Well, substantially, the fragment deals with a girl whose parents wish her to marry an elderly suitor. The mother isn’t so keen on it, but the father, an old Knight, is. The girl, of course, is in love with a younger and a poorer man. Common form? Granted. Then the father, who doesn’t in the least want to, is ordered off to a Crusade and, by way of passing on the kick, as we used to say during the War, orders the girl to be kept in duresse till his return or her consent to the old suitor. Common form, again? Quite so. That’s too much for her mother. She reminds the old Knight of his age and infirmities, and the discomforts of Crusading. Are you sure I’m not boring you?’

‘Not at all,’ I said, though time had begun to whirl backward through my brain to a red-velvet, pomatum-scented side-room at Neminaka’s and Manallace’s set face intoning to the gas.

‘You’ll read it all in my Statement next week. The sum is that the old lady tells him of a certain Knight-adventurer on the French coast, who, for a consideration, waylays Knights who don’t relish crusading and holds them to impossible ransoms till the trooping-season is over, or they are returned sick. He keeps a ship in the Channel to pick ’em up and transfers his birds to his castle ashore, where he has a reputation for doing ’em well. As the old lady points out:

‘And if perchance thou fall into his honde
By God how canstow ride to Holilonde?’

‘You see? Modern in essence as Gilbert and Sullivan, but handled as only Dan could! And she reminds him that “Honour and olde bones” parted company long ago. He makes one splendid appeal for the spirit of chivalry:

Let all men change as Fortune may send.
But Knighthood beareth service to the end.
and then, of course, he gives in
For what his woman willeth to be don
Her manne must or wauken Hell anon.

‘Then she hints that the daughter’s young lover, who is in the Bordeaux wine-trade, could open negotiations for a kidnapping without compromising him. And then that careless brute Mentzel spoils his page and chucks it! But there’s enough to show what’s going to happen. You’ll see it all in my Statement. Was there ever anything in literary finds to hold a candle to it?...And they give grocers Knighthoods for selling cheese!’

I went away before he could get into his stride on that course. I wanted to think, and to see Manallace. But I waited till Castorley’s Statement came out. He had left himself no loophole. And when, a little later, his (nominally the Sunnapia people’s) ‘scientific’ account of their analyses and tests appeared, criticism ceased, and some journals began to demand ‘public recognition.’ Manallace wrote me on this subject, and I went down to his cottage, where he at once asked me to sign a Memorial on Castorley’s behalf. With luck, he said, we might get him a K.B.E. in the next Honours List. Had I read the Statement?

‘I have,’ I replied. ‘But I want to ask you something first. Do you remember the night you got drunk at Neminaka’s, and I stayed behind to look after you?’

‘Oh, that time,’ said he, pondering. ‘Wait a minute! I remember Graydon advancing me two quid. He was a generous paymaster. And I remember—now, who the devil rolled me under the sofa—and what for?’

‘We all did,’ I replied. ‘You wanted to read us what you’d written to those Chaucer cuts.’

‘I don’t remember that. No! I don’t remember anything after the sofa-episode...You always said that you took me home—didn’t you?’

‘I did, and you told Kentucky Kate outside the old Empire that you had been faithful, Cynara, in your fashion.’

‘Did I?’ said he.