Chapter 9

Henry, not knowing whether this Italian Swiss knew more than he ought to know, or whether he was merely assisting the police investigations, answered warily, "No message. But I have been down there on the business, and had to return this way. I must now go as quickly as possible in to the town."

He added, at a venture, glancing sideways at the other, "Signor Wilbraham was down there with his colleagues."

The man started, and the saucer wavered in his hand. Signor Wilbraham was obviously either to him a suspect name, or else his master and leader in intrigue. He was frightened of Wilbraham.

"Where is he now?" he asked. "Will he come here?"

"I think not. Be at ease. He has disappeared in another direction. Have the kindness to show me the way out."

The man led the way to the steps and up them, into a tiny ground-floor bedroom, and through that into a passage. As he unbolted a side door, Henry said to him, "You know something about Signor Wilbraham, then?"

The plump little figure shrugged.

"A good deal too much, certainly."

"Good," said Henry. "Later you shall tell what you know. Don't be afraid. He can't hurt you."

As to that the raised eyebrows showed doubt. Wilbraham, it was apparent, inspired a deep mistrust. The fat little man was shivering, either from fear or cold or thwarted sleep, as he opened the door for Henry to pass out.

"The will of God will be done," was what he regretfully said, "unless his dear Mother can by any means avert it. For me, I escape, if necessary, where they cannot find me. Good-night, Signore."

He shut the door softly behind Henry, who found himself outside a block of old houses at the lake end of the Rue Muzy, under a setting moon, as the city clocks struck two. The night, which had seemed to Henry already so long, was yet, as nights of action go, young.

Henry, as he walked homewards by the lake's edge, wondered where and in what manner Macdermott and Garth had emerged, or would emerge, to the earth's face.

The earth's face! Never, on any of the lovely nights in that most lovely place, had it seemed to Henry fairer than it seemed this night, as he walked along the Quai des Eaux Vives, the clean, cool air filling his lungs and gently fanning his damp forehead, the dark and shining water lapping softly against its stone bounds. How far better was the earth's face than its inside!

Henry, tired and chilled, had now no thought but sleep. To-morrow early he would go to the President of Committee 9 with his report. Also he would wire the story early to his paper. As he lay in bed, too much excited, after all, to sleep (for Henry suffered from nervous excitement in excess) he composed his press story. Anti-disarmament, anti-peace fiends, plotting with Russian Monarchists to wreck the League ... all this had the _British Bolshevist_ many a time suggested, but now it could speak with no uncertain voice. Names might even be given.... Then, in the evening, when the police had explored the avenues, investigated the mystery, and proved the facts, a second telegram, more detailed, could be despatched. What a scoop! After all, thought Henry, tossing wakeful and wide-eyed in the warm dawn, after all he was proving himself a good journalist. No one could say after this that he was not a good journalist.

39

M. Fernandez Croza, delegate from Paraguay, and President of the Committee on the Disappearance of Delegates, sat after breakfast with his private secretary and his stenographer in his sitting-room at the Hotel des Bergues, dictating a speech he meant to deliver at that morning's session of the Assembly on the beauties of a world peace. It was a very creditable and noble speech, and he meant to deliver it in Spanish, as a protest, though his English and French were faultless.

M. Croza was a graceful person, young for a delegate, slightly built, aquiline, brown skinned, black haired, shaved clean in the English and American manner, which Latins seldom use, and which he had picked up, among other things, in the course of an Oxford education. The private secretary and the stenographer were a swarthy young man and woman with full lips and small moustaches.

M. Croza was clever, determined, and patriotic; he believed firmly in the future of the Latin American republics, and particularly in that of Paraguay; in the necessity of imbuing into the staff of the League of Nations more Latin American blood, and in the desirability of making Spanish a third official language in the Assembly. He disliked the Secretariat as at present constituted, thinking it European, narrow, and conceited, and he could, when orating on topics less noble and more imminent than a world peace, make a very relevant and acute speech.

