Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  Ambrose went on to propose a duty roster for week-end and nights and the creation of a bedroom at the Palais Wilson for the duty officer.

  He paused, went to the door and rapped. The door opened, and to the surprise of the meeting, Jules limpingly wheeled in a model of the bell alarm system. It was mounted on a mobile trolley which Ambrose had borrowed from one of the local street vendors. Jules must have been primed and waiting outside. ‘Thank you, Jules.’

  Jules audibly muttered, ‘For peace, anything.’ Everyone was used to Jules’ irreverence.

  Ambrose stood and went over to his demonstration. ‘When the telephonists leave at 8 p.m. they will connect an electric bell running from the telegram tube to the concierge’s desk. If a telegram does arrive, the cartridge carrying a telegram will automatically start the bell ringing.’

  Ambrose directed their attention to a length of telegram tube he had set up. He took a telegram cartridge loaded with a telegram and dropped it down the neck of the tube. It came out the other end and hit a trigger which rang a bell set up on a tray connected by wires and held by Jules at the other side of the room. The bell continued to ring until Ambrose cut it off.

  ‘To make sure that the cartridges do not become stuck in the tube on their way to the Secretariat, my clever mechanics have arranged that one of the lamps of the tube will remain lighted in the concierge’s office until the telegram has arrived safely to the duty officer.’

  Ambrose again demonstrated the flashing light. ‘And that, gentlemen, is my apparatus.’ There was some light clapping.

  ‘Boys will be boys,’ Dame Rachel whispered to her. Edith smiled broadly relishing the rapport with Dame Rachel but her smile also carried a private amusement sparked off by Dame Rachel’s remark, and a voice in her head said, ‘And boys will also be girls.’

  There was much approval of Ambrose’s memorandum and after discussion of costs and so forth, it was adopted unanimously. A triumph.

  ‘I think the League needs a secret code as well,’ Ambrose said in conclusion.

  ‘Oh dear me,’ said Dame Rachel under her breath, again sharing it with Edith, smiling at her in collusion, although Edith felt torn between the collusion and her attachment to Ambrose.

  Sir Eric ruled that the question of codes should be looked into by the Under Secretary Bartou and a report made to the next meeting.

  Following on Ambrose’s submission, Sir Eric reminded them of the immense effectiveness of the League when its political workings were combined with the speed of the telegraph.

  ‘Some of you newcomers to the League were not with us during the Bulgarian crisis …’ He glanced at Edith. ‘At one in the afternoon I received an appeal from Bulgaria. Greek troops had crossed the frontier and were battling their way into Bulgaria. Four days earlier there’d been a quarrel over a card game at the border post at Demir-Kapou. A Greek soldier had been killed and a Greek officer coming up to settle the matter under a white flag of truce had been gunned down. I telephoned Monsieur Briand, then President of Council, and urged him to telegraph both sides, asking them to cease hostilities and withdraw their forces, which he did. Both sides immediately complied with our telegraph. Invasion orders were countermanded. This demonstrates the amazing power of the telegraph. After the telegrams arrived the troops on both sides remained frozen in position. We then issued our first League ultimatum — again by telegraph — that both sides must withdraw to their borders within sixty hours. British, French, and Italian military attachés in the Balkans were dispatched by the League to supervise the withdrawal. The war was over in three days.’

  There were courteous murmurs of pleasure, and a few said, ‘Well done, Sir Eric.’ One or two tapped the table in affirmation. ‘Well done, Sir Eric,’ she said along with the others, in a voice that could hardly be heard.

  ‘Not “Well done, Sir Eric”,’ Sir Eric said, sternly, ‘well done, Sir Telegraph.’

  They laughed like school children at the end of class. He closed the meeting.

  The complaint from New Zealand and the Stockholm Commission on the Lighting of Coasts had not been reached and were put over to the next meeting. She knew about the New Zealand complaints that the mail always got to them too late and that Sir Eric was paid five times more than their Prime Minister.

  As the meeting was breaking up Dame Rachel said, ‘Sir Eric — may I quickly raise a small matter — or what I take to be a small matter?’

  Sir Eric looked at the pocket watch which he had on the table in front of him. ‘If we can be brief, Dame Rachel.’

  ‘It’s about this strange cavalcade which went through Geneva last week.’

