Clouds of Witness Chapter 8 complete

CHAPTER VIII

MR. PARKER TAKES NOTES

“A man was taken to the Zoo and shown the giraffe. After gazing at it a little in silence: 'I don't believe it,' he said.”

                Parker's first impulse was to doubt his own sanity; his next, to doubt Lady Mary's. Then, as the clouds rolled away from his brain, he decided that she was merely not speaking the truth.

                “Come, Lady Mary,” he said encouragingly, but with an accent of reprimand as to an over-imaginative child, “you can't expect us to believe that, you know.”

                “But you must,” said the girl gravely; “it's a fact. I shot him. I did, really. I didn't exactly mean to do it; it was a—well, a sort of accident.”

                Mr. Parker got up and paced about the room.

                “You have put me in a terrible position, Lady Mary,” he said. “You see, I'm a police-officer. I never really imagined——”

                “It doesn't matter,” said Lady Mary. “Of course you'll have to arrest me, or detain me, or whatever you call it. That's what I came for. I'm quite ready to go quietly—that's the right expression, isn't it? I'd like to explain about it, though, first. Of course I ought to have done it long ago, but I'm afraid I lost my head. I didn't realize that Gerald would get blamed. I hoped they'd bring it in suicide. Do I make a statement to you now? Or do I do it at the police-station?”

                Parker groaned.

                “They won't—they won't punish me so badly if it was an accident, will they?” There was a quiver in the voice.

                “No, of course not—of course not. But if only you had spoken earlier! No,” said Parker, stopping suddenly short in his distracted pacing and sitting down beside her. “It's impossible—absurd.” He caught the girl's hand, suddenly in his own. “Nothing will convince me,” he said. “It's absurd. It's not like you.”

                “But an accident——”

                “I don't mean that—you know I don't mean that. But that you should keep silence——”

                “I was afraid. I'm telling you now.”

                “No, no, no,” cried the detective. “You're lying to me. Nobly, I know; but it's not worth it. No man could be worth it. Let him go, I implore you. Tell the truth. Don't shield this man. If he murdered Denis Cathcart——”

                “No!” The girl sprang to her feet, wrenching her hand away. “There was no other man. How dare you say it or think it! I killed Denis Cathcart, I tell you, and you shall believe it. I swear to you that there was no other man.”

                Parker pulled himself together.

                “Sit down, please. Lady Mary, you are determined to make this statement?”

                “Yes.”

                “Knowing that I have no choice but to act upon it?”

                “If you will not hear it I shall go straight to the police.”

                Parker pulled out his note-book. “Go on,” he said.

                With no other sign of emotion than a nervous fidgeting with her gloves, Lady Mary began her confession in a clear, hard voice, as though she were reciting it by heart.

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                “On the evening of Wednesday, October 13th, I went upstairs at half-past nine. I sat up writing a letter. At a quarter past ten I heard my brother and Denis quarrelling in the passage. I heard my brother call Denis a cheat, and tell him that he was never to speak to me again. I heard Denis run out. I listened for some time, but did not hear him return. At half-past eleven I became alarmed. I changed my dress and went out to try and find Denis and bring him in. I feared he might do something desperate. After some time I found him in the shrubbery. I begged him to come in. He refused, and he told me about my brother's accusation and the quarrel. I was very much horrified, of course. He said where was the good of denying anything, as Gerald was determined to ruin him, and asked me to go away and marry him and live abroad.

                I said I was surprised that he should suggest such a thing in the circumstances. We both became very angry. I said 'Come in now. To-morrow you can leave by the first train.' He seemed almost crazy. He pulled out a pistol and said that he'd come to the end of things, that his life was ruined, that we were a lot of hypocrites, and that I had never cared for him, or I shouldn't have minded what he'd done. Anyway, he said, if I wouldn't come with him it was all over, and he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb—he'd shoot me and himself. I think he was quite out of his mind. He pulled out a revolver; I caught his hand; we struggled; I got the muzzle right up against his chest, and—either I pulled the trigger or it went off of itself—I'm not clear which. It was all in such a whirl.”

