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Page 119
Sir Henry Marquis reflected.
"I think they were," he continued. "They have the mark of
spontaneity; of the first disgust of one grasping the fact that
he was being threatened."
The Baronet paused.
"The event had a great effect on England," he said. "And it
helped to restore our shattered respect for a desperate enemy.
The Hun commander didn't sink the transport, and he didn't shoot
St. Alban. It's true there was a sort of gentleman's agreement
among the enemies that hospital transports should not be sunk.
"But anything was likely to happen just then. The Hun had failed
to subjugate the world, and he was a barbarous, mad creature.
England believed that something noble in St. Alban worked the
miracle.
"`You're a brave man!'
"Some persons on the transport testified to such a comment from
the submarine commander. At any rate, he went back to his U-boat
and the undersea.
"That's the last they saw of him. The transport came on into
Dover.
"England thought the affair was one of the adventures of the sea.
A chance thing, that happened by accident. But there was one man
in England who knew better."
"You?" I said.
The Baronet shrugged his shoulders.
"St. Alban," he answered.
He got up and began to walk about the terrace. I sat with the
cup of tea cooling before me. The big man walked slowly with his
fingers linked behind him. Finally he stopped. His voice was
deep and reflective.
"`Man is altogether the sport of fortune!' . . . I read that in
Herodotus, in a form at Rugby. I never thought about it again.
But it's God's truth. St. Alban was at Rugby. I often wonder if
he remembered it. My word, he lived to verify it! Herodotus
couldn't cite a case to equal him. And the old Greek wasn't
hemmed in by the truth. I maintain that the man's case has no
parallel.
"To have all the painstaking labor of years negatived by one
enveloping, vicious misfortune; to be beaten out of life by it,
and at the same time to gain that monument out yonder and one's
niche as hero by the grim device of an enemy's satire; by the
acting of a scene that one would never have taken part in if one
had realized it, is beyond any complication of tragedy known to
the Greek.
"Look at the three strange phases of it: To be a mediocre
Englishman with no special talent; to die in horrible despair;
and to leave behind a glorious legend. And for all these three
things to contradict one another in the same life is unequaled in
the legends of any people."
The Baronet went on in a deep level voice.
"There was a vicious vitality behind the whole desperate
business. Every visible impression of the thing was wrong.
Every conception of it held today by the English people is wrong!
"The German submarine didn't overhaul the hospital transport in
the Channel by accident. The Hun commander didn't fail to sink
the transport out of any humane motives. He didn't fail to shoot
St. Alban because he was moved by the heroism of the man. It was
all grim calculation!
"He thought it was safe to let St. Alban go ahead. And he would
have been right if St. Alban had been the great egotist that he
was.
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