Mr. Standfast quotes

“Thank God there isn’t,” I said, and the old fellow begged permission to tell me a lot of unpalatable things. I knew his kind and didn’t give much for it.

He was the sort who, if he had been under fifty, would have crawled on his belly to his tribunal to get exempted, but being over age was able to pose as a patriot.

But I didn’t like the second lieutenant’s grin, for he seemed a good class of lad. I looked steadily out of the window for the rest of the way, and wasn’t sorry when I got to my station.

“Well done, the old takhaar!” he cried, and started to yarn about Peter’s methods. It appeared that Peter had a theory that every man has a blind spot, and that he knew just how to find that blind spot in the world of air.

The best cover, he maintained, was not in cloud or a wisp of fog, but in the unseeing patch in the eye of your enemy.

I recognized that talk for the real thing. It was on a par with Peter’s doctrine of “atmosphere” and “the double bluff” and all the other principles that his queer old mind had cogitated out of his rackety life.

The result was that when I got up to go on I had recovered a manlier temper. I wasn’t going to shame my friends or pick and choose my duty.

I would trust myself to Providence, for, as Blenkiron used to say, Providence was all right if you gave him a chance.

It was not only Peter’s letter that steadied and calmed me. Isham stood high up in a fold of the hills away from the main valley, and the road I was taking brought me over the ridge and back to the stream-side.

In that moment I had a kind of revelation. I had a vision of what I had been fighting for, what we all were fighting for.

It was peace, deep and holy and ancient, peace older than the oldest wars, peace which would endure when all our swords were hammered into ploughshares.

It was more; for in that hour England first took hold of me. Before my country had been South Africa, and when I thought of home it had been the wide sun-steeped spaces of the veld or some scented glen of the Berg.

Before my country had been South Africa, and when I thought of home it had been the wide sun-steeped spaces of the veld or some scented glen of the Berg. But now I realized that I had a new home.

I understood what a precious thing this little England was, how old and kindly and comforting, how wholly worth striving for.

The freedom of an acre of her soil was cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us. I knew what it meant to be a poet, though for the life of me I could not have made a line of verse.

And I observed something else. There was more than good looks in her young face. Her broad, low brow and her laughing eyes were amazingly intelligent.

She had an uncanny power of making her eyes go suddenly grave and deep, like a glittering river narrowing into a pool.

“We shall never be introduced,” she said, “so let me reveal myself. I’m Mary Lamington and these are my aunts … Did you really like Leprous Souls?”

“My good aunts!” She laughed softly. “

They talk a great deal about their souls, but they really mean their nerves.

Why, they are what you call my camouflage, and a very good one too.”

“A—really—big—thing,” she said slowly and very gravely. “

You and I and some hundred others are hunting the most dangerous man in all the world.

Till we succeed everything that Britain does is crippled. If we fail or succeed too late the Allies may never win the victory which is their right. I will tell you one thing to cheer you.

He considered himself a genius whom it was the duty of the country to support, and he sponged on his wretched relatives and anyone who would lend him money. He was always babbling about his sins, and pretty squalid they were.

I should like to have flung him among a few good old-fashioned full-blooded sinners of my acquaintance; they would have scared him considerably.

He told me that he sought “reality” and “life” and “truth,” but it was hard to see how he could know much about them, for he spent half the day in bed smoking cheap cigarettes, and the rest sunning himself in the admiration of half-witted …

He contradicted everything you said, and looked out for an argument as other people look for their dinner. He was a double-engined, high-speed pacificist, because he was the kind of cantankerous fellow who must always be in a minority.

If Britain had stood out of the war he would have been a raving militarist, but since she was in it he had got to find reasons why she was wrong.

And jolly good reasons they were, too. I couldn’t have met his arguments if I had wanted to, so I sat docilely at his feet. The world was all crooked for Letchford, and God had created him with two left hands.

And jolly good reasons they were, too. I couldn’t have met his arguments if I had wanted to, so I sat docilely at his feet.

The world was all crooked for Letchford, and God had created him with two left hands.

But the fellow had merits. He had a couple of jolly children whom he adored, and he would walk miles with me on a Sunday, and spout poetry about the beauty and greatness of England. He was forty-five;

So I set my teeth and journeyed to White Springs, and the Brothers had a look at my duodenum. They saw that the darned thing wouldn’t do, so they sidetracked it and made a noo route for my noo-trition traffic.

