, if
nobody else's, so to speak, would do. But he couldn't and wouldn't take
his own big things, particularly not that last thing.

When I say that I can't publish this story yet as it stands, I'm not
forgetting that I _have_ published the end of it already. But only in the
way of business; to publish that sort of thing was what I went out for;
it was all part of my Special Correspondent's job.

And when you think that it was just touch and go--Why, if I hadn't bucked
up and taken that job when he told me to I might have missed him. No
amount of hearing about him would have been the same thing. I had to see
him.

What I wrote then doesn't count. I had to tell what I saw just after I
had seen it. I had to take it as I saw it, a fragment snapped off from
the rest of him, and dated October 11th, 1914, as if it didn't belong to
him; as if he were only another splendid instance. And of course I had
to leave _her_ out.

Told like that, it didn't amount to much.

This is the real telling.

I must get away from the end, right back to the beginning.

I suppose, to be accurate, the very beginning was the day I first met him
in nineteen-six--no, nineteen-five it must have been. It was at
Blackheath Football Ground, the last match of the season, when Woolwich
Arsenal played East Kent and beat them by two goals and a try. He was
there as a representative of the Press, "doing" the match for some
sporting paper.

He held me up at the barrier (yes, he held me up in the first moment of
our acquaintance) while he fumbled for his pass. He had given the word
"Press" with an exaggerated aplomb that showed he was young to his job,
and the gate-keeper challenged him. It was, in fact, the exquisite
self-consciousness of the little man that made me look at him. And he
caught me looking at him; he blushed, caught himself blushing and smiled
to himself with the most delicious appreciation of his own absurdity. And
as he stood there fumbling, and holding me up while he argued with the
gate-keeper, who didn't know him, I got his engaging twinkle. It was as
if he looked at me and said, "See me swank just then? Funny, wasn't it?"

He hung about on the edge of the crowd for a while with his hands in his
pockets, sucking his little blond moustache and looking dreamy and rather
incompetent. I was a full-blown journalist even then, and I remember
feeling a sort of pity for his youth. He was so obviously on his maiden
trip, and obviously, I fan