He sees me.  He adorns himself with a smile and comes forward with proffered hand.  I turn violently away.  I have no use for the hand of this sort of outsider, this sort of traitor.

They lie.  That ludicrous person who talks of taking the long view while there are still in the world only a few superb martyrs who have dared to do it, he who is satisfied to contemplate, beyond the present misery of men, the misery of their children; and the white-haired man who was extolling slavery just now, and trying to turn aside the demands of the people and switch them on to traditional massacre; and he who from the height of his bunting and trestles would have put a glamour of beauty and morality on battles; and he, the attitudinizer, who brings to life the memory of the dead only to deny with word trickery the terrible evidence of death, he who rewards the martyrs with the soft soap of false promises—­all these people tell lies, lies, lies!  Through their words I can hear the mental reservation they are chewing over—­“Around us, the deluge; and after us, the deluge.”  Or else they do not even lie; they see nothing and they know not what they say.

They have opened the red barrier.  Applause and congratulations cross each other.  Some notabilities come down from the rostrum, they look at me, they are obviously interested in the wounded soldier that I am, they advance towards me.  Among them is the intellectual person who spoke first.  He is wagging the white head and its cauliflower curls, and looking all ways with eyes as empty as those of a king of cards.  They told me his name, but I have forgotten it with contempt.  I slip away from them.  I am bitterly remorseful that for so long a portion of my life I believed what Boneas said.  I accuse myself of having formerly put my trust in speakers and writers who—­however learned, distinguished, famous—­were only imbeciles or villains.  I fly from these people, since I am not strong enough to answer and resist them—­or to cry out upon them that the only memory it is important to preserve of the years we have endured is that of their loathsome horror and lunacy.

* * * * * *

But the few words fallen from on high have sufficed to open my eyes, to show me that the Separation I dimly saw in the tempest of my nights in hospital was true.  It comes down from vacancy and the clouds, it takes form and it takes root—­it is there, it is there; and the indictment comes to light, as precise and as tragic as that row of faces!

Kings?  There they are.  There are many different kinds of king, just as there are different gods.  But there is one royalty everywhere, and that is the very form of ancient society, the great machine which is stronger than men.  And all the personages enthroned on that rostrum—­those business men and bishops, those politicians and great merchants, those bulky office-holders or journalists, those old generals in sumptuous decorations, those writers in uniform—­they are the custodians of the highest law and its executors.