Others were not so easily held. A certain Woman, with loosened hair, bare arms, flashing eyes and dancing feet, shepherded her knot of waverers, hoarse and exhausted. When the taunt broke out against her from the opposing line: “Tell ’em what you were! Tell ’em if you dare!” she answered unflinchingly, as did Judas who, worming through the crowd like an Armenian carpet-vendor, peddled his shame aloud that it might give strength to others.
“Yes,” he would cry, “I am everything they say, but if I’m here it must be a moral cert for you, gents. This way, please. Many mansions, gentlemen! Go-ood billets! Don’t you notice these low people, Sar. Plees keep hope, gentlemen!”
When there were cases that cried to him from the ground—poor souls who could not stick it but had found their way out with a rifle and a boot-lace, he would tell them of his own end, till he made them contemptuous enough to rise up and curse him. Here St. Luke’s imperturbable bedside manner backed and strengthened the other’s almost too oriental flux of words.
In this fashion and step by step, all the day’s Convoy were piloted past that danger-point where the Lower Establishment are, for reasons not given us, allowed to ply their trade. The pickets dropped to the rear, relaxed, and compared notes.
“What always impresses me most,” said Death to St. Peter, “is the sheeplike simplicity of the intellectual mind.” He had been watching one of the pickets apparently overwhelmed by the arguments of an advanced atheist who—so hot in his argument that he was deaf to the offers of the Lower Establishment to make him a god—had stalked, talking hard—while the picket always gave ground before him—straight past the Broad Road.
“He was plaiting of long-tagged epigrams,” the sober-faced picket smiled. “Give that sort only an ear and they’ll follow ye gobbling like turkeys.”
“And John held his peace through it all,” a full fresh voice broke in. “‘It may be so,’ says John. ‘Doubtless, in your belief, it is so,’ says John. ‘Your words move me mightily,’ says John, and gorges his own beliefs like a pike going backwards. And that young fool, so busy spinning words—words—words—that he trips past Hell Mouth without seeing it!... Who’s yonder, Joan?”
“One of your English. ’Always late. Look!” A young girl with short-cropped hair pointed with her sword across the plain towards a single faltering figure which made at first as though to overtake the Convoy, but then turned left towards the Lower Establishment, who were enthusiastically cheering him as a leader of enterprise.
“That’s my traitor,” said St. Peter. “He has no business to report to the Lower Establishment before reporting to Convoy.”
The figure’s pace slackened as he neared the applauding line. He looked over his shoulder once or twice, and then fairly turned tail and fled again towards the still Convoy.