It was the cunningest piece of surgery since the Lord took a rib out of the side of our First Parent.

They’ve got a mighty fine way of charging, too, for they take five percent of a man’s income, and it’s all one to them whether he’s a Meat King or a clerk on twenty dollars a week.

“A year ago,” he told our host, “I was the meanest kind of dyspeptic.

I had the love of righteousness in my heart, but I had the devil in my stomach.

Then I heard stories about the Robson Brothers, the star surgeons way out west in White Springs, Nebraska. They were reckoned the neatest hands in the world at carving up a man and removing devilments from his intestines.

“Yes,” said Blenkiron reflectively. “

They haven’t got as much sense as God gave to geese.

You’re sure you didn’t hit against any heavier metal?”

Blenkiron got out of his chair and stood above me. “I tell you, Dick, that man makes my spine cold. He hasn’t a drop of good red blood in him. The dirtiest apache is a Christian gentleman compared to Moxon Ivery.

He’s as cruel as a snake and as deep as hell.

But, by God, he’s got a brain below his hat. He’s hooked and we’re playing him, but Lord knows if he’ll ever be landed!”

Blenkiron got out of his chair and stood above me. “

I tell you, Dick, that man makes my spine cold. He hasn’t a drop of good red blood in him.

The dirtiest apache is a Christian gentleman compared to Moxon Ivery. He’s as cruel as a snake and as deep as hell. But, by God, he’s got a brain below his hat.

He’s got enough alibis to choke a boa constrictor, and they’re watertight and copper-bottomed, and they’re mostly damned lies … But you can’t beat him at that stunt.

The man’s the superbest actor that ever walked the earth.

You can see it in his face. It isn’t a face, it’s a mask. He could make himself look like Shakespeare or Julius Caesar or Billy Sunday or Brigadier-General Richard Hannay if he wanted to.

He’s got enough alibis to choke a boa constrictor, and they’re watertight and copper-bottomed, and they’re mostly damned lies … But you can’t beat him at that stunt. The man’s the superbest actor that ever walked the earth. You can see it in his face.

It isn’t a face, it’s a mask.

He could make himself look like Shakespeare or Julius Caesar or Billy Sunday or Brigadier-General Richard Hannay if he wanted to. He hasn’t got any personality either—he’s got fifty, and there’s no one he could call his own.

It isn’t a face, it’s a mask. He could make himself look like Shakespeare or Julius Caesar or Billy Sunday or Brigadier-General Richard Hannay if he wanted to. He hasn’t got any personality either—he’s got fifty, and there’s no one he could call his own.

I reckon when the devil gets the handling of him at last he’ll have to put sand on his claws to keep him from slipping through.

”

“We’ve closed a fair number of his channels in the last few months. No, he don’t suspect me.

The world knows nothing of its greatest men, and to him I’m only a Yankee peace-crank, who gives big subscriptions to loony societies and will travel a hundred miles to let off steam before any kind of audience.

He’s been to see me at Claridge’s and I’ve arranged that he shall know all my record. A darned bad record it is too, for two years ago I was violent pro-British before I found salvation and was requested to leave England.

Them and their socialism! There’s more gumption in a page of John Stuart Mill than in all that foreign trash. But, as I say, I’ve got to keep a quiet sough, for the world is gettin’ socialism now like the measles.

It all comes of a defective eddication.

”

Man, I’m keepin’ them straight. If I didna fight their battles on a sound economic isshue, they would take the dorts and be at the mercy of the first blagyird that preached revolution.

Me and my like are safety-valves, if ye follow me.

And dinna you make ony mistake, Mr. Brand. The men that are agitating for a rise in wages are not for peace. They’re fighting for the lads overseas as much as for themselves.

“Ay, it’s a rotten job. I often feel like vomiting over it mysel’. But it’s no for us to complain. There’s waur jobs oot in France for better men … A word in your ear, Mr. Brand. Could ye not look a bit more sheepish?

Ye stare folk ower straight in the een, like a Hieland sergeant-major up at Maryhill Barracks.

” And he winked slowly and grotesquely with his left eye.

Then from below the bed he pulled a box from which he drew a handsome flute. “Ye’ll forgive me, Mr. Brand, but I aye like a tune before I go to my bed.

Macnab says his prayers, and I have a tune on the flute, and the principle is just the same.

