CHORUS : But in the blaze of brighter days Britannia yet shall rule, While English Sportsmen worship God And bend their buttocks to the rod For the Honour of the School!
When Joshua strafed Jericho (N.B.-another Jew) He did not risk his precious gore Or take a sporting chance in war As English soldiers do: He marched his bandsmen round the walls And knocked it down with bugle calls- A trick that is tabu. [chorus]
When Roland, at the gates of Spain, Died beside Oliver, He must have found it rather hard To stand his ground and keep the guard, Being a foreigner: So we can only think he went There by some kind of accident, Or as an arbiter. [chorus]
When Louis faced the guillotine, That calm the people saw Flinched to a sickly pallor when He knew he was an alien, A Breed without the Law; Where one of truly British phlegm, Of course, would have leapt down at them And socked them on the jaw. [chorus]
'Is all that necessary?' asked Patricia with a smile.
'Of course it is,' said the Saint. 'Because I've got an appointment with one kind of excrescence, must I forget all the others ? God in heaven, while there's still a supply of smug fools for me to tear in pieces I shall have everything to live for. . . . There are about five hundred and fifty more verses to that song, embracing everything from the massacre of Garigliano down through Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo to the last Czar of Russia, which I may write some day. I think it will end like this --'
He wrote again, rapidly:
But in our stately tolerance We condescend to see That heroes whose names end in -vitch Are striving to be something which We know they cannot be, But, sweating hard, they make a good Attempt to do what Britons would Achieve instinctively.
CHORUS: So let's give praise through all our days, Again and yet again, That we do not eat sauerkraut, That some storks knew their way about, And made us Englishmen!
'I can never finish my best songs-my gorge rises too rapidly,' said the Saint; and then he looked at his watch, and stood up, stretching himself with his gay smile. ' Pat, I must be going. Wish me luck.'
She kissed him quickly; and then he was gone, with the cavalier wave of his hand that she knew so well. All the old ageless Saint went with him, that fighting troubadour whom he chose to be, who could always find time to turn aside in an adventure to shape one of those wild satires that came from him with such a biting sincerity. In some way he left her happier for that touch of typical bravado.
Her emotion was not shared by Galbraith Stride, Something had come into the life of that successful man that he felt curiously impotent to fight against, something that had stricken him with a more savage shock because it was the one thing that he had never prepared himself for. It had the inexorable march of a machine. It left him unable to think clearly, with a sense of physical helplessness as if he had been worn down overnight by a fierce fever, struggling with the foreknowledge of defeat against a kind of paralysis of panic. And that thing was the name of the Saint.
He was a silent man at dinner that night. He knew that Abdul Osman had crushed and beaten him with an ease that seemed fantastically ridiculous, and the knowledge hypnotized him into a sort of horrible nightmare. And yet at the same time he knew that he might still have been fighting, calling on all the resources of guile and duplicity that had brought him to the power that was being stripped from him, if it had not been for the words that had stunned his ears early that afternoon. He was that strange psychological freak, a criminal possessed of an imagination that amounted almost to mania; and when Osman had told him that the Saint was still at large an overstrained bulwark on the borders of his reason seemed to have crashed inwards. He was still fighting for all he could hope to save from the disaster, but it was a dumb stubborn fight without vitality.
He sent for Laura Berwick at nine o'clock. Her slender young body looked particularly beautiful in the black evening gown she was wearing; in some way its cool sweetness was framed in that sombre setting with an effect that was pulse-quickeningly radiant from the contrast. To do him justice, Galbraith Stride felt a momentary twinge of remorse as he saw her.
'My dear, I want you to take a note over to Mr. Osman. It's rather important, and I'd feel relieved if you delivered it yourself.'
He had been drinking, but the whisky that reeked on his breath had thickened his voice without making him drunk. It served the purpose of nipping that twinge of remorse in the bud, before he had time to forget his own danger.
'Couldn't one of the crew go?' she asked, in some surprise.
'I'm afraid there are reasons why they can't,' he said. 'They-er-hum-I may be able to explain later. A matter of
