It would mean that the women of Salisbury would remain unsampled by him—unless he found someone at the Tattoo.—Perhaps he would.—He imagined the feel of the rough downland grass on the palms of his hands and on his face.

Orvil looked at him intently and thought of the girls in books who ran away with their father’s chauffeur. He could see the attraction. It lay not so much in the chauffeur himself (this one at least was pink and pig-like) but in the speed; the uniform, as of some mysterious unknown army; the shut-in-together, desert-island feeling; and the melting feeling of escape.

The car stopped, and they had to wander about in the mud and the dark for some time, until they found their seats in the wooden stand.

The tattoo had not begun yet, but a searchlight played on a fat man in white who was leading community singing. He waved his arms and sweated. A weak, genteel answer came from the huge crowd. The fat man swivelled from the hips in a frenzy. Orvil had the fear, when he bent right back and his belly welled forward, that one of the walls might break and rupture. (He thought that, in a rupture, entrails gushed out of a split in the body. He dreaded to see a spreading red stain on the white trousers and shirt.) The full wind-skin belly swung dangerously from side to side. Orv il shut his eyes, then opened them again. The fat man’s pectoral muscles were so relaxed and overlaid with fat thatthey looked like pretty adolescent girl’s breasts. Orvil could see them dancing and bouncing about under the white cotton, and he caught clearer glimpses when the unbuttoned shirt blew wide open.

He wanted to laugh now. They looked so gay and ridiculous; like two little animated castle-puddings.

Suddenly dull drum-beats stopped the singing. Searchlights wheeled round and flooded all their rigid beams into one corner of the field.

At first Orvil could make out nothing, then he saw a white goat emerge from the blackness. It looked almost green in the searchlight beams, and behind its tiny shape came the thick broad river of massed bands.

Orvil thought the sight one of the most wonderful he had ever seen. He could not take his eyes from the proud men throwing silver batons into the air, or from the gladiator-like ones draped in leopard skins, beating scarlet drums as big as the largest cheeses. The tramp and swing of the vast flowing river intoxicated him. And there was the delicate-stepping, wicked little goat, with its beautiful powdered hair blowing freely in the wind, leading all these hundreds of meekly obeying men in arrogant scarlet cloth, gold braid and fur.

Orvil thought of the boys at school who so often joked about goats, nearly always bringing them into their grotesque stories. Now, as he looked at the pageant, he could not rid his mind of the memory of these jokes. He saw the goat being used shamefully by the whole regiment of men. They had all gone mad and were defiling their sacred emblem, until it lay dead at last on the ground.

“Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think,” Orvil told himself desperately, trying to fix his mind on the real scene before him.

The massed bands were passing out of the light now, into the darkness on the other side. The searchlights swung round suddenly and illuminated another region. A mud-coloured city gate and wall jumped out from the blackness. Curious Arabian-looking people flung themselves down from the wall, as if shot. Others advanced and then fell, rolling in agony on the ground. The British troops crept up stealthily in their Victorian helmets. Little puffs of smoke from their rifles hung in the air like white balls. The victors yelled war-cries and cheered. The vanquished grovelled in the dust, begging for mercy.

When it was all over and they had left Ben to go back to his camp, Orvil turned to the chauffeur.

“How did you enjoy it?” he asked.

“Very much indeed, thank you,” came the polite smooth answer.

Orvil looked up at the outline of the chauffeur’s plump face. It seemed placid now.