                She paused. Parker's pen took down the words, and his face showed growing concern. Lady Mary went on:

                “He wasn't quite dead. I helped him up. We struggled back nearly to the house. He fell once——”

                “Why,” asked Parker, “did you not leave him and run into the house to fetch help?”

                Lady Mary hesitated.

                “It didn't occur to me. It was a nightmare. I could only think of getting him along. I think—I think I wanted him to die.”

                There was a dreadful pause.

                “He did die. He died at the door. I went into the conservatory and sat down. I sat for hours and tried to think. I hated him for being a cheat and a scoundrel. I'd been taken in, you see—made a fool of by a common sharper. I was glad he was dead. I must have sat there for hours without a coherent thought. It wasn't till my brother came along that I realized  what I'd done, and that I might be suspected of murdering him. I was simply terrified. I made up my mind all in a moment that I'd pretend I knew nothing—that I'd heard a shot and come down. You know what I did.”

                “Why, Lady Mary,” said Parker, in a perfectly toneless voice, “why did you say to your brother 'Good God, Gerald, you've killed him'?”

                Another hesitant pause.

                “I never said that. I said, 'Good God, Gerald, he's killed, then.' I never meant to suggest anything but suicide.”

                “You admitted to those words at the inquest?”

                “Yes——” Her hands knotted the gloves into all manner of shapes. “By that time I had decided on a burglar story, you see.”

                The telephone bell rang, and Parker went to the instrument. A voice came thinly over the wire:

                “Is that 110a Piccadilly? This is Charing Cross Hospital. A man was brought in to-night who says he is Lord Peter Wimsey. He was shot in the shoulder, and struck his head in falling. He has only just recovered consciousness. He was brought in at 9.15. No, he will probably do very well now. Yes, come round by all means.”

                “Peter has been shot,” said Parker. “Will you come round with me to Charing Cross Hospital? They say he is in no danger: still——”

                “Oh, quick!” cried Lady Mary.

                Gathering up Mr. Bunter as they hurried through the hall, detective and self-accused rushed hurriedly out into Piccadilly, and, picking up a belated taxi at Hyde Park Corner, drove madly away through the deserted streets.

Clouds of Witness Ch 7 cont

“I can't understand how it could have made any difference to Mary,” persisted Miss Tarrant mournfully. “She liked being a worker. We once tried living in a workman's cottage for eight weeks, five of us, on eighteen shillings a week. It was a marvellous experience—on the very edge of the New Forest.”

The New Forest is an area of southern England which includes the largest remaining tracts of unenclosed pasture land, heathland and forest in the heavily-populated south east of England. It covers south-west Hampshire and extends into south-east Wiltshire and towards east Dorset.

The name also refers to the New Forest National Park which has similar boundaries. Additionally the New Forest local government district is a subdivision of Hampshire which covers most of the Forest, and some nearby areas although it is no longer the planning authority for the National Park itself. There are many villages dotted around the area, and several small towns in the Forest and around its edges.

Prehistory

Like much of England, the site of the New Forest was originally deciduous woodland, recolonised by birch and eventually beech and oak following the withdrawal of the ice sheets starting around 12,000 years ago. Some areas were cleared for cultivation from the Bronze Age onwards; the poor quality of the soil in the New Forest meant that the cleared areas turned into heathland "waste", which may have been used even then as grazing-land for horses.[1] There was still a significant amount of woodland in this part of Britain, but this was gradually reduced, particularly towards the end of the Middle Iron Age around 250–100 BC, and most importantly the 12th and 13th centuries, and of this essentially all that remains today is the New Forest.

There are around two hundred and fifty round barrows within its boundaries, and scattered boiling mounds, and it also includes about 150 scheduled ancient monuments. One such barrow in particular may represent the only known inhumation burial of the Early Iron Age and the only known Hallstatt burial in Britain; unfortunately, the acidity of the soil means that bone very rarely survives.

History

The New Forest was created as a royal forest by William I in about 1079 for the royal hunt, mainly of deer. It was created at the expense of more than 20 small hamlets and isolated farmsteads; hence it was 'new' in his time as a single compact area

                “In the winter?”