To him, already thus busy at ten o'clock in the morning, entered a hotel messenger with a card bearing the name of the correspondent of the _British Bolshevist_, and the words "Urgent and private business."

"I suppose he wants a statement on the Paraguay attitude towards Argentine meat," M. Croza commented. "I had better see him."

He turned to his stenographer, and said (in Spanish, in which tongue, it may be observed, it sounded even better than in the English rendering): "And so the gentle doves of peace comma pursued down stormy skies by the hawks of war comma shall find at length ... shall find at length.... Alvarez, please finish that sentence later on. That will do for the present, señorita.... Admit Mr. Beechtree, messenger."

Mr. Beechtree was admitted. The slim, pale, shabby and yet somehow elegant young man, with his monocle, so useless, so foppish, dangling on its black ribbon, pleased, on the whole, M. Croza's fastidious taste.

After introductions, courtesies, apologies, and seatings, Mr. Beechtree got to business.

"I have," he began, in his soft, light, tired voice, "a curious story to tell. I am in a position, after much search, to throw a good deal of light on the recent mysterious disappearances. I have evidence of a very serious nature indeed...."

M. Croza, in his capacity of President of Committee 9, had become used to such evidence of late. But he always welcomed it, and did so now, with an encouraging nod.

Perhaps the nod, though encouraging, had an air of habit, for Mr. Beechtree added quickly, "What I have to tell you is most unusual. It implicates persons not usually implicated. Indeed, never before. I am not here to hurl random accusations against persons for whom I happen to feel a distaste. I am here with solid, documentary evidence. I have it in this case." He opened his shabby dispatch case, and showed it full of papers.

"It implicates," he continued, "an individual who holds a distinguished position on the staff of the Secretariat."

M. Croza leant forward, interested, stimulated, not displeased.

"You amaze me," he said. "Take a note, Alvarez, if you please."

"Some years ago," said Henry, gratified by the delegate's attention and the secretary's poised pencil, "before the League of Nations, so-called----"

"It _is_ the League of Nations," said the delegate, with a little frown.

"To be sure it is," Henry recollected himself. He had merely used "so-called" as a term indicative of contempt, like "sic," forgetting that he was not addressing the readers of the _British Bolshevist_. "Well, before the League of Nations existed--to be exact, in the year 1919--I had occasion, by chance, to discover some things about this individual. I learnt that his wife was the daughter of an armaments knight, and that he himself had a great deal of money in the business. There was no great harm in this, from his point of view; he never, in those days, professed to be a pacifist, for, though he wielded throughout the war a pen in preference to a sword, he truly believed it to be mightier; he was, in fact, in the Ministry of Information. He was not inconsistent in those days, though he was, I imagine, never easy in his mind about this money he had, and held his shares under his wife's name only. But when the League Secretariat was formed, he was one of the first to receive an appointment on it. It was not generally known where he got his income from, and he found himself in a prominent position on the staff of a League, one of whose objects, if only one among many, is to end war. So there he was, his fortune dependent on the continuation of the very thing he was officially working to suppress. It wasn't to be expected that he should be pleased at the prospect of the disarmament question coming up before the Assembly; or at the prospect of the various disputes going on now in the world being discussed in the Assembly and referred to judicial arbitration. Much better for him if the rumours and threats of war should continue."

"Continue," stated the delegate, "they always will. That, Mr. Beechtree, we may take as certain, in this imperfect world. Yes.... He's an Englishman, I assume, this friend of yours?"

"An Englishman, yes. Intensely an Englishman." Henry paused a moment. "I had better tell you at once; he is Charles Wilbraham."

"Wilbraham!" M. Croza was startled. He felt no love for Wilbraham, who, for his part, felt and showed little for the Latin American republics. M. Croza bitterly remembered various sneers which had been repeated to him.... Besides, it was Wilbraham who had cast suspicion on Paraguay. Further, he had been at Oxford with Wilbraham, and had disliked him there.

"Go on, sir," he said gravely and yet ardently.

