Now, sir, I've always fought pretty shy of surgeons, for I considered that our Maker never intended His handiwork to be reconstructed like a bankrupt Dago railway. But by that time I was feeling so almighty wretched that I could have paid a man to put a bullet through my head. "There's no other way," I said to myself. "Either you forget your religion and your miserable cowardice and get cut up, or it's you for the Golden Shore." So I set my teeth and journeyed to White Springs, and the Brothers had a look at my duodenum. They saw that the darned thing wouldn't do, so they sidetracked it and made a noo route for my noo-trition traffic. It was the cunningest piece of surgery since the Lord took a rib out of the side of our First Parent. They've got a mighty fine way of charging, too, for they take five per cent of a man's income, and it's all one to them whether he's a Meat King or a clerk on twenty dollars a week. I can tell you I took some trouble to be a very rich man last year.'
All through the meal I sat in a kind of stupor. I was trying to assimilate the new Blenkiron, and drinking in the comfort of his heavenly drawl, and I was puzzling my head about Ivery. I had a ridiculous notion that I had seen him before, but, delve as I might into my memory, I couldn't place him. He was the incarnation of the commonplace, a comfortable middle-class sentimentalist, who patronized pacificism out of vanity, but was very careful not to dip his hands too far. He was always damping down Blenkiron's volcanic utterances. 'Of course, as you know, the other side have an argument which I find rather hard to meet ...' 'I can sympathize with patriotism, and even with jingoism, in certain moods, but I always come back to this difficulty.' 'Our opponents are not ill-meaning so much as ill-judging,' - these were the sort of sentences he kept throwing in. And he was full of quotations from private conversations he had had with every sort of person -including members of the Government. I remember that he expressed great admiration for Mr Balfour.
Of all that talk, I only recalled one thing clearly, and I recalled it because Blenkiron seemed to collect his wits and try to argue, just as he had done at the end of his lecture. He was speaking about a story he had heard from someone, who had heard it from someone else, that Austria in the last week of July 1914 had accepted Russia's proposal to hold her hand and negotiate, and that the Kaiser had sent a message to the Tsar saying he agreed. According to his story this telegram had been received in Petrograd, and had been re-written, like Bismarck's Ems telegram, before it reached the Emperor. He expressed his disbelief in the yarn. 'I reckon if it had been true,' he said, 'we'd have had the right text out long ago.
They'd have kept a copy in Berlin. All the same I did hear a sort of rumour that some kind of message of that sort was published in a German paper.'
Mr Ivery looked wise. 'You are right,' he said. 'I happen to know that it has been published. You will find it in the _Wieser _Zeitung.'
'You don't say?' he said admiringly. 'I wish I could read the old tombstone language. But if I could they wouldn't let me have the papers.'
'Oh yes they would.' Mr Ivery laughed pleasantly. 'England has still a good share of *******. Any respectable person can get a permit to import the enemy press. I'm not considered quite respectable, for the authorities have a narrow definition of patriotism, but happily I have respectable friends.'
Blenkiron was staying the night, and I took my leave as the clock struck twelve. They both came into the hall to see me off, and, as Iwas helping myself to a drink, and my host was looking for my hat and stick, I suddenly heard Blenkiron's whisper in my ear. 'London ... the day after tomorrow,' he said. Then he took a formal farewell.
'Mr Brand, it's been an honour for me, as an American citizen, to make your acquaintance, sir. I will consider myself fortunate if we have an early reunion. I am stopping at Claridge's Ho-tel, and Ihope to be privileged to receive you there.'
