They won’t need his evidence.

LARRY

Tensely.

By God, I hate to believe it of any of the crowd, if I am through long since with any connection with them. I know they’re damned fools, most of them, as stupidly greedy for power as the worst capitalist they attack, but I’d swear there couldn’t be a yellow stool pigeon among them.

PARRITT

Sure. I’d have sworn that, too, Larry.

LARRY

I hope his soul rots in hell, whoever it is!

PARRITT

Yes, so do I.

LARRY

After a pause—shortly.

How did you locate me? I hoped I’d found a place of retirement here where no one in the Movement would ever come to disturb my peace.

PARRITT

I found out through Mother.

LARRY

I asked her not to tell anyone.

PARRITT

She didn’t tell me, but she’d kept all your letters and I found where she’d hidden them in the flat. I sneaked up there one night after she was arrested.

LARRY

I’d never have thought she was a woman who’d keep letters.

PARRITT

No, I wouldn’t, either. There’s nothing soft or sentimental about Mother.

LARRY

I never answered her last letters. I haven’t written her in a couple of years—or anyone else. I’ve gotten beyond the desire to communicate with the world—or, what’s more to the point, let it bother me any more with its greedy madness.

PARRITT

It’s funny Mother kept in touch with you so long. When she’s finished with anyone, she’s finished. She’s always been proud of that. And you know how she feels about the Movement. Like a revivalist preacher about religion. Anyone who loses faith in it is more than dead to her; he’s a Judas who ought to be boiled in oil. Yet she seemed to forgive you.

LARRY

Sardonically.

She didn’t, don’t worry. She wrote to denounce me and try to bring the sinner to repentance and a belief in the One True Faith again.

PARRITT

What made you leave the Movement, Larry? Was it on account of Mother?

LARRY

Starts.

Don’t be a damned fool! What the hell put that in your head?

PARRITT

Why, nothing—except I remember what a fight you had with her before you left.

LARRY

Resentfully.

Well, if you do, I don’t. That was eleven years ago. You were only seven. If we did quarrel, it was because I told her I’d become convinced the Movement was only a beautiful pipe dream.

PARRITT

With a strange smile.

I don’t remember it that way.

LARRY

Then you can blame your imagination—and forget it.

He changes the subject abruptly.

You asked me why I quit the Movement. I had a lot of good reasons. One was myself, and another was my comrades, and the last was the breed of swine called men in general. For myself, I was forced to admit, at the end of thirty years’ devotion to the Cause, that I was never made for it. I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you’re damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it’s all question and no answer. As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything, especially revolution, you have to wear blinders like a horse and see only straight in front of you. You have to see, too, that this is all black, and that is all white. As for my comrades in the Great Cause, I felt as Horace Walpole did about England, that he could love it if it weren’t for the people in it. The material the ideal free society must be constructed from is men themselves and you can’t build a marble temple out of a mixture of mud and manure. When man’s soul isn’t a sow’s ear, it will be time enough to dream of silk purses.

He chuckles sardonically—then irritably as if suddenly provoked at himself for talking so much.

Well, that’s why I quit the Movement, if it leaves you any wiser. At any rate, you see it had nothing to do with your mother.

PARRITT

Smiles almost mockingly.

Oh, sure, I see. But I’ll bet Mother has always thought it was on her account. You know her, Larry.