by John Buchan
Loeffler passed his hand over his eyes.
“It comes back to me. A middle-aged man with a high colour and a blond moustache. Rather a vulgar fellow? I suspected him, but I had not enough to act upon. But I was right, you say?”
“You were right. I was a British officer, and for three years of the war I was behind your front. Thank God I was able to do your country a fair amount of harm.”
“And now you would atone for it by doing my country much good. No, not atone. There was no need of atonement, for you were doing your rightful duty. But you are chivalrous, and now you would do an old enemy a kindness.”
“May I put it differently? I want to help to build up the world. You are at the moment the chief builder, so my services are at your disposal. I cannot direct — I cannot even carry a hod — but I may be able to keep wreckers away.”
“I thank you.” Loeffler spoke gravely and held out his hand. He seemed to be under the influence either of some emotion or some sudden thought, for he walked to the window and stood there in silence looking out at the morning landscape.
“Come here,” he said, and Adam took his place beside him.
The view was over the terraced garden to the park, which rose to a low wooded ridge. The early hours had been clear and sparkling with frost, but now banks of vapour were drifting athwart the landscape. The garden was plain in every detail, with its urns and parapets and statues, its rose-beds and grass-plots drenched in dew. But the park was dim, and the trees were wreathed in mist, and the ridge was only a shadow. But, far beyond, some trick of light revealed a distant swell of moorland, dark as a sapphire against the pale sky.
“Look!” said Loeffler. “That is how I see the world. The foreground is plain — and the horizon — but the middle distance is veiled. So it is with me. I see the next stage very clear, but all beyond that is hidden from me. But I see also the horizon to which I would move. . . . Let us sit down, Colonel Melfort, and talk a little. I can lay open my heart to my preserver. You are a friend of Germany, but still more you are a friend of the world. I, likewise — for Germany cannot be safe until the world is safe. Nor, I would add, can the world be safe until Germany is at peace. These things are a circle, which the pessimist will call vicious and the optimist virtuous.”
He held his head low, and dropped his clasped hands between his knees, looking, thought Adam, much as Ulysses Grant might have looked at some difficult hour of the Wilderness Campaign.
“This Conference,” he said, “I now think that it will succeed. But its success will only carry us a little way. We shall have a breathing space, no more — not yet a place to rest. After it there will come for Germany the slow business of waiting and toiling and suffering. She will face it, I think, and she will go through with it, but she must have some streak of light on her horizon. If that light is denied, she will despair and sink into the slough of anarchy, from which it will be hard to raise her. Then she will suffer most, but all the world will suffer much, and all our dreams of peace will have gone. We shall be back in the old cruel world — crueller than before, because there will be deeper poverty and no hope. Do you understand me, Colonel Melfort?”
Adam nodded. “You look to the Conference to give you the streak of light?”
“Assuredly. Your country will not deny it us. Nor will America, I think. Nor France, if she is wisely handled. Such a promise of an ultimate dawn will be much. After that my task, if God permits me, is to keep my people steady. That will not be easy, for there are many who are impatient and would cut the knot. Some of them — your friends of the past week — think that my life is the barrier to prosperity, and that with me out of the way the road will be clear. They are foolish, for I matter little. I am only the housemaid sweeping the floor and opening the windows. If I were gone the dust would be thicker, for I do not make dust. But most of my opponents are not violent or criminal, but they are obstinate and short-sighted. They cannot endure to wait. Therefore they will try other ways, and unless they are held there will be disaster.”
Adam looked at Loeffler as he sat with his head poked forward, his voice grave and level, and his eyes abstracted as if in an inward vision.
“I think you can hold your people,” he said.
“I think I can,” was the answer. “But on one condition only — that the streak of light is not allowed to die out of their sky.”
He got to his feet and stood in front of the fire.
“I will be wholly candid with you, Colonel Melfort. It is your right, since you have made yourself my friend. . . . That streak of light does not depend upon Germany, but upon the world outside. It does not altogether depend upon the Governments. They may be difficult at times, but I think they will be reasonable, for after all they understand their own interest. As for the press it does not greatly matter, since the press is not an independent power. But there is a great and potent world which the Governments do not control. That is the world of finance, the men who guide the ebb and flow of money. With them rests the decision whether they will make that river a beneficent flood to quicken life, or a dead glacier which freezes wherever it moves, or a torrent of burning lava to submerge and destroy. The men who control that river have the ultimate word. Now most of them mean well, but they do not see far, and they are not very clever; therefore they are at the bidding of any man who is long-sighted and a master of strategy. Such a man has the future of the world — the immediate future — in his hands.”
“Is there such a man?” Adam asked.
