Lonely Road (31 page)

“Can nothing be done about that fellow in the reading-room? The boy tells me he’s had seven whiskies in the last two hours, and last night just the same. One doesn’t expect to see that sort of soaking in a club like this.”

I smiled a little and passed on. This was the England Ormsby had set out to fool. The task had not proved very difficult, perhaps.

I dressed with infinite exactitude, and went downstairs and dined alone. It seemed but a moment till I was sitting writing again, and yet I must have lingered over my dinner, for it was nine o’clock when I sat down again in the reading-room. I wrote on steadily into the night, and the little pile of manuscript grew steadily at my elbow, and from time to time the boy came to me again, and went.

At last it was finished. It was very still and silent in the reading-room, still with the silence of an empty London club at night, muffled in repose. I settled down to read my story through, and presently the swing doors parted and closed, and the night porter came to me.

“Will you be wanting anything further to-night, sir?”

I stared at him absently. “What’s the time?”

“Five and twenty past one, sir.”

I shook my head. “You might bring me a few biscuits and a double whisky. I shall be going up in a minute.” And I settled down in the deserted room again.

At last I was finished. I addressed three envelopes: one to
Jenkinson and one to Norman, and the third and bulkiest to the editor of the
Morning Herald
, a paper in which I had a holding at that time. I put all these in one large envelope and sealed them up, and addressed it to Jenkinson: “To be opened in the event of my death.” Then I went up to bed.

I suppose I slept that night, but it escapes my memory. I know I heard the clocks chime all the hours of the night, and as soon as it was dawn I pulled my curtains and lay back and tried to read a volume of essays that I had picked up downstairs. And so the night passed, till at last I heard the sound of movement, and I could get up and have my bath.

I put in a trunk call to Cambridge at about nine o’clock and talked for a few moments to the porter at Nicholas. Then I got through to Professor Ormsby, and heard a voice say: “Who is that?”

I smiled a little. “This is Commander Stevenson,” I said, “speaking from London. I must introduce myself on the recommendation of a Miss Adela Jennings, of Esher. I had a most interesting talk with Miss Jennings yesterday over the matter of some carpet-sweepers that I believe you are interested in, too. I was wondering if I might come down to-day—say this afternoon—and have a talk with you about them?”

He had guts, that fellow; there was only the slightest pause. “Certainly,” he said; “I should be very pleased to see you. Shall we say half-past two, in my rooms here?”

“That’s all right for me.”

“Very well, Commander Stevenson,” he replied; “I shall expect you then.” And he rang off.

I had nothing to prepare. At about ten o’clock I left the Club and went and got the Bentley and drove down to Cambridge. It was a lovely day, high summer; in the country it was warm and fresh. I drove with a more contented mind than I had had for many days; looking back upon it now I think that I enjoyed that drive. I was going to a clean-cut issue, going unarmed to meet a man who might be dangerous, with no other weapon but my wits. I was inviolable, for I had nothing left to lose.

I lunched well in Cambridge and went on to Nicholas at the appointed time. The porter took me across the court to a staircase in the southern corner, up some dark stone stairs, and tapped at the door for me. A voice called to me to come in, and I went forward into the room.

He was alone. I found a tall, spare man with very pale blue eyes, a man of perhaps fifty years of age, going a little white about the temples and a little bald on top. It was the room that I had expected I should find, lined with book-shelves on all four walls, and with an oar slung up above the mantelpiece. It was all very quiet and peaceful on that summer afternoon. I close my eyes and I can see it now.

He greeted me cordially enough, and asked me to sit down. He indicated an easy-chair, but I drew up a chair to the table in the middle of the room and sat down there, resting my arms upon the table and facing him as he stood by the fireplace. “I think we can cut the preliminaries of this quite short,” I said. “I had two hours with Miss Jennings yesterday. She told me a good deal about this gun-running, that had not been quite clear to me before.”

