The Passing Bells

by Phillip Rock

  “I say, Ross,” Lord Stanmore called out, “turn into the Strand.”

  He obeyed without question, although it meant cutting in front of other cars, ignoring the squeal of brakes and the irate blowing of horns. Lord Stanmore was leaning forward and pointing across the lowered glass partition, which, when raised, isolated him from his chauffeur.

  “There, Ross . . . in front of Cook’s. Yes, by Jove, thought I’d spotted the fellow. Pull up in front.”

  There was a great press of traffic inching toward Charing Cross Station, but Ross sliced neatly through it to the curb and parked behind a touring bus.

  “Martin!” The earl rolled down the rear window and poked his head out. “Martin, dear boy!”

  Martin Rilke was standing on the pavement talking to the tour director. His attaché case was under his arm, an old leather suitcase beside his feet. He turned at the sound of his name and walked over to the car.

  “Hello, sir.” He still couldn’t find the courage to call the man “Uncle Tony.” “This is a surprise.”

  Lord Stanmore extended his hand through the window and squeezed Martin’s arm. “And a very pleasant one at that. All done with your tour?”

  “There are two more days of it—the sights of London—but I’d rather see those on my own. I was just saying goodbye to the guide.”

  “Just get back in town?”

  “Yes . . . drove in from Cambridge this morning on the bus. It’s been a good trip, but tiring. They keep up a fast pace.”

  Lord Stanmore opened the door. “Hop in, lad, and we’ll take you to the house. All your gear’s up from the country as promised and there’s a room waiting for you.”

  Martin hesitated. “Thank you, sir, but I wrote a few articles about the trip that I think I can sell to the Daily Post. I’ll hail a cab.”

  “Busman’s holiday, eh? Jolly good for you, but hop in anyway. I’m just going to my club, and then the chauffeur will drive you to the Post building.” He shifted over on the seat. “Won’t hurt your chances for a sale if you arrive in style.”

  New Fetter Lane was practically around the corner from the Daily Post Building. Ross was out of the car with alacrity, not giving Martin time to refuse the offer of a ride.

  “I’ll get your luggage, sir,” he said, hurrying across the pavement. “And may I say that it’s nice to see you back again, sir . . . very nice indeed.”

  The Daily Post Building was an architectural melding of Gothic cathedral and Victorian railway station. Slender Ionic columns of soot-blackened stone and dull-green copper flutings bound myriad windows into an awesome monolith designed to impress even the most casual observer with the power of the press.

  “Do you want me to wait for you, sir?” Ross asked as he stopped at the main entrance.

  “No, thanks,” Martin said. “I’ll get a cab. Fifty-seven Park Lane. Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir. Stanmore House.”

  And then the chauffeur was gone, and Martin, clutching his attaché case under his right arm, mounted broad stone steps and entered the palatial lobby of the newspaper building. A uniformed page escorted him up to the second floor to a vast room filled with oak desks and shirt-sleeved men. Taut steel wires were suspended horizontally from the ceiling, crossing and criss-crossing the room. Small metal canisters rocketed back and forth on the wires like artillery shells whizzing from one target to another. Typewriters clattered, men shouted over telephones or cried out for the copy boys, the message containers hummed over the wires, and a bank of teletypewriters added their own chatter to the din. It was a room that made the editorial offices of the Chicago Express seem like the parlor of a funeral home.

  “Mr. Golden’s down there, sir,” the page said in a cockney accent so thick as to make his words barely intelligible to Martin. “Fourth desk in the center past the glass cubicles.”

  Martin pondered what “glarssubles” were, but he could see Jacob Golden, bent over a desk, a green eyeshade pulled low on his forehead, and so he thanked the boy and made his way through the aisles, walking ankle deep in scrap paper at times. A harried-looking man at one of the desks looked up as Martin came abreast of him.

  “How in God’s name do you spell Count Marish Szogyeny? My bloody mind’s gone blank.” A metal tube whizzed overhead and then plummeted down a curved track that jutted up from a corner of the man’s desk, coming to rest in a little contraption that looked like the breech of a gun. The man flipped a lever and the canister plopped into his hand. “Oh, God! Not more memos! The chief’s gone bloody bonkers!”

