"How very German! My chief objection would be that there wouldn't be much room left for the champagne."
"Trust the German for that, my lad. The glasses were extra large, and of a somewhat unusual pattern. As a matter of fact, the decorative effect was rather pretty. It's queer--the way some things stick in your memory and others vanish. I believe that my most vivid impression of the few months I passed in Germany is that blessed table, waiting for its guests, with the peaches in the champagne glasses. I didn't see the guests arrive. Wish I had now. There's always something a little stagey, don't you think, about a table waiting for its guests; but this was more so. It affected me like the throne of melodrama waiting for its emperor. Funny that it should have made such an impression, isn't it?"
I thought not; for it was part of Duncan's business to be impressed by unusual things--more especially when they were symptomatic of something else. It was this that made him so useful, for instance, in that exciting little episode of the cargo of onions which was intercepted--owing to one of his impressions--in a Scandinavian ship. They were perfectly good onions, the first few layers of them; and they looked like perfectly good onions when you burrowed into the lower layers. But Duncan had been seized by an absurd desire to see whether they would bounce or not; and when he experimented on the deck, they did bounce, bounce like cricket balls, as high as the ship's funnels.
This capture of one of the largest cargoes of contraband rubber was due to an impression he got from two innocent cablegrams which had been intercepted and brought to him at the Admiralty,--one of them apparently concerning an operation for appendicitis, and the other announcing the death of the patient. His intuitions, indeed, resembled those of the artist; and, though he was one of the smartest sailors in the Navy, he looked more like a pre-Raphaelite painter's conception of Galahad than any one I had ever seen in the flesh. He looked exceedingly youthful, and the dead whiteness of his face, which his Philistine brethren described as lantern-jawed, was lighted by the alert eyes of the new age. They had that peculiar glitter which one sees in the eyes of aviators, and sometimes in those of the business men accustomed to the electric cities of the new world. His hands were like those of a musician, long and quick and nervous. But I could easily imagine them throttling an enemy.