5

A few days afterwards Carstall came upon his youngest son curled up on a grassy slope beneath a bank of purple iris, reading a Memoir of the Master Director.

He was absorbed in the book. "Gosh!" he exclaimed. Carstall stood over his son unnoticed.

"What do you think of him, Bunny?"

The boy sat up with a start. He answered after due consideration.

"Think of him? I think he was a Holy Terror," he said. "Worse than Napo or Musso or any of them. I suppose you knew him quite well, Father? Talked to him and all that?"

"Your grandfather brought him into the world and II was his schoolfellow. We knew a lot about him. Yes. I was called in. I assisted at his last illness. I suppose it tells you that."

"And it was you made up their minds for them that the Dictator had done his task and that we did not need another. Good old Daddy! They say it was his desire. He turned to you at the last."

"It says that? It says he turned to me at the last?…"

"You knew his work was done?"

"Yes…"

"He must have been a Holy Terror to get on with, though, if half of this is true," said Bunny, after a pause for reflection…"All the same…"

"Yes?"

"He got a move on things…"

Carstall considered that for some moments, Then he expressed the other side of his own unsolved perplexity. "Maybe," he said, "the move was there anyhow; maybe it just took him."

But Bunny was five–and–twenty years at least too young for predestination, Mystical Stoicism and that style of thought. His father's doubts flew over his head unheeded. "It was marvellous the way he seemed to get hold of people. I suppose Bodisham had a very powerful mind; the great world organiser, they call him. And Bellacourt the Air Master. And Norvel. Re–educating the whole world! And those others. But they all worked for him. He was horrid at times; he had people shot and he killed his best friends. But always they stood by him. Didn't they? It says here 'he cleared things out of their way'. It says here 'he seemed to make it possible for them to work unencumbered'. And they seemed in a way to like him, even when he treated them badly. There must have been something about him…And he did, it says, he did clean up the suffocating tangle the world was in'. What a world it was! So mean. Everybody doing everybody in. Profits, usury, appropriating things, taxes upon taxes, patenting, monopolising, sweating, stealing, frauds, gambling…He cleaned it up. I wish I could have seen him once. I missed him by just two years—two years and a month. At least I wasn't born, I mean…I suppose you did all you could for him?"

"Yes," said Carstall slowly. "Yes. I did all I could for him. According to my lights. I did my best for him—and his work. Quite at the last, you know. When he turned to me."

He took the book, flicked over a few pages, mused over it, and handed it back to his son.

"This book exaggerates here and there—and it simplifies things. It simplifies a lot. What else can a book do? I suppose that makes it easier to read. It brings life within our compass…Broadly anyhow it is the truth. The condensed truth about the World Revolution. It is as real as most other historical stuff…"

THE END