ENGLAND, THEIR ENGLAND
CHAPTER IX
In the middle of August, Davies telephoned to Donald and asked him to come round to the office in Henrietta Street and report progress.
Donald was frankly depressed, and he said so. "I'm out of my depth," he said. "My feet aren't on the ground."
Davies laughed. He found his young friend's perplexities amusing.
"I didn't imagine you'd find it very easy," he said. "But don't forget what I told you in that infernal pill-box, years ago. I've got a sort of instinctive notion that the English character——"
"There's no such thing," interrupted Donald. "They're all different."
"That the English character," went on Davies firmly, "is based fundamentally upon kindliness and poetry. Just keep that notion in mind, whether you agree with it or not. And now listen to me, I've got a job for you."
"What sort of a job?" enquired Donald suspiciously.
"A private-secretaryship."
Donald's face fell. "But I want to write things. I don't think I want——"
"Of course you want to write things, you young donkey. And I'm trying to help you. What I'm offering to you is the private-secretaryship to an English politician—English, mind you—and it's only temporary. The man in question is a very old friend of mine, and his permanent fellow has gone down with scarlet fever."
"But Parliament isn't sitting," began Donald.
"There's a little Mr. Know-all," replied Davies pleasantly. "It hadn't escaped my notice that Parliament isn't sitting. But my friend has just been appointed to the British delegation that is going to the Assembly of the League of Nations at Geneva in a fortnight, and he wants someone to go with him, and hold his hat and coat. Would you care to take it on? All expenses and a fiver a week."
"For how long?"
"For a month. He might give you a very good notion of the Englishman as an internationalist."
Donald sprang to his feet.
"Of course!" he exclaimed. "What a fool I am! And how kind you are! You really are most awfully kind," he added naïvely.
Mr. Davies was pleased.
"That's capital," he said. "My friend's name is Sir Henry Wootton, and he's the Conservative member for East Something-or-Other. You'll find him in Vacher's. I'll give you a card to him and I'll ring him up and tell him you're coming to see him. He's a very decent fellow. Apart from that, I won't say another word about him so as not to prejudice you one way or the other. Good-bye and good luck. Come and see me when you get back."
Sir Henry Wootton was a nice, cheerful, elderly buck of about seventy, and he lived in a large house in Queen's Gate. He had a rosy face, a large white moustache, and blue eyes, and his manners were old-fashioned in their perfection. He received Donald in a rather impressive library, lined with books on all sides. But the impressiveness wore off after a bit, for the books were not the books of a reader, but more like the reference section of a public library or a dusty corridor in a West End Club. The Dictionary of National Biography stretched out its interminable array; above it was an old edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Annual Register occupied shelf after shelf. Bailey's Guide to the Turf, Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, the Gentleman's Magazine, huge bound volumes of the Illustrated London News, the Field, Country Life, Horse and Hound, and other periodicals of bygone ages stood massively, leathery, shoulder to shoulder, rather like the massive, prosperous years of Victorianism which they recorded in their pages. They belonged to a period of the life of England in which there was time not only to read the five-hour speeches of long-dead Chancellors, but to re-read them in after-years out of leather-bound collections, a period in which a gentleman had leisure for the pursuit of the gentlemanly pastimes.
Sir Henry belonged to that period. He had driven his coach-and-six to the Derby. He had been taken, as a boy, to see Lord Frederick Beauclerk play a single-wicket match at Lord's; he had seen Jem Mace box; he had damned Oscar Wilde's eyes on the steps of the Athenaeum; he had borrowed money from Sam Lewis to back Ormonde with; he had worshipped the Jersey Lily from afar, and the lesser ladies of Florodora and The Geisha from a little nearer, and a lot of ladies in Paris and Venice from much closer still. And, on inheriting the baronetcy, he had given up all these things and gone into politics. It was the traditional finish to the life of a traditional English gentleman, and Sir Henry was in the tradition.
