For a second or two Cromartie felt himself rocking in the aeroplane, which went humming away across the sky before falling again sideways like a snipe bleating; that was only a moment, as when you shut your eyes and fancy that you can feel the earth spinning in space, and then Cromartie was walking out of the Strand into Trafalgar Square. It was empty, and he looked at the Nelson monument with wonder. Landseer’s great beasts planted their feet flat down before them. What were they, he wondered? Lions or Leopards, or perhaps Bears? He could not say. And suddenly he saw that his right hand was bleeding and his fingers gone. A great crowd had entered the Square; the fountains were playing, the sun was shining, and he got on to a scarlet omnibus. But very soon he saw that the people were whispering together on the omnibus and they were all looking at him, and he knew that it was because they saw his wounded hand. He put his other hand up to his forehead and there was blood on that also. He was afraid then of the people on the bus and so he got out. But wherever he wandered the people stopped and stared at him and whispered, and as he walked among them they drew aside and formed into little groups and gazed after him as he went by, and it was because they knew him by the wounds on his head and on his hand.

They were all of them muttering and looking at him with hatred, but something restrained them, so that though their eyes were like sharp daggers they were one and all afraid to point their fingers…

He was going to vote. He would cast his vote. Nothing should stop him. At last he saw the two entrances to the underground voting hall with Ladies written over one and Gentlemen written over the other, and he went downstairs. But when he asked the attendant for his voting card the man took down a large book bound in lambskin with the wool left on, and turned over several pages and looked down them. At last he said: “But your name is not written in the Book of Life, Mr. Cromartie. You must give up your secret, you know, if you wish to be registered.” When he heard this Mr. Cromartie felt sick, and he noticed the smell that came from all the other voters in their ballot boxes; he hesitated, and at last he said:

“But if I do not give up my secret may I not vote?”

“No, Mr. Cromartie. Nobody can vote who does not give up his secret, that is called the secrecy of the ballot—but it is out of the question for you to vote, anyhow… you bear the Mark of the Beast.”

And Mr. Cromartie looked at his hand and felt his forehead and saw that he did indeed bear the Mark of the Beast where it had bitten him, and he knew that he was an outcast. That was what everybody had whispered. He would not give up his secret so he was rejected by mankind and hated by them, for he frightened them. They were all alike, they had no secrets, but he had kept his and now the Beast had set its Mark upon him, and he seemed terrible to them all, and he himself was afraid. “The Beast has set his Mark on me,” he said to himself. “It will slowly eat me up. I cannot escape now, and one thing is as bad as another. On the whole I would rather the Beast slowly ate me up than give up so much, and the stench of my fellows disgusts me.”