He swallowed his digestive pills, praised the coffee, and then expressed a desire to sleep.
“Cuthbert will look after you,” he said. “Give him anything you want sent to your paper.”
The wireless transmitter was in and beneath the garage; its mast rose high overhead, cleverly disguised as a eucalyptus tree. William watched the first words of his rejected dispatch sputter across the ether to Mr. Salter; then he, too, decided to sleep.
At five o’clock, when he reappeared, Mr. Baldwin was in a different, more conspicuous suit and the same mood of urbanity and benevolence.
“Let us visit the town,” he had said and, inevitably, they had gone to Popotakis’s and they sat there at sunset in the empty bar-room.
*
“… No doubt you are impatient to send off your second message. I trust that the little mystery of the situation here is now perfectly clear to you.”
“Well… No… not exactly.”
“No? There are still gaps? Tut, tut, Mr. Boot, the foreign correspondent of a great newspaper should be able to piece things together for himself. It is all very simple. There has been competition for the mineral rights of Ishmaelia which, I may say as their owner, have been preposterously overvalued. In particular the German and the Russian Governments were willing to pay extravagantly—but in kind. Unhappily for them the commodities they had to offer, treasures from the Imperial palaces, timber, toys and so forth, were not much in demand in Ishmaelia—in presidential circles at any rate. President Jackson had long wanted to make adequate provision for his retirement and I was fortunately placed in being able to offer him gold for his gold concession; my rivals found themselves faced by the alternatives of abandoning their ambitions or upsetting President Jackson. They both preferred the latter, more romantic course. The Germans, with a minimum of discernment, chose to set up a native of low character named Smiles as prospective dictator. I never had any serious fears of him. The Russians more astutely purchased the Young Ishmaelite party and are, as you see, momentarily in the ascendant.
“That I think should give you your material for an article.”
“Yes,” said William. “Thank you very much. I’m sure Mr. Salter and Lord Copper will be very grateful.”
“Dear me, how little you seem to have mastered the correct procedure of your profession. You should ask me whether I have any message for the British public. I have. It is this: Might must find a way. Not @
[email protected] remember; other nations use @
[email protected]; we Britons alone use @
[email protected] Only one thing can set things right—sudden and extreme violence, or better still, the effective threat of it. I am committed to very considerable sums in this little gamble and, alas, our countrymen are painfully tolerant nowadays of the losses of their financial superiors. One sighs for the days of Pam or Dizzy. I possess a little influence in political quarters but it will strain it severely to provoke a war on my account. Some semblance of popular support, such as your paper can give, would be very valuable… But I dislike embarrassing my affairs with international issues. I should greatly prefer it, if the thing could be settled neatly and finally, here and now.”
As he spoke there arose from the vestibule a huge and confused tumult; the roar of an engine which in the tranquil bar-room sounded like a flight of heavy aeroplanes, a series of percussions like high explosive bombs, shrill, polyglot human voices inarticulate with alarm and above them all a deep bass, trolling chant, half nautical, half ecclesiastical. The flimsy structure throbbed and shook from its shallow foundation to its asbestos roof; the metal-bound doors flew open revealing, first, the two commissionaires, backing into the bar and, next, driving them before him, a very large man astride a motor-bicycle. He rode slowly between the ping-pong tables, then put his feet to the floor and released the handle-bars. The machine shot from under him, charged the bar, and lay on its side with its back wheel spinning in a cloud of exhaust-gas, while the rider, swaying ponderously from side to side like a performing bear, surveyed the room in a puzzled but friendly spirit.
It was the Swede; but a Swede transfigured, barely recognizable as the mild apostle of the coffee pot and the sticking plaster. The hair of his head stood like a tuft of ornamental, golden grass; a vinous flush lit the upper part of his face, the high cheek bones, the blank, calf-like eyes; on the broad concavities of his forehead the veins bulged varicosely. Still singing his nordic dirge he saluted the empty chairs and ambled towards the bar.
