In his normal condition, nothing could have exceeded Charles’s terror and shame in such a situation. He had been the cause of a disturbance! He had broken the sacred law of self-effacing, mute compliance—he had made, the phrase ran, an exhibition of him­self! Normally, he would not have waited, except to stammer out his apologies; the burnt man’s injured shout of ‘It’s ’is fault! Throw the clumsy bastard out! Had too much he has!’ would have found him half-way to the door. But now the healing mist of alcohol, half gentle detachment and half fierce arrogance, pro­tected him even against the menacing approach of the landlord. Instead of quailing before the hailstorm of abuse that swept at him from behind the bar, he merely blinked benignly for a moment at the landlord’s whirling face—now dominated by the out-thrust nose, now grotesquely receding under the overhanging eyebrows—and then, turning coolly on his heel, calmly opened the door and went out, to be greeted by the warm silence of the summer night, and the village street opening and closing like a huge oyster shell.

Leaning against a wall, he waited for it to make up its mind, and soon it had settled down to a gentle heaving over which it was possible to walk. He had nowhere to go, no money and no plans, but the night was warm to the point of oppressiveness, the moon shone powerfully, casting deep shadows, and he had enough drink inside him to protect him from his anxiety. Unsteadily, but happily, he began to wander down a side turning between the gardens of cottages. And as he walked his mind gathered speed, until it was racing at the frantic speed which he had learnt to associate with drunkenness.

Charles had, indeed, often amused himself by pouring scorn on the conventional representations of this state in fiction, as a lazy and lethargic state of semi-paralysis. On the contrary, in his case the state of his reasoning faculties was precisely that of a motor engine accelerated to the maximum point with the clutch held out. Freed from its usual responsibilities—not only the responsibilities of fear and guilt and the crushing load of his ingrained conven­tionality, but even the basic duties of physical balance and direc­tion—his mind raced and was capable of reaching major decisions in a few minutes, decisions which he seldom felt the need to reverse when his ‘normal’ incapacity was restored. Now, as he sank down on a grassy bank where crickets chirped and leapt dizzily in the moonlight, the experiences of the last few days merged with the lessons of his lifetime, and amid the circling, surging landscape the new adjustment began.