Put Out More Flags Read online

  The noose tightened about the Lieutenant-Colonel’s throat. He could not speak. It was with a scarcely human croak and an eloquent gesture of the hand that he indicated that the interview was over.

  In the office it quickly became known that he was in one of his bad moods again.

  Basil went back to Angela.

  “How did it go, darling?”

  “Not well. Not well at all.”

  “Oh dear, and you looked so particularly presentable.”

  “Yes; it can’t have been that. And I was tremendously polite. Said all the right things. I expect that old snake Jo Mainwaring has been making mischief again.”

  VII

  “When we say that Parsnip can’t write in war-time Europe, surely we mean that he can’t write as he has written up till now? Mightn’t it be better for him to stay here, even if it meant holding up production for a year or so, so that he can develop?”

  “Oh, I don’t think Parsnip and Pimpernell can develop. I mean an organ doesn’t develop; it just goes on playing different pieces of music but remains the same. I feel Parsnip and Pimpernell have perfected themselves as an instrument.”

  “Then suppose Parsnip were to develop and Pimpernell didn’t. Or suppose they developed in different directions. What would happen then?”

  “Yes, what would happen then?”

  “Why does it take two to write a poem?” asked the red-headed girl.

  “Now Julia, don’t short circuit the argument.”

  “I should have thought poetry was a one-man job. Part-time work at that.”

  “But Julia, you’ll admit you don’t know very much about poetry, dear.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m asking.”

  “Don’t pay any attention, Tom. She doesn’t really want to know. She’s only being tiresome.”

  They were lunching at a restaurant in Charlotte Street; there were too many of them for the table; when you put out your hand for your glass and your neighbor at the same time put out his knife for the butter, he gave you a greasy cuff; too many for the menu, a single sheet of purple handwriting that was passed from hand to hand with indifference and indecision; too many for the waiter, who forgot their various orders; there were only six of them but it was too many for Ambrose. The talk was a series of assertions and interjections. Ambrose lived in and for conversation; he rejoiced in the whole intricate art of it—the timing and striking the proper juxtaposition of narrative and comment, the bursts of spontaneous parody, the allusion one would recognize and one would not, the changes of alliance, the betrayals, the diplomatic revolutions, the waxing and waning of dictatorships that could happen in an hour’s session about a table. But could it happen? Was that, too, most exquisite and exacting of the arts, part of the buried world of Diaghilev?

  For months, now, he had seen no one except Poppet Green and her friends, and now, since Angela Lyne’s return, Basil had dropped out of the group as abruptly as he had entered it, leaving Ambrose strangely forlorn.

  Why, he wondered, do real intellectuals always prefer the company of rakes to that of their fellows? Basil is a philistine and a crook; on occasions he can be a monumental bore; on occasions a grave embarrassment; he is a man for whom there will be no place in the coming workers’ state; and yet, thought Ambrose, I hunger for his company. It is a curious thing, he thought, that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste. Nanny told me of a Heaven that was full of angels playing harps; the communists tell me of an earth full of leisured and contented factory hands. I don’t see Basil getting past the gate of either. Religion is acceptable in its destructive phase; the desert monks carving up that humbug Hypatia; the anarchist gangs roasting the monks in Spain. Hellfire sermons in the chapels; soap-box orators screaming their envy of the rich. Hell is all right. The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish. But Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere skeptic. Am I baptized into this modern world? At least I haven’t taken a new name. All the rest of the left-wing writers have adopted plebeian monosyllables. Ambrose is irredeemably bourgeois. Parsnip often said so. Damn Parsnip, damn Pimpernell. Do these atrocious young people never discuss anything else?

  They were disputing the bill now, and forgetting what he or she had eaten; passing the menu from hand to hand to verify the prices.

  “When you’ve decided what it is, tell me.”

  “Ambrose’s bill is always the largest,” said the red-headed girl.

  “Dear Julia, please don’t tell me that I could have fed a worker’s family for a week. I still feel definitely peckish, my dear. I am sure workers eat ever so much more.”

  “D’you know the index figure for a family of four?”

  “No,” said Ambrose wistfully, “no, I don’t know the index figure. Please don’t tell me. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least. I like to think of it as dramatically small.” (Why do I talk like this? Nodding and fluttering my eyelids, as though with a repressed giggle; why can I not speak like a man? Mine is the brazen voice of Apuleius’ ass, turning its own words to ridicule.)

  The party left the restaurant and stood in an untidy group on the pavement, unable to make up their minds who was going with whom, in what direction, for what purpose. Ambrose bade them good-bye and hurried away, with his absurd, light step and his heavy heart. Two soldiers outside a public-house made rude noises as he passed. “I’ll tell your sergeant-major of you,” he said gaily, almost gallantly, and flounced down the street. I should like to be one of them, he thought. I should like to go with them and drink beer and make rude noises at passing aesthetes. What does world revolution hold in store for me? Will it make me any nearer them? Shall I walk differently, speak differently, be less bored with Poppet Green and her friends? Here is the war, offering a new deal for everyone; I alone bear the weight of my singularity.

