"What about that mass meeting to-morrow?" asked the Colonel.
"I shall not be there, but ten of my men will be. Have no fears of the mass meeting. The snake's head is off—by to-morrow it will be two hundred miles away—and though the body may wriggle, it will be quite harmless. After two or three hours of talk and vain threats the meeting will collapse, and we shall get unconditional surrender."
And so it happened. The talk went on for four solid hours—vain, vapouring talk, during which steam was blown off. At the end the surrender, as Dawson predicted, was unconditional.
That evening of the morrow a telegram sped away over the long wires to the south addressed to the Secretary of the Admiralty.
"Please tell First Lord that the snake is dead. I am returning the Marines carriage-paid and undamaged. My commission as a Captain is no longer required. Dawson."
Back flashed a reply from the Minister himself: "To Captain Dawson, R.M.L.I. Adjutant-General insists that you retain rank and pay until the end of the war. So do I. You have done a wonderful piece of work for which you will be adequately punished in official quarters. But you will suffer in good company."
Though Dawson thus became entitled to call himself Captain for the duration of the war, he never used the rank or the uniform again. Once more, to my knowledge, he served in his well-beloved Corps, but it was then not as Captain, but as private, during his long watch in the Malplaquet, of which I have told the story earlier in this book.
CHAPTER XVII
DAWSON TELEPHONES FOR A SURGEON
I have never been able to plan this book upon any system which would hold together for half a dozen consecutive chapters. I am the victim of my characters who come and go and pull me with them tied to their chariot wheels. When I wrote the first story of the "Lost Naval Papers"—which, by the way, were not lost at all—I had not made the personal acquaintance of William Dawson. When I wrote of my own encounters with Dawson and of my share, a humble share, in his researches, my dear Madame Gilbert had not met me and subdued me into a drivelling worship of her shining personality. While I was amusing myself trying to convey to the reader the frolicsome atmosphere which Madame carries about with her and in which she hides the workings of her big heart and brain, I was ignorant of the adventures of the two battle-cruisers and of Dawson's encounter with the War Committee, and of his triumph over the revolting workmen of the north. I have therefore written, as it were, from hand to mouth, more as one who keeps a vagabond diary than as one who consciously plans a work of art. It is as a diary of personal experiences that this book should be regarded. It has no merit of constructive skill, for I have never known what the future would yield to me of material. When Dawson parted with me to return south to the Yard, and to his deserted family in Acacia Villas, Primrose Road, Tooting, I did not expect to see him again for months, possibly years. But a turn came to the wheel of my destiny as it had done to his. I also was plucked from my northern place of exile and transported joyfully to the south country, whither I have always fled whenever for a few days or weeks I could loosen the bonds which tied me to the north. Now that those bonds have fallen entirely from me, and I am back in my southern home—whether for good or for evil rests upon the lap of the high gods—I have been able unexpectedly to resume contact with Dawson and to bring this, discursive book to some kind of a conclusion. It cannot really end so long as Dawson and Froissart and Madame Gilbert live and remain in friendly association with me. They have become parts of my life, and if I have not outraged their feelings beyond forgiveness by what I have written of them, I have hopes that I shall meet all of them often in the future and that they will tell me many more stories of their exploits.