                “Well—no, we thought we'd better not begin with winter. But we had nine wet days, and the kitchen chimney smoked all the time. You see, the wood came out of the forest, so it was all damp.”

                “I see. It must have been uncommonly interestin'.”

                “It was an experience I shall never forget,” said Miss Tarrant. “One felt so close to the earth and the primitive things. If only we could abolish industrialism. I'm afraid, though, we shall never get it put right without a 'bloody revolution,' you know. It's very terrible, of course, but salutary and inevitable. Shall we have coffee? We shall have to carry it upstairs ourselves, if you don't mind. The maids don't bring it up after dinner.”

                Miss Tarrant settled her bill and returned, thrusting a cup of coffee into his hand. It had already overflowed into the saucer, and as he groped his way round a screen and up a steep and twisted staircase it overflowed quite an amount more.

                Emerging from the basement, they almost ran into a young man with fair hair who was hunting for letters in a dark little row of pigeon-holes. Finding nothing, he retreated into the lounge. Miss Tarrant uttered an exclamation of pleasure.

                “Why, there is Mr. Goyles,” she cried.

                Wimsey glanced across, and at the sight of the tall, slightly stooping figure with the untidy fair hair and the gloved right hand he gave an irrepressible little gasp.

                “Won't you introduce me?” he said.

                “I'll fetch him,” said Miss Tarrant. She made off across the lounge and addressed the young agitator, who started, looked across at Wimsey, shook his head, appeared to apologize, gave a hurried glance at his watch, and darted out by the entrance. Wimsey sprang forward in pursuit.

                “Extraordinary,” cried Miss Tarrant, with a blank face. “He says he has an appointment—but he can't surely be missing the——”

                “Excuse me,” said Peter. He dashed out, in time to perceive a dark figure retreating across the street. He gave chase. The man took to his heels, and seemed to plunge into the dark little alley which leads into the Charing Cross Road.

Charing Cross Road is a street in central London running immediately north of St Martin-in-the-Fields to St Giles Circus (the intersection with Oxford Street) and then becomes Tottenham Court Road. It is so called because it serves Charing Cross railway station (named for the nearby Charing Cross).

Charing Cross Road was developed, in conjunction with Shaftesbury Avenue, by the Metropolitan Board of Works under an 1877 Act of Parliament at a cost of £778,238. The two streets and others such as the Thames Embankment, Northumberland Avenue, Kingsway and Aldwych were built to improve traffic flow through central London. It incorporated the routes of several older streets.

Charing Cross Road is renowned for its specialist and second-hand bookshops. The section from Leicester Square tube station to Cambridge Circus is home to specialist bookshops, and more general second-hand and antiquarian shops such as Quinto Bookshop, Henry Pordes and Any Amount of Books. Most of these shops are located on the ground floor of a block owned by a housing association, which decided in 2001 to raise the rents sharply to bring them closer to the market level. This was opposed by the book dealers, who felt that they were providing a valuable service and contributing to the unique character of the area, and should not be treated in this way by a not-for-profit body. The association's counter-argument was that if the booksellers did not pay a market rent they were being subsidized by its low-income tenants. The booksellers attracted considerable public support and a reduced rent increase was imposed. Several of the bookshops closed nonetheless, including Silver Moon, apparently Europe’s largest women’s interest bookshop, which became part of Foyles. Other shops closed more recently, Zwemmers art bookshop, Shipley the art bookshop in December 2008 and Murder One in 2009. Smaller second-hand and specialist antiquarian bookshops can be found on the adjoining Cecil Court.

The northern section between Cambridge Circus and Oxford Street includes more generalist bookshops such as the venerable Foyles and Blackwell's. A long-standing correspondence between New York based author Helene Hanff and the staff of a bookstore on the street, Marks & Co., was the inspiration for the book 84 Charing Cross Road (1970). The book was made into a 1986 film with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins and also into a play and a BBC radio drama. 84 Charing Cross Road, located just north of Cambridge Circus, has not been a bookstore for many years; at street level it is now a restaurant (entered round the corner in Cambridge Circus), but the upper levels of the building remain as originally constructed. A small brass plaque, noted by Hanff in her book "Q's Lecacy", remains on the stone pilaster facing Charing Cross Road.

