Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  She then asked the sergeant to check the League of Nations seating allocation.

  The clerk went through his list. ‘League of Women Voters?’

  She told him again. ‘League of Nations.’

  The sergeant did so and confirmed that one seat had been allocated in the top gallery.

  Edith asked that the allocation of seating be changed. ‘My name is Edith Berry, and I am Chef du Bureau to the Secretary-General.’ In a sense, she was.

  She pointed to her papers.

  The sergeant glanced at her papers.

  He refused to touch the papers as if fearing that his touch would give them some official recognition.

  ‘I’m sorry, lady, these papers mean nothing to me. And I can’t allocate seats.’

  Edith demanded to see someone who could alter the allocation.

  ‘The officials are all inside the conference hall. Maybe you could take it up with them tomorrow.’

  ‘I want to take it up with them right now,’ she said. ‘I demand to see someone senior from the Conference Secretariat, from the steering committee.

  The sergeant broke contact with her and began talking with another delegate. She stood there for a minute but his attention did not return to her. ‘Excuse me—could I have your name, rank, and status?’ she said.

  He ignored her, now occupied with another person who also held official papers in his hand, written as far as she could see in Arabic.

  Manoeuvre according to circumstances, Napoleon said.

  What manoeuvre remained to her?

  She couldn’t very well lean across and take the sergeant by the collar, which she felt impelled to do.

  Then, at last, she saw a familiar face in the crowd.

  Judge Manley Hudson from the Court of International Justice. ‘Thank the gods,’ she said. ‘At last some authority.’

  She gathered up her papers from the desk.

  She even made a private joke as she pushed her way to him, ‘At last, justice,’ she thought.

  ‘Manley!’

  They warmly grasped each other’s hands.

  ‘Edith—I am so glad to see you.’

  ‘Manley, I urgently need your help. We’re having dreadful trouble with seating. Alex is up the back row in the gods. He isn’t even on the conference floor. Sean is back at the hotel because we haven’t been given enough passes.’

  Judge Hudson’s face was close to rage.

  ‘The Court has no tickets at all,’ he said with anger. ‘We have been excluded. The Court is excluded entirely.’

  ‘What’s happening here!’ she cried. ‘Why are they doing this!?’

  Just then Gerig came up and greeted them. She hadn’t seen Gerig since the World’s Fair. From what she knew, he was now with the American delegation to the conference.

  He seemed pleased to see them both.

  She told him the situation. ‘There’s been a huge blunder! We have no tickets—not the League—not the Court—none of us.’

  Gerig was uncomfortable. ‘Not my area. I’m really hugely busy with the US delegation. But I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘What’s the problem, Benjamin?’ Judge Hudson cried out to him. ‘Why are we excluded like this?’

  ‘I fear it’s the Russians, Judge.’

  ‘The Russians?!’

  ‘They are down on neutrals. The Irish, for example, who they think were too nice to Hitler—that excludes Lester. They’re down on Olivan from the Court because he’s Spanish and they don’t like Franco. And, of course, they are down on the League for expelling them in ’39.’

  ‘That misses the whole point,’ she almost screamed. ‘The people you mentioned are internationalists. Lester stood up to the Nazis. He gave his whole life to internationalism.’

  Gerig showed extreme discomfort. ‘I’ll get the American delegation to take it up with the Russians—believe me, we have nothing but goodwill to the League people. I must go in now. But, Edith, I’m afraid that it might be one of those things where if I interfere they will do the opposite.’

  He looked about and then said conspiratorially, ‘Don’t place too much trust in Hiss.’ He moved away but stopped again, turned and called, ‘Oh, where are you all staying?’

  Edith told him the California Hotel.

  ‘I’ll call when I have some news.’

  She stood there glowering, trying to think of a manoeuvre, but her indignation began to congeal, like cooling wax, into cold hard defeat.

  Manley looked at her helplessly like a child.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, bitterly. ‘How did we become the enemy?’

  ‘I have to go,’ he said simply, and walked off as if in a drugged state, going out of the building and down the steps into the street.

  She wanted to go after him and help him but she felt she should somehow still do something to save the situation.

  The foyer of the building was beginning to clear. The first conference of the United Nations was about to begin.

  From inside the auditorium she heard a booming voice give the familiar preliminary announcements of the conference housekeeping arrangements. The sort of announcements she herself had made at many, many conferences, in many halls, in many countries.

  She was now an outsider.

  Bells were ringing.

  If you want an audience, start a fight, she thought.

  She looked around for someone to fight with.

  And then Edith realised that she had no fight left.

  Close to tears, she put her papers away in her handbag and found her way to the entrance to the top gallery where Loveday was.

  As Loveday must have, she climbed the two sets of bare grey concrete stairs with iron-pipe railings.

  At the top she was allowed as far as the door to the gallery but the Marine would not permit her to go inside.

  She looked for Loveday.

