It was easy enough to connect those folk with the knife
that pinned Scudder to the floor, and with fell designs on the
world's peace. But here were two guileless citizens taking their
innocuous exercise, and soon about to go indoors to a humdrum
dinner, where they would talk of market prices and the last cricket
scores and the gossip of their native Surbiton. I had been making a
net to catch vultures and falcons, and lo and behold! two plump
thrushes had blundered into it.
Presently a third figure arrived, a young man on a bicycle, with a
bag of golf-clubs slung on his back. He strolled round to the tennis
lawn and was welcomed riotously by the players. Evidently they
were chaffing him, and their chaff sounded horribly English. Then
the plump man, mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief, announced
that he must have a tub. I heard his very words--'I've got into
a proper lather,' he said. 'This will bring down my weight and
my handicap, Bob. I'll take you on tomorrow and give you a stroke a
hole.' You couldn't find anything much more English than that.
They all went into the house, and left me feeling a precious idiot.
I had been barking up the wrong tree this time. These men might
be acting; but if they were, where was their audience? They didn't
know I was sitting thirty yards off in a rhododendron. It was simply
impossible to believe that these three hearty fellows were anything
but what they seemed--three ordinary, game-playing, suburban
Englishmen, wearisome, if you like, but sordidly innocent.
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