“I’ve been so long out of touch with English life,” said he, “that it is most interesting to me to meet a typical Englishman.” Pillivant clapped him heavily on the shoulder. “You’re right, my boy,” he asserted thickly. “A downright, patriotic John Bull Englishman. The sort of stuff that’s winning the war for you, and don’t you make no mistake about it.” Baltazar went to bed pondering over his host. The annihilation of his own life’s work did not bear thinking about. That way lay madness. Pillivant brought a new interest. For all his adventurous journeyings he had not met the Pillivant type—or if he had fortuitously encountered it, he had passed it by in academic scorn. Had his ironical remark any basis of truth? Was Pillivant after all typical of the forces behind the war in this unknown modern England? Vulgarity, bluster, self-seeking, corruption, hypocrisy? The old aristocratic order changing into something loathsomely new? Pillivant posed as the successful man, engaged in vast affairs, working night and day for his country—he was only snatching, he had explained, a three weeks’ rest at this little country shanty which he had not seen for nearly a year. The luxury of the “shanty” proved his success; proved the magnitude of his dealings with the Government. So far there was no brag. But how came it that the Government put itself into the hands of such a man, openly boastful of his exploitation of official ineptitude? He could not be unique. There must be hundreds, thousands like him. Was he, in sober earnest, a typical modern Englishman? If so, thought Baltazar, God help England. And yet England must have still the qualities that made Cressy, Poitiers, Agincourt ring in English ears through the centuries: the qualities of the men who followed Drake and Marlborough and Nelson and Raglan. . . . That very morning he had read of British heroism on the Somme battlefield, and had been thrilled at realizing himself merged into the unconquerable soul of his race. He threw off his bedclothes—rose—flung the curtains wide apart, and thrust out all the room’s casement windows not already opened, and looked out into the starlit summer night. No. It was impossible for England to be peopled with Pillivants. They were the fishers in troubled waters, the blood-suckers, the parasites, the excrescences on an abnormal social condition. But why were they allowed to live? What was wrong? Who were the rulers? Their very names were but vaguely familiar to him. And he had read of strikes; of men earning—for the proletariat—fabulous wages, striking for more pay, selfishly, criminally (so it seemed to his unversed and aghast mind), refusing to provide the munitions of war for lack of which their own flesh and blood, earning a shilling a day, might be slaughtered in hecatombs. He threw himself into a chair. “My God!” said he, “I must get out of this and see what it all means.”