I lit a cigarette. Coker took one from me absent-mindedly, without making any comment. A girl came across to us.
“Will you help to clear up?” she asked. “Miss Durrant will be back soon, I expect.”
“Miss Durrant?” I repeated.
“She does the organizing,” she explained. “You’ll be able to fix things up with her.”
It was an hour later and almost dark when we heard that Miss Durrant had returned. We found her in a small, studylike room lit only by the light of two candles on the desk. I recognized her at once as the dark, thin-lipped woman who had spoken for the opposition at the meeting. For the moment all her attention was concentrated on Coker. Her expression was no more amiable than upon the former occasion.
“I am told,” she said coldly, regarding Coker as though he were some kind of silt, “I am told that you are the man who organized the raid on the University Building?”
Coker agreed, and waited.
“Then I may as well tell you, once and for all, that in our community here we have no use for brutal methods, and no intention of tolerating them.”
Coker smiled slightly. He answered her in his best middle-class speech:
“It is a matter of viewpoint. Who is to judge who were the more brutal? Those who saw an immediate responsibility, and stayed—or those who saw a further responsibility, and cleared out?”
She continued to look hard at him. Her expression remained unchanged, but she was evidently forming a different judgment of the type of man she had to deal with. Neither his reply nor his manner had been quite what she had expected. She shelved that aspect for a time and turned to me.
“Were you in that too?” she asked.
I explained my somewhat negative part in the affair and put my own question:
“What happened to Michael Beadley, the Colonel, and the rest?”
It was not well received.
“They have gone elsewhere,” she said sharply. “This is a clean, decent community with standards—Christian standards—and we intend to uphold them. We have no place here for people of loose views. Decadence, immorality, and lack of faith were responsible for most of the world’s ills. It is the duty of those of us who have been spared to see that we build a society where that does not happen again. The cynical and the clever-clever will find they are not wanted here, no matter what brilliant theories they may put forward to disguise their licentiousness and their materialism. We are a Christian community, and we intend to remain so.” She looked at me challengingly.
“So you split, did you?” I said. “Where did they go?”
She replied stonily:
“They moved on, and we stayed here. That is what matters. So long as they keep their influence away from here, they may work out their own damnation as they please. And since they choose to consider themselves superior to both the laws of God and civilized custom, I have no doubt that they will.”
She ended this declaration with a snap of the jaw which suggested that I should be wasting my time if I tried to pursue the question further, and turned back to Coker.
“What can you do?” she inquired.
“A number of things,” he said calmly. “I suggest that I make myself generally useful until I see where I am needed most.”
She hesitated, a little taken aback. It had clearly been her intention to make the decision and issue the instruction, but she changed her mind.
“All right. Look round, and come and talk it over tomorrow evening,” she said.
But Coker was not to be dismissed quite so easily. He wanted particulars of the size of the estate, the number of persons at present in the house, the proportion of sighted to blind, along with a number of other matters, and he got them.