The beginning of his political life was a welter of right-minded hatred of Mr. Lloyd George and his anarchistic theories about land and money. The middle period was a glow of right-minded adoration of Mr. Lloyd George and his magnificence as an organizer of victory; while the closing phase of Sir Henry's career at St. Stephen's was untinged with hatreds or adorations. He had outlived the passions and had glided into a serene tranquillity. He did not understand in the least what had happened to the world or was likely to happen, but he was perfectly happy and perfectly willing to play any part that might be allotted to him. He was an admirable Chairman of Commissions to enquire into things of which he had not known the existence; he did not approve in theory of such things as the Irish Treaty, or votes for young ladies of twenty-one, or supertax, but as they had come and were obviously going to stay, he was quite willing to support them in practice. He liked the older members of the Conservative Party because at least ninety per cent of them were lifelong friends; he liked the "young chaps" because they were the type that would have ridden straight, if hunting hadn't become so damned prohibitive, and would have chased the girls of Florodora and The Geisha if they weren't buckling down so damned well to the business of running the country; he liked the handful of Radicals in the House, because they were mostly brainy chaps and he admired brains; he liked the Socialists because they got so angry, and that made him laugh. In fact, he liked everyone except "those damned turncoats" who jumped about from Party to Party like cats in search of jobs. Sir Henry could not stand them at any price, and said so repeatedly and, for his voice was naturally a rather loud one, loudly.
This, then, was the gentleman who welcomed Donald with old-fashioned politeness into his musty, dusty, leathery library.
"I'll tell you what it is, Cameron," he said, after the usual courtesies had been exchanged, and a butler had brought in a couple of glasses of sherry and a biscuit-jar (in Sir Henry's life ceremonial "Misters" played as small a part as Christian names); "I don't really want a secretary in the proper sense of the word. I'm not going to make speeches with figures and facts and all that sort of rubbish in them. I'm just going to stick to generalities. The truth of the matter is that I don't know much about this League, and I don't know why the P.M. wants me to go. But he's asked me, and so, of course, I'm going. I'm all in favour of peace myself, as every sane man is, but I've got a sort of notion that the best way to keep the peace is the good old British way of building a thumping great fleet and letting the dagoes do what they damned well like, eh? After all, it worked in the past, so why not now? However, I'm told that's all wrong in these modern times, and so I expect it is. They tell me that this League is the dodge now, and if that's so, I'm all in favour of it. Do you see what I mean?"
"Yes, sir," replied Donald. So far he had found little difficulty in following the thread of Sir Henry's discourse.
"I don't run down the League just because it's new," went on Sir Henry. "If we've got to love the black man like a brother, I'm quite prepared to do it. At present I draw the line at loving him like a brother-in-law, but I expect that'll come later. Now your job at Geneva, if you agree to take it on, will be more like a cross between a valet and a friend. I mean you'll have to find my hat for me, and you'll have to keep me posted up with the sporting news from home, and you'll have to see that there's a taxi for me when I want one, and that I don't run out of whisky in the evenings, and all that sort of thing. Do you feel like taking it on for a month?"
"I should be delighted," replied Donald.
"Splendid. We leave on Friday morning. You'd better run round to the Foreign Office and fix up about passports and so on. And you'd better see if you can find out what this League does, and how it works, and all that sort of thing."
Donald found it very difficult at Geneva to keep his mind concentrated upon his task. There was so much that was new to be seen, heard, tasted, drunk, and done. With delegates of more than fifty nations concentrated into one town, or worse, into one small quarter of one town, it was almost impossible to remember that he was engaged upon a specific job—the study, at close quarters and at first hand, of the Representatives of England, at work upon international politics. They were, after all, well worth studying. For the English, whatever may be said against their home politics, or their climate, or their cooking, or their love-making, or their art, or their sport, have proved themselves over and over again throughout the centuries the masters of international diplomacy and foreign affairs. A glance at the history of the world shows how the enemies of England have always collapsed unexpectedly and mysteriously, whether owing to the sudden uprising of a southerly gale to drive invading galleons from Gravelines to the Pentland Firth, or owing to a trivial miscalculation which isolated the wing of an army in the obscure Danubian village of Blindheim, or owing to a Spanish ulcer, or to the sinking of a Lusitania, and it cannot be supposed that these incidents were all fortuitous. In the same way a glance at the geography of the world shows that in the days of sailing-ships every convenient port somehow or other fell into the hands of the English, except Walfish Bay and Pondicherry; that in the days of coal, every coaling-station was English; that in the days of oil, the only oil-wells that did not already belong to people who wanted selfishly to keep them for themselves, became English; that in 1920 even Walfish Bay, useless as it had become, went the same way as all the rest for the sake of the principle, leaving only Pondicherry as a sort of joke; and that the last scramble, the scramble for aerodromes, fell flat because every reasonably smooth island was already in English hands, except one a good deal north of Siberia, called Wrangel Island, and another in the South Seas called Johnson Island. These two alone were left out by English diplomacy: the first because it is so cold that petrol, oil, and water immediately freeze on arriving there, thus rendering it comparatively unfit for aeronautical manœuvres; and the other, Johnson Island, because, after a volley of notes and threats to the Norwegian Government—which also laid claim to it—the English Intelligence Service somehow ferreted out the fact that the disputed island had not been sighted since its first discovery, sixty-eight years earlier, by a dipsomaniacal Australian skipper, who had noted it down in his log as appearing on the horizon between two pale-pink lizards in yellow breeches and deer-stalkers; and that no one knew in the least where it was. The English Foreign Office immediately despatched a most cordial Note to the Norwegian Government relinquishing all claims on Johnson Island, not as a matter of international right and wrong, but as a graceful compliment to the King of Norway, whose birthday was due in a few weeks' time. Meanwhile the English Admiralty marked Johnson Island on its charts as "disappeared in unrecorded land-subsidence," and two years later, the Air Force, hearing the news, provisionally deleted it from its official list of aerodromes.
