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“The world situation,” said Harington—that ‘red-headed squib’ as somebody called him—“is beyond words, frightful. What are we going to do about it, Jaggers?”

He was dining with his friend Philip Jaggers in a little restaurant they had frequented lately in a side street off Knightsbridge near Montpelier Square. It had ‘atmosphere’, they thought, and the food was not poisonous so far. It was run by an elderly Russian and his daughter Natalia, the latter born after her father’s escape from the Red Army with General Wrangel and his broken battalions in the Crimea. In Constantinople Sergei Alexandrovich Miliukov, then a young fellow of nineteen, had danced in the Petits Champs, on the Pera side of the Galata Bridge. Then he had served in a cabaret in Berlin after Kemal Pasha had crossed to Istanbul. Later he had starved in Germany in the time of inflation when the mark had gone to millions for a tram-ticket. He reached Paris very hungry, became an employee of the Galeries Lafayette, married the daughter of a Russian countess who was a sempstress in a dress-making establishment in the Place Vendôme, became a waiter again in a Russian restaurant at the top of the Boule Miche, made a lot of money by tips from rich Americans, set up a little restaurant of his own in Nice which was surprisingly successful, and just before the Second World War came to England with his wife who died of pneumonia in an English winter, leaving him with his pretty Natalia and this little restaurant near Montpelier Square. During the War they had slept in the cellar through many terrifying air raids and now, after the War, they were making money again in a moderate way; all of which story had been told to Christopher Harington with humorous detail by Sergei Alexandrovich Miliukov who made friends with his clients.

The small tables had blue-and-white check cloths; there was a Russian ikon in one of the corners and a samovar on one of the shelves. Some atrocious oil-paintings hung on the walls, bought for sheer charity by Sergei from some of his artistic and poverty-stricken friends, and on one wall was a large and terrible portrait of Mr. Winston Churchill for whom Sergei had a profound though humorous admiration.

Christopher Harington who dined here frequently became familiar with the regular clientèle about whom he learnt something from the patron.

There were several elderly ladies who lived in bed-sitting-rooms in the neighbourhood of Montpelier Square and, if they could afford it, had dinner here twice a week to eke out their rations and save on their electric fires. One of them, somewhat over-painted, was the widow of an Indian Civil Servant who had been knighted for his long service when he retired to a small house in Surrey on a moderate pension. She was Lady Maggs, very much alone in the world except for a Pekinese whom she fed with scraps of her own food under cover of the table-cloth.

Another regular client was the well-known comedian Wellington Giles, employed by the B.B.C. in its Light programme during which time he dropped all his ‘h’s’ and adopted a husky drink-sodden voice according to the tradition of English humour. Three times a week after the seven o’clock news millions listened to his Cockney songs and stories with laughter and delight according to all reports reaching Broadcasting House. On the three other nights he dined at this restaurant, a most melancholy looking little man, with a thin, pallid face and an undernourished look. While he dined alone he read detective stories which seemed to increase his melancholy, but when he talked occasionally with Sergei it was remarked by Kit Harington’s quick ear that he did not drop his ‘h’s’ and spoke in the cultured voice of a B.B.C. announcer.

An elderly husband and wife, entirely without conversation having nothing more to say to each other, dined often at one of the corner tables. Several students and research workers—male and female—from the Imperial College of Science talked earnestly on physics and mineralogy with occasional excursions into ballet and symphony concerts. A Chinese student appeared from time to time silent but smiling; and among the other ‘regulars’ was a young composer of music named Rudolf Hartmann who intrigued Kit Harington by reading musical scores during his meal as ordinary mortals might read the Evening Standard and who would actually scribble bits of music out of his head on the back of envelopes or that night’s menu card.

These people, with casual customers of many types from the neighbourhood, kept Sergei and his daughter busy, except on evenings when for some reason of climate or habit or counter-attraction the little restaurant was almost empty.

It was almost empty that evening when Harington uttered the remark about the state of the world and enquired what they were going to do about it.

