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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Kingdom of the Blind," E. Phillips Oppenheim weaves a captivating spy thriller that delves into the complex world of espionage and betrayal during the early 20th century. The narrative showcases Oppenheim's deft storytelling and his ability to create tension through atmospheric settings and intricate characterizations. The novel's literary style is marked by its crisp dialogue and vivid descriptions, situating it firmly within the genre of classic thrillers, while reflecting the anxieties of a post-World War I society grappling with shifting power dynamics and moral ambiguities. E. Phillips Oppenheim, often dubbed the "Prince of Storytellers," was noted for his keen insight into human nature and his experience in the world of journalism and theater, which informed his writing. His career spanned several decades, during which he gained acclaim for his sharply plotted narratives that often critiqued social issues of his time. This background likely inspired the nuanced characters and the morally complex world depicted in "The Kingdom of the Blind." Readers seeking a thrilling escapade filled with intrigue, political machinations, and the dualities of trust and deception will find "The Kingdom of the Blind" to be an enthralling experience. Oppenheim's blend of suspenseful storytelling and intelligent commentary makes it a must-read for fans of classic spy fiction and literary enthusiasts alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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The Kingdom of the Blind (Spy Thriller Classic)
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a world at war, the most dangerous weapon is not the gun but the blindness that hides motives, confuses loyalties, and allows quiet conspiracies to move unchallenged through drawing rooms, ministries, and shadowed streets while those who most need to see are dazzled by certainty.
The Kingdom of the Blind is a spy thriller by E. Phillips Oppenheim, a prolific British author renowned for tales of international intrigue in the early twentieth century. First published during the First World War, it unfolds against a Europe riven by conflict and suspicion, where official fronts and private agendas intersect. The setting ranges through urbane spaces and tense borderlands, evoking an age when diplomacy, commerce, and espionage overlapped in everyday life. Readers encounter a world of coded messages, discreet meetings, and elegant façades—an atmosphere characteristic of wartime fiction that trades in secrets as much as in bullets.
Without revealing its turns, the novel launches from a seemingly straightforward encounter that nudges an otherwise respectable figure into a labyrinth of clandestine duties. The initial premise is simple: a request that appears harmless, an errand that feels routine, a conversation that hints at more than it says. From there, the circle widens to include watchful officials, ambiguous allies, and opponents whose true purposes are deliberately obscured. Oppenheim crafts suspense not through spectacle alone but through the incremental tightening of obligations, as one favor begets another and the cost of misreading a situation becomes perilously high.
Stylistically, the book offers a polished, cosmopolitan voice, paced with measured urgency. Oppenheim’s craft lies in the friction between cultivated manners and hard political reality: refined rooms where a misplaced word carries consequences, and quiet streets where chance meetings are anything but accidental. The dialogue is crisp, the chapters compact, and the narrative agile, moving from social poise to sudden danger with unfussy confidence. Readers can expect cat-and-mouse tension, misdirection sustained just long enough to unsettle, and a steady accretion of stakes that relies on psychology and position rather than sheer force to drive the story forward.
At its core, the novel interrogates perception—how people see what they wish to see, and how power thrives when assumptions go untested. Themes of patriotism, personal conscience, and moral ambiguity thread through the action, asking what one owes a nation when the nation’s needs are opaque. It examines the costs of security, the seductions of authority, and the vulnerability of public truth to rumor and design. Those concerns resonate today, when questions of disinformation, surveillance, and loyalty remain urgent. The title’s metaphor becomes a lens: blindness is not only inability to perceive, but also complicity in comforting half-knowledge.
For readers interested in the evolution of espionage fiction, The Kingdom of the Blind exemplifies early twentieth-century conventions that would shape the genre for decades. Oppenheim helped popularize an approach that blends social observation with international stakes, favoring intelligent maneuver over brute confrontation. The novel’s emphasis on diplomacy, commerce, and the theater of appearances anticipates later thrillers that link private motives to geopolitical consequences. Its appeal extends beyond period charm: it provides a historical snapshot of wartime anxiety while demonstrating how suspense can be built from coded glances, tactical silence, and the calculated ambiguity of seemingly ordinary encounters.
