XV

“How nice!” she said.

“Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else. And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species! Goodbye! darling! the serpent swallows itself and leaves a void, considerably messed up, but not hopeless. Very nice! When savage wild dogs bark in Wragby, and savage wild pit-ponies stamp on Tevershall pit-bank! te deum laudamus!”

Connie laughed, but not very happily.

“Then you ought to be pleased that they are all bolshevists,” she said. “You ought to be pleased that they hurry on towards the end.”

“So I am. I don’t stop ’em. Because I couldn’t if I would.”

“Then why are you so bitter?”

“I’m not! If my cock gives its last crow, I don’t mind.”

“But if you have a child?” she said.

He dropped his head.

“Why,” he said at last. “It seems to me a wrong and bitter thing to do, to bring a child into this world.”

“No! Don’t say it! Don’t say it!” she pleaded. “I think I’m going to have one. Say you’ll be pleased.” She laid her hand on his.

“I’m pleased for you to be pleased,” he said. “But for me it seems a ghastly treachery to the unborn creature.”