neck. I pressed him to write this story
himself, but he refused. "No," said he, "I have told you the yarn just
as it happened; write it yourself. I am a dull dog, quite efficient at
handling hard facts and making scientific deductions from them, but
with no eye for the picturesque details. I give it to you." He rose to
go--Cary had been lunching with me--but paused for an instant upon my
front doorstep. "If you insist upon it," added he, smiling, "I don't
mind sharing in the plunder."

* * * * *

It was in the latter part of May 1916. Cary was hard at work one
morning in his rooms in the Northern City where he had established his
headquarters. His study table was littered with papers--notes,
diagrams, and newspaper cuttings--and he was laboriously reducing the
apparent chaos into an orderly series of chapters upon the Navy's Work
which he proposed to publish after the war was over. It was not
designed to be an exciting book--Cary has no dramatic instinct--but it
would be full of fine sound stuff, close accurate detail, and clear
analysis. Day by day for more than twenty months he had been
collecting details of every phase of the Navy's operations, here a
little and there a little. He had recently returned from a
confidential tour of the shipyards and naval bases, and had exercised
his trained eye upon checking and amplifying what he had previously
learned. While his recollection of this tour was fresh he was actively
writing up his Notes and revising the rough early draft of his book.
More than once it had occurred to him that his accumulations of Notes
were dangerous explosives to store in a private house. They were
becoming so full and so accurate that the enemy would have paid any
sum or have committed any crime to secure possession of them. Cary is
not nervous or imaginative--have I not said that he springs from a
naval stock?--but even he now and then felt anxious. He would, I
believe, have slept peacefully though knowing that a delicately primed
bomb lay beneath his bed, for personal risks troubled him little, but
the thought that hurt to his country might come from his well-meant
labours sometimes rapped against his nerves. A few days before his
patriotic conscience had been stabbed by no less a personage than
Admiral Jellicoe, who, speaking to a group of naval students which
included Cary, had said: "We have concealed nothing from you, for we
trust absolutely to your discretion.