Approached as both period piece and living narrative, the book rewards careful attention to how characters read one another—and how often they get it wrong. Readers will find a story that invites inference, rewards patience, and balances elegance with menace. It is not merely about outwitting enemies; it is about outwitting the self, shedding assumptions before they become traps. Enter with curiosity, notice what is withheld as much as what is said, and allow the atmosphere of uncertainty to do its work. In its restraint and its questions, The Kingdom of the Blind remains a quietly gripping study of seeing and being seen.
Synopsis
Set in the early years of the Great War, The Kingdom of the Blind follows a capable young Englishman whose diplomatic career has been abruptly curtailed. Drawn back into public service through a discreet approach from the Secret Service, he accepts a role that relies on observation, patience, and social finesse. In London’s restaurants, embassies, and private clubs, he encounters an accomplished continental woman whose connections cross borders and cast doubt on clear loyalties. Their meetings, outwardly casual, become stages for guarded exchanges. The atmosphere is one of watchfulness and restraint, as small gestures and brief messages hint at deeper currents.
He begins by mapping the city’s talk. Salon conversations, pacifist lectures, charitable committees, and fashionable dinners reveal a pattern of influence that seems spontaneous yet repeats names and arguments. Financial backers appear in the background, newspapers echo certain phrases, and couriers move discreetly between townhouses. The woman’s presence in these circles is at once reassuring and unsettling. She opens doors he could not pass alone, yet her discretion obscures motives he cannot test. His assignment, never defined in full, is to follow the trail of ideas, to determine whether opinion is being steered toward outcomes advantageous to an enemy power.
Assignments send him beyond England to neutral ground, where ordinary travel disguises exceptional risk. In Dutch ports and anonymous hotel corridors, he encounters familiar faces under unfamiliar names, and learns the practical grammar of espionage: dead-letter drops in commonplace shops, coded messages folded into business correspondence, tickets purchased in patterns that leave no trace. He advances not by confrontation but by collecting fragments that match. The woman’s path intersects his own abroad, offering assistance that might be help or entrapment. Each meeting adds nuance to the map he builds, suggesting a network whose edges touch both commerce and diplomacy.
Back in England, the investigation narrows. A government office reports a minor loss that matters only if read alongside other incidents: a mistranslated cable, an unexpected resignation, a social visit that coincides with the movement of a private train. A household in the countryside hosts diversions that double as tests, probing whether he can be shaken or led. An unanticipated death sharpens his sense of urgency without clarifying its cause. The woman reappears at critical moments, offering fragments of warning. Promises made in past encounters weigh on decisions that demand speed, while official channels provide less shelter than expected.
The phrase that names the book surfaces as a private creed among those he follows. It describes a strategy rather than a place: in a kingdom of the blind, control belongs to whoever sees slightly more than the rest. The protagonist learns of a quiet coalition of influential men who aim to guide public opinion and policy through finance, rumor, and selective disclosure. Their objective is not melodramatic sabotage but shifts in sentiment that slow production, divert resources, or unsettle alliances. A projected operation, seemingly bureaucratic, would yield consequences far beyond its modest description, if it proceeds unchallenged.
A turning point arrives when trust frays close to home. A colleague with impeccable credentials appears entangled with the same threads he is tracing. Circumstances cast suspicion on the protagonist himself, limiting his access and forcing him to continue without official sanction. In isolation he concentrates on pattern rather than personality, reconstructing a timetable from advertisements, shipping notices, and the rhythm of club visitors. A code yields not to brilliance but to patience, revealing a narrow window in which a decisive act is planned. He must decide whether to confront, to intercept, or to gamble on a risky alliance.
