Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper. Martin Edwards

to be caught.

       He wanted it.

      Suddenly Mr Watson managed to give a violent lurch.

      But it didn’t mean anything. His face was black, his head had sunk, his body gave a kind of twist and Mr Bowling held him a few moments more and then allowed it to collapse face downwards into the red cushion. He pulled up the sagging knees and dumped them on the settee and stood up. He was panting.

      Presently, Mr Bowling straightened his collar, took up his papers and hat and went out of the house.

      He smiled in the summer sunshine and decided to go to the pictures.

      He went to the Metropole in Victoria, somehow he felt more at home in Victoria than Fulham, it was near to Queenie, where he would go later on. For the present, he wanted the quiet and the dark, but not the quiet and the dark of solitude.

      He wanted to think things out.

      He presently decided that he was a fox. He wanted the chase, he expected to be caught, and he even wanted that. He wanted the hunters to have every chance.

      He was one of life’s misfits. A bungler with money, and with life; just a poor devil with an artistic soul, ruined by education. Cursed or blessed with a weak heart, and thereby useless to his country in matters to do with killing; just a knock-about. Yes, yes, he thought in the pictures, the sooner they catch me, the better: though not a soul will ever understand. Not a soul.

      He sat in the pictures with his eyes shut, in very severe mental agony.

      Half way through the big picture, he fell fast asleep. When he woke up, people were roaring with laughter. He roared with laughter too until tears came.

      Then he slipped out and hurriedly bought a newspaper.

       CHAPTER V

      QUEENIE was waiting for him in the new flat she and Rodney had recently chosen. They still stuck to Belgravia, it was a habit, it was home, they knew all the locals.

      Locals were their background.

      Queenie was wife-hunting for Mr Bowling. ‘Dear Bill,’ as she called him. ‘I must have a scout round,’ she told Rodney in her pleasant way.

      ‘I doubt if you need trouble,’ Rodney said. He took what he called rather a poor view of that Bowling fellow.

      ‘Whyever?’ Queenie teased him now and again.

      ‘I hate cynics,’ Rodney commented, and he argued with Queenie that there was too much of the cynic about that Bowling fellow. She wouldn’t agree, saying that ‘old Bill simply wants understanding.’

      ‘Maybe I don’t understand him, then!’

      ‘And he’s going through something,’ she frowned. She was vague about this, usually tossing it aside with a laugh.

      Rodney liked to say that Bill had been rather rude to him about the Civil Service being what he called ‘departmental minded’, licking each other’s boots in a time-serving way in the interests of advancement, and afterwards running each other down behind each other’s backs. All individuality, Mr Bowling pronounced, was unhesitatingly sacrificed in the interests of pay day. On top of this, that fellow Bowling had got a bit tight one night and it had got back to him that Bowling thought him ‘typical’ of the M.O.I. If you offered yourself for a war job there, (Bowling reported) they put you through an exam, and only when you passed it suddenly thought of asking you about your grade of health. If you said you were Grade One, Two or Three, they said, sorry, can’t employ you unless you’re Grade Four, old chap, and looked brightly at you, almost proud of the waste of time and paper involved in the preliminary correspondence and the exam! And Bowling had said: ‘The perfect job for dear old Rodney—suit him down to the ground.’