“But what are you doing here, in a world crisis?”
“I’m over here to buy Italy. Bowling bought Belgium, you know, some time back. He was thick with Leopold, but the old man had too much sense to deal. He knew he would be the first to go smash when the war came. But Albert pocketed the good red gold without a second thought; that’s partly what the trouble is over. Germany found out about it.”
“And why buy Italy? To keep Austria busy, I suppose? These Wops can hardly hope to force the line, especially with the Trentino Salient on the flank.”
“That’s the idea. It would have been better and cheaper to buy Bulgaria. But Grey wouldn’t see it. There’s the eternal fear of Russia to remember. We’re fighting against both sides in the Balkans! And that makes Russia half-hearted, and endangers the whole Entente. But it doesn’t matter so long as enough people are killed. The survivors must have elbow-room for their souls, and the memory of heroic deeds in the lives of them and theirs to weigh against the everlasting pull of material welfare. When those men come back from a few years in the trenches, they’ll make short work of the pious person that informs them of the wickedness of smoking, and eating meat, and drinking beer, and being out after eleven o’clock at night, and kissing a girl, and reading novels, and playing cards, and going to the theatre, and whistling on the Sabbath!”
“I hope you’re right. You’re old, which tends, I suppose, to make you optimistic. In my young ears there always rings the scream of terror of the slave when you offer to strike off his fetters.”
“All Europe will be scream and stench for years to come. But the new generation will fear neither poverty nor death. They will fear weakness; they will fear dishonour.”
“It is a great programme. Qui vivra verra. Meanwhile, I suppose I report to General Cripps.”
“You will meet him, running hard, I expect, somewhere in France. It will be a fluke if Paris is saved. As you know, it always takes England three years to put her boots on. If we had listened to the men who knew – like ‘Bobs’ – and fixed up an army of three millions, there could have been no war – at least, not in this particular tangle of alliances. There would have been a Social Revolution, more likely, an ignoble business of greed against greed, which would have left men viler and more enslaved than ever. As it is, the masses on both sides think they are fighting for ideals; only the governments know what hypocrisy and sham it is; so the ideals will win, both in defeat and victory. Man! only three days ago France was the France of Panama, and Dreyfus, and Madame Humbert, and Madame Steinheil, and Madame Caillaux; and today she is already the France of Roland and Henri Quatre and Danton and Napoleon and Gambetta and Joan of Arc!”
“And England of the Boer wars, and the Irish massacres, and the Marconi scandals, and Tran by Croft?”
“Oh, give England time! She’ll have to be worse before she’s better!”
“Talking of time, I must pack up if I’m to catch the morning train for the Land of Hope and Glory.”
“The train service is disorganised. I came from Toulon in a destroyer; she’ll take you back there. Jack Manners is in command. Report at Toulon to the O. C.! You’d better start in half-an-hour, I’ll see you safe on board. My car’s at the door. Here’s your commission!”
Cyril Grey thrust the document into his pocket, and the two men went up into the house.
An hour later they were aboard the destroyer; they shook hands in silence. Simon Iff went down the gangway, and Manners gave the word. As they raced northward, they passed under the lee of Abdul’s yacht, where Lisa, up to the eyes in champagne, was fondling her new lover.
Her little pig-like eyes sparkled through their rolls of fat; her cheeks, the colour and consistency of ripe Camembert cheese, sagged pendulous upon a many-chinned neck which looked almost goitrous; and the whole surmounted one of those figures dear to engineers, because they afford endless food for speculation as to the means of support. The moon was now exercising her full influence, totally unchecked and unbalanced; and the woman’s nature being wholly of the body, with as little brain in proportion as a rhinoceros, the effect was seen mostly on the physical plane. Her mind was a mere swamp of succulent luxury. So she sat there and swayed and wallowed over Abdul Bey. Cremers thought she looked like a snow man just beginning to melt.
With a sardonic grin, the old woman waved her hand, and went on deck. The yacht was now well out in the open sea on her way to Marseilles. Here Cremers was to be landed, so that she might return to Paris to report her success to Douglas, while the lovers went on their honeymoon. The wind blew fresh from the south-west, and Cremers, who was a good sailor, came as near as she ever could to joy as she felt the yacht begin to roll, and pictured the tepid ice-cream heroine of romance in the saloon.