The music venue the Astoria was located here, as is one of the sites of St Martin's Arts College, as well as the music shops on Denmark Street (known as Britain's Tin Pan Alley). A number of theatres are nearby, such as the Phoenix Theatre which has its entrance on the adjoining Phoenix Street.

An interesting local feature can be found in the middle of Charing Cross Road at its junction with Old Compton Street. Beneath the grille in the traffic island in the middle of the road, the old road signs for the now-vanished Little Compton Street can be seen. This road once joined Old Compton Street with New Compton Street.

Beside the road's southern end is a statue of Edith Cavell. Towards the north end is the Phoenix Garden - an environmental garden run by local residents.

                Hurrying in pursuit, Wimsey was almost blinded by a sudden flash and smoke nearly in his face. A crashing blow on the left shoulder and a deafening report whirled his surroundings away. He staggered violently, and collapsed on to a second-hand brass bedstead.

Home-schooling pioneer weathers controversy in growing, diverse movement

From Columbia Daily Tribune:  Home-schooling pioneer weathers controversy in growing, diverse movement

At dusk on a farm near the confluence of the Chickahominy and James rivers, about 26 miles west of Williamsburg, Va., home-schooling pioneer Susan Wise Bauer is out raking manure.
She cleans her sheep pens, douses her four horses and her donkey, Athena, with bug spray, and fills water troughs for her goats. It had been 103 degrees that afternoon, but the setting sun has brought in a breeze to cool the tomato fields and peach and apple groves on Peace Hill, a property that has been in her family for several generations.
The farm offers Bauer a respite from battles she has fought with her detractors in America's increasingly diverse home-schooling community.
The English professor, historian, author of 18 books and holder of a doctorate in American studies from the nearby College of William & Mary is one of the forces behind America's burgeoning home-schooling movement, which is growing about 7 percent each year. The National Home Education Research Institute estimates that there were 2.04 million home-schooled children in the United States as of 2010, about 4 percent of the nation's school-age population. That's almost double the 1.2 million home-schooled children in 2000. A June article in U.S. News & World Report said that home-schooled children graduate from college at higher rates than their peers, earn higher grade-point averages and are better socialized than most high school students.
Bauer is best known among home-schoolers for "The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home" — written with her mother, Jessie Wise, a former teacher — which has sold more than half a million copies since its first publication in 1999. Classical education focuses on the great books of Western civilization, Latin and lessons about morality and virtue, and is based on the medieval European curriculum that divided learning into the "trivium": grammar, logic and rhetoric. The concept of fusing classical education into modern teaching was popularized by a 1947 essay by British author Dorothy Sayers called "The Lost Tools of Learning." But it was Bauer and her mother who provided parents with a template.
"Susan is very well-known and popular," said Anne Miller, president of the Home Educators Association of Virginia. "When she wrote 'The Well-Trained Mind,' no one had put feet to Dorothy Sayers' ideas."
Bauer also teaches English at William & Mary and runs her own tiny publishing house, Peace Hill Press, which distributes her books and lectures as well as those of a few other authors. She has just completed the third book of a multivolume world history that encompasses 235,000 words, 808 pages, with a 45-page bibliography, an effort aimed more at adults than at home-schooled students. In 11 years, she has covered the ancient world through the Renaissance. She gestured toward a sculpture of a sinking Titanic on her desk. "That is a picture of my working life," she joked. "My ability to get this world history project done made me feel as though I was always sinking."
Her career is definitely still afloat, though the seas have been so rough lately that she has considering changing course.
The Bauers' living room in Peace Hill's 90-year-old red farmhouse has a comfy lived-in-ness: antiques, books and various computers for Christopher, 21; Ben, 19; Dan, 15; and Emily, 11, all of whom were home-schooled. The oldest is at the University of Virginia, and the 19-year-old is attending Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton, Va. A Shakespeare quote is stenciled on the wall above the kitchen stove: "Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers." One floor below live Bauer's parents: mother Jessie and James Wise, a retired pediatrician.
Jessie Wise had begun home-schooling Susan and her two siblings in the 1970s at the farm because she thought the local schools were full of sloppy teaching and rowdy behavior. Susan was reading at fifth-grade level by age 5 and learned Latin at 10. At 17, she attended Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., finished her bachelor's degree in English in five semesters, did a summer stint at Oxford University in England, then was off to Westminster Theological Seminary outside Philadelphia. It was there that she met Peter Bauer, 27, a fellow student. She was 19.
