"BEYOND DOVER"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 May 1939, Page 10

"BEYOND DOVER"

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT.

COPYRIGHT.

By

VAL GIELGUD.

(Author of “Death at Broadcasting House,” etc.)

CHAPTER XIII. (Continued). “Amen,” said Flanescu, somehow without absurdity. "It sounds easy enough —you’re so infernally glib, Casimir.” Casimir put two more white-headed pins into the map, brushed his hands together, and heaved himself to his feet. “I’ve often wondered,” he said, “why people are never really liked or trusted, who can think quickly enough to be able to talk easily. I suppose it must be simply that most people are stupid, very stupid—Well, there you are!” He pointed downwards to the map. Sally, quite fascinated and rather scared, looked over one of Flanescu’s fat shoulders. Certainly the picture of the situation was clear enough—always assuming that Casimir knew what he was doing. Throughout the Islands the whiteheaded pins were numerous. On Torcula itself they were almost solid. But the bottle-neck of mainland across the water was almost as solidly red, the port entirely so. Then following the map inland from the coast, the reds thinned out again. There was a considerable white patch to the south, centreing on Duvornik, and an even bigger one to the north about Bratza. Between Bratza and the capital was an angry-looking (patch of reds, and the capital itself seemed about half and half. “Of course we start in a minority,” said Casimir. “That’s inevitable. But you just wait and see how'quickly the red will turn to white, when on Auffenburg’s tanks and lancers show the royalist colours and cockades in the villages. The Styrians are a picturesque people. They’re bored with the presidential top hat and spats. A communist tyranny might, have had a chance—better at any rate than this aping a democracy by a few bons bourgeois, who don’t know how to conceal the fact tnat all they’re interested in is the lining of their pockets.” “That, I think, is true,” said Flanescu.

Casimir went back to the table on which the jewel cases still lay, and picked up one of them. “Funds here are already short,” he said. “Two days I must have to dispose of this, and then we leave for Turcula. Flanescu, you will be responsible for the rest of these to His Highness—and you will remember to include his uniform among our baggage, of course, with sword and decorations.”

“You can settle those sort of details without me surely,” said Brandon. “My God, you make me feel like a film actor waiting to go down on tn the floor! Sword decorations! Sally, let’s go and look at the Bois and try to keep sane!”

They went out together, still arm-in arm.

“Ride him on the snaffle, Casimir,” urged Flanescu, once the door had closed. “He wont stand for the whip—he’s his father ail over again.” “And hjs father ended against a kitchen garden wall,” said Casimir brutally. “Is he to be allowed to go his own way to the same end? After all, he’s only a boy.” “He’s more than that,” said Flanescu stubbornly. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking he can be used simply as a pawn.” Casimir yawned and closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Leopold, but I’m tired. I had rather an exnausting trip to Brussels and back. Anything else important you want to know?” “The most important thing of all. How will the rest of Europe accept this putsch?” Casimir opened his eyes again, and winked once.

“The Western Group hope it won’t happen. They don’t like absolute monarchies. But I’ve certain assurances from Italy and Germany, always in the event of our success. Great Britain and France will sit on the fence. The Danubian Alliance will fight, if the Styrian Republic isn’t finally and irretrievably smashed within three days of our start. If we come to grief, no one and nothing will raise a finger to help us. You see?”

Flanescu nodded. “And that,” said Casimir, “is why this absurdity with the Martin girl must be put a stop to —here, or on landing. Nothing kills a cause so easily as ridicule. Public opinion might accept Ottokar Maximilian with a mistress —though it would upset some of his more respectable and most valuable supporters! —but not a girl like that, without background. Besides, if we succeed, our easiest method of getting support from a certain Great Power is to marry Ottokar to one of it’s princesses. 1 don't want any silly obstacle to arise over that. The girl must be —liquidated. He flicked ash off his trousers with fore-finger and thumb. “She’s a nice girl, a pretty girl,” said Flanescu feebly. “She’s an infernal nuisance,” grumbled Casimir, “like all women in politics. Wait a minute —let me think. I wonder if that might not do the trick!" He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. When Flanescu questioned him again, he took no notice. And within a very few minutes he was asleep. The Roumanian proceeded methodically to lock away the jewel cases. When Sally and Brandon, returned from their visit to the Bois. he was on his knees, putting the red and whiteheaded pins back into the box. CHAPTER XIV. “I don’t like it,” said Lutyens, “1 don’t like the look of it at all.” He threw across to Nigel a newspaper containing an account, quite ridiculously overwritten, of the suicide of Sebastian Leyland. “Suicide! That cock won’t fight. Craven. That’s murder, whatever anyone may choose to call it, and however cunningly it may have been done! And it means' that we're up against pretty fast workers.” “But why on earth should the chaps we’re after want to kill Leyland?” “Who more likely to want Styrian Crown Jewels than Styrian monarchists —particularly on the eve of a putsch?” parried Lutyens. There was a deep frown between his thick eyebrows, and he seemed to be speaking less to Nigel than to himself, to clear his own mind. “It looks as if things were a good deal farther advanced than I’d anticipated. I think we’d better go for a walk. Nothing like fresh air in a crisis.”

They went forth accordingly into the aright July sunshine. The pavements were unpleasantly hot underfoot; the air felt used-up and dusty; the trees looked parched. It seemed to Nigel the last day to choose for wandering through Paris on foot. Yet Lutyens walked deliberately for what must have amounted in the long run to several miles. His flat proved to be situated in a little street far out beyond the Eiffel Tower. From there he walked Nigel briskly to the Trocadero, followed the river bank as far as the Pont Alexander T'rois, and then led on to the Place de la. Concorde, the Rue de Rivoli, the Place Vendome, and along the Grands Boulevards.

He walked at a good steady pace, so that he had Nigel sweating in a very short time, though he himself looked exactly the same; rather distinguished, a trifle shabby, a lean hard man whom you would have set down at a guess as a big game hunter out of employment.

There were several pauses in the course of the walk. Nigel paid little attention to a brief exchange of words with a beggar by the Trocadero; to the singular attention which Lutyens paid to a scrawl in black chalk upon the coping of the Alexander bridge. But a conversation of some minutes with an old bookseller at a stall along the quais—a conversation having no relation to literature, and resulting in no purchase; the handing of a fifty franc note to another beggar at the base of the Vendome column —a beggar who surprisingly produced change; several minutes’ badinage with an attractive midinette in one of the big shops in the Boulevard les Italiens; finally the collection of a registered letter from a post office as far distant from Lutyens’ own flat as a street near the Porte St Martin; all these things served gradually to convince Nigel Craven that nowever dreary the fundamentals of politics had become under modern conditions yet the details of their undercurrents remained constant, mysterious, exciting, probably dangerous. And he was in it. Paris continued on its way all about him. Taxis flickered past, hooting shrilly. The dust spun in golden whorls. The leaves dried and yellowed. Policeman whistled shrilly, and waved white batons at traffic apparently quite unresponsive. A troop of the Garde Republicaine clattered past, their breastplates glittering in the sunshine, their long horse-hair plumes still feathered, as it were, with what remained of the glories of the Cavalry of the Grand Army. And, in England, his own office must still be functioning, with telephones buzzing, and typewriters clicking, and the opening and shutting of office doors, and pens travelling eternally .across the faces of ledgers. And his club would be playing cricket, and drinking beer, and telling funny stories heard the night before on the wireless, and wondering what , on earth Nigel Craven could be doing. And he was cut of all that, out of it body and soul. Whether he was the more exhilarated or the more afraid, Nigel could not make up his mind. But the occasional touch of Lutyens’ hard elbow against his own as they walked, convinced him that the .present was at any rate very real.

■Once back in the flat Lutyens.threw himself into a chair, rang a bell, and iold his little Japanese to bring them ice and long drinks. He then proceeded to make a number of notes and calculations on the backs of two or three envelopes in his microscopic handwriting. At last he looked up. “You’ve one qualification for this work,” he said. "You seem to know when not to talk. It’s not such a common virtue.”

“I admit I’m bursting with curiosity all the same.” "You’d be inhuman if you .weren’t — and that wouldn’t be a virtue.” Lutyens tore the envelopes across and across again; dropped the pieces into a little bronze bowl that he used as an ash-tray and put a match to! them. "Well, I’m not going into details —I wouldn’t, even if I had the time. But I expect you gathered that I was getting my own news. What’s printed in the newspapers isn’t much use to me." “But you said you had no organisation, Lutyens.” “Oh, the lines of communication are laid for me,” said Lutyens indifferently. “That’s not so difficult in these days, when everybody’s hard up. Especially as by this system none of the people who do the communicating have more han a ghost of a notion what they’re .•eally helping to do! Information, accurate information, means a lot. But t’s nothing like as much as is someimes made out. Think of the amount of valuable information that ran to waste in the War. I could tell you a :hing or two —but we’ve got to make a plan, not talk shop.”

He poured out Nigel’s drink, iced it and his own, took a great gulp with a sigh of satisfaction, and crossed his legs.

"Things are almost on the boil,” he went on. Our best Styrian agent seems to. have closed up like a clam. But there seems to have been a good imitation of a mutiny in one of the artillery brigades in the Capital three days ago, and there was a row in the House of Representatives when the sentences on the ringleaders were announced.

"There’s a rumour that they've cancelled the summer manoeuvres, which is significant, and the Italian Ambassador has been recalled to Rome for a special conference, which is more significant still. The Danubian Alliance is supposed to be taking precautionary measures. It all fits in. More particularly from your and my point of view. Mr Brandon is no longer in the Meurice, and left no address; and the Embassy here seem to have lost him, which they shouldn’t have done.” "But what can we do?” asked Nigel.

He felt that St Teresa setting out to convert the infidel had no more insane task than had Lutyens and himself in trying to stem this torrent of European disintegration.

“If only Great Britain could move officially!” said Lutyens for the first time showing a certain irritability. “But she can’t—or the Government will have half the cranks in the country screaming that they are trying to drag the nation into another war! So it’s up to us and our like to do what we can. First of all —give me your cigarette case. (To be Continued.)