Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘Teach me the way it works.’

  ‘What sort of captain is he, this Captain Strongbow?’

  ‘I don’t know what sort of captain he is. You were an officer. You must have had to shoot.’

  They argued about her accepting the pistol and then he grudgingly agreed to show her how to shoot, ‘For the sake of public safety,’ and then he allowed himself to be interested in the pistol.

  He was partly pacified when she said she would talk unofficially to Under Secretary Bartou. She would discuss the matter of Captain Strongbow with Under Secretary Bartou but would not discuss the pistol.

  They argued.

  She said, ‘There is a distinction between a gift from an admirer and an intended bribe.’ The pistol was a gift from an admirer.

  They agreed to disagree.

  That Saturday, they bought a packet of bullets and drove out to the Bois de Veyrier. Ambrose stood behind her and held her arms for her and guided her with instruction.

  She felt the little spurt of power that firing the pistol gave to her. She loved it. She liked the explosive smell.

  She fired off the whole box, but kept the original five bullets that had come with the gun.

  She went to the tree and examined her target and the effect of the bullets on the tree. ‘Will the tree die?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh no — trees are sturdier than we,’ Ambrose said.

  Back at his apartment, under guidance from Ambrose, and still warm with excitement, she washed the barrel and oiled the pistol.

  On the Monday, she called on Under Secretary Bartou who had been a Swiss diplomat of the old school.

  He welcomed her to the League and said the usual things about the expense of living in Geneva.

  ‘I’ve been here five months now,’ she told him, in case he thought she was green.

  She explained the problem of Captain Strongbow. He seized the problem immediately. ‘What we have with this Captain Strongbow is someone desperate to have a relationship with the League which can then be used by him elsewhere as a credential. If he can, he will use it on his letterhead, will mention some sort of relationship with the League of Nations. You understand?’

  Edith nodded.

  ‘The thing to understand in dealing with such a communication,’ Under Secretary Bartou went on, ‘is that we must avoid confirming any of his claims. An unscrupulous person will write calling himself, say, the Commissioner of the World Police, and if we reply addressing him as the “Commissioner of World Police”, he will twist this into an acknowledgement by us of his status. You have been entrapped perhaps?’ Under Secretary Bartou asked how she had communicated with this Captain Strongbow.

  ‘In a street. At least, in a café conversation. I said for him to make a submission to the League, yes, I suppose.’ She was colouring with embarrassment, more strongly felt in front of Under Secretary Bartou than in front of Cooper, an embarrassment not only of diplomatic naïvety.

  ‘You may find that he now talks of “having been invited to make a submission to the League of Nations”. I wouldn’t worry,’ he said, perceiving her embarrassment, ‘we are all subjected to it. The best protection is to minute these encounters. Treat them as a letter not answered.’

  In her favour, though, she had sensed back in the café that she was being used. Her instincts had been right. Damnation.

  Under Secretary Bartou said, ‘You must now minute your meeting and have nothing more to do with him. To reply or not to reply, by letter or by the telephone, is always a diplomatic act.’

  He stood up and she stood up, and they shook hands. She thanked him for his advice.

  Later she realised that she hadn’t liked the tone in Bartou’s advice. For all her respect, she resisted a little. It sounded like instruction, not advice. But then, he was trained in the diplomacy of the old school. She was of the new school of diplomacy — open diplomacy. She fiercely believed that the obscure issues from which international quarrels arise had to be dragged out into the light of day and the creation of a public opinion made possible. Diplomats and politicians had to learn to face the public and make themselves understood by the public on matters of foreign policy. No more secret treaties. But she had to keep back her irritation because she was, if not green, still a New Girl about the place.

