Up on the high veld our rivers are apt to be strings of pools linked
by muddy trickles—the most stagnant kind of watercourse you would
look for in a day’s journey. But presently they reach the edge of the
plateau and are tossed down into the flats in noble ravines, and roll
thereafter in full and sounding currents to the sea. So with the story
I am telling. It began in smooth reaches, as idle as a mill-pond; yet
the day soon came when I was in the grip of a torrent, flung
breathless from rock to rock by a destiny which I could not control.
But for the present I was in a backwater, no less than the Garden City
of Biggleswick, where Mr Cornelius Brand, a South African gentleman
visiting England on holiday, lodged in a pair of rooms in the cottage
of Mr Tancred Jimson.
The house—or ‘home’ as they preferred to name it at Biggleswick—was
one of some two hundred others which ringed a pleasant Midland common.
It was badly built and oddly furnished; the bed was too short, the
windows did not fit, the doors did not stay shut; but it was as clean
as soap and water and scrubbing could make it. The three-quarters of
an acre of garden were mainly devoted to the culture of potatoes,
though under the parlour window Mrs Jimson had a plot of
sweet-smelling herbs, and lines of lank sunflowers fringed the path
that led to the front door. It was Mrs Jimson who received me as I
descended from the station fly—a large red woman with hair bleached
by constant exposure to weather, clad in a gown which, both in shape
and material, seemed to have been modelled on a chintz curtain. She
was a good kindly soul, and as proud as Punch of her house. ‘We follow the simple life here, Mr Brand,’ she said. ‘You must take us as you find us.’
I assured her that I asked for nothing better, and as I unpacked in my
fresh little bedroom with a west wind blowing in at the window I
considered that I had seen worse quarters.
I had bought in London a considerable number of books, for I thought
that, as I would have time on my hands, I might as well do something
about my education. They were mostly English classics, whose names I
knew but which I had never read, and they were all in a little
flat-backed series at a shilling apiece. I arranged them on top of a
chest of drawers, but I kept the Pilgrim’s Progress beside my bed,
for that was one of my working tools and I had got to get it by heart. Mrs Jimson, who came in while I was unpacking to see if the room was
to my liking, approved my taste. At our midday dinner she wanted to
discuss books with me, and was so full of her own knowledge that I was
able to conceal my ignorance. ‘We are all labouring to express our personalities,’ she informed me. ‘Have you found your medium, Mr Brand? is it to be the pen or the
pencil? Or perhaps it is music? You have the brow of an artist, the
frontal “bar of Michelangelo”, you remember!’
I told her that I concluded I would try literature, but before writing
anything I would read a bit more.
It was a Saturday, so Jimson came back from town in the early
afternoon. He was a managing clerk in some shipping office, but you
wouldn’t have guessed it from his appearance. His city clothes were
loose dark-grey flannels, a soft collar, an orange tie, and a soft
black hat. His wife went down the road to meet him, and they returned
hand-in-hand, swinging their arms like a couple of school-children. He
had a skimpy red beard streaked with grey, and mild blue eyes behind
strong glasses. He was the most friendly creature in the world, full
of rapid questions, and eager to make me feel one of the family.
Presently he got into a tweed Norfolk jacket, and started to cultivate
his garden. I took off my coat and lent him a hand, and when he
stopped to rest from his labours—which was every five minutes, for he
had no kind of physique—he would mop his brow and rub his spectacles
and declaim about the good smell of the earth and the joy of getting
close to Nature.
Once he looked at my big brown hands and muscular arms with a kind of
wistfulness. ‘You are one of the doers, Mr Brand,’ he said, ‘and I
could find it in my heart to envy you. You have seen Nature in wild
forms in far countries. Some day I hope you will tell us about your
life. I must be content with my little corner, but happily there are
no territorial limits for the mind. This modest dwelling is a
watch-tower from which I look over all the world.’
