4

Rud and Chiffan sat on a stile on the hillside above the summer school on their way to the junction. "Time we went," Chiffan had said, "before they start packing. Then they'll have time to miss us and talk you over."

He had announced this decision quite suddenly and they had paid up and slipped away without farewells.

They proposed to go by train to Baiting, where there was trouble brewing in the minor gadget factories. Chiffan wanted to see it for himself and he also wanted Rud to see it. The stile tempted Chiffan after the long path uphill and maybe there was something else, pulling at him.

"You can't expect anyone to say good–bye," he remarked, "who doesn't know you're going…You're not impulsive, Rud."

Rud had nothing to say to that.

"It was a good time anyhow," said Chiffan.

"I've never talked so much in my life," said Rud.

"Or to as good effect…of course—. It's a gentle crowd. They're—how shall I put it?—they're flimsy people. They're not the stuff revolutions are made of. But they polish up revolutionary ideas. If it came to a real show–down with violence, they'd vanish like a heap of dust in a cyclone. All the same it's a good school for talking. I'm glad we came. But we had to quit before we caught their disease."

"Ugh?"

"What? Enervation of the intelligence.

"Too many ideas and no conclusions to them—like a plague of Manx cats on the brain."

He dismissed that thought and came to something else, that had evidently been brewing in his mind for some time.

"You know, Rud, you could be vetted into a pretty tidy leader. Into a very useful leader indeed for a live new movement. You've got real passion. You speak uncommonly well."

Rud had felt that something of the sort was coming. He had felt that for some days. He had already thought out his reply thoroughly and cunningly.

"It isn't impossible," he said, "I believe I might make something of a figurehead and something of a foghorn, but I shouldn't be any good, Chiffan, unless there were men in the ship behind me. And one man in particular…"

It needed no ceremony to bind that tacit treaty.

"I think," said Chiffan presently, "we ought to keep in touch with Figgis and Redwood. There was something in those chaps."

He was already organising, imaginatively.