  She saw that Under Secretary Bartou and maybe even Cooper were worried about minor infractions to the dignity of the League and were, in that sense, hobbled in the most limiting way. They ought, she thought, to develop the philosophies and procedures of the League in a more enterprising way if they wished to escape from diplomatic restraint. Even if there were risks, the League had to take them. There was something she badly wanted to learn: she wanted to learn what made an idea tenable and what made an idea untenable. Politically. Diplomatically. She wanted to know about the assessing of ideas which were ‘unprecedented’. Under Secretary Bartou and Cooper wanted to follow only precedented ideas. Golly, the League itself was unprecedented. She recalled something that Balfour had said, that in foreign affairs it was always politically safer to do an absurd thing with precedent than to make oneself responsible for an unprecedented act of wisdom. She couldn’t remember, though, which position Balfour approved, the unprecedented or the precedented. But she was interested in Ideas Ahead of Their Time and Ideas Whose Time Had Arrived, as well as Seizing the Moment.

  Overnight she decided that she had to make a name for herself at the League and contribute to the development of this new temper. Henceforth, as a rule of personal behaviour, she would do the opposite to that which she imagined Cooper doing. Or, for that matter, the way her dear friend Ambrose would act, he being another old style, British Foreign Office person. She put Under Secretary Bartou to one side because he was a different fish to them both.

  At work next day she opened the file and looked at Strongbow’s telegram and saw that it had been sent from the Hôtel Richemond. Taking a deep, deep breath, Edith had herself put through, by telephone, to the Hôtel Richemond and to ‘Captain’ Strongbow. Following Under Secretary Bartou’s advice on this point at least, she pondered how to address him without granting him his title. She reached not Strongbow, but an eager-voiced Mr Kennedy, and she made an appointment to see Strongbow.

  She wanted to see Strongbow and establish for herself, by her own tests, whether his ideas were tenable, regardless of the soundness of the man. If Captain Strongbow’s ideas were honourable and valid, she wanted to advance those ideas. She wanted to find a way that would allow her to go into the jungle of the world Out There and mix with its animals and still keep unimpaired her analytical self-respect, and the loftiness of the League. She wanted to be a person who could arbitrate and respond to a vital idea of the times.

  Her nerve deserted her for a second and she considered that maybe she was not destined for diplomacy: maybe she was someone who should work in the field. She sometimes yearned to be able to ‘do something’ — to bandage, to ladle soup, to fight malaria, to install wind pumps in Africa, even to fight in just combat.

  But her nerve returned and she resumed her course of action. Further, she wanted to rebuke Strongbow for misusing her.

  At the Richemond she told the desk clerk that she was there for an appointment with Mr Strongbow. The desk clerk said a porter would take her up to his rooms. She would rather have met with him in the lobby.

  In his rooms she was pleased to see a woman, who was introduced as his wife Athena. Athena was dressed in a leather flying outfit with calf boots. Used, Edith guessed, as a motoring outfit. Why wear it in a Hôtel room? Did she not have any other clothing? They were drinking champagne. It did not feel like diplomatic intercourse, at all.

  She refused the offer of a glass of champagne. In what she thought was a formal voice, she raised the matter of the use of her name in a communication to the Secretary-General. Strongbow apologised. She hunted around for a form of rebuke, but none came to mind and she felt she had to leave it at that.

  She wanted now to somehow test hi
s ideas and find if there was reason or evidence behind any of them. She had devised three ways. The first was the Way of Numbers: is there a statistic? Butler had said that a reliable supply of facts and statistics will in itself be a powerful aid to peace. They were the only escape from the guess, the national lie, the false claim, the delusion, and the wish. Statistics had no nationality.

  The second was the Way of Recognition: did he have any status in the eyes of anyone or any organisations which she respected?

  The third was more difficult to use and she was uncertain of it. She called it the Way of Aura: was there an aura about this man Strongbow or his organisation which she could detect and which would substitute for the absence of the above?

  Before she could apply her ways, Strongbow called for tea and said that before they talked about anything else, he had a proposition to announce.