  People were gathering their papers together and rather eager to go but there were chuckles at the mention of the cavalcade.

  Edith coloured and shuffled her papers. Ye gods, please, no.

  Dame Rachel said, ‘This Captain Strongbow had a military motor-car and a girl dressed I think as a cowboy. Other “girls” were involved. I have no recollection, Sir Eric, that this Captain Strongbow had ever obtained any recognition from us. But his publicity material claims so.’

  Under Secretary Bartou gave a comradely glance over at Edith. She wondered whether he was implying that she should say something about the matter. At least he wasn’t mad at her for not having sat with him. She tried to avoid Ambrose’s eyes, realising that the mention of the cowgirl would have caused a penny to drop. She eventually glanced across. He had a strange expression on his face but it was affectionate and he’d obviously made a connection. He wagged his finger in a gesture which said, ‘Just you wait, young lady.’ His comradeship didn’t help much and she filled with apprehension and fiddled with her notes, eyes down.

  ‘Oh, we mustn’t worry ourselves with every exhibitionist who comes to town,’ Sir Eric said, himself putting together his papers to leave.

  Good. No, we must not.

  ‘I felt that it should be made clear in the Journal de Genève?’ Dame Rachel continued.

  ‘If you think so, Dame Rachel,’ said Sir Eric, agreeing, Edith could tell, only for the sake of avoiding further discussion. He looked over at Comert. ‘Could you arrange for a statement to be issued?’

  Edith waited to hear if anything else was to be said, whether Dame Rachel was now going to point at her and say, ‘Finally, Sir Eric, here in this very room, seated beside me, is the traitor, the person who masqueraded as a silly cowgirl and who besmirched the good name of the League of Nations.’ She saw the members of the haute direction in unison shouting, ‘Off with her head.’

  Nothing more was said. The meeting was over.

  Dame Rachel said to Edith, ‘Did you see this cavalcade?’

  Edith was able to answer with technical honesty that no, she had not ‘seen’ the cavalcade.

  ‘The League could end up attracting every crackpot idea and person in the world to Geneva,’ Dame Rachel said crossly.

  ‘I suppose it’s our job to assess them.’

  ‘I sincerely hope not.’

  Relieved of the apprehension of being implicated in the Strongbow matter, Edith now imagined creating a sensation by defending the ideas of Captain Strongbow. However, she knew that it would be beyond her, and anyhow, the meeting was over.

  Sir Eric knocked his pipe on the desk and called for attention. ‘Sorry, people, but there is one further matter. Huston has asked that, during the Assembly, dogs should not be brought into the building. Staff should keep their dogs at home for the two weeks of the Assembly, and that includes section mascots. Some of our less stalwart delegates, I am told, have a phobia about dogs.’

  More laughter.

  Edith felt sweat on her back from her nervousness about the Strongbow matter and she still avoided Under Secretary Bartou’s eyes.

  The meeting broke up at 7.30 p.m, although some of the Directors stayed chatting. Dame Rachel again complimented her on her contribution to the meeting. Although she wasn’t looking, she sensed Under Secretary Bartou coming over to her. She forced herself to
look up at him, deciding that she wouldn’t try to explain why she’d sat with Dame Rachel when she’d said she was going to sit with Ambrose. He congratulated her on her contribution about tendering. ‘It is probably uniquely historic.’

  ‘Historic?’

  ‘You got to give an answer on a problem which probably happens once in a lifetime.’ He smiled. ‘Well done. Good night.’

  She walked back to her office with Ambrose. ‘Cowgirl scandalises League of Nations,’ he said. ‘Very, very naughty. I won’t ask questions. It was very naughty. You take my breath away, Edith Campbell Berry — or it is E. Campbell Berry now? — you take my breath away.’

  ‘You can be the cowgirl next time,’ she said, trying to be self-confident.

  ‘Thank you. So I take it that you were the cowgirl of the cavalcade mentioned?’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  ‘Amazing. I think, in future, we’ll keep costumes for the bedroom. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  The rest of the staff had gone, and she felt a tingle of importance at still being around. She liked it when there were only a few of them working late and she especially loved it when they had to work through the night and came out into quai Woodrow Wilson to see dawn breaking over the lake and all went for a breakfast together in a café. She envied the people in Documents who often worked all night to get the minutes and reports circulated by 9 a.m. and had such wonderful esprit de corps.

