In all the newspaper offices of London there had been tension that morning. Someone in high authority had been sitting at his desk in Printing House Square since ten o’clock, too excited even to grumble at the fate which had brought him to his office at this unconscionable hour. He had done nothing in the half hour he had been waiting, but as ten-thirty came near he began to tap nervously on his desk with his pencil. When at last his desk telephone rang he started nervously. Then he reached for the instrument.
‘It’s all right,’ said the receiver to his ear. ‘He’s done it. Cannon Street at ten-thirty. On time to the second.’
‘Thank God!’ said the man in high authority.
The good old Times had the biggest scoop of the century. This business might have made the paper the laughing-stock of Fleet Street, if it had proved to be a hoax; but the Peacemaker had been as good as his word. Telephone bells were shrilling in the offices of the evening papers, and there excited editors heard the news gabbled out to them by excited reporters, and, ringing off abruptly, had sent excited orders down to the printing presses, where the printers had been standing by with a special edition ready set up. In twenty minutes the papers were on the streets. The vans were racing through London hurling out great bundles to the newsboys, and excited City men were tearing the damp copies from the newsboys’ fingers. ‘Text of the Peacemaker’s Manifesto!’ ‘Who is the Peacemaker?’ ‘Peacemaker’s New Mischief!’
Oh, it was the finest scoop The Times could remember. Every single newspaper in England had to relax its rule never to mention the name of another newspaper. Every one had to quote The Times; in twenty-four hours the paper received more publicity than during the last twelvemonth. People had to buy The Times to learn the facts of the delivery of the Peacemaker’s letters, and to see the facsimile reproduction of his handwriting, even though other papers quoted the letters verbatim.
Dr. Pethwick saw the special editions out for sale when he walked down to Cannon Street to see that everything was as it should be. He bought one and looked at the headlines as he was jostled in the crowd. He himself would never have dreamed of calling that letter of his a ‘manifesto,’ but the newspapers seemed determined upon it. There was not much chance of reading more than the headlines, for the crowd was so dense. The news had gone round the City in a flash that the Peacemaker was at work in Cannon Street, and pens had been flung down and typewriters abandoned while all the City came pouring out to see—there was no more to see, actually, than yesterday; only a cordon of police diverting traffic, and broken-down lorries being pushed into side streets, and vehicles lucky enough to have coil ignition being shoved out of the area over which the Klein–Pethwick Effect was being distributed.
Someone in charge of London’s traffic arrangements had been ready for the emergency, clearly. Cannon Street was not an important link in the chain of London streets. Diversion of traffic from it did not upset all London, especially when prompt measures were taken to prevent jamming, and horses were ready to hand to deal with the heavy stuff. Dr. Pethwick saw what little the crowd and the police would permit him to see; it was enough to show him that the Klein–Pethwick Effect was not causing much inconvenience—and he had not realised that so much of the Cannon Street traffic was horse-drawn. Pethwick turned away from the scene thinking deeply. He found it difficult to decide on the next move; not until he had got back to his office and paced up and down the crowded room for a few minutes did he form any resolution. The present demonstration had not been very convincing. He would devote a few minutes to showing how much power he really had.
Pethwick made further calculations, each one resulting in a new line being drawn up his two sheets of paper, and then, standing his emitter on the point of intersection, he revolved it slowly, keeping it stationary on each line in turn for three minutes. And as he turned it, so did traffic come to a halt, first in Cheapside, and then in Princes Street, and then in Cornhill, and then in King William Street, and then in Queen Victoria Street. The move was an effective one. Three minutes was just long enough to tangle up the traffic, and start the police on their counter-measures. It was more than twenty minutes in each case before they discovered that the Klein–Pethwick Effect had shifted on. The result was that the arrangements made for the diversion of traffic made the confusion worse.
Harassed policemen, faced with a whole succession of contradictory orders as to which streets were clear and which not, lost their heads completely in the end. Matters were at a worse pass even than yesterday when the police had no warning. All round the City the jam was complete. It was at that time that Pethwick straightened his back, switched off the power, and realised that he was hungry.
So far on every day that he had spent in the City he had forgotten about his lunch; in part it was a forgetfulness that Freud could explain, because Pethwick shrank a little from the prospect of entering a strange restaurant and ordering food from a menu in which he was sure to lose his way. But to-day he felt equal to the effort, especially with the aid of his new clothes. He dismantled the apparatus and locked it away, put on the beautiful grey suit, and went out into the seething streets in search of food.
At the table to which chance led him there were five young men having lunch, but it was not of course pure chance that they were debating the Peacemaker’s activities. It would have been extraordinary if Pethwick had found a table where the diners were not doing so. Pethwick listened to their conversation while he ate his fried fillets of plaice—Pethwick was just like a maiden aunt; maiden aunts always choose fried fillets of plaice if it ever happens that they must eat in a strange restaurant.
