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of the mask in front of me was a challenge. The reserve struck me as insolent and stupid. Why is this silly fellow playing a part with me! is what I was disposed to ask. It is the way one is bound to react in the end, before a shut door. This is particularly the case, if from behind the shut door comes a constant stream of words, all vetted for public consumption. Anyhow—verbally—I charged at the shut door.
        “It has always been obvious to me,” I began, “that the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount plays a major role in the history of socialism.”
        “Not the Sermon on the Mount,” Rymer, a little sullenly, but lazily, objected.
        “Oh, I see: not the Sermon on the Mount,” I said.
        “Well, why that?” he asked.
        “I understand perfectly, as a matter of fact, your objection to that. Contemporary socialism is so phenomenally tough that you would rather not have the Sermon on the Mount mentioned in connection with ‘purges’, faked trials, and labour camps.”
        Rymer said nothing.
        “The idea that socialism is unthinkable without Christianity does not appeal to you. Yet was it not fundamentally a Christian impulse that moved the Western intellectuals (even though no longer Christians) to champion the cause of the oppressed and ‘underprivileged’, the underdog?”
        He neglected the second member of this compound question, answering the first. “Socialism”, he said, “is not unthinkable without Christianity.”
        “In that case you differ entirely from the present socialist administration.”
        “Do I?” he sang, amusedly musical.
        “So it appears. One of their brain trusters is my authority.” And I produced a cutting from among some papers in my pocket. “Here is a cutting from the Paris Herald Tribune. ”
        It would be impossible for Samuel Rymer to scowl, he is really too gentle in spite of his brutal dimensions but he made an effort to do so. At the mention of anything to do with the United States he reacted violently. The United States, in spite of its weaknesses, I like, so this is of his idiosyncrasies the one that appeals to me least. He drawled, in a bored and withering voice:
        “Do you read the Herald Tribune? ”
        “Sometimes. But listen. The headline reads ‘Ex-Adviser of Attlee Attacks U.S. Capitalism as Immoral.’”
        “I’m glad Americans are being told what their capitalists are like,” he breathed guardedly. “That’s good.”
        “So you are prepared to accept a moral basis for the indictment?”
        He blinked and let that pass.
        “Well, listen now.” ( I read. )
        “American capitalism was attacked as immoral and producing a neurosis with ‘the stature of a national disease’, in a long article in Fortune magazine by Francis Williams… former public relations adviser to Prime Minister Clement R. Attlee.
        “Mr. Williams called his article ‘The Moral Case for Socialism’…
        “‘I am a socialist,’ wrote Mr. Williams, ‘because I believe that only within a socialist society can human rights be assured…’
        “… Mr. Williams said it is no accident that many early leaders of British socialism were drawn from the churches and non-conformist chapels. ‘It was not personal economic interest but ethical compulsion that drove men like Attlee, Cripps and others to try to build a more moral society,’ he wrote…”
        ( I stop reading. )
        “Finally we are told that Mr. Williams speaks of the ‘great American tradition of freedom and democracy ’.”
        Rymer’s response was instantaneous. “Which is utter nonsense, the Americans have never known what freedom is. It is funny to hear freedom spoken of in the same breath with the lynchers and witch-hunters.”
        “You are interested in freedom now?”
        “Of course I am.” He was aggressively bland and