uld have despised the idea. Hard man as he was, he had loved his son
passionately, though he had never shown it; and he could think of no
better way to prove it now than by a ferocious hatred for those who
had killed him; not, of course, reckoning himself among the number.

There were not many methods of revenge open to a man of his age,
rheumatic and stiff in one arm; but he tried to enlist and was
rejected. He felt that something must be done, and all that he had
left was his brain. Alone in his deserted house with the memory of his
dead wife and child, he sat for hours brooding on these vindictive
thoughts; and like a beast shaking the bars of its cage, waiting for
the chance to spring, his mind raged furiously against the inhibitions
the war put upon him with its iron circle of the trenches.

The clamours of the press drew his attention to Clerambault's articles
which were intensely distasteful to him. The idea of snatching
his precious hatred away from between his teeth! From the slight
acquaintance that he had with Clerambault before the war, he felt an
antipathy for him; as a writer, on account of the new form of his art,
and as a man for numerous reasons: his love of life, and other men,
his democratic ideals, his rather silly optimism, and his European
aspirations. At the very first glance, with the instinct of a
rheumatic in mind and body, Vaucoux had classed Clerambault as one of
those pestilent persons who open doors and windows and make a draught
in that closed house, his Country. That is, as he understood the term,
in his mind there could be no other. After this there was no need for
the vociferations of the papers; in the author of "The Appeal to the
Living," and the "Pardon from the Dead," he saw at once an agent of
the enemy, and with his thirst for revenge, he knew the opportunity
had come.

Nothing can be more convenient than to detest those who differ from
you, especially when you do not understand them; but poor Clerambault
had not this resource, for he did understand perfectly. These good
people had had to bear injuries from the enemy; of course because they
were struck by them, but also frankly, because of Injustice with a
capital I; for in their short-sightedness it filled the field of
vision. The capacity to feel and judge is very limited in an ordinary
man; submerged as he is in the species, he clings to any driftwood;
and just as he reduces the infinite number of shades in the river of