  Martin left him to his troubles and walked on to Golden’s desk.

  “Hello, Rilke,” Golden called out cheerfully. “Pull up a scrap-paper basket and sit down.”

  “I think I’m intruding. You guys seem pretty busy.”

  “Not me, they.” He leaned back in the chair and locked his hands behind his head. “I’m polishing an item about a clerk who made off with five thousand pounds of his firm’s money and is now living in splendor in Brazil. The other lads in this room are not so much busy as they are confused. Austro-Hungarian internal affairs have never been their long suit, and now the chief, meaning my dear old man of course, is demanding reams of articulate, incisive prose in order to explain Bosnian political aspirations to a multitude of unwashed, unlettered readers. I have my own views of that dark corner of the world, but no one around here is interested in hearing them expressed.”

  “That was a terrible thing. But there doesn’t seem to be any major crisis over it.”

  Golden’s slash of a mouth twisted in derision. “Precisely, my dear Watson. It’s the case of the dog that didn’t bark all over again.”

  Martin scratched the side of his jaw. “Sorry, Holmes, but that’s a bit too cryptic for me.”

  Golden uncoiled his hands and reached to the desk for a tin of cigarettes.

  “A bit backward in our knowledge of the European ant heap, are we?”

  “A bit . . . yes.”

  “A common enough fault, I’m afraid, but don’t despair. Professor Golden is at hand with pungent commentary and a full assortment of descriptive material.” He tapped the cigarette tin after removing two cigarettes and handing one to Martin. “The Austro-Hungarian empire, a simple tin of Abdullah smokes—only not so simple in real life. A hodgepodge of Germans, Magyars, Croats, Slavs . . . corrupt and monumentally stupid, exceeded in stupidity and corruption only by the Russians, who border them to the east.” He shifted an inkwell into position. “The mighty Russian inkwell, murky with serfs, Cossacks, mystics, and dark plots . . . most of them hatched in Viennese coffeehouses.”

  “I’m not totally ignorant of European politics,” Martin drawled in his best laconic Chicago manner.

  “No, I’m sure you’re not, Rilke, but you’ve watched it all from a long distance, across a wide ocean. I’ve seen it from the gutters of every capital. Hate. That’s the binding word on the Continent. Everyone hates everybody.”

  Martin picked a match off the desk and lit his cigarette and Golden’s.

  “I know that, too. My mother was French . . . from Lorraine. She mourned the lost province to the day of her death.”

  “And your father was German?”

  “German-American. She never held the Franco-Prussian War against him. They had more personal wars to fight.”

  Golden’s smile was arcane. “French hatred for Germany is a normal hate, almost quaint. To see true hatred, one must go to Serbia, to the little cafés in Belgrade, and, casually, over a glass of slivovitz, bring up the subject of Austria and whether or not she has a legitimate right to keep all those Slavic people in Bosnia and Herzegovina enfolded in the Hapsburg wing. Then you will see hate, my dear Rilke. A violent, hot-blooded people, those Serbs. They cut one of their kings down nine years ago and most of his household. Sliced them up like dog meat and tossed the scraps from the palace windows. The king they have now is very imperial looking—tall and straight, a rather kindly face. Only one minor deficiency in the man�
�he’s insane. It’s a country ruled by a weak regent and strong-armed ministers. Plot and counterplot . . . Pan-Slav radicals . . . the Black Hand. Oh, quite a charming little country, Serbia, but we love them because they’re so small and plucky and Austria is such a big bully.”

  A man darted over from an adjoining desk. “Do you have a pen I can borrow? I just broke my last nib.”

  Golden pulled out the center drawer. “Help yourself. Care to hang about for a few minutes? I’m explaining the Balkan crisis.”

  The man grabbed two pens from the drawer and turned quickly away. “Good Lord, no.”