”

I followed with extreme nervousness, and to my surprise got a fair hearing.

I felt as mean as a mangy dog on a cold morning, for I hated to talk rot before soldiers

—especially before a couple of Royal Scots Fusiliers, who, for all I knew, might have been in my own brigade.

But they were too late to prevent trouble. In self-defence I had to take my jock seriously, and got in my blow when he had overreached himself and lost his balance.

I never hit anyone so unwillingly in my life.

He went over like a poled ox, and measured his length on the causeway.

If I hadn’t got a grip on the rope I would have been down beside you. Say, you’re not hurt? I reckon you’d better come below and get a glass of rum under your belt. You’re about as wet as mother’s dish-clouts.”

There’s one advantage about campaigning. You take your luck when it comes and don’t worry about what might have been.

I didn’t think any more of the business, except that it had cured me of wanting to be seasick.

“Just so,” he said with a grin. “

It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.

”

I puzzled over this till I realized that in all my Cotswold pictures a figure kept going and coming—a young girl with a cloud of gold hair and the strong, slim grace of a boy, who had sung “Cherry Ripe” in a moonlit garden.

Up on that hillside I understood very clearly that I, who had been as careless of women as any monk, had fallen wildly in love with a child of half my age.

I was loath to admit it, though for weeks the conclusion had been forcing itself on me. Not that I didn’t revel in my madness, but that it seemed too hopeless a business, and I had no use for barren philandering.

in old days there wass nothing to do but watch the doors at the flower-shows and keep the yachts from poaching the sea-trout. But now it is spies, spies, and ‘Donald, get out of your bed, and go off twenty mile to find a German.’

I wass wishing the war wass by, and the Germans all dead.

”

An old woman with a mutch sat in an armchair behind the counter. She looked up at me over her spectacles and smiled, and I took to her on the instant.

She had the kind of old wise face that God loves.

Beside her I noticed a little pile of books, one of which was a Bible. Open on her lap was a paper, the United Free Church Monthly. I noticed these details greedily, for I had to make up my mind on the part to play.

He had just the same narrow head, and stubborn mouth, and honest, quick-tempered eyes. It is the type that makes dashing regimental officers, and earns V.C.s, and gets done in wholesale. I was never that kind.

I belonged to the school of the cunning cowards.

In the half-hour before dinner the last wisp of suspicion fled from my host’s mind. For Ted Broadbury and I were immediately deep in “shop.”

An old woman appeared in answer to his call, a woman whose face was so old that she seemed like his mother.

In highland places one sex ages quicker than the other.

“This gentleman would like to bide the night. I wass telling him that we had a poor small house, but he says he will not be minding it.”

But the lairds said it wass better for sheep, and then they said it wass not good for sheep, so they put it under deer, and now there is no black cattle anywhere in Skye.”

I tell you it was like sad music on the bagpipes hearing that old fellow.

The war and all things modern meant nothing to him; he lived among the tragedies of his youth and his prime.

But that did not comfort him. He was not thinking about the land itself, but about the men who had been driven from it fifty years before.

His desire was not for reform, but for restitution, and that was past the power of any Government.

I went to bed in the loft in a sad, reflective mood, considering how in speeding our newfangled plough we must break down a multitude of molehills and how desirable and unreplaceable was the life of the moles.

The men we fought at the Front and the men I had run across in the Greenmantle business, even old Stumm himself, had been human miscreants. They were formidable enough, but you could gauge and calculate their capacities.

But this Ivery was like a poison gas that hung in the air and got into unexpected crannies and that you couldn’t fight in an upstanding way.

Till then, in spite of Blenkiron’s solemnity, I had regarded him simply as a problem. But now he seemed an intimate and omnipresent enemy, intangible, too, as the horror of a haunted house.

I didn’t exactly dislike the idea, for my objection to my past weeks had been that I was out of my proper job, and this was more my line of country.

I always felt that I was a better bandit than a detective.

But a sort of awe mingled with my satisfaction. I began to feel about Ivery as I had felt about the three devils of the Black Stone who had hunted me before the war, and as I never felt about any other Hun.

Now I have slept hundreds of times alone beside my horse on the veld, and I never knew any cause for such awakenings but the one, and that was the presence near me of some human being.

A man who is accustomed to solitude gets this extra sense which announces like an alarm-clock the approach of one of his kind.

