The Secret War (3 page)

Lovelace laughed. “Oh, everyone accuses the British of being hypocrites. It isn't true, though. It's just that our statesmen are so slow in the uptake that quick-witted foreigners always suspect their noncommittal attitude to conceal some deep-laid plan. Generally, before our people have even had time to formulate a policy.”

“Nonsense,” smiled Penn; “they're the astutest bunch of diplomats in the world. Still, even granting that all you have said is honestly believed by the great majority of Italians, you don't believe it yourself, do you?”

“Not altogether.” Lovelace was frank. “I was only arguing for fun just now. Actually, I'm sailing for Abyssinia on Saturday—as a non-combatant, of course—but I shall be helping Abyssinia as far as a neutral can.”

“Really?” Penn looked up with quickened interest. “But it's a bit late in the day, isn't it?”

“Why? Of course, if the League can make some face-saving arrangement by which Mussolini comes off with flying colours a peace may be agreed to-morrow. Again, if the Italians start using poison gas the Abyssinian armies are so ill-organised that they might break up and the Emperor find himself compelled to throw his hand in. But that's unlikely. In six months the Italians have penetrated the country to the depth of about a hundred-and-fifty miles. They still have two-hundred-and-fifty to go before they reach Addis, and the
rains are due in about a month. The probabilities are that the Italians will have to dig in then and wait till the next dry season before they can advance further. Even if they succeed in taking Addis Ababa they will not have conquered the country. The tribes will still put up a stiff resistance in the western mountains. I should have been out there months ago if I hadn't been held up by other, rather important, personal affairs.”

“I see,” Penn hesitated; “but what is it you are going to do out there?”

“I don't quite know yet,” Lovelace said quietly. “I have a little money of my own. Not much, but enough to make me independent, so I've knocked about the world a good deal, and I've rather a gift for languages. I've been mixed up in the tail ends of half a dozen wars too, and know how to handle native labour, so there are plenty of jobs the relief organisations would be glad to give a fellow like myself.”

“I see. You make a habit of being on the spot in any war that's going. But why? Is it because you like the excitement?”

“No.” Lovelace fiddled with his pipe, and seemed a little shy as he gave his reason. “You'll probably think me a queer bird, but if you've never seen it you can have no idea of the incredible misery and suffering which afflicts the population behind a war zone. And since we can't stop the war, I feel it's up to those of us who can afford to chuck up the easy life to go and do the little that's possible to make things just a shade less terrible, particularly for the women and children.”

“That's fine,” said Penn softly. “You're really a war hater, just as much as I am, then. I'm afraid I've done you rather an injustice.”

“Oh, that's all right. It just amuses me to pull the leg of theoretical pacifists like Cassel now and again, that's all.”

Penn passed a hand over his jet-black hair. For a moment he was silent. “You know,” he said at last,
“there's lots of things I'd like to talk to you about. D'you happen to be fixed up for this evening?”

“No. I was going to a show but the man I was going with has gone sick.”

“Well, I can't ask you to dine in New York because it's essential I should go out to my Long Island home to-night. But, if you don't mind the drive, we could dine there and the car could run you back, or I could put you up for the night, just as you prefer.”

“Thanks. I'll come with pleasure.”

As they stood up to leave, Lovelace glanced at the pale ascetic face of the young American again. “I wonder,” he said suddenly, “if there is really anything except pacifist bluff behind this
Millers of God
business. D'you think the police will stand any chance of tracing the man who gave you that message?”

Christopher Penn's beautifully chiselled mouth curved into a faint smile. “Not the least,” he said firmly. “I don't mind telling you now that whatever description I give will be completely mythical, and that the
Millers of God
are in deadly earnest. I am one of them myself, you see.”

“I had an idea that might be the case,” murmured Sir Anthony Lovelace.

As Penn and Lovelace left the warmth and security of the Union Club, the outer world seemed doubly grim by contrast.