  Ambrose and she decided to go off for a champagne celebration of the acceptance of his memorandum on emergency procedures, and Ambrose graciously in turn added, ‘And to celebrate your display of acumen. But not, not to celebrate your display of audacity.’

  She said she wanted to be known for her diplomacy, not for her commercial acumen.

  ‘You will be. Give it time.’

  They collected Florence who was also working late.

  On the way out, Edith teased Ambrose about making a distinction between a conference and congress. ‘Satow no longer thinks it matters. I nearly corrected you in the meeting.’

  Florence, obviously impressed, said, ‘Edith! You’ve been swotting.’

  Florence’s praise caused her to smirk inwardly.

  Ambrose came back, ‘Ah, but Sibert does. On these matters of diplomatic distinction, I’m a Sibert man. I think it’s good to know what a thing is when you see its name. Really, if one was to be a stickler, which I am, congress should be used only when plenipotentiaries meet to make peace.’

  Edith laughed with another, different sensation of gratification. She was glad that Ambrose had made a comeback at her and she was glad to defer to him. She told how as she’d gone into the meeting, Under Secretary Bartou said — Edith mimicked his voice — ‘“Remember, Berry, a meeting is a diplomatic endeavour: you pursue interests: you exercise comity.” The problem was that I didn’t know what comity was. So I couldn’t exercise it. I hope he didn’t notice.’

  They laughed with her.

  ‘Comity is courtesy, Edith dear, those courtesies granted among nations. Expressed through protocol.’

  ‘And protocol is formalised goodwill,’ Edith said.

  ‘Correct. Ten out of ten. Did he also say that diplomacy is part of a country’s arsenal?’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’ She realised how much she loved to relax in deference to Ambrose. Oh, she did. Though as they walked to the Beau-Rivage, she realised that her deference to Ambrose was, this day, not quite firm. In the beginning of their relationship, it had been there strongly. She realised she was frightened now that Ambrose might fail; she no longer had the same unquestioning confidence in him that she had at the beginning. Perhaps it was Dame Rachel saying ‘Boys will be boys’ while she’d been quietly cheering him on. Dame Rachel’s remark had caused her to see Ambrose slightly differently. She couldn’t say exactly how. Maybe today he had gone too much into details over emergency procedures in an almost embarrassing way. The bell business. Jules wheeling in the scale model. No. She worried too much. Today had been a triumph for him.

  She moaned to Florence about how she’d been seen as a horse-trader and not a diplomat at the meeting.

  Florence said, ‘The point is, dear Edith, you were noticed. Now, both of you, tell me what happened. Tell the gossip — is Germany in? Tell all — what exactly did you both do?!’

  Edith was about to tell of her contribution in every detail when Ambrose put a finger to his mouth and shook his head. ‘Confidential.’ He put an arm around Florence, ‘Our lips are sealed — you know, it’s all hush-hush at Directors’ meetings.’

  ‘You can tell me,’ Florence said, miffed.

  ‘Surely I can tell Florence about my contribution?’

  ‘No. All’s confidential,’ Ambrose said, seriously.

  She shrugged and grimaced at Florence. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘But I was the one who talked you into wrangling your way into the meeting!’ Florence was genuinely hurt.

  They walked for a little way in uncomfortable silence.

  At the Beau-Rivage Florence hesitated about joining them, intending to go off in a sulk. They both grabbed her arms and marched her in and made efforts to jolly her out of it.

  With the help of the champagne they were soon giggling and gossiping — but not about the Directors’ meeting, although Edith was still hankering to tell all.

  The Accepting of Gifts: Miss Dickinson’s Chair

  When the Assembly decided, at last, to build the Palais des Nations, Edith cried.

  She cried alone in her rooms in the boulevard des Philosophes from an elation which had begun jetting up out of a pool of humble relief. By deciding to build the Palais, the League had affirmed the covenant in an undeniable, durable and irrevocable way. As her father would have said, affirmed it in bricks and mortar. For these, her old father’s words, she also cried. And she cried because it happened on St Edith’s Day, allowing herself to enjoy a silly congruence.

