I was repeating them to myself as I handed the paper back, and we exchanged comments of which I have no recollection. More comments were passed with the Grahams, and then, blindly, drunkenly, I made my way to my room.
There I found nothing to do less classic than to sit at the open window, to look over at the red-and-yellow house on the opposite hill. It was my intention to think the matter out, but my brain seemed to have stopped working. Nothing came to me but those barbaric sounds, that kept repeating themselves with a kind of hiss: “Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip!”
From my stupefied scanning of the paper I hadn’t grasped the fact that a name utterly unknown that morning was being flashed round the world at a speed more rapid than that of the earth round the sun. Still less did I suspect that it was to become in its way the most sinister name in history. I kept repeating it only as you repeat senseless things in the minutes before you go to sleep.
“Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip!”
CHAPTER XVII
I came back as Major Melbury, of one of the Canadian regiments.
It was in November, 1916, that I was invalided home to Canada, lamed and wearing a disfiguring black patch over what had been my left eye.
There were other differences of which I can hardly tell you in so many words, but which must transpire as I go on. Briefly, they summed themselves up in the fact that I had gone away one man and I was coming back another. My old self had not only been melted down in the crucible, but it had been stamped with a new image and superscription. It was of a new value and a new currency, and, I think I may venture to add, of that new coinage minted in the civil strife of mankind.