"Not quick enough for me, Giles," he said, "and you won't help me out,
d---- you."
I put the goldfish on a chair in front of him. He looked at it for some
moments without seeing it, and then reared himself slowly in his chair.
He began to speak in his broken husky voice, and for an instant I
thought he had gone mad.
"Ha!" he said, leaning forward towards the picture. "You're portrayed,
sir. Your unsympathetic personality, your unhealthy spots, your dorsal
redness, and your abdominal pallor, your sullen eye turned upwards to
your captors and their crumbs, all these are rendered with lynx-eyed
fidelity. Privacy is not for you. Like Marie Antoinette, you are always
in the full view of your gaolers."
He paused to take breath.
"This is England, a free country where we lock into tiny prisons for our
amusement the swiftest of God's creatures, birds, squirrels, rabbits,
mice, fishes. You are silhouetted against a background of incongruous
foreign shells strewn on a zinc floor: the nightmare of a mad
conchologist. What tenderness, what beauty in the cowslips and
primroses which encircle your prison and almost hide the iron
grating--but not quite. The rapture of Spring is in them. They bloom,
they bloom, every bud is opening. The contrast between their joyous
immobility and your enforced immobility is complete. Nothing remains to
you, to you once swift, once beautiful, once free, nothing remains to
you in your corpulent despair except--the pleasures of the table."