[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.“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 at a more fortunate time—and in a more civilized manner.”For a moment he thought neither of them was going to take any notice of him.They stood glaring at each other with the violence of feeling as ugly as that between Pascoe and Dalgetty.Then slowly Shaw relaxed, and as if Hatch had suddenly ceased to be of any importance, turned his back on him and bent down to Dalgetty’s wound again.Hatch, his face like gray granite, his eyes blazing, swiveled on his heel, tearing up the grass, and marched along the footpath back towards the road.Maude Dalgetty went, not to her husband, with whom she was obviously out of patience, but to Prudence Hatch, and gently put her arm around her.10“I SUPPOSE we should have expected it—had we bothered to take the matter seriously at all,” Aunt Vespasia said when Charlotte told her about the duel in the field.“One might have hoped they would have more sense, but had they any proportion in things in the first place, they would not have become involved in such extremes of opinion.Some men lose track of reality so easily.”“Thomas said they were both injured,” Charlotte went on.“Quite unpleasantly.I knew they said a great deal about the subject of freedom of expression, and the need to censor certain ideas in the public interest, but I did not expect it to come to actual physical harm [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]