In this intolerant mood, feeling that the very existence of the human race was an insult to my self-sufficiency, I approached the little green knoll whose further bank, I knew, sloped steeply to the water, but not so steeply as to forbid one to recline on it and bask in the sunshine. Essential solitude and privacy, protection militarily perfect awaited me in this declivity; a security almost tangible, an exquisite medium through which my thoughts could roam with something amounting to physical pleasure. Reaching the summit, I stopped; for my stronghold had been surprised.

A man was lying there in the most perfect, because the most unconscious, occupation. His formidable boots, his grey flannel shirt, his corduroy trousers were lying all about. Ordinarily, the thought that so much should be encased in so little gives a pathos to divested clothing; but his had an amplitude, an air of being successfully, if rudely worn, that forbade pity. The impression of size was repeated by their owner. His head, pivoted on a large arm, turned slowly; he said ‘Good morning’ indistinctly down two sides of a pipe, and resumed his reflections.

Hedged about by his ponderous garments, daunted and almost intimidated by his immobility, I undressed; it was a prosaic business, robbed of all romance. Subject as I was to scrutiny, observed, sized up, I had as little joy of the process as though I were stripping for a Medical Board. The man was intensely difficult to talk to; and his monosyllabic replies had, I was afterwards to remember, a sinister intonation as though he were secretly bargaining with Destiny for my downfall. Mechanically I stuffed my socks into my shoes, after them my spectacles and wrist-watch, and sighed to think that this simple action should once have had all the thrill and significance of a final initiation. Instead of lingering on the bank until the forces of attraction and recoil had reached a delicate equilibrium—without giving the water a chance to get ready for me—I plunged in. The shock of the dive, usually as effective as a night’s sleep in supplying a brand-new set of thoughts and sensations, left mine exactly as they were—small, thwarted and commonplace.

This was awful. I swam round a corner to be out of sight of the monster on the bank, uneasily conscious that his proximity gave me a pioneering impetus, a confidence in negotiating weeds that I lacked before. The sudden rising of fish, the startling croak of a moor-hen in the sparse discoloured reeds, had no terrors for me. With equanimity I clove my way through slow-moving groups of foamy, closely-massed bubbles, to which I was wont to give a wide berth—thinking them the expiring sighs of men long drowned. The climax of my courage came when I investigated and bestrode a great log. This in other days I would have shunned; its curious conformation in three coils suggested a serpent, and who knew how much it trailed, like an iceberg, below it in the water? I stood on a shelving bank of gravel and laughed to feel it suddenly wriggled under my feet; and I dived in deep water and brought up a huge, pale, fleshy weed. At last, trembling and feeling incredibly weak and heavy, I climbed out on to the bank and reached for my towel. My eyes were blurred, and it was some seconds before I noticed that the man on the bank was partially dressed; still longer before I realized that the trousers he was wearing were not his but my own. He had drawn my coat up to his side.

There might be all sorts of explanations; there were perhaps as many lines to take. One could not tell from his attitude whether he was a madman, a convict, or simply a practical joker. If he was a thief, why hadn’t he decamped with the clothes? If he had meant it for a joke he wouldn’t have left the job half done. There was nothing, moreover, in his appearance to suggest jocularity. Provisionally, I was forced to conclude that he was mad; and I thought perhaps the question might be thrashed out more amicably over a couple of cigarettes. I moved across to get them out of my coat pocket.

‘Who asked you to touch that coat?’ said he. ‘It’s mine.’

In spite of my surprise I managed to stammer, ‘Oh, is it? Then I wonder if you would very much mind giving me a cigarette? I usually smoke one after bathing.’ I heard my voice trailing away into uncertainty under the look of his eyes.

‘Now look here,’ he said, ‘it ain’t no——good. I’ve taken a fancy to these clothes, and if you want any you can have mine.’

I was relieved to hear him swear, it made him more human. His madness, too, if such it were, had method in it; but I was not reassured. Sweet reasonableness, I felt, was the line to adopt.

‘I’m afraid your clothes wouldn’t be much use to me,’ I remarked. ‘Mind, I don’t say there’s anything wrong with them. They look very good wearing, and mine aren’t that, as you’ll find, I fear.’ I stopped, once more on a note of futility; his scornful, indifferent eyes held a message that I was beginning dimly to understand.

‘You’d like them back, wouldn’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes, I should,’ I exclaimed in exasperation; but I could have bitten my tongue off when I saw the look of grim satisfaction—the only expression he had yet worn to which you could give a name—cross his face and die away. He said very quietly:

‘That’s how it is, is it? Then don’t you think you’d better try and get hold of them?’

At last, through his elementary sarcasm, the immitigable hostility of his tone, the carefully maintained purposelessness of his outrageous behaviour, I saw his drift; I was up to his little game. He aimed at compassing my complete humiliation, my unconditional surrender to his mastery of the situation. He expected me to go down on my knees, to grovel, to display all the interesting symptoms of moral and physical collapse. He was more subtle than I could have supposed.

I began to feel very cold—faint, too, and a little hysterical. Clouds had darkened the sky and lowered it. My sense of the reality of the situation and of the circumstances that had led up to it was lost; and in its place came a consciousness that I had reached an impasse, a cul-de-sac against which thought continually hurled itself, only to fall away bruised. Small practical movements lost their intention and faltered into meaningless gestures. To convince myself that I retained the use of my limbs I jumped to my feet. The man also rose; and his rising was a fine affair, artistically considered; I was able to reflect that my trousers had never assumed perpendicularity with so much dignity, or participated in such a striking cumulative effect. Any hope I might have cherished of forcibly recovering these garments fell from me. Their possessor’s eyes followed mine round the horizon.

‘No, you don’t,’ he said.

I didn’t, nor, as he might have seen, was I in any condition to; but the formulation of this magnificent comprehensive negative riveted, so to speak, my fetters. He came a step nearer.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘you can have this nice suit of yours back if——’ He lingered on the protasis like a schoolboy afraid of putting the verb in the wrong tense. To give the consonant full play his lips curved back, exposing his teeth, and his eyes, under the stress of unwonted mental exertion, narrowed nearly to slits, preserving long after his lips had abandoned it the sense, almost the sound, of that suppressed condition. I was wondering what fantastic form his proposal would take when suddenly he burst out laughing, slapped me a terrific blow on the shoulder and subsided on the ground convulsed with merriment. Somehow I fancied his heartiness was not wholly genuine. Presently he remarked:

‘You can have them now; I’ve kept them aired for you.’ An incredible peevishness, the result, I suppose, of reaction, seized me.

‘I don’t think I want to wear them after you,’ I said; but instead of the outburst I expected he only remarked: