The Secret of the League: The Story of a Social War

"There is no reply," he said quietly, folding the paper slowly and putting it away in his pocket-book. Were it not that the gain to Hampden of the League was so immense one might have thought, to see him at that moment, that he felt ashamed of something in life.

Members of Parliament had every department of the postal system freely at their service. The statement may not be out of place, for this was what the telegram contained:

"Deeply regret to hear of Comrade Flak's accident, and will have it fully enquired into. Was it while he was engaged at work? Cannot, however, recall any business upon which he could wish to see me. Probably a mental hallucination caused by shock. Have been terribly busy all day, and am engaged at this moment with important State papers which must be finished before I go to bed. If it is thought desirable I will, on receiving another wire, come first thing in the morning, but before deciding to take this course I beg you to consider incessant calls made on my time. Let everything possible be done for the poor fellow.

"James Tubes."

The burden of failure pressed on Hampden as he walked slowly to the bedroom. In that environment of death his own gain did not touch him at all, so completely had he succeeded in eliminating for the time every consideration except an almost fanatical sense of duty to the articles of the Order. It would be better, he felt, if the shadowy consciousness that hovered around the bed could have sunk finally into its eternal sleep, without suffering the pang of being recalled only to hear this, but something in the atmosphere of the room, a brooding tension of expectancy that seemed to quicken in the silence, warned him that this was not to be.

"A reply has been received from Mr Tubes in answer to our telegram."

"He is here?" There was no delay this time; there was an intense eagerness that for a brief minute overcame the growing weakness.

"No. He cannot come. He regrets, but he is engaged on matters of national importance."

Silence. Painful silence. In it Hampden seemed to share the cruel frustration of so great a hope deferred.

"There is this," he continued, more for the sake of making any suggestion than from a belief in its practicability; "I might go and compel him to come. If he understood the urgency – "

"It is too late… A little time ago there was a thin white mist; now it is a solid wall of dense rolling fog. It is nearer – relentless, unevadable…"

"I can still write down what you have to say. Consider, it is the only hope."

"I cannot judge… I had a settled conviction that no other ear… Stay, quick; there are the notes! Incomplete, but they will put him on the track… Swear, swear that you will place them in his hand unread."

"I swear to do as you ask me. Go on quickly."

"To-night, now. Do not … do not let … do not wait…"

"Yes, yes. But the notes? Where are they? How am I to know them?" The voice was growing very thin and faltering, weaker with every word. The disappointment had sapped all its failing strength at a single blow.

"The notes … yes. You will explain… The black wall … how it towers!.." He was whispering inaudibly.

Hampden leaned over the dying man in a final effort.

"Flak!" he cried, "the notes on the Unity League! Where are they? Speak!"

"The envelope" – he caught a breath of sound – "… coat lining… I must go!"

Twenty minutes later Sir John picked up his motor brougham in New Oxford Street. He had telephoned immediately on leaving Paradise Buildings for it to start out at once and wait for him near Mudie's corner. In Paradise Street he had seen a bacchanalian group surrounding "Mrs Flak," high priestess, who chanted a song in praise of home and the domestic virtues. It was at this point that he missed the ghoul-child from his side.

A south-east wind was carrying the midnight boom of the great clock at Westminster as far as Kilburn when he turned out of the High Road, and the little clocks around had taken up the chorus, like small dogs envious of the baying of a hound, as he stopped before the Home Secretary's house.

There was a light still burning in a room on the ground floor, and it was Mr Tubes himself who came to the door.

"I have to place in your hands an envelope of papers entrusted to me by a man called Flak who died in Paradise Street an hour ago," said Hampden, and with the act he brought his night of duty as a faithful servant of his Order to an end.

"Oh, that's you," said Mr Tubes, peering out into the darkness. "I had a wire about it. So the poor man is dead?"

"Yes," replied Hampden a shade drily. "The poor man is dead."

Mr Tubes fancied that he saw the lamps of a cab beyond his garden gate, and he wondered whether he was being expected to offer to pay the fare.