He did not deny or argue it; he was too good a man for that. “Exactly,” he said quietly. And then he said: “Before we begin, I should like to know just where your interest lies, if I may inquire? Am I to take it that you represent the police?”

I shook my head. “I come in my own interest.”

He raised his eyebrows a little. “Ah, as a private individual.”

I stared at him grimly. “That is so. It is wiser to leave drunken men alone, you know. Once you start violence things begin to go wrong.”

He nodded slowly. “I think that is so. From the first moment that I heard of that affair I was afraid that trouble might arise from it.” He broke into a smile. “And now it has. I am sure that you will not accuse me of trying to disarm you if I offer my apologies for the treatment you received, in which I had no hand?”

I stared at him. “You are right in fearing that trouble might arise from me. It has. Bad trouble.”

He met my eyes. “I think you had better tell me what you want,” he said quietly.

I considered for a moment. “This is Wednesday,” I said at last. “The country goes to the poll on Friday week, in ten days’ time. On Saturday next, in three days’ time, a story will appear in all the Labour Press which will bring certain charges against you, personally, together with Miss Jennings and the boy Marston, who was drowned. You know the story. You will be accused of having attempted to bias this election with a trick, to swindle the whole of England with faked propaganda in the Conservative interest. That story will be supported with concrete evidence which will bear examination, and it will be true.”

He had gone very white.

I sat there staring at him from behind the table. “I have come to you now,” I said in a hard voice, “because I am merciful. This story will appear on Saturday. I am giving you three days in which to cut the country before you are arrested on a criminal charge.” I paused. “This thing is now in train,” I said. “I mention that, in case you may be thinking of more violence.”

There was a long slow silence in the room. Out in the court through the open window, I could hear a hum of voices, undergraduates going to and fro, and laughter now and then. There was a bee or two about a great bowl of wild flowers in the window seat, and the air was fragrant with the scent of them. And presently he moved forward and sat down at the table opposite me. “Let me explain a little, if I can,” he said.

He thought for a minute, and then he began. And what he gave me was a clear-cut reasoning, as logical as a judgment in the High Court, of the motives which had led him to the action he had taken. He started in and took me, very simply and concisely, through the economic history of England since the war, and he drew parallels all through with the period that came after the Napoleonic wars. I sat there at his table
in that summer afternoon and he talked to me as he would have expounded his knowledge to an undergraduate, showing me cause and effect in the kaleidoscope of politics and economic law.

And so he proved to me the essence of his creed. I call it a creed, for it was one to him; I had no doubt of that. On his premises, as he gave them me, it was inevitable that a further Labour Government would bring the country to an irretrievable disaster. He sketched the country as a blind man walking along the edge of a precipice, who follows the contour up and down in little slumps, and always straying nearer to the abyss. He proved this with economic logic that I could not controvert—upon his premises. And so he led me to the centre of his whole belief: that the one duty of a patriot who saw the country with unclouded eyes was to prevent this frightful thing—by fair means or by foul.

He told me that this had come to him a year or more before, and he had justified its implications in the intervening time. He sketched for me, very lucidly, the possible courses that could be taken if the country were to continue with a Labour Government, and he showed me in each case the irretrievable disaster which in each case lay ahead within ten years. And then he went on and told me, very briefly, of the steps which had led him to enlist the services of one of his pupils to prevent this thing, and how the enterprise had been conceived.

It would be idle to deny that he impressed me with his reasoning. He had a keen, clear mind, and much of what he said was pitifully true. I sat there motionless as he was talking, staring out of the window to the bright sunshine of the court. I had lost everything I had to lose in this affair. Had I been altogether wrong in my demand for justice, too severe?

I raised my head, and he was speaking of the course that I had told him I was going to take. “If you do this,” he said, “these things will happen. You must not deceive yourself.” He smiled a little. “I can assure you that I am not thinking of myself, although the prospect of exposure is not … very palatable, I admit. But leave that out. If you expose this matter
in the Press, you will be swinging the country solid to the Labour interests, and the consequences which I have outlined to you will occur. That is mere cause and effect.”

