Chapter Two. 'The Village Named Morality'

Mr. Standfast

by John Buchan

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
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 Degousse'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
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 role 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.'