"Well, it's very good of you to take the trouble, though, between ourselves, I hardly imagine that the papers are likely to be of any importance," he remarked. "Now may I ask who I am indebted to?"

Hampden had already turned to go. He recognised that in the strife which he was about to precipitate, the man who stood there would be his natural antagonist, and he regretted that he could not find it in his nature to like him any better than he did.

"What I have done, I have done as a servant of the Order of St Martin," he replied. "What I am about to do," he added, "I shall do as Sir John Hampden."

And leaving Mr Tubes standing on the doorstep in vast surprise, the electric carriage turned its head-lights to the south again.

CHAPTER XII

BY TELESCRIBE

What Sir John Hampden was "about to do" he had decided in the course of the outward journey.

There was nothing in his actions, past or prospective, that struck him as illogical. He would have said, indeed, that they were the only possible outcome of the circumstance.

For the last four hours, as the nameless emissary of the Order to whose discipline he bound himself, he had merged every other feeling in his duty to the dying man and in the fulfilment of a death-bed charge.

That was over; now, as the President of the Unity

League, he was on his way to try by every means in his power to minimise the effect of what he had done; to anticipate and counteract the value of the warning he had so scrupulously conveyed.

It was a fantastic predicament. He had sat for perhaps half an hour with the unsealed envelope in his pocket, and no eye had been upon him. He had declared passionately, year after year, that class and class were now at war, that the time for courteous retaliation was long since past, that social martial law had been proclaimed. Yet as he drove back to Trafalgar Chambers he would have given a considerable sum of money – the League being not ill provided, say fifty thousand pounds – to know the extent of those notes.

When he reached the offices it was almost half-past twelve. Salt would be flying northward as fast as steam could take him, and for the next two hours at least, cut off from the possibility of any communication. The burden of decision lay on Hampden alone.

He had already made it. Within an hour he would have pledged the League to a line of policy from which there was no retreat. Before another day had passed the Government could recall the little band of secret service agents and consign their reports to the wastepaper basket. Every one would know everything. Everything? He smiled until the remembrance of that cheap frayed envelope in Mr Tubes's possession drove the smile away.

Next to his own office stood the instrument room. Here, behind double doors that deadened every sound, were ranged the telephones, the tape machines, the Fessenden-d'Arco installation, and that most modern development of wireless telegraphy which had come just in time to save the over-burdened postal system from chronic congestion, the telescribe.

Hampden had not appeared to move hurriedly, but it was just seventeen seconds after he had sent his brougham roving eastward that he stood before the telephone.

"1432 St Paul's, please."

There was a sound as of rushing water and crackling underwood. Then the wire seemed to clear itself like a swimmer rising from the sea, and a quiet, far-away voice was whispering in his ear: "Yes, I'm Lidiat."

"I am at Trafalgar Chambers," said Hampden, after giving his name. "I want you to drop anything you are on and come here. If my motor is not waiting for you at the corner of Chancery Lane, you will meet it along the Strand."

At the other end of the wire, Lidiat – the man who possessed the sixth code typewriter – looked rather blankly at his pipe, at the little silver carriage clock ticking on the mantelpiece, at the fluted white-ware coffee set, and at his crowded desk. Then, concluding that if the President of the Unity League sent a message of that kind after midnight and immediately rang off again he must have a good reason for it, he locked up his room as it stood, took up a few articles promiscuously from the rack in the hall, and walked out under the antique archway into Fleet Street.

In the meantime the Exchange was being urged to make another attempt to get on with "2743 Vincent," this time with success.

"Mr Salt is not 'ere, I repeat, sir," an indignant voice was protesting. "He is out of town."

"Yes, yes, Dobson, I know," replied "St James's." "I am Sir John Hampden. What train did your master go by?"

"Beg pardon, sir," apologised "Vincent." "Didn't recognise your voice at first, Sir John. The wires here is 'issing 'orrible to-night. He went by the 10 o'clock from the Great Central, and told me to meet the 10.40 Midland to-morrow morning."

"He did actually go by the 10 train?"