Philip Jaggers grinned at him over an escalope de veau.

“Meaning you and me, Kit, or the world in general?”

“Meaning you and me,” answered Harington, fixing his friend with his very blue eyes. “Meaning also our Conservative colleagues and our Labour Ministers and their back-benchers; and the people in this restaurant—that painted old jezebel; that comedian over there looking so damn’ miserable; those earnest young people from the Imperial College of Science. Only two of them tonight by the way. Probably the others can’t afford a meal before next week’s pay packet.”

“What bug is biting you now?” asked Philip Jaggers of the Middle Temple. “What do you want us to do? Burst into tears, and say all this is very dreadful? Hold a prayer meeting in Trafalgar Square? Anyhow, let’s have some more beer.”

Kit Harington developed his ideas.

“Jaggers, you self-indulgent egoist, I’m getting alarmed. As Hitler remarked on more than one occasion, my patience is becoming exhausted. We’re all behaving like ostriches with our heads in the sand and our backsides exposed to view.”

“Don’t be vulgar,” answered Jaggers. “What’s your grouse this evening? By what ridiculous and far-fetched thesis are you going to drag me into an argument and spoil my hour of ease and refreshment? I want some more beer, Sergei, my aristocratic Slav, another bottle of beer, if you please.”

“At once, Mr. Jaggers,” said Sergei.

Harington thrust his fingers through his red hair as though to liberate his thoughts.

“We’re all deliberately turning our eyes away from ugly and menacing realities,” he said. “Here are you and I sitting quite complacently over this escalope de veau——”

“Beautifully cooked. I will say our Sergei is a master.”

“—While there are forces gathering in the world and bearing down on this island population which menace our food supplies, our last reserves of wealth, and the morale of our people.”

Philip Jaggers gave a quiet laugh.

“Very humorous, my little one! A talented imitation of a Labour Minister trying to persuade the miners to sweat a bit more for higher wages.”

Harington answered his laugh.

“I know! It sounds funny. I could twist it into comedy. If there’s a Devil, which I firmly believe, he must be laughing like hell at the idiocy of Man. But I’m going to drop being flippant about it. It’s getting beyond a joke. The end of it is death.”

“Been drinking, laddy?” asked Philip Jaggers. “One over the eight before coming to this chop-house?”

Harington smiled in his absurdly boyish way and then glared at his friend.

“I’m getting fed up with this party game of make-believe. We ought to get all the best brains in the country together to face a so-called crisis, which—unless we handle it in time—will get us all down. Poor little Attlee and his crowd are over-burdened. They’re not big enough to carry all this alone with a running fight on party lines. If our own crowd came in they would be just as ineffective, paralysed by party intensity and representing only a section of the people. There would still be the same political cleavage and party make-believe. Meanwhile we’re sliding down the slippery slope. We must pull back, and pull together, as a united nation.”

“Still harping on that string?” asked Jaggers, impatiently.

Harington nodded.

“It’s becoming an obsession with me. When I listen to those fellows on the Government front bench, and when I hear a sham attack led by the Opposition, I’m horrified by the insincerity of it all while we drift towards the rocks.”

Philip Jaggers ordered a pêche Melba before pronouncing any further opinion. Then in due time he spoke.

“You’re losing your sense of humour. It’s no good taking all this seriously for the simple reason that we can’t do a damn’ thing about it.”

“We can!” insisted Harington. “We must! That’s my point.”

Jaggers ignored his point. It was his turn to do a bit of talking.

