see how the fates betray them. In their service of the defunct ideal they find themselves utterly humiliated, sold. In England, Italy, Germany, India, Australia, that had been the one word men had used to describe their feeling. They had been sold. But not before they had sold themselves. Now then. The moment a man feels he has been sold, sold in the deepest things, something goes wrong with his whole mechanism. Something breaks, in his tissue, and the black poison is emitted into his blood. And then he follows a natural course, and becomes a creature of slow, or of quick, revenge. Revenge on all that the old ideal is and stands for. Revenge on the whole system. Just revenge. Even further revenge on himself.
Men revenged themselves on Athens, when they felt sold. When Rome, persisting in an old, defunct ideal, gradually made her subjects feel sold, they were revenged on her, no matter how. Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire the same. And now our turn. "Revenge," Timotheus cries. And Timotheus is just everybody, except those that have got hold of the money or the power.
There is nothing for it but revenge. If you sow the dragon's teeth, you mustn't expect lilies of the valley to spring up in sweet meekness.
And Kangaroo? Kangaroo insisted on the old idea as hard as ever, though on the Power of Love rather than on the Submission and Sacrifice of Love. He wanted to take his revenge in an odour of sanctification and Lily of the Valley essence. But he was the mob, really. See his face in a rage. He was the mob: the vengeful mob. Oh, God, the most terrifying of all things.
And Willie Struthers? The vengeful mob also. But if the old ideal had still a logical leaf to put forth, it was this last leaf of communism—before the lily-tree of humanity rooted in love died its final death. Perhaps better Struthers than Kangaroo.
"But what about myself?" said Richard Lovat to himself, as he lay in the darkness of Sydney, his brain afire. For the horrible bitter fire seemed really to have got into his brain, burst up from his deepest bowels. "What about me? Am I too Timotheus crying Revenge?"
Oh, revenge, yes, he wanted to be avenged. He wanted to be avenged. Especially when he felt tangled up in the
