by John Buchan
This was much heavier metal than the faithful of Sarcophagus and Jumpersville. The agitation was now of national importance; it had attained ‘normalcy’, as you might say, the ‘normalcy’ of the periodic American movement. Conventions were summoned and addressed by divines whose names were known even in New York. Senators and congressmen took a hand, and J. Constantine Buttrick, the silver trumpet of Wisconsin, gave tongue, and was heard by several million wireless outfits. Articles even appeared about it in the intellectual weeklies. Congress wasn’t in session, which was fortunate, but Washington began to be uneasy, for volunteers for the crusade were enrolling fast. The C.C. was compelled to carry long despatches, and Ladas had to issue them to the English Press, which usually printed them in obscure corners with the names misspelt. England is always apathetic about American news, and, besides, she had a big strike on her hands at the time. Those of us who get American press-clippings realised that quite a drive was starting to do something to make Moscow respectful to religion, but we believed that it would be dropped before any serious action could be taken. Meanwhile Zinovieff and Trotsky carried on as usual, and we expected any day to hear that the Patriarch had been shot and buried in the prison yard.
Suddenly Fate sent Roper Willinck mooning round to my office. I suppose Willinck is the least known of our great men, for you fellows have never even heard his name. But he is a great man in his queer way, and I believe his voice carries farther than any living journalist’s, though most people do not know who is speaking. He doesn’t write much in the Press here, only now and then a paper in the heavy monthlies, but he is the prince of special correspondents, and his ‘London Letters’ in every known tongue are printed from Auckland to Seattle. He seems to have found the common denominator of style which is calculated to interest the whole human family. On the Continent he is the only English journalist whose name is known to the ordinary reader - rather like Maximilian Harden before the war. In America they reckon him a sort of Pope, and his stuff is syndicated in all the country papers. His enthusiasms make a funny hotch-potch — the League of Nations and the British Empire, racial purism and a sentimental socialism; but he is a devout Catholic, and Russia had become altogether too much for him. That was why I thought he would be interested in McGurks’ stunt, of which he had scarcely heard; so he sat down in an armchair and, during the consumption of five caporal cigarettes, studied my clippings.
I have never seen a man so roused. ‘I see light,’ he cried, pushing his double glasses up on his forehead. ‘Martendale, this is a revelation. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings... Master Ridley, Master Ridley, we shall this day kindle a fire which will never be extinguished...’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘The thing will fizzle out in a solemn protest from Washington to Moscow with which old Trotsky will light his pipe. It has got into the hands of highbrows, and in a week will be clothed in the jargon of the State Department, and the home towns will wonder what has been biting them.’
‘We must retrieve it,’ he said softly. ‘Get it back to the village green and the prayer-meeting. It was the prayer-meeting, remember, which brought America into the war.’
‘But how? McGurks has worked that beat to death.’
‘McGurks!’ he cried contemptuously. ‘The time is past for slobber, my son. What they want is the prophetic, the apocalyptic, and by the bones of Habbakuk they shall have it. I am going to solemnise the remotest parts of the great Republic, and then,’ he smiled serenely, ‘I shall interpret that solemnity to the world. First the fact and then the moral — that’s the lay-out.’
He stuffed my clippings into his pocket and took himself off, and there was that in his eye which foreboded trouble. Someone was going to have to sit up when Willinck looked like that. My hope was that it would be Moscow, but the time was getting terribly short. Any day might bring the news that the Patriarch had gone to his reward.
I heard nothing for several weeks, and then Punk suddenly became active, and carried some extraordinary stuff. It was mostly extracts from respectable papers in the Middle West and the South, reports of meetings which seemed to have worked themselves into hysteria, and rumours of secret gatherings of young men which suggested the Ku-Klux-Klan. Moscow had a Press agency of its own in London, and it began to worry Ladas for more American news. Ladas in turn worried the C.C., but the C.C. was reticent. There was a Movement, we were told, but the Government had it well in hand, and we might disregard the scare-stuff Punk was sending; everything that was important and reliable would be in its own service. I thought I detected Willinck somewhere behind the scenes, and tried to get hold of him, but learned that he was out of town.
One afternoon, however, he dropped in, and I noticed that his highboned face was leaner than ever, but that his cavernous eyes were happy. ‘“The good work goes cannily on”,’ he said — he was always quoting — and he flung at me a bundle of green clippings.
They were articles of his own in the American Press, chiefly the Sunday editions, and I noticed that he had selected the really influential country papers — one in Tennessee, one in Kentucky, and a batch from the Corn States.
I was staggered by the power of his stuff — Willinck had never to my knowledge written like this before. He didn’t rave about Bolshevik crimes — people were sick of that — and he didn’t bang the religious drum or thump the harmonium. McGurks had already done that to satiety. He quietly took it for granted that the crusade had begun and that plain men all over the earth, who weren’t looking for trouble, felt obliged to start out and abolish an infamy or never sleep peacefully in their beds again. He assumed that presently from all corners of the Christian world there would be an invading army moving towards Moscow, a thing that Governments could not check, a people’s rising as irresistible as the change of the seasons. Assuming this, he told them just exactly what they would see.