“This country, once rich and proud and arrogant, is now living on charity—God bless Mr. Marshall who is coming to our aid if he can convert the backwoodsmen in Congress. But what can you and I do about it, my child? What can anyone do? There’s a world shortage of food owing to increases of population. Our reserves of wealth have been dissipated in two world wars. You can’t eat your cake and have it. We’ve eaten our cake. At the moment we can get markets for our export drive, but presently those markets, saturated with mass-produced goods, will close against us. Then what? Meanwhile, I agree, we live in a dream of make-believe. All our export targets don’t bring us anywhere near national solvency. This food we’re eating is subsidized. These potatoes, getting scarce, are subsidized. This bread, which Sergei gives us contrary to regulations, is subsidized; and the Labour Government daren’t tell the country the real truth. Not even Stafford Cripps tells the whole truth or anything like it. Why? Because they’re all in a blue funk. They’re frightened men. It makes me smile when I watch them putting up a bluff on the front benches. But I have a certain amount of sympathy with them. None of us can afford to look truth in the face. It’s too ugly. The best philosophy of life is ‘live for the moment and make the best of it. Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.’ I find that amusing and even wise in a way. It’s like the stories of Boccacio written to take people’s minds off the plague which was raging around them and choosing its victims among them.”

“Horrible!” exclaimed Harington. “The philosophy of despair which I abhor. Not in our stars, dear Brutus...”

He gave a sudden laugh at the profundity of his friend’s gloom, so far exceeding his. Then he spoke seriously again.

“I have the courage to look truth in the face as far as I can see it. It’s pretty damn’ awful but I’m not going to sit down in the mud and say ‘the worst is bound to happen’. It needn’t happen; if we all get together as we did in the War there can be a renaissance of England. I see a new Elizabethan England, vital, adventurous, high-spirited with a new outcrop of art and literature. We shall have to develop the Empire.”

“Labour is giving it away every other morning,” said Jaggers.

“We are part of a great Commonwealth with a future of incalculable wealth. There will have to be mass emigration from this overcrowded island and from other good stocks in Europe. There’s plenty of room! Here we shall have to grow our own food in large measure. Perhaps we shall be poor, in reduced circumstances as the old ladies used to say, but we may be rich in genius. That’s my hope. Better than despair, and within our own hands.”

Philip Jaggers looked at his red-headed friend and grinned.

“You’re very young, Kit! You can’t forget that you were once President of the Oxford Union. That’s fatal to a man’s career. He always remains an undergraduate. You’re living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.”

Harington answered his laugh good-humouredly.

“Beyond this present darkness,” he said, “I see the light. It signals to us.”

Jaggers could not see a gleam of light ahead. He had jeered at Harington for starting a conversation on serious lines. Now he swept all hope aside.

“Your little flowers of hope, my scarlet optimist, are doomed to be blasted in the bud. You, who have been talking of facing realities, have ignored the greatest reality of all.”

“Which?” asked Harington, smiling over at Natalia who was sitting behind the counter with her arms on it, and her little pointed chin resting on her clasped hands. Her black hair was looped over her ears in the Russian style and her dark eyes answered his smile.

Jaggers answered his question by five words.

“Russia. The Third World War.”

“No!” said Harington quickly. “That mustn’t happen. We must prevent it happening.”

“How?” asked Jaggers. “It’s all set. The Yanks are turning out atom bombs as hard as they can. Russia, no doubt, is busy with the same toys, meanwhile pushing the frontiers of Communism closer to the Channel ports. Through Albania and Jugoslavia they are already in the Mediterranean. They have their Fifth Columns in every country, including ours. An attack on Greece will be the casus belli. Not yet of course. I give it four years.”

“I refuse to envisage it!” said Harington.

“Ostrich!” answered Jaggers sardonically.

“It’s still possible,” said Harington, “to establish a new Balance of Power in Western Europe, ourselves and the United States. Russia will think twice before her leaders challenge that combination of force.”

He was startled by a voice from one of the tables.

“Hear, hear!”

It was from one of the young men who belonged to the Imperial College of Science in South Kensington. Harington and Jaggers had clear, somewhat resonant voices. They had been totally unaware that the other people in the restaurant—only four or five tonight—had been listening to their conversation.

Harington turned round sharply and laughed.

“Glad of your support!” he said.

“The atom bomb will also provide a Balance of Power,” said the young man from the Imperial College of Science. “Both sides will hesitate to use it. I hope instead that we shall see atomic energy used for peaceful and industrial purposes. We are only three or four years away from that new source of power.”