"I 'anded him the despatch case through the carriage window not five minutes before the whistle went. He was sitting with his – "

"Thank you, Dobson. That's all I wanted to know. Sorry if you had to get up. Good night," and Sir John cut off a volume of amiable verbosity as he heard the bell of his Launceston ring in the street below.

"Fellow watching your place," said Lidiat, jerking his head in the direction of a doorway nearly opposite, as Hampden admitted him. Had he himself been the object of the watcher's attention it would have been less remarkable, for had not the time and the place been London after midnight, Lidiat's appearance must have been pronounced bizarre. Reasonable enough on all other points he had a fixed conviction that it was impossible for him to work after twelve o'clock at night unless he wore a red silk skull cap, flannels, and yellow Moorish slippers. Into this æsthetic costume he had changed half an hour before Hampden rang him up, and in it, with the addition of a very short overcoat and a silk hat that displayed an inch of red beneath the brim, he now stepped from the brougham, a large, bovine-looking man, perfectly bald, and still clinging to his pipe.

Hampden laughed contemptuously as he glanced across the street.

"They have put on half a dozen private enquiry men lately," he explained. "They are used to divorce, and their sole idea of the case seems to be summed up in the one stock phrase, 'watching the house.' Possibly they expect to see us through the windows, making bombs. Why don't they watch Paris instead? Egyptian Three Per Cents. have gone up 75 francs in the last fortnight, all from there, and for no obvious reason."

Lidiat nodded weightily. "We stopped too much comment," he said. "Lift off?"

"There are only two short flights," apologised Hampden. "Yes; I saw that even the financial papers dismissed it as a 'Pied Piper rise.' Here we are."

They had not lingered as they talked, although the journalist ranked physical haste and bodily exertion – as typified by flights of stairs – among the forbidden things of life.

Hampden had brought him to the instrument room. In view of what he was asking of Lidiat, some explanation was necessary, but he put it into the narrowest possible form. It was framed not on persuasiveness but necessity.

"Salt is away, something has happened, and we have to move a week before we had calculated."

Lidiat nodded. He accepted the necessity as proved; explanation would have taken time. His training and occupation made him chary of encouraging two words when one would do, between midnight and the hour when the newspapers are "closed up" and the rotaries begin to move.

"I should like," continued Hampden, "in to-day's issue of every morning paper a leader, two six-inch items of news, one home one foreign, and a single column six-inch advertisement set in the middle of a full white page."

Lidiat had taken off his hat and overcoat and placed them neatly on a chair. It occurred to him as a fair omen that Providence had dealt kindly with him in not giving him any opportunity of changing his clothes. He now took out his watch and hung it on a projecting stud of the telephone box.

"Yes, and the minimum?" He did not think, as a lesser man with equal knowledge of Fleet Street might have done, that Hampden had gone mad. He knew that conventionally such a programme was impossible, but he had known of impossible things being done, and in any case he understood by the emphasis that this was what Hampden would have done under freer circumstances.

"That is what I leave to you. The paragraphs and comment at some length I shall look for. The provinces are out of the question, I suppose? The eight leading London dailies must be dealt with."

"You give me carte blanche, of course – financially?"

"Absolutely, absolutely. Guarantee everything to them. Let them arrange for special trains at all the termini. Let them take over all the garages, motor companies, and cab yards in London as going concerns for twelve hours. They will all be in it except The Tocsin and The Masses. We can deal with the distributing houses later. You see the three points? It is the patriotic thing to do at any cost; they can have anything they like to make up time; and it is absolutely essential."

"Yes," said Lidiat; "and the matter?"

Hampden had already taken a pencilled sheet of paper from his pocket. He had written it on his way up to Kilburn. He now handed it to the journalist.

"Between four and five o'clock that will be telescribed over the entire system," he explained. "Those who are not on the call will see it in the papers or hear from others. Every one will know before to-night."