  Because it was difficult to talk seriously while waiting for tea, she thanked him for the pistol and made a half-hearted gesture of returning it as an extravagant gift from one stranger to another. But the mention of the pistol and her primly thanking him for it, seemed to make for a fanciful atmosphere and anyhow she’d already fired it. The unreality of the situation was taken further when Athena showed Edith her pistol, what she called a ‘point two-five calibre’. She said it was a purse pistol. Edith took it and handled it. It had an engraved handle inlaid with silver and ivory. Every girl should have a pistol of silver and ivory.

  ‘It’s truly beautiful,’ she said.

  Talk about pistols took over for a time.

  Edith lied and told them that her pistol would go into the League of Nation’s armoury. Maybe, in a sense, it was the first weapon in the armoury. They engaged in small talk about her background, kangaroos, the condition of the roads of Australia, and she was told about the team’s planned trip across Europe and Asia with the motor-cars.

  The tea arrived and Strongbow said he would now make his proposition.

  He outlined a parade through Geneva to launch the people’s ballot. ‘We want you to ride with us because we want a woman in every vehicle.’

  ‘That is out of the question.’

  ‘Don’t rush to say no. I swear that you will not be advertised as a representative of the League. You will simply represent Womanhood and add, may I say, a refinement and loveliness to the occasion.’

  Edith shrugged off the flattery along with the preposterous idea of the parade.

  Athena said she was recruiting women to be representatives of Womanhood in each vehicle.

  ‘I am afraid,’ Edith said, in her official voice, ‘that it is out of the question.’

  But she was brought face-to-face with a persuasive line. ‘We must all come up with trail-blazing ideas for untried times,’ said Strongbow. He raised a hand for a pause in the discussion. ‘Before you make up your mind, Ambassador Berry, there is a warning. This could be a dangerous mission. We will probably draw their fire.’

  ‘Draw fire? I don’t follow. And I am not an ambassador.’

  ‘In my eyes and in the eyes of the world, you are one of the New Ambassadors, an ambassador of the planet. This is no easy thing we do — if the cavalcade attracts the notice of dangerous elements and brings them into the open, we could expect that they may truly try disruption or worse.’

  Edith saw herself being brave. The voice of her old headmistress said, ‘We choose the way of peril because it offers the possibility of glory. And if we fail we will be remembered as having behaved well.’

  Strongbow boomed on, ‘However if that be so, then, so be it. We will have exposed them and they will, we hope, be caught. Better the bombs, if they be thrown, be thrown at us in our motor-cars than at the vulnerable League Secretariat.’

  Edith mustered herself and tried to apply her new ways. ‘How many people are there against the League and what is the name of their organisation?’ she asked, using the Way of Numbers. ‘Round figures will do.’ She had been waiting for places in the conversation to apply the tests, feeling a growing apprehension that she would not be able to find convincing answers which would allow her behaviour to proceed with prudent certainty. Maybe behaviour could only proceed with confidence, never certainty. Maybe behaviour proceeded on the footing of something even less than confidence. She saw now why people needed doctrines and dogma and effrontery to propel them into action. Maybe the will to action went by hunch and by lurch more than by the Way of Numbers.

  ‘Can we take your silence as meaning assent?’ asked Strongbow. ‘Or at least serious consideration?

  She looked up and out from her thoughts. The man had not answered her. What did one do now?

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘It is truly out of the question. As an officer of the League there is no way. And you have not answered my enquiry.’

  Instead of answering, Strongbow asked her to promise him one thing.

  ‘What is that, Captain Strongbow?’ Oh damn. She’d been trying to get through the conversation without granting him his title. She told herself she was granting it only as an honorific.

  ‘I want you to promise not to make up your mind. Not to give a decision now. Go away and do not give an answer until twenty-four hours have lapsed.’

  ‘I would like the evidence,’ she asked again, ‘of this collusion against the League, in round numbers.’ She ploughed on with her enquiry. ‘Maybe you could supply me with references — someone who knows of your organisation?’

  ‘Evidence is for juries,’ he said, rising to his feet. He went to stand at the window with his back to them, booted feet apart, hands behind his back. ‘We are at the visionary stage of mankind. I am a vision maker.’