After that he took me for a walk. We met parties of returning
tennis-players and here and there a golfer. There seemed to be an
abundance of young men, mostly rather weedy-looking, but with one or
two well-grown ones who should have been fighting. The names of some
of them Jimson mentioned with awe. An unwholesome youth was Aronson,
the great novelist; a sturdy, bristling fellow with a fierce moustache
was Letchford, the celebrated leader-writer of the Critic. Several
were pointed out to me as artists who had gone one better than anybody
else, and a vast billowy creature was described as the leader of the
new Orientalism in England. I noticed that these people, according to
Jimson, were all ‘great’, and that they all dabbled in something
‘new’. There were quantities of young women, too, most of them rather
badly dressed and inclining to untidy hair. And there were several
decent couples taking the air like house-holders of an evening all the
world Over. Most of these last were Jimson’s friends, to whom he
introduced me. They were his own class—modest folk, who sought for a
coloured background to their prosaic city lives and found it in this
odd settlement.
At supper I was initiated into the peculiar merits of Biggleswick. ‘It is one great laboratory of thought,’ said Mrs Jimson. ‘It is
glorious to feel that you are living among the eager, vital people who
are at the head of all the newest movements, and that the intellectual
history of England is being made in our studies and gardens. The war
to us seems a remote and secondary affair. As someone has said, the
great fights of the world are all fought in the mind.’
A spasm of pain crossed her husband’s face. ‘I wish I could feel it
far away. After all, Ursula, it is the sacrifice of the young that
gives people like us leisure and peace to think. Our duty is to do the
best which is permitted to us, but that duty is a poor thing compared
with what our young soldiers are giving! I may be quite wrong about
the war . . . I know I can’t argue with Letchford. But I will not
pretend to a superiority I do not feel.’
I went to bed feeling that in Jimson I had struck a pretty sound
fellow. As I lit the candles on my dressing-table I observed that the
stack of silver which I had taken out of my pockets when I washed
before supper was top-heavy. It had two big coins at the top and
sixpences and shillings beneath. Now it is one of my oddities that
ever since I was a small boy I have arranged my loose coins
symmetrically, with the smallest uppermost. That made me observant and
led me to notice a second point. The English classics on the top of
the chest of drawers were not in the order I had left them. Izaak
Walton had got to the left of Sir Thomas Browne, and the poet Burns
was wedged disconsolately between two volumes of Hazlitt. Moreover a
receipted bill which I had stuck in the Pilgrim’s Progress to mark
my place had been moved. Someone had been going through my belongings.
A moment’s reflection convinced me that it couldn’t have been Mrs
Jimson. She had no servant and did the housework herself, but my
things had been untouched when I left the room before supper, for she
had come to tidy up before I had gone downstairs. Someone had been
here while we were at supper, and had examined elaborately everything
I possessed. Happily I had little luggage, and no papers save the new
books and a bill or two in the name of Cornelius Brand. The
inquisitor, whoever he was, had found nothing . . . The incident gave
me a good deal of comfort. It had been hard to believe that any mystery
could exist in this public place, where people lived brazenly in the
open, and wore their hearts on their sleeves and proclaimed their
opinions from the rooftops. Yet mystery there must be, or an
inoffensive stranger with a kit-bag would not have received these
strange attentions. I made a practice after that of sleeping with my
watch below my pillow, for inside the case was Mary Lamington’s label.
Now began a period of pleasant idle receptiveness. Once a week it was
my custom to go up to London for the day to receive letters and
instructions, if any should come. I had moved from my chambers in Park
Lane, which I leased under my proper name, to a small flat in
Westminster taken in the name of Cornelius Brand. The letters
addressed to Park Lane were forwarded to Sir Walter, who sent them
round under cover to my new address. For the rest I used to spend my
mornings reading in the garden, and I discovered for the first time
what a pleasure was to be got from old books. They recalled and
amplified that vision I had seen from the Cotswold ridge, the
revelation of the priceless heritage which is England. I imbibed a
mighty quantity of history, but especially I liked the writers, like
Walton, who got at the very heart of the English countryside. Soon,
too, I found the Pilgrim’s Progress not a duty but a delight. I
discovered new jewels daily in the honest old story, and my letters to
Peter began to be as full of it as Peter’s own epistles. I loved,
also, the songs of the Elizabethans, for they reminded me of the girl
who had sung to me in the June night.
