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in the management of his newspapers.”
The three strangers bowed, and Dougal managed to incline his stiff neck.
“You wish to see Mr Craw. Mr Craw unfortunately is not at home. But in his absence my colleague and I are here to do what we can for you.”
“You do not know where Mr Craw is?” inquired Count Casimir sharply.
“Not at this moment,” replied Barbon truthfully. “Mr Craw is in the habit of going off occasionally on private business.”
“That is a misfortune, but it is temporary. Mr Craw will no doubt return soon. We are in no hurry, for we are at present residents in your beautiful country. You are in Mr Craw’s confidence, and therefore we will speak to you as we would speak to him.”
Barbon motioned them to a table, where were five chairs, and ink, pens, and blotting paper set out as for a board meeting. He and Dougal took their seats on one side, and the three Evallonians on the other.
“I will be brief,” said Count Casimir. “The movement for the restoration of our country to its ancient rights approaches fruition. I have here the details, which I freely offer to you for your study. The day is not yet fixed, but when the word is given the people of Evallonia as one man will rise on behalf of their Prince. The present misgovernors of our land have no popular following, and no credit except among international Jews.”
Mr Barbon averted his eyes from the maps and papers which the other pushed towards him.
“That is what they call a Putsch, isn’t it?” he said. “They haven’t been very successful, you know.”
“It is no foolish thing like a Putsch,” Count Casimir replied emphatically. “You may call it a coup d’état, a bloodless coup d’état. We have waited till our cause is so strong in Evallonia that there need be no violence. The hated republic will tumble down at a touch like a rotten branch. We shall take the strictest precautions against regrettable incidents. It will be the sudden uprising of a nation, a thing as irresistible as the tides of the sea.”
“You may be right,” said Barbon. “Obviously we cannot argue the point with you. But what we want to know is why you come to us. Mr Craw has nothing to do with Evallonia’s domestic affairs.”
“Alas!” said Prince Odalchini, “our affairs are no longer domestic. The republic is the creation of the Powers, the circumscription of our territories is the work of the Powers, the detested League of Nations watches us like an elderly and spectacled governess. We shall succeed in our revolution, but we cannot maintain our success unless we can assure ourselves of the neutrality of Europe. That is why we come to Britain. We ask her—how do you say it?—to keep the ring.”
“To Britain, perhaps,” said Barbon. “But why to Mr Craw?”
Count Casimir laughed. “You are too modest, my friend. It is the English habit, we know, to reverence historic forms even when the power has gone elsewhere. But we have studied your politics very carefully. The Herr Professor has studied them profoundly. We know that in these days with your universal suffrage the fount of authority is not in King or Cabinet, or even in your Parliament. It lies with the whole mass of your people, and who are their leaders? Not your statesmen, for you have lost your taste for oratory, and no longer attend meetings. It is your newspapers that rule you. What your man in the street reads in his newspaper he believes. What he believes he will make your Parliament believe, and what your Parliament orders your Cabinet must do. Is it not so?”
Mr Barbon smiled wearily at this startling version of constitutional practice.
“I think you rather exaggerate the power of the printed word,” he said.
Count Casimir waved the objection aside.
“We come to Mr Craw,” he went on. “We say, ‘You love Evallonia. You have said it often. You have ten—twenty millions of readers who follow you blindly. You will say to them that Evallonia must be free to choose her own form of government, for that is democracy. You will say that this follows from your British principles of policy and from that Puritan religion in which Britain believes. You will preach it to them like a good priest, and you will tell them that it will be a very great sin if they do not permit to others the freedom which they themselves enjoy. The Prime Minister will wake up one morning and find that he has what you call a popular mandate, which if he does not obey he will cease to be Prime Minister. Then, when the day comes for Evallonia to declare herself, he will speak kind words about Evallonia to France and Italy, and he will tell the League of Nations to go to the devil.’”
“That’s all very well,” Barbon protested. “But I don’t see how putting Prince John on the throne will help you to get back your lost territories.”
“It will be a first step. When we have once again a beloved King, Europe will say, ‘Beyond doubt Evallonia is a great and happy nation. She is too good and happy a nation to be so small.’”
“We speak in the name of democracy,” said the Professor in a booming voice. He spoke at some length, and developed an intricate argument to show the true meaning of the word “self-determination.” He dealt largely with history; he had much to say of unity of culture as opposed to uniformity of race; he touched upon Fascism, Bolshevism, and what he called “Americanism”; he made many subtle distinctions, and he concluded with a definition of modern democracy, of which he said the finest flower would be an Evallonia reconstituted according to the ideas of himself and his friends.
Dougal had so far maintained silence, and had studied the faces of the visitors. All three were patently honest. Casimir was the practical man, the schemer, the Cavour of the party. The Prince might be the prophet, the Mazzini—there was a mild and immovable fanaticism in his pale eyes. The Professor was the scholar, who supplied the ammunition of theory. The man had written a famous book on the British Constitution and had a European reputation; but this was Dougal’s pet subject, and he suddenly hurled himself into the fray.
It would have been well if he had refrained. For half an hour three bored and mystified auditors were treated to a harangue on the fundamentals of politics, in which Dougal’s dialectical zeal led him into so many overstatements that to the scandalised Barbon he seemed to be talking sheer anarchism. Happily to the other two, and possibly to the Professor, he was not very intelligible. For just as in the excitement of debate the Professor lost hold of his careful English and relapsed into Evallonian idioms, so Dougal returned to his ancestral language of Glasgow.
The striking of a single note by the baroque clock gave Count Casimir a chance of breaking off the interview. He gathered up his papers.
“We have opened our case,” he said graciously. “We will come again to expand it, and meantime you will meditate… We dine with you to-night at eight o’clock? There will be ladies present? So?”
“One word, Count,” said Barbon. “We’re infernally plagued with journalists. There’s a by-election going on now in the neighbourhood, and they all want to get hold of Mr Craw. I needn’t tell you that it would be fatal to your cause if they got on to your trail—and very annoying to us.”
“Have no fear,” was the answer. “The official tenant of Knockraw is Mr Williams, a Liverpool merchant. To the world we are three of Mr Williams’s business associates who are enjoying his hospitality. All day we shoot at the grouse like sportsmen. In the evening our own servants wait upon us, so there are no eavesdroppers.”
Mr Craw had entertained but little in Castle Gay, but that night his representatives made up for his remissness. The party from the Mains arrived to find the hall blazing with lights, Bannister with the manner of a Court Chamberlain, and the footmen in the sober splendour of their gala liveries. In the great drawing-room, which had scarcely been used in Alison’s recollection, Barbon and Dougal were holding in play three voluble gentlemen with velvet collars to their dress-coats and odd bits of ribbon in their buttonholes. Their presentation to the ladies reminded Alison of the Oath of the Tennis Court or some other high and disposed piece of history, and she with difficulty preserved her gravity. Presently in the dining-room, which was a remnant