The Blue Field Read Online Free PDF Page A

distilling sufficient alcohol to make a drink. On VJ-Day, however, the machine excelled itself and produced three pints, which he shared among his fellow prisoners. They all became extremely ill, and the raw spirit acted so fiercely upon the emaciated body of Sir Gerald that he nearly died. Indeed, when at last he arrived at Brensham the porter at the station failed to recognize him; and Joe Trentfield, seeing him go by the Horse and Harrow, asked who the devil was that little wizened fellow like a Chink.
    Now, in the gracious house called Gables at the top of the village, the two old friends while away the twilight of their days with Pottering and Port; and Mr Chorlton had the satisfaction of blaming the Government for the occasionalattacks of gout which he had previously laid at the door of Messrs Cockburn. Because he was temporarily immobilized by one of these attacks he had asked me to go to tea and tell him the village news; and we sat on the lawn, beside the lily-pond which leaked and the rockery which was the grave of so many rare Alpines, and feasted our eyes on the blue splendour of William Hart’s flax field halfway up the hill.
    â€˜What a colour!’ said Mr Chorlton. ‘Is it ideological, do you think? Does it not strike you as somehow rather defiant? Perhaps I associate it with the ribbons in the buttonholes of Temperance reformers who used to provoke me in my youth.’
    â€˜They were a different shade,’ said Sir Gerald. ‘I wore one myself.’
    This statement caused us no surprise; for Sir Gerald, in the few years we had known him, had dabbled in Christian Science, Spiritualism, Yoga, the British Israelites and the Oxford Group. He had been a vegetarian for a month, a Blackshirt for a week, and at one time was nearly converted to Islam. Dabbling, as he called it, was the intellectual counterpart of his physical Pottering, and was just as harmless. Indeed it was more so, for the form of Pottering in which he was engaged as we sat on the lawn seemed to involve considerable danger to life and limb. It had occurred to him, while he languished in the Japanese prison camp, that mankind was very much to blame for its wicked waste of safety-razor blades. He was reminded of this deplorable fact every morning, because he greatly desired a shave; and as he fingered his long, hot and itchy beard he used to contemplate with sorrow and even with indignation the huge and prodigal expenditure of blades which went on every minute of the day all over the civilized world. He whiled away many hours trying to estimate the daily wastage; but it was incalculable. He remembered bitterly that there wereat least a hundred old blades lying in a box in his bathroom at home, because he had never been able to discover any way of disposing of them other than by burial, and he had been too idle to dig a hole. What would he not have given now for the oldest, rustiest, bluntest of them all? From this sad reflection his thoughts turned to the various possible uses of razor blades, other than for shaving the face. One could make them into pencil sharpeners, of course; but nobody needed a hundred pencil sharpeners. It was surely not beyond the wit of man to devise some other employment for those multitudinous little pieces of tempered steel! Therefore when he was not taking to pieces or putting together his illicit still, Sir Gerald devoted himself to the consideration of this problem; and now on his lawn he was engaged in putting his theories to a practical test. He had obtained several strips of metal with holes in – I think they must have been part of a meccano set – and having joined them together in a length of about three feet he was bolting razor blades along them to make a frightful serrated cutting-edge which, he declared, would ultimately form part of a patent lawn-mower.
    I could hardly bear to watch this operation, for he was notoriously clumsy and I was terrified lest he should cut his fingers off.