He paused. “If on the other hand, you stop this Press campaign, the matter rests as it is. You tell me that no action is to be taken by the police till after the election has passed by. That means that the election will take place without bias in either way. I cannot swing it to Conservative, as I would have done. I am asking you not to swing it to the Labour interest, and I have told you why.”

He stopped speaking, and there was a long silence in the sunlit room. “That lets you out of it all right,” I said cynically. “I see that.” He flushed but did not speak, and I moved over to the window and stood looking down upon the creeper-covered walls and the smooth turf.

And presently I turned to him. “Five men have been killed in this affair, and one girl. Three of the men were your agents, and as murderers of the others they deserved to die. Marston was one of those; if he had not been drowned he’d have been hung. That is what you made of him.” I paused. “One of the others was your lorry driver, and it may be that he was so involved as to be culpable in this affair.”

I smiled at him, without mirth. “In fact, all your agents have received their punishment, and only you are left.”

He did not speak.

I went on: “But it’s about the last two that I am concerned. You’ve played your fancy game, and you’ve committed murder. You’ve murdered two quite innocent people. One was a police official, a married man with children. They’ll be left pretty badly off. The other was a little dancing girl, from Leeds. She never did you any harm.”

I paused. “I should like to know what you are going to do about these murders, first.”

He inclined his head. “About those”—he hesitated for a moment—“murders, as you call them, nothing can be done, except financially. I should myself refer to them as accidents, in that they were not planned or willed by anyone. In this
matter we were playing for a great stake. We were playing for the future of this country and this Empire. You run great hazards when you play for a great stake like that.”

He turned on me. “You must keep a sense of proportion,” he exclaimed. “These deaths are lamentable. But it is this country and this Empire we are dealing with. The issue is the place that Britain” takes, the future of the Empire in the world. And you are putting in the scale against all that, a policeman and a dancing girl!

“Think of it, man,” he cried. “A girl that you could pick up for a sovereign in the street! What does one girl of that description matter in a thing like this?”

T
HERE
was a silence after he said that. Down in the court I heard the voices of the undergraduates talking and chaffing by the doorway of some staircase. They were talking about a round of golf, and dinner at some pub up-river late that night. I remember that, because it was listening to them that helped me fight my anger down as I stood there. For the moment I was seeing red; it was as if he had slashed me in the face with a whip. And I think he saw that something had gone wrong, because he was very quiet when I came to answer him.

I moved across the room, and sat down again in my old position at the table, facing him. “I have listened to what you have to say,” I said harshly, “especially the last part. And I regard it as a pack of nonsense. The whole thing is a figment of your own imagination, nurtured by your own conceit.” And then I shot at him, suddenly: “Have you ever lived in Manchester?”

He shook his head.

“Or Newcastle, or Birmingham? Tell me, have you ever earned your living in any great industrial town?”

He said: “We have considerable industries here in Cambridgeshire. But I am a scientist of economics, as you might say. Not an industrialist.”

I nodded slowly. “Leeds is a town as well as Cambridge, but about thirty times as many Englishmen live there. And you know nothing of them, nor of Birmingham, nor Newcastle, nor Manchester. You’ve lived your life out in this little hole among your little class, and yet you’ve got the most disastrous conceit to legislate for them, the people that you do not know. How do you know what may be good for them or bad, or what they may do or they may not do?”

I stared at him. “Time you were out of this,” I said. “You’d
better pack your bag and get away. This matter will go on.”

He had gone white again. “What do you mean to do?”

I rose to my feet and faced him across the table. “I mean to drive you out of this into the world, for the bloody murderer and scoundrel that you are. You’ve got three days in which to get away before I start this thing, and if you don’t get out, on Sunday you will be arrested as a criminal. You will be tried for murder, and I think that you may hang. The Government and all the country will be crying for your death. But if you get off that, you won’t get off a term of penal servitude. That means the end of everything for you.” I stared around his delicately furnished, scholarly room. “You’ve done with all this.”