Читать книгу Red Fleece - Will Levington Comfort - Страница 7

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Peter and Lonegan were together at dinner three hours after the message from The States.

“It's a big chance, Mowbray. That's all I can say. I stay at the wire—no heroics.”

“You ought to see it all from here.”

Lonegan smiled deprecatingly. “Boylan will help you get through. You don't know him yet. Some time, perhaps, you will—two hundred and fifty pounds of soul. He'll do all he can to get you the same chance he has, because I asked him; and then he'll try to make The States look obsolete as a newspaper, wherein, of course, he'll fail. But he'll try. If he takes to you, it won't make him try less, but he'd do your stuff and his, if you fell sick. There isn't another Boylan—a great newspaper man, too. The States will watch closely, knowing that Rhodes'' will get everything possible from Boylan's part of the front. The point is—and I think he'll want it, too—you'd better work together on the main line of stuff, as we do here. Your letters on the side should be better than his, because you're a better writer. As for war stuff, Boylan is the old master—Peking, Manchuria and the Balkans—that I think of; also the Schmedding Polar Failure. That last was war—a spectacular expedition of the Germans—

“I might as well make this a lecture, now that I've started,” Lonegan went on. “The war game isn't complex. All the bewildering technicalities that bristle from a military officer's talk are just big-name stuff designed to keep down the contempt of the crowd—the oldest professional trick. Whenever the crowd gets to understand your terminology your game is cooked. You know how it is in a drug-store, and you've seen the old family doctor look wise....

“There's a lot of different explosives which they fire by mathematics, and which you can learn in part from our homely encyclopedias, but the main game will be fought out on the same principles that Attila fought it and Genghis Khan—numbers, traps, unexpectedness, the same dull old flanking activities, the raid of supplies and communications, the bending back of wings, the crimp of a line by making a hole in one part—and all that archaic rot. As I say, the game is extinct, so far as our modern complicated intelligences go, and the men whose names are biggest in the papers from now on are the same old beefy type of rudiments whom a man wouldn't associate with in times of national quiet.... I will end this by saying that the big story is the man—the peasant, the trooper, the one blinded little dupe, who dies, or plunges, or loses his legs in the name of the Fatherland—”

“I see that,” said Peter; “but what really is interesting to me is this peasant's blindness and the monkey other men make of him—”

“I'm glad you spoke of that, for it is a thing to avoid. Interesting, I grant, but not popular with our kind of press. We are not servants of the minority or the elect. You'll find Boylan exploiting the army he's with—just as another might have done under Napoleon. By the way, where are you going to-night?”

“I'm going to sit at the feet of the most genial anarchist at large. His name is Fallows, an American, who has been ten years in Russia among the peasants.”

“Duke Fallows—I know of him. When did he come to town?”

“Two days ago.”

“Peter, how did you get next?” Lonegan looked a bit in awe at the other.

“I was asked to one of his private audiences last night.”

Peter knew that Lonegan had many things to ask by the quick tone in which he spoke the first question.

“You know what Fallows will do to you?”

“Yes, if one lets go. He has learned how to use his power. He has brought forth his young upon the bare rocks, as somebody said.”

“He'd turn an angel into an anarchist.”

“A man ought not to be afraid to listen if there's a chance for him to be proved wrong—”

“Correct, absolutely. I am merely thinking about our job.”

“A man gets in the habit of thinking about his job—doesn't he?”

“Did he tell you about the plowman of Liaoyang?”

“No, but my companion did. Fallows must have seen that episode rather clearly.”

“Let's not get off the job business, Peter. As I was saying, the truth isn't popular—”

“That doesn't sound like Lonegan.”

“No, and I don't like the feel of saying it, but it's very much to the point—”

“Possibly.”

“Mowbray, we are taking our bread, and its cake, too, from a paper that expects us to exploit the orthodox heroics. The pity and atrocious sham of it all has its side. But the fact still remains its side does not furnish the stuff that American newspapers pay men and cable tolls to furnish.”

“Won't you come to-night?” Peter asked laughing. “Perhaps we can both reach the high point some day when we have earned the right to be poor.”

“That's a higher point than I dream of, Peter. I can't help but think what a nest you've got into. Of course, I mean with Fallows and his kind—”

“An eagle's nest.”

“But the eaglets are starving.”

“Heretofore the job has been served. Come along with me and meet Duke Fallows again—”

“No. I must go back to the wire for the present. Boylan would be shocked, too. By the way, I've got a bid in for you with General Kohlvihr. Boylan is to help me put it through, of course. The more decorated they are the more they fall for Boylan. There's a chance that you'll start south with a column within two days. So you'd better get at that encyclopedia stuff—”

“Yes, I'll attend to that.”

Peter left him smiling, and turned his steps across the Square, into a narrow street of the poor quarter, and on toward a little room and a low lamp, where a woman's hands sewed magically as she waited.