Prisoners | Page 9

a vast army.
His obvious good looks were like the good looks of others. He looked

well bred, but to look that is as common in a certain class as it is rare in
another. He had the spare, wiry figure, tall and lightly built, square in
the shoulders, and thin in the flank; he had the clear weather-beaten
complexion, the clean, nervous, capable hand, and the self-effacing
manner, which we associate with myriads of well-born,
machine-trained, perfectly groomed, expensively educated, uneducated
Englishmen. Our public schools turn them out by the thousand. The
"lost legion" is made up of them. The unburied bones of the pioneers of
new colonies are mostly theirs. They die of thirst in "the never never
country," under a tree, leaving their initials cut in its trunk; they fall by
hundreds in our wars. They are born leaders where acumen and craft
are not needed. Large game was made for them, and they for it. They
are the vermin destroyers of the universe. They throw life from them
with both hands, they play the game of life with a levity which they
never showed in the business of cricket and football.
They are essentially not of the stuff of which those dull persons, the
thinkers, the politicians, the educationalists, are made. No profession
knows them except the army. They have no opinions worth hearing.
Only the women who are to marry them listen to them. They are
sometimes squeezed into Parliament and are borne with there like
children. About one in a hundred of them can earn his own living, and
then it is as a land agent.
They make adorable country squires, and picturesque, simple-minded,
painstaking men of rank. They know by a sort of hereditary instinct
how to deal with a labouring man, and a horse, and how to break in a
dog. They give themselves no airs. We have millions of men like this,
and it is doubtful whether the nation finds much use for them, except at
coronations, where they look beautiful; or on county councils, where
they can hold an opinion without the preliminary fatigue of forming it;
and on the bloodstained fringes of our empire, where they serenely
meet their dreadful deaths.
In the ranks of that vast army I descry Michael, and I wonder what it is
in him that makes me able to descry him at all. He is like thousands of
other men. In what is he unlike?

I think it must be something in his expression. Of many ugly men it has
been said with truth that one never observes their ugliness. Something
in the character redeems it. With Michael's undeniable good looks it
was the same. One did not notice them. They were not admired, except,
possibly, for the first moment, or across a room. His rather insignificant
grey eyes were the only thing one remembered him by, the only part of
him which seemed to represent him.
It was as if out of the narrow window of a fortress our friend for a
moment looked out; that "friend of our infinite dreams" who in dreams,
but, alas! never by day, comes softly to us across the white fields of
youth; who, later on, in dreams but never by day, overtakes us with
unbearable happiness in his hand in which to steep our exhaustion on
the hillside; who when our hair is grey comes to us still in dreams but
never by day, down the darkening valley, to tell us that our worn out
romantic hopes are but the alphabet of his language.
Such a look there was in Michael's eyes, and what it meant who shall
say? Once and again at long intervals we pass in the thoroughfare of
life young faces which have the same expression, as if they saw beyond,
as if they looked past their own youth across to an immortal youth,
from their own life to an unquenchable, upwelling spring of life. When
Michael spoke, which was little, his words verged on the commonplace.
He explained the obvious with modest directness. He had thought out
and made his own a small selection of platitudes. It is at first a shock to
some of us when we discover that a beautiful spiritual nature is linked
with a tranquil commonplace mind and narrow abilities.
When Michael's eyes rested on anything his still glance seemed to pass
through it, into its essence. An inscrutable Fate had willed that his eyes
should not rest on any woman save Fay.
Was her little hand to rend his illusions from him; or did he perhaps see
her as she was, as her husband, her shrewd old grandmother, her sister
even, had never seen her? Fay had revealed to Michael that of which
many men who write glibly of