CHAPTER II

“The Village Named Morality”

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 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 schoolchildren. 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 role 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 fellow

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, July 3rd”.

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 Sukhomlinov 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 Apollyon, 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 realised 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 patronised

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 sympathise 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 _Weser 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.”