But I could hear nothing. There was a scraping and rustling on the moor, but that was only the wind and the little wild things of the hills. A fox, perhaps, or a blue hare.

“Well, I’m ready.

I may be a poor creature, but I’m damned if I’m afraid of you, or anything like you.

” That was a brave thing to say, for it was a lie; his teeth were chattering.

I heard too a phrase several times repeated, which seemed to me to be pure gibberish—Die Stubenvögel verstehn. It was spoken by the man from the sea. And then the word Wildvögel.

The pair seemed demented about birds.

For a second an electric torch was flashed in the shelter of the rock, and I could see a tanned, bearded face looking at some papers. The light disappeared, and again the Portuguese Jew was fumbling with the stones at the base of the tower.

I remember that he asked no question of me, but he used language rare on the lips of conscientious objectors about the men who had lately been in the crevice.

We, who four hours earlier had been at death grips, now curled up on the hard floor like two tired dogs, and fell sound asleep.

I woke to find Wake in a thundering bad temper. The thing he remembered most about the night before was our scrap and the gross way I had insulted him.

I didn’t blame him, for if any man had taken me for a German spy I would have been out for his blood, and it was no good explaining that he had given me grounds for suspicion.

He was as touchy about his blessed principles as an old maid about her age.

I was feeling rather extra buckish myself and that didn’t improve matters. His face was like a gargoyle as we went down to the beach to bathe, so I held my tongue. He was chewing the cud of his wounded pride.

But the salt water cleared out the dregs of his distemper.

You couldn’t be peevish swimming in that jolly, shining sea.

We raced each other away beyond the inlet to the outer water, which a brisk morning breeze was curling. Then back to a promontory of heather, where the first beams of the sun coming over the Coolin dried our skins.

He put the case in his waistcoat pocket. “I’ll go round Garsbheinn,” he said, “and over by Camasunary. I’ll be at the Kyle long before evening. I meant anyhow to sleep at Broadford tonight … Goodbye, Brand, for I’ve forgotten your proper name.

You’re not a bad fellow, but you’ve landed me in melodrama for the first time in my sober existence.

I have a grudge against you for mixing up the Coolin with a shilling shocker. You’ve spoiled their sanctity.”

For her sake I held Biggleswick delectable, because I had seen her there. I wasn’t sure if this was love, but it was something I had never dreamed of before, something which I now hugged the thought of.

It made the whole earth rosy and golden for me, and life so well worth living that I felt like a miser towards the days to come.

I had about finished supper, when I was joined by another guest. Seen in the light of that infamous lamp, he seemed a small, alert fellow, with a bushy, black moustache, and black hair parted in the middle.

I concluded by observing morosely that the bagman had been a better man when he peddled books for Alexander Matheson, and that put the closure on the business.

That train was a record. It stopped at every station, and in the afternoon it simply got tired and sat down in the middle of a moor and reflected for an hour.

I stuck my head out of the window now and then, and smelt the rooty fragrance of bogs, and when we halted on a bridge I watched the trout in the pools of the brown river.

My reflections were not pleasant.

I had got down too far below the surface, and had the naked feeling you get in a dream when you think you have gone to the theatre in your nightgown.

I had had three names in two days, and as many characters. I felt as if I had no home or position anywhere, and was only a stray dog with everybody’s hand and foot against me.

I told myself all that, but it didn’t cheer my spirits. I was feeling mean and hunted and very cold about the feet.

But I have a tough knuckle of obstinacy in me which makes me unwilling to give up a thing till I am fairly choked off it.

The chances were badly against me. The Scottish police were actively interested in my movements and would be ready to welcome me at my journey’s end. I had ruined my hat, and my clothes, as Amos had observed, were not respectable.

And then I remembered that all this glory had only one use in war and that was to help the muddy British infantryman to down his Hun opponent. He was the fellow, after all, that decided battles, and the thought comforted me.

A great exhilaration is often the precursor of disaster, and mine was to have a sudden downfall.

It was getting on for noon and we were well into England—I guessed from the rivers we had passed that we were somewhere in the north of Yorkshire—when the machine began to make odd sounds, and we bumped in perfectly calm patches of air.

… aim was to deploy the troops on too narrow a front so that they were bound to fan outward, and I had to be quick about it, for I didn’t know when the hapless movie-merchant might be retrieved from the battlefield and dispute my authority.

