“Presently, my good girl,” replied the Captain, “presently.”
Sir Brian Dillon was seated where O’Hagan first had found him. He was smoking a cigarette. His face was somewhat pale.
He rose, as the Captain entered, and very deliberately threw the cigarette into the tiny hearth. To any but a student of indications, he must have appeared quite composed. O’Hagan knew it to be otherwise. Yet he was unprepared for Dillon’s action. Dillon, silently, leapt at him across the room!
I say he was unprepared. In a certain sense he was. But, on the other hand, a pupil of Myuku is never unprepared. O’Hagan dropped his cane, instinctively (the Higher Jiu-jitsu is essentially instinctive). He grasped the fist which whizzed within half an inch of his right ear, performing one of those lightning movements unachievable by any other man of my acquaintance. He thrust it up. He twisted it to the right—down—and doubled the arm behind Dillon’s back. Daintily, he clasped the other wrist and held the left arm inert, outstretched at an angle of forty-five from his opponent’s side.
This, you may know, is a simple trick, which can be performed, with luck, by several members, individually, of the Metropolitan and City Police forces.
Dillon made one attempt to break away—and then stood still, looking back across his shoulder at O’Hagan.
“By God, I’ll kill you!”
There was something shocking in the murderous intent which beaconed from his eyes.
“Later, you shall be afforded every opportunity. But, first, you must hear me. Shall I release you?”
No humiliation can equal that which it is in the power of the expert Jiu-Jitsuist to inflict. An enraged man, though he be outclassed, overweighted, may fight to the last and keep his pride. But this supreme inertia, this being petrified, posed as for a ballroom scene in a “living-picture,” with frenzied anger boiling in the veins and no muscle responding to the mind’s urgent commands, is something that must be experienced fully to be appreciated.