Donald ought, therefore, to have found no difficulty in concentrating upon the most fascinating of human spectacles, Experts at Work. The English had proved themselves for hundreds of years the Heads of the Profession, and here they were again, at the very centre of the international world, using all their unrivalled skill for the still further betterment of their Empire.
But there were many distractions. The streets were crowded with strange sights. Abyssinians in great blue robes and wearing great black beards swung proudly along the boulevards; Chinese and Japanese and Siamese and Cochinese and Cingalese and Tonkinese and Annamese moved inscrutably hither and thither. Frenchmen chattered. Australians in big hats strode. Sinn Fein ex-gunmen, now Ministers of State, sat in cafés and told witty stories. Albanians, ill at ease without their habitual arsenal of firearms, scowled at Yugo-Slavs. South Americans abounded, dark men with roving eyes and a passion for kissing typists in lifts. Maharajahs who were descended from ten thousand gods walked as if they were conscious of their ancestry. Newsboys, usually well over eighty years of age, sold papers written in every conceivable language but mainly in the language of the Middle-Western States of the United States; and everywhere pattered private secretaries, racing hither and thither, always in a hurry, always laden with papers, and always just managing to snatch a moment to exchange the latest gossip with each other as they sped by.
In strange contrast to these active young men was the vast, amorphous mass of American tourists who never had anything to do. They eddied about the streets in aimless shoals, like lost mackerel, pointing out celebrities to each other and always getting them wrong; taking endless photographs of obscure Genevese citizens in mistake for German Chancellors or Soviet Observers, and pretending that they had important luncheon-dates. Geneva during September had become as much a pilgrimage for Wyoming, Nebraska, and Boston, to name only three of the main pilgrim-exporting centres, as the Colosseum, the Venus de Milo, the outside of Mr. Beerbohm's villa at Rapallo, or the fields at St. Mihiel where the German Imperial Army met its first, its only, and its final defeat.
Nor was life in the streets the only distraction. There was the International Club, for instance, where a gentleman in a white coat, called Victor, performed prodigies of activity in the mixing of Bronxes, Gin-Slings, John Collinses, and Brandy St. Johns, leaping to and fro, like a demented preacher, for bottles, sugar, lemons, cherries, and straws. His clients were mostly journalists, and very swagger journalists at that. They were not the type which runs round feverishly trying to pick up news. They did not carry note-books in their hip pockets. They did not pester statesmen for interviews. What they did was to play billiards all day in the Club, calling upon the services of Mr. Victor from time to time, until a message arrived giving the hour at which the French Foreign Minister, or the German Foreign Minister, was ready to receive them and answer questions. Occasionally the British Foreign Minister received them, but his receptions were not nearly so popular as those of his two colleagues, for the Frenchman could usually be relied upon for several calculated indiscretions, while the German could always be relied upon for free Munich beer. The Englishman, on the other hand, was both discreet and temperate.
