He repeated the name as we walked downstairs and whistled unsuccessfully for a taxi. On the steps I told him again that he had been making a nuisance of himself, for she was probably living in some modest boarding-house. Grayle would only murmur irrelevantly that she was a devilish pretty girl, an opinion evidently shared by George Oakleigh and the Maitland boys, who had surrounded her before Grayle was out of the room. I cannot remember that her looks left any impression on me at this meeting.
"'The Sanctuary'," he murmured for the third time, as we set off on foot for the House. "Didn't happen to hear what her name was, did you? Never bother about names myself."
"It would be inartistic," I said.
We walked through Eaton Square in silence and along Buckingham Gate and Birdcage Walk to Parliament Square. As we approached the Palmerston monument, Grayle touched my arm, pointed ahead and quickened his limping pace; an open-air meeting of two soldiers, nine loafers and one woman was being addressed by a shabbily-garbed young man who seemed to be on the worst possible terms with his audience; Grayle, who has the nose of a schoolboy or a terrier for any kind of fight, clearly felt that this, like the war, was too good to miss. What went before, I have, of course, no means of judging, but such fragments of vituperation as reached me suggested the wonder why a man, who cared nothing for his hearers, troubled to harangue an exasperated group, which was quite unconvinced by his reasoning. The speaker kept his temper; his hearers had lost theirs from the outset, I should imagine, and this possibly amused him and justified the effort.
"Go aht and fight yourself," cried one of the soldiers truculently, "before yer snacks at the men that 'ave been out there."
"I should not der-ream of fighting," the lecturer answered with practised and very clear enunciation.
"Precious sight too careful of yer dirty skin!"
The lecturer laughed with maddening calm.
"I value my life," he conceded, "but I happen to be brave enough to value my soul more. I do not choose to be the deluded instrument of Junkers here or elsewhere, and, had anyone thought you worth educating, you would not choose it either. My fine fellow, you were before the war—what? A coal-heaver? But you had no quarrel with the coal-heavers of Germany, until your Junkers told you to fight; you will again have no quarrel when your Junkers tell you to stop fighting. I was a medical student once, I had no quarrel with the medical students of other nations, nor can I make a quarrel when a Junker tells me to hate, to be red and angry—if you could see how red and angry you look now!—to stab and shoot and slash. If I have to kill, let me kill a Junker, who cannot maintain the peace of the world." He sank his voice with artistic pretence of talking to himself. "But I was educated, I have thought, I am not a dog to be whistled to heel or incited to fight other dogs."
In the pause that followed Grayle put his lips to my ear and whispered behind his hand.