It takes a long time to straighten a thing out, but it does not take long to tangle it, especially when the thing is so delicate a machine as disciplined troops.

In about eight minutes I had produced chaos. The flanks spread out, in spite of all the shepherding of the N.C.O.s, and the fringe engulfed the photographers. The cameras on their little platforms went down like ninepins.

He took Amos’s view of the soundness of the British workingman, but he said something which made me think. He was convinced that there was a tremendous lot of German spy work about, and that most of the practitioners were innocent.

“The ordinary Briton doesn’t run to treason, but he’s not very bright. A clever man in that kind of game can make better use of a fool than a rogue.”

As he saw me off he gave me a piece of advice. “Get out of these clothes as soon as you reach London. Private Tomkins will frank you out of Bradfield, but it mightn’t be a healthy alias in the metropolis.”

I did what I had done a hundred times before at the Front, and dropped flat on my face.

The man who says he doesn’t mind being bombed or shelled is either a liar or a maniac.

This London air raid seemed to me a singularly unpleasant business. I think it was the sight of the decent civilized life around one and the orderly streets, for what was perfectly natural in a rubble-heap like Ypres or Arras seemed an outrage here.

“Only that I know our gentleman better than you. I’ve been twice up against him.

He’s the kind of wicked that don’t cease from troubling till they’re stone-dead.

And even then I’d want to see the body cremated and take the ashes into mid-ocean and scatter them. I’ve got a feeling that he’s the biggest thing you or I will ever tackle.”

For all I know he may have breakfasted at Downing Street with letters of introduction from President Wilson, or visited the Grand Fleet as a distinguished neutral. Then think of the women; how they talk.

We’re the leakiest society on earth, and we safeguard ourselves by keeping dangerous people out of it.

We trust to our outer barrage. But anyone who has really slipped inside has a million chances.

But it’s a question of destroying this one man, and his front is a razor edge. How are you going to find him? It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, and such a needle!

A needle which can become a piece of straw or a tin-tack when it chooses!

”

“What about the ‘blind spot’?” I asked, and I told them old Peter’s pet theory. “

Every man that God made has his weak spot somewhere, some flaw in his character which leaves a dull patch in his brain.

We’ve got to find that out, and I think I’ve made a beginning.”

I didn’t recognize him before, for I thought he was dead, and the nerve in my brain which should have been looking for him wasn’t working. But I’m on my guard now, and that nerve’s functioning at full power.

Whenever and wherever and howsoever we meet again on the face of the earth, it will be ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume’ between him and me.

”

Herr B at the other end replied in the Frankfurter, and a few days later shrewd editors and acute Intelligence officers—and Mr. A—were reading it in London, though only Mr. A knew what it really meant.

It struck me as a bright idea, the sort of simple thing that doesn’t occur to clever people, and very rarely to the Boche.

I wished I was not in the middle of a battle, for I would have had a try at investigating the cipher myself. I wrote a long letter to Macgillivray putting my case, and then went to sleep.

I might have gone in and ransacked the place, but I knew I should find nothing.

It was borne in on me that it was only when evening fell that that house was interesting and that I must come, like Nicodemus, by night.

Besides I had a private account to settle with my conscience. I had funked the place in the foggy twilight, and it does not do to let a matter like that slide. A man’s courage is like a horse that refuses a fence;

Besides I had a private account to settle with my conscience. I had funked the place in the foggy twilight, and it does not do to let a matter like that slide.

A man’s courage is like a horse that refuses a fence; you have got to take him by the head and cram him at it again.

If you don’t, he will funk worse next time. I hadn’t enough courage to be able to take chances with it, though I was afraid of many things, the thing I feared most mortally was being afraid.

As for me, the miles to Douvecourt passed as in a blissful moment of time. I wrapped Mary in a fur rug, and after that we did not speak a word.

I had come suddenly into a great possession and was dazed with the joy of it.

I felt very humble, too, and very kindly towards all the world—even to the Boche, though I can’t say I had ever hated him very wildly.

You find hate more among journalists and politicians at home than among fighting men.

I wanted to be quiet and alone to think, and since that was impossible I went about my work in a happy abstraction.

I had only to think of Mary to know just what Joan of Arc was. No man ever born could have done that kind of thing.

It wasn’t recklessness. It was sheer calculating courage.

