, with an exasperating suggestion of
indifference to any concerns more spacious than their own; they would discover the police-
guarded house with amazement and exit in the opposite direction, where the great trusses of a
giant hydrangea hung across the pavement, staring back or pointing. Now and then a man
would come and ask one of the policemen a question and get a curt reply ...
Opposite the houses seemed dead. A housemaid appeared once at a bedroom window and
stared for a space, and it occurred to Redwood to signal to her. For a time she watched his
gestures as if with interest and made a vague response to them, then looked over her shoulder
suddenly and turned and went away. An old man hobbled out of Number 37 and came down
the steps and went off to the right, altogether without looking up. For ten minutes the only
occupant of the road was a cat....
With such events that interminable momentous morning lengthened out.
About twelve there came a bawling of newsvendors from the adjacent road; but it passed.
Contrary to their wont they left Redwood s street alone, and a suspicion dawned upon him that
the police were guarding the end of the street. He tried to open the window, but this brought a
policeman into the room forthwith....
The clock of the parish church struck twelve, and after an abyss of time  one.
They mocked him with lunch.
He ate a mouthful and tumbled the food about a little in order to get it taken away, drank freely
of whisky, and then took a chair and went back to the window. The minutes expanded into grey
immensities, and for a time perhaps he slept....
He woke with a vague impression of remote concussions. He perceived a rattling of the
windows like the quiver of an earthquake, that lasted for a minute or so and died away. Then
after a silence it returned.... Then it died away again. He fancied it might be merely the
passage of some heavy vehicle along the main road. What else could it be?
After a time he began to doubt whether he had heard this sound.
He began to reason interminably with himself. Why, after all, was he seized? Caterham had
been in office two days  just long enough  to grasp his Nettle! Grasp his Nettle! Grasp his
Giant Nettle! The refrain once started, sang through his mind, and would not be dismissed.
What, after all, could Caterham do? He was a religious man. He was bound in a sort of way by
that not to do violence without a cause.
Grasp his Nettle I Perhaps, for example, the Princess was to be seized and sent abroad. There
might be trouble with his son. In which case  ! But why had he been arrested? Why was it
necessary to keep him in ignorance of a thing like that? The thing suggested  something
more extensive.
Perhaps, for example  they meant to lay all the giants by the heels I They were all to be
arrested together. There had been hints of that In the election speeches. And then?
No doubt they had got Cossar also?
Caterham was a religious man. Redwood clung to that. The back of his mind was a black
curtain, and on that curtain there came and went a word  a word written in letters of fixe. He
struggled perpetually against that word. It was always as it were beginning to get written on the
curtain and never getting completed.
He faced it at last.  Massacre! There was the word in its full brutality.
No! No! No! It was impossible! Caterham was a religious man, a civilised man. And besides
after all these years, after all these hopes!
Redwood sprang up; he paced the room. He spoke to himself; he shouted.
 No! 
Mankind was surely not so mad as that  surely not! It was impossible, it was incredible, it
could not be. What good would it do to kill the giant human when the gigantic in all the lower
things had now inevitably come? They could not be so mad as that!  I must dismiss such an
idea, he said aloud;  dismiss such an idea! Absolutely!
He pulled up short. What was that?
Certainly the windows had rattled. He went to look out into the street. Opposite he saw the
instant confirmation of his ears. At a bedroom at Number 35 was a woman, towel in hand, and
at the dining-room of Number 37 a man was visible behind a great vase of hypertrophied
maidenhair fern, both staring out and up, both disquieted and curious. He could see now too,
quite clearly, that the policeman on the pavement had heard it also. The thing was not his
imagination.
He turned to the darkling room.
 Guns, he said.
He brooded.
 Guns?
They brought him in strong tea, such as he was accustomed to have. It was evident his
housekeeper had been taken into consultation. After drinking it, he was too restless to sit any
longer at the window, and he paced the room. His mind became more capable of consecutive
thought.
The room had been his study for four-and-twenty years. It had been furnished at his marriage,
and all the essential equipment dated from then, the large complex writing-desk, the rotating
chair, the easy chair at the fire, the rotating bookcase, the fixture of indexed pigeon-holes that
filled the further recess. The vivid Turkey carpet, the later Victorian rugs and curtains had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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