ish from the kitchen, and the cook reported trout. "Trout!"
said Mr. Britling to one of the corporals; "now where did you chaps get
trout?"

The "fisherman," they said, had got them with a hair noose. They
produced the fisherman, of whom they were manifestly proud. It was, he
explained, a method of fishing he had learnt when in New York Harbour.
He had been a stoker. He displayed a confidence in Mr. Britling that
made that gentleman an accessory after his offence, his very serious
offence against pre-war laws and customs. It was plain that the trout
were the trout that Mr. Pumshock, the stock-broker and amateur
gentleman, had preserved so carefully in the Easy. Hitherto the
countryside had been forced to regard Mr. Pumshock's trout with an
almost superstitious respect. A year ago young Snooker had done a month
for one of those very trout. But now things were different.

"But I don't really fancy fresh-water fish," said the fisherman. "It's
just the ketchin' of 'em I like...."

And a few weeks later the trumpeter, an angel-faced freckled child with
deep-blue eyes, brought in a dozen partridge eggs which he wanted Mary
to cook for him....

The domesticity of the sacred birds, it was clear, was no longer safe in
England....

Then again the big guns would go swinging down the road and into
Claverings park, and perform various exercises with commendable
smartness and a profound disregard for Lady Homartyn's known objection
to any departure from the public footpath....

And one afternoon as Mr. Britling took his constitutional walk, a
reverie was set going in his mind by the sight of a neglected-looking
pheasant with a white collar. The world of Matching's Easy was getting
full now of such elderly birds. Would _that_ go on again after the war?
He imagined his son Hugh as a grandfather, telling the little ones about
parks and preserves and game laws, and footmen and butlers and the
marvellous game of golf, and how, suddenly, Mars came tramping through
the land in khaki and all these things faded and vanished, so that
presently it was discovered they were gone....

CHAPTER THE THIRD

MALIGNITY

Section 1

And while the countryside of England changed steadily from its lax
pacific amenity to the likeness of a rather slovenly armed camp, while
long-fixed boundaries shifted and dissolved and a great irreparable
wasting of the world's resources gathered way, Mr. Britling did his duty
as a special constable, gav