The Devil's Paw

CHAPTER XVII

Julian, on, the morning following his visit to the Prime Minister, was afflicted with a curious and persistent unrest. He travelled down to the Temple land found Miles Furley in a room hung with tobacco smoke and redolent of a late night.

“Miles,” Julian declared, as the two men shook hands, “I can’t rest.”

“I am in the same fix,” Furley admitted. “I sat here till four o’clock. Phineas Cross came around, and half-a-dozen of the others. I felt I must talk to them, I must keep on hammering it out. We’re right, Julian. We must be right!”

“It’s a ghastly responsibility. I wonder what history will have to say.”

“That’s the worst of it,” Furley groaned. “They’ll have a bird’s-eye view of the whole affair, those people who write our requiem or our eulogy. You noticed the Press this morning? They’re all hinting at some great move in the West. It’s about in the clubs. Why, I even heard last night that we were in Ostend. It’s all a rig, of course. Stenson wants to gain time.”

“Who opened these negotiations with Freistner?” Julian asked.

“Fenn. He met him at the Geneva Conference, the year before the war. I met him, too, but I didn’t see so much of him. He’s a fine fellow, Julian—as unlike the typical German as any man you ever met.”

“He’s honest, I suppose?”

“As the day itself,” was the confident reply. “He has been in prison twice, you know, for plain speaking. He is the one man in Germany who has fought the war, tooth and nail, from the start.”

Julian caught his friend by the shoulder.

“Miles,” he said,—“straight from the bottom of your heart, mind—you do believe we are justified?”

“I have never doubted it.”

“You know that we have practically created a revolution—that we have established a dictatorship? Stenson must obey or face anarchy.”

“It is the voice of the people,” Furley declared. “I am convinced that we are justified. I am convinced of the inutility of the prolongation of this war.”

Julian drew a little sigh of relief.

“Don’t think I am weakening,” he said. “Remember, I am new to this thing in practice, even though I may be responsible for some of the theory.”

“It is the people who are the soundest directors of a nation’s policy,” Furley pronounced. “High politics becomes too much like a game of chess, hedged all around with etiquette and precedent. It’s human life we want to save, Julian. People don’t stop to realise the horrible tragedy of even one man’s death—one man with his little circle of relatives and friends. In the game of war one forgets. Human beings—men from the toiler’s bench, the carpenter’s bench, from behind the counter, from the land, from the mine—don khaki, become soldiers, and there seems something different about them. So many human lives gone every day; just soldiers, just the toll we have to pay for a slight advance or a costly retreat. And, my God, every one of them, underneath their khaki, is a human being! The politicians don’t grasp it, Julian. That’s our justification. The day that armistice is signed, several hundred lives at least—perhaps, thousands—will be saved; for several hundred women the sun will continue to shine. Parents, sweethearts, children—all of them—think what they will be spared!”

“I am a man again,” Julian declared. “Come along round to Westminster. There are many things I want to ask about the Executive.”

They drove round to the great building which had been taken over by the different members of the Labour Council. The representative of each Trades Union had his own office, staff of clerks and private telephone. Fenn, who greeted the two men with a rather excessive cordiality, constituted himself their cicerone. He took them from room to room and waited while Julian exchanged remarks with some of the delegates whom he had not met personally.

“Every one of our members,” Fenn pointed out, “is in direct communication with the local secretary of each town in which his industry is represented. You see these?”

He paused and laid his hand on a little heap of telegraph forms, on which one word was typed.

“These,” he continued, “are all ready to be dispatched the second that we hear from Mr. Stenson that is to say if we should hear unfavourably. They are divided into batches, and each batch will be sent from a different post-office, so that there shall be no delay. We calculate that in seven hours, at the most, the industrial pulse of the country will have ceased to beat.”

“How long has your organisation taken to build up?” Julian enquired.

“Exactly three months,” David Sands observed, turning around in his swing chair from the desk at which he had been writing. “The scheme was started a few days after your article in the British Review. We took your motto as our text ‘Coordination and cooperation.’”

They found their way into the clubroom, and at luncheon, later on, Julian strove to improve his acquaintance with the men who were seated around him. Some of them were Members of Parliament with well-known names, others were intensely local, but all seemed earnest and clear-sighted. Phineas Cross commenced to talk about war generally. He had just returned from a visit with other Labour Members to the front, although it is doubtful whether the result had been exactly in accordance with the intentions of the powers who had invited him.