At the first alarm Mr. Popotakis had fled the building. The Swede spanned the counter and fumbled on the shelf beyond. William and Mr. Baldwin watched him fascinated as he raised bottle after bottle to his nose, sniffed and tossed them disconsolately behind him. Presently he found what he wanted—the sixty per cent. He knocked off the neck, none too neatly, and set the jagged edge to his lips; his adam’s apple rose and fell. Then, refreshed, he looked about him again. The motor-bicycle at his feet, churning and stinking, attracted his notice and he silenced it with a single tremendous kick.
“Might,” said Mr. Baldwin reverently.
The Swede’s eyes travelled slowly about him, settled on William, goggled, squinted, and betrayed signs of recognition. He swayed across the room and took William’s hand in a paralyzing grip; he jabbed hospitably at his face with the broken bottle and addressed him warmly and at length in Swedish.
Mr. Baldwin replied. The sound of his own tongue in a strange land affected Olafsen strongly. He sat down and cried while Mr. Baldwin, still in Swedish, spoke to him comfortably.
“Sometimes it is necessary to dissemble one’s nationality,” he explained to William. “I have given our friend here to believe that I am a compatriot.”
The black mood passed. Olafsen gave a little whoop and lunged in a menacing manner with the absinthe bottle.
He introduced William to Mr. Baldwin.
“This is my great friend, Boot,” he said, “a famous journalist. He is my friend though I have been made a fool. I have been made a fool,” he cried louder and more angrily, “by a lot of blacks. They sent me down the line to an epidemic and I was laughed at. But I am going to tell the President. He is a good old man and he will punish them. I will go to his residence, now, and explain everything.”
He rose from the table and bent over the disabled motor-bicycle. Mr. Popotakis peeped round the corner of the service door and, seeing the Swede still in possession, popped back out of sight.
“Tell me,” said Mr. Baldwin. “Your friend here—does he become more or less pugnacious with drink?”
“I believe, more.”
“Then let us Endeavour to repay his hospitality.”
With his own hands Mr. Baldwin fetched a second bottle of sixty per cent from the shelf. Tolerantly conforming to the habits of the place, he snapped off the neck and took a hearty swig; then he passed the bottle to the Swede. In a short time they were singing snatches of lugubrious Baltic music, Mr. Baldwin matching the Swede’s deep bass, in his ringing alto. Between their songs they drank and between drinks Mr. Baldwin explained, concisely but with many repetitions, the constitutional changes of the last twenty-four hours.
“Russians are bad people.”
“Very bad.”
“They say they are Princes and they borrow money!”
“Yes.”
“President Jackson is a good old man. He gave me a harmonium for my mission. Some of the Jacksons are silly fellows, but the President is my friend.”
“Exactly.”
“I think,” said the Swede, rising, “we will go and see my friend Jackson.”
*
The Presidential Residence, on this first, and, as it turned out, last, evening of the Soviet State of Ishmaelia, was ceremoniously illuminated, not with the superb floods of concealed arc lamps dear to the more mature dictatorships, but, for want of better, with a multitude of “fairy lights” with which the Jacksons were wont to festoon the verandah on their not infrequent official birthdays; all the windows of the façade, ten of them, were unshuttered and the bright lamps behind ga
ve cozy glimpses of Nottingham lace, portières and enlarged photographs. A red flag hung black against the night sky. Doctor Benito, backed by a group of “Young Ishmaelites,” stood on the central balcony. A large crowd had assembled to see the lights.
“What is he saying?” asked William.
“He has proclaimed the abolition of Sunday and he is calling for volunteers for a ten day, fifty hour, week. I do not think he has chosen the occasion with tact.”
