“We should go to the Zoo more often, and watch the monkeys. The chimpanzee leaps with the dexterity of a politician. The Irish-looking ourang smokes his pipe as placidly as a Camden Town murderer. The purple-bottomed mandrils on heat will initiate you into love. And the perpetual chatter of the small monkeys—how like ourselves! What ecstatic clicking about nothing! Go to the ape, thou poet.” Mr. Upjohn laughed abruptly and spat with a raucous cough: “An old idea, but what’s it got to do with _le mouvement?_ Still, what I mean is, I might do something with it....” Poor old George! He was a bloody fool. He never learned how fatally unwise it is to express any sort of an idea to a brother—still less to a sister—artist. Mr. Upjohn discoursed on Suprematism and himself. At Notting Hill Gate, George halted. The Sabbath ennui shot its tentacles at him, and enlaced his spirit, dragging him down into the whirlpool of wanhope. Why go on? Why affront the veiled hostility of people? Why suffer those eyes to search and those nimble unerring tongues to wound? Oh, wrap oneself in solitude, like an armoured shroud, and bend over the dead words of a dead language! A simian biped! O gods, gods! And Plato talks of Beauty. “Come along,” shouted Mr. Upjohn, a few paces ahead, “this way. Holland Park. Old Shobbe’ll be waiting for me in that mob. What I mean is, he knows I’m the only other intelligent person in London.” George still hesitated. He sank deeper in the maelstrom of unintelligible and causeless despair. Why go on? The adolescent love of death and suicide—corollary to youth’s vitality and vivid energy—swept over him in choking waves. To cease upon the midnight with no pain.... “I think I shan’t come,” he shouted after the retreating Mr. Upjohn. Mr. Upjohn hurried back and seized George’s arm: “What’s the matter with you? The best way to get an article out of Shobbe is to go and see him on his Sunday evenings. Come on. We shall be late.” No Euripidean chorus uttered gnomic reflections on the inevitable and irresistible power of Ananke, the Destiny which is above the gods. No bright god warned him, no oracular voice spoke to him. Conflict of free-will and destiny! But is there a conflict? Whether we move or are still, whether we go to the right or the left, hesitate or rush blindly forward, the thread is inexorably spun. Ananke. Ananke. George yielded reluctantly to the tug at his arm. “All right, I’ll come.” [ II ]