I can’t do justice to Willinck by merely describing these articles; I ought to have them here to read to you. Noble English they were, and as simple as the Psalms... He pictured the constitution of the army, every kind of tongue and dialect and class, with the same kind of discipline as Cromwell’s New Model — Ironsides every one of them, rational, moderate-minded fanatics, the most dangerous kind. It was like Paradise Lost - Michael going out against Belial... And then the description of Russia — a wide grey world, all pale colours and watery lights, broken villages, tattered little towns ruled by a few miscreants with rifles, railway tracks red with rust, ruinous great palaces plastered over with obscene posters, starving hopeless people, children with old vicious faces... God knows where he got the stuff from - mainly his macabre imagination, but I daresay there was a lot of truth in the details, for he had his own ways of acquiring knowledge.
But the end was the masterpiece. He said that the true rulers were not those whose names appeared in the papers, but one or two secret madmen who sat behind the screen and spun their bloody webs. He described the crusaders breaking through shell after shell, like one of those Chinese boxes which you open only to find another inside till you end with a thing like a pea. There were layers of Jew officials and Lett mercenaries and camouflaging journalists, and always as you went deeper the thing became more inhuman and the air more fetid. At the end you had the demented Mongol — that was a good touch for the Middle West — the incarnation of the backworld of the Orient. Willinck only hinted at this ultimate camarilla, but his hints were gruesome. To one of them he gave the name of Uriel — a kind of worm-eaten archangel of the Pit, but the worst he called Glubet. He must have got the word out of a passage in Catullus which is not read in schools, and he made a shuddering thing of it — the rancid toad-man, living among the half-lights and blood, adroit and sleepless as sin, but cracking now and then into idiot laughter.
You may imagine how this took hold of the Bible Belt. I never made out what exactly happened, but I have no doubt that there were the rudiments of one of those mass movements, before which Governments and newspapers, combines and Press ag
encies, Wall Street and Lombard Street and common prudence are helpless. You could see it in the messages C.C. sent and its agitated service cables to its people. The Moscow Agency sat on our doorstep and bleated for more news, and all the while Punk was ladling out fire-water to every paper that would take it.
‘So much for the facts,’ Willinck said calmly. ‘Now I proceed to point the moral in the proper quarters!’
If he was good at kindling a fire he was better at explaining just how hot it was and how fast it would spread. I have told you that he was about the only English journalist with a Continental reputation. Well, he proceeded to exploit that reputation in selected papers which he knew would cross the Russian frontier. He was busy in the Finnish and Latvian and Lithuanian Press, he appeared in the chief Polish daily, and in Germany his stuff was printed in the one big Berlin paper and — curiously enough — in the whole financial chain. Willinck knew just how and where to strike. The line he took was very simple. He quietly explained what was happening in America and the British Dominions — that the outraged conscience of Christiandom had awakened among simple folk, and that nothing on earth could hold it. It was a Puritan crusade, the most deadly kind. From every corner of the globe believers were about to assemble, ready to sacrifice themselves to root out an infamy. This was none of your Denikins and Koltchaks and Czarist émigré affairs; it was the world’s Christian democracy, and a business democracy. No flag-waving or shouting, just a cold steady determination to get the job done, with ample money and men and an utter carelessness of what they spent on both. Cautious Governments might try to obstruct, but the people would compel them to toe the line. It was a militant League of Nations, with the Bible in one hand and the latest brand of munition in the other.
We had a feverish time at Ladas in those days. The British Press was too much occupied with the strike to pay full attention, but the Press of every other country was on its hind legs. Presently things began to happen. The extracts from Pravda and Izvestia, which we got from Riga and Warsaw, became every day more like the howling of epileptic wolves: Then came the news that Moscow had ordered a very substantial addition to the Red Army. I telephoned this item to Willinck, and he came round to see me.
‘The wind is rising,’ he said. ‘The fear of the Lord is descending on the tribes, and that we know is the beginning of wisdom.’
I observed that Moscow had certainly got the wind up, but that I didn’t see why. ‘You don’t mean to say that you have got them to believe in your precious crusade.’
He nodded cheerfully. ‘Why not? My dear Martendale, you haven’t studied the mentality of these gentry as I have. Do you realise that the favourite reading of the Russian peasant used to be Milton? Before the war you could buy a translation of Paradise Lost at every book kiosk in every country fair. These rootless intellectuals have cast off all they could, but at the back of their heads the peasant superstition remains. They are afraid in their bones of a spirit that they think is in Puritanism. That’s why this American business worries them so. They think they are a match for Rome, and they wouldn’t have minded if the racket had been started by the Knights of Columbus or that kind of show. But they think it comes from the meeting-house, and that scares them cold.’
‘Hang it all,’ I said, ‘they must know the soft thing modern Puritanism is — all slushy hymns and inspirational advertising.’
‘Happily they don’t. And I’m not sure that their ignorance is not wiser than your knowledge, my emancipated friend. I’m inclined to think that something may yet come out of the Bible Christian that will surprise the world... But not this time. I fancy the trick has been done. You might let me know as soon as you hear anything.’ And he moved off, whistling contentedly through his teeth.