“I’ll tell you something about war,” he said, “which contradicts most every other experience. There’s scarcely a great subject in the world which you don’t have to take as a whole, and from the biggest point of view, to appreciate it thoroughly. It’s exactly different with war. If you want to understand more than the platitudes, you want to just take in one section of the fighting. Say there are fifty Englishmen, decent fellows, been dragged from their posts as commercial travellers or small tradesmen or labourers or what-not, and they get mixed up with a similar number of Germans. Those Germans ain’t the fiends we read about. They’re not bubbling over with militarism. They don’t want to lord it over all the world. They’ve exactly the same tastes, the same outlook upon life as the fifty Englishmen whom an iron hand has been forcing to do their best to kill. Those English chaps didn’t want to kill anybody, any more than the Germans did. They had to do it, too, simply because it was part of the game. There was a handful of German prisoners I saw, talking with their guard and exchanging smokes. One was a barber in a country town. The man who had him in tow was an English barber. Bless you, they were talking like one o’clock! That German barber didn’t want anything in life except plenty to eat and drink, to be a good husband and good father, and to save enough money to buy a little house of his own. The Englishman was just the same. He’d as soon have had that German for a pal for a day’s fishing or a walk in the country, as any one else. They’d neither of them got anything against the other. Where the hell is this spirit of hatred? You go down the line, mile after mile, and most little groups of men facing one another are just the same. Here and there, there’s some bitter feeling, through some fighting that’s seemed unfair, but that’s nothing. The fact remains that those millions of men don’t hate one another, that they’ve got nothing to hate one another about, and they’re being driven to slaughter one another like savage beasts. For what? Mr. Stenson might supply an answer. Your great editors might. Your great Generals could be glib about it. They could spout volumes of words, but there’s no substance about them. I say that in this generation there’s no call for fighting, and there didn’t ought to be any.”

“You are not only right, but you are splendidly right, Mr. Cross,” Julian declared. “It’s human talk, that.”

“It’s just a plain man’s words and thoughts,” was the simple reply.

“And yet,” Fenn complained, in his thin voice, “if I talk like that, they call me a pacifist, a lot of rowdies get up and sing ‘Rule Britannia’, and try to chivy me out of the hall where I’m speaking.”

“You see, there’s a difference, lad,” Cross pointed out, setting down the tankard of beer from which he had been drinking. “You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don’t like it, because we are all of us out to protect what we’ve got, any way and anyhow. But that doesn’t alter the fact that there’s something wrong in the world when we’re driven to do this protecting business wholesale and being forced into murdering on a scale which only devils could have thought out and imagined. It’s the men at the top that are responsible for this war, and when people come to reckon up, they’ll say that there was blame up at the top in the Government of every Power that’s fighting, but there was a damned sight more blame amongst the Germans than any of the others, and that’s why many a hundred thousand of our young men who’ve loathed the war and felt about it as I do have gone and done their bit and kept their mouths shut.”

“You cannot deny,” Fenn argued, “that war is contrary to Christianity.”

“I dunno, lad,” Cross replied, winking across the table at Julian. “Seems to me there was a powerful lot of fighting in the Old Testament, and the Lord was generally on one side or the other. But you and I ain’t going to bicker, Mr. Fenn. The first decision this Council came to, when it embraced more than a dozen of us of very opposite ways of thinking, was to keep our mouths shut about our own ideas and stick to business. So give me a fill of baccy from your pipe, and we’ll have a cup of coffee together.”

Julian’s pouch was first upon the table, and the Northumbrian filled his pipe in leisurely fashion.

“Good stuff, sir,” he declared approvingly, as he passed it back. “After dinner I am mostly a man of peace—even when Fenn comes yapping around,” he added, looking after the disappearing figure of the secretary. “But I make no secret of this. I tumbled to it from the first that this was a great proposition, this amalgamation of Labour. It makes a power of us, even though it may, as you, Mr. Orden, said in one of your articles, bring us to the gates of revolution. But it was all I could do to bring myself to sit down at the same table with Fenn and his friend Bright. You see,” he explained, “there may be times when you are forced into doing a thing that fundamentally you disapprove of and you know is wrong. I disapprove of this war, and I know it’s wrong—it’s a foul mess that we’ve been got into by those who should have known better—but I ain’t like Fenn about it. We’re in it, and we’ve got to get out of it, not like cowards but like Englishmen, and if fighting had been the only way through, then I should have been for fighting to the last gasp. Fortunately, we’ve got into touch with the sensible folk on the other side. If we hadn’t—well, I’ll say no more but that I’ve got two boys fighting and one buried at Ypres, and I’ve another, though he’s over young, doing his drill.”

“Mr. Cross,” Julian said, “you’ve done me more good than any one I’ve talked to since the war began.”

“That’s right, lad,” Cross replied. “You get straight words from one; and not only that, you get the words of another million behind me, who feel as I do. But,” he added, glancing across the room and lowering his voice, “keep your eye on that artful devil, Fenn. He doesn’t bear you any particular good will.”

“He wasn’t exactly a hospitable gaoler,” Julian reminiscently observed.