“Pardon me, gentlemen,” said Sergei, “I heard the word Russia. Shall I tell you something about Russia?”

“If you don’t take too long about it,” said Jaggers, glancing at his wrist-watch.

“Soviet Russia,” said Sergei, “has certain religious convictions which are articles of faith in their Communist creed. Karl Marx was their prophet. Lenin reiterated them. Stalin has accepted and repeated them. Molotov holds rigidly to their doctrine. The first article of faith is that there must be an inevitable war between Pluto-democratic Capitalism and World Communism. The First World War prepared the way by weakening the forces of the Capitalist world. The Second World War was the second phase of this inevitable struggle. The Third World War will be the final clash. They are preparing for it.”

“Horrid thought!” said Jaggers.

“The English people,” said Sergei, “or let me say your Labour Government, believe that if they are reasonable with Russia, Russia will be reasonable with them. They still cling to that belief in spite of what has happened in the United Nations, in spite of Mr. Molotov’s No! No! No! They cling to the belief that Russia is suspicious of the Western Powers because of ignorance and misunderstanding, and that if those misunderstandings are removed Russia will co-operate with the Western democracies and kiss Mr. Attlee on both cheeks. That is not so, gentlemen. Mr. Molotov does not misunderstand. The men in the Kremlin do not misunderstand. There are few things they do not know about England’s state and political outlook. They hate Social-Democracy. Social democrats are to them Public Enemies Number One. They do not wish to see a prosperous Europe. That is why they oppose the Marshall Plan. They wish to see the Western states of Europe weakened by hunger and poverty and political chaos. Their agents are in Palestine, in Greece, in India, in China—everywhere, gentlemen—stirring up trouble, sowing the seed of Communism. There can be no truce or peace with Soviet Russia.”

“I disagree!” said Harington, hotly. “That also is the policy of despair.”

The patron of the little restaurant put a friendly hand on Harington’s shoulder.

“You are a young man, Mr. Harington. In youth there is always hope. That is right.”

“Pa,” said Natalia from behind the counter, “you’re talking too much. It’s a good job there’s no Ogpu round the corner!”

“It is now the N.K.V.D.,” said her father. “But you’re right, Natalia. I permit myself too many words. It’s a Russian failing. We talk and talk and talk!”

Somewhat to Harington’s embarrassment another of the regular clients had something to say. It was the well-known comedian, Wellington Giles.

“Personally I don’t want to go on living until the Third World War. I propose to swallow something before it happens.”

At one of the tables sat the little Chinese gentleman. Never before had he given tongue more than enough to order his meal. Now he spoke after a titter of laughter.

“Excuse me! A velly interesting conversation. But you leave out China and the Far East. In China we learn velly many things. Machine-guns. Airplanes. High explosives. There are four hundred million people in China. One day we have something to say. One day London will be a Chinese city. It is written. Excuse me!”

Lady Maggs had paid her bill and smeared her lips with scarlet. She picked up her little bag and rose to leave the restaurant but stopped and smiled at Kit Harington.

“I agreed with every word you said. We’re really in a most dreadful situation. It’s all the fault of the Labour Government, of course. We must throw them out at the next Election. Queues and coupons! Too annoying!”

She smiled archly at Harington, raised a thin hand in a very dirty glove and went out of the restaurant.

“A general debate!” remarked Jaggers with an uneasy smile. “Time we left, Kit.”

That night when Christopher Harington returned to his bed-sitting-room in Belgrave Road, Pimlico, there was a letter for him in a handwriting he knew. His heart gave a lurch. It was from Pamela Faraday.

Dearest Kit [she wrote], I shall be back from Germany next Thursday. Julian is coming later as he isn’t yet demobilized. Shall we lunch somewhere on Friday? I want to talk to you—before going down to Longacre. I will be on the steps of the National Gallery at a quarter to one, in case you care to meet me. My love to you, Kit.

Pam.

This note gave Harington a touch of torture and, foolishly perhaps, a gleam of hope.