I found the Tube entrance filled with excited humanity.  One stout lady had fainted, and a nurse had become hysterical, but on the whole people were behaving well.  Oddly enough they did not seem inclined to go down the stairs to the complete security of underground; but preferred rather to collect where they could still get a glimpse of the upper world, as if they were torn between fear of their lives and interest in the spectacle.  That crowd gave me a good deal of respect for my countrymen.  But several were badly rattled, and one man a little way off, whose back was turned, kept twitching his shoulders as if he had the colic.

I watched him curiously, and a movement of the crowd brought his face into profile.  Then I gasped with amazement, for I saw that it was Ivery.

And yet it was not Ivery.  There were the familiar nondescript features, the blandness, the plumpness, but all, so to speak, in ruins.  The man was in a blind funk.  His features seemed to be dislimning before my eyes.  He was growing sharper, finer, in a way younger, a man without grip on himself, a shapeless creature in process of transformation.  He was being reduced to his rudiments.  Under the spell of panic he was becoming a new man.

And the crazy thing was that I knew the new man better than the old.

My hands were jammed close to my sides by the crowd; I could scarcely turn my head, and it was not the occasion for one’s neighbours to observe one’s expression.  If it had been, mine must have been a study.  My mind was far away from air raids, back in the hot summer weather of 1914.  I saw a row of villas perched on a headland above the sea.  In the garden of one of them two men were playing tennis, while I was crouching behind an adjacent bush.  One of these was a plump young man who wore a coloured scarf round his waist and babbled of golf handicaps . . .  I saw him again in the villa dining-room, wearing a dinner-jacket, and lisping a little. . . .  I sat opposite him at bridge, I beheld him collared by two of Macgillivray’s men, when his comrade had rushed for the thirty-nine steps that led to the sea . . .  I saw, too, the sitting-room of my old flat in Portland Place and heard little Scudder’s quick, anxious voice talking about the three men he feared most on earth, one of whom lisped in his speech.  I had thought that all three had long ago been laid under the turf . . .

He was not looking my way, and I could devour his face in safety.  There was no shadow of doubt.  I had always put him down as the most amazing actor on earth, for had he not played the part of the First Sea Lord and deluded that officer’s daily colleagues?  But he could do far more than any human actor, for he could take on a new personality and with it a new appearance, and live steadily in the character as if he had been born in it . . .  My mind was a blank, and I could only make blind gropings at conclusions . . .  How had he escaped the death of a spy and a murderer, for I had last seen him in the hands of justice? . . .  Of course he had known me from the first day in Biggleswick . . .  I had thought to play with him, and he had played most cunningly and damnably with me.  In that sweating sardine-tin of refugees I shivered in the bitterness of my chagrin.