“I’m not speaking of that only,” Cross went on. “There wasn’t one of us who didn’t vote for squeezing that document out of you one way or the other, and if it had been necessary to screw your neck off for it, I don’t know as one of us would have hesitated, for you were standing between us and the big thing. But he and that little skunk Bright ain’t to be trusted, in my mind, and it seems to me they’ve got a down on you. Fenn counted on being heart of this Council, for one thing, and there’s a matter of a young woman, eh, for another?”

“A young woman?” Julian repeated.

Cross nodded.

“The Russian young person—Miss Abbeway, she calls herself. Fenn’s been her lap-dog round here—takes her out to dine and that. It’s just a word of warning, that’s all. You’re new amongst us, Mr. Orden, and you might think us all honest men. Well, we ain’t; that’s all there is to it.”

Julian recovered from a momentary fit of astonishment.

“I am much obliged to you for your candour, Mr. Cross,” he said.

“And never you mind about the ‘Mr.’, sir,” the Northumbrian begged.

“Nor you about the ‘sir’,” Julian retorted, with a smile.

“Middle stump,” Cross acknowledged. “And since we are on the subject, my new friend, let me tell you this. To feel perfectly happy about this Council, there’s just three as I should like to see out of it—Fenn, Bright—and the young lady.”

“Why the young lady?” Julian asked quickly.

“You might as well ask me, ‘Why Fenn and Bright?’” the other replied. “I shouldn’t make no answer. We’re superstitious, you know, we north country folk, and we are all for instincts. All I can say to you is that there isn’t one of those three I’d trust around the corner.”

“Miss Abbeway is surely above suspicion?” Julian protested. “She has given up a great position and devoted the greater part of her fortune towards the causes which you and I and all of us are working for.”

“There’d be plenty of work for her in Russia just now,” Cross observed.

“No person of noble birth,” Julian reminded him, “has the slightest chance of working effectively in Russia to-day. Besides, Miss Abbeway is half English. Failing Russia, she would naturally select this as the country in which she could do most good.”

Some retort seemed to fade away upon the other’s lips. His shaggy eyebrows were drawn a little closer together as he glanced towards the door. Julian followed the direction of his gaze. Catherine had entered and was looking around as though in search of some one.

Catherine was more heavily veiled than usual. Her dress and hat were of sombre black, and her manner nervous and disturbed. She came slowly towards their end of the table, although she was obviously in search of some one else.

“Do you happen to know where Mr. Fenn is?” she enquired.

Julian raised his eyebrows.

“Fenn was here a few minutes ago,” he replied, “but he left us abruptly. I fancy that he rather disapproved of our conversation.”

“He has gone to his room perhaps,” she said. “I will go upstairs.”

She turned away. Julian, however, followed her to the door.

“Shall I see you again before you leave?” he asked.

“Of course—if you wish to.”

There was a moment’s perceptible pause.

“Won’t you come upstairs with me to Mr. Fenn’s room?” she continued.

“Not if your business is in any way private.”

She began to ascend the stairs.

“It isn’t private,” she said, “but I particularly want Mr. Fenn to tell me something, and as you know, he is peculiar. Perhaps, if you don’t mind, it would be better if you waited for me downstairs.”

Julian’s response was a little vague. She left him, however, without appearing to notice his reluctance and knocked at the door of Fenn’s room. She found him seated behind a desk, dictating some letters to a stenographer, whom he waved away at her entrance.

“Delighted to see you, Miss Abbeway,” he declared impressively, “delighted! Come and sit down, please, and talk to me. We have had a tremendous morning. Even though the machine is all ready to start, it needs a watchful hand all the time.”

She sank into the chair from which he had swept a pile of papers and raised her veil.

“Mr. Fenn,” she confessed. “I came to you because I have been very worried.”

He withdrew a little into himself. His eyes narrowed. His manner became more cautious.

“Worried?” he repeated. “Well?”

“I want to ask you this: have you heard anything from Freistner during the last day or two?”

Fenn’s face was immovable. He still showed no signs of discomposure—his voice only was not altogether natural.

“Last day or two?” he repeated reflectively. “No, I can’t say that I have, Miss Abbeway. I needn’t remind you that we don’t risk communications except when they are necessary.”

“Will you try and get into touch with him at once?” she begged.

“Why?” Fenn asked, glancing at her searchingly.

“One of our Russian writers,” she said, “once wrote that there are a thousand eddies in the winds of chance. One of those has blown my way to-day—or rather yesterday. Freistner is above all suspicion, is he not?”

“Far above,” was the confident reply. “I am not the only one who knows him. Ask the others.”

“Do you think it possible that he himself can have been deceived?” she persisted.

“In what manner?”

“In his own strength—the strength of his own Party,” she proceeded eagerly. “Do you think it possible that the Imperialists have pretended to recognise in him a far greater factor in the situation than he really is? Have pretended to acquiesce in these terms of peace with the intention of repudiating them when we have once gone too far?”