“I am coming to believe that there is. And I think you know him. He can command money, and he can dictate its use, for he is clever — no, not clever — he has genius, a persuasive genius. If he wished, he could move — what? Not the State treasuries, which are difficult things. Those responsible for them have to give strict account and carry with them in their policy millions of uninstructed voters. No, he could move the private hoards of which the world is full, and apply them wisely to sowing here and irrigating there in the certainty of a rich harvest. The Rothschilds, you remember, made their great fortunes by helping a bankrupt Europe through the Napoleonic wars, by moving money to the point where it was needed. Such a man as I speak of could do more to-day, for he could move money not to pay bills for war material and war damages but to nurse throughout the globe the new life which is waiting to break forth. The world is richer to-day than it has ever been, but the communications are choked, so that one half of it is water-logged and the other half a parched desert.”
“The man you speak of is not doing what you want?”
Loeffler shook his head.
“He is moving money but capriciously, without any wise purpose. I do not think that he cares greatly for wealth, but he is scornfully amassing it — nothing more. He has persuaded finance to trust him — in America, in France, to some extent in Britain — and the trust is not misplaced, for he will earn for it big dividends. He provides loans for many lands but at too high a price, for he exacts in return a control over certain things which in no land should be under foreign control. He has his pound of flesh, and the flesh is taken from vital parts of the body. Therefore his loans do not benefit. They tide over a momentary difficulty, but in the end they cripple recovery — and they may kill it.”
“That is not all,” he went on. “They foster a bitter nationalism which I would fain see die. A people is not grateful when it sees its choicest possessions go in payment for this foreign help. Such a man may create violent antagonisms — dangerous for himself, more dangerous for the world.”
“Let’s get down to names,” said Adam. “There would be more hope for things if Creevey were out of the way?”
“Yes,” said Loeffler. “And also No. You open your eyes, but I will tell you what I mean. Mr Creevey has genius beyond question, but it is a misdirected genius. Misdirected, not in its essence malevolent. As I read him he is still immature. You may laugh, but I am very serious. He has immense abilities, but he uses them like a clever child. His fault is an a
rrogance of intellect. He is so wrapped up in the use of a superb intelligence that he does not permit himself to look to ultimate things. He is, if you please, not awakened. Now there is so little genius in the world that I cannot wish for its disappearance, even if it stands in my way. Mr Creevey is no common man; he is no mere money-spinner. He is no doubt very rich, but I do not think that he pays much heed to his private bank account. He seeks nobler game — the satisfaction to be won from the use of a great mind. But it is not the noblest, and in its results it may be disastrous. He is at present a dark angel in the world, but could his power be orientated otherwise he might be an angel of light.”
“Why do you tell me this?” Adam asked. “I cannot help you.”
Loeffler smiled.
“I tell it you because you are my friend, and I want my friend to understand me.”
There was a knock at the door and Lamancha entered.
“The cars will be ready in half an hour,” he said. “You’re coming with us, Adam, aren’t you?”
“If I may. I’m by way of dining with Falconet to-night.”
V
Adam and Falconet dined in the latter’s rooms in St James’s Street. Another man joined them after dinner, whose name was Blakiston, an Englishman who had been for thirty years in New York and was Falconet’s partner in many enterprises. He was small, grizzled and clean-shaven, and when he spoke he had the habit of dangling tortoiseshell eyeglasses at the end of a black ribbon. He looked the conventional banker, and he had a note-book which was seldom out of his hand.
He gave a list of businesses which sounded like an extract from the speech of the chairman of an investment company.
“Which of them are going to raise questions in the next few months?” Falconet asked.
Blakiston considered. There was a group of wood-pulp propositions in East Prussia which might be difficult — an attempt to combine several had been blocked by the local boards. An Italian artificial silk concern was at loggerheads with the Government over certain labour questions. Then there were the michelite mines in Rhodesia — something had to be done there in the way of a working agreement with the Swedish and American interests. The financial arrangements, too, with Leigh and O’Malley of New York were due for revision, for some of that group were kicking about the German municipalities loan. Blakiston had a list of other activities — a coffee combine in Brazil, the vast estates of a Westphalian syndicate in the Argentine, the proposed match monopoly in Turkey, and a new harbour on the Adriatic.
“All of them boiling up to be nasty, you think?” Falconet asked. “And with a little trouble you reckon you could make them boil faster?”
Blakiston did not consult his note-book.
“Sure,” he said, smiling. “Up to a point, that is. Our interests are so widely scattered that we can bring some kind of pressure to bear in most parts of the globe.”
“Enough to make it necessary for Mr Creevey to give the business his personal attention? I mean, go out and look at things for himself?”
Blakiston considered.
“Yes, I think so. He won’t go to Rhodesia — couldn’t be spared that long from England. But we could so fix it that he would have to visit New York.”
“Mr Melfort wants the chance of a long private talk with him, and that can’t be got in London. What do you recommend?”
“Why not an Atlantic crossing? We could arrange that they had adjacent cabins.”
Adam shook his head. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t do. I want rather more than Mr Creevey’s company. We must set the stage a little.”
Presently Blakiston had to leave for an appointment, and the two others sat on till Big Ben tolled midnight.
“I don’t quite get you,” said Falconet. “You want Creevey to yourself for a bit. What do you hope to do with him? Convert him?”