The Swede had left them, pushing forward on his errand of liberation. William and Mr. Baldwin stood at the back of the crowd. The temper of the people was apathetic. They liked to see the palace lit up. Oratory pleased them, whatever its subject; sermons, educational lectures, political programs, panegyrics of the dead or living, appeals for charity—all had the same soporific effect. They liked the human voice in all its aspects, most particularly when it was exerted in sustained athletic effort. They had, from time to time, heard too many unfulfilled prophecies issue from that balcony to feel any particular apprehensions about the rigors of the new regime. Then, while Benito was well in his stride, a whisper of interest passed through them; necks were stretched. The Swede had appeared at the ground floor window. Benito, sensing the new alertness in his audience, raised his voice, rolled his eyes and flashed his white teeth. The audience stood tip-toe with expectation. They could see what he could not—the Swede in a lethargic but effective manner, liquidating the front parlor. He pulled the curtains down, he swept the fourteen ornamental vases off the chimney-piece, with a loud crash he threw a pot of fern through the window. The audience clapped enthusiastically. The “Young Ishmaelites” behind Benito began to consult, but the speaker, unconscious of all except his own eloquence, continued to churn the night air with Marxian precepts.
To the spectators at the back of the crowd, out of earshot of the minor sounds, the sequence unfolded itself with the happy inconsequence of an early comedy film. The revolutionary committee left their leader’s side and disappeared from view to return, almost immediately, in rout, backwards, retreating before the Swede who now came into the light of the upper drawing-room brandishing a small gilt chair over his head.
It was not ten feet drop from the balcony. The traditional, ineradicable awe of the white man combined with the obvious, immediate peril of the whirling chair legs to decide the issue. With one accord they plunged over the rail onto the woolly pates below. Benito was the last to go, proclaiming class war with his last audible breath.
The Swede addressed the happy people in Ishmaelite.
“He says he is looking for his friend President Jackson,” explained Mr. Baldwin.
A cheer greeted the announcement. “Jackson” was one of the perennially exhilarating words in the Ishmaelite vocabulary; a name associated since childhood with every exciting event in Ishmaelite life. They had been agreeably surprised to learn that the Jacksons had that morning all been sent to prison; now, it would be a treat to see them all again. As long as something, good or ill, was happening to the Jacksons, the Ishmaelites felt an intelligent interest in politics. Soon they were all crying: “Jackson. Jackson. Jackson.”
“Jackson. Jackson,” shouted Mr. Baldwin, at William’s side. “I think we may be satisfied that the counter-revolution has triumphed.”
*
An hour later William sat in his room at the Pension Dressler and began his dispatch to the Beast.
From the main street a short distance away could be heard sounds of rejoicing from the populace. President Jackson had been found, locked in the wood shed. Now, dazed and stiff, he was being carried shoulder high about the city; other processions had formed about other members of the liberated family. Now and then rival processions met and came to blows. Mr. Popotakis had boarded up his café but several Indian drink shops had been raided and the town was settling down to a night of jollity.
PRESS COLLECT URGENT MAN CALLED MISTER BALDWIN HAS BOUGHT COUNTRY, William began.
“No,” said a gentle voice behind him. “If you would not resent my co-operation, I think I can compose a dispatch more likely to please my good friend Copper.”
Mr. Baldwin sat at William’s table and drew the typewriter towards himself. He inserted a new sheet of paper, tucked up his cuffs and began to write with immense speed:
MYSTERY FINANCIER RECALLED EXPLOITS RHODES LAWRENCE TODAY SECURING VAST EAST AFRICAN CONCESSION BRITISH INTERESTS IN TEETH ARMED OPPOSITION BOLSHEVIST SPIES…
“It will make about five full columns,” he said, when it was finished. “From my experience of newspapers I think I can safely say that they will print it in full. I am afraid we are too late for tomorrow’s paper, but there is no competition to fear. Perhaps I shall have the felicity of finding you as my fellow traveler on the return journey.”
The sounds of rejoicing drew nearer and rose to a wild hubbub in the lane outside.
“Dear me,” said Mr. Baldwin. “How disconcerting. I believe they have found me out.”
But it was only General Gollancz Jackson being pulled about the town in his motor-car. The bare feet pattered away in the darkness. The cries of acclamation faded.
A knock on the door.
Cuthbert reported that, in view of the disturbed state of the town, he had taken the liberty of bringing his master’s sheets to the Pension Dressler and making up a bed for him there.
