“What has my own people ever done for me?” the valet sneered. “Or women either—that I should lose a cushy job, and risk my neck for the sake of the three of you? I wouldn’t do it for all of your bloomin’ England, I tell you straight.”
“It’s no good, Traherne,” Major Crespin warned from the window. “Come down to tin tacks.”
“Only a sighting shot, Major,” Traherne explained. “It was just possible we might have misread our man.”
“You did,” Watkins broke in passionately, “if you took ’im for a V.C. ’ero wot ’ud lay down his life for England, ’ome and beauty. The first thing England ever done for me was to ’ave me sent to a reformatory for pinching a silver rattle off a young h’aristocrat in a p’rambulator. That, and the likes of that, is wot I’ve got to thank England for. And why did I do it? Because my mother would have bashed my face in, if I’d have come back empty-handed. That’s wot ’ome and beauty has meant for me. W’y should I care more for a woman being scragged than what I do for a man?” Foul words, foully spoken, but the passion that hissed through them was real, and so was the sense of outrage. Watkins had his reasons. Most of us have.
“Ah, yes, I quite see your point of view.” Dr. Traherne dismissed it with that. “But the question now is: What’ll you take to get us out of this?”
Watkins sniggered offensively. Men have been killed for less. “Get you out of this!” he laughed truculently. “If you was to offer me millions, ’ow could I do that?”
Traherne told him. “By going into that room and sending this message through to the Amil-Serai aerodrome,” he snapped. And Major Crespin crossed the room, and held out the message.
Watkins took it gingerly, read it through with slow ferret eyes, but an expressionless face, and laid it down deliberately on the writing-table. “So that’s the game, is it?” he commented with a shrug.
“That, as you say, is the game,” Traherne told him tersely.
“You know what you’re riskin’” Watkins asked significantly.