The narrative quickens as the appointed hour approaches. A diplomatic reception provides cover for a document exchange; elsewhere, a warehouse grows too quiet, and on a coastal line a night train runs with unexpected passengers. Alerts travel by telephone and messenger, yet the most important choices are made in rooms where only two or three people stand. The woman’s role cannot be deferred. She asks for trust without proof and offers information whose value is inseparable from its timing. The protagonist moves between deference and initiative, determined to prevent a blow that would be felt far beyond the capital.
The immediate crisis resolves without spectacle. Outcomes register in small acknowledgments, in doors that stay closed, and in headlines that do not appear. Some reputations survive, others recede from view; the official record remains sparse. The protagonist’s standing alters in ways that matter to those who sent him but cannot be celebrated publicly. The woman’s position is clarified only enough to permit the story to continue without romantic certainty. Within the service, the affair prompts adjustments in methods and in the handling of sources whose motives are mixed. The war’s wider pressures return, unchanged by one quiet success.
The novel’s message emerges from its restraint. It shows a battle fought not in trenches but in drawing rooms, corridors, and anonymous hotels, where opinion, money, and information move with greater force than weapons. The kingdom of the blind is the complacent field in which such efforts take root, and the advantage belongs to those who see a little more and act without drama. The story emphasizes vigilance, the ambiguity of personal loyalty, and the fragile link between private decisions and public outcomes. It presents espionage as patient work, undertaken by fallible people, whose victories are measured in what does not happen.
Historical Context
Set amid the upheavals of the First World War, The Kingdom of the Blind unfolds primarily in London and across key continental nodes such as Paris, the Low Countries, and Switzerland. The atmosphere is one of secrecy and constraint: blackout orders, censorship, and travel permits shape daily life, while ministries, embassies, gentlemen’s clubs, and grand hotels become arenas for discreet negotiations. Britain’s Defence of the Realm regulations, tightened from August 1914 onward, penetrate social routine, and the old cosmopolitan ease of pre-1914 Europe hardens into suspicion. Oppenheim situates characters at the intersection of official bureaucracy and elite society, where private salons, corridors of power, and border stations overlap with the imperatives of wartime intelligence.
The overarching event is the First World War (1914–1918). Triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the conflict drew in Britain on 4 August after Germany violated Belgian neutrality. Trench warfare on the Western Front, from Flanders to the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917), created a stalemate that elevated intelligence, diplomacy, and economic pressure to strategic prominence. The novel mirrors this shift, emphasizing information, misdirection, and clandestine influence rather than battlefield heroics. References to Paris, London, and embassies evoke the war’s diplomatic theater, while the constant fear of spies and defections reflects how total war blurred home front, front line, and backroom statecraft.
Central to the novel’s world is the rapid institutionalization of British intelligence. In 1909, the Secret Service Bureau was created under Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, later bifurcated in 1914 into domestic counter-espionage (MI5) under Vernon Kell and the foreign section (MI6) led by Captain Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the legendary “C.” Simultaneously, the Admiralty’s Room 40, under Director of Naval Intelligence Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, advanced signals intelligence; its 1917 decryption of the Zimmermann Telegram helped precipitate U.S. entry into the war on 6 April 1917. Oppenheim’s narrative echoes these developments through portrayals of watchers, cut-outs, codebreakers, and discreet safe houses. The book channels contemporary fascination with the figure of the spymaster and the bureaucratic machinery—files, passwords, coded cables—that quietly redirected grand strategy.
Equally shaping the milieu were spy scares and counter-espionage laws. The Aliens Restriction Act (5 August 1914) and successive Defence of the Realm Regulations (from 8 August 1914) empowered detention, censorship, and movement control. High-profile cases—such as the execution of German agent Carl Hans Lody in the Tower of London on 6 November 1914—publicized an invisible war. Zeppelin and Gotha raids on Britain, including London’s first major Zeppelin attack on 31 May 1915, intensified paranoia about enemy spotters and informants. Across the Channel, espionage trials, like the execution of Mata Hari in Paris on 15 October 1917, fed the European imagination. The novel harnesses this climate, dramatizing hidden networks embedded in respectable society and the legal architecture that policed them.