There was also the great building of the Secretariat itself, in which the permanent officials were always ready to welcome visitors at any hour during the day. There was the lake, blue, clear, like a polished aquamarine, translucent, exquisite, studded with far-off brick-red sails of barges and white butterfly yachts, and defended by the everlasting snows of Mont Blanc and the Dent du Midi. Boats could be hired for sailing on the lake, the bathing was warm and luxurious, and on the far side were restaurants, where a man might dine with a lovely lady and see what could be done in the way of wooing by the light of Orion upon dark waters and the sound of little murmurous waves. And anyone who failed to advance his suit in those little lake-side restaurants might just as well reconcile himself at once to a long life of dreary celibacy.
In addition to all these attractions there were the dancing-halls and the cabarets and the cafés in the Old Town, especially the one that wasn't actually the one that Lenin and Trotsky used to frequent in the old days and is now demolished, but wasn't far off, and the Kursaal, and the lounges of the big hotels and the cinemas.
Yes, Geneva was full of distractions for even the keenest of students of international affairs and English policy, and, after the first week of pre liminaries, Donald had to make a stern resolution to attend to business and eschew frivolities.
Sir Henry Wootton was thoroughly enjoying himself, and had already devoted several evenings to the discussion of a lot of urgent international business at one of the lake-side restaurants with the permanent deputy-chief of the Exchange-of-Municipal-Experience Section of the Secretariat. The permanent deputy-chief looked very fetching in black velvet and a picture hat, and Sir Henry was as sorry as his secretary when the time came for the application of noses to grindstones.
The normal procedure of the Assembly was as follows. The first week was devoted to speech-making on any subject under the sun by any delegate who wanted to get his name into print in the newspapers of his native country. Nobody listened to them, not even the reporters of the native newspapers, for they had received typewritten copies of the speech which affected them, six or seven hours before it was delivered.
After this week of oratory had been completed, the Assembly split itself up into six Committees, three of which were presided over by an English, French, and German president, two by South Americans, and one by an Asiatic. On this occasion the two South Americans were Panama and Paraguay; the Asiatic was Caspia. But the procedure had to be somewhat modified, as at first no South American delegates were available, for the following rather singular and quite exceptional reason. The second week of the Assembly happened to coincide with the fourth session of the Permanent Committee for the Suppression of Obscene Photographs, Post Cards, Magazines, Advertisements, and Publications in General, and by a curious coincidence all the South Americans, including Cuba, San Domingo, and Haiti—indeed, headed by San Domingo and Haiti, with Cuba well in the running for a place—decided to attend the meetings of the Committee. Fortunately for the work of the Assembly, the sessions of the Permanent Committee for the Suppression of Obscene Photographs, Post Cards, Magazines, Advertisements, and Publications in General came to an abrupt halt on the second day, the entire collection of specimens of the literature in question, so laboriously collected over a long period by the Secretariat, having been pinched by the delegates.
Sir Henry was assigned by the Earl of Osbaldestone, Britain's senior delegate, to the Committee for the Abolition of Social Abuses, and he despatched Donald first to the Secretariat for documents, which would tell him what exactly the Abuses were, and then to the Staff of Foreign Office experts for information about the British Official Policy which Sir Henry was to expound and advocate.
Donald had no difficulty about the documents. There were sheaves of them, printed and typed, records of past Conferences, verbatim minutes of Committees, draft resolutions, amendments to draft resolutions, alterations to amendments of draft resolutions, cancellations of alterations, copies of speeches, and Press reports from publications as far divided, geographically and politically, as the Singapore Hardware and Allied Trades Independent, the Santiago de Chile Indigo Exporters' Quarterly, The Times, Der Wienerwurst und Schnitzeller Tages-Zeitung of Rothenburg-am-Tauber, a matrimonial journal called The Link, the Manchester Guardian, Who's Who in Cochin-China, and the Irish Free State Union of Sewage-Inspectors' Annual Report.
Donald hired two taxis and filled one up to the roof with the necessary documents and directed the man to drive to Sir Henry's hotel, while he himself went in the other.
After a couple of hours spent in sorting, sifting, and arranging, Donald discovered the crucial sheet of paper on which was printed the agenda of the Commission. It appeared that the two main Abuses at which Sir Henry was due to launch himself were the Illicit Traffic in Synthetic Beer, and the existence in certain countries of Houses of Ill-Repute, discreetly called Licensed Establishments, and Donald set off on his second mission—to obtain the Official Policy on these two matters.
