Rose Macaulay

“ Mademoiselle the delegate from Roumania demanded the word. Mademoiselle the delegate for Roumania was a large and buxom lady with a soft, mellifluous voice that cooed like a turtle-dove's when she spoke eloquently from platforms of the wrongs of unhappy women and poor children. This delegate was female indeed. Not hers the blue-stocking sexlessness of the Scandinavian lady delegates, with their university degrees, their benign, bumpy foreheads, and their committee manners. She had been a mistress of kings; she was a very woman, full of the élan of sex. ”

“ The motor-launch churned its foaming path down the moonlit lake. Henry sat in the stern, trailing his fingers in cool, phosphorescent water, happy, drowsy, and well fed. What a delightful evening! What a charming old man! What a divine way of being taken home! And now he had the warm, encouraged feeling of not pursuing a lone trail, for the ex-cardinal's last words to him had been: “Coraggio! Follow every clue; push home every piece of evidence. Between us we will yet lay this enemy of the public good by the heel.” ”

“ Even the journalists, lodging less proudly in smaller hotels, or in apartments, all lodged cleanly, all decently, excepting only Henry, the accredited representative of the British Bolshevist.
Bitterly and proudly, with a faint sneer twisting his lips, Henry, leaning against the lake-side parapet, watched the tumultuous arrival of the organisers of peace on earth. The makers of the new world. What new world? Where tarried it? How slow were its makers at their creative task! Slow and unsure, thought Henry, whose newspaper was not of those who approved the League. ”

“ After all, one would expect a trap-door to be bolted. He wondered if it would be of any use to knock. Did it give on to a street, a courtyard, or a house?
He rapped on it with the end of his electric torch, softly and then loudly. He went on rapping, and knew the fear that assails the assaulter of impregnable, unyielding silence, the panic of him who calls aloud in an empty house and is answered only by the tiny sounds of creaking, scuffling, and whispering that cause the skin to creep, the blood to curdle, the marrow to freeze, the heart to stop, and the spirit to be poured out like water. ”

“ If you do wrong you are News, and if you have a bad accident, you are News, but if you mysteriously disappear, you are doubly and trebly News. To be News once in one's life—that is something for a man. Though sometimes it comes too late to be enjoyed.
[Pg 169]
36
In and out of the maze of ancient streets that are Old Geneva, to and fro along the alleys that lead through balconied, leaning houses, up and down obscure and sudden flights of stone steps, Henry wandered under the September moon. All day he had, with the help of Charles Wilbraham's unwitting secretary, tracked Charles Wilbraham. ”

“ All these hostels were, on this Sunday morning before the opening of the Assembly, receiving the delegates of the nations, their staffs and secretaries, and even journalists. Crowds of little grave-faced Japs processed into the Hotel de la Paix; the entrance hall of Les Bergues was alive with the splendid, full-throated converse of Latin Americans (“Ah, they live, those Spaniards!” Henry sighed) ; while at the Beau Rivage the British Empire and the Dominions hastened, with the morbid ardour of their race, to plunge into baths after their night journey. ”

“ Franchi's man must obviously know where he lived, so camouflage was unavailing. He had intended (only, lost in thought, he had let the moment pass) to be set down at the Paquis, as if he had been staying on the Quai du Mont Blanc or thereabouts. But he had said nothing, and, without doubt or hesitation, this disagreeable chauffeur (or whatever an electric launch man was called) had made for the Quai du Seujet and drawn up at it, as if he knew, as doubtless he did, that Henry's lodging was in one of the squalid alleys off it.
It could not be helped. Things do get about; Henry knew that of old. ”

“ This; that Svensen's will not be the only disappearance at Geneva. For what would be the use of getting rid of one man only, however prominent? The Assembly, after the first shock, would proceed with its doings. But what if man after man were to disappear? What if the whole fabric of Assembly, Council, and Committees should be disintegrated, till no one could have thoughts for anything but the mysterious disappearances and how to solve the riddle, and how, still more, to preserve each one himself from a like fate? ”

“ Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humour, of honour, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men. How few persons discuss superfluous bachelors, or whether the male arm or leg is an immodest sight, or whether men should vote. For men are not News.
Anyhow, thought Henry, anyhow delegates became News the moment they disappeared. ”

“ Russia was reaching out its evil White hands to grasp and weld again into a vast unhappy whole its former constituent republics of Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, Tauride, and White Russia. There seemed every chance that it would shortly succeed in doing so. The nations growled everywhere like sullen dogs on fragile chains. Never had the League of Nations, in all its brief career, been more necessary, never less available. ”