  He crossed Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street, walking without any particular object except to take the air. It was not until he was under its shadow and saw the vast bulk of London University insulting the autumnal sky, that he remembered that here was the Ministry of Information and that his publisher, Mr. Geoffrey Bentley, was working there at the head of some newly formed department. Ambrose decided to pay him a call.

  It was far from easy to gain admission; only once in his life, when he had had an appointment in a cinema studio in the outer suburbs, had Ambrose met such formidable obstruction. All the secrets of all the services might have been hidden in that gross mass of masonry. Not until Mr. Bentley had been summoned to the gate to identify him, was Ambrose allowed to pass.

  “We have to be very careful,” said Mr. Bentley.

  “Why?”

  “Far too many people get in as it is. You’ve no conception how many. It adds terribly to our work.”

  “What is your work, Geoffrey?”

  “Well, mostly it consists of sending people who want to see me on to someone they don’t want to see. I’ve never liked authors—except, of course,” he added, “my personal friends. I’d no idea there were so many of them. I suppose, now I come to think of it, that explains why there are so many books. And I’ve never liked books—except, of course, books by personal friends.”

  They rose in a lift and walked down a wide corridor, passing on the way Basil who was talking a foreign language which sounded like a series of expectorations to a sallow man in a tarboosh.

  “That’s not one of my personal friends,” said Mr. Bentley bitterly.

  “Does he work here?”

  “I don’t suppose so. No one works in the Near East department. They just lounge about talking.”

  “The tradition of the bazaar.”

  “The tradition of the Civil Service. This is my little room.”
/>
  They came to the door of what had once been a chemical laboratory, and entered. There was a white porcelain sink in the corner into which a tap dripped monotonously. In the centre of the oil-cloth floor stood a card table and two folding chairs. In his own office Mr. Bentley sat under a ceiling painted by Angelica Kauffmann, amid carefully chosen pieces of Empire furniture. “We have to rough it, you see,” he said. “I brought those to make it look more human.”

  “Those” were a pair of marble busts by Nollekens; they failed, in Ambrose’s opinion, to add humanity to Mr. Bentley’s room.

  “You don’t like them? You remember them in Bedford Square?”

  “I like them very much. I remember them well, but don’t you think, dear Geoffrey, that here they are just a weeny bit macabre.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Bentley sadly. “Yes, I know what you mean. They’re really here to annoy the civil servants.”

  “Do they?”

  “To a frenzy. Look at this.” He showed Ambrose a long typewritten memorandum which was headed Furniture, Supplementary to Official Requirements, Undesirability of. “I sent back this.” He showed a still longer message headed Art, Objets d’, conducive to spiritual repose, Absence of in the quarters of advisory staff. “To-day I got this.” Flowers, Framed Photographs and other minor ornaments, Massive marble and mahogany, Decorative features of, Distinction between. “Quite alliterative with rage, you see. There, for the moment, the matter rests, but as you see, it’s uphill work to get anything done.”

  “I suppose it would make no difference if you explained that Nollekens had inspired the greatest biography in the English language.”

  “None I should think.”

  “What terrible people to work with. You are brave, Geoffrey. I couldn’t do it.”

  “But, bless my soul, Ambrose, isn’t that what you came about?”

  “No. I came to see you.”

  “Yes, everyone comes to see me, but they all come hoping to be taken on in the Ministry. You’d better join now you’re here.”

  “No. No.”

  “You might do worse, you know. We all abuse the old M. of I., but there are a number of quite human people here already, and we are gradually pushing more in every day. You might do much worse.”

  “I don’t want to do anything. I think this whole war’s crazy.”

  “You might write a book for us then. I’m getting out a very nice little series on ‘What We are Fighting For.’ I’ve signed up a retired admiral, a Church of England curate, an unemployed docker, a negro solicitor from the Gold Coast, and a nose and throat specialist from Harley Street. The original idea was to have a symposium in one volume, but I’ve had to enlarge the idea a little. All our authors had such very different ideas it might have been a little confusing. We could fit you in very nicely. ‘I used to think war crazy.’ It’s a new line.”

  “But I do think war crazy still.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Bentley, his momentary enthusiasm waning. “I know what you mean.”

  The door opened and a drab, precise little man entered. “I beg your pardon,” he said coldly. “I didn’t expect to find you working.”

  “This is Ambrose Silk. I expect you know his work.”

  “No.”

  “No? He is considering doing a book in our ‘Why we are at War’ series. This is Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers, our departmental assistant director.”

  “If you’ll excuse me a minute, I came about memorandum RQ/1082/B4. The director is very worried.”

  “Was that Documents, Confidential, destruction by fire of?”

  “No. No. Marble decorative features.”

  “Massive marble and mahogany?”

  “Yes. Mahogany has no application to your sub-department. That has reference to a prie-dieu in the religious department. The Church of England advisor has been hearing confessions there and the director is very concerned. No, it’s these effigies.”

  “You refer to my Nollekenses.”

  “These great statues. They won’t do, Bentley, you know, they really won’t do.”