In the afternoons I took my exercise in long tramps along the good
dusty English roads. The country fell away from Biggleswick into a
plain of wood and pasture-land, with low hills on the horizon. The
Place was sown with villages, each with its green and pond and ancient
church. Most, too, had inns, and there I had many a draught of cool
nutty ale, for the inn at Biggleswick was a reformed place which sold
nothing but washy cider. Often, tramping home in the dusk, I was so
much in love with the land that I could have sung with the pure joy of
it. And in the evening, after a bath, there would be supper, when a
rather fagged Jimson struggled between sleep and hunger, and the lady,
with an artistic mutch on her untidy head, talked ruthlessly of
culture.
Bit by bit I edged my way into local society. The Jimsons were a great
help, for they were popular and had a nodding acquaintance with most
of the inhabitants. They regarded me as a meritorious aspirant towards
a higher life, and I was paraded before their friends with the
suggestion of a vivid, if Philistine, past. If I had any gift for
writing, I would make a book about the inhabitants of Biggleswick.
About half were respectable citizens who came there for country air
and low rates, but even these had a touch of queerness and had picked
up the jargon of the place. The younger men were mostly Government
clerks or writers or artists. There were a few widows with flocks of
daughters, and on the outskirts were several bigger houses—mostly
houses which had been there before the garden city was planted. One of
them was brand-new, a staring villa with sham-antique timbering, stuck
on the top of a hill among raw gardens. It belonged to a man called
Moxon Ivery, who was a kind of academic pacificist and a great god in
the place. Another, a quiet Georgian manor house, was owned by a
London publisher, an ardent Liberal whose particular branch of
business compelled him to keep in touch with the new movements. I used
to see him hurrying to the station swinging a little black bag and
returning at night with the fish for dinner.
I soon got to know a surprising lot of people, and they were the
rummiest birds you can imagine. For example, there were the Weekeses,
three girls who lived with their mother in a house so artistic that
you broke your head whichever way you turned in it. The son of the
family was a conscientious objector who had refused to do any sort of
work whatever, and had got quodded for his pains. They were immensely
proud of him and used to relate his sufferings in Dartmoor with a
gusto which I thought rather heartless. Art was their great subject,
and I am afraid they found me pretty heavy going. It was their fashion
never to admire anything that was obviously beautiful, like a sunset
or a pretty woman, but to find surprising loveliness in things which I
thought hideous. Also they talked a language that was beyond me. This
kind of conversation used to happen.—Miss Weekes: ‘Don’t you admire
Ursula Jimson?’ Self: ‘Rather!’ Miss W.: ‘She is so John-esque in her
lines.’ Self: ‘Exactly!’ Miss W.: ‘And Tancred, too—he is so full of
nuances.’ Self: ‘Rather!’ Miss W.: ‘He suggests one of Dégousse’s
countrymen.’ Self: ‘Exactly!’
They hadn’t much use for books, except some Russian ones, and I
acquired merit in their eyes for having read Leprous Souls. If you
talked to them about that divine countryside, you found they didn’t
give a rap for it and had never been a mile beyond the village. But
they admired greatly the sombre effect of a train going into
Marylebone station on a rainy day.