  “I have few listeners.” Golden sighed, puffing smoke. “The reason being that no one can conceive of a world that isn’t neatly divided into villains and heroes. Well, they’re all villains across the channel, every bloody one of them.” He moved a box of paper clips into position below the flat tin of cigarettes. “Serbia. On Austria’s southern flank. That’s why the Russians love them. They keep the Austrians off-balance and tie up half their army. Austria could never go to war against Russia, not with all those Serbs facing their soft underbelly. Well, now, what have we got right at this moment? One dead archduke. Not much of a loss. A typical Hapsburg, who had a girdle on his belly and one around his brains. But his death will give the Austrians an excuse to crush Serbia, if they can prove it was a Serbian activist who committed the crime, and there’s no doubt in my mind that one did.” He pushed the tin sharply against the box of clips. “Austria moves against Serbia, but not in swift anger—a dog that doesn’t bark can’t be heard, can it? Oh, no, they’d never cross the Danube unless they can be assured that Germany will keep the Russians in check, and they’ll be given that assurance in due time. That will anger the Russians no end, and so we can move the inkwell against the smokes. Hordes and hordes of bearded Russkies, more than enough to deal with Austria and the Germans, too. And what will France do if war flares from the Baltic to the Adriatic? She has a treaty with Russia, just the excuse la belle France needs to avenge 1870 . . . Alsace and Lorraine, the holy names. With the Russian bear scaring the wits out of the Germans in East Prussia, the French will attack across the Rhine and storm Berlin with their magnificent élan, march in triumph down Unter den Linden the way the Germans marched on the Champs-Elysées forty-four years ago.”

  He leaned forward with a gleeful smirk and pointed his cigarette at Martin’s face. “But the Germans are such clever chaps. They know all this . . . they’ve worked it out on paper years ago. They prize and honor generals with brains while we despise ours and the French ignore theirs. Rather a sad omen, that. Anyway, the Germans have a plan to deal with French moves. It’s not a secret. Every sous-lieutenant in the French army scoffs at the details. It calls for a massive flanking sweep through Belgium in order to fold the French armies into a net . . . to crush them in less than three weeks, before the Russian bear can even stumble out of its cage. Not a plan without its flaws, dear Rilke, but it might well work and even work well. The French refuse to believe that Germany would violate Belgian neutrality. So do we. It wouldn’t be sporting, would it? Not playing the game. Belgium is sacred and inviolate. There’s a paper to prove it, signed by us and all the great powers years and years ago. One more holy relic to toss on the scrap heap.”

  “Oh, shit,” the man at the next desk cried out in exasperation. “Put a sock in it. I can’t hear myself think.”

  “You can’t hear what you can’t do, old boy.” Golden sighed wearily. “Oh, well, I suppose all prophets are without honor in their own countries.”

  The man leered at him. “That makes you rather unique, Jacob. You’re without honor in every bloody country. Bar none. But thanks for the pens. You’re a generous soul at heart.”

  Golden leaned back in his chair and stared into space, the cigarette drooping from his lips.

  “Where was I?”

  “Damned if I know.” Martin laughed. “Bucketing along through Belgium.”

  “Yes. Crying havoc as usual. I don’t really blame people for ducking under tables when I come into a room. Hope I didn’t bore you.”

  “Not at all. I’m glad you brought me up to date.”

  Golden stabbed out his cigarette and tidied up the European scene by moving the inkwell to its proper place and dropping the box of paper clips into the top drawer. “Back to more pleasant subjects. So the Yankee tripper has returned safe and sound. How did you find little Britain? No revolutions in Manchester, I trust. Is the wild and hairy Scot still keeping to his side of the border?”

  “I had a grand time.” Martin laughed. He placed the attaché case on the desktop. “Wrote half a dozen sketches. In shorthand, I’m afraid. If I could borrow a typewriter—”

  “No need for that. I learned Pitman at my old dad’s knee. It is Pitman, I hope, not that awful American stuff.”

  “It’s Pitman.”

  “Good.” He lit a cigarette and pushed the tin toward Martin. “Leave your copy and go wander about for a bit. You’ll find a canteen of sorts down that corridor to your right. Acidulous tea and stale buns . . . all profits to a home for venereal mill girls in Huddersfield. Ta-ta and leave me to it.”

