You know how the great hunter who sleeps with his gun at his pillow
is awake in an instant, with all his faculties alert, when the sacred
spider breaks a twig in the jungle? You remember how the handsome
highwayman, at the first far clatter of hoofs on the great North Road,
is up and out on the scullery roof of the inn before you have turned
the page, and is deep in Lonely Copse (wearing the serving-wench's
stomacher) before his first fat pursuer has said, "Open in the name of
the Law," below his window? Well, like Jimmy's bloodhound in _Punch_,
I am very good at that.
But it is a telephone-bell that does it. You go down seventy-two
steps--backwards, or you hit your head--to a German room, which smells
German, and you will find my boudoir, furnished with sandbags, a
shaving mirror and a telephone.
At eleven o'clock I lie on the sandbags and, like the great hunter,
close my eyes immediately in dreamless sleep.
At five minutes past eleven the telephone-bell rings.