But it was the men who interested me most. Aronson, the novelist,
proved on acquaintance the worst kind of blighter. He considered
himself a genius whom it was the duty of the country to support, and
he sponged on his wretched relatives and anyone who would lend him
money. He was always babbling about his sins, and pretty squalid they
were. I should like to have flung him among a few good old-fashioned
full-blooded sinners of my acquaintance; they would have scared him
considerably. He told me that he sought ‘reality’ and ‘life’ and
‘truth’, but it was hard to see how he could know much about them, for
he spent half the day in bed smoking cheap cigarettes, and the rest
sunning himself in the admiration of half-witted girls. The creature
was tuberculous in mind and body, and the only novel of his I read,
pretty well turned my stomach. Mr Aronson’s strong point was jokes
about the war. If he heard of any acquaintance who had joined up or
was even doing war work his merriment knew no bounds. My fingers used
to itch to box the little wretch’s ears.
Letchford was a different pair of shoes. He was some kind of a man, to
begin with, and had an excellent brain and the worst manners
conceivable. He contradicted everything you said, and looked out for
an argument as other people look for their dinner. He was a
double-engined, high-speed pacificist, because he was the kind of
cantankerous fellow who must always be in a minority. If Britain had
stood out of the war he would have been a raving militarist, but since
she was in it he had got to find reasons why she was wrong. And jolly
good reasons they were, too. I couldn’t have met his arguments if I
had wanted to, so I sat docilely at his feet. The world was all
crooked for Letchford, and God had created him with two left hands.
But the fellow had merits. He had a couple of jolly children whom he
adored, and he would walk miles with me on a Sunday, and spout poetry
about the beauty and greatness of England. He was forty-five; if he
had been thirty and in my battalion I could have made a soldier out of
him.
There were dozens more whose names I have forgotten, but they had one
common characteristic. They were puffed up with spiritual pride, and I
used to amuse myself with finding their originals in the Pilgrim’s Progress. When I tried to judge them by the standard of old Peter,
they fell woefully short. They shut out the war from their lives, some
out of funk, some out of pure levity of mind, and some because they
were really convinced that the thing was all wrong. I think I grew
rather popular in my rôle of the seeker after truth, the honest
colonial who was against the war by instinct and was looking for
instruction in the matter. They regarded me as a convert from an alien
world of action which they secretly dreaded, though they affected to
despise it. Anyhow they talked to me very freely, and before long I
had all the pacifist arguments by heart. I made out that there were
three schools. One objected to war altogether, and this had few
adherents except Aronson and Weekes, C.O., now languishing in
Dartmoor. The second thought that the Allies’ cause was tainted, and
that Britain had contributed as much as Germany to the catastrophe.
This included all the adherents of the L.D.A.—or League of Democrats
against Aggression—a very proud body. The third and much the largest,
which embraced everybody else, held that we had fought long enough and
that the business could now be settled by negotiation, since Germany
had learned her lesson. I was myself a modest member of the last
school, but I was gradually working my way up to the second, and I
hoped with luck to qualify for the first. My acquaintances approved my
progress. Letchford said I had a core of fanaticism in my slow nature,
and that I would end by waving the red flag.
Spiritual pride and vanity, as I have said, were at the bottom of most
of them, and, try as I might, I could find nothing very dangerous in
it all. This vexed me, for I began to wonder if the mission which I
had embarked on so solemnly were not going to be a fiasco. Sometimes
they worried me beyond endurance. When the news of Messines came
nobody took the slightest interest, while I was aching to tooth every
detail of the great fight. And when they talked on military affairs,
as Letchford and others did sometimes, it was difficult to keep from
sending them all to the devil, for their amateur cocksureness would
have riled Job. One had got to batten down the recollection of our
fellows out there who were sweating blood to keep these fools snug.
Yet I found it impossible to be angry with them for long, they were so
babyishly innocent. Indeed, I couldn’t help liking them, and finding a
sort of quality in them. I had spent three years among soldiers, and
the British regular, great follow that he is, has his faults. His
discipline makes him in a funk of red-tape and any kind of superior
authority. Now these people were quite honest and in a perverted way
courageous. Letchford was, at any rate. I could no more have done what
he did and got hunted off platforms by the crowd and hooted at by
women in the streets than I could have written his leading articles.
