“You refer to my Nolleykinses?”
“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…Ill 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 into 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 any more 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, bearded, 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 people 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 this 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.”
“Who sent you to the Near East?”
“Chap called Smith, Digby-Smith. Very interested in my bombs he was.”
“Have you been to Pauling, yet?”
“Pauling? Yes, I was with him yesterday. Very interested he was in my bombs. I tell you everyone is. It was him said I ought to show them to Digby-Smith.”
Mr. Bentley talked at length about the difficulties and impossibilities of bureaucratic life. “If it was not for the journalists and the civil servants,” he said, “everything would be perfectly easy. They seem to think the whole Ministry exists for their convenience. Strictly, of course, I
shouldn’t have anything to do with the journalists I deal with books here but they always seem to shove them onto me when they get impatient. Not only journalists; there was a man here this morning with a suitcase full of bombs.”
“Geoffrey,” said Ambrose at length. “Tell me, would you say I was pretty well known as a Left Wing writer?”
“Of course my dear fellow, very well known.”
“As a Left Wing writer?”
“Of course very Left Wing.”
“Well known, I mean, outside the Left Wing itself.”
“Yes, certainly. Why?”
“I was only wondering.”
They were now interrupted for some minutes by an American war correspondent who wanted Mr. Bentley to verify the story of a Polish submarine which was said to have arrived at Scapa; to give him a pass to go there and see for himself; to provide him with a Polish interpreter; to explain why in hell that little runt Pappenhacker of the Hearst press had been told of this submarine and not himself.
“Oh dear” said Mr. Bentley. “Why have they sent you to me?”
“It seems I’m registered with you and not with the Press Bureau.”
This proved to be true. As the author of Nazi Destiny, a work of popular history that had sold prodigiously on both sides of the Atlantic, this man had been entered as a “man of letters” instead of as a journalist.