Facing the Flag quotes

It has been justly remarked that madness is an excess of subjectivity; that is to say, a state in which the mind accords too much to mental labor and not enough to outward impressions. In the case of Thomas Roch this indifference was practically absolute.

He lived but within himself, so to speak, a prey to a fixed idea which had brought him to the condition in which we find him.

Could any circumstance occur to counteract it—to “exteriorize” him, as it were? The thing was improbable, but it was not impossible.

He next plucked some leaves from a neighboring tree and stuck them in the mounds like so many tiny flags. All this was done with the utmost seriousness and without any attention whatever being paid to the onlookers.

It was the amusement of a child, but a child would have lacked this characteristic gravity.

“Is he then absolutely mad?” demanded the Count d’Artigas, who in spite of his habitual impassibility appeared to be somewhat disappointed.

Then taking a pebble between his index finger and bent thumb, as a boy plays at marbles, he projected it against one of the little sand-heaps. It scattered, and he jumped for joy.

“Blown to pieces! The bastion is blown to pieces! My explosive has destroyed everything at one blow!” he shouted, the light of triumph flashing in his eyes.

“You see,” said the director, addressing the Count d’Artigas. “The idea of his invention never leaves him.”

But what he has discovered will ere long be lost with himself in one of these fits which are becoming more frequent and intense. Very soon even the motive of interest, the only sentiment that appears to have survived in his mind, will become extinct.”

“Mayhap the sentiment of hatred will remain, though,” muttered the Count, as Spade joined them at the garden gate.

I can now hear voices. A conversation is going on outside the door, but it is carried on in a language that I do not understand. I shout to them—I shout again, but no answer is vouchsafed.

There is nothing to do, then, but wait, wait, wait! I keep repeating the word and it rings in my ears like a bell.

Let me try to calculate how long I have been here. The ship must have been under way for at least four or five hours.

“By what right, sir?”—I begin.

“By the right of might,” replies the Count.

Then he turns on his heel, and Thomas Roch is carried below.

“Maybe it would be difficult, and even impossible to get him to do so,” says Engineer Serko with a smile.

“Because there is no such person as Count d’Artigas here.”

“You are jesting, I presume; I have just seen him.”

“Answer me, Count d’Artigas—or rather, for I know who you are—answer me, Ker Karraje!” I shout.

“The Count d’Artigas is Ker Karraje,” he coolly replies, “just as Warder Gaydon is Engineer Simon Hart; and Ker Karraje will never restore to liberty Engineer Simon Hart, who knows his secrets.”

I go down to the very edge, and cast in the keg which contains the precious document and all my hopes.

“God be with it!” I fervently exclaim. “God be with it!”

For a minute or two the little barrel remains stationary, and then floats back to the side again. I throw it out once more with all my strength.

Gently the Sword moved towards the orifice.

Oh! the horrible mischance! How have I survived it? How is it that my heart is not broken?

A dim light appeared in the depth of the tunnel, about twenty-five yards in front of us. The advancing light could be none other than that, projected through the lookout of Ker Karraje’s submarine boat.

“The bandits,” he hisses, “are those who spurned me without a hearing, who heaped injustice and ignominy upon me, who drove me from country to country, whereas I offered them superiority, invincibleness, omnipotence!”

It is the eternal story of the unappreciated inventor, to whom the indifferent or envious refuse the means of testing his inventions, to pay him the value he sets upon them.

I know it well—and also know all the exaggeration that has been written upon this subject.

“What do you mean by ‘your country?’ I no longer have any country, Simon Hart.

The inventor spurned no longer has a country. Where he finds an asylum, there is his fatherland!

They seek to take what is mine. I will defend it, and woe, woe to those who dare to attack me!”

My search has been futile.

In my present condition, a prey to indefinable hallucinations it seems to me that these walls are thicker than ever, that they are gradually closing in upon and will crush me.

How long this mental trouble lasts I cannot say. But I afterwards find myself on the Beehive side, opposite the cell in which I cannot hope for either repose or sleep. Sleep, when my brain is in a whirl of excitement?

… to the side which cannot be approached from the sea on account of the reefs and which is not likely to be watched, I reach a narrow excavation about two hundred and twenty-five yards from where the point of the coast extends towards the northwest.

At last I am out of the cavern. I am not free, but it is the beginning of freedom.

On the point the forms of a few sentries stand out against the clear sky, so motionless that they might be mistaken for pieces of the rock.