after him, waving and calling out, his wife, Eulalia. Separated by a slightly longer space was a grim figure with scarf and hat which Pitt guessed to be Josiah Hatch, but he was too distant to distinguish features. And presumably the woman behind him, just breaking into a run, was Prudence.
“Thank God,” one of the seconds gasped. “The doctor-”
“And why in God’s name didn’t you call him before you began, you incompetent ass?” Pitt shouted at him. “If you are going to second in a duel, at least do it properly! It could have meant the difference between a man living or dying!”
The man was stung at last by the injustice of it, and the thoroughgoing fear that Pitt was right.
“Because my principal forbade me,” he retaliated, pulling himself up very straight.
“I’ll wager he did,” Pitt agreed, looking at Dalgetty, now dripping blood freely and very pasty-faced; then at Pascoe holding his arm limply and beginning to shake from cold and shock. “Knew damned well he’d prevent this piece of idiocy!”
As he spoke Shaw came to a halt beside them, staring from one to the other of the two injured men, then at Pitt.
“Is there a crime?” he said briskly. “Is any of this palaver”-he waved his hands, dropping the bag to the ground-“needed for evidence?”
“Not unless they want to sue each other,” Pitt said disgustedly. He could not even charge them with disturbing the peace, since they were out in the middle of a field and no one else was even aware of their having left their beds. The rest of Highgate was presumably taking its breakfast quietly in its dining rooms, pouring its tea, reading the morning papers and totally unaffected.
Shaw looked at the two participants and made the instant decision that Dalgetty was in the more urgent need of help, since he seemed to be suffering from shock whereas Pascoe was merely in pain, and accordingly began his work. He had done no more than open his bag when Clitheridge arrived, acutely distressed and embarrassed.
“What on earth has happened?” he demanded. “Is somebody hurt?”
“Of course somebody’s hurt, you fool!” Shaw said furiously. “Here, hold him up.” He gestured at Dalgetty, who was covered in blood and was beginning to look as if he might buckle at the knees.
Clitheridge obeyed gladly, his face flooding with relief at some definite task he could turn himself to. He grasped Dalgetty, who rather awkwardly leaned against him.
“What happened?” Clitheridge made one more effort to understand, because it was his spiritual duty. “Has there been an accident?”
Lally had reached them now and her mind seized the situation immediately.
“Oh, how stupid,” she said in exasperation. “I never thought you’d be so very childish-and now you’ve really hurt each other. And does that prove which of you is right? It only proves you are both extremely stubborn. Which all Highgate knew anyway.” She swung around to Shaw, her face very slightly flushed. “What can I do to be of assistance, Doctor?” By that time Josiah Hatch had also reached them, but she disregarded him. “Do you need linen?” She peered in his bag, then at the extent of the bloodstains, which were increasing with every minute. “How about water? Brandy?”
“Nobody’s going to pass out,” he said sharply, glaring at Dalgetty. “For heaven’s sake put him down!” he ordered Clitheridge, who was bearing most of Dalgetty’s weight now. “Yes, please, Lally-get some more linen. I’d better tie some of this up before we move them. I’ve got enough alcohol to disinfect.”
Prudence Hatch arrived breathlessly, gasping as she came to a halt. “This is awful! What on earth possessed you?” she demanded. “As if we haven’t enough grief.”
“A man who believes in his principles is sometimes obliged to fight in order to preserve them,” Josiah said grimly. “The price of virtue is eternal vigilance.”
“That is freedom,” his wife corrected him.
“What?” he demanded, his brows drawing down sharply.
“The price of
He winced and let out a squeak as the spirit hit the open wound, but no one took any notice of him.
“Freedom and virtue are not the same thing at all,” Hatch argued with profound feeling, his face intent, his eyes alight. To him the issue obviously far outweighed the ephemeral abrasions of the encounter. “That is precisely what Mr. Pascoe risked his life to defend!”
“Balderdash!” Shaw snapped. “Virtue isn’t in any danger-and prancing about on the heath with swords certainly isn’t going to defend anything at all.”
“There is no legal way to prevent the pernicious views and the dangerous and degrading ideas he propagates,” Pascoe shouted across Prudence’s instructions, his lips white with pain.
Lally was already setting off again towards the road on her errand. Her upright figure, shoulders back, was well on its way.
“There should be.” Hatch shook his head. “It is part of our modern sickness that we admire everything new, regardless of its merit.” His voice rose a little and he chopped his hands in the air. “We get hold of any new thought, rush to print any idea that overturns and makes mock of the past, the values that have served our forefathers and upon which we have built our nation and carried the faith of Christ to other lands and peoples.” His shoulders were hunched with the intensity of his emotion. “Mr. Pascoe is one of the few men in our time who has the courage and the vision to fight, however futilely, against the tide of man’s own intellectual arrogance, his indiscriminate greed for everything new without thought as to its value, or the result of our espousing it.”
“This is not the place for a sermon, Josiah.” Shaw was busy working on Dalgetty’s cheek and did not even look up at him. Murdo was assisting him with considerable competence. “Especially the arrant rubbish you’re talking,” he went on. “Half these old ideas you’re rehearsing are fossilized walls of cant and hypocrisy protecting a lot of rogues from the light of day. It’s long past time a few questions were asked and a few shoddy pretenses shown for what they are.”
Hatch was so pale he might have been the one wounded. He looked at Shaw’s back with a loathing so intense it was unnerving that Shaw was oblivious of it.
“You would have every beautiful and virtuous thing stripped naked and paraded for the lewd and the ignorant to soil-and yet at the same time you would not protect the innocent from the mockery and the godless innovations of those who have no values, but constant titillation and endless lust of the mind. You are a destroyer, Stephen, a man whose eyes see only the futile and whose hand holds only the worthless.”
Shaw’s fingers stopped, the swab motionless, a white blob half soaked with scarlet. Dalgetty was still shaking. Maude Dalgetty had appeared from somewhere while no one was watching the path across the field.
Shaw faced Hatch. There was dangerous temper in every line of his face and the energy built up in the muscles of his body till he seemed ready to break into some violent motion.
“It would give me great pleasure,” he said almost between his teeth, “to meet you here myself, tomorrow at dawn, and knock you senseless. But I don’t settle my arguments that way. It decides nothing. I shall show you what a fool you are by stripping away the layers of pretense, the lies and the illusions-”
Pitt was aware of Prudence, frozen, her face ashen pale, her eyes fixed on Shaw’s lips as if he were about to pronounce the name of some mortal illness whose diagnosis she had long dreaded.
Maude Dalgetty, on the other hand, looked only a little impatient. There was no fear in her at all. And John Dalgetty, half lying on the ground, looked aware only of his own pain and the predicament he had got himself into. He looked at his wife with a definite anxiety, but it was obvious he was nervous of her anger, not for her safety or for Shaw in temper ruining her long-woven reputation.
Pitt had seen all he needed. Dalgetty had no fear of Shaw-Prudence was terrified.
“The whited sepulchers-” Shaw said viciously, two spots of color high on his cheeks. “The-”
“This is not the time,” Pitt interrupted, putting himself physically between them. “There’s more than enough blood spilled already-and enough pain. Doctor, get on with treating your patients. Mr. Hatch, perhaps you would be good enough to go back to the street and fetch some conveyance so we can carry Mr. Pascoe and Mr. Dalgetty back to their respective homes. If you want to pursue the quarrel on the merits or necessities for censorship, then do it