“You did quite right, Cuthbert… And now, if you will forgive me, I will say good-night. I have had an unusually active day.”
BOOK THREE
Banquet
One
The bells of St Bride’s chimed unheard in the customary afternoon din of the Megalopolitan Building. The country edition had gone to bed; below traffic-level, in grotto-blue light, leagues of paper ran noisily through the machines; overhead, where floor upon floor rose from the dusk of the streets to the clear air of day, ground-glass doors opened and shut; figures in frayed and perished braces popped in and out; on a hundred lines reporters talked at cross purposes; sub-editors busied themselves with their humdrum task of reducing to blank nonsense the sheaves of misinformation which whistling urchins piled before them; beside a hundred typewriters soggy biscuits lay in a hundred tepid saucers. At the hub and still center of all this animation, Lord Copper sat alone in splendid tranquility. His massive head, empty of thought, rested in sculptural fashion upon his left fist. He began to draw a little cow on his writing pad.
Four legs with cloven feet, a ropy tail, swelling udder and modestly diminished teats, a chest and head like an Elgin marble—all this was straightforward stuff. Then came the problem—which was the higher, horns or ears? He tried it one way, he tried it the other; both looked equally unconvincing; he tried different types of ear—tiny, feline triangles, asinine tufts of hair and gristle, even, in desperation, drooping flaps remembered from a guinea-pig in the backyard of his earliest home; he tried different types of horn—royals, the elegant antennae of the ibis, the vast armory of moose and buffalo. Soon the paper before him was covered like the hall of a hunter with freakish heads. None looked right. He brooded over them and found no satisfaction.
It was thus that Mr. Salter found him.
Mr. Salter had not wanted to come and see Lord Copper. He had nothing particular to say. He had not been summoned. But he had the right of entry to his owner’s presence, and it was only thus, he believed, by unremitting wholly uncongenial self-assertion, that he could ever hope for a change of job.
“I wanted to consult you about Bucharest,” he said.
“Ah.”
“There’s a long story from Jepson about a pogrom. Have we any policy in Bucharest?”
Lord Copper roused himself from his abstraction. “Someone on this paper must know about cows,” he said petulantly.
“Cows, Lord Copper?”
“Don’t we keep a man to write about the country?”
“Oh. That was Boot, Lord Copper.”
“Well have him come and see me.”
“We sent him to Africa.”
> “Well have him come back. What’s he doing there? Who sent him?”
“He is on his way back now. It was Boot who brought off the great story in Ishmaelia. When we scooped Hitchcock,” he added, for Lord Copper was frowning in a menacing way.
Slowly the noble face lightened.
“Ah, yes, smart fellow, Boot. He was the right man for that job.”
“It was you who discovered him, Lord Copper.”
“Of course, naturally… had my eye on him for some time. Glad he made good. There’s always a chance for real talent on the Beast, eh, Salter?”
“Definitely, Lord Copper.”
“Preparations going ahead for Boot’s reception?”
“Up to a point.”
“Let me see, what was it we decided to do for him?”
“I don’t think, Lord Copper, that the question was ever actually raised.”
“Nonsense. It is a matter I have particularly at heart. Boot has done admirably. He is an example to everyone on the staff—everyone. I wish to show my appreciation in a marked manner. When do you say he gets back?”
“At the end of next week.”
“I will thank him personally… You never had any faith in that boy, Salter.”
“Well…”
“I remember it quite distinctly. You wished to have him recalled. But I knew he had the makings of a journalist in him. Was I right?”
“Oh, definitely, Lord Copper.”
“Well then, let us have no more of these petty jealousies. The office is riddled with them. I shall make it my concern to see that Boot is substantially rewarded… What, I wonder, would meet the case?…” Lord Copper paused, undecided. His eye fell on the page of drawings and he covered it with his blotting paper. “Suppose,” he said at length, “we gave him another good foreign assignment. There is this all-women expedition to the South Pole—bound to be a story in that. Do you think that would meet the case?”