Page:The haunted bookshop.djvu/135

 anything real to help, got tired of wearing neat little uniforms with Sam Browne belts?"

"Well," said Roger, "it was a bad time. The war contradicted and denied everything I had ever lived for. Oh, I can't tell you how I felt about it. I can't even express it to myself. Sometimes I used to feel as I think that truly noble simpleton Henry Ford may have felt when he organized his peace voyage—that I would do anything, however stupid, to stop it all. In a world where everyone was so wise and cynical and cruel, it was admirable to find a man so utterly simple and hopeful as Henry. A boob, they called him. Well, I say bravo for boobs! I daresay most of the apostles were boobs—or maybe they called them bolsheviks."

Titania had only the vaguest notion about bolsheviks, but she had seen a good many newspaper cartoons.

"I guess Judas was a bolshevik," she said innocently.

"Yes, and probably George the Third called Ben Franklin a bolshevik," retorted Roger. "The trouble is, truth and falsehood don't come laid out in black and white—Truth and Huntruth, as the wartime joke had it. Sometimes I thought Truth had vanished from the earth," he cried bitterly. "Like everything else, it was rationed by the