It
framed his face down to the jaw. The face looked like it was set
in iron, and it was a thick-lidded, heavy, menacing face; the
sort of face that a broad-line cartoonist gives to a threatening
war-joss. At any rate, that's how the picture presents him. One
thinks of Attila under his ox head. You can hardly imagine
anything human in it, except a cruel satanic humor.
"He must have looked like Beelzebub that morning, on the
transport, when he let St. Alban go on."
The Baronet looked down at me.
"Now, that's the truth about the fine conduct of Plutonburg that
England applauded as an act of chivalry. It was a piece of
sheer, hellish malignity, if there ever was an instance."
Sir Henry took a turn across the terrace, for a moment silent.
Then he went on:
"And in fact, everything in the heroic event on the deck of the
transport was a pretense. The Hun didn't intend to shoot St.
Alban. As I have said, Plutonburg had him in just the sort of
hell he wanted him in, and he didn't propose to let him out with
a bullet. And St. Alban ought to have known it, unless, as he
afterwards said, the whole thing from the first awful moment in
the cabin was simply walled out of his consciousness, until he
began dimly to realize up there in the sun, in the crowd, that he
was being threatened and blurted out his words from a sort of
awful disgust.
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