Neutral zones and maritime choke points became crucial theaters. The Netherlands, with Rotterdam and The Hague, functioned as a conduit between Germany and the Atlantic, monitored through measures such as the Netherlands Overseas Trust (established November 1914) to control contraband. Switzerland’s cities—Geneva, Zurich, Bern—hosted diplomats, exiles, and agents amid conspicuous neutrality. Britain’s naval blockade, tightened from late 1914, and the expansion of passport controls in 1915 reshaped mobility and commerce. Oppenheim draws on these realities by moving characters through border hotels, consulates, and ferry ports where identities could be assembled or erased, reflecting how espionage thrived in spaces where commerce, diplomacy, and surveillance intersected.
Domestic political crises formed the background to clandestine maneuver. The Shell Crisis of 1915 forced a coalition government in May and the creation of the Ministry of Munitions under David Lloyd George in June. Conscription arrived via the Military Service Acts of January and May 1916, while the Easter Rising in Dublin (24–30 April 1916) and the executions in May shook imperial confidence. Lloyd George replaced Asquith as prime minister in December 1916, inaugurating a more centralized war direction. The novel’s emphasis on cabinet intrigues, leaks, and pressure groups reflects these strains, portraying how intelligence could sway ministries and how foreign adversaries sought to exploit Britain’s internal vulnerabilities.
Social transformation underwrote the era’s tensions. Women entered munitions factories in vast numbers, with the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps formed in 1917 and parallel naval and air auxiliaries in 1918. Labor unrest flared intermittently in 1917–1918 as inflation and long hours bit. The Representation of the People Act (6 February 1918) extended the franchise to many working-class men and to women over 30 meeting property qualifications, signaling political recalibration. These shifts, along with class pressures and wartime philanthropy, created new social circuits—fundraisers, committees, relief organizations—that Oppenheim repurposes as plausible covers for surveillance and recruitment, illustrating how war loosened traditional hierarchies and opened discreet channels for influence and betrayal.
As a social and political critique, the book interrogates the opacity of power during total war. Its very title suggests elites and publics moving “blindly” under the sway of hidden committees, censorship, and raison d’état. By staging conflicts in drawing rooms and ministries rather than trenches, it critiques the complacency of ruling circles that underestimated modern espionage and the ethical costs of a security state expanded by DORA. It also exposes the perils of xenophobia and opportunism: foreign surnames, social origins, and political dissent become grounds for suspicion. The narrative thus questions who benefits from secrecy, how accountability erodes, and how fear distorts justice and policy.
The Kingdom of the Blind (Spy Thriller Classic)
CHAPTER I
Lady Anselman stood in the centre of the lounge at the Ritz Hotel and with a delicately-poised forefinger counted her guests. There was the great French actress who had every charm but youth, chatting vivaciously with a tall, pale-faced man whose French seemed to be as perfect as his attitude was correct. The popular wife of a great actor was discussing her husband’s latest play with a Cabinet Minister who had the air of a school-boy present at an illicit feast. A very beautiful young woman, tall and fair, with grey-blue eyes and a wealth of golden, almost yellow hair, was talking to a famous musician. A little further in the background, a young man in the uniform of a naval lieutenant was exchanging what seemed to be rather impressive chaff with a petite but exceedingly good-looking girl. Lady Anselman counted them twice, glanced at the clock and frowned.
“I can’t remember whom we are waiting for!” she exclaimed a little helplessly to the remaining guest, a somewhat tired-looking publisher who stood by her side. “I am one short. I dare say it will come to me in a minute. You know every one, I suppose, Mr. Daniell?”
The publisher shook his head.
“I have met Lord Romsey and also Madame Selarne,” he observed. “For the rest, I was just thinking what a stranger I felt.”