Four months later, they were engaged. They married in January 1990 and moved back to the farm to live with Susan's parents 18 months later. Babies started to arrive. As eldest son Christopher approached kindergarten age in the mid-1990s, Susan Bauer approached her mother about how to teach her growing family the way she had been taught. The two women wrote a home-schooling manual focused on classical education. They wanted to produce a book that was informed by their Christian beliefs yet used secular resources that would be acceptable to nonreligious home-schoolers.
A book agent said editors at Norton were interested but wanted to meet with them "to see if you're marketable." Bauer's grandfather pulled out a credit card and told them to "go to Richmond and buy some New York clothes." Attired in new suits, Wise and Bauer went to New York in 1996 to meet with Star Lawrence, then Norton's editor-in-chief, and his staff.
The Norton editors grilled them for an hour. "You know, you're really nice people," a man told Jessie afterward.
"They expected us to be weird," Wise said. "They had never met any home-schoolers."
Lawrence was impressed. "Most of the home-schoolers were doing it for religious and social reasons, and the textbooks were weighted in the direction of Christian teaching," he recalled. "Susan and her mother wished to redress that imbalance."
But trying to maintain that balance has wearied Susan Bauer over the years.
In the 40 years since Bauer's mother began teaching her to read at age 3, home-schooling has gone from a mostly religious fringe activity to a chic trend with numerous conferences, publishers, methods and factions focused on theological views, organic living, parenting styles or various stances on homosexuality or same-sex unions.
Bauer has been a fixture behind the lectern at state and national home-schooling conferences for years. But this past spring, she announced she would sit out the conferences next year because of rifts in this once seemingly monolithic movement.
"For a number of people involved in it, their primary focus is not educating kids, but a lifestyle," she said. Whereas early home-schoolers were a freewheeling bunch forced to stick together against a hostile world because of their aversion to public schools, now it seems as if there are litmus tests for acceptance into the community.
For example, she said, Peace Hill Press came under fire from home-schooling creationists — at conferences, on the Internet and via email — for publishing the work of scholar Peter Enns, who argues against a strict literal reading of the Book of Genesis.
"Susan got really beat up by inappropriate behavior," said Leigh Bortins, founder of Classical Conversions, a North Carolina-based home education movement. "In many ways, home-schooling has grown up, but people don't always act like grown-ups."
Bauer's disagreement with home-schooling proponents who say the public schools are hostile to Christianity also has become a point of contention.
"I've been told if I say anything supportive of public schools, even charter ones, I'll lose my speaker's fee, and I don't get my expenses reimbursed," she said. "Of course, I tell them I won't come."
Bauer has been asked "to swear I won't bring certain books for my book table; to mention certain words," she wrote on her blog in April. "None of which, I should say, have anything to do with what I normally talk about: grammar, history, writing, reading, learning. I have been told that I am not welcome, in some cases, because I talk too much about the psychology of learning, and not about the Bible. Or because I have a theological degree and am obviously pushing a Christian agenda. Because my 'professional associations,' however loose, are too liberal, or too secular, or too Christian."
Mark Reynolds, the new provost at Houston Baptist University, who has home-schooled his four children, believes the annual home-schooling conferences have moved to the right.
"A more fundamentalist minority has seized control of the conferences," he said. "Fewer people are attending them because most of the information you used to only get at a conference you can now get online. I think Susan is right. What's happened to her says that the national organizations are irrelevant to home-schoolers in the United States."
Ann Clay of Manassas, Va., a board member for the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers who has used "The Well-Trained Mind" to home-school her two sons, also sees splintering among home-schoolers.
"I've had Christian friends who didn't attend conferences because they were not the 'right' kind of Christians," she said. "There is something going on out there. Susan's stuff is not real preachy, and it doesn't teach evolution or creationism. She kind of glosses over it."
Not everyone agrees that the movement has become more polarized. "Frankly, I think they've always been that way," said Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Home School Coalition. "There's always been a debate between the religious right home-school friends and the ACLU home-school friends, and even within those circles."
Nevertheless, Bauer is moving on. She plans to devote 2013 to starting an agritourism business where would-be farmers could stay at a bed-and-breakfast within walking distance of her farm and learn to cultivate land and tend animals. She'll be on leave from teaching; as for chronicling world history, she hasn't decided whether to write more books.
Lawrence doubts that Bauer will truly take a rest.
"I look forward to what she turns to next," he said. "I don't think she's going to sit there and watch the zinnias grow."

