Mr. Standfast
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