“I spent a week at Grimsby, some years ago, organizing a fisherman’s union. They used to throw the fish back into the sea, tons upon tons of it, that men had risked their lives to catch, that would have fed half London’s poor. There was a ‘glut’ of it, they said. The ‘market’ didn’t want it. Funny, isn’t it, a ‘glut’ of food: and the kiddies can’t learn their lessons for want of it. I was talking with a farmer down in Kent. The plums were rotting on his trees. There were too many of them: that was the trouble. The railway carriage alone would cost him more than he could get for them. They were too cheap. So nobody could have them. It’s the muddle of the thing that makes me mad—the ghastly muddle-headed way the chief business of the world is managed. There’s enough food could be grown in this country to feed all the people and then of the fragments each man might gather his ten basketsful. There’s no miracle needed. I went into the matter once with Dalroy of the Board of Agriculture. He’s the best man they’ve got, if they’d only listen to him. It’s never been organized: that’s all. It isn’t the fault of the individual. It ought not to be left to the individual. The man who makes a corner in wheat in Chicago and condemns millions to privation—likely enough, he’s a decent sort of fellow in himself: a kind husband and father—would be upset for the day if he saw a child crying for bread. My dog’s a decent enough little chap, as dogs go, but I don’t let him run my larder. “I’ll be lonely and anxious till you come back,” he said. “But that will have to be my part of the fight.”!

“What’s he like in himself?” he asked her. “You’ve been seeing something of him, haven’t you?” “Ah,” he said, “you would understand if you had. When one of the horses goes down gored, his entrails lying out upon the sand, you know what they do, don’t you? They put a rope round him, and drag him, groaning, into the shambles behind. And once there, kind people like you and Monsieur le Médecin tend him and wash him, and put his entrails back, and sew him up again. He thinks it so kind of them—the first time. But the second! He understands. He will be sent back into the arena to be ripped up again, and again after that. This is the third time I have been wounded, and as soon as you’ve all patched me up and I’ve got my breath again, they’ll send me back into it. Mam’selle will forgive my not feeling grateful to her.” He gave a short laugh that brought the blood into his mouth.

She stood beneath the withered trees, beside the shattered fountain. The sad-faced ghosts peeped out at her from the broken windows of the little silent houses. She forced him gently back into his chair, and seated herself upon the floor between his knees. “What were you thinking of when I came in?” she asked. “You weren’t asleep, were you?” Joan recounted the episode—so far as the doorstep.