“The man who talks French so well,” Lady Anselman told him, dropping her voice a little, “is Surgeon-Major[2] Thomson. He is inspector of hospitals at the front, or something of the sort. The tall, fair girl—isn’t she pretty!—is Geraldine Conyers, daughter of Admiral Sir Seymour Conyers. That’s her brother, the sailor over there, talking to Olive Moreton; their engagement was announced last week. Lady Patrick of course you know, and Signor Scobel, and Adelaide Cunningham—you do know her, don’t you, Mr. Daniell? She is my dearest friend. How many do you make that?”
The publisher counted them carefully.
“Eleven including ourselves,” he announced.
“And we should be twelve,” Lady Anselman sighed. “Of course!” she added, her face suddenly brightening. “What an idiot I am! It’s Ronnie we are waiting for. One can’t be cross with him, poor fellow. He can only just get about.”
The fair girl, who had overheard, leaned across. The shade of newly awakened interest in her face, and the curve of her lips as she spoke, added to her charm. A gleam of sunlight flashed upon the yellow-gold of her plainly coiled hair.
“Is it your nephew, Captain Ronald Granet, who is coming?” she asked a little eagerly.
Lady Anselman nodded.
“He only came home last Tuesday with dispatches from the front,” she said. “This is his first day out.”
“Ah! but he is wounded, perhaps?” Madame Selarne inquired solicitously.
“In the left arm and the right leg,” Lady Anselman assented. “I believe that he has seen some terrible fighting, and we are very proud of his D. S. O.[1] The only trouble is that he is like all the others—he will tell us nothing.”
“He shows excellent judgment,” Lord Romsey observed.
Lady Anselman glanced at her august guest a little querulously.
“That is the principle you go on, nowadays, isn’t it?” she remarked. “I am not sure that you are wise. When one is told nothing, one fears the worst,[1q] and when time after time the news of these small disasters reaches us piecemeal, about three weeks late, we never get rid of our forebodings, even when you tell us about victories…. Ah! Here he comes at last,” she added, holding out both her hands to the young man who was making his somewhat difficult way towards them. “Ronnie, you are a few minutes late but we’re not in the least cross with you. Do you know that you are looking better already? Come and tell me whom you don’t know of my guests and I’ll introduce you.”
The young man, leaning upon his stick, greeted his aunt and murmured a word of apology. He was very fair, and with a slight, reddish moustache and the remains of freckles upon his face. His grey eyes were a little sunken, and there were lines about his mouth which one might have guessed had been brought out recently by pain or suffering of some sort. His left arm reclined uselessly in a black silk sling. He glanced around the little assembly.
“First of all,” he said, bowing to the French actress and raising her fingers to his lips, “there is no one who does not know Madame Selarne. Lady Patrick, we have met before, haven’t we? I am going to see your husband in his new play the first night I am allowed out. Mr. Daniell I have met, and Lord Romsey may perhaps do me the honour of remembering me,” he added, shaking hands with the Cabinet Minister.
He turned to face Geraldine Conyers, who had been watching him with interest. Lady Anselman at once introduced them.
“I know that you haven’t met Miss Conyers because she has been asking about you. This is my nephew Ronnie, Geraldine. I hope that you will be friends.”
The girl murmured something inaudible as she shook hands. The young soldier looked at her for a moment. His manner became almost serious.
“I hope so, too,” he said quietly.
“Olive, come and make friends with my nephew if you can spare a moment from your young man,” Lady Anselman continued. “Captain Granet—Miss Olive Moreton. And this is Geraldine’s brother—Lieutenant Conyers.”
The two men shook hands pleasantly. Lady Anselman glanced at the clock and turned briskly towards the corridor.
“And now, I think,” she announced, “luncheon.”
As she moved forward, she was suddenly conscious of the man who had been talking to Madame Selarne. He had drawn a little on one side and he was watching the young soldier with a curious intentness. She turned back to her nephew and touched him on the arm.
“Ronnie,” she said, “I don’t know whether you have met Surgeon-Major Thomson in France? Major Thomson, this is my nephew, Captain Granet.”