Clouds of Witness Ch 7

“Scenes which make emotional history,” said Miss Heath-Warburton, “should ideally be expressed in a series of animal squeals.”

                “The D. H. Lawrence formula,” said the other.

David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, "The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation."[3] Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. Lawrence is now valued by many as a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature.    

 “Or even Dada,” said the authoress.

Dada  or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early twentieth century. It began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter.[1] To quote Dona Budd's The Language of Art Knowledge,

    Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words da, da, meaning yes, yes in the Romanian language. Another theory says that the name "Dada" came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French-German dictionary happened to point to 'dada', a French word for 'hobbyhorse'.

The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestoes, art theory, theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. In addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and had political affinities with the radical left.

Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. Key figures in the movement included Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader, Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Richard Huelsenbeck, Georg Grosz, John Heartfield, Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, Kurt Schwitters, and Hans Richter, among others. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including surrealism, Nouveau réalisme, pop art and Fluxus.

    Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism             

“We need a new notation,” said the curly-haired man, putting both elbows on the table and knocking Wimsey's bread on to the floor. “Have you heard Robert Snoates recite his own verse to the tom-tom and the penny whistle?”

A made up character

                Lord Peter with difficulty detached his attention from this fascinating discussion to find that Miss Tarrant was saying something about Mary.

                “One misses your sister very much,” she said. “Her wonderful enthusiasm. She spoke so well at meetings. She had such a real sympathy with the worker.”

                “It seems astonishing to me,” said Wimsey, “seeing Mary's never had to do a stroke of work in her life.”

                “Oh,” cried Miss Tarrant, “but she did work. She worked for us. Wonderfully! She was secretary to our Propaganda Society for nearly six months. And then she worked so hard for Mr. Goyles. To say nothing of her nursing in the war. Of course, I don't approve of England's attitude in the war, but nobody would say the work wasn't hard.”

                “Who is Mr. Goyles?”

                “Oh, one of our leading speakers—quite young, but the Government are really afraid of him. I expect he'll be here to-night. He has been lecturing in the North, but I believe he's back now.”

                “I say, do look out,” said Peter. “Your beads are in your plate again.”

                “Are they? Well, perhaps they'll flavor the mutton. I'm afraid the cooking isn't very good here, but the subscription's so small, you see. I wonder Mary never told you about Mr. Goyles. They were so very friendly, you know, some time ago. Everybody thought she was going to marry him—but it seemed to fall through. And then your sister left town. Do you know about it?”

                “That was the fellow, was it? Yes—well, my people didn't altogether see it, you know. Thought Mr. Goyles wasn't quite the son-in-law they'd take to. Family row and so on. Wasn't there myself; besides, Mary'd never listen to me. Still, that's what I gathered.”

                “Another instance of the absurd, old-fashioned tyranny of parents,” said Miss Tarrant warmly. “You wouldn't think it could still be possible—in post-war times.”

                “I don't know,” said Wimsey, “that you could exactly call it that. Not parents exactly. My mother's a remarkable woman. I don't think she interfered. Fact, I fancy she wanted to ask Mr. Goyles to Denver. But my brother put his foot down.”