“No,” said Adam. “I couldn’t live with him in argument for ten minutes. I don’t talk his language. If Kit Stannix can do nothing with him it’s not likely that I should succeed.”
“Agreed. Then, what do you mean to do?”
“Put myself alongside him — and keep there.”
“In the hope that fate will shuffle the cards for you?”
“In the certainty,” said Adam simply. “My job is sharpened to a point now, and that point is Creevey. He is the grit in the machine, and the grit has to be removed.”
Falconet whistled.
“Pity we don’t live in simpler times. Or that you were something of a ruffian. It would be so easy to knock him on the head. . . . I don’t say you’re not right. There are other kinds of appeals than argument, and you’re an impressive fellow when you get alongside a man. You say you want to set the stage? How d’you mean?”
“I want to isolate him — get him out of his padded life into a rougher one. I want to put him outside all the fortifications he has built and make him feel naked. The Arctic ice would be the place — or the desert — but, since these are impossible, I must find a substitute.”
Falconet grunted.
“I see. You want to reason with him as man to man — not as the amateur and the big professional.”
“I want to make facts reason with him.”
“And you believe that they will? It’s a great thing to have your grip on predestination. Well, I daresay something could be managed. Blakiston will have to get busy. Our job is to shepherd Mister Creevey out of board-rooms and special trains and big hotels into the wilderness. It might be done, for, though we are darned civilised, the wilderness is still only across the road. Count me in. I’m going to get a lot of quiet amusement out of this stunt. But it’s a large-size job. You’re right to look solemn.”
As Adam walked home along the Embankment, he stopped to lean over the parapet and watch the river bubbling with the up-running tide. He had shown a grave face to Falconet, and gravity was the key of his mood, a grave expectancy. His mind ran back to the first sight of Creevey, when he had dined with Scrope at the restaurant and Scrope had spoken significant words about the man with the big forward-thrusting head and the ardent eyes. He remembered his first meeting with him in Falconet’s room, and his own puzzled antagonism. Later meetings were telescoped into one clear impression — of something formidable, infinitely formidable, perverse and dangerous. He had no personal feeling in the matter; he neither liked nor disliked him, but regarded him as he would have regarded a thunderstorm or a cyclone, a perilous natural force against which the world must be protected.
And yet — was this man only an angel of destruction? In the talk in Berlin in August he had detected in him a fiery honesty; to one thing he would never be false, the power of reason with which he had been so nobly endowed. Loeffler, too, believed that if fortune were kind this capricious disintegrating force might be harnessed for the world’s salvation. . . . Adam had one of those moments of revelation in which he saw life narrowed to a single road moving resolutely to a goal. His mission had been to find quality, and he had found it. His task was now to release that quality for the service of mankind — or to clip its wings and render it impotent for ever.
He had a passing moment of nervousness. His opponent was now not the perversity of the world, but a single man, and that man a genius. He mistrusted his powers, till he remembered that he was only a servant of great allies. A servant — the humblest of servants. He was not architect or builder, not even a labourer with a hod, but something lowlier still, and in his lowliness was strength. As he let himself into his rooms on the quiet Temple staircase, he was in the same mood which had sent him to his knees years before in his prison cell. The sign he had asked for had been given him.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I
Mr Warren Creevey took his seat in the reserved compartment of the boat-train, and, as the whistle sounded, unfolded his Times and settled down to a slightly cynical study of the foreign page. It was his custom to travel in a modest state, with the best reservations; his private secretary was in an adjoining carriage, and somewhere in
the train his assiduous valet; he travelled so much that he was respectfully greeted by the railway company’s servants, and could count on the way being made smooth for him. The weather was sharp, so he wore a heavy fur coat, which he removed in the warm compartment. As he regarded the luxurious garment he smiled, for it reminded him of a thought which had crossed his mind as the train was starting.
A secretary and two clerks had seen him off, bringing him papers to sign and receiving his final instructions. This hasty visit to Italy was a nuisance. What had caused the Brieg-Suffati people to get suddenly at loggerheads with the authorities, when hitherto they had pulled so well together? He had a great deal of work on his hands in London and resented this interruption, even if it were only for a few days. . . . Yet, as he waved a farewell to his secretary and tipped the guard, he realised that he was not altogether displeased. Mr Creevey was not a vain man — the lack of vanity was part of his strength — but he could not but be conscious that he mattered a good deal in the world. The sable-lined coat on the seat beside him was an emblem of the place he had won.
Old General Ansell, who sat on one of his boards, had a metaphor which he was never tired of using. It was drawn from the Western Front in the war. He said it had been like a great pyramid with its point directed to the enemy. Behind the lines was a vast activity — factories like Birmingham, a network of railway lines like Crewe, camps, aviation grounds, square miles of dumps, hospitals, research laboratories, headquarters full of anxious staff officers. But as one went forward, the busy area narrowed, and the resources of civilisation grew more slender. And then at the apex of the pyramid you were back in barbarism, a few weary human beings struggling in mire and blood to assert the physical superiority which had been the pride of the cave-dweller.