"So," said Henry, "Wilbraham hatches a scheme. Or, possibly it is hatched by his father-in-law, Sir John Levis (he's one of the directors of Pottle & Kett's, the great armament firm), and Wilbraham is persuaded to carry it out; it doesn't matter which. Levis has been in Geneva now for some days. He has lain rather low and has not been staying at Wilbraham's house, but I've evidence from his secretary that they have been constantly together. They cast around to find convenient colleagues, unscrupulous enough to do desperate things, and with their own reasons for wishing to nullify the work of the League and to hold up discussion of international affairs while disturbances come to a head."

"Such colleagues," mused M. Croza, "would not be hard to find."

"Whom do they pitch on? There are a number of possibly suitable helpers, and I can't say how many of them are involved. But what I have evidence of is that they brought in the Russian delegate to their councils--Kratzky, who is a byword even among Russians for sticking at nothing. If Kratzky could stave off discussion of European politics and paralyse the Assembly until Russia should be ready and able to pounce on and hold by force the new Russian republics--well, naturally monarchist Russia would be pleased. I have evidence that Wilbraham and Levis have been continually meeting and conferring with Kratzky since the Assembly began. Kratzky, that bloody butcher...."

M. Croza, whose sympathy was all with small republics against major powers, agreed about Kratzky.

"You haven't," he suggested, "notes of what has actually passed between Wilbraham and Kratzky on the subject?"

"I regret that I have not. I could never get near enough.... But I have evidence of continual meetings, continual lunches and conferences. This I have obtained from Wilbraham's secretary. She has to keep his engagements for him. I have obtained possession of the little pocket-book in which she notes them. I have it here. See: 'Saturday, Lunch, Café du Nord, Kratzky and Sir John. Sunday, Up Salève, with Kratzky. Monday, 8 a.m., Bathe, Kra----' No, that can't be Kratzky; he wouldn't bathe; that must be some one else. And so on, and so on. Now, I ask you, what would one talk about to Kratzky all that time except some iniquitous intrigue? It's all Kratzky knows about. So, you see, when I began to suspect all this, I took to tracking Wilbraham, following him about. It's been, I can tell you, a most tiring job. Wilbraham is such a very tedious man. A most frightful bore. His very voice makes me sick.... But I followed him. I tracked him. All over the shop I tracked him. And last night he trapesed round the town with Levis and Kratzky and a horrid little Calvinist clergyman who must be in it too. I hate Calvinists, don't you?"

"Intolerable persons," agreed the delegate from Paraguay.

"Well, at last they hared down a trap-door in an archway into the bowels of the earth. I saw them into it. After some time I went down too. I couldn't find them, but I found an extraordinary system of tunnelling--a regular catacomb. You get in and out of it all over the town, through _trappons_, mostly in old houses, I think. I didn't discover where half the tunnels ended. But obviously Wilbraham and his friends know all about it. And that's what they've done with the delegates. Either hidden them somewhere alive down there, or killed them. When Kratzky's in an affair, the people up against him don't, as a rule, come out alive.... I don't know how much the police know about this tunnel business, but they must make a complete investigation, of course."

"Obviously, without delay.... A singular story, Mr. Beechtree; very singular."

"Life is singular," said Henry.

"There you are very right." ... But M. Croza, used to the political life of South American republics, found no stories of plots and intrigues really singular. "You have reason," he added, "to think badly of Mr. Wilbraham, I infer?"

"Grave reasons. I know him for a very ugly character. It is high time he was exposed."

M. Croza thought so too. As has been said, he did not care for Charles Wilbraham. And what a counter-charge to Wilbraham's accusations again the residents at the Hotel des Bergues!

"One of these Catholic converts," he reflectively commented. "I do not like them. To be born a Catholic, that is one thing, and who can help it? After all, it is the true faith. To become a Catholic--that is quite another thing, and seems to us in Paraguay to denote either feebleness of intellect or a dishonest mind. In a man, that is. Women, of course, are different, not having intellect, and being naturally _dévotes_. So, anyhow, we believe in Paraguay. But perhaps one is unfair."

