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themselves – seemed malignantly at work. However, that was no fault of Bracey’s.
    ‘Why did you think it wrong of Billson to give the little boy a slice of cake?’ I asked.
    We were still looking at the match, which, to tell the truth, did not entirely hold my attention, since I have never had any taste for watching games.
    ‘Not hers to give,’ said Bracey, very sternly.
    I can see now, looking back, that the question was hopelessly, criminally, lacking in tact on my own part. I knew perfectly well that Bracey and Albert did not get on well together, that they differed never more absolutely than on this particular issue. I had often, as I have said, heard my parents speak of the delicacy of the Albert-Bracey mutual relationship. There was really no excuse for asking something so stupid, a question to which, in any case, I had frequently heard the answer from other sources. All the same, the incident to which my inquiry referred had for some reason caught my imagination. In fact everything to do with ‘Dr Trelawney’s place’, as it was called locally, always gave me an excited, uneasy feeling, almost comparable to that brought into play by the story of the bandaged soldier. Sometimes, when out for a walk with Edith or my mother, we would pass Dr Trelawney’s house, a pebble-dashed, gabled, red-tiled residence, a mile or two away, somewhere beyond the roofs on the horizon faced by the Stonehurst gate.
    Dr Trelawney conducted a centre for his own peculiar religious, philosophical – some said magical – tenets, a cult of which he was high priest, if not actually messiah. This establishment was one of those fairly common strongholds of unsorted ideas that played such a part in the decade ended by the war. Simple-lifers, Utopian socialists, spiritualists, occultists, theosophists, quietists, pacifists, futurists, cubists, zealots of all sorts in their approach to life and art, later to be relentlessly classified into their respective religious, political, aesthetic or psychological categories, were then thought of by the unenlightened as scarcely distinguishable one from another: a collection of visionaries who hoped to build a New Heaven and a New Earth through the agency of their particular crackpot activities, sinister or comic, according to the way you looked at such things. Dr Trelawney was a case in point. In the judgment of his neighbours there remained an unbridgeable margin of doubt as to whether he was a holy man – at least a very simple and virtuous one – whose unconventional behaviour was to be tolerated, even applauded, or a charlatan – perhaps a dangerous rogue – to be discouraged by all right-thinking people.
    When out with his disciples, running through the heather in a short white robe or tunic, his long silky beard and equally long hair caught by the breeze, Dr Trelawney had an uncomfortably biblical air. His speed was always well maintained for a man approaching middle years. The disciples were of both sexes, most of them young. They, too, wore their hair long, and were dressed in ‘artistic’ clothes of rough material in pastel shades. They would trot breathlessly by, Dr Trelawney leading with long, loping strides, apparently making for nowhere in particular. I used to play with the idea that something awful had happened to me – my parents had died suddenly, for example – and ill chance forced me to become a member of Dr Trelawney’s juvenile community. Casual mention of his name in conversation would even cause me an uneasy thrill. Once, we saw Dr Trelawney and his flock roaming through the scrub at the same moment as the Military Policeman on his patrol was riding back from the opposite direction. The sun was setting. This meeting and merging of two elements – two ways of life – made a striking contrast in physical appearance, moral ideas and visual tone-values.
    My mother had once dropped in to the post office and general shop of a neighbouring village to buy stamps (perhaps