It ought to be too, for heaven’s sake. It’s not kid’s stuff to be in the vanguard. He said that: the vanguard.

The arrow polisher lets his cloth move slowly across the gilt. He is moved, and grateful to be given the opportunity to join the struggle, as the gilded man said. He says to himself: We want what is good. We want liberty. We want peace.

What more is there?

A good reward.

Well, that goes without saying. That’s part of what is good.

He polishes on until the end of his shift. He has never shirked his duty for half an hour, he tells himself. I’ll work till my last breath. But now his shift is over, he leans the ladder up against the wall and goes home to eat.

5

The Brain

Deep in the centre sits a man clutching his constricting collar. It feels constricting at any rate. But he is powerful. No one is allowed to be at his side. Whoever attempted such a thing would be made to vanish from the face of the earth. The man has to be alone with his brain and with all that it nourishes.

The gilded arrows stream in from all corners of the house and meet, to be collected in his brain; and there they circle and parade round and round before streaming out again. This is where they belong. They have risen up out of the darkness within him and acquired their dangerous gliding shape, so that they move by themselves – and here he sits directing them and cannot get free, cannot escape them any more. They circle endlessly, in a burning, smoothly scoured brain chamber. There is no cranny of it left capable of giving him peace or coolness. Nothing can exist there except the shining arrows. They run slowly in the same circuit, without rest. They are bewitched, but he must sit directing them as they parade endlessly past.

He clutches his collar. They are bewitched! he shouts, wishing to reject his responsibility. Yet he continues to fashion more. And still more. He fashions them so fast that the speed makes him confused and dizzy.

He stares around him in bewilderment. What is this that has grown up with such terrible speed? This darkness that seethes up around him – what is it? Outside, in the house, everything is distorted. There is a struggle going on there in the dark. People with his arrows on them come and go – he no longer keeps pace with what they are doing, he has more than enough to do organizing the stream of arrows in his brain, he is driven by a sinister commandment. What is happening outside? Others have it all in their hands. It has simply gone its own way since he let it loose. His room lies three paces deeper in than all the others, and only whispers are heard in his presence.

What is going to happen? he groans in his darkness. But he clutches at his constricting collar. He can think: Stop! But the stream merely goes on circling round so that the smooth chamber burns and blazes. He trembles, yet directs them so that they move with precision. He cannot get free of them for an instant. They blaze in his brain. Everywhere else inside him is dark. There is no difference between night and day.