                “Oh well, what can you expect?” said Miss Tarrant scornfully. “But I don't see what business it was of his.”

                “Oh, none,” agreed Wimsey. “Only, owin' to my late father's circumscribed ideas of what was owin' to women, my brother has the handlin' of Mary's money till she marries with his consent. I don't say it's a good plan—I think it's a rotten plan. But there it is.”

                “Monstrous!” said Miss Tarrant, shaking her head so angrily that she looked like shock-headed Peter. “Barbarous! Simply feudal, you know. But, after all, what's money?”

                “Nothing, of course,” said Peter. “But if you've been brought up to havin' it it's a bit awkward to drop it suddenly. Like baths, you know.”

Clouds of Witness Ch 7 cont

Wimsey reminded himself that in so democratic an institution one could hardly expect the assistants to assume that air of superiority which marks the servants in a West End club. For one thing, they would not be such capitalists. In the dining-room below the resemblance to a mission tea was increased by the exceedingly heated atmosphere, the babel of conversation, and the curious inequalities of the cutlery.

The Tower of Babel  forms the focus of a story told in the Book of Genesis of the Bible. According to the story, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar  where they resolved to build a city with a tower "whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."

God came down to see what they did and said: "They are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withheld from them which they purpose to do." "Come, let us go down and confound their speech." And so God scattered them upon the face of the Earth, and confused their languages, so that they would not be able to return to each other, and they left off building the city, which was called Babel "because God there confounded the language of all the Earth".

The Tower of Babel has often been associated with known structures, notably the Etemenanki, a ziggurat dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk by Nabopolassar, king of Babylonia (c. 610 BC). The Great Ziggurat of Babylon base was square (not round), 91 metres (300 ft) in height, and demolished by Alexander the Great. A Sumerian story with some similar elements is told in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.      

Miss Tarrant secured seats at a rather crumby table near the serving-hatch, and Peter wedged himself in with some difficulty next to a very large, curly-haired man in a velvet coat, who was earnestly conversing with a thin, eager young woman in a Russian blouse, Venetian beads, a Hungarian shawl, and a Spanish comb, looking like a personification of the United Front of the “Internationale.”

The united front is a form of struggle or political organization that may be carried out by revolutionaries or communist political regimes. The basic theory of the united front tactic was first developed by the Comintern, an international communist organization created by communists in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

According to the thesis of the 1922 4th World Congress of the Comintern: “The united front tactic is simply an initiative whereby the Communists propose to join with all workers belonging to other parties and groups and all unaligned workers in a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie.”

The united front allowed workers committed to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism to struggle alongside non-revolutionary workers. Through these common struggles revolutionaries sought to win other workers to revolutionary socialism. The united front perspective is also used in contemporary and non-Leninist perspectives.   

Lord Peter endeavored to please his hostess by a question about the great Mr. Coke, but was checked by an agitated “Hush!”

                “Please don't shout about it,” said Miss Tarrant, leaning across till her auburn mop positively tickled his eyebrows. “It's so secret.”

                “I'm awfully sorry,” said Wimsey apologetically. “I say, d'you know you're dipping those jolly little beads of yours in the soup?”

                “Oh, am I?” cried Miss Tarrant, withdrawing hastily. “Oh, thank you so much. Especially as the color runs. I hope it isn't arsenic or anything.” Then, leaning forward again, she whispered hoarsely:

                “The girl next me is Erica Heath-Warburton—the writer, you know.”

                Wimsey looked with a new respect at the lady in the Russian blouse. Few books were capable of calling up a blush to his cheek, but he remembered that one of Miss Heath-Warburton's had done it. The authoress was just saying impressively to her companion:

                “—ever know a sincere emotion to express itself in a subordinate clause?”

                “Joyce has freed us from the superstition of syntax,” agreed the curly man.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in (and with) an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent amongst these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His complete oeuvre also includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters.

Joyce was born to a middle class family in Dublin, where he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, then at University College Dublin. In his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe does not extend far beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.