Granet turned at once and offered his hand to the other man. Only Geraldine Conyers, who was a young woman given to noticing things, and who had also reasons of her own for being interested, observed the rather peculiar scrutiny with which each regarded the other. Something which might almost have been a challenge seemed to pass from one to the other.
“I may not have met you personally,” Granet admitted, “but if you are the Surgeon-Major Thomson who has been doing such great things with the Field Hospitals at the front, then like nearly every poor crock out there I owe you a peculiar debt of gratitude. You are the man I mean, aren’t you?” the young soldier concluded cordially.
Major Thomson bowed, and a moment later they all made their way along the corridor, across the restaurant, searched for their names on the cards and took their places at the table which had been reserved for them. Lady Anselman glanced around with the scrutinising air of the professional hostess, to see that her guests were properly seated before she devoted herself to the Cabinet Minister. She had a word or two to say to nearly every one of them.
“I have put you next Miss Conyers, Ronnie,” she remarked, “because we give all the good things to our men when they come home from the war. And I have put you next Olive, Ralph,” she went on, turning to the sailor, “because I hear you are expecting to get your ship to-day or to-morrow, so you, too, have to be spoiled a little. As a general rule I don’t approve of putting engaged people together, it concentrates conversation so. And, Lord Romsey,” she added, turning to her neighbour, “please don’t imagine for a moment that I am going to break my promise. We are going to talk about everything in the world except the war. I know quite well that if Ronnie has had any particularly thrilling experiences, he won’t tell us about them, and I also know that your brain is packed full of secrets which nothing in the world would induce you to divulge. We are going to try and persuade Madame to tell us about her new play,” she concluded, smiling at the French actress, “and there are so many of my friends on the French stage whom I must hear about.”
Lord Romsey commenced his luncheon with an air of relief. He was a man of little more than middle-age, powerfully built, inclined to be sombre, with features of a legal type, heavily jawed. “Always tactful, dear hostess,” he murmured. “As a matter of fact, nothing but the circumstance that it was your invitation and that Madame Selarne was to be present, brought me here to-day. It is so hard to avoid speaking of the great things, and for a man in my position,” he added, dropping his voice a little, “so difficult to say anything worth listening to about them, without at any rate the semblance of indiscretion.”
“We all appreciate that,” Lady Anselman assured him sympathetically. “Madame Selarne has promised to give us an outline of the new play which she is producing in Manchester.”
“If that would interest you all,” Madame Selarne assented, “it commences—so!”
For a time they nearly all listened in absorbed silence. Her gestures, the tricks of her voice, the uplifting of her eyebrows and shoulders—all helped to give life and colour to the little sketch she expounded. Only those at the remote end of the table ventured upon an independent conversation. Mrs. Cunningham, the woman whom her hostess had referred to as being her particular friend, and one who shared her passion for entertaining, chatted fitfully to her neighbour, Major Thomson. It was not until luncheon was more than half-way through that she realised the one-sidedness of their conversation. She studied him for a moment curiously. There was something very still and expressionless in his face, even though the sunshine from the broad high windows which overlooked the Park, was shining full upon him.
“Tell me about yourself!” she insisted suddenly. “I have been talking rubbish quite long enough. You have been out, haven’t you?”
He assented gravely.
“I went with the first division. At that time I was in charge of a field hospital.”
“And now?”
“I am Chief Inspector of Field Hospitals,” he replied.
“You are home on leave?”
“Not exactly,” he told her, a shade of stiffness in his manner. “I have to come over very often on details connected with the administration of my work.”
“I should have known quite well that you were a surgeon,” she observed.
“You are a physiognomist, then?”
“More or less,” she admitted. “You see, I love people. I love having people around me. My friends find me a perfect nuisance, for I am always wanting to give parties. You have the still, cold face of a surgeon—and the hands, too,” she added, glancing at them.
“You are very observant,” he remarked laconically.
“I am also curious,” she laughed, “as you are about to discover. Tell me why you are so interested in Ronnie Granet? You hadn’t met him before, had you?”