All the same I was rather low about my job. Barring the episode of the
ransacking of my effects the first night, I had not a suspicion of a
clue or a hint of any mystery. The place and the people were as open
and bright as a Y.M.C.A. hut. But one day I got a solid wad of
comfort. In a corner of Letchford’s paper, the Critic, I found a
letter which was one of the steepest pieces of invective I had ever
met with. The writer gave tongue like a beagle pup about the
prostitution, as he called it, of American republicanism to the vices
of European aristocracies. He declared that Senator La Follette was a
much-misunderstood patriot, seeing that he alone spoke for the toiling
millions who had no other friend. He was mad with President Wilson,
and he prophesied a great awakening when Uncle Sam got up against John Bull in Europe and found out the kind of standpatter he was. The
letter was signed ‘John S. Blenkiron’ and dated ‘London, 3 July’.
The thought that Blenkiron was in England put a new complexion on my
business. I reckoned I would see him soon, for he wasn’t the man to
stand still in his tracks. He had taken up the rôle he had played
before he left in December 1915, and very right too, for not more than
half a dozen people knew of the Erzerum affair, and to the British
public he was only the man who had been fired out of the Savoy for
talking treason. I had felt a bit lonely before, but now somewhere
within the four corners of the island the best companion God ever made
was writing nonsense with his tongue in his old cheek.
There was an institution in Biggleswick which deserves mention. On the
south of the common, near the station, stood a red-brick building
called the Moot Hall, which was a kind of church for the very undevout
population. Undevout in the ordinary sense, I mean, for I had already
counted twenty-seven varieties of religious conviction, including
three Buddhists, a Celestial Hierarch, five Latter-day Saints, and
about ten varieties of Mystic whose names I could never remember. The
hall had been the gift of the publisher I have spoken of, and twice a
week it was used for lectures and debates. The place was managed by a
committee and was surprisingly popular, for it gave all the bubbling
intellects a chance of airing their views. When you asked where
somebody was and were told he was ‘at Moot,’ the answer was spoken in
the respectful tone in which you would mention a sacrament.
I went there regularly and got my mind broadened to cracking point. We
had all the stars of the New Movements. We had Doctor Chirk, who
lectured on ‘God’, which, as far as I could make out, was a new name
he had invented for himself. There was a woman, a terrible woman, who
had come back from Russia with what she called a ‘message of healing’.
And to my joy, one night there was a great buck nigger who had a lot
to say about ‘Africa for the Africans’. I had a few words with him in
Sesutu afterwards, and rather spoiled his visit. Some of the people
were extraordinarily good, especially one jolly old fellow who talked
about English folk songs and dances, and wanted us to set up a
Maypole. In the debates which generally followed I began to join, very
coyly at first, but presently with some confidence. If my time at
Biggleswick did nothing else it taught me to argue on my feet.
The first big effort I made was on a full-dress occasion, when
Launcelot Wake came down to speak. Mr Ivery was in the chair—the
first I had seen of him—a plump middle-aged man, with a colourless
face and nondescript features. I was not interested in him till he
began to talk, and then I sat bolt upright and took notice. For he was
the genuine silver-tongue, the sentences flowing from his mouth as
smooth as butter and as neatly dovetailed as a parquet floor. He had a
sort of man-of-the-world manner, treating his opponents with
condescending geniality, deprecating all passion and exaggeration and
making you feel that his urbane statement must be right, for if he had
wanted he could have put the case so much higher. I watched him,
fascinated, studying his face carefully; and the thing that struck me
was that there was nothing in it—nothing, that is to say, to lay
hold on. It was simply nondescript, so almightily commonplace that
that very fact made it rather remarkable.