Then Blenkiron took up the tale. The newspaper we found that Christmas Eve in the Château was of tremendous importance, for Bommaerts had pricked out in the advertisement the very special second cipher of the Wild Birds.

They don’t know where to put their hands or how to keep their feet still … Your copper-bottomed English nobleman has got to keep jogging himself to treat them as equals instead of sending them down to the servants’ hall.

Their fine fixings are just the high light that reveals the everlasting jay.

They can’t be gentlemen, because they aren’t sure of themselves.

That was right enough, maybe, in the days when you hurrooshed into battle waving a banner, but it don’t do with high explosives and a couple of million men on each side and a battle front of five hundred miles.

The hero of this war is the plain man out of the middle class, who wants to get back to his home and is going to use all the brains and grit he possesses to finish the job soon.

”

“Cut it out,” he said. “It is a word that’s gone bad with me.

There’s just two kind of men, those who’ve gotten sense and those who haven’t.

A big percentage of us Americans make our living by trading, but we don’t think because a man’s in business or even because he’s made big money that he’s any natural good at every job.

“You’re an old Ottoman, Dick. You haven’t doubled Cape Turk yet, and I don’t believe you’re round Seraglio Point.

Why, women aren’t the brittle things men used to think them. They never were, and the war has made them like whipcord.

Bless you, my dear, we’re the tougher sex now. We’ve had to wait and endure, and we’ve been so beaten on the anvil of patience that we’ve lost all our megrims.”

She was so sure of herself, so happy in her single-heartedness that she terrified me. My type of man is not meant for marriage, for women must be in the centre of life, and we must always be standing aside and looking on.

It is a damnable thing to be left-handed.

”

“That’s one way of putting it. I should put it more harshly. I hate more than I love.

All we humanitarians and pacifists have hatred as our mainspring.

Odd, isn’t it, for people who preach brotherly love? But it’s the truth. We’re full of hate towards everything that doesn’t square in with our ideas, everything that jars on our ladylike nerves.

I remember that I looked at him with a sudden understanding. “I think I know you.

You’re the sort of chap who won’t fight for his country because he can’t be sure that she’s altogether in the right. But he’d cheerfully die for her, right or wrong.

”

His face relaxed in a slow smile. “Queer that you should say that. I think it’s pretty near the truth.

Men like me aren’t afraid to die, but they haven’t quite the courage to live.

Every man should be happy in a service like you, when he obeys orders. I couldn’t get on in any service. I lack the bump of veneration. I can’t swallow things merely because I’m told to.

He used to talk about Mr. Standfast in his queer way as if he were a friend of us both, like Blenkiron … I tell you I was humbled out of all my pride by the sight of Peter, so uncomplaining and gentle and wise.

The Almighty Himself couldn’t have made a prig out of him, and he never would have thought of preaching.

Only once did he give me advice. I had always a liking for shortcuts, and I was getting a bit restive under the long inaction. One day when I expressed my feelings on the matter, Peter upped and read from the Pilgrim’s Progress:

Only once did he give me advice. I had always a liking for shortcuts, and I was getting a bit restive under the long inaction. One day when I expressed my feelings on the matter, Peter upped and read from the Pilgrim’s Progress: “

Some also have wished that the next way to their Father’s house were here, that they might be troubled no more with either hills or mountains to go over, but the Way is the Way, and there is an end.

”

… Schwabing, the exile, who had done more for Germany than any army commander … Mary’s words came back to me—“the most dangerous man in the world” … I was not afraid, or brokenhearted at failure, or angry—not yet, for I was too dazed and awestruck.

I looked at him as one might look at some cataclysm of nature which had destroyed a continent.

“I am happy to offer you hospitality at last,” it said.

If you were cleverer you would appreciate the compliment. But you were fool enough to think you could beat me, and for that you must be punished. Oh no, don’t flatter yourself you were ever dangerous.

You were only troublesome and presumptuous like a mosquito one flicks off one’s sleeve.

”

“You will have time for reflection, so I propose to enlighten you a little. You are an observer of little things. So?

Did you ever see a cat with a mouse? The mouse runs about and hides and manoeuvres and thinks it is playing its own game.

But at any moment the cat can stretch out its paw and put an end to it. You are the mouse, my poor General—for I believe you are one of those funny amateurs that the English call Generals.

Happily he wasn’t there, and there was no witness of my cowardice.

Happily, too, it is just as difficult to be a coward for long as to be a hero.