Fenn seemed for a moment to have shrunk in his chair. His eyes had fallen before her passionate gaze. The penholder which he was grasping snapped in his fingers. Nevertheless, his voice still performed its office.

“My dear Miss Abbeway,” he protested, “who or what has been putting these ideas into your head?”

“A veritable chance,” she replied, “brought me yesterday afternoon into contact with a man—a neutral—who is supposed to be very intimately acquainted with what goes on in Germany.”

“What did he tell you?” Fenn demanded feverishly.

“He told me nothing,” she admitted. “I have no more to go on than an uplifted eyebrow. All the same, I came away feeling uneasy. I have felt wretched ever since. I am wretched now. I beg you to get at once into touch with Freistner. You can do that now without any risk. Simply ask him for a confirmation of the existing situation.”

“That is quite easy,” Fenn promised. “I will do it without delay. But in the meantime,” he added, moistening his dry lips, “can’t you possibly get to know what this man—this neutral—is driving at?”

“I fear not,” she replied, “but I shall try. I have invited him to dine to-night.”

“If you discover anything, when shall you let us know?”

“Immediately,” she promised. “I shall telephone for Mr. Orden.”

For a moment he lost control of himself.

“Why Mr. Orden?” he demanded passionately. “He is the youngest member of the Council. He knows nothing of our negotiations with Freistner. Surely I am the person with whom you should communicate?”

“It will be very late to-night,” she reminded him, “and Mr. Orden is my personal friend—outside the Council.”

“And am I not?” he asked fiercely. “I want to be. I have tried to be.”

She appeared to find his agitation disconcerting, and she withdrew a little from the yellow-stained fingers which had crept out towards hers.

“We are all friends,” she said evasively. “Perhaps—if there is anything important, then—I will come, or send for you.”

He rose to his feet, less, it seemed, as an act of courtesy in view of her departure, than with the intention of some further movement. He suddenly reseated himself, however, his fingers grasped at the air, he became ghastly pale.

“Are you ill, Mr. Fenn?” she exclaimed.

He poured himself out a glass of water with trembling fingers and drank it unsteadily.

“Nerves, I suppose,” he said. “I’ve had to carry the whole burden of these negotiations upon my shoulders, with very little help from any one, with none of the sympathy that counts.”

A momentary impulse of kindness did battle with her invincible dislike of the man.

“You must remember,” she urged, “that yours is a glorious work; that our thoughts and gratitude are with you.”

“But are they?” he demanded, with another little burst of passion. “Gratitude, indeed! If the Council feel that, why was I not selected to approach the Prime Minister instead of Julian Orden? Sympathy! If you, the one person from whom I desire it, have any to offer, why can you not be kinder? Why can you not respond, ever so little, to what I feel for you?”

She hesitated for a moment, seeking for the words which would hurt him least. Tactless as ever, he misunderstood her.

“I may have had one small check in my career,” he continued eagerly, “but the game is not finished. Believe me, I have still great cards up my sleeve. I know that you have been used to wealth and luxury. Miss Abbeway,” he went on, his voice dropping to a hoarse whisper, “I was not boasting the other night. I have saved money, I have speculated fortunately—I—”

The look in her eyes stifled his eloquence. He broke off in his speech—became dumb and voiceless.

“Mr. Fenn,” she said, “once and for all this sort of conversation is distasteful to me. A great deal of what you say I do not understand. What I do understand, I dislike.”

She left him, with an inscrutable look. He made no effort to open the door for her. He simply stood listening to her departing footsteps, listened to the shrill summons of the lift-bell, listened to the lift itself go clanging downwards. Then he resumed his seat at his desk. With his hands clasped nervously together, an ink smear upon his cheek, his mouth slightly open, disclosing his irregular and discoloured teeth, he was not by any means a pleasant looking object.

He blew down a tube by his side and gave a muttered order. In a few minutes Bright presented himself.

“I am busy,” the latter observed curtly, as he closed the door behind him.

“You’ve got to be busier in a few minutes,” was the harsh reply. “There’s a screw loose somewhere.”

Bright stood motionless.

“Any one been disagreeable?” he asked, after a moment’s pause.

“Get down to your office at once,” Fenn directed briefly. “Have Miss Abbeway followed. I want reports of her movements every hour. I shall be here all night.”

Bright grinned unpleasantly.

“Another Samson, eh?”

“Go to Hell, and do as you’re told!” was the fierce reply. “Put your best men on the job. I must know, for all our sakes, the name of the neutral whom Miss Abbeway sees to-night and with whom she is exchanging confidences.”

Bright left the room with a shrug of the shoulders. Nicholas Fenn turned up the electric light, pulled out a bank book from the drawer of his desk, and, throwing it on to the fire, watched it until it was consumed.