"It is difficult not to be unfair to these," Henry agreed. "But it is more than difficult, it is impossible, to be unfair to Wilbraham. Nothing we think or say of him can be in excess of the truth. Such is Wilbraham. He always has been.... Now, if you will, sir, I will show you the documents I have with me which corroborate my story."

The delegate beckoned to his secretary.

"Go through Mr. Beechtree's papers, Alvarez. I must be getting to the Assembly. It is past the hour.... At this afternoon's meeting of Committee 9, Mr. Beechtree, I will lay these suggestions of yours before my colleagues, and we will consider what action shall be taken. You will be present. Meanwhile, Alvarez, have orders taken to the police to explore the subterranean passages. Mr. Beechtree, you will be able to direct them to the means of entry, will you not."

"I shouldn't wonder," said Henry, "if they are being explored. Macdermott, from Ulster, and Garth of the _Morning Post_, were down there last night. I don't know if they ever got out or not, but if they did they'll be doing something about it this morning. They take a different view from mine, I may say. Macdermott suspects Sinn Feiners (Ulster has only one idea, you know), and Garth agrees with him, but adds Bolsheviks and Germans. Neither of them would suspect either Wilbraham or Kratzky without absolute proof. They do not like Wilbraham. No one does. But they are obsessed with their pet ideas."

"To every man his own scapegoat; it's the law of life. Now, Mr. Beechtree, I must leave you. We meet again at three o'clock. Here is a card of entry to the committee meeting. Till then I shall say nothing to any one. I will lay your story before the committee for what it is worth, but I do not, you must remember, commit myself to it. It is merely a basis for inquiry, and the committee shall undoubtedly have the facts before them. But care and discretion are advisable.... Your paper, I think, is not celebrated for its love either for the League of Nations and its Secretariat, or of monarchist Russia, or of armament princes? We must be prepared for the imputation to you of prejudice."

"It would be," Henry admitted, "not unjustified. My paper is prejudiced. So am I. To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. After all, we are not animals, to judge everything by its smell and taste as it comes before us, irrespective of preconceived theories. The open mind is the empty mind. The pre-judgment is often the deliberate and considered judgment, based on reason, whereas the post-judgment is a hasty makeshift affair, based on the impressions of the moment. Fortunately, however, the two are apt, in the same mind, to concur----"

"Quite so, quite so." M. Croza, who was in a hurry, nodded affably but decidedly, and Henry, who was apt, in the interests of discussion, to forget himself, left him.

40

Henry despatched straightway a long message to the _British Bolshevist_, guarded in language but sinister in implication, and hinting that further developments and more definite revelations were imminent. In the journalists' lobby he encountered Garth, who had also been sending a message.

"Oh, hallo," said Garth, "so you got out all right. So did Macdermott. I had the devil of a time. I tried one exit that didn't work; must have been bolted on the outside, I suppose. Anyhow, I hammered away and nothing happened. Then I struck another avenue and came to another trap which gave after mighty efforts on my part, and I came up into that book-shop which Burnley disappeared into, and which told the police so firmly that he left again in a few minutes. The trap was hidden away under the counter. I didn't stop; I thought it probably wasn't healthy, so I unbolted the front door and crept off home to bed. First thing this morning I put the police on the track, and they're getting busy now asking the bookseller questions and sending gangs to work the catacombs. One thing I've discovered; that book-shop is a meeting-place for Bolshie refugees and German anarchists. They meet in the old chap's back parlour and do their plotting there and send gold to the trade-unions."

"How do you know?" Henry asked, interested.

"Well, it's quite obvious. Too busy to go into the evidence now. I must look in at the Assembly and see what's doing...."

Henry perceived that the correspondent of the _Morning Post_ was actuated, in the matter of Bolshevists, Germans, trade-unions, and gold, rather by a deliberate and considered pre-judgment than by the hasty and makeshift impressions of the moment, or, anyhow, that the two had in his mind concurred. He asked after Macdermott.

