Free Fellow Passenger by Geoffrey Household

to ask him if he believed all he read in the capitalist press.
     
    ‘I won’t have anything to do with you,’ he insisted. ‘I shall resign from the party.’
     
    ‘You can resign when you like and as often as you like, comrade, but you will obey now.’
     
    ‘I don’t see what they can do to me if I refuse,’ he said sturdily.
     
    ‘You ought to know. You have been engaged on propaganda.’
     
    That was a safe shot - though I doubt if he did anything but talk communism in and out of season. However, he would call that propaganda; so would the party whenever they wanted to make him feel important.
     
    ‘How would you like it to be spread all over the town that you assisted Howard-Wolferstan?’ I asked.
     
    ‘It would be a lie.’
     
    ‘Would it? What are you doing here? Why are the tracks of your car in this lane? Where did you tell your office that you were going, and why aren’t you there? You ought to know that we have ways of giving information to the police.’
     
    ‘Nonsense! You couldn’t prove it, and you have nothing to gain by it.’
     
    ‘Nothing to gain by it, comrade? Nothing to gain by punishing disobedience?’
     
    ‘I’ll denounce you to the police myself,’ he said.
     
    ‘No, you won’t. Whatever else you may be, you are not a traitor to your class.’
     
    Cold sweat was dripping down my ribs. I could not have continued this duel much longer. But it was near the end. I had him completely bewildered.
     
    ‘That’s true,’ he muttered, and then shouted at me: ‘But you leave me alone!’
     
    ‘Oh, be logical, comrade!’ I insisted patronizingly. ‘You’re not a scab. You’ll never go to the police. So you’re as guilty as I am from their point of view. You might just as well help me and keep us all out of trouble.’
     
    ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.
     
    ‘Drive me where I tell you. Salisbury, for a start.’
     
    On the journey I did my best to make him feel that he was a gallant party member serving the peaceful future of the world; his mind had to be kept from brooding on divided loyalties and kindly, understanding policemen. But in spite of all my courtesy and eloquence I could not strike a spark of enthusiasm out of him. Of course it did not help matters that he should have to make some slight pecuniary sacrifice for the party. At Salisbury I made him buy me an oilskin coat, a cooking-pot, matches, torch, shaving things and a comb and mirror. And when we arrived at a promising lonely track, which seemed as good a destination as any, I relieved him of his spare cash and gave him a receipt for it.
     
    I never like to part from a man on bad terms, so I thanked him with noble emotion, and asked him if there were anything at all the party could do for him.
     
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They can allow me to resign.’
     
    I assured him that they would. I think it quite certain that they did - the silly, sturdy, little man!
     
    Where he left me was the edge of Cranborne Chase. I remembered that remote bit of country from twenty years before when I stayed nearby with the wife of the headmaster of my progressive school. Honi soit. She felt that I must be lonely in my holidays. The thickets of the Chase seemed to me fairly safe to inhabit while letting my beard grow. That was what I wanted - a short, black beard to go with the drawing-board, thoroughly untidy like the rest of me but with the dirt of the careless rather than the tramp.
     
    At least three weeks of discomfort would, I reckoned, be necessary; but not much more, for this Mediterranean chin of mine needs shaving twice a day. My poor mother’s family were quite remarkable for the luxuriance of their beards and whiskers, and the speeches which issued from those romantic and usually political coverts impressed out of all reason the clean-shaven Church and the merely moustachioed Army. Long before the communists ever thought of it, my ancestors lived by the theory of continuous revolution; but