His companions had to gather him up and help him pulley-hauley fashion into the car ahead, while an officious ticket-taker demanded my name and address. I found in my wallet the card of a U.S. senator and gave him that, whereat he apologized profoundly and addressed me as “Colonel”—a title with which he continued to flatter me all the rest of the journey except once, when he changed it to “Admiral” by mistake.
Grim went back into our compartment and laughed; and none of the essays I have read on laughter—not even the famous dissertation by Josh Billings—throw light on how to describe the tantalizing manner of it. He laughs several different ways: heartily at times, as men of my temperament mostly do; boisterously on occasion, after Jeremy’s fashion; now and then cryptically, using laughter as a mask; then he owns a smile that suggests nothing more nor less than kindness based on understanding of human nature.
But that other is a devil of a laugh, mostly made of chuckles that seem to bubble off a Bell-brew of disillusionment, and you get the impression that he is laughing at himself—cynically laying bare the vanity and fallibility of his own mental processes—and forecasting self-discipline.
There is no mirth in it, although there is amusement; no anger, although immeasurable scorn. I should say it’s a good safe laugh to indulge in, for I think it is based on ability to see himself and his own mistakes more clearly than anybody else can, and there is no note of defeat in it. But it is full of a cruel irony that brings to mind a vision of one of those old medieval flagellant priests reviewing his sins before thrashing his own body with a wire whip.
“So that ends that,” he said at last, with the gesture of a man who sweeps the pieces from a board, to set them up anew and start again. “Luckily we’re not the only fools in Asia. Those six rascals know now that Mabel and we are one party.”
“Pooh!” sneered Jeremy. “What can the devils do?”
“Not much this side of the border at Deraa,” Grim answered. “After Deraa pretty well what they’re minded. They could have us pinched on some trumped-up charge, in which case we’d be searched, Mabel included. No. We’ve played too long on the defensive. Deraa is the danger-point. The telegraph line is cut there, and all messages going north or south have to be carried by hand across the border. The French have an agent there who censors everything. He’s the boy we’ve got to fool. If they appeal to him this train will go on without us.
“Ramsden, you and Narayan Singh go and sit with Mabel in her compartment. Jeremy, you go forward and bring Yussuf Dakmar back here to me; we’ll let him have that fake letter just before we reach Deraa, taking care somehow to let the other five know he has it. They won’t discover it’s a fake until after leaving Deraa—”
“Why not?” I interrupted. “What’s to prevent their opening it at once?”