The general attitude of the five young men towards the Peacemaker was one of admiration, perhaps even of envy. They did not blame him in the least for what he had done. They called it a ‘sporting effort’; they thought it rather amusing that he should set a city of ten million souls in a turmoil. They laughed immoderately at the account of the fury of the senior partner who employed one of them at the non-arrival of something or other which he was urgently expecting. Pethwick listened to all this with a secret pleasure. It was only after some time that he began to realise that none of this admiration was directed towards the object he had in mind when he began. There was no word among them about disarmament.
Twice Pethwick put down his knife and fork and looked across at them. He was on the point of asking them what was their opinion of disarmament and the Peacemaker’s views, but he found he simply could not bring himself to plunge uninvited into conversation with strangers; besides, he feared lest he might betray himself. And then, right at the very end of the meal, the thin dark one of the party brought up the subject.
‘Do you think he really means it about this disarmament business?’ he asked.
‘He’s got a hope if he does, poor blighter,’ said the red-haired one. ‘But I don’t expect he does. Give us my ticket, please, Lily.’
That was all—two sentences exchanged while they were getting up from the table.
Pethwick did not know it, but the colour had gone from his face and he walked stiffly and more upright than usual as he paid for his lunch and walked out of the restaurant. His first action when he was back in his office was to pull out his fountain-pen and reach for paper. He must clear up any doubts on the subject of his earnestness straight away.
Yet to write that letter was more than he could do. He was no man of the pen. It was torment to him to try and write in detail about matters on which he felt very strongly. That original letter of his to The Times showed how unsuited he was for this part of the business. It told all the necessary facts, but without embellishment or elaboration; and a man who wishes to plead a cause before the masses must learn not to flinch from reiteration, must not spare his own feelings—if he has any—must point the obvious and not hesitate in the matter of clap-trap appeal. He must do all the things Pethwick shrank from doing.
What Pethwick needed at the moment was someone to play Huxley to his Darwin, someone of fluent pen and v
igorous argument, who could encase the mailed fist of Pethwick’s brute force in the velvet glove of words. The time was ripe for a brilliant exposition of Pethwick’s ideals. A well-written statement of the case for disarmament might at the moment have been read with sympathy, now that the wandering attention of the public had been diverted towards it for a space. Pethwick had actually felt this when he came back to the office; just for a moment he had been in touch with public opinion—a most unusual state of affairs for Dr. Pethwick.
But with pen and paper before him the momentary inspiration oozed away. He could not state the obvious all over again. People who wanted to know what his proposal was could refer to to-day’s Times—Pethwick did not appreciate the fact that in a week’s time no one would dream of referring back to an issue a week old; he judged people by himself, and he was quite accustomed to being referred to arguments printed in the British Journal of Physics months ago.
And he had not the arts of demagogy. Now that he had caught the attention of the public he could not change his tactics and revert from threats to argument—he could not, that is to say, take a lesson from the practice of public speakers who start their speeches with an anecdote in order to induce people to listen to them before proceeding to argue. He had not guessed at the subtle mixture of force and persuasion which is necessary to get things done; he had quite underestimated the amount of force which would be called for, and it had never occurred to him that persuasion might be necessary.
If Pethwick had ever made use of analogy, he might have compared himself with a parent who finds his child playing with an adder under the impression that it is a grass snake. Probably the parent has only to say ‘Put down that snake. If it bites you you will die’ to be obeyed. At worst he has only to add, ‘If you don’t put it down I will smack you.’ To Pethwick the attitude of the world towards armaments could not be very different from that of the child towards the adder. Circumstances had compelled him to start with the smack to attract the child’s attention and to show him that smacking was possible, but after the smack no intelligent child would go on playing with the adder when once he had been told it was poisonous. Perhaps dealing with intelligent children had unfitted Pethwick for dealing with the public.
The result of the fading out of the inspiration which had possessed him on his return was that the letter he wrote was excessively brief. All he said was:
Dear Sir,
I am quite sincere in my desire to bring about disarmament. I hope that the necessary steps will soon be taken to initiate the movement.
Yours truly,
Peacemaker.
That was all he could say. Once again, it was a complete statement of the relevant facts, and Pethwick could not imagine any necessity for further elaboration—for a few seconds he had had the revelation, but it was gone now.
As he addressed the envelope he remembered, with an odd twisted smile, that the police were after him now. It was very likely that a watch was being kept in Printing House Square to see who might be delivering letters by hand. Pethwick decided that it would be better to send the letter by post. It would reach The Times office by the evening, and ought even then to appear in the morning’s issue; Pethwick was nearly sure that newspapers were not printed until night-time, and he had a strong suspicion that a contribution from his pen would be considered important enough for immediate publication.
And when he had posted the letter he realised that there was nothing more for him to do to-day. He might as well go home, and he turned his steps towards London Bridge and the station. The sight of the evening newspaper placards suddenly reminded him that he had not read the early edition he had bought—he must have lost it somewhere or other. He did something he had never done before in his life—he bought copies of all the three London evening papers, and went on board the train with them.