Wake was speaking of the revelations of the Sukhomhnov trial in
Russia, which showed that Germany had not been responsible for the
war. He was jolly good at the job, and put as clear an argument as a
first-class lawyer. I had been sweating away at the subject and had
all the ordinary case at my fingers’ ends, so when I got a chance of
speaking I gave them a long harangue, with some good quotations I had
cribbed out of the Vossische Zeitung, which Letchford lent me. I
felt it was up to me to be extra violent, for I wanted to establish my
character with Wake, seeing that he was a friend of Mary and Mary
would know that I was playing the game. I got tremendously applauded,
far more than the chief speaker, and after the meeting Wake came up
to me with his hot eyes, and wrung my hand. ‘You’re coming on well,
Brand,’ he said, and then he introduced me to Mr Ivery. ‘Here’s a
second and a better Smuts,’ he said.
Ivery made me walk a bit of the road home with him. ‘I am struck by
your grip on these difficult problems, Mr Brand,’ he told me. ‘There
is much I can tell you, and you may be of great value to our cause.’
He asked me a lot of questions about my past, which I answered with
easy mendacity. Before we parted he made me promise to come one night
to supper.
Next day I got a glimpse of Mary, and to my vexation she cut me dead.
She was walking with a flock of bare-headed girls, all chattering
hard, and though she saw me quite plainly she turned away her eyes. I
had been waiting for my cue, so I did not lift my hat, but passed on
as if we were strangers. I reckoned it was part of the game, but that
trifling thing annoyed me, and I spent a morose evening.
The following day I saw her again, this time talking sedately with Mr
Ivery, and dressed in a very pretty summer gown, and a broad-brimmed
straw hat with flowers in it. This time she stopped with a bright
smile and held out her hand. ‘Mr Brand, isn’t it?’ she asked with a
pretty hesitation. And then, turning to her companion—’This is Mr
Brand. He stayed with us last month in Gloucestershire.’
Mr Ivery announced that he and I were already acquainted. Seen in
broad daylight he was a very personable fellow, somewhere between
forty-five and fifty, with a middle-aged figure and a curiously young
face. I noticed that there were hardly any lines on it, and it was
rather that of a very wise child than that of a man. He had a pleasant
smile which made his jaw and cheeks expand like indiarubber. ‘You are
coming to sup with me, Mr Brand,’ he cried after me. ‘On Tuesday after
Moot. I have already written.’ He whisked Mary away from me, and I had
to content myself with contemplating her figure till it disappeared
round a bend of the road.
Next day in London I found a letter from Peter. He had been very
solemn of late, and very reminiscent of old days now that he concluded
his active life was over. But this time he was in a different mood.
‘I think,‘ he wrote, ‘that you and I will meet again soon, my old friend. Do you remember when we went after the big black-maned lion in the Rooirand and couldn’t get on his track, and then one morning we woke up and said we would get him today?—and we did, but he very near got you first. I’ve had a feel these last days that we’re both going down into the Valley to meet with Apolyon, and that the devil will give us a bad time, but anyhow we’ll be together.‘
I had the same kind of feel myself, though I didn’t see how Peter and
I were going to meet, unless I went out to the Front again and got put
in the bag and sent to the same Boche prison. But I had an instinct
that my time in Biggleswick was drawing to a close, and that presently
I would be in rougher quarters. I felt quite affectionate towards the
place, and took all my favourite walks, and drank my own health in the
brew of the village inns, with a consciousness of saying goodbye. Also
I made haste to finish my English classics, for I concluded I wouldn’t
have much time in the future for miscellaneous reading.
The Tuesday came, and in the evening I set out rather late for the
Moot Hall, for I had been getting into decent clothes after a long,
hot stride. When I reached the place it was pretty well packed, and I
could only find a seat on the back benches. There on the platform was
Ivery, and beside him sat a figure that thrilled every inch of me with
affection and a wild anticipation. ‘I have now the privilege,’ said
the chairman, ‘of introducing to you the speaker whom we so warmly
welcome, our fearless and indefatigable American friend, Mr
Blenkiron.’