It was Blenkiron’s phrase about Mary that pulled me together—“She can’t scare and she can’t soil.” No, by heavens, she couldn’t. I could trust my lady far better than I could trust myself.

He saw what was happening and got the pick of his axe fixed in the ice before I was allowed to stir. He spoke often to cheer me up, and his voice had none of its harshness.

He was like some ill-tempered generals I have known, very gentle in a battle.

At the end the snow began to fall, a soft powder like the overspill of a storm raging beyond the crest. It was just after that that Wake cried out that in five minutes we would be at the summit. He consulted his wristwatch.

I yearned for warmth, for the glow of a fire, for a tree or blade of grass or anything which meant the sheltered homeliness of mortality.

I knew then what the Greeks meant by panic, for I was scared by the apathy of nature.

But the terror gave me a kind of comfort, too. Ivery and his doings seemed less formidable. Let me but get out of this cold hell and I could meet him with a new confidence.

I have no doubt he was sincere, for he had many moods, and the libertine whom he had revealed to me at the Pink Chalet had given place to the honourable gentleman.

He could play all parts well because he could believe in himself in them all.

Then he spoke of danger, not so as to slight her courage, but to emphasize his own thoughtfulness. The world in which she had lived was crumbling, and he alone could offer a refuge.

For she was going into the unknown with a man whom she hated, a man who claimed to be her lover.

It was the bravest thing I have ever heard of, and I have lived my life among brave men.

“I will come with you,” she said. “But you mustn’t speak to me, please. I am tired and troubled and I want peace to think.”

Even through the fog in which my brain worked it was forced upon me that here was a man born to play a big part.

He had a jowl like a Roman king on a coin, and scornful eyes that were used to mastery.

He was younger than me, confound him, and now he looked it.

The man’s moment had come, and he was minded not to miss a jot of his triumph. His figure seemed to expand, his eye kindled, his voice rang with pride.

It was melodrama of the best kind and he fairly rolled it round his tongue.

I don’t think I grudged it him, for I was fingering something in my pocket. He had won all right, but he wouldn’t enjoy his victory long, for soon I would shoot him.

If ever I saw a man going through hell it was now. His pasteboard castle had crumbled about his ears and he was giddy with the fall of it.

The man was made of pride, and every proud nerve of him was caught on the raw.

“So much for ordinary business,” said Blenkiron. “There’s the matter of a certain lady. You haven’t behaved overnice about her, Graf, but I’m not going to blame you. You maybe heard a whistle blow when you were coming in here? No!

I looked only at Ivery. His face had gone very pale, and his eyes were wandering.

I am certain his brain was working at lightning speed, but he was a rat in a steel trap and the springs held him.

If ever I saw a man going through hell it was now. His pasteboard castle had crumbled about his ears and he was giddy with the fall of it.

But before it comes you will have understood the hell to which you have condemned honest men.”

In moments of great fatigue, as in moments of great crisis, the mind takes charge and may run on a track independent of the will.

It was not myself that spoke, but an impersonal voice which I did not know, a voice in whose tones rang a strange authority. Ivery recognized the icy finality of it, and his body seemed to wilt, and droop.

“I wonder,” said the girl gravely. “

I don’t think there’s any discharge in this war.

Dick, have you news of the battle? This was the day.”

“I am not afraid for you,” she said. “You are going to stand in the breach, and I know—I know you will win.

Remember that there is someone here whose heart is so full of pride of her man that it hasn’t room for fear.

”

Looking back, it seems a miracle that any of us came out of it. Only the grace of God and the uncommon toughness of the British soldier bluffed the Hun and prevented him pouring through the breach to Abbeville and the sea.

We were no better than a mosquito curtain stuck in a doorway to stop the advance of an angry bull.

The Army Commander was right; we were hanging on with our eyelashes.

The natural thing is to be always a little scared, like me, but by an effort of the will and attention to work to contrive to forget it. But Wake apparently never gave it a thought.

He wasn’t foolhardy, only indifferent.

He used to go about with a smile on his face, a smile of contentment. Even the horrors—and we had plenty of them—didn’t affect him. His eyes, which used to be hot, had now a curious open innocence like Peter’s.

“Yes,” he replied, “it is very wonderful. I did not think a man could go through it and keep his reason. But I know many things I did not know before.

I know that the soul can be reborn without leaving the body.

”