The London traffic roared and spluttered past him. Dim and familiar, noisy and harmless, ugly and yet with a strange nostalgic charm the London of 1938 drew Mark back into her ponderous bosom.
The blackened sheep grazed placidly beneath the incredible green of the late summer trees in St. James’s Park. The tropical birds by the lakeside were perfectly adjusted to their Park limitations. A little inconspicuous litter defied the park-keeper and the dustbins. The shapes of a few worn-out, defeated human beings lay on the dusty grass close to the splendid field of scarlet geraniums in front of the smug Victorian Palace.
What a shoddy capital and yet how solid, with how much ancient pride, and with what unmanageable modern shames! London was just as vast, as soft, as rich, selfish and helpless as Mark had remembered it. ‘What a target,’ he whispered to himself bitterly, as he walked across Buckingham Palace Road, and turned down Buckingham Gate.
Downing Street was empty except for a single policeman outside the Foreign Office confronted by a single pigeon.
Mark found no difficulty in entering the comfortable, shabby old mansion that housed the foreign policy of Great Britain. 43
An old porter took Mark’s card with friendly courtesy, and pressed him to take a seat on a spacious couch, beneath the great staircase.
Dear old menservants shuffled about the dusty corridors, carefully balancing tea trays. The broad empty staircase was lined with bad pictures in dim golden frames. They held no figure more tangible than History. There was an almost unthinkable absence of weapons or uniforms anywhere in the great muffled building.
Reggie, though he wasn’t at all grand and didn’t keep him waiting a moment, had a high-ceilinged spacious room to himself; and pushed Mark at once with friendly hands into a cavernous leather armchair. He was grand enough, Mark supposed, for the sickening repercussions of world crisis after world crisis to reach him sooner than they reached the outside world and with more authentic force.
There had been such a crisis yesterday – and there would be another one to-morrow – even more terrifying, and a step nearer to the edge of doom. But was anyone under this somnolent roof anxious about it? Did anyone, however lofty, urge the need of hurry?
Reggie greeted Mark as if they had just parted an hour ago over an hilarious lunch at the Ritz. ‘Hullo,’ he murmured, ‘you back? Nice of you to look me up.’ Their eyes met briefly and glanced away again, as if anything in the solid, upholstered room was more significant to them, than the intimate friendship of a lifetime.
Nor did Reggie grow any graver or less casually genial, as Mark disclosed drily and with no effort to lessen its gloom, the painful, threatening and conclusive facts he had brought back from the simmering Continent.
It was inescapable Mark finished, that Hitler meant war. Slaves or enemies was Hitler’s fixed idea, and the one peace 44available for the British Empire was complete and abject surrender to an arch-criminal with a paranoiac mind.
Reggie sat at his desk, and drummed his thin alert-looking fingers lightly on its surface. After a long pause he said in a low voice, ‘“But-I-don’t-want-to-fight-and-I’m-sure-it’s-wrong” that’s as far, my dear old chap, as our present leaders have got to – and nothing you or I can say will shake them! So it is wrong, of course. War, at our stage of game, is worse than wrong – it’s silly. But you’ve got to take the right steps in order to avoid it. I needn’t tell you – and I shouldn’t tell anyone else – that we haven’t taken them. It is our amazing arrogance in thinking we can get away with what we want – without paying for it – that has me beat. Nine years of easy optimism has brought us into this back alley, and God knows whether even Hitler will pull us out of it in time!’
Mark felt half relief and half a deeper clutch of fear, to see that Reggie hadn’t been fooled by any delusive wish-dream. There was no ace then up his sleeve; and he had got to play the worst hand any gambler ever held, without it.
‘Why on earth then—’ Mark murmured. Reggie shook his head.
‘We all know – here in the Foreign Office,’ he explained wearily, ‘exactly where we are – well over the jaws of Hell and half-way down Hitler’s throat, but we can’t do anything more about it than we have done. Against us we’ve got the Chamberlain Government, The Red-Bogey haunted Tory Houses, and the slap-happy Punch-drunk Public all muddling along in a rosy glow together. While the few enlightened people, like ourselves, become more and more like figures in a nightmare dressed in scanty and unsuitable clothing – trying to catch a train that has already left the station!’ 45
Even Mark’s fantastic plan seemed no great surprise to Reggie. Naturally he didn’t like the idea of sending his best friend as a lunatic into an enemy country. Still, he explained gently, puffing away at his pleasant cigarette and jogging a beautifully polished patent leather shoe, when you had a small and overpopulated island on your mind, loosely attached through threatened oceans to an equally undefended and undependable empire, if you had no army to speak of, a mere handful of boys in the air, and a navy which however powerful in armament and personnel had to be thought about in terms of what would blow it up simultaneously, from above and below – it was apt to make you feel both groggy and ruthless. You used what you’d got. An Eton master who spoke German like a native and climbed mountains like a chamois, was not to be sneezed at.
‘You’re a straw, my dear chap,’ Reggie dispassionately told him, ‘rather a good straw that’s floated my way. Naturally I clutch you! You’ve got a clean slate, your mother’s dead, and you’re not married. You’ve been brought up not to tell anybody anything. Chaps across the way would say “an ideal enemy agent”.