Manhattan Island was still in the grip of winter. Spring might be on the way, but the towering blocks of steel and concrete flung their pinnacles towards a grey and lowering sky. An icy wind bent the tree-tops in Central Park and howled down the man-made canyons, causing the down-town crowd to draw their wraps more closely round them as they hurried homewards from their offices.

During the forty-mile drive the two men hardly spoke. Penn, at the wheel of his long low car, was intent on the swift-moving traffic as it hurtled towards them, while Lovelace, naturally a rather silent man, was busy with his own thoughts.

The car swung right after passing through Baysbore and turned in through a pair of tall gates with a lodge on one side. The drive wound through ancient trees, and ended in a wide sweep before a long, low, rambling house. Lovelace saw just enough of its front, as the headlights swept the porch and balconies, to realise that it was old, creeper-covered and mellowed by time. Actually it was the original home of Christopher's branch of the Penn family, and except that its big stables were now garages and the house had all the additional comforts that modern science could supply, it was little altered from what it had been when Abraham Lincoln was a boy.

As a servant came out to take over the car, the deafening roar of an aeroplane engine sounded overhead.

“That chap's flying pretty low,” remarked Lovelace.

“It's not a chap; it's Valerie, I expect. Her people are our nearest neighbours. Have been for generations. She's my fiancée, you know.”

Lovelace looked at the young American with some surprise as they passed into the house. He could well understand any girl falling for such a handsome fellow. Women would be certain to find his black eyes beneath their curling lashes “romantic,” and his unusual pallor “interesting.” Yet he did not strike the Englishman as a woman's man at all. It was difficult to imagine him making love. He seemed such a spiritual type—almost as though he lived in a world apart.

“Hardly flying weather, particularly for a girl,” Lovelace added after a moment.

“Oh, Valerie's all right.” The reply was casual. “She can fly as well as most men, or better, and anyhow, she'll have landed and be safe at home by now. Come along in.”

He led the way into a square, book-lined room and pushed a couple of arm-chairs up to an old-fashioned open hearth, upon which a bright fire was burning. “You'll excuse me for a moment while I give some orders, won't you? There are the drinks and cigarettes. Help yourself. I shan't be long.”

“Thanks.” Lovelace poured himself a drink and sat down, thrusting his feet forward to the blaze, but a moment later he drew them sharply up again and leaned forward to peer at a solitary photograph which occupied a prominent position on the mantelpiece.

It was that of a girl, and he judged her to be about twenty-five. The style of hairdressing showed that it was quite a recent portrait, but it was difficult to guess if her hair were golden or brown. The eyes were large, but rather pale in the photograph, which gave them an almost magnetic look and made Lovelace suspect that they were grey. They were set under dead-straight brows, giving the young face a look of tremendous
personality and determination. It would have been almost forbidding had it not been for the mobile mouth and for an enormous, but somehow quite incongruous dimple under the curve of the left cheek.

Certain in his own mind that he knew the original of the portrait, he stood up to examine it more closely, but he searched his memory in vain for a clue. He was still gazing at it when his host returned.

“Sorry,” Lovelace apologised. “You must think me an ill-mannered fellow staring at your friend.”

“Oh, no. That's Valerie, the girl we were talking about just now.”

“Yes, I think I guessed that; but the strange thing is I'm sure I've met her, and for the life of me I can't think where.”

Penn laughed. “That's easily explained: she's Valerie Lorne, the flying ace, and she holds all sorts of records. You must have seen photographs of her in the Press a hundred times.”

“Of course, how stupid of me!” Lovelace shrugged. Yet although he had never seen the famous air-woman in the flesh he was certain now that her hair was not fair, but chestnut, and that those compelling eyes were grey. He could not account for the queer impression that he had been face to face with her on some occasion.

Half an hour later the two men sat down to dinner. The mahogany was of an earlier period than the house, and the chairs were of the broad-seated comfortable variety: a memory of more spacious days when people liked ample elbow-room and men sat long over their wine. The Georgian silver was no purchase from an auction-room, but had come to the family straight from its maker in the hold of a sailing ship, when steam transport was still undreamt of.

