He wasn't on the programme, but he knew somehow that
his master was planning a separation, and refused to fall in with the
scheme. He was discovered in the motor-car when it was ready to start,
looking his best, his dear face parted in the middle with an
irresistible, ingratiating smile. When Brian tried to put him out he
flattened himself, and clung like a limpet. By Father Beckett's
intercession, he was eventually taken, trusting to luck for toleration
by the British Army. Of course he continued to smile upon all possible
arbiters of his fate; and the drama of his history, combined with the
pathos of his blind master who fought on these battlefields of Flanders,
which now he cannot see, made Brian's Sirius and Sirius's Brian _personae
gratae_ everywhere.
"I should have been nobody and nothing without them!" modestly insisted
the millionaire philanthropist for whom all the privileges of the trip
had been granted.
To me, with the one thought, the one word "Jim--Jim--_Jim_!" repeating
in my head it was strange, even irrelevant to hear Jim's unsuspecting
father and my blind brother discoursing of their adventures.
We all assembled in Mother Beckett's sitting room to listen to the
recital, she on a sofa, a rug over her feet, and on her transparent face
an utterly absorbed, tense expression rather like a French spaniel
trying to learn an English trick.
Father Beckett appointed Brian as spokesman, and then in his excitement
broke in every instant with: "Don't forget this! Be sure to remember
that! But so-and-so was the best!" Or he jumped up from his chair by
the sofa, and dropped his wife's hand to point out something on the
map, spread like a cloth over the whole top of a bridge-table.
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