He was right. Three days later we got the news from Warsaw, and the Moscow Agency confirmed it. The Patriarch had been released and sent across the frontier, and was now being coddled and feted in Poland. I rang up Willinck, and listened to his modest Nunc dimittis over the telephone.
He said he was going to take a holiday and go into the country to sleep. He pointed out for my edification that the weak things of the world — meaning himself — could still confound the strong, and he advised me to reconsider the foundations of my creed in the light of this surprising miracle.
Well, that is my story. We heard no more of the crusade in America, except that the Fundamentalists seemed to have got a second wind from it and started a large-scale heresy hunt. Several English bishops said that the release of the Patriarch was an answer to prayer; our Press pointed out how civilisation, if it spoke with one voice, would be listened to even in Russia; and Labour papers took occasion to enlarge on the fundamental reasonableness and urbanity of the Moscow Government.
Personally I think that Willinck drew the right moral. But the main credit really belonged to something a great deal weaker than he —— the aged Tubb, now sleeping under a painted cast-iron gravestone among the dust-devils and meerkats of Rhenosterspruit.
Sing a Song of Sixpence
Pall Mall Magazine, 1928
The effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. Something, we feel, should happen; we know not what, yet we proceed in quest of it.
R.L. STEVENSON
LEITHEN’S FACE HAD that sharp chiselling of the jaw and that compression of the lips which seem to follow upon high legal success. Also an overdose of German gas in 1918 had given his skin a habitual pallor, so that he looked not unhealthy, but notably urban. As a matter of fact he was one of the hardest men I have ever known, but a chance observer might have guessed from his complexion that he rarely left the pavements.
Burminster, who had come back from a month in the grass countries with a face like a deep-sea mariner’s, commented on this one evening.
‘How do you manage always to look the complete Cit, Ned?’ he asked. ‘You’re as much a Londoner as a Parisian is a Parisian, if you know what I mean.’
Leithen said that he was not ashamed of it, and he embarked on a eulogy of the metropolis. In London you met sooner or later everybody you had ever known; you could lay your hand on any knowledge you wanted; you could pull strings that controlled the innermost Sahara and the topmost Pamirs. Romance lay in wait for you at every street corner. It was the true City of the Caliphs.
‘That is what they say,’ said Sandy Arbuthnot sadly, ‘but I never found it so. I yawn my head off in London. Nothing amusing ever finds me out — I have to go and search for it, and it usually costs the deuce of a lot.’
‘I once stumbled upon a pretty generous allowance of romance,’ said Leithen, ‘and it cost me precisely sixpence.’
Then he told us this story.
It happened a good many years ago, just when I was beginning to get on at the Bar. I spent busy days in court and chambers, but I was young and had a young man’s appetite for society, so I used to dine out most nights and go to more balls than were good for me. It was pleasant after a heavy day to dive into a different kind of life. My rooms at the time were in Down Street, the same house as my present one, only two floors higher up.
On a certain night in February I was dining in Bryanston Square with the Nantleys. Mollie Nantley was an old friend, and used to fit me as an unattached bachelor into her big dinners. She was a young hostess and full of ambition, and one met an odd assortment of people at her house. Mostly political, of course, but a sprinkling of art and letters, and any visiting lion that happened to be passing through. Mollie was a very innocent lion-hunter, but she had a partiality for the breed.
I don’t remember much about the dinner, except that the principal guest had failed her. Mollie was loud in her lamentations. He was a South American President who had engineered a very pretty coup d’état the year before, and was now in England on some business concerning the finances of his State. You may remember his name — Ramon Pelem —— he made rather a stir in
the world for a year or two. I had read about him in the papers, and had looked forward to meeting him, for he had won his way to power by extraordinary boldness and courage, and he was quite young. There was a story that he was partly English and that his grandfather’s name had been Pelham. I don’t know what truth there was in that, but he knew England well and Englishmen liked him.
Well, he had cried off on the telephone an hour before, and Mollie was grievously disappointed. Her other guests bore the loss with more fortitude, for I expect they thought he was a brand of cigar.
In those days dinners began earlier and dances later than they do today. I meant to leave soon, go back to my rooms and read briefs, and then look in at Lady Samplar’s dance between eleven and twelve. So at nine-thirty I took my leave.
Jervis, the old butler, who had been my ally from boyhood, was standing on the threshold, and in the square there was a considerable crowd now thinning away. I asked what the trouble was.
‘There’s been an arrest, Mr Edward,’ he said in an awestruck voice. ‘It ‘appened when I was serving coffee in the dining-room, but our Albert saw it all. Two foreigners, he said - proper rascals by their look — were took away by the police just outside this very door. The constables was very nippy and collared them before they could use their pistols — but they ‘ad pistols on them and no mistake. Albert says he saw the weapons.’
‘Did they propose to burgle you?’ I asked.
‘I cannot say, Mr Edward. But I shall give instructions for a very careful lock-up to-night.’
