When I’m fed up with business and home life it’s often done me a lot of good to go and have a talk with Porteous. But tonight it didn’t seem to. My mind was still running on the same lines as it had been all day. Just as I’d done with the Left Book Club lecturer, I didn’t exactly listen to what Porteous was saying, only to the sound of his voice. But whereas the lecturer’s voice had got under my skin, old Porteous’s didn’t. It was too peaceful, too Oxfordy. Finally, when he was in the middle of saying something, I chipped in and said:

“Tell me, Porteous, what do you think of Hitler?”

Old Porteous was leaning in his lanky, graceful kind of way with his elbows on the mantelpiece and a foot on the fender. He was so surprised that he almost took his pipe out of his mouth.

“Hitler? This German person? My dear fellow! I don’t think of him.”

“But the trouble is he’s going to bloody well make us think about him before he’s finished.”

Old Porteous shies a bit at the word “bloody,” which he doesn’t like, though of course it’s part of his pose never to be shocked. He begins walking up and down again, puffing out smoke.

“I see no reason for paying any attention to him. A mere adventurer. These people come and go. Ephemeral, purely ephemeral.”

I’m not certain what the word “ephemeral” means, but I stick to my point:

“I think you’ve got it wrong. Old Hitler’s something different. So’s Joe Stalin. They aren’t like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off and so forth, just for the fun of it. They’re after something quite new—something that’s never been heard of before.”

“My dear fellow! There is nothing new under the sun.”

Of course that’s a favourite saying of old Porteous’s. He won’t hear of the existence of anything new. As soon as you tell him about anything that’s happening nowadays he says that exactly the same thing happened in the reign of King So-and-so. Even if you bring up things like aeroplanes he tells you that they probably had them in Crete, or Mycenae or wherever it was. I tried to explain to him what I’d felt while the little bloke was lecturing and the kind of vision I’d had of the bad time that’s coming, but he wouldn’t listen. Merely repeated that there’s nothing new under the sun. Finally he hauls a book out of the shelves and reads me a passage about some Greek tyrant back in the B.C.S who certainly might have been Hitler’s twin brother.