Meanwhile, the destroyer, her nose burrowing into the sea like a ferret slipped into a warren, drove passionately towards Toulon. The keenness and ecstasy of Cyril’s face were so intense that Manners rallied him about it.
“I thought you were one of the all-men-are-brothers crowd,” he said. “Yet you’re as keen as mustard to slay your cousin-German.”
“Puns,” replied Cyril, “are the torpedo-boat destroyers of the navy wit. Consider yourself crushed. Your matchless intelligence has not misled you as to my views. All men are brothers. As a magician, I embrace, I caress, I slobber over the cheeks of Bloody Bill. But fighting in the army is not a magical ceremony. It is the senseless, idiotic, performance of a numbskull, the act, in a word, of a gentleman; and as, to my lasting shame, I happened to be born in that class, I love to do it. Be reasonable! It’s no pleasure to me, as an immortal God, to sneeze; I refuse to render myself a laughing-stock to the other Olympians by such indignity; but when my body has a cold in its head, it is proper for it to blow its nose. I do not approve, much less participate; and my body is therefore the more free to act according to its nature, and it blows its nose much harder than it would if I took a hand. That is the advantage of being a magician; all one’s different parts are free to act with the utmost possible vigour according to their own natures, because the other parts do not interfere with them. You don’t let your navigators into the stoke-hole, or your stokers into the chart-house. The first art in adeptship is to get your elements sorted out and specialised and organised and disciplined. Here endeth the first lesson. I think I’ll turn in.”
“It’s a bit beyond me, Cyril. All I know is that I’m willing to risk my life in a good cause.”
“But it’s a rotten bad cause! We have isolated Germany and hemmed her in for years exactly as we did a century ago with Napoleon; Wilhelm, who wanted peace, because he was getting fat on it, knew us for his real enemy. In ’ninety-nine he came within an ace of uniting Europe against us, at the time of the Fashoda incident. But we baffled him, and since then he has been getting deeper in every moment. He tried again over the Boer war. He tried threats, he tried diplomacy, he tried everything. The Balkan War and the Agadir incident showed him his utter helplessness. The kingdom of Albania! The war in Tripoli proved that he could no longer rely on Italy. And when Russia resorted to so shameless an assassination as that of Sarajevo – my dear good man! England has been a pirate as she always was. From Hengist and Horsa, and the Vikings, she first learnt the trick. William the Conqueror was a pirate; so was Francis Drake. Look at Morgan, whom we knighted, and all the other buccaneers! Look at our system of privateering! Ever hear of the ‘Alabama’? We learnt the secret of sea-power; we can cut the alimentary canal of any nation in Europe – bar Switzerland and Russia. Hence our fear of Russia! It’s the Jolly Roger you should fly, Jack Manners! We stood all Germany’s expansion; we said we were her cousins – but when she, started a Navy, that was another barrel of fish!”
“I don’t think I can bear this, you know!”
“Cheer up! I’m one of the pirate crew!”
“Oh, you’re Captain Kidd!”
“I have already stated my opinion a
s to the conversational value of puns. I’m going to turn in; you get busy, and find a neutral ship to rob.”
“I shall do my best to maintain the law of the sea.”
“Made by the pirate to suit his game. Good God! I can’t see why we shouldn’t be sensible. Why must we invoke Law and Gospel every time we want to do a dirty act? My character’s strong enough to let me kill all the Germans I can without persuading myself that I’m saving them from Prussian Tyranny! Goodnight!”
“The youth is unintelligible or immoral,” thought Manners, as he turned his face to the spindrift; “but I bet he kills a lot of Germans!”
Chapter XXII
OF A CERTAIN DAWN UPON OUR OLD FRIEND THE BOULEVARD ARAGO;
AND OF THE LOVES OF LISA LA GIUFFRIA AND ABDUL BEY, HOW THEY PROSPERED. OF THE CONCLUSION OF THE FALSE ALARM OF THE GREAT EXPERIMENT, AND OF A CONFERENCE BETWEEN DOUGLAS AND HIS SUBORDINATES.