The Foreign Office experts occupied the whole of the second floor of the hotel, and Donald doubtfully entered a sitting-room from which issued a rattle of typewriters, and on the door of which was pinned a label which said, rather surprisingly, "Chancery." He was instantly abashed at finding himself in the midst of a perfect vision of beauty and elegance. On all sides radiant young ladies, obviously straight from the establishments of Poirot, Paquin, or Molyneux, were whacking away with dainty fingers at typewriting machines. The air was full of incense. Blood rushed to Donald's head. His eyes went dim. The room darkened. A golden-haired Aphrodite slid up to him but he could not see her. He wanted to fly but his legs would not move. He perspired vehemently, and longed for the quiet midden at the Mains of Balspindie.
After what seemed five or six hours, a vision of blue eyes and golden hair swam out of the mist before him and he stammered a vague and halting statement of his requirements, dropping his hat twice during the recital and, on the second occasion, clutching wildly at the Aphrodite's silken ankle as he groped for it. The goddess was quite unperturbed by the sudden grasp. Lady Secretaries at international conferences which are attended by South Americans quickly get accustomed to almost anything. Nervous Englishmen, or Scotsmen, are child's-play to those who can, with deftness and dignity, handle a Venezuelan.
As soon as Donald had released his grip upon her ankle, had retrieved his hat, and had embarked upon a flood of apologies, she cut him short with kindly firmness, and led him through the roomful of beauty to an inner sanctum into which she pushed him with the words, "You want Mr. Carteret-Pendragon."
The inner sanctum was a strange contrast to the outer room. It was very large, being one of the largest sitting-rooms in the hotel and seldom occupied during the other months of the year except by Nebraskans and Maharajahs, and was furnished tastefully in green, gold, and marble. There were probably more than one thousand gold tassels on the curtains alone, a source of legitimate pride to the management.
Three young men were sitting in complete silence at three tables, marble-topped and gilt-legged. None of them looked up as Donald came in, and after the golden Venus had closed the door with a snap, a deep, religious soundlessness fell upon the place, as in a cathedral upon a summer's afternoon.
Donald choked down a nervous cough and waited. At last one of the young men laid down his pen, leant back in his chair and said, "Well?"
"Mr. Carteret-Pendragon?"
"That is my name, sir."
"I am Sir Henry Wootton's private secretary," began Donald. "My name is Cameron——"
"How-do-you-do. My name is Carteret-Pendragon. Let me introduce Mr. Carshalton-Stanbury, and this is Mr. Woldingham-Uffington."
The two young men got up and bowed gravely and sat down again and went on with their work. Donald noticed that all three were wearing Old Etonian ties.
"It's about Sir Henry and the Social Abuses Commission," said Donald.
"Sit down," said Mr. Carteret-Pendragon. He was a young man of about thirty with beautiful fair hair, parted at the side and flat and very shiny, a razor-like crease down his grey trousers, pale-yellow horn-rimmed spectacles, and a dark-red carnation in his buttonhole. Mr. Carshalton-Stanbury's hair was black, his horn-rims dappled, and his carnation vermilion. Mr. Woldingham-Uffington's hair, horn-rims, and carnation were all yellow.
"Sir Henry wants to know what line he is to take about the traffic in Synthetic Beer," said Donald.
Mr. Carteret-Pendragon wrinkled his snow-white brow.
"I don't think I quite follow," he said in some perplexity.
"Sir Henry thinks that he will probably have to make a speech about it, you see," explained Donald.
"In a sense, yes," replied Mr. Carteret-Pendragon, "and in another sense, no. It will," he added, as if clarifying the position, "of course, be expected of him."
"And he wants to know what to say."
"Oh! The usual things," said Mr. Carteret-Pendragon easily. He went on, checking off the points on his fingers: "Devotion of British Commonwealth of Free Nations to ideals of League, nation of peace-lovers, all must co-operate, wonderful work of League, praise of the Secretariat, economy in League expenditure, a word about Woodrow Wilson, and a tribute to the French."
He picked up a document, and began to study it as if the interview had been brought to a conclusion that was satisfactory to everyone.
"But why a tribute to the French?" asked Donald in surprise.
"It's the usual way to finish off a speech here. It does no harm and the French like it."
"But what about the Synthetic Beer?"
"What about it?" said Mr. Carteret-Pendragon in a rather tired voice.
"I mean, what is our policy?"
At the word "policy" the other two diplomatists started as if they had suddenly been confronted with a rattlesnake, and all three stared at Donald.