It was the old Blenkiron, but almightily changed. His stoutness had
gone, and he was as lean as Abraham Lincoln. Instead of a puffy face,
his cheek-bones and jaw stood out hard and sharp, and in place of his
former pasty colour his complexion had the clear glow of health. I saw
now that he was a splendid figure of a man, and when he got to his
feet every movement had the suppleness of an athlete in training. In
that moment I realized that my serious business had now begun. My
senses suddenly seemed quicker, my nerves tenser, my brain more
active. The big game had started, and he and I were playing it
together.
I watched him with strained attention. It was a funny speech, stuffed
with extravagance and vehemence, not very well argued and terribly
discursive. His main point was that Germany was now in a fine
democratic mood and might well be admitted into a brotherly
partnership—that indeed she had never been in any other mood, but had
been forced into violence by the plots of her enemies. Much of it, I
should have thought, was in stark defiance of the Defence of the Realm
Acts, but if any wise Scotland Yard officer had listened to it he
would probably have considered it harmless because of its
contradictions. It was full of a fierce earnestness, and it was full
of humour—long-drawn American metaphors at which that most critical
audience roared with laughter. But it was not the kind of thing that
they were accustomed to, and I could fancy what Wake would have said
of it. The conviction grew upon me that Blenkiron was deliberately
trying to prove himself an honest idiot. If so, it was a huge success.
He produced on one the impression of the type of sentimental
revolutionary who ruthlessly knifes his opponent and then weeps and
prays over his tomb.
Just at the end he seemed to pull himself together and to try a little
argument. He made a great point of the Austrian socialists going to
Stockholm, going freely and with their Government’s assent, from a
country which its critics called an autocracy, while the democratic
western peoples held back. ‘I admit I haven’t any real water-tight
proof,’ he said, ‘but I will bet my bottom dollar that the influence
which moved the Austrian Government to allow this embassy of freedom
was the influence of Germany herself. And that is the land from which
the Allied Pharisees draw in their skirts lest their garments be
defiled!’
He sat down amid a good deal of applause, for his audience had not
been bored, though I could see that some of them thought his praise of
Germany a bit steep. It was all right in Biggleswick to prove Britain
in the wrong, but it was a slightly different thing to extol the
enemy. I was puzzled about his last point, for it was not of a piece
with the rest of his discourse, and I was trying to guess at his
purpose. The chairman referred to it in his concluding remarks. ‘I am
in a position,’ he said, ‘to bear out all that the lecturer has said.
I can go further. I can assure him on the best authority that his
surmise is correct, and that Vienna’s decision to send delegates to
Stockholm was largely dictated by representations from Berlin. I am
given to understand that the fact has in the last few days been
admitted in the Austrian Press.’
A vote of thanks was carried, and then I found myself shaking hands
with Ivery while Blenkiron stood a yard off, talking to one of the
Misses Weekes. The next moment I was being introduced. ‘Mr Brand, very pleased to meet you,’ said the voice I knew so well.
‘Mr Ivery has been telling me about you, and I guess we’ve got
something to say to each other. We’re both from noo countries, and
we’ve got to teach the old nations a little horse-sense.’
Mr Ivery’s car—the only one left in the neighbourhood—carried us to
his villa, and presently we were seated in a brightly-lit dining-
room. It was not a pretty house, but it had the luxury of an expensive
hotel, and the supper we had was as good as any London restaurant.
Gone were the old days of fish and toast and boiled milk. Blenkiron
squared his shoulders and showed himself a noble trencherman.
‘A year ago,’ he told our host, ‘I was the meanest kind of dyspeptic.
