She sat and ruminated. The thunder crashed outside. It was like being in a little ark in the Flood.
"You seem to have such a lot behind you," she said.
"Do I? It seems to me I've died once or twice already. Yet here I am, pegging on, and in for more trouble."
She was thinking hard, yet listening to the storm.
"And weren't you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel was dead?"
"No! They were a mingy lot." He laughed suddenly. "The Colonel used to say: Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful thirty times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea would give them a stoppage. They're the mingiest set of ladylike snipe ever invented: full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their bootlaces aren't correct, rotten as high game, and always in the right. That's what finishes me up. Kow-tow, kow-tow, arse-licking till their tongues are tough: yet they're always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs! A generation of ladylike prigs with half a ball each."
Connie laughed. The rain was rushing down.
"He hated them!"
"No," said he. "He didn't bother. He just disliked them. There's a difference. Because, as he said, the Tommies are getting just as priggish and half-balled and narrow-gutted. It's the fate of mankind, to go that way."
"The common people too, the working people?"
"All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motorcars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck the last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It's all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They're all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but machine-fucking!—It's all alike. Pay 'em money to cut off the world's cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind, and leave 'em all little twiddling machines."
He sat there in the hut, his face pulled to mocking irony. Yet