"Policy?" repeated Mr. Carteret-Pendragon in bewilderment, and Mr. Carshalton-Stanbury and Mr. Woldingham-Uffington echoed the word and gazed vaguely round the room, like people who have lost something which might turn up unexpectedly at any moment—a dog, for example, or a small child.
"Policy?" repeated Mr. Carteret-Pendragon in a firmer voice. He had quicker wits than the other two, and had grasped what this queer youth in the lounge-suit and no buttonhole was talking about.
"My dear sir," he went on indulgently, "we don't have policies about things. We leave all that to the dagoes. It keeps them out of mischief."
"But don't we—don't you—doesn't Great Britain take an independent line about anything?"
"Whatever for?" enquired Mr. Carteret-Pendragon, and the other two murmured the words "independent line," like men in a maze.
"We are here to preserve balances," went on the diplomat. "Our task is to maintain equilibriums—equilibria, I ought to say," he corrected himself with a small cough. "After all, there are the proportions, when all is said and done. One must have a sense of equipoise."
"Naturally," murmured the other two, hitching up their beautiful trousers about a centimetre and a half in complete unison.
"But how does anything get settled?" enquired Donald, feeling remarkably foolish in the presence of these sophisticated men of the great world.
"Oh, they get settled all right—if not now, at some other time, and if not at Geneva, then in London. It's all a matter of tact. When in doubt agree with the Frenchman. Or if you prefer it, disagree with the Italian. It's all one."
"And what about brothels? What do we say about them?"
"At the last six Assemblies we've simply said that we don't know what they are. All you have to do is to say it again."
Mr. Carteret-Pendragon pondered a moment and then added, "Broadly speaking, you are fairly safe to take as a generalization, that so far as Organized Vice is concerned, we might, as an Empire, be reasonably described as being more or less against it."
The interview was now definitely at an end, and Donald went out, feeling that he had gained some sort of insight, at first hand, into the subtle diplomacy which had spread the Union Jack upon all the potential aerodromes of the world. He could see that the genius was there, though he could not have explained for the life of him how it worked. But, of course, that was the genius of it.
The outer room was a dull and drab place as he passed through it. For it was by now past 12 o'clock and Beauty had gone off to lunch, leaving only a memory and a fragrance.
The President of the Committee for the Suppression of Social Abuses was the senior Caspian delegate, and he was enabled to carry through the sections on the agenda which dealt with the traffic in dangerous drugs with great expedition, being himself a lifelong addict to heroin, which he injected subcutaneously into his arm, just as Sherlock did, with a silver hypodermic syringe, encrusted with carved turquoises. His expert knowledge enabled him to correct several of the delegates when their rhetoric about the dismal after-effects of drugging carried them out of the sphere of reality into the sphere of imagination. It was the President also who threw a great deal of cold water upon the fervour of the Swiss representative, when that gentleman was affirming with a vast amount of eloquence that Switzerland had entirely extirpated the villainous crew of drug-traffickers from her free and snowy soil. For, having only that very morning run out of his indispensable heroin, the President had approached a gendarme, courteously touched his red fez and enquired whether there was a drug-seller in the vicinity. The gendarme, according to the President, had courteously saluted and replied, "Does your Excellency perceive that house along the street with pink shutters and an advertisement for the Sun Insurance Company above its door? Your Excellency does? Good. That is the only house in this vicinity that I know of, at which drugs are not procurable."
But when the drug sections of the agenda had been satisfactorily dealt with and the consideration of a number of important resolutions postponed until the following year, the President's efficiency fell off considerably. This was partly owing to his lack of interest in the subjects, and partly that, between injections, he was inclined to drop off for forty winks. This habit led to one very unfortunate incident.
The item on the agenda which was being discussed was the advisability of compiling a register of deaths from bubonic plague in the ports of Macao, Bangkok, Wei-hai-Wei, and one or two fishing harbours at the southern end of the island of Formosa, and the Yugo-Slav
delegate, having caught the President's eye just before the latter fell into a quiet snooze, delivered a slashing harangue. He stated, with all the emphasis at his command, that while approving in principle of the register of deaths from bubonic plague, for his Government yielded to none in its loyal adherence to all measures for the pacific betterment of humanity, at the same time he felt that he ought to draw the attention of the Committee to the barbarous conduct of the Hungarian Army in Yugo-Slavia during the Great War. The Hungarian delegate protested warmly, but the President, who was dreaming of the Mahometan Paradise, only smiled sweetly, and the Yugo-Slav continued.