  The tea was fresh, the buns were soft, and the charity was a trade school for orphaned boys in Southwark. Martin sat at a small table next to a window with a view of the Temple gardens and the river. He was finishing his second mug of tea and his third bun when Golden came into the canteen with the travel-copy papers rolled into a tight cylinder. He sat down and tapped the roll against the edge of the table.

  “Spend much time on these, Rilke?”

  “No . . . not much.”

  “Just off the top of your head?”

  “Sort of . . . yes.” He could feel his face beginning to burn.

  “Well, they’re bloody damn good. You have a sharp eye and a finely tuned ear. I laughed out loud over the Yorkshire cattleshow piece. The judges were right out of Dickens. Gentle satire. Just the ticket.” He looked thoughtful. “When are you leaving for the Continent?”

  “The day after tomorrow.”

  “Is it absolutely vital that you go?”

  “No . . . I guess not. Why?”

  “Because perhaps you could postpone it for a bit. I think your style of writing would go over very well with our readers. A Yank’s-eye view of Britain . . . with the emphasis on the upper-middle-class types . . . mildly satirized, like the Yorkshire squires. It’d probably be good for eight weeks at least, and being a roving feature writer for the Post would be jolly good experience for you. Or do you have to be back in Chicago by any fixed date?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know if I’ll have a job when I get back.”

  “Does that mean you’re interested?”

  “Sure.”

  The sardonic mouth softened into a warm smile. “Jolly good. Let’s hop upstairs and I’ll introduce you to the chief. . . . Give the old boy the pitch, as they say in America.”

  The top floor of the building formed an awesome contrast to the lower depths. No harried men there, no nerve-racking typewriters. Deep carpets and oak-paneled walls subdued all sound. Massive oak doors lined a broad carpeted corridor, all of them closed, all of them bearing discreet brass markers with engraved names: MR. KEENE. MR. UPSHAW. MR. ROSENBERG.

  “The real powers,” Golden whispered as though in church, “reside here as the prophets reside in heaven. Policy makers all.” The hooked little smile returned. “A terribly difficult job. Does one advocate votes for women now, or wait and see how the wind’s blowing? And what stand do we take on birth control? Ribald plays? The income tax? Should décolletage be more or less this season? If one stands very still and listens hard, one can hear the brains creak like rusting gears.”

  The corridor ended in a double set of oak doors. No brass nameplate. None was needed. The doors opened into a vestibule in which several men were seated in leather armchairs, all of them with the resigned expression of men who had waited a long time and knew they would wait a
good deal longer. A male secretary sat behind a small desk adjacent to another set of double oak doors.

  “Is he busy?” Golden asked.

  “Naturally,” the secretary drawled in Oxonian tones. “You know better than to ask, but he’ll see you if it’s important.”

  “It is,” Golden said. He leaned toward the man and spoke in a stage whisper. “The chap I’m with fired the fatal shot yesterday and is willing to tell all for fifty quid.”

  A few nodding heads stirred. The secretary faked a stage yawn.

  “Go in, Jacob, and take your assassin with you.”

  Beyond the doors was a cavernous room that seemed to be part office and part museum. Glass cases filled with Egyptian artifacts stood next to teletypewriters enclosed in soundproof glass domes. Paintings by Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Turner competed for wall space with two-shilling maps of Europe, Russia, Africa, and other sections of the world that were pinned to the oak panels with thumbtacks. Secretaries and typists, both male and female, abounded, scurrying in and out of glass-enclosed cubicles, all of them moving in a soundless frenzy. At the far end of the room was a broad oak dining table used as a desk, and behind it, in a Biedermeier chair, sat Harry Golden, Lord Crewe.

  “Guv’nor,” Jacob said, “meet Martin Rilke . . . from Chicago. An eminent journalist on the Express.”

  There wasn’t even the remotest family resemblance, Martin was thinking as he extended his hand across the table. If Jacob was a willow, his father was an oak, and a substantial one at that, the king of all oaks, a dark brown trunk of a man, with arms that could truly be called limbs. A sailor, Martin dimly recalled, a constant contender for the America’s Cup races, and as constantly fated to lose in the trials to Sir Thomas Lipton. The hand that reached out and took hold of his own was as hard and horny as a sailor’s foot.