An elderly butler and one footman waited on them; they served a meal that was good but unpretentious. Christopher Penn drank only water, but Lovelace found the Burgundy, which was served with the duck, excellent
and
chambré
to a nicety. The port, too, was a pre-prohibition vintage, which had lain undisturbed, steadily approaching maturity, during the years that the Volstead Act had been in force. Yet there was not the least suggestion of glitter and display in the quiet room, and Lovelace felt that he might have been enjoying a pleasant dinner with one of his less well-off friends at home, rather than with a young man who controlled enormous vested interests and was several times a millionaire.

During the latter part of the meal the two discovered a mutual interest in fishing, and talked of flies, tackle, and of the red-letter days on which they had made their best catches.

The heat, the dust, the rains of Abyssinia all had faded from the Englishman's mind, and he was thinking of the brown trout which frequented a pool he knew on the Findhorn, when he realised with a little shock that, unobserved by him, the servants had left the room, and that his host was speaking.

“I want to talk to you seriously, Lovelace, about the real possibilities of stopping war.”

“Yes; this society, the
Millers of God
, eh? I'd be most interested to hear more of that, if you care to tell me. It was taking a bit of a risk though, wasn't it? To admit you're a member, seeing that I'm, well—a comparative stranger.”

Penn shook his dark head. “I don't think so. You see, I've rather a gift for sizing people up, and I felt I could trust you all along. When you said that about chucking the easy life to go out and make things just a shade less terrible for the innocent who suffer in every war, I was certain that, even if you didn't approve our methods, you wouldn't give me away in a thousand years.”

“That's so, of course. Has your society been operating for long?”

“It started at Oxford just after the Great War. Quite a lot of men went up there to take their degrees who should have gone up years before. Many of them
were broken and bitter. You know how it was, they'd been through it all and come out three parts wrecked in mind and body. There were others, too, who hadn't seen the fighting but spent the war years at their public schools. Half starved, poor devils, and deprived of all the natural fun which goes with boyhood. They had listened on Sundays, week after week, to all those long lists read out in chapel; fathers, jolly uncles, chaps who had been in the eleven or fifteen a few terms before, cousins and friends; one by one posted as dead, casualties, or missing.”

Lovelace sighed. “Yes, it was pretty grim.”

“Well, some of 'em got together. They watched the Versailles Treaty in the making. Like a few of the more intelligent diplomats of the old school, who weren't allowed to have a say, they felt that it was an instrument of vengeance which must lead to further war—instead of a step towards a permanent peace. They had no faith in Governments, either Democratic or run by some big political Boss. They'd been let down too badly, and they saw that the best of Governments were only puppets pushed and tricked into acting on the will of ignorant multitudes. The people; who are swayed first one way and then another. A dozen of those embittered men met constantly. In private they surveyed the whole situation with the logical cynicism engendered by their wrecked lives and cheated youth. They came to the conclusion that there was only one way to stop future wars: to declare war themselves on the men who stir the multitudes to demand that their Government shall take action:
the men who sit behind it all and reap the benefits of war
.”

“But surely you're too young to've been at Oxford just after the war?” Lovelace cut in with a puzzled frown.

“Oh yes. I was only speaking of the origin of the society. There are branches of it in a dozen Universities now. It's become international, and I became a recruit, through my tutor, at Yale.”

“I see, and what have the
Millers of God
done so far?”

‘Well, the Mills of God grind slowly, you know, even if they grind exceeding small. Still, we've a certain amount to show. Each of us is prepared to use every penny we possess, if necessary, and all the influence we've got, to preserve peace. The Neutrality Bill has been put through in this country largely through our efforts. There's not a great deal in that. It's only an example which we hope other nations will follow. Then, much more important, there is the new law that all armament factories are to become the property of the State. That is a great step forward because it cuts the throat of the munition racket—at all events here.”