Almost for the first time he turned and looked directly at his neighbour. She was a woman whose fair hair was turning grey, well-dressed, sprightly, agreeable. She had a humorous mouth and an understanding face.
“Captain Granet was a stranger to me,” he assented. “One is naturally interested in soldiers, however.”
“You must have met thousands like him,” she remarked,—“good-looking, very British, keen sportsman, lots of pluck, just a little careless, hating to talk about himself and serious things. I have known him since he was a boy.”
Major Thomson continued to be gravely interested.
“Granet!” he said to himself thoughtfully, “Do I know any of his people, I wonder?”
“You know some of his connections, of course,” Mrs. Cunningham replied briskly. “Sir Alfred Anselman, for instance, his uncle.”
“His father and mother?”
“They are both dead. There is a large family place in Warwickshire, and a chateau, just now, I am afraid, in the hands of the Germans. It was somewhere quite close to the frontier. Lady Granet was an Alsatian. He was to have gone out with the polo team, you know, to America, but broke a rib just as they were making the selection. He played cricket for Middlesex once or twice, too and he was Captain of Oxford the year that they did so well.”
“An Admirable Crichton,” Major Thomson murmured.
“In sport, at any rate,” his neighbour assented. “He has always been one of the most popular young men about town, but of course the women will spoil him now.”
“Is it my fancy,” he asked, “or was he not reported a prisoner?”
“He was missing twice, once for over a week,” Mrs. Cunningham replied. “There are all sorts of stories as to how he got back to the lines. A perfect young dare-devil, I should think. I must talk to Mr. Daniell for a few minutes or he will never publish my reminiscences.”
She leaned towards her neighbour on the other side and Major Thomson was able to resume the role of attentive observer, a role which seemed somehow his by destiny. He listened without apparent interest to the conversation between Geraldine Conyers and the young man whom they had been discussing.
“I think,” Geraldine complained, “that you are rather overdoing your diplomatic reticence, Captain Granet. You haven’t told me a single thing. Why, some of the Tommies I have been to see in the hospitals have been far more interesting than you.”
He smiled.
“I can assure you,” he protested, “it isn’t my fault. You can’t imagine how fed up one gets with things out there, and the newspapers can tell you ever so much more than we can. One soldier only sees a little bit of his own corner of the fight, you know.”
“But can’t you tell me some of your own personal experiences?” she persisted. “They are so much more interesting than what one reads in print.”
“I never had any,” he assured her. “Fearfully slow time we had for months.”
“Of course, I don’t believe a word you say,” she declared, laughing.
“You’re not taking me for a war correspondent, by any chance, are you?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Your language isn’t sufficiently picturesque! Tell me, when are you going back?”
“As soon as I can pass the doctors-in a few days, I hope.”
“You hope?” she repeated. “Do you really mean that, or do you say it because it is the proper thing to say?”
He appeared for the moment to somewhat resent her question.
“The fact that I hope to get back,” he remarked coldly, “has nothing whatever to do with my liking my job when I get there. As a matter of fact, I hate it. At the same time, you can surely understand that there isn’t any other place for a man of my age and profession.”
“Of course not,” she agreed softly. “I really am sorry that I bothered you. There is one thing I should like to know, though and that is how you managed to escape?”
He shook his head but his amiability seemed to have wholly returned. His eyes twinkled as he looked at her.
“There we’re up against a solid wall of impossibility,” he replied. “You see, some of our other chaps may try the dodge. I gave them the tip and I don’t want to spoil their chances. By-the-bye, do you know the man two places down on your left?” he added dropping his voice a little. “Looks almost like a waxwork figure, doesn’t he?”
“You mean Major Thomson? Yes, I know him,” she assented, after a moment’s hesitation. “He is very quiet to-day, but he is really most interesting.”
Their hostess rose and beamed on them all from her end of the table.
“We have decided,” she announced, “to take our coffee out in the lounge.”