  He was seated in the second back row. He was seated as far from the rostrum down on the floor of the conference room as any seating could be.

  He sat alone and crushed.

  He had some conference proceedings paper in his hand.

  She pulled back from the door, not wanting to catch Loveday’s eye.

  All those years. All the sweat and tears.

  This lone figure represented all the thousands and thousands who had worked for the League, those people who’d come across the world from every nation to lend a hand in Geneva.

  All this now diminished to a lone representative of the League at the back of the hall.

  Thunderous applause broke out as the conference was declared open.

  All those present stood and clapped except Loveday who remained seated.

  Edith had never felt so cold. She had never felt such true and deep bitterness.

  In the strange disembodied voice of the public address system, she heard someone say, ‘We are plaiting a rope for a ladder to a ledge of a cliff on a mountain in a range of mountains.’

  The words made her feel ill, she was close to vomiting.

  She walked down the concrete steps, hearing the clapping from the conference hall recede behind her.

  Back at the foyer of the California Hotel, which itself seemed a reproach and a continuation of the humiliation, she wondered what she could say to Lester.

  From the lobby telephone, she tried again to call Sweetser but knew that it was a hopeless time to call.

  She took the elevator to Lester’s room.

  She knocked on the door.

  She heard Lester call out, ‘Yes! Who is it?’ in a rather expectant voice, a voice hoping for good news, for the bungle to have evaporated.

  ‘It’s me, Edith,’ she said, trying to forewarn him of what she had to tell by her tone of voice.

  He opened the door. He was straightening his tie, putting on his jacket.

  ‘All sorted out?’ he asked, smiling at her.

  She gave a small hopeless smile back. ‘Ambrose not with you?’

  ‘Sent him away.’


  ‘Alex is seated. Gerig is looking into it. I couldn’t get any sense out of the military clerks at the Opera House.’

  ‘We still have no seating, then?’

  She felt tempted to lie to him. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  He looked into her eyes with disbelief.

  They went into his room. There was an unopened bottle of Irish whiskey on the table, a bucket of ice, a soda siphon, and glasses.

  She decided to report accurately as a good officer should. She was not a nursemaid, she was not a wife. She could not shield him from the world.

  She told him precisely what had happened.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  He stood there with his back to her and then sat.

  He looked up. ‘Thank you for everything, Edith. Thank you.’

  ‘Would you like me to stay with you?’

  ‘I would like to be alone.’

  Back in their room, she lay on the cool sheets of the bed, naked, with the lights off. Ambrose sat in the armchair still in his new suit, drinking.

  The room was very warm, the air-conditioning seemed not to be working.

  ‘What will become of us?’ she asked.

  They sat for a moment in silence and then she answered herself. ‘Remember when the League moved from the Palais Wilson to the new Palais des Nations?’

  ‘Yes, I remember it—the move was massive.’

  ‘I told you that back then we invented a new administrative ploy—a new category for official documents.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Whenever some document couldn’t be found, or we didn’t want to find it, we said it was “lost in the move”.’

  ‘Yes, I remember now. You said that everyone began using it. Until you finally forbad it.’

  ‘You and I, dear Ambrose, have been lost in the move.’

  She watched his profile as he sat there in the half-light and she saw him nod.

  ‘I’ve never thought of myself as tragic,’ she said, ‘but I do now.’ She reached for her drink on the bedside table.

  ‘God, it’s hot in here,’ he said.

  He began to take off his tie and then his suit. He hung it carefully in her wardrobe.

  He then went to the bathroom and returned carrying a clean towel.

  He placed the towel on the time-worn armchair seat and then sat down again, nude, legs crossed.

  He looked across at her. ‘Not impressed with this American air-conditioning.’

  ‘Did we waste our lives at the League? All those words we wrote and spoke?’

  ‘There is no one to tell us whether we did or did not.’

  ‘I’ve worked nearly all my life for something which utterly failed. And moreover, we no longer exist in the eyes of the world.’

  ‘Edith, you have lived fully—that’s not affected by considerations of success or failure.’

  ‘Maybe I didn’t live fully,’ she said, trying somehow to pass her mind’s eye over her years at the League, catching odd cameos of meetings, speeches and arguments.

  ‘Oh yes, Edith—you lived fully,’ he said without hesitation. ‘You did.’

  In a quiet voice he then mentioned to her Haydn’s Farewell Symphony where the members of the orchestra leave, one by one, until there are no instruments left. ‘Remember? It goes like this.’

  He hummed the final bars to her, as he came over to her bed. He lay down beside her, naked, still humming, conducting with a finger.

  In the dimness she could see his wry smile.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, putting her head on his chest.

  They folded desperately into each other’s arms.

  ‘What do we do tomorrow?’ she whispered.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ He lay there in her arms, staring at the ceiling. ‘Tomorrow, we find ourselves a place in this new world.’