I had the love of righteousness in my heart, but I had the devil in my
stomach. Then I heard stories about the Robson Brothers, the star
surgeons way out west in White Springs, Nebraska. They were reckoned
the neatest hands in the world at carving up a man and removing
devilments from his intestines. Now, sir, I’ve always fought pretty
shy of surgeons, for I considered that our Maker never intended His
handiwork to be reconstructed like a bankrupt Dago railway. But by
that time I was feeling so almighty wretched that I could have paid a
man to put a bullet through my head. “There’s no other way,” I said to
myself. “Either you forget your religion and your miserable cowardice
and get cut up, or it’s you for the Golden Shore.” So I set my teeth
and journeyed to White Springs, and the Brothers had a look at my
duodenum. They saw that the darned thing wouldn’t do, so they
sidetracked it and made a noo route for my noo-trition traffic. It was
the cunningest piece of surgery since the Lord took a rib out of the
side of our First Parent. They’ve got a mighty fine way of charging,
too, for they take five per cent of a man’s income, and it’s all one
to them whether he’s a Meat King or a clerk on twenty dollars a week.
I can tell you I took some trouble to be a very rich man last year.’
All through the meal I sat in a kind of stupor. I was trying to
assimilate the new Blenkiron, and drinking in the comfort of his
heavenly drawl, and I was puzzling my head about Ivery. I had a
ridiculous notion that I had seen him before, but, delve as I might
into my memory, I couldn’t place him. He was the incarnation of the
commonplace, a comfortable middle-class sentimentalist, who patronized
pacificism out of vanity, but was very careful not to dip his hands
too far. He was always damping down Blenkiron’s volcanic utterances.
‘Of course, as you know, the other side have an argument which I find
rather hard to meet . . .’ ‘I can sympathize with patriotism, and even
with jingoism, in certain moods, but I always come back to this
difficulty.’ ‘Our opponents are not ill-meaning so much as
ill-judging,’—these were the sort of sentences he kept throwing in.
And he was full of quotations from private conversations he had had
with every sort of person—including members of the Government. I
remember that he expressed great admiration for Mr Balfour.
Of all that talk, I only recalled one thing clearly, and I recalled it
because Blenkiron seemed to collect his wits and try to argue, just as
he had done at the end of his lecture. He was speaking about a story
he had heard from someone, who had heard it from someone else, that
Austria in the last week of July 1914 had accepted Russia’s proposal
to hold her hand and negotiate, and that the Kaiser had sent a message
to the Tsar saying he agreed. According to his story this telegram had
been received in Petrograd, and had been re-written, like Bismarck’s
Ems telegram, before it reached the Emperor. He expressed his
disbelief in the yarn. ‘I reckon if it had been true,’ he said, ‘we’d
have had the right text out long ago. They’d have kept a copy in
Berlin. All the same I did hear a sort of rumour that some kind of
message of that sort was published in a German paper.’
Mr Ivery looked wise. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I happen to know that
it has been published. You will find it in the Wieser Zeitung.’
‘You don’t say?’ he said admiringly. ‘I wish I could read the old
tombstone language. But if I could they wouldn’t let me have the
papers.’
‘Oh yes they would.’ Mr Ivery laughed pleasantly. ‘England has still a
good share of freedom. Any respectable person can get a permit to
import the enemy press. I’m not considered quite respectable, for the
authorities have a narrow definition of patriotism, but happily I have
respectable friends.’
Blenkiron was staying the night, and I took my leave as the clock
struck twelve. They both came into the hall to see me off, and, as I
was helping myself to a drink, and my host was looking for my hat and
stick, I suddenly heard Blenkiron’s whisper in my ear. ‘London . . .
the day after tomorrow,’ he said. Then he took a formal farewell. ‘Mr
Brand, it’s been an honour for me, as an American citizen, to make
your acquaintance, sir. I will consider myself fortunate if we have an
early reunion. I am stopping at Claridge’s Ho-tel, and I hope to be
privileged to receive you there.’
Nguồn: Wikisource English — Mr Standfast/Chapter 2. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.