erwards; but,
my God, what a place it was! Buck, have you ever stood and let a six
foot of man lash and lash at your head with six feet of pole with six
pounds of steel at the end? Because, when you have had that
experience, as Walt Whitman says, 'you re-examine philosophies and
religions.'"

"I have no doubt," said Buck. "If that was Portobello Road, don't you
see what happened?"

"I know what happened exceedingly well. I was knocked down four times;
an experience which, as I say, has an effect on the mental attitude.
And another thing happened, too. I knocked down two men. After the
fourth fall (there was not much bloodshed--more brutal rushing and
throwing--for nobody could use their weapons), after the fourth fall,
I say, I got up like a devil, and I tore a poleaxe out of a man's hand
and struck where I saw the scarlet of Wayne's fellows, struck again
and again. Two of them went over, bleeding on the stones, thank God;
and I laughed and found myself sprawling in the gutter again, and got
up again, and struck again, and broke my halberd to pieces. I hurt a
man's head, though."

Buck set down his glass with a bang, and spat out curses through his
thick moustache.

"What is the matter?" asked Barker, stopping, for the man had been
calm up to now, and now his agitation was far more violent than his
own.

"The matter?" said Buck, bitterly; "don't you see how these maniacs
have got us? Why should two idiots, one a clown and the other a
screaming lunatic, make sane men so different from themselves? Look
here, Barker; I will give you a picture. A very well-bred young man of
this century is dancing about in a frock-coat. He has in his hands a
nonsensical seventeenth-century halberd, with which he is trying to
kill men in a street in Notting Hill. Damn it! don't you see how
they've got us? Never mind how you felt--that is how you looked. The
King would put his cursed head on one side and call it exquisite. The
Provost of Notting Hill would put his cursed nose in the air and call
it heroic. But in Heaven's name what would you have called it--two
days before?"

Barker bit his lip.

"You haven't been through it, Buck," he said. "You don't understand
fighting--the atmosphere."

"I don't deny the atmosphere," said Buck, striking the table. "I only
say it's their atmosphere. It's Adam Wayne's atmosphere. It's the
atmosphere which you and I thought had vanished from an educated world
for ever."

"Well, it hasn't," sai