He had known such different deep fears. In Sicily, a sudden fear, in the night of some single murderer, some single thing hovering¹ as it were out of the violent past, with the intent of murder. Out of the old Greek past, that had been so vivid, sometimes an unappeased spirit of murderous-hate against the usurping² moderns. A sudden presence of murder in the air, because of something which the modern psyche³ had excluded, some old and vital thing which Christianity has cut out. An old spirit, waiting for vengeance⁵. But in England, during the later years of the war, a true and deadly fear of the criminal living spirit which arose in all the stay-at-home bullies⁶ who governed the country during those years. From 1916 to 1919 a wave of criminal lust⁷ rose and possessed⁸ England, there was a reign⁹ of terror, under a set of indecent bullies like Bottomley of John Bull and other bottom-dog members of the House of Commons. Then Somers had known what it was to live in a perpetual state of semi-fear: the fear of the criminal public and the criminal government. The torture was steadily¹⁰ applied¹¹, during those years after Asquith fell, to break the independent soul in any man who would not hunt with the criminal mob. A man must identify himself with the criminal mob, sink his sense of truth, of justice, and of human honour, and bay like some horrible unclean hound, bay with a loud sound, from slavering, unclean jaws¹².