  “Won’t do for what?” said Mr. Bentley bellicosely.

  “They won’t do for the departmental director. He says, very properly, that portraits of sentimental association…”

  “These are full of the tenderest association for me.”

  “Of relatives…”

  “These are family portraits.”

  “Really, Bentley. Surely that is George III?”

  “A distant kinsman,” said Mr. Bentley blandly, “on my mother’s side.”

  “And Mrs. Siddons?”

  “A slightly closer kinswoman, on my father’s side.”

  “Oh,” said Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers. “Ah. I didn’t realize… I’ll explain that to the director. But I’m sure,” he said suspiciously, “that such a contingency was definitely excluded from the director’s mind.”

  “Flummoxed,” said Mr. Bentley, as the door closed behind Sir Philip. “Completely flummoxed. I’m glad you were there to see my little encounter. But you see what we have to contend with. And now to your affairs. I wonder where we can fit you in to our little household.”

  “I don’t want to be fitted in.”

  “You would be a great asset. Perhaps the religious department. I don’t think atheism is properly represented there.”

  The head of Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers appeared round the door. “Could you tell me, please, how you are related to George III? Forgive my asking, but the director is bound to want to know.”

  “The Duke of Clarence’s natural daughter Henrietta married Gervase Wilbraham of Acton—at that time, I need not remind you, a rural district. His daughter Gertrude married my maternal grandfather who was, not that it matters, three times mayor of Chippenham. A man of substantial fortune, all, alas, now dissipated… Flummoxed again, I think,” he added as the door closed.

  “Was that true?”

  “That my grandfather was mayor of Chippenham? Profoundly true.”

  “About Henrietta?”

  “It has always been believed in the family,” said Mr. Bentley.

  In another cell of that great hive Basil was explaining a plan for the annexation of Liberia. “The German planters there outnumber the British by about fourteen to one. They’re organized as a Nazi unit; they’ve been importing arms through Japan and they are simply waiting for the signal from Berlin to take over the government of the state. With Monrovia in enemy hands, with submarines based there, our West Coast trade route is cut. Then all the Germans have to do is to shut the Suez Canal, which they can do from Massawa whenever they like, and the Mediterranean is lost. Liberia is our one weak spot in West Africa. We’ve got to get in first. Don’t you see?”

  “Yes, yes, but I don’t know why you come to me about it.”

  “You’ll have to handle all the preliminary propaganda there and the explanations in America afterwards.”

  “But why me? This is the Near East Department. You ought to see Mr. Pauling.”

  “Mr. Pauling sent me to you.”

  “Did he? I wonder why. I’ll ask him.” The unhappy official took up the telephone and after being successively connected with Films, the shadow cabinet of the Czecho-Slovaks and the A.R.P. section, said: “Pauling. I have a man called Seal here. He says you sent him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you sent me that frightful Turk this morning.”

  “He was child’s play to this.”

  “Well, let it be a lesson to you not to send me anymore Turks.”

  “You wait and see what I send you… Yes,” turning to Basil, “Pauling made a mistake. Your business is really his. It’s a most interesting scheme. Wish I could do more for you. I’ll tell you who, I think, would like to hear about it—Digby-Smith; he handles propaganda and subversive activities in enemy territory, and, as you say, Liberia is to all intents and purposes enemy territory.”

  The door opened and there entered a beaming, beard
ed, hair-bunned figure in a long black robe; a gold cross swung from his neck; a brimless top-hat crowned his venerable head.

  “I am the Archimandrite Antonios,” he said. “I am coming in please?”

  “Come in, Your Beatitude; please sit down.”

  “I have been telling how I was expulsed from Sofia. They said I must be telling you.”

  “You have been to our religious department?”

  “I have been telling your office clergymen about my expulsing. The Bulgar peoples say it was for fornications, but it was for politics. They are not expulsing from Sofia for fornications unless there is politics too. So now I am the ally of the British peoples since the Bulgar peoples say it was for fornications.”

  “Yes, yes, I quite understand, but that is not really the business of this department.”

  “You are not dealing with the business of the Bulgar peoples?”

  “Well, yes, but I think your case opens up a wider issue altogether. You must go and see Mr. Pauling. I’ll give you someone to show the way. He deals especially with cases like yours.”

  “So? You have here a department of fornications?”

  “Yes, you might call it that.”

  “I find that good. In Sofia is not having any such department.”

  His Beatitude was sent on his way. “Now you want to see Digby-Smith, don’t you?”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes, he’ll be most interested in Liberia.”

  Another messenger came; Basil was led away. In the corridor they were stopped by a small, scrubby man carrying a suitcase.

  “Pardon me, can you put me right for the Near East?”

  “There,” said Basil, “in there. But you won’t get much sense out of him.”

  “Oh, he’s bound to be interested in what I’ve got here. Everyone is. They’re bombs. You could blow the roof off the whole of this building with what I got here,” said the lunatic. “I’ve been carting “em from room to room ever since the blinking war began and often I think it wouldn’t be a bad plan if they did go off sudden.”