‘Naturally they’ll have to build you up. In a sense our having been to school together and all that, makes it a nasty idea having to shove you out into the danger zone, while I sit here pot-boiling in whatever security London has to offer. Which in a few months’ time – might – as we both know – not be much. We want someone badly in enemy country, and though of course we already have some good men wandering about, we shall want more, just when it gets most difficult to keep ’em there. They think the world of Father Martin across the way, and whoever he passes on to you, should be foolproof. I’ve never heard of your ginger-haired Circe, but I daresay she’ll come up to scratch. We 46think we’re good for a few months yet, before the bust-up. The date we have in our minds is somewhere round 1939. Probably Hitler will want to wait till Republican Spain is off the map and Stalin a shade less peppery. France is our main problem. She’s an unhealthy country politically just now, and the way Abetz and Laval are working it, she may go a good deal more unhealthy yet. No one can tell till the fight starts, whether all this Cagoulard versus Communist stuff is just a benevolent tumour that’ll clear up under the knife or a malignant cancer closing in on a vital organ.’
‘But Gamelin and the army are all right, aren’t they?’ Mark anxiously demanded, ‘and the Maginot Line? Even the Germans speak respectfully of it!’
‘Well, we hope so,’ Reggie murmured. ‘We do quite a lot of hoping one way or another.’
It struck Mark that Reggie knew what was going to happen without quite taking it in. He had not felt the deadly grip of living in a country already successfully strangled. He didn’t want to make a fuss, and to try to take it in would seem to him equivalent to making a fuss. But was it? Mark felt an uncomfortable new pang assail him – was it really so awfully clever to avoid looking facts in the face in order to show a control that took up strength, that might better be used to meet them?
‘History,’ Reggie went on, pacing slowly up and down between his desk and the window, as if the slight movement relieved him of any unnecessary strain, ‘is chock-a-block with the tight corners our old Lady Britannia has turned! In my opinion she’ll do it again. Elizabeth’s reign was one long see-saw over a precipice with Philip of Spain sitting pretty on the lighter beam. Think of Chatham and Pitt! They had something to worry about with their little Corsican and his flat-bottomed barges just round the corner. Let’s 47reckon up our mercies and go out to dinner! There’s the channel – a good tank trap – and we’ve Churchill waiting in the wings, to take the helm when the storm breaks. There’s our own Chief with the locked-up grit and common sense of eight years unused and ready to go in with him. We’ve next to no Communists and what we have the British working-man very sensibly won’t touch with a barge pole. Our Fascists have started us laughing and half the time our Reactionaries – though a heavy lot – don’t react. Of course nobody knows whether a country is sound or not till it’s punched in the ribs. Wait till our punch comes – and between ourselves we’re not wholly supine! We don’t talk about what’s going on, but quite a lot is!’
Mark too got up, and peered out of the window – the pigeon and the policeman still confronted each other with placid unconcern on the pavement below.
‘But what are we waiting for?’ he murmured half to himself, half to Reggie, who was swiftly and neatly tidying up his desk preparatory to departure. ‘Is it only the war with Hitler? What is Hitler? Why does a big, sound, prosperous people like the Germans go all whoozy over a Viennese house-painter, kept by women – who can’t paint? And why do we – who with France held every card in the pack in 1919 – never play one of them, and stop this Mr. Hitler?
‘I have an idea that it isn’t only Hitler! Something’s got loose, Reggie, and scudded past us – at the funeral of good old George the Fifth.
‘Do you remember standing with me on the roof of Scottish House and looking up Whitehall? There was a damned swastika floating from a pole in Piccadilly, above the German Embassy! Even then it gave me a queer feeling in the pit of my stomach. Poor old Beatty tottered past us like a shrivelled-up eagle dying on his feet. Our Edward 48too – white as a sheet – and not much more solid; blown off his throne by a puff from old Baldwin’s pipe! I remember thinking to myself as we stood there, “What is this procession marching into – and what is the British Empire – after all?”’
‘Um!’ agreed Reggie. ‘Well – no doubt compared to that cursèd efficient arsenal you’ve just got out of, this all does seem rather antediluvian. Still you know, there was the ark and after starving for a few months on end cheek by jowl, the funny old Noah’s outfit did survive – out they came, dove and all!’
‘Mud and rivers, that’s what they survived to,’ Mark reminded him.
‘You always were a lousy old pessimist,’ Reggie replied. ‘Let’s go across the way and tell your bed-time story to old B. He’ll like all that Hollywood stuff about the ginger-haired woman – the monk and the artist! Quite sure she’s as ugly as you make out?’
‘As ugly as sin, and as cold as a winter wave,’ Mark said with decreasing gloom, ‘and I’m not at all sure now that I didn’t dream the whole thing! Only I’ve got half a dozen of the damned woman’s medical books; and she’s kindly marked the passages referring to Manic Depressives.’
‘She must be a cinch of a psychologist,’ Reggie told him. ‘I spotted that was your type in prep. school myself. Don’t you remember going down with mumps before the most important match of the season – and you my best centre-forward?’
‘I’d like to think I’d got mumps to fall back on now,’ Mark murmured, as Reggie gently shepherded him into the lifeless corridor.