"Libraries, often containing as many as sixty or seventy books," he cried, "were burnt. Castles were razed to the ground. Pictures were stolen, including a whole set of reproductions of the works of Rubens in the house of a baron; statues were broken; photogravures slashed; trees cut down, gardens destroyed; women raped——"
"What did you say?" exclaimed the Costa Rican delegate, waking up sharply.
"Women raped," repeated the Yugo-Slav firmly.
"Mr. President," cried the senior Guatemalan, leaping up in great excitement, "I beg to move the following resolution: that this Commission reaffirms its unshakable loyalty to the League of Nations, expresses its sincere sympathies for the sufferings of the kingdom of the Serb-Croat-Slovenes, and warmly invites the delegate of that kingdom to submit photographs of the atrocities to which he has alluded."
"Mr. President," cried the delegate of San Salvador, "I beg to second that resolution."
"Agreed, agreed!" shouted an enthusiastic chorus of Latin-American voices.
The President, who had just reached the Seventh Heaven, nodded and smiled. The Yugo-Slav burst into tears of emotion. The New Zealander called across to the South African, "For God's sake, let's go and have one. These swobs make me sick," and the two stalwart Colonials marched out, followed hastily by the Australian.
It was some moments before the Yugo-Slav, mastering his manly sobs, was able to thank the honourable delegates of Guatemala and San Salvador. He held up a huge book.
"This book contains photographs," he said, "of the ruined castles of my unhappy country."
"Only the castles?" asked the Venezuelan hopefully.
"Good God!" cried the Yugo-Slav. "Isn't that enough for you?"
"No!" replied the Latin-Americans in chorus.
The representative of the kingdom of the Serb-Croat-Slovenes was so disgusted by this infidelity that he addressed himself sulkily to the question on the agenda, the bubonic plague in the Far East. Unfortunately the President, awaking at that moment, injected a dose of heroin into his arm and briskly ruled the speaker out of order, and the Commission broke up in confusion.
But the important Commission was the one devoted to Disarmament. All the senior delegates were represented upon it, and Donald stood in a crowd upon the steps of the Secretariat one morning and watched them arrive. The Frenchmen drove up in four magnificent Delage cars with the Tricolor on the radiators; the Spaniards were in Hispano-Suizas, for to the ignorant world the Hispano is even more Spanish than its name; the Italians in Isotta-Fraschinis, with their secretaries in Fiats; the Belgians in Minervas; while the Germans outdid everyone in vast silver Mercédès cars, driven by world-famous racing-drivers. The United States official Observers were mostly in Packards, Chryslers, Graham-Paiges, Willys-Knights, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, and Stutzes, and the Earl of Osbaldestone and his two chief colleagues came in a four-wheel cab, and his secretaries, Mr. Carteret-Pendragon, Mr. Carshalton-Stanbury, and Mr. Woldingham-Uffington, walked.
Fortunately the prestige of British motor manufacturers was well maintained by the eleven Rolls-Royces, with real tortoiseshell bodies and gold bonnets, specially brought over from England by the Right Honourable Lieutenant-General the Maharajah of Hyderadore.
Donald attended several of the debates of the Disarmament Commission and listened to a masterly speech, lasting nearly an hour and three-quarters, in which the Earl of Osbaldestone explained that Great Britain had no special views on the burning question of the reduction and limitation of the output of nails for the horseshoes of cavalry horses, and to the superb oration by the French Foreign Minister which proved, to the complete satisfaction of Poland, Roumania, Czecho-Slovakia, and Yugo-Slavia, that a reduction of cavalry horseshoe-nails would be to France the equivalent of the withdrawal from the Vosges, the surrender of Metz, and the abandonment of conscription. His peroration, ending with the immortal words, "The France of Charlemagne, of Gambetta, of Boulanger, the France of the 22nd of October, the France of the 18th of November, and the France of the 4th of March, is built upon the nails of her immortal horses," drew thunders of applause.