LORD ANTONY BOWLING was one of three men in the War Office who could speak French perfectly; despite this drawback, he had been selected to confer with the French headquarters in Paris. Here he met Cyril Grey, busy with his tailor. The young magician had once held a captaincy in a Hussar regiment, but a year of India had developed his native love of strange places and peoples. He had been tempted to resign his commission, and yielded. He had gone exploring in Central Asia, and the deadly districts beyond Assam. He could not stand gymkhanas, polo, and flirtation. Simon Iff had given him a hint now and again of what magick might effect if a war came, and the boy had profited. He had formed provisional plans.
He encountered Lord Antony by chance one evening on the Boulevard des Italiens, dined him, and on finding that all amusements, even that of watching the world from the terrace of a cafe, were to end by order of the Military Governor of Paris, at eight o’clock, suggested that they should spend the evening smoking opium “chez Zizi”, a delightful girl who lived with a brilliant young English journalist on the Boulevard M. Marcel. At midnight, serenely confident that God was in his heaven, as asserted by the late Robert Browning, they decided to finish the night at Cyril’s studio. Here the young magician “reconstructed the crime” of the jumping balls of the mysterious countess, and recounted the episode of the Thing in the Garden, to the delectation of the “Merman of Mayfair”. He then offered to amend Bowling’s coat of arms by the introduction of twelve prawns couchant, gules, gartered azure, and the substitution of Poltergeists for the Wild Men of the ducal escutcheon.
Modestly disclaiming these heraldic glories, Lord Antony regaled his host with an ingenious account of a Swedish gentleman who materialised the most voluminous spectres from – as subsequently appeared in circumstances which can only be qualified as dramatic – the contents of a steel cylinder measuring twelve inches in length and three in diameter, which a search of the medium, stripped to the buff, had at first failed to disclose.
But neither was honestly interested in his own remarks; the subconscious excitement of the War made all conversation on any other topic sound miserably artificial. Bowling’s story made them both distrait; they fell into a heavy silence, pondering methods of concealing dispatches or detecting spies. Investigation of spiritualism makes a capital training-ground for secret service work; one soon gets up to all the tricks.
Presently Cyril Grey began to preach magick.
“Germany is on a pretty good wicket,” he said. “She is at war; we have only taken a holiday to go fighting. The first condition of success in magick is purity of purpose. One must let no other consideration interfere with the business in hand. But we are hypocrites in England; consequently, we compromise and fumble. When a magician does get in charge of an affair, all goes pretty well; look how Simple Simon has isolated Germany! Even there he has been thwarted by the Exchequer; five millions in the right place would have bought the Balkans. How much do you think that little economy will cost us before we’re through? As for the foolishness of leaving Turkey doubtful, it’s beyond all words!”
“Yes,” agreed Bowling “we ought to have supported Abdul Hamid from the first. The best kind of Englishman is blood brother to the best kind of Mussulman. He is brave, just, frank, manly and proud. We should always be in alliance with Islam against the servile Hindus and so-called Christians. Where is the spirit of the Paladins and the Templars and the Knights of the Round Table? The modern Christian is the Bourgeois, whose character is based on fear and falsehood.”
“There are two kinds of animals, mainly: one whose defence is obscurity, shunning death, avoidance of danger; the other whose defence is attack.”
“Yes; we’re all right so long as we make ourselves feared. But Victorian prudery turned our tigers into oxen; we found that it was wrong fight dangerous to drink beer, wicked to love; presently it was cruel to eat beef, immoral to laugh, fatal to breathe. We went in terror of the omnipresent germ. Hence we are fat, cowardly slaves. I hear that Kitchener is hard put to it to get his first 100,000 men. Only the public schools respond. Only gentlemen and sportsmen really love England – the people that have been cursed these last few years as tyrants and libertines.
“Only the men.”
“And few there are, in the crowd of canaille, old women, slackers, valetudinarians, eaters of nuts!”
“God rest the soul of Edward Seventh! I thought all would be well when Victoria died; but now – ”
“This is no hour of the night to lapse into poetry! Anyhow, Germany is nearly as bad, with her Social Democratic Party.”