He watched Lidiat sharply as he read the statement. Apart from the two principals, he was the first man in England to receive the confidence, and Sir John had a curiosity, not wholly idle, to see how it would strike him. But Lidiat was not, to use an obsolete phrase, "the man in the street." He absorbed the essence of the manifesto with a trained, practical grasp, and then held out his hand for the other paper, while his large, glabrous face remained merely vacant in its expression.

The next paper was a foreign telegram in cipher, and as Lidiat read the decoded version that was pinned to it, the baronet saw, or fancied that he saw, the flicker of a keener light come into his eyes and such a transient wave across his face, as might, in a man of impulse, indicate enthusiasm or appreciation.

"Are there to be any more of these – presently?" was all he said.

"I think that I might authorise you to say that there will be others to publish, as the moment seems most propitious."

"Very good. I will use the instruments now."

"There is one more point," said Hampden, writing a few short lines on a slip of paper, "that it might be desirable to make public now."

Lidiat took the paper. This was what he read:

"You are at liberty to state definitely that the membership of the Unity League now exceeds five million persons."

There was a plentiful crop of grey hairs sown between Charing Cross and Ludgate Hill in the early hours of that summer morning. With his mouth to the telephone, Lidiat stirred up the purlieus of Fleet Street and the Strand until office after office, composing room after composing room, and foundry after foundry, all along the line, began to drone and hum resentfully, like an outraged apiary in the dead of night. When he once took up the wire he never put it down again until he had swept the "London Dailies: Morning" section of Sell and Mitchell from beginning to end. Those who wished to retort and temporise after he had done with them, had to fall back upon the telescribe – which involved the disadvantage to Fleet Street of having to write and coldly transmit the indignant messages that it would fain pour hot and blistering into its tormentor's ear. For two hours and a half by the watch beneath his eye he harrowed up all the most cherished journalistic traditions of the land, and from a small, box-like room a mile away, he controlled the reins of the Fourth Estate of an Empire – a large, fat, perspiring man of persuasive authority, and conscious of unlimited capital at his back.

By the end of that time chaos had given place to order. The Scythe had shown an amenable disposition with a readiness suggesting that it possibly knew more than it had told in the past. The Ensign was won over by persuasion and the condition of the Navy, and The Mailed Fist was clubbed and bullied and cajoled with big names until it was dazed. For seven minutes Lidiat poured patriotism into the ear of The Beacon's editor, and gold into the coffers of The Beacon's manager, and then turned aside to win over The Daily News-Letter by telling it what The Daily Chronicler was doing, and the Chronicler by reporting the News-Letter's acquiescence. The Morning Post Card remained obdurate for half an hour, and only capitulated after driving down and having an interview with Hampden. The Great Daily– well, for more than a year The Great Daily had been the property and organ of the League, only no one had suspected it. The little Illustrated Hour, beset by the difficulty of half-tone blocks, and frantic at the thought of having to recast its plates and engage in the mysteries of "making ready" again after half its edition had been run off, was the last to submit. So long was it in making up its mind, that at last Lidiat sarcastically proposed an inset, and, taking the suggestion in all good faith, the Illustrated Hour startled its sober patrons by bearing on its outside page a gummed leaflet containing a leaderette and two news paragraphs.

So the list spun out. Lidiat did not touch the provinces, but sixteen London dailies, including some sporting and financial organs, marked the thoroughness of his work. At half-past three he finally hung up the receiver; and taking the brougham, rode like another Wellington over the field of his still palpitating Waterloo. His appearance, bovine and imperturbable despite the shameful incongruity of his garb when revealed in the tremulous and romantic dawn of a day and of an epoch, and further set off by the unimpeachable correctness of the equipage from which he alighted, was a thing that rankled in the minds of lingering compositors and commissionaires until their dying days.

A few minutes after his departure Hampden returned to the telephone and desired to make the curious connection "1 Telescribe."

"Who is there?" he asked, when "1 Telescribe" responded.

The man at the other end explained that he was a clerk on the main platform of "1 Telescribe" – name of Firkin, if the fact was of Metropolitan interest.

"Is Mr Woodbarrow there yet?"