  It also affirmed to Edith that her work for the League would continue, not in the crass sense of having a job, but in the sense that she believed in her vocation and wanted it to go on to fulfil its destiny. Until now the League’s only solidity was in its procedures, the making of new files, the enlarging of the staff, and the pumping out of League publications. The Assembly still met in a rented hall and the Palais Wilson was, after all, a renovated hotel.

  To get down to the level of the whinge, yes, she would be heartily glad to get out of the Palais Wilson and its foul acoustics and away from office overcrowding. Of course, she would work in a hole in the ground for the League if she had to, but the ‘physicals’ — again, her father’s word; he had always stressed the physicals — were the credence of an enterprise. The League had now to affirm itself and build its Palace as a bulwark against human frailty.

  She dried her eyes and put on a gramophone record of Carmen and prepared for a night alone, flopping into her big, soft armchair. Though she wouldn’t mind if she cried on and off, but it would be the crying of mellow tears from the anticipation of vulnerable, good things.

  Although she saw herself as a person who wanted to be with people, she also cherished the aloneness of some of her nights of solitary indulgence. She led a life of ever-changing faces at ever-changing meetings and she didn’t bemoan this. Every month at the Secretariat there seemed to be new faces. She had her familiars and her work friends, but sometimes it was a relief to know that nothing was happening or changing in her life that night, or the next morning, and especially if nothing was happening also the following day. She treasured waking up in the morning and realising that she had nothing to do, that no one expected anything of her that day. She was absolutely sure that she was suited for administrative work which required so much dealing with strangers and most of the time she enjoyed the exploration of new faces and meeting someone of a nationality she had not before encountered. She never minded having to tell strangers how the League worked. Every new document which came to her desk she took up with enthusiasm. Nor did she feel st
range in Geneva, but there was still some unfamiliarity in the city. She had yet to become fully international but was making progress; she still found her French, while much improved, would occasionally bring corrections from her French friend Jeanne or from those who, unasked, dutifully adopted the role of French tutor at every conversation.

  But that she couldn’t intensely and tearfully share her jubilation about the new building with anyone was also part of her tears. She cried alone because she thought it would be difficult to share with Ambrose, who was always wanting to live life lightly and sardonically, or with Florence, who was, she now thought, a bit breezy, and who could be seen also as crafty, or with Victoria, who worried, and was not a jubilant type, although they were all committed to the League. If she’d tried to celebrate her joy with Victoria, Victoria would say, ‘Prepare yourself to be cheated.’ They were all staunch, she knew that, but they did not suffer as much as she did about all this, about designing the future. Florence talked of going to work in Russia for the revolution although she was not a communist. She tried to describe herself as an adventuress but it didn’t quite fit. Ambrose still had some arrangement, a bolt-hole he called it, with the British Foreign Office.

  For Edith, there was now nothing else in her life. Maybe she had a life back in Australia, but that was fading as time passed — her life back there was rusting away in a paddock. Letters were not as frequent — from her to Australia as well as to her. Except for her family, her friends didn’t correspond the way they’d promised they would. She had Ambrose as something of a lover, but she didn’t have a husband and family, unlike most of her friends back home, something she kept meaning to think seriously about — because she certainly wanted to be a mother and a wife, it came to her mind every month at the cycle of her womanhood. When? She liked the idea of being a wife and liked the word wife. Those matters had been adjourned in her. Could these things really be adjourned? She didn’t have an eligible man and was not conscious of looking for one. Ambrose was too bizarre, and her own behaviour of late with Ambrose had not led her to believe that she was fit to be a bride just yet. She giggled, sniffling from her mellow tears, drying her eyes. Sometimes, in fact, with Ambrose she was more the bridegroom than the bride. Although it was sometimes said that the modern bride, or any bride at any time, had to be something of a courtesan as well as wife and mother to the man. Her behaviour was somewhat different again to that of a courtesan and she didn’t have a word for it, if a word existed, and she perhaps didn’t want particularly to know the word which applied to her amorous behaviour at this point in her life. The world had changed in that matter, the matter of sexual behaviour. Even her broadminded mother would die if she could see how people in Europe behaved now. She really believed that sexual behaviour at least had been separated from sin, and then separated from motherhood, and the implications of this were something she meant to learn more about, and that was an advance. Physical love was now also what it should be — a manifestation of the times. The League was not yet concerned with these matters but she imagined that it would get around to it.