  ‘Is there a place for the likes of us?’

  ‘We will find a place.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘No. We will make ourselves a place.’

  Postscript

  The Dinner for Lester

  Sean Lester, the last Secretary-General of the League of Nations, waited at the California Hotel in San Francisco for a month but was never asked to speak to the newly formed United Nations.

  Alexander Loveday, Director of the League’s Financial, Economic, and Transit Section, with twenty-five years experience, was asked to speak only once—on committee structure.

  Seymour Jacklin, Treasurer of the League of Nations, and an Under Secretary-General, with twenty-five years experience, was permitted to speak to the conference for fifteen minutes.

  Arthur Sweetser organised, and paid for, the only dinner given in San Francisco to honour the League delegation. It was attended by thirty-seven friends and former associates.

  At the San Francisco Conference, fifty nations ratified the charter of the United Nations on 26 June, 1945.

  In 1946, a final Assembly meeting of the League in Geneva formally dissolved the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice, and its property, including the Palais des Nations, in Geneva, was handed over to the United Nations.

  The League of Nations ceased to exist formally on 18 April, 1946.

  The Fate of the League Pavilion at the World’s Fair

  February 10, 1946

  Dear Sweetser,

  I have a somewhat faint recollection that during the early days of my coming to Princeton when you were a permanent resident here, you once mentioned that some League property was stored in the farm buildings near the Institute. I believe you mentioned a copper plate or something of the kind.

  Unless I am dreaming would you be good enough to let me know exactly what the article is …

  Signed, P.G. Watterson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey

  April 4, 1946

  Dear Watterson,

  The copper plate was from the League of Nations Pavilion at the World’s Fair in 1939.

  It measured two metres across and its circular lettering read: ‘Peace on earth—Good-will to men’.

  Signed: Arthur Sweetser

  Historical Notes

  Languages

  The official languages of the League of Nations were French and English and officers of the League were expected to be fluent in both.

  Under Secretaries-General

  In practice, the Under Secretaries-General of the League reflected the nationalities of the permanent members of the Council, consequently there was never a Swiss Under Secretary-General.

  After 1932, one of the two Deputy Secretaries-General was drawn from outside the permanent members of Council.

  Rationalism

  Edith and her mentor, John Latham, were both members of the Rationalists’ Association of Australia, which grew out of the parent organisation in the UK formed at the end of the nineteenth century.

  In Melbourne, a Rationalist Association was formed in 1906, in Brisbane 1909, Sydney 1912, and Perth and Adelaide in 1918. Rationalists stated their position as the adoption of ‘those mental attitudes which unreservedly accept the supremacy of reason’ and aimed at establishing ‘a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority’. The Rationalist Association had no doctrinal tests for membership and included as members Julian Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Arnold Bennett, Georges Clemenceau, Clarence Darrow, Sigmund Freud, J.B.S. Haldane, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Professor L. Susan Stebbing, Havelock Ellis and Professor V. Gordon Childe. They saw religion as their main opponent. The movement declined after World War 2.

  The British Rationalists were responsible for the creation of The Thinker’s Library.

  Alger Hiss and the United Nations

  Alger Hiss, a high ranking officer of the US State Department, played a role in all three of the wartime conferences which worked towards the formation of the United Nations charter (Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta and San Francisco). At San Francisco in 1945, Hiss acted as tem
porary Secretary-General of the UN.

  After this, Hiss became the Director of the US Office of Special Political Affairs.

  On 3 August, 1948 allegations were made by Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor of Time and a former member of an espionage group spying for the Soviet Union in Washington DC, that Hiss was a member of this same espionage group. Chambers claimed that Hiss had given Chambers classified State Department documents to be handed over to the Soviet Union.

  These allegations were made before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

  Chambers allegedly hid some filmstrips of the documents in question in a pumpkin on his farm, and the case was tagged the ‘Pumpkin Papers’.

  At his first trial in 1949, Hiss pleaded not guilty. In 1950, he was convicted of lying to a Federal Grand Jury by claiming that he had no knowledge of the documents.

  Richard Nixon played a central role in the conviction of Hiss.

  The Hiss trial was said to have fuelled McCarthyism in the US.

  In its day, the case symbolised the left–right political clash—left-wing intellectuals against the right-wing McCarthyites—and was one of those issues which, in the words of Theodore Draper, ‘separated friends and divided families’.

  At the time this book was being written, the most recent comprehensive account of the case was Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, (updated from the original published in 1978) by Allan Weinstein, Random House, 1997. In this updated book, Weinstein, having looked at the records of the NKVD and other material from Russia and Hungary, has changed from supporting Hiss to being convinced of his guilt.

  This is also the conclusion of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr in their book Venona: decoding Soviet espionage in America, Yale University Press, 1999.

  The Debacle of the League and the United States

  The failure of the United States to join the League of Nations was a democratic debacle.