He was almost prepared, by now, for the reception which the papers were according to his proposals for augmenting the well-being of the world. There was a howl of indignation in every column. As he passed from page to page he found the same attitude maintained. The Peacemaker’s activities were a criminal impertinence. He must be mad to imagine that a country like England could be driven into a change of policy by high-handed methods. The sooner the police pulled themselves together and laid this dangerous lunatic by the heels the better. It was not by crimes against private property that the world had ever been reformed. Had the Peacemaker taken no thought for the unoffending people his actions would injure—the clerks in the buses, the firms which owned the lorries? Had he forgotten the injury he would be doing England? He was impeding England’s sacred commerce, stopping the flow of her very life-blood. Not to any great extent, of course, so this leader hastened to add. But sufficiently, perhaps, to damage England’s credit in foreign eyes, because foreign public opinion was likely to take an exaggerated view of disturbances in peaceful England.
The second paper was as violent. According to this one, the Peacemaker’s activities were as bad as those of the bombing aeroplanes which he professed to deprecate. A bomb dropped in a town did indiscriminate damage to the private property of unoffending citizens. So did this new invention. The leader ventured to cast doubts on the nationality of the man—or men—who were guilty of this unnational act. It was not what could be expected of Englishmen. Far more likely it was part of a Bolshevik plot, or it was a Communist affair. On another column this paper had gone to the trouble to collect legal opinions on the subject of with what crimes the Peacemaker could be charged when he was apprehended. The list was portentous, ranging from petty offences like obstructing streets and causing a crowd to collect all the way up to the heights of high treason—one very eminent legal luminary had committed himself to this last.
Alongside this column was another, made up of fresh interviews with scientists regarding the nature of the new phenomenon and the methods by which the miscreant could be traced. Most of these opinions were singularly cautious. The inevitable Norbury made great play with references to Clerk Maxwell’s calculations regarding the ratio between the electromagnetic and electro-static constants of the ether, but he did not seem to advance very far along those lines. On the contrary, the impression on the reader’s mind was that Norbury was fighting a brilliant rearguard action, carrying out his retirement behind a skirmishing screen of technicalities. One or two other people were a little bolder, but the most noticeable unanimity of opinion was that every one agreed now that the thing could be done, even though no one could put forward a working suggestion as to how. No one—not even Norbury, who had brought the matter to Pethwick’s notice—seemed to remember anything about the researches of the late August Klein.
Next to these columns came the cartoon, which displayed the Peacemaker (a brilliant conception distinguished by a squint, round spectacles, straws in his hair, and a wide grin that displayed vast teeth) hitting John Citizen on the head with a club, and saying: ‘There, that’ll show you how to be peaceful.’
The last thing Pethwick bothered to read in this paper was the usual sort of column filled with the usual sort of sentiment about the blessings of peace and disarmament. Every paper, even the most bellicose, had evinced (as Dorothy Laxton had pointed out to Pethwick weeks ago) occasional sentiments of this sort ever since 1918. They had every appearance of being genuine; it was bewildering. Apparently the writer of this particular article had been in search of variety. Whereas every other article had begun by condemnation of the Peacemaker’s methods and had concluded with the perfunctory paragraph of lip service to the cause of peace, this writer had simply reversed the process. He enumerated the blessings of peace, and had even quoted from the long list of distinguished men who were on the side of disarmament; but from there he proceeded to attack the Peacemaker’s methods of attaining these ends. Such was the vehemence of the attack, so obviously had he no words bad enough to do justice to his subject, and so skilfully were his arguments mustered, that the final effect left upon the mind of the reader was that all this co
ndemnation was equally deserved by the names quoted higher up.
Pethwick had not started the third paper when the train ran into the station and he got out. Walking home, along the High Street and up Verulam Road, he felt depression overcoming him. If this were the way which his attempt to ameliorate the condition of the world was going to be received, he was up against a very difficult task. Yet it was not the difficulties ahead of him which depressed him so much as the incredible stupidity of mankind. All the opposition to his scheme he attributed to prejudice and inertia. In a new moment of clairvoyance he realised that prejudices were far bigger obstacles than convictions. All this vast mass of prejudice must be swept away before he could win through to Dorothy’s favour, and not only here in England, but in France, Germany, Poland, Italy. It was a long, dreary, lonely road that lay ahead of him. But all the same, there was something about Pethwick which made him more determined the more he realised the difficulties he had to encounter. His head came up and his chin came forward. By the time he reached the corner of Launceton Avenue he looked twice the man he had appeared when he got down from the train.
Perhaps it was that gesture of straightening his back which reminded him of what he had not done, or perhaps it was just the gleam of the beautiful suit which caught his eye. Pethwick stopped in consternation. Here he was, only a hundred yards from home, still wearing his new clothes. If the realisation had been delayed two more minutes Mary would have seen them. Pethwick felt himself flush as he pictured to himself the torrent of questionings to which he would have been instantly subjected, the suspicion and the embarrassment. The cause for which he was labouring, even, would have been imperilled—Pethwick had no doubts about the chances of his secret being disclosed if Mary shared it. There was only one thing to do. Pethwick turned about abruptly, back to the station, by train back to London Bridge, back to the office, where he changed his clothes.
The Peacemaker Page 14