  She stared at him, trying to decide whether he had aura. He obviously had no statistics.

  It was more swagger than aura.

  ‘Not for twenty-four hours — no decision,’ he said, turning from the window and standing before her. ‘Agreed?’

  ‘I will consider the matter further.’

  ‘Grand,’ he said. ‘Grand. I sense that I am talking to a visionary.’

  ‘I am first and foremost an officer of the League.’

  ‘And we salute that,’ he said, ‘we salute that.’ And he did, quite solemnly.

  She stood and he led her to the door. She found herself then in the lobby, saying goodbye to Athena, who had accompanied her down in the lift.

  ‘I know,’ Athena said, ‘that you will dare to be.’

  Edith then found herself walking towards the Palais Wilson.

  She thought that the language of the group was excessive, but she put it down to their American manner. She was disappointed in herself, for she had found out nothing which would allow her to assess them. Were they a circus, and was that bad? Were they charlatans? They stayed at the Richemond in a suite of rooms — that was something. They drank champagne during the day. What did that mean? Did Captain Strongbow have aura?

  But wasn’t that what made her different from the others? Strongbow had an American flair and that was something else. She could join with the American flair more readily than she could join with the diplomacy of the old world.

  She turned and walked back to the Hôtel Richemond. The League may be against secret diplomacy but it was not against confidentiality in action. This was her confidential mission of sorts. Cooper had implied that she should investigate this man and his proposals. I must dare, Edith said to herself. The way to investigate was to go into the field.

  She asked the desk clerk to call Captain Strongbow and to tell him to meet her down in the lounge.

  Nor would she be told by Captain Strongbow how long to wait before making a decision. She was not one of those people who took twenty-four hours to make up her mind. She would make it now. She would make her decisions, however, on the neutral ground of the lobby.

  The Captain, Athena, and Mr Kennedy, all came down the stairs.

  She told Captain Strongbow that she would ride in the motor-car.

  ‘Grand,’ said Strongbow.

&nbs
p; ‘Why, that’s terrific,’ said Athena.

  ‘Welcome aboard,’ said Mr Kennedy.

  ‘You are a visionary, but more — you are a dauntless visionary,’ said Captain Strongbow. He looked at his watch. ‘And you made a decision in twenty-four minutes, not twenty-four hours.’ He looked to Athena and to Mr Kennedy and said, ‘This is a woman who acts with alacrity.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Mr Kennedy. ‘Indeed she does. With dispatch.’

  Captain Strongbow turned to her and said, ‘I will leave you with Athena to talk details. Thank you for the vote of confidence.’ Captain Strongbow and Mr Kennedy both shook her hand strongly.

  Athena and she sat in the lounge, and Athena told her that the plan was for each woman in the cavalcade to wear a national costume.

  ‘National costume?’ Edith felt sick. She did not like fancy dress at any time. ‘Australia has no national costume.’

  ‘You can be a cowgirl from the golden west. I know that Australia has cowboys. They must, then, have cowgirls.’

  ‘A cowgirl?’

  ‘A cowgirl. I myself am dressing as a Hawaiian. In a grass skirt.’

  A grass skirt.

  Edith’s spirit shied. She had seen it more as, well, a sober parade of serious concern. ‘I cannot see myself dressed up. Dressed up as a cowgirl.’ Saying that made her feel staid.

  Athena said that they had to put on a show. These were show business times. She said that Captain Strongbow often said the League of Nations was the ‘biggest show in town’.

  Edith didn’t quite see the League or the world ballot as a ‘show’.

  Athena explained that there was a time for attracting attention to an idea and that anything that served that purpose was right. ‘I would take off my clothes for this idea,’ Athena said.

  Edith privately thought that Athena would take off her clothes for just about any persuasive reason. Athena had something of the chorus girl about her.

  Edith was about to get up and go, once again, and once again she was filled with exasperation, disappointed with her reserve. ‘Is there any other costume? Apart from cowgirl?’