the intellectual leader of the sect, a huge-voiced haberdasher with
a big black beard, a white-faced, extraordinarily pregnant woman, his
wife, a spectacled rate collector with a bent back.... I hear the talk
about souls, the strange battered old phrases that were coined ages ago
in the seaports of the sun-dry Levant, of balm of Gilead and manna in
the desert, of gourds that give shade and water in a thirsty land; I
recall again the way in which at the conclusion of the service the talk
remained pious in form but became medical in substance, and how the
women got together for obstetric whisperings. I, as a boy, did not
matter, and might overhear.

If Bladesover is my key for the explanation of England, I think my
invincible persuasion that I understand Russia was engendered by the
circle of Uncle Frapp.

I slept in a dingy sheeted bed with the two elder survivors of Frapp
fecundity, and spent my week days in helping in the laborious disorder
of the shop and bakehouse, in incidental deliveries of bread and so
forth, and in parrying the probings of my uncle into my relations
with the Blood, and his confidential explanations that ten shillings
a week--which was what my mother paid him--was not enough to cover my
accommodation. He was very anxious to keep that, but also he wanted
more. There were neither books nor any seat nor corner in that house
where reading was possible, no newspaper ever brought the clash of
worldly things into its heavenward seclusion; horror of it all grew in
me daily, and whenever I could I escaped into the streets and tramped
about Chatham. The news shops appealed to me particularly. One saw
there smudgy illustrated sheets, the Police News in particular, in
which vilely drawn pictures brought home to the dullest intelligence an
interminable succession of squalid crimes, women murdered and put into