"Oh, Macdermott found Sinn Fein plots all over the place. He had a hair-raising time. He went miles and miles, he says, and came up at last against a wall. There was no trap-door: it was merely a cul-de-sac. So he retraced his steps and took a by-path, and emerged finally in a brothel close to the cathedral. Of course, the advantage of a brothel is that it's alive and humming even at dead of night; anyhow it was morning by that time, so he had no difficulty in making himself heard. He couldn't get anything out of the people; they were German Swiss, and pretended to be merely stupid. But they're being sorted by the police this morning."

"And where do the Sinn Feiners come in?"

"Oh, I don't know. They meet there to plot, Macdermott said. Together with Germans. Probably they've a bomb-cache in the tunnels too. He told O'Shane about it, and O'Shane said republicans would never make use of a disorderly house, not even for the best patriotic purposes. He's rather sick that he wasn't on to this catacombs business too; he'd have found Orange plots down there. I left them at it.... What's going on within, Jefferson?"

"That damned little Greek holding forth on the importance of disarming Turkey. We've just had Paraguay on the beauties of a world peace and the peaceful influence of the South American republics."

"Well," said Garth, "I shall go in and hear the Greek. He always makes things hum."

Henry, too, went in and heard the Greek, whose manner of oratory he enjoyed.

41

Committee 9 met at three o'clock in the spacious and sunny saloon known as Committee Room C. The only portion of the public admitted was the correspondent of the _British Bolshevist_, who sat behind the President's chair with a portfolio full of papers, looking pale, shabby, and tired, but exalted, like one whose great moment is at hand.

After the minutes of the last meeting had been read, the President rose to address the committee, in French. He had, he said, some fresh and important facts to communicate. A quite new line of inquiry had that day been suggested to him by one who had for some time been secretly pursuing investigations. The facts revealed were so startling, so amazing, that very substantial evidence would be necessary to persuade committee members of their truth. It could at present be only a tentative theory that was set before the committee; but let the committee remember that _magna est veritas et prevalebit_; that they were there to fulfil a great duty, and not to be deterred by any fears, any reluctances, any personal friendships, any dread of scandal, from seeking to draw out truth from her well. He asked his colleagues to listen while he told them a strange story.

The story, as he told it, gained from his more important presence, his more eloquent and yet more impartial manner, a plausibility which Henry's had lacked. His very air, of one making a painful and tentative revelation, was better than Henry's rather shrill eagerness. Every now and then he paused and waved his hand at Henry sitting behind him, and said, "My friend Mr. Beechtree here has documentary evidence of this, which I will lay before the committee shortly." When, after long working up to it, he gave the suspected member of the Secretariat the name of Wilbraham, it fell on the tense attention of the whole table. Henry, looking up to watch its reception, saw surprise on many faces, incredulity on several, pleasure on more, amusement on a few. He met also the blue eyes of Mr. Macdermott fixed on him with a smile of cynical admiration. Macdermott would doubtless have something to say when the President had done. But what he was now thinking was that the correspondent of the _British Bolshevist_ had more journalistic gifts than one would have given him credit for.

"Where, you may demand of me," proceeded the President, "is M. Wilbraham now? That I cannot tell you. He entered this system of secret passages last night in company with those who are suspected by Mr. Beechtree of being his fellow conspirators, and he has not been seen since. Have they, possibly, escaped, their evil work done? Whither have they gone? Who was that Protestant pastor? What doings, gentlemen, engage the attentions of M. Kratzky of Russia, that enemy of small republics, Sir John Levis of Pottle and Kett, that enemy of peace, a _soi-disant_ Protestant pastor, the presumed enemy of true religion, and M. Wilbraham of the Secretariat? Mind, gentlemen, I impute nothing. I merely inquire."

A murmur of applause broke from the Latin Americans. As it died down, Henry, looking up, saw standing by the door Charles Wilbraham, cool, immaculate, attentive, and unperturbed, and the _soi-disant_ Protestant pastor at his elbow.

42