“Do you think that?” cried Cyril, sharply, sitting up. His gesture was indecipherably intense; it seemed utterly disproportionate to Bowling’s casual commonplace.
“I know it. It’s one of the chief causes of the war. The Zabern incident showed the Junkers that they were safe only for a year or two; after that the people would start out to be too proud to fight,” replied Lord Antony, anticipating a transpontine chameleon.
“And so?” Cyril’s voice trembled. A tense thrill ran through his body. He had become sober in an instant.
“The Court Party wanted war, to bring back the manly spirit to the nation, and incidentally to keep their place in the sun.”
The boy sank with a large sigh into his seat. His tone changed to its old supercilious slurring.
“Bloody Bill was afraid for his dynasty?”
“Scared green.”
“Don’t talk for five minutes, there’s a good chap! I’ve a strange feeling come over me – almost as if I were going to think!”
Lord Antony obliged with silence. The five minutes became twenty. Then Cyril spoke.
“I had better get to Cripps double quick,” said he; “I’m his Intelligence Officer, and I think it my duty to inform him of the plans of the German Great General Staff!”
“Yes, you should certainly do that!” answered Lord Antony, laughing.
“Then let’s stroll up the Boulevard. Dawn’s breaking. We’ll get a cafe-brioche at the Rotonde, and then I’ll tyrannise my tailor, and get off.”
They went out into the cold morning air. Three hundred yards away, outside the Sante prison, a small crowd had collected. The centre of attraction seemed to be a framework, two narrow uprights crowned with a cross-bar where a triangular piece of metal glittered in the pale twilight.
“Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war!” drawled Cyril, cynically. “Confess that I have entertained you royally! Here is a choice savoury to wind up our feast.”
Lord Antony could not conceal his horror and repulsion. For he knew well enough what sight chance had prepared for them. But the fascination drew him far more surely than if his temperament had resembled that of his friend. They approached the crowd. A ring was kept about the framework by a cordon of police.
Just then the gates of the prison opened, and a little procession came out. All eyes were drawn instantly to its central figure, an old, old man whose jaw was dropped, and from whose throa
t issued a hoarse howling, utterly monotonous and inhuman. His eyes were starting from his head, and their expression was one not to be described. His arms were bound tightly to his sides. Two men were half supporting him, half pushing him. Save for his horrible cry, there was no sound. There was no movement in the crowd – no whisper. Like automata the officials did their duty. In a trice the prisoner was thrown forward on to a board, thrust up toward the framework. His caterwaul suddenly ceased. A moment later a sharp order rang out in the voice of one of the prison officials. The knife fell. From the crowd burst a most dreadful sound an “Ah!” so low, so fierce, that it had no human quality. Lord Antony Bowling could never be sure whether it was after that or before it that he heard the head tumble into the basket.
“Who was it?” asked Cyril of a bystander.
“Un anglais,” answered the man. “Le docteur Balloch.”
Cyril started back. He had not recognised his old enemy.
But even at that moment he was accosted by one whom he would never fail to know, even dressed as he was in the uniform of French colonel – Douglas. On his arm was a child whose eyes were blear already with debauchery, who staggered, her eyes rolling, her hair dishevelled, her mouth loose and wet, laughing with indecent and profane intoxication.
“Good morning, Captain Grey; well met, well met indeed!” began Douglas, urbane in his triumph.
“I trust you passed a pleasant time in Naples.”
“Very pleasant,” returned Grey. “Dr. Balloch,” continued Douglas, “crossed my path. I am glad you should have seen the end of him.”
“I am glad,” said Cyril.
“And what end do you think I have reserved for you?” said the sorcerer, with a sudden foam of ferocity.
“Something charming, I am sure,” said Cyril, silkily. “I always admired your work, you know. That translation of The Book of the Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage, in particular. You remember the passage about the wicked Antony of Prague,” he went on, with sudden force and solemnity, “the marvellous things he did, and how he prospered – and how he was found by the roadside, his tongue torn out, and the dogs at feast upon his bowels! Do you know what has saved you so far? Only one bar between you and destruction – the love of your wife, whom you have murdered!” With that Cyril cried aloud three words in a strange tongue, and giving the other no chance to reply, marched rapidly away with his friend.
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