He was followed by a Roumanian lady who descanted a good deal upon the beauties of dawn coming over distant mountain-tops, and whose hand was admiringly kissed at the end of her speech by numbers of swarthy delegates, and she was followed by a small Lithuanian who pointed out in a squeaky voice that the whole question of horseshoes, and nails for horseshoes, was inextricably bound up with the act of dastardly brigandage by which Poland had stolen the ancient Lithuanian capital of Vilna. At this point an unseemly commotion was caused by a loud burst of laughter from a group consisting of the South African representative, the second Indian delegate, and a United States Observer, to whom the Foreign Minister of the Irish Free State had just whispered a vulgar story. The Vice-Chairman, a courtly Chinese, saved the situation by springing to his feet and saying, in slow but perfect French, "Honourable gentlemen and ladies of the Commission, of which I have the honour unworthily to act as Vice-Chairman, I would crave the permission of you all to put the following consideration before you. The hour is now a quarter to 2, and we have laboured long and earnestly this morning in the cause that we all have at heart, and I would put it to you, in all deference and submission, that the time is at hand when we must decide whether to adjourn now for midday refreshment and resume our task, our so important task, with redoubled vigour later in the day, or whether to continue without rest or interval until we have settled this problem while it is fresh in our minds. I submit, most honourable ladies and gentlemen of the Commission, that we should now come to a decision upon this matter. I will ask the most honourable interpreter to render into English the poor observations which I have had the honour to address to you."
He bowed with old-world grace to right and to left and sat down. The interpreter, a rosy youth whose knowledge of languages was only equalled by the profundity of his thirst, sprang to his feet eagerly and said in a loud voice, "The Vice-Chairman says that if we don't stop now we'll be late for lunch," and, snapping an elastic band round his note-book, he thrust it under his arm and walked out of the room. There was a helpless pause for a moment or two, and then the delegates, in ones and twos, headed by the British Dominions, streamed out into the corridor.
The third week of the Assembly was a dull week for Donald and also for Sir Henry Wootton. Sir Henry had made his two speeches and had found no difficulty in keeping to the lines laid down for him by Mr. Carteret-Pendragon. Indeed, his two speeches were so very like each other, and were so carefully phrased in order to avoid giving the impression that Great Britain took any very strong interest in anything, that by a secretarial error the speech against the traffic in Synthetic Beer was printed in the section of the official report relating to Houses of Ill-Repute, and vice versa, and no one noticed that anything was wrong.
But after the two speeches had been delivered there was nothing more to be done.
Donald found that the other private secretaries attached to the delegation were in the same position. Their chiefs had each made their two speeches and their work was finished.
The fourth and last week was a little better, as there was a general inclination to return to lunch-parties, bathing, yachting, and discreet little dinners by starlight. Peace-makers, no less than warriors, need relaxation.
During this last week, part of Donald's duties was to entertain Sir Henry Wootton's sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Fielding, who were visiting Geneva to watch the League at work. Mr. Fielding, a man of about sixty, who looked like a farmer and talked almost as charmingly and learnedly as the great Mr. Charles Ossory himself, took a great fancy to Donald, and, by some mysterious process of unobtrusive questioning, succeeded in extracting from him the secret of his book about England.
Mr. Fielding was both sympathetic and enthusiastic, and insisted that Donald should visit them in their Buckinghamshire home later in the year.
"No foreigner can understand England, Cameron," he said, "until he's seen Buckinghamshire."
The final sessions of the Assembly were held. The last item on the agenda, the election of the Council, was taken, and a six-hour ballot resulted in the reelection of the entire Council with the exception that San Domingo took the place of Haiti. The last speeches were made. The last tributes to the peaceful ideals of France were paid by the Foreign Ministers of Poland, Roumania, Czecho-Slovakia, and Yugo-Slavia, and the delegates slipped away. The tumult and the oratory died.
Donald, sitting in his sleeper in the Paris express as it pulled out of Bellegarde, the Swiss-French frontier station, ran over in his mind the result of the four weeks' entertainment at which he had assisted, and checked off on a sheet of paper the results that had been achieved. He was flabbergasted to discover that there was hardly a man, woman, or child on the surface of the globe whose lives would not be affected for the better by the plans laid, schemes evolved or furthered, and measures taken during those four weeks. But how these results had been achieved, and when, and by whom, he was utterly unable to say. He was also utterly unable to detect how the English had gone about their inscrutable and mysterious paths their wonders to perform. In his complete bafflement he could only fall back upon the old truism, ars est celare artem, and conclude, as the world for centuries has concluded, that in the realms of international affairs the English are the supreme artists.