It appeared, with increased respect, that Mr Woodbarrow was in his own office and could be informed of the gentleman's name.

"Please tell him that Sir John Hampden wishes to speak with him."

In two minutes another voice filtered through the wire, a voice which Hampden recognised.

"What are you running with now, Mr Woodbarrow?" he asked, when brief courtesies had been exchanged.

Mr Woodbarrow made an enquiry, and was able to report that a 5 H.P. Tangye was supplying all the power they needed at that hour. Nothing was coming through, he explained, except a few press messages from America, a little business from Australia, and some early morning news from China.

"I should be obliged if you would put on the two Westinghouses as soon as you can, and then let me know when you can clear the trunk lines for a minute. Within the next hour I want to send an 'open board' message."

There was no response to this matter-of-fact request for an appreciable five seconds, but if ever silence through a telephone receiver conveyed an impression of blank amazement at the other end, it was achieved at that moment.

"Do I rightly understand, Sir John," enquired Mr Woodbarrow at the end of those five seconds, "that you wish to repeat a message over the entire system?"

"That is quite correct."

"It will constitute a record."

"An interesting occasion, then."

"Have you calculated the fees, Sir John?"

"No, I have not had the time. You will let me know when the power is up?"

Mr Woodbarrow, only just beginning to realise fully the magnitude of the occasion and tingling with anticipation, promised to act with all possible speed, and going to his own room Sir John took up an agate pen and proceeded to write with special ink on prepared paper this encyclical despatch.

A library of books had been written on the subject of the telescribe within two years of its advent, but a general description may be outlined untechnically in a page or two. It was, for the moment, the last word of wireless telegraphy. It was efficient, it was speedy, it was cheap, and it transmitted in facsimile. It had passed the stage of being wondered at and had reached that of being used. It was universal. It was universal, that is, not in the sense that tongues are universally in heads, for instance, but, to search for a parallel, as universal as letter-boxes are now on doors, book-cases in houses, or cuffs around men's wrists. There were, in point of number, about three millions on the index book.

It was speedy because there was no call required, no intervention of a connecting office to wait for. That was purely automatic. Above the telescribe box in one's hall, study, or sitting-room, was a wooden panel studded with eight rows of small brass knobs, sixteen knobs in each row. These could be depressed or raised after the manner of an electric light stud, and a similar effect was produced: a connection was thereby made.

All the country – England and Wales – was mapped out into sixteen primary divisions, oblong districts of equal size. The top row of brass knobs corresponded with these divisions, and by pulling down any knob the operator was automatically put into communication with that part of the system, through the medium of the huge central station that reared its trellised form, like an Eiffel Tower, above the hill at Harrow, and the subsidiary stations which stood each in the middle of its division.

The second stage was reached by subdividing each primary division into sixteen oblong districts, and with these the second row of knobs corresponded. Six more times the subdividing process was repeated, and each subdivision had its corresponding row. The final division represented plots of ground so small that no house or cottage could escape location.

Pulling down the corresponding studs on the eight rows instantly and automatically established the connection. The written communication could then be transmitted, and in the twinkling of an eye it was traced on a sheet of paper in the receiving box. There was no probability of the spaces all being occupied with telescribes for some years to come. A calculation will show that there was provision for a good many thousand million boxes, but only three million were fixed and attuned at this period.

That, briefly, was the essential of the telescribe system. It was invaluable for most purposes, but not for all. Though speedier than the letter, it lacked its privacy when it reached its destination, and it also, in the eyes of many, lacked the sentimental touch, as from hand to hand, which a letter may convey. It carried no enclosures, of course, and, owing to the difficulties of ink and paper, printed matter could not be telescribed at all. It cost twice as much as a letter, but as this was spread in the proportion of three-quarters to the sender and one quarter to the receiver the additional cost was scarcely felt by either. Thus it came about that although the telescribe had diminished the volume of telegrams by ninety per cent., and had made it possible still to cope with a volume of ordinary postal correspondences which up to that time had threatened to swamp the department, it had actually superseded nothing.