“ The Assembly of the League of Nations is not News, until it stumbles on mystery and disaster, becoming material for a shocker. The meeting together of organisations for the betterment of the world is not News, in the sense that their failure is. Deeply Henry, going about his secret and private business, intent and absorbed, pondered this question of News, what it is and what it is not. Crime is News ”

“ Are you a Catholic, Miss Longfellow?”
She gave a little shrug.
“I was brought up Catholic. Women believe what they are taught, as a rule, don't they?”
“I hadn't observed it,” Henry said, “particularly. Are women so unlike men then?”
“That's quite a question, isn't it. What do you think?”
“I can't think in large sections and masses of people,” Henry replied. “Women are so different one from another. So are men. That's all I can see, when people talk of the sexes.”
“Macchè! You don't say!” said Miss Longfellow, looking at him inquiringly. “Most people always think in large masses of people. ”

“ To-morrow she would walk once more about the romantic, clean, and noble city, look her last on the most lovely lake, visit the ice-cream café and perhaps go up Salève, which she had not yet had time to do. Or up the lake to Nyons. She would not visit the Assembly Hall or the Secretariat, for by those she encountered there she would be looked at askance. She had made a fool of herself and been made a fool of, and she had, it would be supposed, tried to make a fool of Committee 9 in order to spite Charles Wilbraham. She would be thought no gentleman, even no lady. ”

“ The Assembly would become merely a collection of bewildered and nervous individuals turning themselves into amateur detectives, and, incidentally, the laughing-stock of the world. The League might never recover such prestige as it has, after such a disastrous session. Mark my words; there will be further attempts on the persons of prominent delegates. Whether they will be successful attempts or not is a question. Who is responsible for them is another question. You say (and I am half with you) our friend of the Secretariat, who had better be nameless until we can bring him to book. ”

“ If the League of Nations should fail, should go to pieces, it will be from excess of this patriotism. Every country out for its own hand. That has always been the trouble with the world, since we were hordes of savages grouped in [Pg 78] tribes one against the other—as, indeed, we still are.”
“Well, zio mio,” said Miss Longfellow breezily, “if you don't look out for number one, no one else will, you may be dead sure. And then where are you? In the soup, sure thing. Nel zuppo!” She gave a gay, chiming, cuckooish laugh. A cheerful girl, thought Henry.
“Viva the League of Nations!” ”

“ Besides which, the society had come to the conclusion that to make, once, a complete fool of the League Assembly and Council before the world, so that its constitution would be disintegrated and its achievements would be as dust before the wind, would [Pg 223] deal the prestige of the League such a heavy blow as permanently to discredit it. To this end, after much cogitation, the society had got hold of a very brilliant and accomplished agent indeed; an agent who cared not what he did nor for what side he fought, so long as he was largely enough paid. ”

“ How different from young British widows, who, from their dress, might just as well have only lost a parent or brother. All widows are wonderful: Henry knew this, for always he had heard “Dear so-and-so is being simply wonderful” said of bereaved wives, and knew that it merely and in point of fact meant bereaved; but French widows are widows indeed. However, Henry wished they would sit still.
Henry was at the end of a row of English journalists. On his right, across a little gangway, were Germans. “At close quarters,” reflected Henry, “one is not attracted by this unfortunate nation. ”

“ The girl fluttered in front of them, still uttering the peculiar cry of her species, which to the good ladies was a desperate appeal for help, till she suddenly bolted beneath a low, dark archway.
[Pg 155]
The ladies hesitated. Then, “I must follow her, poor girl,” Mlle. Bjornsen remarked simply, for the courage of a thousand Scandinavian heroes beat in her blood.
“And where you adventure, my dear friend,” cried Mlle. Binesco, “I, a Roumanian woman and a friend of kings, will not be behind! We advance, then, in the name of humanity and of our unhappy sex!” ”

“ The young man Grattan, with whom Henry had dined last night, lounged in, with his cynical smile.
“You're very young and innocent, Beechtree. I suppose you've been here since ten. It's just on eleven now. The President's not to hand and no one seems to know where he is. Oh, well, it's not his fault; people spoil him. His head's turned, poor Svensen. I expect he made a night of it and is lying in this morning. I don't blame him. We don't need a President. But there seems to be some unrest among the Secretariat.” ”

“ Who was that Protestant pastor? What doings, gentlemen, engage the attentions of M. Kratzky of Russia, that enemy of small republics, Sir John Levis of Pottle and Kett, that enemy of peace, a soi-disant Protestant pastor, the presumed enemy of true religion, and M. Wilbraham of the Secretariat? Mind, gentlemen, I impute nothing. I merely inquire.”
A murmur of applause broke from the Latin Americans. As it died down, Henry, looking up, saw standing by the door Charles Wilbraham, cool, immaculate, attentive, and unperturbed, and the soi-disant Protestant pastor at his elbow. ”